Mike's Books

Sands Rising: The California Ballot Killings Book I by   H.M. Wilhelmborn   2 Stars Sands Rising is well written, with a cast of interesting, relatable characters that are often flawed and occasionally very funny.   Those qualities kept me turning the pages because I kept hoping that the story was actually going to go somewhere.   In the end it just didn’t.   The story told in Sands Rising just absolutely, positively, did not work for me.   It very well may for others but, for me, it was a complete dud.

The Ultimate Boston Red Sox Time Machine Book by   Martin Gitlin 4 Stars I’d like to thank NetGalley, the publisher, and the author for providing me with a digital ARC of this book for my review. The Ultimate Boston Red Sox Time Machine Book is a thoroughly enjoyable history of the Red Sox, many of their best players, and even their fans.   There’s not really anything new here, but then again it would be difficult to present anything truly new given all that’s been written about the Red Sox (especially since they broke the 86-year “curse” in 2004).   Nonetheless, the book is a pleasure for any Red Sox fan who wants to relive some of the joy of the last 15 years and who doesn’t mind remembering some of the pain of the years before the world changed in 2004.   Gitlin actually gives pretty equal treatment to both, but I personally would have preferred a little more emphasis on the more distant past.   After all, I’ve lived and died with this team...

Active Measures (Jericho Quinn #8) by   Marc Cameron   4 Stars I was torn between 3 and 4 stars on this one, but because this is the first Jericho Quinn novel I’ve read and I’m jumping into the middle of the series I decided to round up to 4.   I think more familiarity with the characters would have made the book more enjoyable and there was still plenty here to send me to the beginning of the series to catch up. So a Cuban defector lands on a beach in south Florida and is almost immediately killed by Cuban security operatives before he can do more than claim to have information vital to the United States.   It turns out the information he has relates to the existence of an aging Soviet nuclear missile in the hands of a rogue military officer in Cuba, a missile this officer intends to launch on Miami.   Enter Jericho Quinn and his team, who travel to Cuba and foil his plot in the midst of a hurricane.   There’s plenty of action and t...

The Plots to Kill Hitler: The Men and Women Who Tried to Change History by   Richard Dargie 3 Stars The Plots to kill Hitler is an interesting and enjoyable survey of the many attempts that were made on the Nazi leader’s life during the course of his rule.   Some of them are well documented, like von Stauffenberg’s Operation Valkyrie bombing.   Many others are not well known.   While the book doesn’t discuss any of these in great detail (and more detail would have led me to give the book a higher grade), just gathering them all in one place is informative.   There were many individuals who were willing to risk their lives to end Hitler’s.   Unfortunately, none of them succeeded.

The Tower Treasure (The Hardy Boys #1) by   Franklin W. Dixon 4 Stars OK, the 4 stars here are purely for the nostalgia.   If you’re an adult reading the Hardy Boys for the first time this clearly is not a 4 star book.   The Hardy Boys books were written for kids, and like millions of other boys from my generation I grew up reading them.   I also read some of them with my son when he was young, but he was never as fond of them as I was.   I suppose they really haven’t aged all that well.   This, the first book in the series, was written in 1927 and it certainly portrays a very different world from the one we live in today.   But if you grew up on the series as I did, it’s a marvelous trip down memory lane, one that I intend to continue through more of the series.

The Topeka School by   Ben Lerner 3 Stars The Topeka School was a mixed bag for me. First, I should admit that it’s not the kind of book that would ordinarily be my first choice for reading material.   It’s a study of a young man and his family, each of them dealing with more than their fair share of personal and emotional troubles.   Their stories are at times compelling and the writing style, jumping repeatedly from past to present, is an interesting one.   The writing itself is at times wonderful; elegant, flowing prose that’s a pleasure to read.   But at other points it degenerates into seemingly endless run-on sentences that just simply get lost. The book also strives to be a contemporary social and political commentary, and falls kind of flat for me in that respect.   Again, I must admit I don’t particularly agree with the message, but I also didn’t find that message to be very well conveyed.   It’s a bit of a weak back drop...