One New York Life

Full disclosure: I actually read this trilogy out of order. I grabbed book three, misread the roman numeral, saw the number two in the title, and ended up reading this out of order. It felt like I’d missed a giant block of stuff, but thought he just jumped past the first siege and was going to fill in the gaps via flashback. Too much LOST, I guess. I’m going to skip reviewing that one because, well, really I felt I was able to get the whole of the trilogy without actually reading the second book.

That’s probably not good.

Ultimately, the novel keeps the major plot lines active for future novels, and introduces several more. And for me, this is where it falls flat. I wanted a lot out of this trilogy, which is apparently the last before Drizzt jumps a century in the future and leaves all these characters behind. I’m glad to get Drizzt’s new relationship with Innovindil (his first elven companion) and was glad to see him finally get some education from a surface elf. The scenes between these two were generally worth the price of admission and she finally got him to see that it’s OK to live his exceptionally long life in many small lifetimes. It took thousands of pages to get to this point — that it’s OK to love someone who is going to die 800 years before you do.

In all, a trilogy that started off really good for me ended up leaving me feeling kind of blah. Drizzt and Catti-brie finally start a relationship after a bunch of years of nonsense (A good thing they retconned her age, or it would have taken him until she was in her late 30s to wake up). Delly Curtie is, as predicted, disposed of in an ultimately pointless and stupid way (and in a way no sufficiently paranoid group of adventurers would ever allow… leaving your intelligent blade that hates you unattended in close proximity to NPCs? Really?) and Colson is kidnapped. Delly was written out so quickly and ignominiously that, were she an actress, I would have assumed she demanded an ungodly contract.

Secondly, I had a terribly hard time believing that NONE of the surrounding townships saw fit to send in support for a neighboring kingdom battling a goblin-horde of over 20,000. Whatever politician made the argument “hey, the goblin-races will be perfectly satisfied to take over a little chunk of the world and then they’ll settle down. Not our problem” deserves the golden bullsh*t award. I realize Faerun’s states are notoriously provincial, it seems almost ridiculous that the humans wouldn’t team up to end the orc-threat before it got out of hand.

Thirdly, Drizzt spends the whole of the second and third book assuming his friends are dead and never actually going to check. I find this nigh impossible to buy. I realize that Drizzt is generally self-absorbed, fatalistic, and thinks the world revolves around him — but spending months out in the wilderness instead of going back to Mithril Hall and, at the very least, paying his respects? It’s beyond even his goth personality, felt forced, and was completely out of character… again.

I’m torn on the series jumping ahead. On one hand, this world desperately needs a shake-up of some sort. On the other, it would have been nice to give Wulfgar one happy ending. You’d think spending 5 years in Hell followed by another few years as a drunk with PTSD would earn the guy some karma points. Guess not. If the series jumps ahead we leave Wulfgar being partially responsible for the death of his wife and the kidnapping of his adopted daughter. Can the guy catch a break? Just one?

If these characters are never going to move forward, never die, and never really be at a threat — there’s only so many situations you can put them in. They’ve now survived a war, the drow, assassins, an evil goddess, and Hell itself. There’s nothing left. It’s time for Drizzt to find some new friends.

We’ll see how Transitions goes. It’s got one book.

I took a break from this author for a bit to read a few other things. I decided to drop back in to fantasy to decide if I wanted to invest a year in Wheel of Time. The answer is probably “not me, not now” but that’s besides the point.

I hopped back in to another Salvatore book even after the crushing terribleness of Sea of Swords to give him another shot with a trilogy. The set-up is this — after years decades forever getting beat up by first-level PCs, from the ashes rises a great orc leader. An orc with brain enough to organize the goblin races enough to pose a serious threat to civilized people. A quartet of drow install Obould Many-Arrows as the leader of the orcs and arrange an alliance with the frost giants. The alliance begins running attacks against the towns of the north. I will, for purposes of enjoyment, put aside my difficulty accepting a brilliant orc after years of being conditioned that they’re nothing but dumb mules. Bruenor convinces the companions to go on one final adventure before he settles down to rule Mithril Hall forever.

