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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Been going for a few days without much rest to get a project done. Here’s a few illustrations I drew for it.

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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Here’s a recent illustration for a project that got me to use my reptile drawin’ skills.

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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Here’s a book illustration of a lion I finished this past week. I’ve been real busy and have not been posting here recently. All kinds of projects have been coming in. Along the way I’ve been trying to get a Florida history book finished. When I planned to do the Florida history book, I didn’t plan on other artwork coming in. At first i was turning work down and then realized I was really risking my financial position turning everything down. So, I’ve been juggling it all. I’ll try to catch up and add some of the caricature and illustration work I’ve been doing!

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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Here’s part of a feature I’m working on right now.

Was in JPnte Vedra, near Jacksonville, drawing golf enthusiasts at the Players Club at Sawgrass Country Club. GREAT crowd! They each had so much to say about themselves and I got to really work out my creative juices in the storytelling of most of the drawings. Here are some photos!