Mike's Books

  The Wax Pack: On the Open Road in Search of Baseball’s Afterlife by   Brad Balukjian   3 Stars   I was disappointed in The Wax Pack .  It wasn’t that the book was bad; it was enjoyable enough.  It’s just that I expected something very different, and something that I think would have been considerably more.  The concept grabbed me as soon as I saw the book for the first time:  open an old pack of baseball cards and then track down the players pictured to find out what their lives after baseball have been like.  Unfortunately, there was far too much of the author’s own story and far too little of the players’ stories for my taste.  There really wasn’t anything about Brad Balukjian that I was particularly interested in, but I really wanted to know a lot more about the players he managed to meet. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51312349-the-wax-pack

  Jurassic Park (Jurassic Park #1) by   Michael Crichton   5 Stars   Michael Crichton has long been my favorite author, and I have been happily rereading all of his books recently.   A frequent theme in Crichton’s work is the idea of science and technology being misused, or at least not accorded the respect that they deserve, often with disastrous results.   Jurassic Park is probably the best known of those books and rereading it now in the time of COVID and climate change made me realize how timely some of Crichton’s ideas are.   The world is fighting a deadly virus that probably originated in a lab in Wuhan, China.   Scientists thought they could safely study the virus, but clearly they were wrong.   It got out, with disastrous results.   To paraphrase Ian Malcolm from Jurassic Park , life found a way.   Climate change, the idea that human activity is dramatically accelerating the pace of global warming, is another threat we hear about every day.   Decades ago we h

  The Cactus League by   Emily Nemens   2 Stars   I really wanted to like this book, but it just didn’t work for me.   The book is a series of related stories centered around a troubled baseball star during spring training in Arizona.   The book is billed as a novel, but each chapter is essentially a separate story centered around one character or group of characters that come together during spring training.   As a result, there’s very limited character development and little or no flow to the story.   The ending attempted to tie it all together, but it was extremely weak and disappointing.   And I guess that really sums up my impression of the book as a whole:   weak and disappointing. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/45892265-the-cactus-league https://www.bookbub.com/books/the-cactus-league-by-emily-nemens

  Lakewood by   Megan Giddings     3 Stars   First of all, thank you to the author and publisher for providing an ARC of the book for my review in a Goodreads giveaway.   I enjoyed the book and would probably give it 3.5 stars if Goodreads allowed that; the story held my attention, I liked the characters and the writing was pretty good (although I think there’s room for some editing before the final version).   Nonetheless, I just didn’t know what to make of the book.   I felt like I wanted something more from the story, like it was building up to something huge, and in the end it was kind of a letdown.   The something huge just never came.   The big reveal at the end didn’t even make a lot of sense to me.   What happened at the end of the story (I won’t spoil anything with more details) exposed the bad guys to the world and yet I had the impression that they did it themselves.   Unfortunately, after an otherwise enjoyable read I was left scratching my head a little. ht

  Hella by David Gerrold 3 Stars Hella is an interesting story set sometime in the future of an earth colony living on a distant planet where everything is really big. But while the story is entertaining and the writing is good, it just didn’t grab me. It’s clearly a young adult book but isn’t billed that way at all that I can see. And there are some aspects of the book that I found particularly troubling. One other reviewer described Hella as having a “social structure that has evolved past where we are now in terms of gender and sexuality.” I’m not sure evolved is the word I would use though. In this world, people are able to change their gender back and forth at will, and they often do so when they are very young children. It seems to me that issues of gender identity are far deeper than wanting to be like an older sibling or wanting to pee standing up (which were the reasons for a very early-life gender change for the book’s hero). And by the end of the book the 13-year-old hero ha

The First Conspiracy: The Secret Plot to Kill George Washington   by   Brad Meltzer   and Josh Mensch   4 Stars   I found The First Conspiracy to be a very interesting account of a little known and seldom written about aspect of the American Revolution: a British plot to turn colonists (and especially colonial soldiers) to the British side and (possibly at least) to capture and perhaps kill George Washington and other colonial generals.   I won the book in a Goodreads giveaway, so first of all I’d like to thank Goodreads, the publisher, and the author for a chance to read and review the book.  When I entered the giveaway I didn’t realize that this was a “Young Reader’s Edition” of the book.  I was apprehensive when I first saw that but still found the book very interesting and informative.  The only major concession to “Young Reader’s” I noted was the very short chapters.   Highly recommended. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44280876-the-first-conspiracy https://www.book