On July 28th I introduced the new Florida History text book at The Knowledge Exchange. I conducted to talks. One about cartooning and the other about Florida history. Above are some from the Florida history class.

During the cartooning class I got the attendees to contribute various ideas and we all came up with this scene.

Here’s a close up of the artwork.

Dead Silence by Randy Wayne White
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Every so often I give another swing to a book by Randy Wayne White. Each time I walk away disappointed. There are a number of reasons why I know that happens. One is the embracing of illegal drugs. To me this makes the characters dirty and I immediately don’t like them. In this book practically all the “good” guys are involved in illegal drugs of some sort. This puts me in an odd position with the bad guys who don’t use drugs. I found myself rooting for them at times. Since the book’s intent is to have some kind of good guy stop the bad guy, I’m obviously having trouble with the intent. This all pointing to White’s pointed political viewpoints being intertwined with the characters so that it is often difficult to say one is bad or good. If that is his intent then his books really stink because it leaves him with the option of killing off even the reoccurring characters. I mean, what the Hey, if he doesn’t know who is after who or if they even should be, just knock off the Tomlinson character, which I think would be a step in the right direction.

About the story: Kidnapping, Senators, Castro, secret papers, horses makeup the core of this story. If that sound confusing, the book doesn’t help. All of it is convoluted and way too much coincidentally happens in one area. There’s a whole thing about Castro papers that really doesn’t matter to the plot except as a MacGuffin. There is waaaaay too much about the kidnap victim that really bogs things down.

All in all, as much as I dislike White books, this one also gets a thumbs down due to the plot.

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Florida: Enchantment of America by Allan Carpenter
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

“Enchantment of America: Florida’ is part of a 1960s series that each cover a different state and written for students in junior high school. My experience with this is that state series typically do a poor job of telling the history of Florida. This one is an exception. Especially refreshing to read the non-PC version of Florida history that is setup in all Florida history books I’ve seen published in the past fifteen years. I also like the author’s writing style. The watercolor illustrations are outstanding. That is another difference in a young person’s textbook from the 1960s and the textbooks of today. Today’s textbooks have little artwork. Illustrations in today’s textbooks are usually boring computer graphics and static photographs. I recommend this book for anyone wanting to learn about Florida history.

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History of Brevard County Vol. 2 by Jerrell H. Schoffner
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This volume of Brevard history is in sharp contrast to the first volume by Jerrell Schoffner. The first book was very thorough and related the ups and downs of the community. The second volume drowns in numbers of all shapes and sizes. Numbers of people moving in, numbers of costs to various construction projects, too many results of elections and way more information than needed about the space program. There is very, very little about the community so well covered in the first volume. There are glances at Erna Nixon and various politicians and too many involved with the space program. It was as if all that happened in Brevard County from 1950 to the printing of the volume in 1992 was space and political elections. I can think of any number of various milestones that occurred in Brevard County in that time. Some focus on other businesses might’ve been fun. Just a few paragraphs about the Thompson family and Dixie Crossroads restaurant would’ve been interesting and much needed in this very dry effort that falls short of what Schoffner is known for in covering history.

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Lifeguard by James Patterson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The loudest kudos I can offer of this book are the location references. Some of Lifeguard takes place in Massachuets and I know nothing about that place. Florida, on the other hand, I very much do. Someone involved with the authoring of this book did a crackerjack job of checking locations to get this book set in the right palace. The Palm Beach County locations are right on. The Coleman Correction Center was also very good (though it’s a good 5 hours to get to Delray Beach from Coleman). It might have been fun to have the character have to be trying to put together the 32 dollars to pay for parking at The Breakers.

Humor is one thing missing from this book. There are some attempts at humor but otherwise this is just short of being a Matthew Reilly binge of action. There is plenty of character development, but when a book like this moves like it does – Who cares? Thus, I really didn’t care about any of the characters.

The story is intertwined with all kinds of switchbacks, but I was on to them at the start and, as always, HATE IT when I’m right and know the ending so soon.

The problem, to me, seems to be that there were three writers, at least, working on this book. I could tell tenor changes all over the book. Me reading this book was sometimes like roaring across an unpaved road. It also seemed to pave the way for an inevitable conclusion. Too many cooks have to be careful not to add to many ingredients to spoil the stew.

I sure had fun reading the book and I think anyone would. But it sure would be neat to have been crafted by a better writer like John D. MacDonald and see what the book could have been.

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Encyclopedia Brown’s author, Donald J. Sobol, has died at 87. Wow, did his books become a must read for me from elementary school to adulthood. I graduated from Leroy Brown to Dr. Haledjian in Sobol’s ‘Two Minute Mysteries’. Loved how he baffled me in each story. It’s one reason why I get so frustrated with today’s “Mysteries” that are so very easy to figure out.