Salvatore’s at his best here. He’s much better setting up multiple story threads to arc over a number of books. When he has the ability to create a bunch of different plot threads he can braid together over a lot of pages. In his single books, it comes across as two loosely related short stories. In 1000 pages of trilogy, it feels less forced.

There isn’t a whole lot of review to be done on the single book — it’d be like reviewing a prologue — but the opening was perfectly acceptable and good. A few thoughts, though:

1) Salvatore’s disdain for Delly Curty (the woman Wulfgar brought to Mithril Hall from Luskan) is apparent. After being a core character in bringing him back from the brink of insanity, she’s boxed in to nagging, insecure, jealous wife and person who looks after Colson. Once Salvatore feels he has no more use for characters, they’re not long for the world; regardless of how forced or stupid the death seems. I expect Delly to be dispatched with in the war. Instead of being Wulfgar’s “ground”, she’s just a non-adventurer who doesn’t “get it” and stays home watching the baby while he goes out to court death. Wulfgar going out on adventures just doesn’t sit right with me anymore — not with a wife and baby that he supposedly cares about at home. Drizzt and Catti-brie are one thing… should they go, they went out trying to protect one another. Wulfgar, on the other hand, leaves a baby at home. It makes him seem selfish more than heroic.

2) I have a good idea that this war campaign is going to be epic, as he’s drawing in as many characters as he can without seeming ridiculous. There’s no good reason for the Bouldershoulders to be involved other than he just wants more dwarves.

3) It is always interesting to me that bad rulers in fantasy books are always written exactly the same. They are rich, spoiled people who absolutely don’t understand their subjects. In this case, a ruler locks up a dwarf who is thinking of defecting to Mithril Hall. Rather than just letting him go and letting him be forgotten in a month, he instead locks him in a prison and turns him in to a cause. The decision shows a basic misunderstanding of how dwarves react to things and, instead, half his population defects to Mithral Hall… conveniently just as a war’s about to start.

While I do like the plot being laid out, I have a feeling I’m going to dislike the execution. One problem with Salvatore’s books is that the characters don’t grow much. Drizzt and Catti-brie have been flirting with no forward movement for 15 years. Wulfgar was crazy heroic barbarian who died and then had PTSD but found love and babies and is now back to crazy heroic barbarian who ignores love and babies. I have a hard time buying that all these characters are going to make the same decisions at almost 30 as they did at almost 18. Maybe it’s just my own off-my-lawniness talking. Not sure.

But, don’t want to get down on it before I have to. For now, good stuff.

I think this book came to PLR via a co-worker. It’s not a genre normally on her reading list because it’s not 1) by a woman 2) about women 3) historic fiction or 4) Glamour. See No Evil by Robert Baer is an autobiographical account of an ex-CIA case officer writing about his time on the ground in the Middle East. The book is presented in its final draft form as it was presented to the CIA with the Agency’s redactions intact. It’s the source material on which 2005′s Syriana was based and is sold as a glimpse in to how the CIA operated in the 70s and 80s vs. how it currently operates. The publishing company certainly struck while the iron was hot, putting it out about 18 months after the September 11th attacks.

The lion’s share of this book deals with Baer’s own experience as a field agent in the CIA. He goes over how he recruited spies, how he met with them, and how he kept them safe. He takes the reader from the agency he joined — one that actively recruited agents with ties to the families of suicide bombers and terrorist leaders — to the agency we have today. An agency that doesn’t really believe in the gathering of intelligent via word-of-mouth, but instead with satellite imagery and computer networks. The problem, he points out, is that a satellite image can’t find a network of tunnels and a computer monitor can’t track not put on a network. Opponents of political correctness will have a field day with this book. The most egregious example being a passage where Baer describes taking over an informant contact from an agent who’s moved on. We find out the agent, on the US’s dime, spent all of her meetings trying to convince the informant to accept Jesus Christ as his lord and savior instead of debriefing him for information. When informed of this, the government tells Baer they can’t reprimand her because of the First Amendment.

