16.The Jupiter Legacy by Harry Harrison

Looks like a question mark

I took this book mainly on the strength of its cover design.  I was a big fan of Harry Harrison in my teenage years, but won't go out of my way to read his books now a days.  I just really dug the cover and it is about a plague, which is Post-Apocolyptic adjacent.  The original title was "Plague from Space".  I bet there are some much more illustrative and action-oriented earlier covers with that title and then when we got into the late '60s (this version was published in 1970), they wanted a more conceptual and heady look and title.

The protagonist, Sam Bertolli, is an intern, late in life to become a doctor, working on the emergency shift.  He and his driver get a call to JFK airport where a ship that had gone to Venus, has landed basically frying a bunch of the airport and now just sitting there amongst the ruins.  It's gigantic and when they get there,  the main door opens and a sick man comes out.  He dies before he can say anything, other than "sick in ship".  They quarantine him but soon learn that somehow, when the main door was open a disease beam shot out of the ship in a straight line, infecting anything that it hit, which was birds.

The birds soon become the vector for this strange space disease that kills in hours.  The odd thing about the disease is that (at first) it only jumps from birds to humans, but not humans to humans.  While trying to figure out the disease, they also have to decide on the logistical response, which means killing all the birds and setting up a perimeter.  Though Bertolli is only an intern, he has some connected past which I forgot, so he gets access to everything.  He must figure out the source of the disease and deal with bureaucracy and ignorant colleagues.

The first half of the book was quite grim, lacking the light touch that is Harrison's usual style.  It's a pretty dark look at what would happen if you tried to kill all the birds around the tri-state area and prevent people from leaving.  There are a couple of bad plot points that extend the narrative, the big one being that the doctors decide to seal off the rocket and not let anybody go inside and investigate.  Bertolli, at first agrees with this decision.  The plan is to nuke it! This is so stupid.  Of course, they would go in and investigate, even with the risk of losing other diseases.  Set up a perimeter around the entire rocket, send people in with hazmat suits.  Furthermore, Bertolli suddenly changes his mind about halfway through, I guess out of desperation, though the book does not offer any explanation.  So now he has to escape the bureaucratically repressive doctors  to meet up with his old General and break into the rocket.

Despite the flawed premise, the book really kicks into gear in the second half.  It moves away from dour social collapse to fun individual adventure with a pretty fun sci-fi explanation as to what is going on.  The action moves forward as does the reader's desire to find out.  This is a neat multi-genre story that is a bit flawed in its construction but mostly fun in execution and concept.

15. The Fighting American by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby

I wrestle with the ethics of adding a comic book to the 50 Books count, not because I consider reading comics in any way a lesser literary or artistic endeavour than reading just words but because they can be so quick to read and feels a bit like stat-padding. Ideally, I would have a separate count/blog just for comics, but I don't read enough to justify that.  My general rule is that if it took me a few days and if it is an entire series, then I can count it.  If the material is particularly interesting and worth discussing, I may even bend those previous two rules a bit to get one in.

Fighting American checks all 3 boxes, so I'm counting it.  There were only 8 issues and the are all collected in this beautiful hardback.  It's quite an interesting evolution as it starts out being a Captain America facsimile but with the bad guys being the reds rather than the Nazis. The first issue is sort of straight forward, having a similar concept of Reds as we see in the I Was a Communist for the FBI OTR series, with commies being these impossibly organized cells all over the country, led and connected with other types of criminals.  By the third issue, though, things start to get really weird.  It's a great combo of Kirby clearly starting to feel his insane creativity busting out and both of them recognizing the insanity and absurdity of the red scare.  The bad guys get wackier and the tone gets goofier until by the end we are in Plastic Man territory.  It's great fun!

From this (where they wipe out an invading force hiding on the summit of Mt. Shasta!):

To this:

 

What's also interesting is how Fighting American actually lives with his sidekick in the same apartment and they even share a single bedroom!  Different times.

