Dire Omens and Portents

 So, while most of the shocking revelations from Bob Woodward and Robert Costa's Peril were mostly revealed prior to publication. the book itself paints a much more interesting portrait than the tidbits sizzling to sell the book in the first place.

Chronicling from late 2019 to early 2021, we start with Joe Biden deciding to run for the nomination, proceed through Donald Trump's reelection campaign and COVID, and end up around the end of Biden's first 100 days in office. All with authors' style of presenting a timely backed with facts and the soul of a prosecutor presenting a case. (Hey, I read All the President's Men; other than Woodward and Bernstein describing themselves as scrappy and handsome, which is not discussed here, the writing style hasn't changed much.) 

One can wonder if the figures treated most sympathetically here were ones who talked to him, or if some of the folks regarded as villains are actually not as bad as presumed. (In particular, Bob Barr is portrayed as less an architect of the obstruction of justice as more in trying to explain to his boss exactly what the Constitution says about the electoral college voting. Lindsay Graham also is portrayed as being one of the few trying to get Trump past the post election lies that the former guy has seemingly swallowed hook, line, and sinker. Generally agreed upon as being wretched hives of scum and villainy Ivanka, Jared, and Mitch McConnell even get more favorable press here than Trump.) 

I'm sure one of the biggest critiques people will point out in relation to this (and really ALL books with either author) is their politics; frankly, one gets the impression politics doesn't matter as much as effective administration to either of them. That seems to be the big conclusion on the end of the era, while they think Trump did good with getting the vaccine out and approved (it's mildly amusing, since that same fight to get treatment or some kind of prevention into the hands of people played a big part in the narrative of the last book I reviewed on here), the complete lack of any sort of plan to do anything with it AFTER getting it out doomed the response. Well, that and going out of the way to downplay the risks of the virus, prophylactic measures that could have helped, and indeed, playing up to his base, what could have actually been a much more effective thing almost died in the womb. 

This would be one of the big lessons in here. Projects that affect an entire planet need competent administration on several levels to work. 

The events of January 6th, 2021, get a lot of discussion. As is the perilous line that certain members of the Legislative branch have to walk to "keep the base happy" vs the actual mortal danger they were in. Since we end before the current crop of (pardon my language) batshit conspiracy that overtook some of that branch in trying to justify what so many of us watched live on TV, this wasn't explored as deeply as it really really needs to be by people who can at least present as being an objective observer. (Yeah, we all, myself included, can get caught up in a narrative that may or may not be the full story.)

Of note, they avoid, for the most part, discussing the nuttery that is "QAnon", although Guilianni comes off as a complete and total idiot in the eyes of almost everyone. 

When we get into Biden's first 100 days (almost a welcome relief at this point), we get deep into the structural faults that exist in the Senate that didn't particularly exist during Biden's tenure in both the Senate and his days as Veep. (This is a discussion that also deserves a deeper dive somewhere, as the Senate generally had a reputation for having less hot heads than the House, which has changed over time as ideologues have won races for state seats there. This is not to say that ideologues haven't served in the senate, I can name several from the past few years, but more that there does seem to be a heck of a lot more unwilling to do anything now than there were, and the narrative does point this out in a few places, pointing at the strained relations between Missouri's Roy Blunt and Josh Hawley. I look at my own state, where Rob Portman (who I disagree with on a lot of things) is retiring, and we're already getting TV ads from folks more in the vein of Hawley running for the seat. 

My conclusions after reading this could be stated as follows; While some things are black and white, much of the stuff leading to those events were much more gray than anyone was portraying. While the villains remain villains, some of them were less Bond Villain, and more MCU villain. Unless there is accountability, we run the risk of repeating everything again.

Meh (An X-ers reaction)

 I for the life of my don't remember requesting Never Silent: ACT UP And My Life in Activism by Peter Staley, but it showed up, so I read it. And I spent a lot of my time reading it trying to figure out how the heck to review it. Bear with me here.

For those who don't know, Staley got involved with the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power (ACT UP) in NYC fairly early on, after having worked as an investment banker who happened to be gay and have HIV. (To qualify this, his diagnosis was originally AIDS Related Complex [ARC], a diagnosis that no longer exists, and even if he did at a few points hit what has since become the t4 levels that qualifies for a diagnosis of AIDS, the diagnostic criteria was not there during the periods his cells were under the threshold.) He got involved, and got semi famous. 

Here, he chronicles his highs and lows in ACT UP, TAG, AIDSmeds.com, and more recent forays into COVID. 

This includes more than a little name dropping, dissections of long ago fights, Crystal Meth addiction, surviving while others were dying and the guilt that comes with it...

Rather than rehash this, let me just try to break down the good and the bad with the narrative as presented.

THE GOOD:

30ish years since the start of where the narrative picks up, he's got a lot of perspective, so the immediacy of things that came out during the era is not as present. (This could also be listed as bad.)

