A second look at From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor, by Jerry Della Femina
For lovers of Mad Men here is the inspiration.
This book is a memoir by one of the Mad Men gods. An unedited piece of 1970 history – language and all. I am not sure how much is fact and how much embellishment – Femina takes us through the tale and it seems not to matter.
What I found fascinating in Femina’s tales is how little has changed in our Industry. The biggest Mad Men and their ad agencies are still here – Ogilvy, WPP for example – and while technology and terms have changed the day-to-day business of advertising and selling has not. The tales of politics, pitches and how to swing those big deals are all unchanged. Creative departments are still things to be kept behind bars as “a bunch of crazies”, account handlers still stressed to the max. Not even the locations have changed – New York being where its at for ad men, mad or not.
The Secret Speech, by Tom Rob Smith
When Tom Rob Smith’s debut, Child 44, was long listed for the Man Booker in 2008, it gave crime fiction aficionados something to cheer about. Finally the literary establishment had taken note of something the rest of us had known for a long time – crime fiction can be quality fiction. Sadly for Smith the follow up book, The Secret Speech, fell victim to several critics upholding the unpleasant tradition of “build ‘em up, knock ‘em down.” While much commentary was wholeheartedly favourable, cynics spoke of “second book syndrome,” and decried Smith for eschewing human drama in favour of action. Not having had the pleasure of reading Child 44, nor ever having been one for unthinking literary elitism, this reviewer approached The Secret Speech with an open mind.
The tale continues the life of Leo Demidov, the Russian secret policeman introduced in Child 44. Now in charge of the controversial Homicide Department, Demidov struggles with the most dysfunctional of families; his wife Raisa married him out of fear, and the eldest of his adopted daughters despises him for his involvement in the killing of her biological parents. These are the least of his problems however, when new premier Nikita Khrushchev releases the eponymous secret speech, a denunciation of Josef Stalin and the worst excesses of his reign. While well-intended, the speech serves to bewilder and enrage the Russian people, bred as they have been on a diet of unequivocal and incessant praise for their former leader. Of greater concern to Demidov and his family is the malevolence the speech engenders in the population. As tools of Stalin’s oppression, Demidov and all former government agents are targeted by forces bent on revenge.
The Track of Sand, by Andrea Camilleri
Inspector Montalbano is one of Italy’s most enduring detectives. Despite Andrea Camilleri’s advancing years (he turns 86 in September), he remains prolific, and this outing is the 12th appearance by his smart Sicilian hero. The Track of Sand has echoes of the great Conan Doyle’s short story ‘Silver Blaze,’ in that the victim is a horse. Although while Silver Blaze was merely kidnapped, the unfortunate beast in Camilleri’s novel is bludgeoned to death with iron bars and dumped (coincidentally) in front of Montalbano‘s house. While no formal complaint is made, Montalbano’s curiosity is aroused by the discovery, and he begins an unofficial investigation which takes him into the murky world of illegal horse racing, and finds him unearthing links to private vendettas and to the Mafia. Read more
Footprints #1, by Joey Esposito & Jonathan Moore
Footprints is a new four-part comic by Joey Esposito [comics editor at IGN, Roscoe and Alice Find God] with art by Jonathan Moore [FUBAR] tracking Bigfoot and his posse of cryptozoological deviants as they attempt to solve a complex noir conspiracy.
In Footprints #1 Bigfoot [living in a nifty apartment and going by the catchy moniker of Mr B. Foot] receives a letter from his estranged brother, Yeti, summoning him urgently to the Arctic. Fortunately, the Jersey Devil owes Bigfoot a favour and so flies him out to Yeti’s cave. The pair arrives too late though, the cave has been ransacked and Yeti’s decapitated body is found arranged under a scrawled “Mother”. While the assailant is long gone, Bigfoot and Jersey Devil follow a map hidden by Yeti to what appears to be an abandoned military base in the arctic. Believing that the government are responsible for his brother’s murder and, moreover, that Yeti had discovered that the mysterious Motheresa is still alive, Bigfoot calls upon his old cryptid gang [Megalodon, El Chupacabra, and the Loch Ness Monster] to help him unpick the mystery and solve Yeti’s murder.
Blue Monday, by Nicci French
Blue Monday marks a turning point for Nicci French; the first book in a new series starring Frieda Klein and a movement away from the first-person narrative to a broader narrative, allowing for a much larger cast of characters.
