Reviews from READER VIEWS

 I occasionally write reviews for the book review site Reader Views.  

Reader Views 

It is a great site that helps new and mostly self-published authors (such as myself) to be reviewed.  The philosophy of the site (and of Sheri Hoyte, who is the main curator of the site) is to be firm, honest, but gentle if possible.  Because these are new and often unedited authors, their prose isn't always the most scintillating.  And  - those who live in glass houses etc.  - Reader Views has also reviewed my stuff - which I include at the end of the list below. 

I sometimes verged on being a bit mean - especially if the content was unartfully titillating or was too blatantly riding the coattails of current events - you know - "ripped from the headlines" stuff.  But I take the job seriously  - I am paid an honorarium for each review. I am currently taking a break from reviewing for the site,  as I am working on a new project and recovering from the election, but I hope Sheri will let me return to join her cadre of reviewers down the road. 

I have learned a great deal doing this - about spotting mistakes and weaknesses in my own work by seeing them appear in others - but also I find some really innovative narrative techniques that push the boundaries, yet often do work very well. And the ideas presented or the characters portrayed are often very unstereotypical, and can be boldly crafted.   One other reason I am taking a break is that it is hard work. Because I get paid, I take it very seriously. I read the novels closely, taking notes, and writing and revising the reviews to provide some value to the authors as well as their potential readers. Anyway - if you are looking for new fiction (and non-fiction too) to read and support authors who deserve a chance to be read - check out Reader Views to look for some interesting titles. 

 Here are my reviews.

 

Mutually Beneficial - a blackmailer has sexually provocative pictures of the Vice President 

The Encounters of Quintas Livius - A young, orphaned Roman living in Israel arrives late to Jesus’s miracles

Splendors of Quanzhou, Past and Present -a history, as well as an archaeological and architectural tour of the Chinese city

 

The Serpent Underneath - Describes a “Near Term Dystopia”—what can happen to our society and country if, in the next twenty years or so, things go off the rails. 

 

The Evolution of China’s Anti-Poverty Strategies - A collection of 20 stories about Chinese people who have risen from poverty to have successful careers. 

 

 The New Empire - set in Northern California in the mid-1700s, alt-history of how the Chinese beat Europe to the punch during the 15th century’s Age of Discovery.

 

 Casadora Island - A burnout retreats to a Caribbean Island - a story of rediscovered love, and a dreamscape of escape, an idealized vision of the perfect life with wonderful friends

 

Vietnam was a Just War - An unabashed rejection of any viewpoints sympathetic to North Vietnam or the Vietcong or anything critical of the US.  

 

The Intrepid Brotherhood - A memoir of a long running bureaucratic knife fight between the author, an IT systems manager, and his organization’s CEO 

 

No Peace with Hitler - is a 700 page survey of Churchill’s life and why refused to parley with Hitler in the spring of 1940 

 

The Plot to Save America - Springtime, 2024 – the January 6, 2021 insurrection succeeded – the rioters broke through, captured and killed Vice President Pence, set the Capitol on fire, where half of congress died, and the other half were put in detention.  

 

Dancer of Death - is based on the life of the Spanish bullfighter, Manolete, who was the most famous matador of the 1940s 

 

 Full Circle Freedom's Firewall - An android cop intercepts an intergalactic cargo ship, beginning a civil war between the corrupt humans and the androids (and their human allies).

 

The Hidden Game - A thriller about modern American pro football, and it brings together the mechanics of how and why games might be fixed for the benefit of “the product.”  

 

Trump Dog – Wild Tales of Lies, Hair Dye and Dog Poop - A funny, light satire that is very prescient, about a world divided over politics, where people can quickly find their allegiances in all sorts of cultural markers.  

 

The Truth Effect - a story of a fearless woman journalist who’s trying to warn England of the government’s plan to impose an artificially intelligent-powered thought control regime in 2030. 

 

 Here are some notes about my novels by other Reader Views reviewers

Farewell the Dragon - With twists and turns and surprises unraveling, this book depicts China’s cities and sounds extremely well...This makes the book not just entertaining to readers but also eye-opening.

 

Digging Up New Business: The SwiftPad Takeover - Satire that is brutally honest, hysterical, and unforgettable. Not a dystopian world; this is a very real, bare bones, trash-talking world that all of us are still living through to this day.  

 

Digging the Golden Fungus: The SwiftPad Insurgency - SwiftPad, Inc, becomes the number one social media site in the world. Based in Portland, Oregon, the company is also the prime ‘enemy’ of the President of the United States.  

 

Digging Around the Pandemic: The SwiftPad Extinction - - Kip “Chubby” Rehain (who is SwiftPad’s co-founder) is journeying though Alt-world, meeting up with the fear, terror, and panic that’s all around. A trail takes him across Asia, Siberia, and eventually to the very source of it all. 

 

And an interview with yours truly..