His descriptions of actions taken is vivid and compelling, as we hear about the ACT UP event where they interrupted the New York Stock Exchange to protest price gouging on AZT ($10,000 a year at the outset), sit ins at companies to get better trials for people who might benefit from the trial medications, inflating a condom on Jesse Helms's house...

His memories of people in the movement, and the tribute he pays to them, even if he disagreed with them. No man is an island, and he was a visible part with a lot of support.

His honesty in discussing addiction, STDs, and survivor guilt. All of these are things that don't often get brought into the light, and it's refreshing to see someone examine it from the eyes of experience. 

 His chapter concerning consulting on Dallas Buyers Club was eye opening. 

THE BAD:

Unlike Cleve Jones's memoir, we don't get a couple chapters of romance with a hairy Greek man; we do get a chapter on Staley's coming of age with 8 men in 7 days in London. I understand why it's here; despite his other faults, he's fairly libertine with his attitudes towards sex... it just felt a bit like braggadocio. 

I couldn't help but feel that his recaps of the internecine fighting that lead to him leaving ACT UP was one sided. I realize this is autobiography, and therefore a chance to justify his actions, but I keep wondering what the logic the opposition using in those fights. I mean, frankly, I likely would have been on his side in the situation, as his Inside-Outside strategy is more in line with the activism I joined in 1994, but I can't help but feel that we're missing half the discussion. And what little is presented of the other side, I can see why people would be resentful of his actions. 

While he does sort of acknowledge his own privilege as a white man from the Upper Class, there's a hell of a lot of Classist rhetoric thrown in unconsciously.) Seriously, at one point, after going on about going on disability after leaving the banking world, and having no real employment, he talks about withdrawing a larger amount than I make in a month from his bank to cover an impromptu recon trip. When he discusses how more well off white men got better treatment faster, there's a bit of acknowledgement, but not much. 

Based on his age, he's basically at the tail end of the Boomer Generation, and it shows quite a bit. 

I was kind of sad he really didn't get into actions that actually made the news in my small hometown, like the Die-In at St. Patrick's Cathedral. 

His complete erasure of Gen X when discussing the "Second Great Silence" (the first being Reagan, the second being the dying down of publicity after the 3 drug cocktail became the norm, making most viral loads undetectable and mostly affordable) and the advent of PrEP (Truvada, or PreExposure Prophylaxis.) He spends some time praising millennial activists, while completely ignoring any and all things Generation X did and still does. To be fair, this is Boomer ideology at its ugliest, and thus, MEH.

While I appreciate his addiction and recovery didn't dominate the entire narrative, 10 years of addiction and recovery takes up 2 pages and doesn't tie in to the narrative beyond that. 

 FINAL TAKE:

Whether or not he's taking all the credit for what ACT UP accomplished and whether those accomplishments could be credited to ACT UP to begin with are always going to be up for debate. However, he does a good job on shedding some light on events that quite a few of us did not really get exposed to in the time period discussed.

Young Cordelia

 I should have written this up a few days ago, but work has been nuts.

At a long ago library sale, I picked up Lois McMaster Bujold's Barrayar, which is another chapter in her Vorkosigan Saga, focused on Miles's mother, Cordelia. (As I mention when I review books in the saga, I have yet to read a Miles book. However, Cordelia, Ethan, and her World of Five Gods series are some of the best books I've read. So, eventually....)

Cordelia Naismith-Vorkosigan has newly married Aral Vorkosigan, following some events that evidently happen in a prior book. As the current Emperor of Barrayar is dying, he appoints Aral to be Regent for his son, who is 5ish as the story opens. Cordelia is gravid with child, and Aral is trying hard to find a balance between the Vor class (Aristocrats, usually with the title of Count) and much more socialist plebes. 

Aral's attempts at progress (at this point, a new continent is being terraformed, and a new colony being built on Sergyar) are being resisted by hardline counts, who have some control over the military. This leads to a few assassination attempts, including a gas attack on him and Cordelia, which threatens her foetus. Cordelia, coming from Beta Colony, has no issues putting her son in a Uterine Replicator with an experimental treatment to try to prevent the side effects the poison and the antidote from killing Miles. 

Of course, one Count in particular tries to stage a coup; however, the young Emperor escapes to the Vorkosigan estate and Aral makes arrangements to get him somewhere safe. Cordelia also escapes, and winds up leading a small raid on the capital to save her baby. 

As I keep saying, McMaster Bujold is a fantastic author, and her Sci-fi, while not hard core tech, is some of the best I've ever read. Well worth the read.

Threefer

 A while back, I bought a 3 in one volume of James Herbert novels for the last novel included, one that was advertised in a pulp paperback I read as a kid. 

Any rate, let's break these down.

