Set in modern times, Kate Stanley, a Harvard train Shakespearean expert and director, is pulled into a twisted plot of blood, ritual, and deceit as she is hired to direct Shakespeare’s darkest play in the infamous Dunsinnan. Scotland’s hills come to life at Lady Nairn’s castle as the secrets of ancient Celtic ritual sacrifices become more than folklore of a religious rite. The key to reawakening the power of the nether world is the missing Shakespeare’s original manuscript that had the magical words of the original rite. The novel follows the missing manuscript and the desire to obtain its power to London, New York, and back to Scotland ending in a fiery climax having all the blood and deception of the original Macbeth.

A book involving Shakespeare, Wicca, Birnam wood, blood and history is enough to please any reading palate. The strength of the novel actually rests in its historical characters, especially Dr. Dee, a Shakespearean era Wicca expert, who knows the power and place of the manuscript. Carrell places this flashback sparingly in the modern mystery, murder plot that turns too much on itself. She is best when she uses history and interweaves it into the modern fascination with ancient religions and Shakespearean theatre. There is enough history to get you through the 387 pages and keep you entranced.

The novel falls flat on its characters. The characters never really leave the plain surface of the paper. They are stock characters revolving around the very round creations of Shakespeare’s play. Trying to make the new Di Vinci Code, the reader never really understand Kate’s role as a superhero and never really understands the villains’ willingness to spill blood to capture the past magic. We are left with appreciating some glimpses into the Bard’s past and some fascination to the Celtic religion.  She elevates her novel on areas where audiences would be intrigued, but fails the reader in creating anything new and novel.

What is done cannot be undone and what is read cannot be unread. Lovers of Macbeth and Shakespeare will be fascinated for a little while, but soon will realize the ruse. People who have respect for Wicca and ancient religions will be insulted by the limited view of this faith. It is fiction and with fiction you have much leeway. Jennifer Lee Carrell’s Haunt Me Still has enough Macbeth blood in it to keep you reading, but lacks the character development and clear plot to haunt the reader.  

Some rights reserved by mamnaimie

Essentially, Ender's Game examines the conflicts inherent in being a military genius at the tender age of six years old. The protagonist Ender Wiggin is the last hope of three genetic experiments in his family that aimed at producing a leader capable of defeating a buglike race of aliens threatening to wipe out humanity. Since the 1980s, readers have found affinity with Ender's isolation and struggles to fit in as a child prodigy. Now a favorite across generations, Ender's Game certainly has a lot to say about how adults use and abuse gifted children for the purposes of achieving their own ends even if it means depriving the pawned wunderkinder of their childhoods.

Themes of personhood and the rights of minors (and extraterrestials, of course) coupled with lots of personal drama and zero gravity battles make Ender's Game an exciting read, even if the growth of its protagonist and the wider setting of its universe are conspicously unrealistic. In addition to interstellar battles, star fleet personality clashes, and other old standbys of science fiction, today's readers may find elements of Ender's Game make it worth reading or re-reading in 2012. The story describes sophisticated video games, remote combat by flying drones, and even the impact of citizen journalists on geopolitics in a fashion eerily reminiscent of what is happening in America today.

Any gamers out there will certainly appreciate how part of Ender's training takes place not in the battlerooms of a space station, but in video games played during his leisure time on a device called a "desk" that's basically a foreshadowing of the laptop computer. The fantasy game is an open world RPG with levels that can only be beat by solving fantastic puzzles involving clever, sometimes graphically violent solutions. Like the complex and absorbing video games of today, the computer adapts to the player's strengths and weaknesses even incorporating images from the player's own memory, creating a fantasy game uniquely challenging and consuming to the individual playing it.

Even the trainers who created the game lose control of it as the levels become more bizarre. When Ender enters into uncharted digital territory, one teacher gives up trying to figure out the AI's end objective, commenting that "the mind game is a relationship between the child and the computer. Together they create stories. The stories are true, in the sense that they reflect the reality of the child's life." How many of today's children and teenagers are having their lives profoundly shaped by the video games they play in total abstraction from the real world?

