Truman Books

Roy C. Smith offers a readable, straight-forward, right-of-center review of the famous economist, Adam Smith. The book introduces Smith's thoughts in basic detail, and spends a great deal of time putting Smith in the context of the American revolution, which of course is when "The Wealth of Nations" was published, in 1776. At times the history seems to drown-out the thems of Adam Smith's contribution, but by the conclusion the author ties up his thesis that Adam Smith's thought had a pervasive and substantial impact on the Founding Fathers, and upon the way Americans have done busness since then. A good read for introductory or undergraduate readers. Author's focus remains on Smith and American context. Little mention of John Maynard Keynes is made, and no discusion of Marx or socialism as a competing alternative. This did not detract from book, as plenty of other books and articles speak to those subjects.

R Smith is certainly correct that Hamilton,Washington,Madison,Franklin,etc.,had either read the Wealth of Nations(WN,1776) or were familiar with its point of view.Of course,these individuals formed the Federalists.They were the real thing as far as genuine conservatism is concerned.They were opposed by the Anti Federalsts(Mason,Randolph,Henry,Paine,Jefferson,etc.)who took their cue from the work of J B Say.These individuals are not conservatives.They are libertarians.It is this group that believed in laissez faire,opposed all tariffs,opposed a uniform currency,opposed the creation of a central bank to control the problematic behavior of private commercial banks,opposed the creation of a strong federal government,opposed giving the federal government the power to tax,etc.R Smith has obviously not read the Wealth of Nations in its entirety because the real Adam Smith favored overall progressive taxes,supported both revenue and retaliatory tariffs,supported extensive public goods and works spending by a democratically elected government(as opposed to the " Government" tyranny of George III.R Smith badly misrepresents Smith's views here),had a very clear understanding of free market failure,externalities and spillover effects,the need to prevent any bank loans from going to projectors(J M Keynes's rentiers and speculators),prodigals,and imprudent risk takers,the need to fix the rate of interest in the long run permanently at a low level a little bit above the prime rate,the skewing of loans to the sober middle class entrepreneurs who would use the loans to create productive jobs and not leveraged buyouts ,dot com frauds,and subprime scams, and the importance of making sure that all individuals had an education and religious instruction that would be provided free of charge by the state if they were unable to pay for such education themselves.There is no substantial discussion of any of these Smithian topics anywhere in R Smith's book.R Smith appears to believe that Adam Smith was a libertarian.Nothing could be further from the truth.The interested reader is encouraged to read pp.280-340,especially Smith's summary on pp.339-340,434-439,681-690,716-768,and 794-795 of the Modern Library(Cannan)edition of the WN to discover the real Adam Smith.You will not find him in this book.

This Conan saga is very much in keeping with the Conan movie that Governor Arnold made famous, and very much like REH portrayed in his stories of the adventurous Cimmerian... Like the movie, Conan in this graphic novel is paired up with a sniveling complaining cohort who helps bring levity to a very dark story. And as in most of REH's stories Conan is pretty much out for himself... The artwork is top notch, especially the coloring; it is lush and sets a dark malevolent mood of danger and adventure. I have almost all the Conan Graphic novels and I feel this one while different is on par with those by Cary Nord, the artistic genius and the many others that have been allowed to render Conan. And in many respects I prefer this one because the coloring is beyond the softness of Nord's books and there is a lot more black on these pages making the characters more solid looking. This may not be an REH story, but it is very much like the Conan movie, which I feel is an incredible interpretation of REH's Conan.

You'd think that a comic featuring Conan against a wizard who can forcibly shapeshift other creatures, leading up to the bringing of a Lovecraftian nasty into the world at the climax, would be a great ride.

Alas, this one isn't. Besides being pretty much a retread of a hundred other bad Conan pastiches, "Songs of the Dead" suffers under a painfully bad script full of lame locker room humor. Yes, Conan has descended to poop jokes and verbal pissing-contests. Not pretty.

The few things that are good about "Songs of the Dead" are quickly disposed of (most notably an intriguing djinn character who sadly gets reduced to just another cheesy babe for Conan to have sex with, and a wizard with some interesting moments of characterization who is killed in short order once he gets within reach), and the rest never really manages to get better than "mediocre and done better before by other people".