The lead novel, The Fog, sadly has nothing to do with John Carpenter's 80's film. Instead, we're in a small village in south central England where an Earthquake manages to unleash long buried genetically modified germs that make hosts violent. (The book was published in the early 70's, but it kind of reminds me of the more recent Mad Cow outbreak.) Our hero, Mr. Holman, is a former government man, who somehow gains immunity from the germs, but given the cloud of yellow germs has an almost sentience going on, it's a long process trying to stop it. The narrative here tends to drift a bit, as we get occasional scenes of what happens to people caught in the fog before everything resolves at the end. 

In the middle lies The Spear, wherein Mr. Steadman, a former SAS and Mossad Agent now working as a gumshoe goes up against a British-German conspiracy involving the Thule Society and the Longinius's Spear. 

And last, we wind up with Sepulchre, in which Mr. Halloran, who also worked in Army intelligence, but who now works for a company protecting people from kidnapping, ends up dealing with a client trying to bring back Bel-Marduke. 

All three are breathless and pulpy reads, albeit enjoyable breathless and pulpy reads. There are prescient bits in here; in The Fog, an infected pilot steers his jumbo jet into a major London landmark, for instance. 

We also have some problematic bits and a few mixed bags thrown in. One particularly bad part is the reveal of a hermaphrodite in The Spear, whose reveal is met with revulsion and a severe beating. Both The Fog and Sepulchre include minor gay characters, which is rare in that era of horror; however, in both, the gay guys are on the bad side. On the other hand, they fact that they're gay doesn't make them evil in these narratives, they just have other evil acts they perform that do. 

Fun reads, but definitely from a different era. 

It's a different world

 My brother, Charles Ebert, published an anthology of his short fiction titled A World Where Sandy Never Died and Other Worlds, which I finished up a few days ago (and haven't had a chance to review yet, because of my hideous work schedule this week.)

This work collects 12 stories, 11 of which were published elsewhere, and each comes with a preface talking a bit about the story. Most fall somewhere under the umbrella of "Soft Sci-Fi" or "Near Future Sci-Fi", although more than a few are under different headings.  

Honestly, I was happy a story I heard him read out loud at a convention was included here ("Hauntings"), since it's almost a play on Beetlejuice in terms of trying to get rid of a problem tenant. 

We have a much more "could be current" story in "The Ossuaries", where the connections between historical atrocities and our modern age come really into focus, as does the choice between fulfilling a dream or temporarily preventing an echo or a previous atrocity. 

I enjoyed the title story, which concerns people people slipping between universes to find albums from artists who died in our world but survived in others. While I'm not as passionate about the artists mentioned in here as the author is, I kept picturing other ways to enjoy such excursions, and wondering if one could build a much larger story on world presented here. 

For me, those 3 are the highlights of the collection. They're all good and well written, but these three are the ones that stuck with me. I believe this one is on Amazon, so if you have some extra cash, give it a whirl.

This is why we tell the story

 In a case of falling victim to targeted adverts, I ended up buying Stephen Purdy's Second Edition of Flop Musicals of the Twenty-First Century Part I: The Creatives thanks to something I saw scrolling. 

According to his afterword, this came about due to a question of of a theater seminar he was leading, which lead into getting in touch with people involved in several levels of productions that are now considered failures. 

Frankly, some of them I expected to be included (Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark), some I was surprised to see were considered flops (Rocky), most I had never heard of, and in a few cases (Lestat) I found myself wondering who thought they'd be a good idea in the first place. 

Anyway, the book covers 13 musicals that either did not return the money invested in them, closed very quickly, or really disappointed in other ways. (In almost every case, ticket sales were below 50% for every performance prior to closing; most shows need at least 70% to remain profitable enough to keep running.) In some cases, like Glory Days, Wonderland, and King Kong, the shows never really got taken through a lot of development processes like out of town tryouts or workshops, and therefore couldn't get the kinks worked out prior to arriving in New York. Others did well out of town, but failed to find an audience in New York (Cheeseburger in Paradise.) Some (Dance of the Vampires) had too many cooks trying to fix things (In that last case, the star of the show got all kinds of creative control, and wound up becoming "Liberace as a Vampire"). Some had dream teams of creatives, like Elton John and Bernie Taupin working with big name choreographers, but the book kept changing while the music didn't (Lestat. Again, I have yet to figure out how a condensed version of Anne Rice would work as a musical. If by some chance one of our local troupes produces it, I'd love to see it.) 

Hearing more about Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark was also very entertaining, since the music I heard from it was good (written by Bono and The Edge from U2), but all I ever heard was the number of accidents involving the show. While the accidents likely did play a big part in the fact it lost $20,000,000, the number of rewrites (the first act ended with a battle between Green Goblin and Spider-Man, the second act involved a new character named Arachne trying to trap Peter in her web in dreams... The words tap dancing spiders was used to describe this. It was supposed to end with a big shot of webbing cannoned off the stage onto a screen like a splash page in the comics. Sadly, the device never worked, everyone hated the second act, so they stretched out Act I into two acts, with a thrilling aerial finale.)