In another prescient side plot, Ender's Game spends a few chapters on Peter and Valentine Wiggin, the older brother and sister of Ender. Just as intellectually gifted as their brother, these supporting characters were ultimately rejected from battle school due to personality flaws. Their exaggerated behaviors mirror aspects within Ender's own personality. When balanced correctly, the Wiggin family genes promise military brilliance, but become dangerous and out of adult control in the imperfectly crafted older vessels.

Extremely intelligent but unwanted bi-products of genetic experimentation, the neglected Peter and Valentine rival Ender's ability to dissemble adversaries. Peter possesses a powerful killer extinct, but he too easily turns to cruelty as he deals with the shame of being overshadowed by his younger brother. In contrast, Valentine is so caring that she could hardly destroy any lifeform herself. But her empathy lends this middle child the ability to understand other humans' thinking so well that she can manipulate them into following her even to their own self-destruction.

While Ender is away in space preparing for a showdown with aliens, his brother and sister plan to use their rhetorical gifts to steer Earth's politics into their control. Peter explains his quest saying, "the world is always a democracy in times of flux, and the man with the best voice will win." Publishing their political opinions on worldwide information forums called "the nets", the pair adopt the suggestive pseudonyms of Locke and Demosthenes, build their journalistic chops and fanbase over several years, and eventually become culturally relevant enough to impact world events. Not unlike the political commentators and bloggers of today, their words alone help the elder Wiggin siblings become more influential than the politicians and generals they claim to analyze.

When considered alongside real life examples of the video game-like remoteness of current wars, increased military drone activity in the Middle East, and the ongoing clamorings for war with Iran coming from opinion leaders who rarely hold any elected office or combat experience themselves, Ender's Game may soon enter the literary category of books widely considered to be ahead of their time. As winner of both the Hugo and the Nebula Awards, Ender's Game is a must read for any fan of science fiction, especially for those who favor Star Wars-influenced tales of fighter pilots battling strange new intelligences across the galaxies. But even for those who usually steer clear of the genre, this novel contains some interesting themes with an uncomfortable degree of real world relevance atypical for supposed science fiction. Whether in the present day or in the fantastic future, Ender's Game points out an immutable truth of human nature; unless united in defeating an external threat, the human race will inevitably turn its capacity for cruelty and horror into wars waged against each other.

Ed Yourdon

Alice Ozma’s The Reading Promise proposes an even more terrifying suggestion. What if reading is on its way out; being replaced by educational pundits who believe that narrative is holding humanity back from reaching its technological potential? This young Philadelphian author has penned her touching memoir of being a daughter of a lover of books.  She and her father explore a journey of over 3,000 nights of reading together. From Shakespeare to Lowery, The Secret Garden to Harry Potter, Alice traces her passion for books as she recounts her family life from the precious and intimate to the tragic and bizarre aspects that make each family dynamic unique.

The Streak begins when Alice was nine and ends on her first day of college. The Reading Promise offers a zestful attitude towards reading rarely seen in her generation. The book consists of simple four to five page essays on mostly pedestrian childhood and teenage issues tied together with the motif of a father and daughter relationship. For the first part of the book, you have the feeling that Alice Ozma is learning how to write, in love with her own voice, and afraid to reveal too much to the reader. Her writing is a girl in a pretty, frilly dress who does not want it to get dirty. She is afraid to judge and challenge as it becomes a tribute to her demigod of her father.  

Ed YourdonThe chapter inscriptions taken from other works was the most valuable part of the first 15-20 chapters. I was about to give up this too sweet candy when I started to feel the writer breaking through. Just when the streak of her father’s reading to her was coming to its conclusion, Alice Ozma starts finding her voice. She challenges her mother in a stream of consciousness when she is in a car accident. She sees flaws in her father as he tries to start relationships and his frugality. The best part of the work is when her father’s job as a librarian and his “reading aloud” philosophy are challenged and discarded by his school district, thus sending him into retirement.  Though the first 20 chapters are worth a peripheral read, they do set up a young person’s emergence as a passionate advocate for the value of reading and loyalty. The last ten chapters reveal a new voice rising with emotion, style and insight.

