K Blows Top by Peter Carlson

In 1959, the leader of the Soviet regime, Nikita Khruschev, visited the United States for a lengthy tour of both major cities and country fairs. He was met with varying levels of interest, sometimes parades and sometimes protests (and sometimes both).

The author begins his story with Vice-President Nixon's visit to Moscow and the "Kitchen Debates", but that is only the preface to the real story. Originally Khruschev was to reciprocate the invitation to come to America with an agreement to meet for talks on the arms race. But wires got crossed, and the codicil to the invitation went unvoiced.

This put the tour by Khruschev on a somewhat tense level with the Eisenhower administration which felt it had an obligation for diplomacy by allowing the tour to be one-sided from their point of view, but it was pulled together nonetheless. What follow in the latter ¾ or so of the book is an entertaining and often hilarious tale of the Soviet premier's encounters with diplomats and ordinary citizens as he goes from New York to Los angeles to a county fair in the Mid-West, with people fawning over him in some of the most unlikely of places, given the atmosphere of the time. (This, you will have to be aware, occurred not long after the McCarthy "Red Scare", and just following on it's heels would have been the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis of the next President's term.)

All of this proves to be one of the more readable biographies I have read in recent years (albeit not a true "biography" in the sense of the word that I would normally mean, since it spans less than a year in total time). I highly reccommend it to anyone who normally avoids biographies, though, because it hardly feels like one, more like an anecdotal remembrance instead.

I rate it 7½ stars

The Return of the Remiss Reviewer

Once again, I have been reading books and not doing reviews. Expect a slew of them of the next few days.

Discover's 20 Things.... by the editors of Discover Magazine

To the authors' credit, they admit in the introduction that the title of this book is misleading; it's not 20 things about "everything". But there are 20 chapters of various subjects, ranging from aliens to weather, each contained in it's own chapter.

If you are familiar with the monthly magazine and it's regular column "20 Things You Didn't Know About...", then you may have seen these before, or like me, you may not. I'm not entirely sure if they are reprints since I have only been an infrequent browser of the magazine.

That said, there is still plenty of reason to read the book, even if you do know everything. It's fun, for one thing. There are the 20 things in each chapter, but there are a lot of sidebars with other intriguing pieces of info, and numerous quotes from different people that are peppered in the text.

Give it 7½ stars.

Mr. Monk and the Dirty Cop by Lee Goldberg

The final season of the TV series Monk is on us and that presents a problem for fans of the series. Where will we get our Monk fix now? The answer is in the person of Lee Goldberg, a writer for the show and, with this book, an eight-time novelist of the series. Fortunately Mr. Goldberg (who is still a young chap, from the looks of him) doesn't seem to be dry on ideas for novels for our "intrepid" hero. (If, by "intrepid", you take to mean will go to any lengths to catch his man, as long as there aren't any germs, heights, snakes or a bottle of milk between them...)

At the outset of this mystery, Monk has been laid off as a consultant for the San Francisco PD due to budget cuts, but Monk, being Monk, can't just let the crimes go unsolved. He begins making "anonymous" calls to the police hotline giving clues that solve the various crimes that are on the police docket. This is OK with Monk, but both his assistant Natalie and Captain Stottlemeyer are frustrated with him for not keeping out of the mix.

To the rescue comes a private agency called Intertect who hires him on with a very generous salary to work for them. And work for them he does, staying up all night to solve cases. In the meantime, a rather unsavory former policeman with SFPD, now a police officer in a neighboring town, turns up dead, and evidence seems to point to Capt. Stottlemeyer. It is up to Monk to save the day. Except for one problem. The evidence even convinces Monk that the Captain is guilty.

Will Monk save his friend or will the Captain get the electric chair? Will natalie strangle Monk to keep him from solving cases for free, thus putting her job and lifestyle in jeopardy? And more importantly, will Monk even get within a hundred yards of this dirty cop? Tune in (or rather read in) to find out.

With the exception of two early issues in the novel, with Monk having an larger, more self-important ego than I previously thought he had, and felt out of place (although probably not as out of place as they felt to me), I did enjoy this installment.

I rate this one 8 stars.

Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger

I recently set for myself a lofty goal of reading every book in a list I found online of 50 Banned Books. After struggling through this one, I put off the goal for a while.

One of the acknowledged "classics" of American literature, I found this stream-of-conciousness styled story very hard to continue. I admit at the outset that I had never encountered this style of writing before, and that may shade my opinion of it somewhat. But I found it extremely tedious, and the main character Holden Caufield to be the most boring fictional character I have ever read.

The basic premise, for those of you who may never have read it either before now, is a weekend in the life of a young teen who has recently been expelled from a prep school. His adventures in New York City, while living extravagantly (in my opinion) on money he has acquired prior to his expulsion.

Most of the time, he is either drinking himself silly or ranting about the jerks he has met. Apparently he doesn't like anybody he ever met, except for his younger sister. While in NYC, he has a couple of encounters with the seedier side of big city life, including an experience with a prostitute. In every encounter, he goes on about what jerks the people are whom he meets.

While I am the most vocal of advocates against censorship, and despite my opinion of the piece, I still think it shouldn't be banned. I just don't have a very high opinion of the book.

Rate it 3 stars. And that's being generous.

¡Ask A Mexican! by Gustavo Arellano

Why do Mexicans wear clothes when they go swimming? And what's up with those monuments to dead people on the windows of their cars? And, by the way, what is it about the word illegal that mexicans don't understand?

These are the kinds of questions that the author gets all the time for his syndicated column, ¡Ask A Mexican!, and answers them in said column each week. He does so with some panache and a little bit of humor, helping gabachos and wabs alike. (Look them up in the beginning of the book if you don't know what they mean; the author graciously tells you there, as well as several times in the text to whom he is referring with those slang words.)

Occasionally, the author gets a little long-winded on some subject, (in particular, the article on Mexican infatuation with singer Morrissey), but for the most part, these are short concise answers to inquisitive and sometimes antagonistic questions. I leave it to the author to either verify or dispute whether these are the actual questions he received for his column, since some of them seem made-up to me, especially the sometimes funny, sometimes unbelievable psuedonyms that the alleged letter writers use to sign their queries.

But don't let that dissuade you from reading a pretty good book in its own right. Just go into it with an open mind. I rate this one 6 stars.

The Rocklopedia Fakebandica by T. Mike Childs

An encyclopedia dedicated to all the fake bands that appeared in movies and TV over the years, while not inclusive, is still a hoot to read. The author acknowledges that he may have missed some (and I noted a few myself, such as Billy Wayne and Bobby Shelton from the movie Oh God, You Devil).

Its highly unlikely you will have heard of all of these fake singers and musical groups, although with some, you would have either had to just been born within the past few years, or lived in seclusion your whole life. In which case, the book will hold no interest for you.

The book is laid out like an encyclopedia (hence the name), with entries for hundreds of fictional bands that either appeared on screen, with either real musicians posing as the band, or in the case of some, characters from the movie or TV show pretending they can sing.

Of course you get the obvious ones like Spinal Tap, The Archies, Josie and the Pussycats and others that are immediately recognizable names. But you also get the names of bands that appear in both well-known movies and obscure ones, which makes it all the more challenging to track down if you have your interest peaked by the entry.

The author's sarcastic wit may wear you down at times, but I think the subject matter definitely is worth wading through it. I give this one 7 stars.