Carr Books

I am a parent and read this book, I thought it was ok, but thats where it ends. As a parent I buy books that will teach and challenge my children. This book was a Christmas gift. Reading this book I don't see that you could learn anything. Its not going to win any reading awards because there is just not much in the book. I think there is a reason it is selling for under a dollar. Its just not a bad book, but not a good one either.

This book was not a great as I expected it to be. Yes, it has a lot of topics and some useful information, but nothing that couldn't be found elsewhere. I gave it 2 stars just because it covered so much content that every now and then there was something helpful. Also, even though it says K-12, I didn't see much that was really geared towards the elementary ages. Overall, save your money, this one is not worth it.

The content of this book is excellent, however, the condition it arrived in was far from ideal. The book arrived with the cover bent and a number of pages dog eared. Very disappointing!!!

John Dickson Carr, for so many years a genius when it came to constructing impossible crime puzzles and also a fantastic builder of atmosphere . . . and then, by the time the fifties roll around, he gets a bit leaden. In this late Dr. Fell novel, the entire backdrop of Hitler's mountain eyrie at Berchtesgaden is built up bit by bit, a marvelous exercise in brooding evil, only to be dismissed a few chapters later when the book lands with a thud in bourgeois Geneva (Switzerland), as the middle-aged painter Brian Innes tries to cope with his attraction to the youngish daughter of an old friend. Innes nowhere seems like a painter, and never is his supposed knowledge of art or color used to indicate anything. But the puzzle is ingenious. What could cause a once-famous actress to tumble off a balcony in full view of two people--without being touched? And the back story, where it does not involve Eve Eden's abortive 1939 pilgrimage to Hitler, is absorbing indeed. Basically the problem is one that even Carr's greatest partisans have to acknowledge reluctantly, a constant flow of exposition badly delivered by people who already know everything, and a continual swarm of interruptions to the dialogue that serve no other purpose but to pad the plot and slow down the storyline. The "Macbeth" inspired title, "In Spite of Thunder," should say it all, but doesn't actually mean anything in context.

This could have been a great 250 page book. The first 150 pages are pure background, half of which is absolutely irrelevant to the story. The author drones on about the religious epiphanies and work history of the victims and their families.

As for trail life on the Appalachian Trail, I detected some gross factual errors that made me question the author's research. Damascus is not a week from Pearisburg on the AT, and Chestnut Knob is not, under any circumstances, a day's hike from Wapiti shelter, the scene of the crime.

Although the narration of the crimes and subsequent manhunt are page turners, the book again needlessly boggs down in courtroom proceedings which are rehashed verbatim.

I only recommend this book if you REALLY want to know about these murders....

If you are a new to the piano or are getting your kids into playing the piano, this book is NOT for you. The authors start with very little definition of terms and notes and when they do are very unclear what to do with the information. Plus, the songs they give, which seem like nice songs are way too hard for any level 1 student to even come close to playing. If the piano student has a qualified teacher in music to accompany the book, it may be a good buy, otherwise it's teaching methods for self learning are far out of date.

Here are two novels in the Ace Double Novel series from 1963, one by Old Pro Robert Moore Williams and the first solo novel by Terry Carr. (His first novel was a collaberation with Ted White.) Both feature poltical figures who are rather nasty pieces of work. In the Williams novel,it is the owner of a giant corporation who keeps the population of America in slavery. In Carr's novel, it is a gubernatorial candidate who plans to exterminate the natives on an alien planet.

_The Star Wasps_ starts off well enough. We are shown the Super Corporation Building in Denver, run by the ruthless magnate, Erasmus Glock. We see the hero, who has a plan to gum up the corporate works using a small crystal sphere to break the conditioning of the workers. We meet a heroine longing to be free. We encounter some mysterious and deadly dots of light that only a few people can see. We meet the scientist responsible for the lights. It begins as a good, lightweight adventure. But then the story starts to fall apart. Scenes repeat themselves. The action becomes little more than a routine and mindless shoot-'em-up. There is a final scene at the end that redeems things a little. But it is not enough.

_Warlord of Kor_ is clearly better written than _The Star Wasps_. The plot is more sophisticated,and the style is much more controlled. The story involves an archeologist who is working with the surviving natives on a planet in an effort to unravel a mystery. At some time, thousands of years ago, peace was adopted or imposed on the natives. Yet it seems to have been done by the "forgetting" of certain areas of knowledge. Even though the natives have almost near-perfect racial memories, certain things have been supressed. What are these areas of knowledge? What is the secret of the planet that the aliens are trying to conceal? And why do they seem apathetic about the growing threat to their lives? These problems are all fairly solved. It's generally a better read... and yet, it is also somehow a routine piece. Ace put out a number of better Double Novels than these two.

_Individual Ratings_: _The Star Wasps_: Two stars; _Warlord of Kor_: Three stars

This book is a compilation of research studies and findings/publications. I had to have it for class, but I found it very difficult to follow at times. It felt as though someone had compiled a bunch of bad homework assignments into a book! You know, like the author was required to write something, and this was the best they could come up with. Some of the information and findings were helpful for the class, but most were not. Unless you HAVE to have this for a class, I wouldn't suggest it.

I am the author of this book. It has a few good scenes, but is essentially "roman a clef" nonsense that every writer has to get out of his system early on. Do yourself a favor and read ANYTHING else I've written (you'll be doing me a favor, too). Forgive the follies of youth.

After reading The Alienist, I thought "Why not see what else this guy's written?" Should've known better. All I can say is thank God he waited 14 years to write another book!!! (Must've been taking classes....) Couldn't really make it past the first chapter. The charcters were, well, thinly veiled real people. He should have just called the "hero" Caleb... Sorry, Caleb, loved everything else, even the history books, but this is simply unforgivable!

This book was bor-ring. It is supposed to be about some evil secret society, but after about fifty pages I gave up, as almost nothing had happened. This book was especially disappointing because I had just read his The Corpse in the Waxworks, written some thirty years before this one, and it was a brisk and inventive detective novel of the locked-room category for which Carr is justifiably famous.

I can see why someone might be bored by this book. It has a very slow beginning. The impoverished Jeffrey Wynne is returning a young lady from France to her uncle, Sir Mortimer. Their way lies across London Bridge, but they discover that a military guard has been set on the bridge. The houses that line both sides of the bridge from time out of mind are to be torn down to allow more room for vehicular traffic. The guard has been set to prevent those who had lived there, by that time the very poor, from creeping back into their homes. After some rather puzzling noodling around Jeffrey and Peg end up back at a house on London Bridge at the sign of the Magic Pen where a locked room mystery of a sort is waiting for them.

Carr's writing is a fair copy of mediocre mid 18th century prose. He has done his homework because he tells the reader more about the minituae of 18th century life than the reader probably wants to know. The reader is also introduced to John Fielding, Magistrate of Bow Street (better known from Bruce Alexander's more recent mystery series) and Laurence Stern (libidinous parson and author of Tristam Shandy among other works).

I ended up wanting to shake both the heroine and the hero. The heroine keeps running headlong into danger in the TSTL (Too Stupid to Live)fashion of heroines in older historicals and the hero isn't particularly nice. The fight scenes are so precisely described that the reader will have to stop and picture what they are doing, which slows the pace even more.

You might want to avoid this book if you are not a fan of JDC or the mid 18th century.