 

Interview with S. Lee Barckmann – Author of “The SwiftPad Trilogy”

Has Anyone Seen My Toes? by Christopher Buckley

   Has Anyone Seen My Toes?, (HASMT?)  is an acerbic, comic novel about an overweight, aging screenwriter in the throes of writer’s block. He fears and shows the apparent signs of approaching dementia.  He lives “two hours” outside Charleston South Carolina, and is a fast-food and social media addict.  He is struggling with a screenplay about the Nazis kidnapping Roosevelt from Bernard Baruch's South Carolina estate of Hobcaw Barony, which was Roosevelt’s trysting hideaway (with Lucy Mercer).   

I read HASMT? because my friend Carl sent it to me. I had sent Carl a copy of a screenplay that I had recently written, (based on my first novel “Farewell the Dragon”).  Carl is a great letter writer, but his reply seemed to skirt around anything critical of my screenplay.  But still his letter had a sly understated tone that I read as,

“Lee are you OK?”  

And he told me he was mailing me a copy of Buckley’s book, HASMT?, (which almost sounds like the acronym for “hazardous  materials” – humm…).  When the book arrived two days later, I tore the brown wrapping paper off the hardcover novel, thinking OK, maybe Carl is sending me a message...

 Or maybe I am just reading too much into it. Carl is a very private person, so I will only say we have known each other since high school, where we trained together and competed against each other for three years.  We were both decent high school distance runners and I beat him more than he beat me, but – alas -  he beat me the last time.  

All that was more than fifty years ago, so we are old now. Carl is much the opposite of me. Where I am a vainly boastful, loud, class clown type, Carl is very soft-spoken, shadowy, (his nickname was “The Assassin” for his ability to suddenly “appear” where he had been lurking all along). He’s a man of few (but always meaningful) words.  I promptly read HASMT? cover to cover. (As a opposed to starting in the middle and reading it backwards.)

Mr. Christopher Buckley is perhaps most  famous for the comic novel and subsequent movie “Thank you for Smoking”. He is the son of the Godfather of the Pre-Trump Conservative movement, William F. Buckley.  He is about my age.  Both Christopher  and HASMT?’s unnamed screenwriter, (who I will call "Chris") have many biographical points in common.  

Mr. Buckley also intrudes into my biography because Christopher Buckley went to sea after college, working on a merchant ship and wrote a book about it. It was the last book my father read before he died. Dad gave me the book but I never finished it. It struck a sore point with me because  I was supposed to go to sea with Dad after college. Dad was a Chief Engineer in the Merchant Marines.  But I punked out of the gig because of my fear of losing my college girl friend (another story I will probably never write). Dad had gone to some length to arrange a very rare “Cadetship” for me with his company, so I could train to be an merchant marine deck officer down the road, but I never took that road.  I know it was a disappointment for Dad, and Buckley’s sea story brought that disappointment back up for me during Dad’s last days.
 

 I was a fan of his father’s show “Firing Line”,  and later briefly chatted with William F. Buckley, which you can read about here. (Review of Saving the Queen ).

 
Well, anyway, all that aside, "Chris" the unnamed screenwriter,  is married to a woman who slowly becomes concerned about Chris’ forgetfulness and growing confusion between real life and his slowly evolving (or rather devolving)  screenplay.   From Chris’s point of view it all makes sense, and we ride along on his bizarre AD-HD-like inability to focus. He has a huge trove of historical and literary knowledge stored up in his fragmented mind, and he is constantly Googling offshoots and tangents of his untethered thought process. What makes it so powerful though is how this Googling and tangent chasing mirrors what it is like for many of us in the Post-COVID and possible Trump Interregnum period. (I write this five (5) days before the 2024 election, so I don’t know NOW how this is all going to turn out. ) “Chris”  is sly in his slightly hidden disdain of Trump. (“If you can have “alternative facts” why can’t you have “Alternative history?”). But the possibility of  a 2nd Trump term lurks behind much of Chris’ fearfully scattered imaginative romps, which is all in search of the “finishing touches” on his Roosevelt kidnapping screenplay, called “Heimlich’s Maneuver” (Heimlich is the Nazi U-boat commander in charge of the kidnapping).

“Chris” is an etymologist, (like Buckley’s father) who constantly searches for the original meaning of words.  The running joke through out HASMT? is that "mayonnaise is one of the few words in English of Carthaginian origin". (We finally learn in the post script that Mayonnaise was “invented” in the Minorcan city of Mahon which was named for Hannibal’s brother.  A cheap kind of Carthaginian origin.)

While showing disdain for Henry James and Proust, he reveals he is in fact the product of those upper class prep schools that teach “The Western Canon” of the literature of Dead White Men. Much of the story is of “Chris” threading the needle between the enforced political correctness of our age with the eternal truths of those great books that are being read less and less.

He covers much of what we have been living through since 2020 – George Floyd’s murder, Confederate statues coming down, fierce partisan-fueled local elections (in his case the weird South Carolina tradition of electing the local coroner. )  He riffs on suicide, especially about writers who killed themselves.  He of course Googles it and we read a long list of self-slaughtered writers.   He searches for an appropriate quote to leave behind as his own suicide note. He writes about a 20th century artist (who paints Victorians in Togas) who kills himself and leaves a note that the world isn’t big enough for him and Picasso, but then notes that Picasso never heard of him before or after his suicide.  

