Review 526: Dracula

Dracula by Bram Stoker
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Finished reading this on Halloween, in time to close out October with a spooky read. Generally, I do not like horror books and Halloween is not one of my favorite holidays. But if one was to read a frightful book that is a good season if a reason was needed.

I’ve been exposed to many tales of vampires, mostly on television or movies. I don’t find them horrifying, at least what I’ve seen so far. Since this book is the original I couldn’t be certain this would be frightening, but honestly it wasn’t. It had all the familiar aspects already known to me. I do suspect this might have been somewhat horrifying to the people of the late 1800s, as they didn’t have so much horror media back in those days. One does tend to get desensitized to some extent.

The story itself I found well done, better than I expected for the age of the book. It was told mainly by diary entries from the main characters, along with some letters. There were hints of things that a modern reader one knows the meaning ahead of time. Had the feeling a bit of knowing an inside joke.

I felt the tension was adeptly written and overall, a book well worth the time to read.

Review 525: Rise & Shine

Rise & Shine by Patrick Allington
My rating: 2.75 of 5 stars

A dystopian world thirty years after the catastrophe. A few people found a new way to live and started a new community, two cities one named Rise and the other Shine. They are perpetually at war and this footage feeds their people. Growing plants is now a crime. It's an odd book for sure. Not sure I really liked it, but it was short.

Review 524: Young Men and Fire

Young Men and Fire by Norman Maclean
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book is the story of what happened at the Mann Gulch Fire on August 5, 1949. Smokejumpers were a relatively new way to fight forest fires, and were the elite of the firefighters. On that day, the fire turned into a blow-up and killed nearly all of the smokejumpers.

Norman Maclean, a firefighter in his youth and grew up in the area was a bit haunted by that day and all those deaths. He wrote and investigated this tragedy for decades, but the book wasn’t finished, he had a hard time finding his way into the story. Instead it was published after his death.

It story repeats, the actions and what happened are gone over multiple times. There are different versions of what happened, what was in court cases, and what the two remaining survivors told Maclean. The language used was at times poetic, a literary language.

I’d wanted to read this book for a long while. Earlier this year I attended a webinar for the 75th anniversary of Mann Gulch Fire, my desire to read this book, and reminded me I still haven’t read Maclean’s book. Then I saw the unabridged version of the audiobook available but only for another week in the Audible Plus catalog that I was finally propelled to get to this one. I may even have rushed through the ending in order to finish before I lost access to the book.

Review 523: The Prague Sonata

The Prague Sonata by Bradford Morrow
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

My favorite of the year! At least for fiction.

Should have some thoughts on this...love the way that Prague was written, could actually see that city. I enjoyed how the mystery unfolded, but this is hardly a mystery story.

Review 522: BOOM

BOOM: Oil, Money, Cowboys, Strippers, and the Energy Rush That Could Change America Forever by Tony Horwitz
My rating: 3.5 of 5 stars

This is a short book. Horwitz traces where the XL Pipeline was proposed to carry the oil from the tar sands in Canada. Starting out in Canada he talks to people who are working on mines in the oil tar sands. Two tons of these sands will produce one barrel of oil, and daily they produce about 3 million barrels a day. That is an enormous amount of sand processed. The size is unfathomable, but Hortwitz does try to describe what the giant mine looks like.

After talking to mainly workers and others, he starts to follow the pipeline location, although it hadn’t been started yet. Most of the people he tries to talk to are land owner who’s land it will be sitting on, and we get their opinion. For the most part people seem to be for this venture, for the jobs and the money it will bring in.

There are some that are completely against it, and Horwitz talks to some of those people too, but there is not a balance. It felt to me that the majority included in this book are for the pipeline for what it will bring. Maybe I didn’t keep close enough track.

This is a journalist travel narrative, with the expected notes on things such as the border crossing and his rental car, along with some other local flavor and experiences.

Review 521: Forty Years a Forester

Forty Years a Forester by Elers Koch
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is an autobiographical account of Elers Koch who started working as a forester when the U.S. Forest Service begun near the beginning of the 20th century. Gifford Pinchot established the forest service, being the very first chief and perhaps the very first United States Forester. He hired the first group of young men, with Koch being among them, and the only one that grew up in the West.

While the book starts with his early days of growing up and college, there isn’t very much of his personal life, instead it is focused on being a forest ranger. The earliest days were taken up mostly as surveying the forests, drawing up maps then claiming them for protection. Then as inspector. The forest service also handled the logging, determining which trees should be cut and which should stay, so they were involved in managing the forest. And of course, there are forest fires. Several chapters discuss this and are among the most exciting passages of the book when escaping near death from the flames.

Koch occasionally compares how things were done in those early days to now, such as using airplanes and smoke jumpers helping out in fighting the forest fires. Of course his “today” is now many decades ago and things have changed even more. Koch advocated for sometimes not fighting a natural fire and letting it burn as the best way to manage the forest. That was not the policy at the time. Another thing Koch did not approve was in this all-out effort to save the forest from burning, roads were made and developed throughout the woodlands, thus ruining the pristine wide open lands and wilderness.

When the book was originally written in 1949 Koch could not find a publisher. He died before it was published, it took nearly 50 years before the book found a publisher. This is a very readable book and an fascinating account of what it was being a forester over a hundred years ago. Glad this book finally found a publisher.

I listened to the audiobook version but also had access to an eBook which I used to glance through and see the photographs and maps that were included. Those are always a nice addition to a non-fiction book, particularly an autobiography.

Review 520: Big Box USA

Big Box USA: The Environmental Impact of America’s Biggest Retail Stores by Bart Elmore
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A fascinating look at the big box store model and the environment. It began with Walmart and the rest followed the model. One section of the book is devoted to the big box stores that are outdoor retailers, such as REI, Cabela’s and Bass Pro Shops. I wrote a longer review which will be published in a forthcoming issue of the Electronic Green Journal.

Review 519: Hum

Hum by Helen Phillips
My rating: 3.5 of 5 stars



While this book takes place in a not so distant future, it speaks to today and where we might be headed. At the center of the story is May Webb, who we first encounter getting paid for a micro-plastic surgery that will alter her face in such a small way that will evade facial recognition. She and her family desperately need this money.

This future is populated by robots called Hum. They are helpful, do many things, such as the robot conducting the facial surgery. May splurges with the money to take her family on a vacation to stay in the botanical garden for a few nights. Something she feels she desperately needs, nature, a forest. We also sense May wants to find a deeper connection to her two kids, and hopes to get that with this vacation and to ensure that she takes their “bunnies” away from them. (This becomes a major plot point later.) These bunnies are devices attached to children wrists that seem like they are like phones. In this future people are very attached to their phones, much like today.

The writing was good, and found that the kids are very well portrayed. Maybe one of the better portrayals of children I’ve read in a while.

This book tries to address several topics some more subtly than others, such as rich being able to afford to turn off the constant bombardment of advertising; or how mothers are being taken to account for their children’s welfare more than fathers. There were other topics raised but not fully addressed, which leaves these open hanging issues…such as that facial surgery. This glossing over key elements of the book detracted from the overall quality of the book.

I listened to the audiobook, which was well done. For myself I felt this was a better way to read the book, but may not be for everyone. If you do like audiobooks, this may be the way to go for you.