"Conan and the Songs of the Dead" was a real disappointment, and should be shunned by Robert E. Howard fans.

In a topic that is commonly infused with rhetoric and distortion it's refreshing to read something that doesn't resort to any cheap tricks. This book is simply a balanced account of the situation that resulted in the use of atomic weapons at the end of World War II. Instead of pointing fingers and manufacturing conspiracy theories, as many books on this subject do, it's "just the facts, ma'am". Japanese peace feelers are discussed, as is the reality that these efforts were not endorsed by the militarists who ran the country. Efforts to assure the Japanese that their emperor would not be removed, which some believed would hasten the end of the war, are detailed. In addition, the viewpoints of those who favored a more strict interpretation of the unconditional surrender doctrine are explained. The revisionists who argue that the use of the bomb was unnecessary go through this story with a cleaver and chop out the parts that don't fit in with their preconceived notions. Fears about Soviet expansion in Asia are emphasized while the battle of Okinawa with it's massive U.S. casualties is ignored, for example, giving the impression that the bomb was dropped as a warning to the Russians. In fact, you could go through this book with a pair of scissors ala William Burroughs's cutup method and only keep certain parts of certain sentences, paste those parts together and voila - you've got yourself a standard issue anti-bomb dropping diatribe.

The most interesting part of the book to me dealt with the Japanese "peace party". There were some who wanted to avoid the war altogether and tried to arrange a meeting with Roosevelt to defuse tentions. Even in 1942 there were a few clear sighted individuals who knew the war could not be won and wanted to start negotiations with the U.S. This tale only shows how fully the militarists were in control. Overall, however, the writing style here is dry and academic. The details that bring history to life are occasionally present but can't overcome the less than riveting presentation. This isn't something to bring to the beach. You'll have to have a serious interest in the topic in order to like it.

The author appropriately confines his personal views to the back of the book where they belong. He says repeatedly that the allied policy of unconditional surrender was "a policy of revenge". This is flat wrong and betrays a deep lack of knowledge about the wider period in time surrounding the narrowly focused events he describes. Unconditional surrender was a response to the lessons of World War I as well as the policies of appeasement that resulted in the Second World War. It's aim was to end the war without laying the seeds of future conflict. The fact that Germany and Japan have not been a threat to world peace since 1945 proves the value of this policy. Wainstock tells us that if we had only been willing to negotiate with the likes of Hitler and his pals we could have ended the war earlier and saved a lot of lives. I'm sure he hopes our government will take this approach the next time we're confronted with two powerful dictatorships bent on conquest. Let's head to the negotiating table and work out a deal - they'll be reasonable. Hey, everybody's got the right to second guess the decisions taken a half-century ago during the largest war the world has ever seen. At least the line between opinion and fact remains solid in this book.

This was an amazing book. My father is a history teacher and there were things in this book that not even he knew. Wainstock adeptly guides you through the Japanese situation in 1945, history about the bomb and the scientists who made it, the Potsdam Conference and Decleration and Truman's final decision. Packed with quotes from both the American and the Japanese this book is an unbiased account of the atomic bomb.

I originally read this book about 30 years ago as the textbook in an LDS institute class. At the time I was very impressed by the content of this little book and decided to re-read it. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it again.

The book is a collection of 7 essays by Truman Madsen, about the LDS concept of man as an eternal being, which were originally published in the Instructor, the LDS church's magazine geared toward youth and young adults, starting in 1963. They were collected in book form and published in 1966. The book is only 80 pages long, but the concepts contained herein are profound and powerful. The book is geared toward LDS college students, who were asking "How do the arguments and positions of the various `schools' of thought compare with the teachings of Joseph Smith and of the Restored Gospel?"

The first essay is titled "Whence Cometh Man???" and is a summary of the next 6 chapters and discusses the foundational LDS doctrine of the pre-existence and highlights that men and women have always existed as uncreated and indestructible intelligences and are co-eternal with God. The doctrine states that we are spiritually begotten of God, and that physical life is to obtain a physical body and prove ourselves worthy to return to God's presence.