It is rare that you get to read a new writer and watch her grow in the midst of a book. You have that in this coming of age collection of essays.  It will serve the reader in exploring a father daughter bond, remembering when books became important, and how we must defend and promote the written word by reading and promoting the craft. Alice Ozma’s warning comes clear in the end: if readers are not passionate about this form of communication, then its enemies will eliminate it from the future.

That trip long ago, when I was six to my father’s printing job, made me passionate about writing and words. He did not see his disappearance coming, just like Alice’s father in The Reading Promise. We should spend a little time thinking how important reading is and why our society is devaluing it each day. If we do not make the promise to be passionate about books and words and practice reading and writing today, there is a real reality that it will not be here tomorrow.

From the Book Jacket:

Alice Ozma, a recent Rowan University graduate, lives in Rittenhouse Square area of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She is passionate about literature, education, and working with children. Find out more about the author by visiting her website:  www.makeareadingpromise.com

 You might also like these other posts from the Lunch Break: Writing’s Future, Books: Who told you you might meddle with such hifalut'n foolishness, hey?, and A 30 Somethings' Reflection On The Modern Day Bookstore

Presidential Powers has a powerful beginning as a unknown terrorist bomb kills the acting President and whole Supreme Court. Vice President Powers, an African American and decorated military general, takes control of a shocked and fragile government by declaring martial law. Through martial law, the acting President reforms law and order by suspending civilian courts, eliminating the drug trade with military power, suspending foreign trade, and spending on domestic jobs and manufacturing without the hindrance of Congress.

Gerhardt creates a sympathetic dictator that the reader cheers as the President creates an America of possibility and hope. The reader is also offered a traditional perspective with the news anchor Westphall, the white female Vice President, who becomes a voice of reason and proponent to restoring the citizen’s voice of a Democratic Republic. The story connects the two protagonists, Powers and Westphall, in political arguments and assassination attempts. Their growing respect for each other’s ideals lead to a maturing of what is possible for America if change comes rapidly and if our desire for democracy is overturned by good government.

The plot has enough action to get us through, but the mystery of the bombing propels the novel. The reader becomes a jury member looking for the culprit who has brought these unelected leaders to our living rooms. They work hard to become heroes for the readers and achieve their status with an explosive ending. With the help of a diabolical and suave Congressman, a precocious engineer stepdaughter, and a few romance interests, the book has something to give each reader. The plot is not enough for an action thriller reader or a mystery devotee, but it does mix them nicely into a philosophical quest into the problems of Washington, politics, and the future of America as a world economic and military power.             

Nick Carraway recently wrote Rights of US Citizens under Threat from NDAA; White House Send Mixed Signals and before I read this book, the idea of a military takeover would frighten the wits out of my American sensibilities. But Michael Gerhardt’s Presidential Powers offered me another avenue to questions my beliefs in democratic government, especially if the benefits insure safety, high standard of living, and a strong and proud future for my children. Are you willingly to give up your vote for a better future for America? After you read this 369-page novel, the answer may not be rhetorical. 

You can purchase this book at http://www.amazon.com/Presidential-Powers-Michael-Gerhardt/dp/0967182522

keithusc

RJ Furth weaves a powerful yarn of terrorism, ideology, and unfortunate circumstance that will have the reader spell bound with his story telling ability. Set in Thailand, this exotic culture brings about the lives of 8 foreigners who are caught up in an ideological revolution bent on changing capitalism’s persecution on the Southeast Asian people.  An action story of the kidnapping of westerners blows up into a philosophical discussion on how violence will not solve the struggle of economic apartheid that has decimated millions of lives in Asia.

Frank is the main character who is searching for meaning in his fruitless hedonistic meanderings. After a divorce and a few failed relationships, he meets an Australian born Trevor on a tropical island paradise. He starts a relationship with Petra who is also on vacation while meeting a young, yuppie Canadian couple Mark and Danielle.  The Southeast Asian Revolutionary Army (SARA) take and torture this group, along with a passenger Futoshi and two young Israelis, until the West meets their demands.  The majority of the book is the hostages planning their escape and learning to live with constant and certain death resulting from factors outside of their control.

iriskhDavidson and Travers are two ex-Vietnam soldiers who work for their release. The story is a fast paced 275 pages that reveals enough story to push the plot through with character intrigue. While the main characters learn about SARA’s demands and deal with the benign and hostile forces in the army, Davidson must hire Travers to help save the hostages because America and most of West has stopped negotiating with terror groups. Even when RJ Furth leaves the scene of the camp to break the tension, we are never far from the theme of how real life is sacrificed for the philosophical and economic policies of governments.