The book takes a trip from interesting to disconcerting in final section. The final section deals mostly with the invasiveness of oil companies in the US Government. It tries to put in to context exactly how much money flows in to DC via oil companies and foreign governments and how it shapes policy. CIA operations that are stopped so they don’t tick off a royal family. Oil money donated to the Clinton campaign leading to suspended CIA investigations. Stuff that if read on the Internet would be dismissed as conspiracy theory nonsense. With a real, vetted source describing this stuff, it carries a frightening amount of weight.

Another somewhat disconcerting thing I took from the book — it turns out that federal government agencies really don’t get along together. It’s not something created by Hollywood for movie conflicts. This seems unbelievable. Why is the government divided in to the DEA, DOD, FBI, CIA, and DHS if none of them care to share information or work together? What’s the point? Why do we pay people in multiple agencies to work against each other? It’s a scary thought that the agencies tasked with preventing attacks and crime are actually as chaotic as 24 portrays them.

There is a quote from the book that has stayed with me. Baer is investigating a bombing in Saudi Arabia and his superior tells him he may have to stop because of Amoco’s interests in the region. Baer asks his superior: “Do you mean to tell me we have to stop an operation against a terrorist group — one perhaps responsible for killing five Americans in Saudi Arabia — to protect Amoco’s balance sheets?” That’s the theme from the last part of the book. Oil company wallets reach so deep in to Washington that it affects Washington’s ability to gather information. And that’s a very scary thing. And don’t think it starts and ends with the Bush family. The book touches on money trails that include the Clintons, Kennedys, and other deeply rooted in DC.

It would be easy to write this book off as a guy grinding an axe with an agency that passed him by. You could do that — and you might even be right — but what you find is that the agency probably shouldn’t have passed him by. He seems to simply want an agency with eyes on the ground gathering information from people. Not via coercion, but from the folks in these Middle Eastern countries who don’t really believe in blowing themselves up to make a point. Regardless of what fear-mongers would have you believe, they are out there.

Everyone should read this book. Seriously.

After the break from these characters given to us in Servant of the Shard, the Paths of Darkness arc concludes with Sea of Swords. We’ve jettisoned the bad guys of the previous books off in to their own series so now we need to bring the good guys back together, get Aegis-Fang back, and return to their lives.

And after two straight home-runs, Salvatore comes back down to Earth with this “get a book out there” offering.

The story in this book should have been “Wulfgar trying to track down the pirates that have his hammer while everyone else tries to track down Wulfgar.” That would have been fine, acceptable, and OK. Unfortunately, Salvatore throws in a pointless sub-plot involving a semi-new elf character named Le’Lorinal.

Le’Lorinel is a stupid character — both in motivation and in inclusion. There are two repeated themes in Le’Lorinel that Salvatore used in previous books. First, almost identically to Vierna in Starless Night, he takes a character from previous books that had reacted in certain ways and then totally throws that away to create a “bad guy” for purposes of giving Drizzt a useless fight and an even more useless murder. Second, much like in The Spine of the World, he creates a supremely useless B-storyline with, again, paper thin motivation for a really, really crappy payoff. Le’Lorinel’s identity is SO obvious that Salvatore has to dress her up as a male, and refer to her only as a male until the “surprising” reveal in the last chapter. The reveal is telegraphed early to readers who’ve been paying attention. There is only one surviving elf who 1) thinks they know Drizzt personally and 2) would have a reason to hate him this much — even though it makes the character amazingly ignorant.

The Le’Lorinal reveal is so disappointing that Salvatore would eventually go on to write a short story to ret-con the character’s motivation. At least, in this case, Drizzt seemed somewhat sorry for what he was doing, unlike his sister Vierna who used to like but murders and never thinks of again. The whole story falls apart, though, when you realize that the character’s timeline from the time she met Drizzt the last time — in the forest in Starless Night when he’s returning to the Underdark — she went from normal elf to completely insane vengeance machine. The reader is supposed to accept that an hour after this meeting, the elf almost immediately (since it’s said she trained for 6 years to kill Drizzt) went off, shaved her head, bought a mask, and created this identity and feud. This is not the pragmatic elves we’re conditioned to expect. It’s a worthless B-story that kills off a character who should have been a much, MUCH bigger part of Drizzt’s life. A character whose life he saved and whose done nothing to indicate to anyone that he’s anything other than a hero.