The remaining chapters cover the following issues: 1. The Problem of Identity, which reviews the LDS position on self compared with orthodox Christianity, Existentialism, and Humanism. 2. The Paradoxes of Creation, which discusses the LDS rejection of creation "ex nihilo" and its profound impact on many philosophies. 3. The Mind-body Problem, which talks about the Mormon view that the body and spirit combined form the soul of man and how the physical resurrection and permanent union of these is one of the objects of our creation. 4. The Problem of Human Freedom, which shows how humans truly are free agents and are not simply creatures and the impact of this thought. 5. The Problem of Evil, of Suffering, which can be explained much more easily given that fact that we are eternal beings here to learn to love and be tried and strengthened, which can only happen with true free will and its consequences. 6. The Problem of Self-awareness, which reflects on those flashes of remembrance some of us have related to the divine that many poets have discussed and how this relates to our spiritual pre-existence.

I highly recommend this book to anyone desiring to understand the most fundamental philosophical differences between LDS and others. It would be great to see this book reprinted once again.

...This book is a period piece that describes the essentially fundamental Latter Day Saints view according to Joseph Smith as a more logical way to narrate the Christian metanarratives. Specifically, it avoids the Platonic paradoxes by moving away from the orthodox conception of the Creator God who creates ex nihilo or who creates man. Man instead is eternal as is God and God is subject to the demands of the universe. This book demonstrates a well read author, though one who missed the linguistic turn.

I thought how interesting it would be to have a grandparent who became the President of this country. Mr. Daniel did not have much to say about that aspect of his life. President Truman died when Daniel was 15.

What Mr. Daniel wrote about was a son who had famous parents and turned to alcohol and drugs to deal with his inferiority complex.

Very interesting book about what it was like to grow up with a historical figure in the family. The author talks about how having a famous grandfather influenced his life. The author also talks about his experiences in and around Washington and his perspective on them from "the inside".

The second in Margaret Truman's "Murder in Washington" series is better than the first. In "Murder on Capitol Hill" Truman has a surer grasp of character and plot than in "Murder in the White House", but her research is still done from memory and the story is predictable. Senator Cale Caldwell is murdered at a party, leaving readers a finite number of suspects as heroine lawyer Lydia James leads the investigation. Truman gives us an interesting and well-drawn array of suspects, but most readers will have worked out the plot halfway through.

As in "White House", Truman relies heavily on her Washington memories rather than researching new ones. So instead of interesting and detailed insights into the Senate's back rooms, we get a lot of chats in restaurants and bars. Despite its title, there is very little description of Capitol Hill. Readers interested in juicy insider insights will be disappointed. With a few pen strokes, the book could be set in any city. A quick read, not bad, but lots of room for improvement.

This was my first time reading a book from margaret truman and it was goog she had me thinking hadr to finish the it had ti up and down. she has differnts books by the same name may be next time a will read a differnt book of murders but with a different killer.

William Baer's The Unfortunates is a poignant and realistic collection of mini-portraits of humans who have fallen through the cracks. Baer writes as both narrator and as if he were inside the mind of the unfortunate subject of each poem. The reader realizes a sense of unease, of nervous silence, as he eavesdrops on these whispered conversations. These poems are reminiscent of a quieter Howard Nemerov, a Robert Frost who is more involved in writing about social ills, and a William Butler Yeats who uses the language of the late 20th century. Baer's poetry is the vehicle that will propel the tradition of blank verse well into the next century.

William Baer's first book of poems is, despite the praises printed on the back, an enormous disappointment. The poems themselves read like outlines for short stories. The language itself is flat, dull, and unvarying. Baer's choices for his subjects are themselves intriguing and full of possibility. A former cult member, or a middle-aged man who loves to ride roller coasters, or a boy who pretends to be the brother of an accident victim so he can be on the news, are interesting, surprising subjects, but Baer fails to bring anything out of them other than the most obvious possibilities. Should poetry reflect life's dullness to this degree? Is this even poetry? Baer himself, as editor of "The Formalist", might disagree, since the "blank verse" contains lines of wildly irregular meter and length. As a whole, the book seems unfinished; perhaps Baer was concentrating on a deadline rather than on the writing.