Here’s a mystery I never did figure out and i always found ironic: Just how do you pronounce ‘Haledjian’? I always took it in as Hal-dee-an. What do you all think?

Involving Encyclopedia Brown, I also enjoyed the illustrations of Leonard Shortall. Shortall did the cover to the left and all of the interior illustrations of the early part of the series. I believe his illustrations are still being used inside a recent publication I saw of one of the early books. Here’s a list I found of books he illustrated.

I was constantly checking the Encyclopedia Brown series out of Princeton Elementary School library in Orlando. When the Scholastic van started coming to the school, ‘Two Minute Mysteries’ was one of the first I bought for 75 cents. I still have it and the rest I have since purchased.

These books, I think, really had me looking a bit deeper into what was going on in life and greatly contributed to my love of philosophy. They also helped in getting me to be a bit difficult in just buying into anything that’s tossed at me. What was the ‘Rest of the Story’?

I’ll have to go through these mysteries again and see how they hold up to today’s mystery writers, like Patterson, Brown and the like.

Click here for more about Donald J. Sobol and his books.

Hit Man by Lawrence Block

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Block’s book is nearly a travel journal as the main character roams about doing his job and trying to figure out his place in life. As each trip is logged in another story starts within the book. The stories aren’t broken into specific named chapters. The overall book contains probably a dozen tales of the adventures of the character. I wonder if that was the original thought. To have a series of short stories for a magazine or some such. Overall it is very good. Well written. Well defined characters. The interaction of the main character and the main contact for his work is nearly magic. The writing there is simply superb.

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A Historical Album of Florida by Charles A. Wills

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Wow, is this awful! This is as great as an example as to why I am producing my own short history of Florida. In Willis’s book there’s a weird fixation on immigration and black Americans while leaving out important parts of Florida history. To go on pages about immigration of such a short history and only leave a photo of the 1928 hurricane and claim the crash in Florida was due to cold and hot temperatures shows a scary ignorance of one of the most important and guiding events in the state’s entire history. It seems the author’s intent was to get personal political viewpoint documented than tell the state’s history. There’s also too much mentioned about the Liberty City race riots, which lasted a short time. If the author wants to point out racial issues in Florida, why not focus of desegregation moves in Tallahassee in the 1950s & 1960s that made waves nationwide that we still feel the effects of today? There are other volumes of Florida history that take similar paths and frustrate me. Why not just tell the history. Willis is not in or from Florida and this seems like an assignment he was given and got through and went to the next one. Our great state of Florida deserves far better treatment.

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Angel’s Cove by Allan Pedrazad

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

The formula method bleeds through this a bit too obviously. What helps that is the main character who is only sketched out. I left this book not sure who the main character really is. The other characters seemed drawn from a mystery clipart book. There are a few interesting characters, but the author never fleshes out anyone enough to really care about them or what happens to them. One of the better characters is taken out before half way through. I kept hoping that character would be resurrected anytime during the book to give more dimension to the story. The saddest part is the ending that is severely lacking. There is some very good writing. Some asides are very inspired, even though I don’t agree with the politics included. It seems the writer is good at putting editorial writing in place but not, in this case, a good story.

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The Goodbye Look by Ross Macdonald
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a good detective novel that has an ending that is hard to figure out. This is another Lew Archer round by the author who calls himself “MacDonald” (I recently leaned that none of the names he is printed with is his actual name). It seemed to me MacDonald worked a little too hard with the complexity of the story and had trouble getting it all to flow together. I believe that is why I had a bit of trouble following just who all the characters are in the book. Maybe that was his intent to make solving the mystery by the reader hard to do. I would recommend this book to those looking to settle in for a good mystery.

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The Howard Hughes Affair by Stuart M. Kaminsky
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Nice to return to a solidly written story, after another bout with a current author that was left alone by a good editor. Kaminsky does move this one very, very fast. The plot is very good, the mystery great and the characters very well done. As usual, Kaminsky nails the dialogue of the separate characters. Also, if you are a nostalgia nut like me, you’ll love the appearances of the well-known during this 1940s setting. To some, I’m guessing, this all appears way too old fashioned. Cynics of this day might say it isn’t realistic to what was really happening at the time, as if they knew what was realistic at the time (We sure have a weird view of “realism” today). These Toby Peters novels are just very good mysteries that are also much fun to read. With the 500 page tombs drowning in excess being produced today, I think some have forgotten what a good book is.

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