The attention-grabbing opening sets the tone for the rest of the novel: carefree Rosie Vine skips home from school with her little sister in tow and struggling to keep up. Rosie stops in the corner shop to buy some sweets and waits impatiently for Joanna to arrive so that she can pay, but as the seconds draw into minutes and the door doesn’t open, panic sets in. She runs home, hoping that her sister has made her way back without her, but it is too late: Joanna has vanished without a trace. Read more
Mozart’s Last Aria, by Matt Rees
From the man who brought us the Omar Yussef series comes Mozart’s Last Aria, Matt Rees’ take on the death of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Where the play (and later film) ‘Amadeus’ sought to pin the blame for Mozart’s death on his contemporary, Antonio Salieri, Rees instead involves the great composer in a much more shadowy intrigue, taking in the Masons, the Illuminati and Central European power struggles.
After Mozart’s prediction of his own death tragically comes true, his widow writes a letter to his sister, Nannerl, outlining her concerns. Desperate for answers and justice, Nannerl immediately departs for Vienna to begin an investigation. Read more
God Collar, by Marcus Brigstocke
Are you there Marcus? It’s me, Simon. I’m pretty sure you exist, because I’ve been to see you recording The Now Show, so there might be a little less existential angst in this review than in your book, but I just wanted to say (assuming that you do in fact exist) how much I enjoyed it. I am sure many people will be able to relate to your central dilemma, that of being profoundly unreligious, indeed even anti-religion, and quite possibly atheist too, in the sense of not believing in the big guy with the beard and the love of smiting, yet of having a spiritual gap in their lives that they are looking for something to fill.
You went on the road with your God Collar show to talk to audiences about this, and now you’ve written a book about your thoughts and experiences – including profoundly influential experiences, such as the death of your best friend James when he was only in his thirties. You are remarkably frank about your whole life really – weight problems, expulsions from school, and so on – and you don’t pull any punches when it comes to knowing your own faults, either, all of which is actually rather endearing.
Bernard O’Donoghue
Bernard O’Donoghue was born in Cullen, Co. Cork in 1945. He is a Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford, where he teaches Medieval English. He has published five collections of poetry including The Weakness (1991), Gunpowder (winner of the 1995 Whitbread Award for Poetry), Here Nor There (1999) and Outliving (2003). His latest collection is Farmer’s Cross.
The Dervish House, by Ian McDonald
The Dervish House is a complex tale of several characters that all live in the titular abode in near-future Istanbul. A detailed plot synopsis would be as long as the book. It is so rich, detailed and bristling with ideas that at times it might seem to be drowning under its own weight.
It’s 2025 and as a heat wave hits northern Turkey, a terror attack also hits. Necdet, who is estranged from his family, witnesses the attack but as in all good fiction, not everything is as it seems. In fact, as a result of the attack, he starts seeing Djinn everywhere. An elderly Greek economist, Georgios Ferentinou, befriends 9-year old Can Durukan who is obsessed with his shape-shifting robot toy and would love to be a detective. Leyla gets a job working for distant relations developing new nanotechnology while Ayse, a gallery owner, accepts a job looking for a Mellified Man, which is a mythological human mummy confection. The lives and adventures of these characters come together and drift apart around Adem Dede Square, which is where you would find the Dervish House.
The characters’ lives inter-weave in the multifaceted narrative while the plot navigates between nanotechnology, future AI based-economics, robotics, political conspiracy, ancient history, religion and mythology. And yes, there is a satisfying conclusion.
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The Age of Responsibility: CSR 2.0 and the new DNA of Business, by Wayne Visser
Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) today is not about being good, it’s about being less bad. No book needs to tell us that even if everyone were to start being good right now, we are still heading towards global degradation. Government legislation doesn’t seem work or hasn’t been rolled out with enough conviction, while NGOs lacks clout. In a world where corporations actually account for a larger slice of the global economy than countries do, Wayne Visser suggests that only businesses have the money and power to make big changes.
With that premise he begins by describing how we ended up here; how business and responsibility in the community has been evolving up till now in the ages and stages of CSR. Using case studies, he illustrates the Age of Greed, characterised in the 1980s by the dramatic rise and fall of Lehman Brothers and Enron. To describe the Age of Philanthropy, he recounts the story of John D. Rockefeller, known best for his extraordinary wealth built on the back of his oil monopoly, but less known for his forward-thinking social responsibility for staff welfare and charitable activities. The Age of Marketing is described by companies that ostensibly appear to be doing good things and garnering good public relations, but are doing little more than aligning CSR principles to their overall strategy, rather than aligning their overall strategy with CSR – a term Visser calls ‘Systemic CSR’. The Age of Management is characterised by contemporary brands Nike, Starbucks and Cadbury, where CSR has been embedded into management strategy. Finally the Age of Responsibility is populated by CSR 2.0 pioneers such as Seventh Generation, Body Shop and Grameen Bank.