And that’s before you get in to the fact that the heroes are beginning to border on the ridiculous as they take down an entire encampment of pirates and ogres without suffering an injury and Drizzt was able to kill a hasted, stoneskinned, invisble, elf and was only brought down by a fire-shield enchantment (which duplicates all injuries sustained by the caster on to the attacker).

This book came across as thrown together in every sense of the word. It served the purpose of getting the characters back together but, when that wasn’t enough to fill 400 pages, he threw in another storyline and burned off a good character for a nothing reason and used Robillard (Drizzt’s wizard friend on The Sea Sprite) as the hand of god to move characters where he needed them. The whole thing really was worthless.

The book serves as a bridge between the Paths of Darkness and the next series. Nothing more.

I got the tip to check out Hitman: My Real Life in the Cartoon World of Wrestling via a review over on Bootleg’s site. And, much like with Watchmen, I’m going to take the easy way out and let Cam do the heavy lifting with his review.

One spot where I disagree with Cam’s review — Bret’s overbearing tone never gets to be too much for me. It seemed like he had his WWF reign in perspective. If it’s actually true that his merchandise was the top in international sales then I understand the creative control that he kept over his character. This fact (which I didn’t know until reading this book) really makes his whole “heel turn but only in America” storyline make way more sense then it did when it was happening. I do recall how the announcers continually framed him as a whiner for almost a year leading up to the turn. Now, a lot of it makes sense. I got played without even realizing it.

Now, that’s not to say Bret doesn’t come across insufferably full of himself. And, if you take a step back — how much of an asshole must Bret have been during his WWF days? No one in the history of wrestling books has ever had anything good to say about Shawn Michaels. Near as I can tell, everyone from management to locker room always hated Michaels — he refused to lose belts, was a pill-fiend, got beat up in bars for stealing girls, wrestled in drug hazes, retired for a year with a fake knee injury rather than put guys over, and just never put guys over in general. Shawn didn’t sell half the merchandise Bret did, was universally hated by most wrestling fans (even after his face turn) for being a pretty boy douche, and threw temper tantrums mid-match. And THIS was the guy Vince chose to back through the whole decade? How difficult must Bret have been to deal with? Did he just not suck up enough? Was he too over-bearing? How did Vince, within 2 years of giving this guy a 25-year contract, suddenly decide that he just couldn’t do it anymore? This is what fascinates me. And, as an aside, how much has these last five years after five years off saved Shawn Michaels’s legacy? If Shawn left forever after his match with Austin, Bret’s career would have probably been remembered as better. Instead, Shawn takes five years off and comes back when Hunter is at the height of power and is able to write his own ending. What did Bret do in a previous life? Rape nuns?

Bret isn’t exactly the world’s greatest writer, but he really does change the tone of the book properly from the beginning to end. In the beginning, when he’s talking about coming up through Stampede and traveling to Puerto Rico, his tone is hopeful. As he moves on through tragedy after tragedy and the business claims more and more lives, he becomes more bitter and beat down. His brother’s death, the reader can tell, killed wrestling for him.

As for the rest of his family — I need to read any book released by anyone in the Hart family or even tangentially related. The level of insanity in the Hart enclave is unspeakable. I had to put Diana Hart’s book on my list. Diana is such a horrible person that she conspired with the WWE to hurt Owen Hart’s wife Martha’s wrongful death suit against the WWF by stealing and faxing details of her team’s legal strategy to the WWE’s lawyers. Now, I work in the legal industry and I’m pretty sure that has to violate something or other. As for Bret’s wife… I don’t understand why he even married the woman, much less stayed with her. It comes across as he didn’t really want to get married and then never really enjoyed being married. It seemed like he found a person with an equal level of insane as the people in his own family.