The art is early Kirby so not quite as angular and explosive as he would get but definitely uniquely his style.  Bodies in the fight scenes are always so contorted and lined, nothing wrinkles like a bad guy's suit when he gets flattened by a Kirby hero.  And I love his teeth!  My only complaint is that the inking and colour separations are a bit sloppy.  I suspect this is not a fault of the reprint but that these comics were cranked out quite rapidly at the time.  

As always with Kirby just incredible covers, works of art each one

 

14. The Luck of Ginger Coffey

I picked this one up from a free box because I had some notion that it is a Canadian/anglo Montreal classic.  Other than that, I really didn't know much about it.

Ginger Coffey is an Irish immigrant to Canada with his wife and daughter in the early 50s. As the book starts, he is approaching a life crisis. He was supposed to be a freelance field sales agent for Irish whiskeys and clothes, but had run out of clients and now almost money.  Veronica, his wife is utterly finished with his promises and bluster and when she learns that he spent the $600 she had put aside for a return trip to Ireland, she decides to leave him altogether. There is also a third party in the mix, generous and gregarious Canadian Gerry Grosvener, who at first seems to support the family but then reveals himself to be in love with Veronica.  The story follows Ginger as his life falls apart and he tries to hold it together.

At this stage, it is hard to ignore that this is another book about a flawed, self-involved white male whose challenges are almost entirely internal.  The economy was pretty good at this point and there are plenty of jobs available for him, yet he is all up in his head because they don't fit into who he thinks he should be.  He is 39 and that spectre of life failure is real, but at the same time, does it really take an entire book for the dude to realize that he is responsible for his own destiny and should stop fucking around with childish hopes and dreams and just start making a steady income and set up a dependable situation for his wife and daughter?

It is well-written and quite funny.  The cast of side characters and the locales are great as well.  Also very revealing how sidelined Quebecois culture is.  There are a few french characters, most of them being brutal cops and jailers and basically sidelined as the slightest hint of decoration on what is otherwise all very anglo-saxon, even down to the food in the restaurants.  I think this is the world that today's dying out angryphones remember and miss.  Despite the "erasure" of the french, it does paint a picture of a pretty diverse and rough-edged Montreal which seemed fun as hell (relatively speaking for the early '50s).

So an enjoyable read with an archaic mission. One could argue that the reification of the flawed white male is not only still with us, but actually having a dark and ugly resurgence with the victim narrative of  today's authoritarian rise. Even without the forced political interpretation, I was generally a bit frustrated with Ginger as a protagonist.  Despite that, I had a good time reading the book.

 

 

13. In the Grip of Winter by Colin Dann

Love these covers!

I finally have read another Colin Dann!  My good buddy brought me home two of his books in these great Beaver Books versions and I convinced my daughter for us to read it together.  It takes place immediately after The Animals of Farthing Wood.  The gang of wandering animals have found a new home in a reserve for white deer that they call White Deer Park.  Everything is looking good until winter comes, a particularly hard one this year.

My daughter pointed out, somewhat disappointingly I thought, that this book was more episodic in nature.  It is overall about the animals and their struggle with winter, but it is really made up of separate mini-adventures, including Badger getting injured and then taken in and healed by the warden, his turning on his friends, the attempts to get food to survive through the winter, the warden's sickness and poachers coming on the reserve and finally Toad instinctively trying to return to Farthing Wood (which is now a housing development).  The cover makes it seem like it is all about Badger, which I think also contributed to my daughter's expectation of a single narrative.

We enjoyed it, but it didn't grab me the way my first reading of King of the Vagabonds did.  It's still a lot of fun. It's an interesting juxtaposition and a bit of a delicate one where the hero animals are sentient and can talk as well as resist their instincts to eat each other, while the "NPC" characters are still animals (though they can also talk).  I'm curious to see how it evolves as I also have the next book, which we are reading now.  It turns out there is a bit of a Farthing Wood series.

 

12. Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

I read this in the context of Black History Month at work.  One of the organizers recommended it and another non-fiction book.  I fortunately got this one out of the inter-library loan service in a few days.  I am always happy to diversify my reading, and especially trying to cut down the proportion of white male authors I read (which is probably like in the high 80%s at least lol).  So I was pleased to have this book recommended.  They are going to have discussions but that is not my thing at all.