Captive in Paradise gets preachy at points but there is a balance to the author presenting the ideological boundaries between the revolutionaries and western countries. It is a story of how action creates conflict that the characters must retreat and surrender to or confront and create their own fate. Everyone is a victim but each character has strength of individuality that makes the book a good read for understanding why there is such havoc and discontent in many parts of the world.

Even with that horrid pictures and video from Libya last week, there is separateness in media and television coverage for Americans. We have lost understanding of why the rebels were fighting. We are left to comprehend if this group can create concord when they are capability of such violence and hatred. We are left to detach from their plight as the divide between their violent revolutions for democracy counters our ideal of a peaceful democratic society. RJ Furth in his Captive of Paradise uses fiction to close the gap of misunderstanding as we view both sides of the ideological conflict. But the greatest strength is his focus on the humanity and normal individuals who suffer because of them.

About the author: Ron Furth is currently working on his sixth novel. Many of his travel stories - fiction and nonfiction- as well as stories written by fellow world travelors can be found at www.rjfurth.com. 

About the book:

Captive in Paradise

Date of publish: December 2010 Pages 284

ISBN: 978-1453676509

S.R.P.: $12.99

Publisher: CreateSpace 

Invisible Hour

Kedric H. Cecil’s Wisdom from the Streets challenges this cynical vantage point. This short, but powerful 150-page journey into the psyche and life of a Seattle street kid offers hope from someone who survived the streets and prospered: the author. The first person narrative account is half autobiography and half-instructional book for teachers, coaches, ministers, and mentors who reach out to society’s most vulnerable.  Through a candid look at the family reasons that created the allure for the streets to the problems of disassociation from meaningful relationships, the author offers good advice in reaching and affecting our youth with two key ideas: self-control and self-esteem.

Wisdom from the Streets has its strengths when the author is delving into his past and his experience in the streets. Cecil reveals many of the problems that existed in his childhood and how they materialized again and again in doubt and pain of future relationships. He reveals vulnerability in the book that helps an outsider understand that being on the streets in not a helpless place, but a place of power and choices for someone who feels they have none. The streets become the escape from a home and lifestyle that dominates in abuse, in divorce, or in pressure to perform. Most of all, the streets are a place of choice, as powerful as any drug, to rid ourselves of the burden of human fragility in relationships and emotions.

jbhthescotsThe author could have given us more. Every time he gets into his story, where the intrigue and choices would make the prose palpable, he jumps back into therapist mode. He is afraid to reveal too much as he returns to the safety of the therapist’s coach. The reader is left to decide whether the book was written for an audience to help understand runaways, or a place where the author can begin to reveal his past. You learn enough from both perspectives, but the book would have been more poignant if he delved deeper in his street past and how those experiences evinced themselves in his adult life.

Kedrick Cecil promises a more in-depth look in his next book and I will be looking for it. He is a gifted writer with a inviting, conversational tone that never enters the pulpit. His advice is meaningful and derives its truth from the story. I appreciated the candor and I learned more about myself and others by his approach. It may be true that Huck never makes it into his twenties, but if he did, he would have some stories to tell and advice to offer, just as Cecil does in Wisdom from the Streets. 

david_shankbone

In David S Reynold’s exhaustive cultural biography Walt Whitman’s America, the good gray poet’s proactive words powerfully display his concern for the working classes’ well-being.  Whitman spoke for the voiceless populace as he maligned the political parties polluting Congress and the White House in the 1840s and 50s. He wrote essays and poems celebrating the real America who were building the democracy with their own hands and effort.