If I had a complaint, I would have enjoyed a little more road stories and a little less about how everyone in the WWF locker room loved him. But then I might have missed out on the best Vince McMahon story — which was Bret outlining a plan for his match at Wrestlemania, Vince writing it down in a little book, and then returning a few days later to tell Bret about an awesome idea Vince had for Bret’s match at Wrestlemania. Vince rules.

All in all, one of the better wrestling books I’ve read since Foley 1 and a really good and honest biography overall.

In recent months, I’ve started trying to find out when my ancestors showed up in Upstate New York. My home town of Stillwater, NY is right on the Hudson River just north of Albany (not to be confused with the next town over, Mechanicville where I bought my townhouse. Just to the south in Waterford, the Champlain Canal (the canal that connected Lake Champlain, and thus Montreal, to New York City) empties in to the Erie Canal (the canal that connected the Great Lakes, and thus Chicago and Buffalo, to New York City). Around and to the north in Stillwater, Schuylerville, Bemis Heights, and Glens Falls is the site of the Battle of Saratoga. My town boasts the first and oldest continuously operating hydro-electric station in the country. At one point it housed the third largest railroad yard in the country, paper mills, and textile plants. These are a lot of words to say that it was, at one time, an important, vibrant part of the state. That time has gone — but at least it’s pretty easy to determine why people decided to settle there at some point.

Regardless, I’ve been able to track most of my ancestry except through my dad’s mother’s side. Her mother’s mother, mostly due to somewhat shoddy record keeping when womenfolk got married off, is something of a mystery. The more research I’ve done, the more I’ve realized that the jokes about me being related to everyone in my town are sketchily close to truth. My great-grandmother was one of about a dozen children. Further up the line on her mother’s side is a guy who had 17 sons… one of which had 19 sons. Further up the line on her father’s side is a family of 14 children, one of whom wound up owning most the land along the river where my high school is today.

While Googling some of these names, I found a mention of John Becker (one of the aforementioned children of gigantic families) in a book called The Hudson by Carl Carmer. Becker makes an appearance on one page as a little kid during the battles of Saratoga. And that’s how I came across this book.

I’ve had a hard time explaining this book to people. Near as I can tell, Carmer is somewhere in between a historian and a folklorist. The book seems to be written by taking historic records from people’s journals and letters, speaking to folks that remembered (or were told the story of) the events, and turning the whole thing in to a series of short stories outlining the history of society on the Hudson River. It starts with Indians traveling eastward because a prophecy bade them search out the “river that flows both ways” (the Hudson is affected by the tides so when it comes in, the water looks like it’s flowing up-river) to the “present day” 1930s when the book was written.

And one finds out rather quickly that the rich screwing the poor is a tradition as old as the state of New York. The original Dutch settlers took giant swaths of land via land grants. These people then parceled this land out to farmers. The manor lords would then charge the farmers rent for the right to farm this land. On top of a flat rent, they’d charge a portion of the farm’s profits and tithe of the farm’s goods. Since these manor lords owned almost all the river farmland, farmers generally had no choice. The manor lords are all names people from the state will recognize — their family names are on bridges, universities, towns and buildings all over the state. Van Rensselaer, Vanderbilt, Clinton, Fenimore, Beverwyck… all these names are of people who had the ability to throw people who fell behind on their tribute payments in to debtor prison. This ridiculous system lasted through the British take-over of the Dutch colonies and it was part of the reason used to spur river farmers in to rebellion against the British. Little did the farmers know that the feudal system would remain in place even after the Revolution was won.

If anything, it’s another bit of proof to my theory that everything in New York occurs through a complex series of favors dating back to the 1600s. All these recognizable names — men that are remembered as great philanthropists who helped found colleges and open houses for the arts — spent a solid portion of their lives demanding manor taxes from peasants and keeping this ridiculous system of laws in place using their considerable weight. This would all eventually lead to an insurrection against the state called the Tin Horn Rebellion, after which tenants were convicted of treason, which turned public opinion against the manor lords, which led to the election of a governor that abolished the manor system and pardoned those convicted in the Tin Horn Rebellion, which apparently then erased the history of the manor lords as asses. It’s pretty wicked, when you think about it — when people were upset with the government in the 1800s, mobs broke people out of prison who were unfairly imprisoned. People tarred and feathered tax collectors. The governor had the option of declaring a “state of rebellion.” Now… we bravely…. blog about stuff.