I am glad I didn't read all the reviews on this book before reading it,as I might not have read it at all. There are a lot of good things about this book,but it seems there are a lot of things that prevent it from becoming a great book.
The attack on Pearl Harbor has been covered in many books and films. It was an event that had so much to it that one wonders whether it can ever be covered perfectly. Even people who were there that terrible day;would have seen it very differently.
The thing about this book that is different, is that it concentrates as much as possible,on the USS Arizona;but not entirely.The fact that this ship's story has to be seen in its relationship to what went on around it that day.
The book does a good job of showing what it was like to sail on the Arizona from its earliest days and what it was like to be part of the crew the day she was destroyed.
As much as possible,the book concentrates on the personal experiences of several survivors who were lucky enough to live to tell their stories.
The book also tells what efforts were made to retrieve the bodies of the victims ,salvage operations,visits to the wreck by divers;and the decisions and things that were done to create the memorial that now exists. Complete lists of all the casualties,as well as survivors is included in appendix B&C.Also included in appendix D are all the funeral services held at the memorial for Arizona Men who were aboard the Arizona that fateful day,but have since died and requested it be the final resting flace of their remains with their friends.
The book includes 33 B&W photographs.
No one book can say everything that needs saying about the Attack on Pearl Harbor,so this book should be taken in that light.
I don't know ,nor do I imagine does anyone else,what details are correct and what are errorerous or simply careless researching.It seems others have critizied the book on these points,so I guess many of the details must be taken with caution.

I purchased this book as a gift for an uncle who was an ARIZONA survivor who had preceeded me in my Naval career. He survived to serve twenty more years in the Navy after the sinking of his ship, including surviving having another ship sunk beneath him. Unfortunately he died before I had the chance to give it to him--though prehaps not so unfortunate in one respect. He was a stickler for details and he would probably have been disappointed in the story of his ship as told in this book.

The book is a dramatic story of a dramatic event that shaped world history. Having said that, there's not much else to say about it. It is the result of collaboration by three authors, one of whom is a retired U.S. Marine. It reads as though they each took one part of the story to write and the book was hurriedly cobbled together to meet a publishing deadline without adequate reconciliation of the different parts. Other than the personal accounts of the individual survivors quoted, I can find little new material in the book that isn't published elsewhere. I was disappointed in the inconsistant data in the books--such as calling ADM H.E. Kimmel an Admiral (4 stars), a Rear Admiral (2 stars) and a Fleet Admiral (5 stars) in the space of a page and a half. That part was obviously not written by the Marine, who would never make such a mistake in rank. There was also a discription of one of the surviors who, also in the space of a couple of pages was referred to as a "chief warrant officer", a "warrant officer" and "eligible for warrant officer" (a chief petty officer). Other similarly discordant data jangled the attention of a reader. Nautical terminology was sometimes used, sometimes misused, sometimes disregarded entirely. Many of the scenes were decribed repetatively and inconsistantly, not just from the different viewpoints of the different survivors but from the narative matrix connecting the stories. Details about the ship and the people were erratic and kept the reader off balance, trying to construct a picture of the events. The pace and feel of the book was inconsistant throughout and not of the caliber I'd have expected of a book recording events from the perspective of sixty years later.

The USS Arizona by Joy Waldron Jasper, James P. Delgado, and Jim Adams was great. Granted to the perfectionist this is not a flawless. This isn't a detailed, stats filled book. It is more of a holistic view of a ship that has become an icon of America told by 3 people. I believe this book is perfect for your everyday person wanting to learn about the Arizona and not meant for your core historian. I have read many books and seen many shows about Pearl Harbor and the ships, sailors and battle of December 7th. This book takes these 3 individuals, a journalist, a historian and a Marine, who all have been connected in some way to the Arizona and tell the ships story from a Ship of War to a Symbol of America.

The interviews of the survivors and history that covered the time before December 7th was something new for me in that it gave me a new perspective of life on the Arizona. I did not really think about the fact that battle ship was over 20 years old and been around the world. It was good to be reminded of the daily routine of the sailors and how much the ship was their life and home. It gave me a new appreciation of the impact her loss and the other ships' of Pearl Harbor had on the sailors that served in them.