 Whitman was an activist who was comfortable in this humble lifestyle and admired the men and women of America who existed on the daily bread their hands worked diligently to provide. Reynold’s portrayed Whitman at his most endearing and memorable during this time period. Whitman saw and protected New York’s honest and vibrant community struggling to survive against the corruption of government and business.

After reading the book, you will find an America social system that has not changed. What has changed perhaps is the absence of the powerful voice of America’s poet celebrating our working class struggles.  With the unions joining the struggle today, the fringe calling for anarchy and communism may frighten the middle class less and allow a strong message of unity and change to be heard.

_PaulS_The rich and poor should protect the American system of democracy because it is good. Capitalism spurs innovation with hopes of economic gain and prosperity for the individual. Capitalism promotes the individualism that Reynold’s Walt Whitman would also protect and value. Communism devalues the individual who infuses true democratic spirit. The call for more equity in the tax system is one of Patriotism, not anarchy. Our Democratic Capitalism is not broken if we restore nationalism and pride for the future and prosperity of the United States.

Reynold’s biography of Walt Whitman has its power when the poet spoke for the working classes. The people protesting on Wall Street sing in the same voice as Whitman. As you examine the lengthy book, even the famous poet forgets the struggle the working class forges constantly against capitalists’ wealth. As age, fame and money came to the poet, he grew more concerned with his American literary legacy. Yet regardless of this change, he continued to sing of the greatness of America and its hopeful future in the world.

We would do well to remember the passion and struggle of the working classes in history as we extend it to our time. America has always dealt with the delicate balance between our own individual pursuit of wealth and our civic duties to keep America’s greatness alive. It was the struggle of Walt Whitman of Brooklyn. It is the struggle of Wall Street Protesters. It is the struggle of the past, present and future America. And it will be as long as we believe in the greatness of Whitman’s America.

 Follow me now on twitter @JamesDuganlb

Courtesy of Dee Shore

You just might want to sink your teeth into a hot vampire series by JR Ward. There are nine “Novels of the Black Dagger Brotherhood” available so far, with another one due out in March 2012.

I have raced through five of these romance/fantasy novels within the past month, and am eagerly devouring book six. I have to pace myself because books seven and eight won’t arrive from Amazon until next week.

The first novel in the series, “Dark Lover,” features a 20+ -year-old newspaper reporter named Beth who grew up in a series of foster homes. Beth learns about the human mother she never knew and a vampire named Darius, her father. Darius is one of the Black Dagger Brotherhood, a small group of vampire warriors who are the last remaining full-blooded of their race. Their role is to defend and protect the vampire society. Just before Darius is murdered by a “Lesser,” a species of evil non-humans who exist to destroy vampires, he asks Wrath, one of his brothers, to watch over Beth and help her through her “transition” from human to vampire. Wrath and Beth fall in love.

As a reporter, one of Beth’s assignments is to cover the police beat. Detectives figure prominently in the story, as one is in love with Beth and another cop, her friend Butch O’Neil, tries to protect her from Wrath. Butch ends up leaving the force and in an effort to save Beth he becomes intricately involved with the secret vampire race.

JR Ward has built a fantastic world around the vampires, with mansions, “doggens” (servants) and other creative terms, an old world societal hierarchy, and the “scribe virgin” who is the highest goddess with eminent domain over her race. The vampires’ enemies, or “Lessers” are led by a malevolent spirit known as the “Omega,” similar to Satan or the devil. Readers are led into the fascinating other worlds of these spirits with their traditions and philosophies.

By book two, Wrath has decided to step up and fulfill his destiny as King of the Vampires, with Beth as his Queen. (Okay, they are not Bill and Sookie, but still very entertaining!) Each book focuses on a different brother, weaving a complex life history for that character. We learn their strengths and weaknesses, their habits of smoking, and drinking, and their penchants for women, nightclubs, fast cars and fine clothes. There’s a place sort of like Merlot’s or Fangtasia but way classier. It’s got a VIP room where the brothers hang out in between all the fighting. By book four, several of the brothers have met and married the loves of their lives. Book five changes the tone by focusing on a brother who has gay and masochistic tendencies. Ward does an excellent job of pairing this brother with an intelligent, witty, driven female human surgeon.