I do like that the book reads as fiction even though it is non-fiction. Reading 25 pages about a steamboat tragedy on the Hudson would be boring. Reading it written in the first person perspective from a guy on the boat is a little better. It also parcels out cool bits of knowledge wrapped up in prose. For instance, there are quite a few old houses in the northeast shaped like octagons. For a 40ish-year period in the late 1800, it was en vogue to build houses shaped like octagons. The original was built by 1840s version of Dr. Phil, a phrenologist named Fowler. Fowler’s Folly was built in Fishkill, NY — was considered one of the first purely American housing designs — and they started to pop up around the Northeast. One of these, built in 1858 by the aforementioned one of 17 sons who himself had 19 sons is in my town (pictured here on an 1889 map across the street from the church — those of you who’ve driven through Stillwater will recognize the fork as the one with the Mobil — and here from a news story in 2006. The “cute” carousel theme has, thankfully, disappeared). It was cool to get random upstate facts that I didn’t know.

My biggest complaint about the book was I expected it to deal more with river communities north of Albany. Instead, it dealt mostly with river communities south of Albany. It was much more about the fishing and steamboat industries in Hudson and Poughkeepsie than the northern communities. I suppose that whaling, fishing, and steamboat travel lends itself more to cute, folksy stories then do paper mills and industry, but more than two would have been nice.

I wouldn’t recommend this to anyone that wasn’t a local history nerd for Upstate New York, like myself. I’m interested in the topic and I had to renew it twice because it was slow going. If I give it credit for anything, it’s the further reading section which suggested many more books on more focused topics.

Sometimes I mean to review something and I stick a note in here reminding me that I have to flesh out notes, but I continually put it off because something else comes up and by the time I get back to writing the review — it’s been months and I’ve already forgotten some important stuff. Such is the unfortunate case with Watchmen.

Like most people who haven’t really been in to the graphic novel, I only really decided to try Watchmen because I saw the trailer attached to The Dark Knight. I had a bit of a wait for it because of the bump from the trailer and the fact the library only had 4 copies of it for all of New York City. Apparently, my tax dollars do not go in to keeping up with increased demand for books about to be made in to a movie. Fools.

Anyway, at this point, I’m not even going to attempt to review it anymore. Instead, I’ll just refer everyone to the awesome Low Resolution Book Club Review which goes chapter by chapter and hits all the major plot points and has better discussions then we could get going here. It is not, by any means, a spoiler-free review, so if you want to be surprised by the movie or have plans to read the book and want to experience it as you go along, then avoid it until after. If you want to get an idea about the movie, check it out.

Two things I will note. I found (and someone on Low Resolution mentioned) reading a graphic novel to be mentally exhausting. When I picked it up, I expected to buzz through it like the occasional X-Men or Buffy comic I read when I wait for Ms. L to find something at Borders. Not so with a well-done graphic novel. A graphic novel, when one is trying to catch extra clues and storyline elements in the images, is working both hemispheres of the brain at the same time. It’s challenging when you’re not used to it. You may roll your eyes at this paragraph, but it’s true.

Second, the ending is supremely depressing and I will be VERY interested to see if the movie people leave it intact. Hollywood has a terrible tendency to go for happy endings. The ending of this — not really happy.

I’m glad I read it. It was a fun read and gave me the idea of the quality stuff out there in graphic novel form.

After 12 books following Drizzt and his friends, two new characters finally get a spin-off to their own series. Artemis Entreri and Jarlaxle, two guys who have been a thorn in Drizzt’s side on and off for all the other books finally get their chance to be fleshed out. Servant of the Shard doubles as the third book in the Paths of Darkness arc and the first book in The Sellswords trilogy. This seems like it was the general idea of the Paths of Darkness — give the more interesting characters their own books and see what sticks.

Artemis and Jarlaxle stuck.