Another, Glory Days, has the honor of being one of the rare shows to close the night it opens. Which is sad, since by all accounts, the show was a diamond in the rough, and ran into issue of hitting Broadway before it was really ready to be there. (It fell victim to market research saying a scaled down intimate show would play well in a cavernous setting.) Which is sad, since the plot synopsis listed with the show makes it sound like it would be a good watch, but the stress of the show evidently nearly ended the friendship of the guys who wrote it. 

Cheeseburger in Paradise evidently did really well in tryouts in more tropical climes, but New Yorkers (and tourists) evidently weren't all that interested in getting drunk and listening Jimmy Buffet songs. 

By far the one thing that sticks out in almost every story here is exactly how many good things people involved in these shows had to say about them. These folks remain invested in things that have long since gone dark, telling fun tales from behind the scenes, and discussing why they think their show didn't find an audience. 

All told, while some of the shows in here might find new life either touring or a revival either in New York or a local production, they all succeeded in opening on Broadway, a feat not every show gets. And frankly, it sounds like many of these shows deserve another chance somewhere.

Mages in this series are like Spinal Tap drummers

 And as the twofer concludes, Jak Koke's Beyond the Pale concludes the Dragoneheart Saga, wrapping up the various story lines we've been confused by for two books now. 

Burnout, now Billy, is still possessed by Lethe, and being held captive in Atzlan. Ryan has the Dragon Heart, but needs to find a way to get it to Thayla in the spirit realm. A young blood mage who is entranced by Thayla is trying to break free of her mentor. They get a new Mage, Talon (who stars in his own series), and start meeting some of the bigger names in the setting, like Harlequin, the elf who may or may not predate the 6th Age. 

By the end, everyone is either dead or redeemed, we know what Lethe is, and Ryan finally gets the answers he's been seeking. 

The conclusion here is a hell of a lot better written than the preceding books. I do have to wonder how much of it is canon, though, since it reveals a solution to a fairly major mystery in the setting. 

Really fun read to conclude the trilogy. Worth the slog through the past two books.

Ghost Gangsters

 Morgan Brice returns to Cape May with Blink, as we join Ben and Eric on another adventure in ghosts and gangsters. 

Friend Jaxon wants to reopen an old theater with the Arts Council. Problem being said theater is cursed by a strega, and Jaxon winds up in a coma. 

In the mean time, the Russian Mob and the Newark Mob are gunning for our heroes thanks to their former jobs. 

It's pretty much what I've come to expect from these, fairly breezy, a bit of smut, and the incongruity of two guys trying to protect each other from their pasts also dealing with domestic issues, like whether or not to propose or even move in together. This one does have a nice twist towards the end, involving the best Spielberg reference in print currently.

Fun, light, and good for a relaxing evening.

Locked up

 Clockwork Asylum by Jak Koke, aka Book 2 of The Dragon Heart Cycle, picks up right after the last book ended, with Burnout swimming in the Snake River, possessed by the spirit Lethe.

This leads to Ryan Mercury and Assets Inc trying to track him and the Dragon Heart artifact down. All while Ryan and his girlfriend have to deal with the investigation into the death of Dunzlekhan, in which both are suspects. 

All of which leads up to an explosive conclusion in the Dragon's arboretum as almost every faction involved in the affair wind up in DC at the same time.

While this is better paced and much clearer than book one was, it still suffers from way too many plots not quite meshing together well most of the time. 

But still, I ended this one wanting to read the finale much more than I wanted to read this one after the first.

Death of a Dragon

 I picked up the Shadowrun DragonHeart Saga a while back, since evidently my favorite Mage in the setting showed up in here somewhere. While he isn't in the first book, what is in here is kind of interesting.

Stranger Souls opens with Ryan Murphy, an agent of Dunzelkhan (Elder Dragon, and newly elected president of the United Canadian and American States) running afoul of some kind of ritual in Atzlan (formerly Mexico.) Not long after Ryan goes down, Dunzelkhan blows up in front of the Watergate Hotel in the DC Fed. 

Then we briefly meet Lethe, a male spirit tasked by Thalya to find the Dragon Heart to keep the chasm between our world and the outsiders open. 

It's a lot to process, and made more complicated by the fact that Ryan, while not dead, is however being prepped to receive possession by a gent who currently lives on as a Matrix simulation. And lest we forget, there's Burnout, the cyberzombie, who, like a certain antagonist from another franchise, is much more man than machine. 

Eventually this all winds up with the Dragon heart fallin into the Snake Rive along with an antagonist possessed by Lethe while Ryan figures out who he is now that he has two different sets of memories. 

It's engaging, but it's messy.