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A Drink Before the War, by Dennis Lehane
Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro have been friends since they were kids, and as adults they work together as private investigators. When three local politicians hire them to retrieve some stolen documents from a cleaning lady, they think little of it and track her down.
But what awaits them is not a coward ready to cooperate; it is a feisty, intelligent woman with a story to tell, and Kenzie and Gennaro are drawn inexorably into an underlying plot involving gang violence, family ties and some crimes too cruel to mention. Rather than turning away when the going gets tough, he is unable to extricate himself in good conscience, and before he knows it he is embroiled in someone else’s trouble up to his neck.
The Story of England, by Michael Wood
The Story of England is an epic tale tracing one village through pre-history to the present day, presented by a power house of a historian.
The choice of village is interesting – firstly the village of Kibworth is roughly at the centre of England in the midlands (Wood is keen to point out that this is an English village and history – those of Scotland and Wales have a different trajectory). Secondly the village has been under the tenure of Merton College, Oxford. As such the college was a meticulous record keeper and these records make up the bulk of Wood’s researches. Wood has no local connections to the area, which I think helps with his god-like view.
The Help, by Kathryn Stockett
Aibileen and Minnie are black maids in Jackson, Mississippi in the early 60′s, and segregation is a fact of life, for them. White people are an unknown quantity, people with so much power that even the nice ones are not to be trusted – but when Miss Skeeter starts poking around to try and find out what happened to her own childhood maid, an unlikely bond begins to form between the three women as they seek to set the world to rights in a way that could endanger them all. As their story unfolds, the backdrop of Jackson’s white socialites and their unthinking discrimination and ignorance provides a canvas against which the tale plays out beautifully.
This book will change your life. There is no other way to put it; it will change the way you look at the world, and change it forever. The insights Kathryn Stockett gives you into segregationalist Mississippi, and the way in which she makes the past come to life is nothing short of magical.
The Lost Fleet: Fearless and Courageous, by Jack Campbell
Following on from the first book, Dauntless, these are the second and third volumes in Jack Campbell’s military SF series The Lost Fleet, republished this year by Titan Books. They tell the continuing story of the attempt by the Alliance Fleet to get home after its defeat and betrayal by its arch-enemies, the Syndics. By an accident of fate, the fleet is now commanded by John ‘Black Jack’ Geary, literally a throwback to the early days of the war because he was found after 100 years hibernating in a drifting escape pod.
Geary faces considerable challenges: dissent within the fleet, opposition from the Syndics and the growing suspicion that an alien force is manipulating humanity. In these two books he has to use tactics and ideas long lost to the Alliance Navy to fight a series of engagements with the Syndics, while trying to keep them guessing as to the intentions of the fleet. A love interest develops, in the form of the only civilian on the flagship, Co-President Rione, and John Geary has to fight against the desire to turn in to the persona of ‘Black Jack’ Geary that developed when he was believed to be dead and gone – ruthless, decisive and utterly without fear or doubt.
Now You See Me, by S. J. Bolton
Well over a century has passed since the autumn of 1888, and Jack the Ripper has lost none of his appeal. By some considerable distance the most famous serial murderer in history, the Ripper has inspired artists across a broad range of media; literature, music, art and even video games. Indeed, study of the Whitechapel murders led to the coining of the phrase “Ripperology.” For all this interest though, the standard of Ripper art has been somewhat diverse. While there have been entertaining and exhaustive studies like Donald Rumbelow’s The Complete Jack the Ripper, there have also been hackneyed efforts like the dreadful 2001 film ‘From Hell.’ For S. J. Bolton then, it could go either way.
Bolton is a promising Lancashire-born author who, off the back of just four books, has already picked up a CWA Dagger nomination (for Blood Harvest) and a Mary Higgins Clark Award (for Awakening). Thus far Bolton has avoided introducing a returning hero, choosing instead of offer up a series of standalone novels. Read more
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami
Toru Okada’s life is a calm, quiet procession of predictable events. Stay-at-home husband to the lovely Kumiko, he cooks, cleans, and takes trips to the dry-cleaner. The only niggle in his life is the disappearance of the cat they’ve had since kittenhood, and the anonymous sexual phonecalls he keeps getting.
But his carefully ordered life is slowly spinning out of control. Invisible at first, as Toru’s life begins to rip itself loose from its moorings he becomes more and more aware of the strangely twisted tales that wind their ways through his every waking moment, and he is helpless to do much other than watch a procession of strangers march through his life, each making his or her own subtle changes and complicating matters in their own way.