The basic plot of the book deals with Jarlaxle’s plan to expand the reach of his mercenary guild — Bregan D’aerthe — to the surface world. As the surface dwellers aren’t usually interested in dealing with drow (with their whole reputation for treachery and murdering their business associates) Jarlaxle drafted Entreri to be his front in Calimshan and Morik the Rogue to be his front in Luskan. With these two guys in place, Jarlaxle sets in to motion plans to take over the thieves’ guild in both towns using these guys as figureheads. As there is plenty of profit and power in the position the two humans don’t really protest that much.

That plot kind of takes a back-seat to the secondary plot — the gentle guiding of Artemis Entreri from evil assassin to semi-honorable hero. While Salvatore still makes it a point to duck whatever it is that set Entreri down the path of evil early on in his life (but he does drop some hints — specifically Entreri’s blinding hatred of religion and priests) he starts to finally give the reader’s some hints. You start to get the sense that Entreri and Jarlaxle are homerun characters. Oddly, it’s likely that neither of them were created to be so. Entreri was created to be the human, evil version of Drizzt. Jarlaxle was created to explain what happens to drow who have no house. The lack of backstory has done nothing but make them more interesting as Salvatore starts to flesh them out. What you learn by the end of this book is that Drizzt and Entreri aren’t really all that different at the end of the day. Their motivations really aren’t all that different. Drizzt doesn’t kill for money, but he does kill people who have wronged others. Entreri does the same — he just earns a profit doing so.

Ironically, through all the trials and tribulations all the characters in this pocket of of Faerun have gone through because of the Crystal Shard, it’s one of the evil guys who eventually takes up the quest to have it destroyed. That kind of fills in as the third plot line in this book. How two bad guys sort out Crenshinibon between the two of them and its final fate.

I can only assume that the second and third books of the trilogy deal with more of the backstory of these two very interesting characters. But I’d consider this one the second consecutive home run by an author that I started to get a little burned out on.

Strong recommendation.

I’ve wanted to pick up and read a couple of Dodger/Giant history books for a while now. I’d been waiting to read about one as a reference in some other book but it hasn’t come up. So, I just picked one at random. I went with Brooklyn’s Dodgers by Carl E. Prince.

In the future, I need to be careful not to pick up a book by and for sociologists (I still love you Mr. and Ms. The Big Show) when what I want is a history book.

This is one of the few books that I actually gave up on. If you’re the type of baseball fan that finds baseball books by statisticians to be snooty and superior, you’d be blown away by the general snootiness and superiority of the author. Keep in mind, I like stat books and I thought the author was snooty. There were two and a half interesting chapters. The Jackie Robinson chapter spoke to how the other players and the borough accepted Robinson and how management dealt with those who didn’t (Hint: lots of trades with the Cardinals). The second explored the Dodgers’ and the women of Brooklyn. Surprisingly, it wasn’t about young Dodger players mowing through the daughters of Brooklyn. It more dealt with Walter O’Malley and Branch Rickey being amongst the first owners in baseball to reach out to women in the surrounding neighborhood to fill empty seats during day games. They were the first owners in baseball to realize the income potential in women’s afternoon free time and how they went about overcoming stereotypes about women who hung out at ballparks. The half chapter of interest was about the reserve clause. It included the “indentured servitude” speech that accompanies all stories about the reserve clause, but also outlined how the “overgrown boys playing a game” stereotype came about. It was something the owners actively spread through the papers to keep player salaries down. “Why should we pay these guys a lot of money when they’re just boys playing a game?” I’d never thought of that before.

Unfortunately, there were other chapters. Specifically, the parts talking about the macho male culture of Brooklyn and bars as they relate to baseball fans. Much like the “this is a lot of paper to tell me we need clean water” Sprint firefighter commercial, Prince spent an awful lot of paper to tell me that guys who didn’t have TV went to bars to watch or listen to baseball games, sometimes would get in to fights with fans of the other New York teams, and that baseball teams do a lot of posturing toward each other to throw opponents off their game. I just summed up four chapters in two sentences.

