Bookpusher

Working at a library, I’m used to not paying for books. Whenever I want something I just go to the shelves and get it or else put it on hold and wait a bit. It makes me wonder why I even bothered paying for all those books when I worked for bookstores all those years ago. (Probably because they gave employees a house account so we had to keep working there in order to pay it off: a modern-day version of indentured servitude. But I digress.)

There’s a very short list of authors I will plunk down my money for. Everything else I’ll happily wait on the hold list like everyone else. Those authors are: 

Michael Connelly. George Pelecanos. Robert Crais just misses this list, but not by much. Lee Child used to be on the list until his latest release sucked; he is exiled until further notice. Don Winslow. Charlie Huston. (I’m currently tearing through Huston’s latest – not as good as Shotgun Rule thus far, but then I’m only halfway through.) Daniel Silva was off the list but is working his way back on – he needs another solid release to get back into my good graces. Bill Simmons.

And, finally, Megan Abbott. If you haven’t read Queenpin, get yourself to your library and snag it immediately, as it’s a sexy, smooth, brilliant, and nasty piece of noir as you’re ever going to read. On the strength of that book alone, Abbott has guaranteed my undying patronage. (By “undying”, I mean at least a three-book grace period.) Having not heard from her lately, I buzzed over to her site and was greeted by a blurb regarding her latest release, due in July, entitled Bury Me Deep, which sent me into spasms of anticipation. Talented writer? Check. My favorite genre? Check. Lurid-as-hell title and cover? Check and mate. Cannot. Freaking. WAIT. For this one.

I wish we could all just wait a few weeks to let the Super Bowl get a bit cold in our minds before we start throwing around terms like “Best Super Bowl Ever.” That always annoys me: some idiot sportscaster is always throwing around “best”, “all-time”, and “greatest” in every game, to the point where it loses all meaning. There’s nothing wrong with “pretty good”, people, and that was a pretty good game last night. Certainly belongs in the conversation of Best Ever. But let’s wait a few weeks, huh?

And the halftime show. Sure, Springsteen did a nice set – he shoved his crank in the camera with that badly-timed power slide of his, which was far, far more offensive that anything Janet Jackson could have dreamed up. But even though I was in high school when Born in the USA came out and his “Dancing in the Dark” video with Courtney Cox was all MTV could show, I’ve never been a Bruce guy. Never owned any of his albums, don’t have any of his songs on my MP3 player. His entire Jersey working-class schtick never resonated with me – I grew up in working-class Raytown, Missouri, so any romance or poetry about the situation was pretty much lost on me at an early point.

And to all the baby-boomer producers of the Super Bowl, a 60-year-old Bruce Springteen is about as hip and current as they’re willing to provide after Janet ruined it for everyone. The kids aren’t going to be allowed to sit at the big table for a while – we won’t have Kanye or Spoon or the Ting Tings until they’re 60 years of age.

World War I is a topic I was fairly ignorant of a few weeks ago, even though I lived my entire life in Kansas City. KC is the site of our nation’s premiere museum and monument to that war. It’s not a war that my generation has an easy grasp of – I grew up during the 70s and 80s when the boomers were (and still are) trying to deal with the Vietnam War, so its images constantly flooded movie theaters and television sets. Likewise, WWII was an easy war to grasp for me. The good guys and bad guys were clearly defined. The good guys were us, while the bad guys included the nut in the funny mustache who tried to take over the world and put people he didn’t like in concentration camps.

World War One existed farther back, over the horizon, murky and ill-defined. I had images of doughboys wearing gas masks in trenches surrounded by barbed wire – along with Snoopy getting shot up by the Red Baron, that was pretty much about it. I recently decided to rectify this and to fill the void in my personal and historical knowledge.

Finding the right book was, oddly enough, a tough go. After a few attempts with some others, I happened across A World Undone by G.J. Meyer, who is not a historian, or even an academic, but a journalist. That distinction helped a bunch, I think, as Meyer approaches the book not trying to frame the war in any sort of grand, sweeping statement, but in a just-the-facts-ma’am manner. Meyer has no judgment he’s making, no point of view to defend or shoehorn facts into. He just spends his time telling us the story of the war, and makes something as incredibly complex as World War One into something graspable and understandable.

Meyer doesn’t assume the reader already has intimate knowledge of the facts and players involved, so he goes into much-needed background of some of the major decisions, explaining why those decisions were made. Chapter interstitials go into a brief, casual history of some aspect of the war – the Romanov dynasty, the Ottoman Empire, trench warfare, Kaiser Willhelm – giving you enough information to explain why people did what they did, why they made those decisions, without ever overloading you, dispensing information efficiently and engagingly. There’s only so much even a talented writer like Meyer can do, as the war, at several points, turns into a series of failed offensives, both sides bogged down in a lethal stalemate, and the deaths mount to horrendous heights.

Granted, it’s not a small book – take a look at some of the other WWI books at your library sometime, most will easily put the Yellow Pages to shame – but for those with an interest in the era, it’s an excellent introduction.