The novel is filled with hilarious, pathetic self-referential jokes that rotate around  and connect with other jokes that appeared earlier, as if they are interior concentric circles of humorous asides that constantly, (and almost randomly) recur.  It is the kind of satire that has the reader looking off from the pages in embarrassment at his own reaction of laughter combined with a feeling of deep loss. We (me and “Chris”) are almost at the end of it all, whether we pull the trigger ourselves or let nature do it for us.

He has a  “Concierge” doctor, (who he pays a healthy retainer to be on his speed-dial) a beautiful woman recommended by the hound-dog husband of his wife’s best friend.  She puts him on some meds to deal with his self-reported, very unspecific ailments. This leads to a pretty good ending which makes it all the more worth getting to that end.

It certainly didn’t read like a “great book”, when I was in the midst of it, but later, after thinking of how it affected me, I think it just might be – a very serious and worthwhile read, maybe even  - a great one.

The Apprentice

 The Apprentice

Written by Gabe Sherman, Starring Sebastian Stan, Jeremy Strong and Maria Bakalova

 

 “The Apprentice” is a biopic of the early days of the rise of Donald Trump. It is a brilliant work, especially considering the hurried, momentous timing of its release. It is an artistic triumph, especially for Jeremy Strong. but also Sebastian Stan, an actor who I had never heard of before.

It is a hard film to watch in many ways. It is gritty and its low budget shirttails hangout (like Donald’s white dress shirt in several scenes as he is pulling on his pants getting ready to hit the Manhattan night.) The camera doesn’t flinch from glimpses of raw gay and public sex, marital rape, or Donald’s liposuction and scalp reduction surgery. It captures the trashy streets of 1970s NY. 

It begins with Donald in a cheap suit, driving a big (but dirty) Cadillac sedan through one of the outer Boroughs to a low-end high-rise apartment building where he proceeds to knock on doors collecting and shaking down rent from very poor, old, but mostly white tenement dwellers. The hallway smells, and the barking dogs and crying children and the profanity-laced complaints about his demands for back rent disgusts him, and shows his self-righteous anger and self-pity. But compassion? Zero.  The actor Sebastian Stan realistically portrays the empty callousness of a small time loser dreaming of something he knows is out there, but is out of reach.

But then Trump meets Roy Cohn at a restaurant and things begin to happen for him. Jeremy Strong exudes evil from the moment you see him. He brags about how he conned the Judge (illegally, "ex parte") in the Rosenberg case to sentence both Ethel and Julius to death, in-spite of the weak case against Ethel. Roy Cohn is a gay Jew who explodes with hatred against homosexuals and is a virulent anti-Semite. He teaches Donald three rules – attack, deny, and declare victory no matter the outcome.

The film portrays Donald growing from an very average NYC schmo, not too bright or socially perceptive, into the monster he became under Cohn’s tutelage. His early attempts to impress bankers and developers is grossly transparent, revealing a total lack of interpersonal adroitness. But gradually, as he follows Cohn around the Manhattan Party scene we see him pick cues better, and become something of a real estate player. Then he meets Ivana, who marries him in spite of the insulting prenup Cohn writes for Donald, and she begins to smooth out some of his edges.

In the end roles reverse – Cohn becomes almost sympathetic, as he is betrayed by Donald, who evicts Cohn’s AIDS-stricken, long time boy friend from his hotel. Stan the actor shows Donald as he becomes even more desensitized, and begins to repeat himself as he ages, even in the early days. Donald, masters Cohn’s three rules (see above) and pushes his way into Atlantic City and beyond. He is no longer the "Apprentice", but the over-confident blowhard we all know, even as Cohn warns him that he is becoming over-leveraged. But nothing can tame Trump’s greed. A light suddenly comes on in Cohn’s eyes as he sees what he has created. Donald’s older brother Fred, addicted, sick and dying comes knocking on the door, desperate for help, but Donald pushes him out, in a scene where Ivana sees her own future.

Trump’s relationship with his father is shown but not deeply explored. I suppose some might see it as a weak point. But this to-the-point film has a clear warning message that FOX News will undoubtedly call “a hit-job” and - and – so what? (As Trump said when told the Jan 6 rioters wanted to kill Mike Pence.)

I had a professor in college who said that Shakespeare's Richard III was not appreciated as a great play until the 20^th century. It was considered by early critics as too over the top, and a caricature, because surely no one could be such a baldfaced liar, so unconditionally evil. But then we had the 20^th century dictators who showed exactly how it was done. Yes - it is possible to be that empty of humanity and still finds a way to climb to the top. Now our generation knows that as well.

Politics had nothing to do with the way the film moved me. I was shaken as we left the theater.

It is a travesty that HBO or Apple didn’t pick the film up to stream 24 hours every day until the election. Mary and I went today, opening day, and there were only two (2) other people in the theater.