At first, I was a bit put off, as the story starts with a birth in a 19th century West African village in the Asante and Fante region, involving fire and a mean step-mother and it all felt very magical realism/literary fiction.  It did have some of that, but fortunately, as I read on I saw that it was in the service of a much more interesting project.  Homegoing is basically a narrative genealogy beginning with a pair of sisters, separated at birth in the aforementioned village.  One stays in Africa and the other is captured as a slave and sent to America.  Each chapter is then the story of the next generation down.  We get the entire connection from the beginning in Africa to two modern-day people with all the major historical stops along the way. 

It's all very narrative and story-driven as everything has to be these days, so each chapter is sort of like a finely crafted short story, though connected both to the story before and after.  The literary trappings are much more toned down for the rest of the book except the beginning and the end to tie it all thematically together.  I found myself just enjoying (though there are a lot of unpleasant moments) the story and wanting to know how each person would end up.  The inherited trauma of slavery and its fallout both in society and the individuals is woven throughout the stories.  It makes the book doubly effective as a history, in that it really shows what actually happened while also helping you to understand how it impacted and impacts the people.

The beginning was particularly enlightening for me, as it portrays the mechanics and politics of the slave trade on the Africa side.  There are only the briefest scenes of the horror of the slaves being kept in Cape Coast Castle and then put on the ships, but they are almost harder to take than the tortures of slavery in the South which I had just finished reading.  I never doubt the capacity of cruelty by our species, but it is still shocking to even read about how the slaves were treated.

11. Kick Start by Douglas Rutherford

cover design by Phillip Castle

I'm quite pleased with this discovery.  I took it from a free box solely on the Fontana reputation and period.  Turns out the Rutherford was a fairly prolific men's adventure writer, but I guess we could say lesser-known.  His particular angle was that most of his works featured cars and motorcycles.  This isn't really my thing, but the bulk of this book was quite good so that I will definitely keep my eye out for his books in the future.

It started off in a slightly low-brow way that set off my alarm bells.  The main character, Valentine Kroll (cool name) starts off bluntly stating how we wanted to pull off a specific crime.  There was a lack of subtlety as well as the dropping of several brand names (he refers to his watch as his "Breitling wrist chronometer" on page 1) that made me glad it was quite a thin book as I thought I would be in for a surdose of that particular brand of stupid British 70s masculinity and faux prestige (cough Ian Fleming cough).  Fortunately, once the action starts, much of that drops away and we get a pretty entertaining adventure that though truncated, approaches a Desmond Bagley level of situation with a post-earthquake dam about to explode.

Kroll's particular skill is his motorcycle riding and maintenance and ostensibly for money but more likely for the thrills, he devises a plan to check in for a flight to Rome from Heathrow, than race back to London to rob a fading movie star of her famous diamond and then back to the flight.  It's a cool idea and though I am not a motorcycle guy, I got quite into all the details of the driving and the mechanics.  It won't be too much of a spoiler to say he gets away with it as far as Rome where the real plot begins.  He gets nabbed by Interpol who need his specific skill to sneak into a valley in Tunis where there has just been a terrible earthquake and find an Israeli spy and steal the deadly bacteria he was trying to sell there.  The extra cool twist is that there is a giant dam that has been damaged by the earthquake and risks collapsing at any moment.  You can anticipate, I am sure, where the motorcycle comes into play.  It doesn't disappoint.

This still is a 1970s man's action book, so there are a few unpleasantly sexist tropes (like the movie star disappointed that he was only there to steal the jewel and not rape her).  The location and the treatment of the Tunisians was relatively informed and respectful.  Rutherford fought in North Africa (and was in Monte Casino!) in World War II and his descriptions are vivid and convincing.  The plot gets a teeny bit goofy near the end (let's join the British tour bus party to avoid our pursuers!) but in a fun way.  I dug it!