As with True Blood, sex and violence have prominent places in these books. But good and evil are squarely set up to battle as well, and the sacrifices that come with being a hero are well described.  The writing is excellent; the characters are so deep and realistic you can hear them and see them in your mind. The story lines are complex enough to keep you reading long into the night. The books are #1 New York Times Bestsellers.

I am enjoying this series immensely, and Ward is such a good writer that I also ordered a few books from her other series about fallen angels.

If you like True Blood and need something tantalizing to hold you over until the next Charlaine Harris book or the fifth HBO season, try delving into the world of the Black Dagger Brotherhood. At $7.99 a paperback, it won’t drain you. Amazon has bundled the first six as a set for less than $35. A bloody bargain!



Courtesy of vexroboticsESPN: Those Guys Have All the Fun

While the authors did a good job in detailing ESPN’s birth and growing pains, I felt the overall work suffered for two reasons:  First:  The sources/interviews which comprised of 95% of the body of the book were just dull corporate types who were afraid to say anything controversial and Second, the book was very poorly edited.

Anytime you do a “first person” verbal history where you have dozens, if not hundreds, of players discussing the subject, in order for it to be entertaining, you need the interviewees to be entertaining as well.  For “Live from NY”, that was easy.  When Tina Fey, Will Ferrell, Dan Akroyd, Chevy Chase, Lorne Michaels and Jimmy Fallon are retelling stories they do it with the skills of comedic entertainers and are simultaneously witty, interesting and sometimes outright funny.  When you try and do the same thing discussing a sports channel’s rise to glory and you are interviewing a lot of senior management, video directors, and sales reps…uhm, not nearly as entertaining.  Throw in current ESPN employees who were deathly afraid of saying anything that could come back to bite them in print, relatively dull athletes, and ESPN camera personalities who have mastered the art of “talking a lot but not saying anything,” and what you had was  a lot of bland filler. 

The executives were the worst culprits.  If felt like you were reading a company handbook from HR with all of the “Corporate Speak” that they threw around to justify bad decisions, policies and controversies.  So much of it was skim-able once you realized they had nothing of substance to say.  I wonder if a lot of that is due to the environment that ESPN covers, namely professional athletes.  I will go on the record that 99% of professional athletes are absolutely awful interviews.  They fall into two camps:  either they lack the verbal skills to put together coherent sentences other than mindless athletic clichés (“We came to play today.”  “We just need to go out there and execute.”  “One game at a time.” Blah, blah, blah.).  Or, in a less common case ala Derek Jeter they choose to say nothing as to provide little insight into their thinking for their opponents.  I think there may have been five times in Derek Jeter’s 16 year career in NYC that he ever said anything that could be interpreted as controversial…or for that matter, interesting.  And that is entirely a conscious move by Jeter. 

That leads me to believe that the majority of ESPN personnel who were interviewed for this book just decided to give cliche, by-the-book answers to the majority of questions no matter how controversial the topic was.  Smart for those who want to climb the ESPN corporate ladder, bad for the authors who are trying to write an interesting book.   

Now, one thing about these first person interviews, some of the “personalities” of ESPN who have garnered certain reputations through the blogosphere over the years did really nothing to disprove them.  Chris Berman who was around since the first day at Bristol comes off as a pompous blowhard who believes his own press clippings.   Keith Olbermann has his brilliance, paranoia and general pain in the ass attitude on full display.  Bill Simmons, who parlayed his Boston Sports Guy schtick into a million dollar contract with ESPN with millions of readers comes off as witty, whiny, insightful and bratty all in the space of a few paragraphs. Simmons has admitted on certain interviews that at the time of these interviews he thought he was leaving ESPN and so was a lot more honest in his comments which he now regrets.  Just reinforces my earlier claim that no one who still is employed by ESPN wanted to admit or state anything on the record that was in the least controversial.