The part afterwards about the memorial and the ship today was a good conclusion. Understanding the Navy's attempts at salvage and finally settling on leaving her as a memorial shed new light on how she got the way she is. I really appreciated the accounts of the burial of survivor's ashes back aboard the sunken ship. All in all I felt a certain closure with this book and have a better understanding of what the USS Arizona means to me and other Americans.

I bought my copy of "The USS Arizona" after a trip to the 'Arizona' memorial in Hawaii last year. I have always been interested in Pearl Harbor and World War Two in the Pacific Theatre, and have read extensively on it (I particularly like the Gordon Prange books, especially "At Dawn We Slept".) I found the 'Arizona' memorial to be a place of beauty and tranquility, yet amazingly solemn and haunting. After the visit, I decided to learn more about the 'Arizona' herself. This is a great book for a start. It is an interesting amalgam of operational history, information on the attack, including an excellent section debunking myths surrounding the attack, personal recollections, and historical preservation efforts today.

The bulk of the book deals with recollections of crewmembers on shipboard life, with emphasis on December 7, 1941, obviously. These recollections form a valuable oral history of the ship, and though there are minor conflicts between the stories on a couple of details, they are heartfelt, well told, captivating, and historically irreplaceable.

Equally important is the story of the current preservation efforts of the National Park Service to manage the wreck. In particular, the stories of survivors who elect to rejoin their fallen comrades when they are interred in Turret Four are moving beyond all expectations, and reinforce the significance of the Pearl Harbor attack in their lives.

There are some minor errors in the book, many of which are typographical, for instance using "savage" instead of "salvage". Some of the errors are a bit more careless as in a reference to 'General Yamamoto', when he was, of course, and Admiral, and going back and forth on whether the 'Arizona' was tied up at quay F-7 or F-8 (I believe it was F-8.) These are pretty nit-picky, but need to be mentioned. The book does have a couple of standout features in the five appendices. Appendix A is an excellent, if brief, overview of the key events in the Pacific war, Appendix B is an 'Arizona' casualty list, Appendix C is a list of 'Arizona' survivors, and Appendix E is a list of ship casualties of Japan in World War Two. Appendix E makes a sobering statement, that I have never heard anywhere else and found utterly fascinating: "Of the attacking Japanese fleet that initiated the war against the United States on December 7, 1941, all ships ended up on the bottom of the sea by the war's end except one midget submarine." As horrible as Pearl Harbor was for the American forces, the whirlwind reaped by Japan, in the end, was no less ferocious.

This poorly written book reads in part like some dollar tourist brochure available at any Honolulu newsstand. And those are some of the better parts. This is all said in respect to the ship and its men, more respect than they are shown between the covers of this book.

THE USS ARIZONA was written by three authors (Jasper, Delgado and Adams), and was obviously written in haste with little collaboration and less intelligent editing. As it reads it is almost an affront to the memories of the men who fought and died on board, and to those who lived to tell about it. It gets two stars in their honor. The oral histories of that terrible December day are worthy of remembrance.

The memoirs of Regular Navy swabbies who called the ARIZONA home in the late 1930's and early 1940's are priceless. They give the reader a fine sense of what being a sailor on a battleship in peacetime was like: A spartan man's world of honest hard work punctuated by liberty calls in one of the world's most exotic ports of call.

The terrible and sorrowful recollections of the men who lived through Sunday, December 7th are likewise to be treasured. They are a testament to an America that was blasted out of a dolorous drowse of peace and yet immediately showed its best side. ARIZONA men tried to defend Hawaii, protect their ship, save their buddies, and turn back the invader. That the ship and her crew died in the doing takes nothing away from them at all.

Unfortunately, the book's flaws are so glaring that they detract from these finer points. The seams of the story, where one author left off and another began, stand out like scars. The tense shifts from third to first person, depending on who is writing. The changes in tone and changes in pace are jarring. So is the repetition of information. For example, we are told five times (and three times in two pages!) of the same modification made to Japanese aerial torpedoes.

It's a shame the authors were not up to their task. The book's recounting of the early history of the ARIZONA is spotty. We find out that the ARIZONA once ferried President Hoover, but we never find out where or why. Technical information on the ship is virtually nonexistent. The ship underwent several major refits in her career but almost nothing is said about them. Likewise, relatively little is actually said about Pearl Harbor, the ARIZONA's role there, the attack, or the damage to the ship.

