Before we started reading “The Nine” I unsuccessfully tried to cram in one of my favorite guilty pleasures: “Wicked Prey,” the latest in a series of mysteries by a former Twin Cities journalist who writes under the name John Sandford.
The Prey series is one of two I picked up as a young teenager because my mom read them and they seemed grown up. My tastes have long since shifted, but, though you’ll never find me waxing nostaligic about another pre-teen fave, Mary Higgins Clark, you’ll always find me with a copy of the latest Prey book.
When I finished Jeffrey Toobin, I picked up Sandford. More than anything, I wanted to see what the hero, a former-cop-turned-state-agent named Lucas Davenport, was up to. The books rely a little too heavily on boilerplate mystery cliches, but the pace, both in the book and as you read it, is fast enough to keep you involved. The problem with the Prey books is that they’re all so similar, I tend to forget them almost as soon as I read them. I can’t really tell you where the last book’s narrative thread ran out, but I can tell you a lot about Davenport. There’s something about Davenport and the way he moves through the cities that makes me want to sign up for the Minneapolis police force, too.
I feel the same way about the other mystery series with a solid place on my own young adult shelf, the Kinsey Millhone novels by Sue Grafton. Millhone is a private investigator in a Santa Barbara-like fake town called Santa Teresa. More importantly, the book titles are in such a form — “A is for Alibi,” “B is for Burglar,” “C is for Corpse,” — that guessing what the next title would be was a favorite car game for my family when we were young kids. Coming up: “U is for Undertow.” We didn’t guess that one. Still waiting for news on the X. Xerox was really our best shot because x-ray seemed like cheating.
Because Grafton writes the books as if little time is passing in Millhone’s world between each one, it’s still the 80′s in Santa Teresa. And that makes the feeling that I’m revisiting my own past even stronger. Whatever I’m doing in my real life, I’m spending the end of the day or so it takes me to suck down one of these books scoping out properties on the southern California coastline so that I can get into my VW Rabbit and go become a private investigator. Not that I have a Rabbit. Or the skills to become an investigator.
SPOILER ALERT: You know what happens in “Wicked Prey?” Lucas Davenport catches the bad guys. Ah, the reassuring feeling of a predictable trip to a favorite place.
I’ve nearly finished “Frozen Fire,” the new techno-thriller by Greenwich resident Bill Evans, and it’s clear the WABC meteorologist can do more than give the weather report — he also tells an engaging story. Even more importantly, Evans has brought to the surface a little-known, but highly divisive debate over the potential use of methane hydrate as an alternative energy source. For a preview of the book, go here.
Found mostly beneath the ocean floor, methane hydrate is a solid compound that contains a large amount of methane frozen in the crystalline structure of water ice. Since there’s so much of the stuff — the U.S. Geological Survey suggests there is between 100,000 and 300 million trillion cu. ft. on Earth — it has the potential to be an abundant source of energy. Even better, it burns relatively clean.
But Evans, a supporter of research into methane hydrate extraction, admits that there are obstacles to harvesting the substance. For starters, it would take an enormous financial investment to start a drilling operation on the ocean floor (in “Frozen Fire,” it is risk-taking billionaire Dennis Cavendish who does just that). And though it might sound far-fetched, Evans warns that an operation could be sabotaged by radical eco-terrorists (that’s where evil Earth activist Garner Blaylock, Cavendish’s arch-nemsis, comes in).
But from what I’ve gathered, those aren’t the primary concerns of many scientists and environmentalists, who view the idea of methane hydrate extraction as yet another way to exploit and already vulnerable planet. As we have observed in the Niger Delta in recent years, oil drilling operations conducted by gas giant Shell have created an environmental disaster and contributed to political and social upheaval in that region. What then, the environmentalists ask, would happen if companies like Exxon/Mobil, Shell and Texaco were given free reign of the ocean floor?
I’ve really only scratched the surface on this debate, but I encourage anyone interested in the topic to do some research on their own. “Frozen Fire,” an entertaining and easy-to-read novel, might be a good start. And a recent article by Sonia Shah on Salon.com is also very informative on the subject.