In terms of my earlier comment about the editing of this book, I admit that I have no credibility as an editor but when as a reader you find there are many instances of stories that seem to be thrown in haphazardly without regards to the flow of a narrative…you do not need 20 years at Random House to know a bad edit job.  In fact, during one of the many interviews the writers had given, Miller has actually said that when the paperback edition comes out there is about 100 pages he wants to remove from the hardcover and insert a different 100 pages.  Should this have not been done already?  Heck, after one reading I could have said that there was too much time devoted to “ESPN: The Magazine” and Michelle Beadle and not enough to ESPN.com and Craig Kilborne. 

There were also many instances where stories were thrown in seemingly out of nowhere without any context and seem incredibly ill-fit. For instance, during a particular chapter where they are discussing Keith Olbermann's and Dan Patrick’s Sportscenter success, out of nowhere they have a blurb with Mel Kiper Jr. (ESPN’s longtime NFL draft expert) talking about the time a VP from the Indianapolis Colts was taking him to task on live TV about “Who the hell is Mel Kiper anyway?  What has he ever done?” after Kiper ripped the organization apart following a bad draft pick.  While this was a pretty memorable clip, it was completely inserted at random without any context before or after. 

I almost felt they should have broken the book up into sections where one part discussed its history, another discussed the personalities, and another went into memorable moments and behind the scenes drama.  Instead they did everything off a timeline and it was jarring when one guy was talking about the dual revenue model being revolutionary to cable, followed by a section on interoffice romances, followed by THE ESPY’S, followed by some athlete kissing the network’s ass for putting his sport into the general public’s conscience.  There was little rhythm to any of it. 

In short, this was an ambitious effort that ultimately fell short in the entertaining category. 

You can support the Lunch Break Blog by purchasing this book and other Amazon materials through the icons located on the left column of the page. Thank you for supporting great writing and discussion.

Courtesy of Karoon.com

The book’s title comes from Project Dragon Blood, a three-prong initiative devised by the Peoples Republic of China to turn soft coal into synthetic oil, build vehicles that are powered by the fuel, and create roads and other infrastructures to encourage widespread use of the new fuel and vehicles. The project, if successful, has the potential to make China the world’s leading superpower, surpassing the United States. Its downside involves global warming, as byproducts from the synthetic fuel manufacturing are destined to cause rising sea levels and ultimately death by drowning to those who live near the water.

Meanwhile, in Iran, government agents plot to release anaerobic bacteria that feed on crude oil into major US refineries. The plan is partially successful, causing consumer panic and rising prices at the pump. The President of the United States gathers his top aides to deal with the crisis. At the same time, Iran's president is ousted from power and a new government is forming.

Just before learning of the Iranian infiltration of America’s oil supplies, the US President and his wife meet with the US Deputy Secretary of Energy Walt Dryden and the suave, powerful female president of a world class agrichemical company, Gwenn Jordan. During this meeting, the President learns that Jordan’s top researchers have discovered a 16-year-old Israeli boy genius who has figured out a way to produce ethanol from air by using the water and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Gwenn convinces the President to endorse this eco-friendly energy source and to put strength into the plan by mandating that all government vehicles be equipped to run on alternative fuels. The President takes it one step further by creating a nonprofit trust that will own and manage the patent. His vision is to eliminate the playing field of  “haves” and “have not” countries when it comes to oil.

Howard is a master at details. The 84-year old author is a retired chemical and mechanical engineer. His expertise is evident in that there is no shortage of plausible explanations for how these complex plans work and who is behind them. The descriptions are so vivid, one could easily envision this story as a film. In addition to the world-class espionage and power struggles, Howard manages to weave in a romance between Gwen and Walt. It is Walt’s father who figures out key information to help the President with the oil-eating bacteria crisis. There is a fine balance of personal, professional and political levels within the storylines.

The book is not an easy read. There are subheads to alert the reader to the change in locale, and opening scenarios don’t become meaningful until well into the book. At some points the dialogue could use a good editor. In the end though, it is worth seeing this story to the final page. The novel got a very good review from Kirkus. If you’d like to read a little sample of this self-published novel, go to the author’s Web site, www.howardbook.com. The book is also available for sale on Amazon.com and other Internet sites.

Happy reading! It will make you think twice about all the energy you use.

You can support the Lunch Break Blog by purchasing this book and other Amazon materials through the icons located on the left column of the page. Thank you for supporting great writing and discussion.