The Ritual, by Adam Nevill
I’m basically a short fiction lover. Novellas are still acceptable but I seldom read (and review) novels, with a few exceptions that I won’t mention here. The universal critical acclaim for Adam Nevill’s Apartment 16, however, made me put aside my usual circumspection and prompted me to try Nevill’s latest novel , The Ritual. And so I got my reward and my punishment. My reward because the book has wonderful moments and contains some excellent fiction; my punishment because The Ritual is not one novel, but two novels, quite different in terms of quality and style, and the second novel is not too good.
The story features four British friends, who take a holiday trip in the Swedish forest but, while trying to follow a shortcut, end up being lost in the wilderness. Exhausted and with two of them injured, they have to face an even worse ordeal. A murderous, unknown creature hunts them down and repeatedly attacks them . That mysterious attacker appears to be somehow related to the vestiges of a secluded, dilapidated habitation in which ancient pagan rites seem to have taken place. In addition the personal relationships between the four friends start coming apart and old grudges surface, making it hard for them to act together as a team.
Deadline, by Mira Grant
It’s a little under a year since Feed, the first book in the Newsflesh series, ended, and the After the End Times staff are spinning their wheels. Outwardly performing all their duties, they surreptitiously share the feeling that they’re simply waiting for life to start again.
And it does, with the arrival of a scientist bearing grave news about Kellis-Amberlee, the viral infection causing wide-spread zombieism the world over. Unforeseeable combination of two separate viruses designed to cure cancer and the common cold, KA has been present in every mammalian life form since its original formation after both viruses were released into the atmosphere to improve the health of the world’s human inhabitants. Amplification, the active becoming of a zombie, happens only in specific circumstances, but the consequences are dire and society lives in a world full of decontaminations and impromptu blood tests. Read more
Monsieur Pain, by Roberto Bolano
Some years ago, in either 1981 or 1982, Roberto Bolano wrote a novel called The Elephant Path and entered it for the Felix Urubayen prize for a short novel, awarded by the Toledo City Council. The Elephant Path won the prize and so netted Bolano three hundred thousand pesetas. Bolano enjoyed his victory so much that he re-titled the novel, entered it in another regional competition, and came away with a further hundred and twenty thousand pesetas. Realising that this bout of lucrative competition mania could be spun into a great author-centric yarn, Bolano used it as the basis for ‘Sensini’, a short story later included in his excellent Last Evenings on Earth collection. Now that original story has been reborn again, in English translation, as Monsieur Pain. It’s all very meta.
Monsieur Pain begins in 1938 as the Peruvian poet Cesar Vallejo lies stricken in a Paris hospital. Vallejo is hiccupping himself to death. When the doctor’s prove baffled by her husband’s condition, Madame Vallejo seeks help from the eponymous Monsieur Pain, an acquaintance of her friend Madame Reynaud. Pain is a reclusive bachelor, wounded and traumatised by the First World War, whose meagre government pension allows him to live a threadbare existence while devoting his time to his twin passions of hypnotism and the occult. He is also in love with Madame Reynaud and so agrees to try and help her friend.
A Rage in Harlem, by Chester Himes
There is no more harsh indictment of racism in American literary circles than the marginalisation of Chester Himes. Reading Himes’ work, with all its grimy and gritty brilliance, there is nothing but racial prejudice that can explain his absence from the classically accepted top table of American crime writing.
A Rage in Harlem is the opening salvo in Himes’ Grave Digger and Coffin Ed series, although it features the duo less heavily than his later works. Himes was no great lover of the police; as a teenager he was chained upside down and beaten by them until he confessed to an armed robbery. Unsurprisingly then, he struggled with casting policemen of any race as heroes, and indeed in this first offering Jones and Johnson are less heroic than in their subsequent appearances. Himes casts them as hypocrites; they deplore violence, except when they themselves are dispensing it, and their commitment to justice is negligible. In A Rage in Harlem, Grave Digger is motivated principally by revenge; there is little beyond their badges to distinguish the pair from rank and file Harlem villains. Read more
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The Bookgeeks Interview
Simon Kernick
Simon Kernick is one of Britain’s most exciting new thriller writers. He arrived on the crime writing scene with his highly acclaimed debut novel The Business of Dying, the story of a corrupt cop moonlighting as a hitman. However, Simon’s big breakthrough came with his novel Relentless which was selected by Richard and Judy for [...]
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Five copies of John le Carré’s Smiley vs Karla Trilogy to be won
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was one of the big film releases of 2011, and to celebrate its release on DVD we have five copies of John le Carré’s Smiley vs Karla Trilogy to be won – consisting of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley’s People.
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