We are facing a dire energy crisis and as Evans suggests, methane hydrate could be a viable solution. At the same time, are we willng to risk further environmental destruction to satiate our energy needs?
Well, I finished “A-Rod: The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez.” It didn’t end as badly, with all the heavy psychoanalysis, as it began. But it didn’t end well. The book didn’t really tell us anything about Rodriguez, it didn’t make a hard and fast case that he is a cheater, and it didn’t tell us why he’s so hot and cold as a player.
It didn’t really tell us much of anything. But that might speak more to the subject than to the writer, and the rush to get it out might speak more to the state of the publishing industry than anything else. Reading it cost us a contributor, but hopefully our eagerness to tear it apart, honestly and critically, didn’t lose us any readers.
The holes in the book’s assessment of him as a player and a person just made me want to read more about A-Rod, and now I want to see him in action. Maybe I’ll actually catch a Yankees game this year.
Reading the book also made us realize that Selena Roberts probably lives in Westport. Sorry, Selena.
We’re ready to close the book on the ill-fated match between Roberts and A-Rod. Then it’s on to “The Nine,” the 2007 book by New Yorker writer Jeffrey Toobin about the Supreme Court. Just in time for the Sonia Sotormayor confirmation hearings. Stay tuned.
My perusal of E.M. Forster’s classic novel began with such good intentions. With wholesome, faintly academic fervor, I embraced the prospect of reading the imperishable “A Room With a View” after several months of contemporary fiction. I love modern novelists, but I was ready to return, for a moment, to 1908, the year the novel was published. And, this was a book, I’d been told by many, that everyone must read, one of those timeless, inimitable pieces of literature that should not only be read thoroughly but absorbed with reverence for its merit and splendor. Settling on my couch, flanked by a cat and a cup of tea, I opened the book, fully prepared for merit and splendor.
Like Forster’s young heroine, Lucy Honeychurch, my initial reaction to the opening pages was pragmatic and studious. I strolled through the paragraphs much like Lucy strolled through the glorious churches of Florence, painstakingly searching for the praised frescoes of Giotto with the aid of Baedeker, her indispensable guidebook. I ventured into Forster’s prose with the air of a somewhat nervous tourist, armed for sightseeing. Ooh, look at his wonderful diction, succinct and yet so evocative! And how artlessly he deploys his humor! Ah, such skill and mastery. I chuckled with appreciative laughter over sentences like this one, describing the fussy British chaperone:
Miss Bartlett was already seated on a tightly stuffed armchair, which had the colour and contours of a tomato. She was talking to Mr. Beebe, and as she spoke, her long, narrow head drove backwards and forwards, slowly, regularly, as though she were demolishing some invisible obstacle.
Oh, Mr. Forster. With deft strokes, he paints a sharp and accurate portrait of the British upper classes abroad — eager for a Fashionably Exotic Adventure, but priggish and suspicious of foreigners, unwilling to completely leave their comfortable Britannia behind.
For November, I'll be reading American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House by Jon Meacham, which won the Pulitzer Prize last year. We'll update our book club selection for December and January shortly.
Marilyn Ramos is a partner at the Stamford litigation law firm of Silver Golub & Teitell. She is a member of the Connecticut Trial Lawyers Association and the Connecticut Bar Association. She is currently on the Board of Directors of the Fairfield County Bar Association and the Fairfield County Bar Foundation. She received her law degree from Pace University School of Law in 1989 and is a member of the Connecticut and New York bars. Prior to her career in law, she was a teacher with the Greenwich Public Schools and worked for the Stamford Human Rights Commission. Her views expressed on this blog are completely her own and do not represent those of Silver Golub & Teitell.
Roy J. Nirschel is president of Roger Williams University in Bristol, R.I. He grew up in Stamford and his father was a firefighter on the West Side. He received his bachelor's degree from Southern Connecticut State University and went on to receive a master's degree in public administration and a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Miami. He has traveled around the world, visiting 35 countries, but said, "I can’t credit on the road with getting me on the road."