Much of this is probably not so much the fault of the authors (whose qualifications to write this book are exemplary) as much as of the editors who simply did a BAD job, unworthy even of a high school "alternative" newspaper, such as:

"At 7:55 AM the sky was dark over Oahu...the sun glinted off the wings of the Japanese planes."

Hawaii is an admittedly amazing place, but even there the sun does not shine at night in the morning. Nor does gloom of night last until eight bells. We are told that the ARIZONA had taken on "a million" or "millions" of gallons of oil prefatory to sailing, but in other spots we are given precise (but varying) amounts which seem far too small, such as 3,300 or 5,000 gallons, a huge discrepancy. It would seem relatively easy to find out what the oil bunker capacity of the ship was (4,630 tons, or 9,260,000 gallons according to outside sources) but the authors leave us, carelessly, not knowing. Disdaining fact-checking as a luxury, apparently the editors confused oil tonnage and gallon capacity in their rush to get this book into print for the 60th anniversary of Pearl Harbor.

The book also lacks maps and diagrams, an unforgivable oversight in any book involving Pearl Harbor and its ships. The photograph on the cover of the Mass-Market Edition is NOT that of the ARIZONA, but of a much smaller vessel. Several of the photographs within the book are also of other ships misidentified as the ARIZONA. THE USS ARIZONA is peppered throughout with this kind of editorial slovenliness. It ruins this book.

Meant to be a paean to the ship and its crew, THE USS ARIZONA fails miserably, except where ARIZONA survivors speak in their own voices. It would have been profound to write a quality history of the ship instead of this patchwork job in which so much is unremembered, half-remembered and distorted.

Someone looking for the ARIZONA is well-advised to tread cautiously amongst the memory holes that Jasper, Delgado and Adams leave behind them. A visit to the Memorial, where one can experience the presence of the ship is a far, far better thing than this overall disappointing book.

I love mysteries. I love suspense as well. And this book didn't fail in that respect. However, I am spoiled, I like really good writing when I am reading a mystery ~~ this book doesn't qualify.

Mac Smith is appointed by the Vice-President Angrile to go to Mexico to oversee the elections there. There have been a series of murders lately ~~ and it all points to the ruling class in Mexico ~~ as they fought to keep the political powers in their grasp. Stories and rumors fly about in Washington and Mac Smith is right in the middle of it. His wife joins him on the trip to Mexico and they're in the midst of all the excitement.

It is a fast read ~~ an interesting one. But if you're looking for a book with some substance to it ~~ this book would not be it. It is just a fast mystery read that you don't have to think about the characters much. It's a perfect read for a lying-in on a blanket while enjoying the fall colors.

9-22-03

All of M. Truman's books are entertaining. However this one doesn't live up to expectations. The main theme seems to editorialize about her opinions concerning U.S. policies re' Mexico. The mystery plot is late arriving and almost incidental.Hope the next one returns to her former standard.

No fan of her writings, I still buy them all, when they become available in paperbacks, because I like the "inside" insights she always has to offer on Washington. But after 13 (or is it 14?) I have to repeat what I said about the third one: Poor Meg, she never could sing and she still can't write! In Watergate she almost outdoes herself for bad grammar, awkward syntax and malapropisms; this one afforded opportunities for bad Spanish as well, of which she took plenty of advantage. Otherwise we have the usual plodding method: No one can come onstage without a complete inventory of how he is dressed, whether or not it adds to his character portrayal. No one can eat a meal without a litany of courses obvioualy drawn from the restaurant menu. Every movement through any city has to be traced out on a city map. I'm sure by now she has a healthy library of menus, maps and fashion magazines, where what she really needs is a good editor. But there is something new in Watergate, or anyway something I've not noticed in previous Murders here and there -- political polemics, and the lady plainly does not understand the politics or economics of free trade, and her bungling treatment of NAFTA detracts from an already-less-than-mediocre story.

Truman has outdoone herself with this one! its the best mystery ever by the queen of political mystery. Who did it? ask Margaret and she will tell you who!