 

10. The Narratives of Fugitivs Slaves in Canada recorded and compiled by Benjamin Drew

I found this in one of the free boxes here and had it put to one side.  I realized at the beginning of Black History Month that I did not have a single book by a Black author on my on-deck shelf, except this one.  I was a bit worried it was going to be too dry but it makes obvious sense to read now so I started it.  

It did start out to be very hard to get through as the introductory essay by Drew is written in that verbose, indirect manner of the 19th century.  I do enjoy long and complex sentences, but they have to be well-written and actually clearly deliver their meaning.  Unfortunately here, the language is cumbersome and indirect.  It's not entirely Drew's fault as he is writing in response to the insane pro-slavery arguments that were the dominant rhetoric in America at the time.  At the time, pro-slavery propaganda was pushing the lies that slaves were happy and needed the structure and guidance of their masters.  This book was written to counter those arguments.  Even though it was hard to read, the opening essay also drives home how the forces of oppression have used propaganda and sophistic logic to defend their clearly immoral positions.  These techniques have flared up to an extreme today, amplified by social media, leading to a bunch of con artists and racists taking over the US government.  I suspect a smarter and more informed historian could trace a direct line between the slave-holding south of the 19th century to today's MAGA.

From a purely reading perspective,  once we get past the introductory essay, this book gets extremely readable, though very very painful at times.  It is divided up into sections by region or town, each one starting with a brief overview with some statistics on the number of people per race, the state of land clearing and schools.  Then we get a series of narratives by various individuals.  Given that many of them could not read or write, I am assuming they were told verbally to Drew who then transcribed them.  They tend to have a consistency of language and structure that also suggests he asked specific questions in a specific order in order to put forth a consistent argument.  So they usually talk about their own story that led them to Canada, followed by their current situation, like how much land they own and how much of they have cleared, what animals they have, etc. and concluding with their opinion on slavery.  They also often mention that the money gathered to help slave refugees never seems to get to them and that even if they did, they wouldn't want it and don't need it, as there is ready work for them in Canada and they are able to gather their own community support for new arrivals.  

Anyhow, I am myself being quite dry here in describing the structure.  The narratives themselves are incredibly powerful and enraging.  Each one could make a novel of their own. It seems obvious to us today that slavery is a profound evil, but reading about the actual details of the brutality and tortures that were done to the actual people is still shocking.  The list of atrocities that go on in these stories is long and varied from the most basic concept of one human owning another (and all the ancillary crimes that stem from that such as hiring out a skilled slave and the owner taking all the salary), splitting off children from their parents, wives from husbands to just straight up torture, rape and murder.  One thing I didn't realize is that one of the most common triggers to finally drive a slave to run away is that they often would be raised to a "good" master who treated them well and promised to give them freedom but as soon as that person died or hit economic issues, they would be sold off to a potentially much worse owner.  

 The escapes themselves are harrowing. Though written in very dry language ("I lived in the forest for 3 months"), the toughness and will of these people is astounding. They had to survive both intense physical challenges, like not having shoes or food for weeks long treks as well as never being able to trust anybody else on their road.  The Fugitive Slave Law basically made it legal for people to just grab any Black person, escaped slave or not, and kidnap them back to the South for a reward or just to be sold into slavery.  And even other Black people could not always be trusted, as they were under their own pressures.  On the other hand, there are great tales of bravery and selflessness both by Blacks and abolitionist whites, like when all the waiters surrounded one of the escapees when he was working at a restaurant and got accosted by slave hunters.

On the Canadian side, this is a tantalizing insight into the very early days of Black Canadians.  I was totally ignorant of the many Black communities in what is today the far western side of the Windsor corridor near the border.  Sadly, their populations were reduced by usurious land practices and the end of slavery. Today, though, there are still several famous Black Canadians who came out of that region and some interesting museums and historical locations (I plan to visit the Josiah Henson Museum of African-Canadian History one day).  I am curious if there are still Black people living in that area.  I am very ignorant of the Windsor-Toronto corridor even though it is a crucial economic region for Canada!