I did, however, take two things away that I look forward to seeing more of in future books. First, had the Dodger’s never left Brooklyn, their fans would be as annoying as Red Sox fans. Boston has this provincial “if you weren’t born here three generations ago and you don’t like the Sox, you’re not worth anything.” Brooklyn natives are like this, too, AND have accents that grate on outsiders. Second, the hatred between Dodger fans and Yankee fans would be on the order of the hatred between the White Sox and the Cubs. It would represent everything from borough pride to income levels — white collar vs. blue collar and everything in between. Extending that, the idea of having two teams in the same division in the same city is mind-blowingly awesome. If the Dodgers and Yankees hated each other and they only met maybe once a year, then the Dodgers/Giants rivalry, while getting much less press, must have been great. I can’t even imagine the extra bile and hatred that would exist between Brooklyn and Manhattan if they had a sports feud with each other. I know the Dodgers and Giants carried their rivalry all the way out to the west coast… what it must have been like when they were separated by 13 miles instead of 400 must have been something to behold.

I need to find books on the Dodgers not like this one. Strongest recommendation to avoid.

With a ten-hour round trip train ride, I figured I’d knock another of these books off. This was Salvatore’s attempt at making one of the non-drow characters and giving him his own book. Wulfgar, as you may remember, was the character tortured in hell for six years and eventually left the party because he felt himself a detriment of his friends because he was held prisoner by his own memories. Spine of the World is the second book in the Paths of Darkness cycle (following The Silent Blade, in the spirit of grouping, but sharing no plot at all) and the 12th overall book using these characters.

The book follows Wulfgar to Luskan — a port city full of scum and villany — and his ongoing bout with post-traumatic stress following his six years of torture in hell. He soon finds out that alcohol is a pretty good way to force yourself to live in the moment and forget the past and, as such, finds himself as a bouncer in a local tavern in a seedy part of town working for room, board, and wine.

In an odd sort of way, I think this might be one of the better books since the original set. Salvatore really manages to address an issue pretty relevant in the present day in a fantasy setting. We get a picture of a character we’ve come to care about over the last decade destroyed mentally. The years and torture has caught up with him and all he wants to do is forget, but he can’t. This leads him down a pretty dark path. He becomes an alcoholic and denies his past as a hero. He finds himself in league with shady characters and walking down a path of criminality before hitting rock bottom and beginning to work back to what he was. It’s a story that probably anyone whose battled an addiction could relate to — albeit dramatized and placed in a fantasy setting.

If I had a complaint about the book is that it’s split in to two separate and distinct stories. Chapters alternate between Wulfgar’s story in Luskan and his new friendship with fellow shady Luskanite Morik the Rogue and the introduction of a set of new characters that I found myself struggling to care about. In the midst of this great story about downfall and redemption, I have to keep taking pointless interludes to a story about teenage love and the unfairness of duty. Secondly, once these new characters were introduced and I figured out where the story was going, there was only one of two ways the story was going to end. The characters were obviously inserted for the author to give Wulfgar something heroic to do, but I didn’t need 150 pages of paper-thin, chick-lit “who you should love” vs. “who you do love” plot that’s been beaten to death in movies and books for 100 years. I’ve seen the “young peasant girl loves young peasant boy but is betrothed to the Lord” storyline a million times. The author could have done better.

Never have I seen an author’s best and worst been in the same book, at the same time, sharing the same storyline. The only reason the peasant girl plot didn’t make the rest of the book unreadable was because the Wulfgar stuff was SO good. Salvatore does a great job of putting you in Wulfgar’s head and following his downfall from hero to guy who is almost happy when he thinks he’s about to be put to death. The description of him at the Prisoner’s Carnival after he’s been tried and sentenced to death for something he didn’t do is relatively amazing. He knows he’s going to be tortured to death by these people for the entertainment and he’s almost relieved. First, because no torture they can inflict on his mortal body will be remotely as bad as what he’s already been through. Second, when they’re finished torturing him he will be dead and that will be the end of it. It’s a stunning look inside a completely broken person.

So, if it’s possible to give the strongest recommendation for the book and the strongest recommendation to avoid every other chapter and have it average out to a semi-recommendation to avoid every other chapter like it was on fire, this is it.