But this one wasn't as great as most of the others. I enjoyed the action and even found the opinionated descriptions of corruption in Mexico somewhat interesting and thought-provoking. But wish that this book didn't feel so rushed and that it had more heart. I was getting a "Lawrence Sanders" kind of feeling (whose books I also enjoy, but in a different way).

It has been 5 weeks since I ordered this book and I'vs not seen any sign of it or received any notice of a shipping delay.

I would not deal with this seller again.

Another good instalment in the Wild Card series, even if much delayed. Focusing on aces with powers of seemingly little consequence, some of whom are jokers as well, this book is a little more upbeat, or even lighthearted at times.

Plenty of aces make cameos, even Cameo, not to mention Demise. So lots of old favorites are around. Peregrine's son, also, as a teenager.

Fidel Castro has a different job, and Grace Kelly's husband has been very good for her, as two of the more tongue-in-cheek tales unfold.

You like Wild Cards, or this sort of thing, you will certainly like this. This book a series of stories, again.


Wild Cards 16 : 01 Storming Space - Michael Cassutt
Wild Cards 16 : 02 Four Days in October - John J. Miller
Wild Cards 16 : 03 Walking the Floor Over You - Walton Simons
Wild Cards 16 : 04 A Face for the Cutting Room Floor - Melinda M. Snodgrass
Wild Cards 16 : 05 Father Henry's Little Miracle - Daniel Abraham
Wild Cards 16 : 06 Promises - Stephen Leigh
Wild Cards 16 : 07 With a Flourish and a Flair - Kevin Andrew Murphy




Shoestring spaceflight triangle.

4 out of 5


Kid reporter baseball investigation.

3.5 out of 5


Comedy babe's secret Sleeper save.

3.5 out of 5


Centaur porn and the beauty secrets of the famous.

4 out of 5


Priest protection to prevent a Demise.

3 out of 5


Petrified of family life.

3 out of 5


Hats in fashion unto the seventh generation.

4 out of 5

My perspective on this collection of stories is different than the other reviewers,because this is the first and only collection from the Wild Card series that I have read. To be honest, I did not think much of the stories in general, but one story stood out as excellent.

Daniel Abraham's story, "Father Henry's Little Miracle" is the best short story I have read in sometime. The two main characters of the story are Father Henry and Gina. When I had read the story, I really wanted to take Father Henry out for a beer, and I really wanted to sleep with Gina.

It was nice to visit the wild cards again... especially the Sleeper... However it was a bit sad knowing that Zelazny was not at the helm of that story... I also miss the Turtle and some of the other gang... but i guess this was a book for the deuces... i hope that there is another effort to revitalise this series. with GRR Martin's massive popularity (very deserved i might add) there should be an effot to get some writters together and have some adventures... Now that the jumpers and the rox is gone, hopefully we can get back to the 3 books per villain structure... although it will be hard to top the astromomer, or the swarm...

It was nice to go back and visit again... but next time i want aces and jokers...

Browsing in a bookstore circa 1986 I came upon the first Wild Cards book. Curious, I bought it . .. and devoured it in a night.That set a patern I would follow with the release of all the subsequent books. The premise, the shared milieu, the contributions of the various writers, the twists, turns, and thrills, it was just so much fun. Like other fans, I was sorry when the series seemed to end, but I understood that the death of Roger Zelazny might want to make the others involved retire the concept. What cause for celebration then to see the Wild Cards resurrected! So, okay, this is not the most exciting entry in the series, dealing as it does with deuces, wild carders who powers seem to be useless. Not so, of course, the authors are quite ingenious at making those useless powers pivotal. There are cameos by some old favorite characters, and the last story, involving a frantic search for a specific top hat, is quite entertaining. But this book does differ from its predecessors in that it does not begin, suspensefully continue, or slam-bang conclude a story arc. I miss that Saturday serial kind of anticipatory excitement, and uneasily wonder if that means the series will not be continued any time soon. If not, too bad. I always left the Wild Cards world wanting more. I always hoped for a story about the Harlem Hammer, or the Troll, and like most fans, wondered whatever happened next to the Radical. C'mon, George R. R. Martin and co., don't leave us hanging!