No One Heard Her Scream, by Jordan Dane

I should know better. Or maybe not. I found this book on the Publisher's Weekly notable books list for 2008. It was listed under "mass market". Mass market paperbacks do not have to be bad, I can certainly attest. In this case, though, I should have looked more closely before ordering the book from a fellow paperbackswap member.

I did not realize it was in the category of "romantic suspense", a slight improvement over straight "romantic". It's a category I don't particularly like but that I occasionally read, mainly because somebody gave me the book.

The two main characters are Rebecca ("Becca", of course) and Diego, both thirty-something or below, both coping with issues of trust, both strong and highly attractive blah blah blah...in other words, the usual characters in romantic suspense novels.

Becca is a detective in the San Antonio police department, while Diego's position is a bit more shady, man on the inside of a powerful empire led by a wealthy fifty-something man with unsavory predilections.

Becca is still trying to cope with the disappearance and apparent murder of her younger, teenage sister when she takes on an arson case that results in the discovery of a body, dead seven years. The body is of another young woman who disappeared, and the two cases appear to be connected.

From here we get romance, danger, really bad people with no redeeming qualities (not for Jordan Dane a complex antagonist), and fairly sketchy policework. Dane knows some things about police and fire procedure but not enough. Ask me about the blood spatter in the hotel room where Becca's sister was held...no, don't ask because I'm likely to forget this book within a few days.

I recommend this book to people waiting in line, people stuck on airplanes, people trying to get through the time. Or LifeTime movie producers.

The Atheist's Way - advance notice

A plug:

There is a new book on atheism that looks excellent (I have read some of it). The book is called The Atheist’s Way: Living Well Without Gods and it’s written by Eric Maisel, known for his many books in the creativity field. I have read a couple of his other books and find his approach refreshing and straightforward.

David Mills, author of Atheist Universe, endorsed The Atheist’s Way this way: “I find Maisel's writings more witty than Hitchens, more polished and articulate than Harris, and more informative and entertaining than Dawkins. A 5-star read from cover to cover!” John Allen Paulos, author of Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don’t Add Up, wrote: “How do you bravely face the world as it is and create meaning for yourself without the crutch of a divine benefactor? The Atheist’s Way is a wonderful resource for your quest.” The Atheist’s Way has gotten many more endorsements like these and I'll be reading it myself soon.

Here is the link to the book on Amazon.

Fine Just The Way It Is, by Annie Proulx

I listened to these stories in my car, on my CD player. I think the impression a book has can vary significantly depending on how it is "read", and in this case the audio version may not have been my best choice.

Fine Just the Way It Is is a set of short stories, specifically Wyoming Stories, as its subtitle says. The stories take place in the frontier days, in the present time, and in between. They vary in specific location, in the length of the tale and in the characters. But they are all about Wyoming, as if no matter who the human character is he or she cannot shake the indelible control of Wyoming on its soul. Oh, and I don't use that term "soul" lightly. Three of the stories feature the devil him- or herself.

It's possible that the actors on Selected Shorts have spoiled me for the usual professional readers of audio books. I love to listen to Selected Shorts on public radio, to how these veteran actors read fascinating stories, bringing every one to life. During one visit to New York City I could hardly contain my excitement the night I made my way to Symphony Space to watch the actors live, and I know I would go there regularly if I lived in Manhattan.

The readers of audio books are good readers, highly qualified, yet often for me there is no good fit between them and the material - or perhaps I am simply prejudiced. I found it difficult in the present case to get comfortable with the accent and style of speaking of Will Patton. Patton was chosen, I am sure, because these stories take place in Wyoming, and he has a decidedly western accent. Beyond the accent, he places emphasis where it might be natural for a westerner. He immerses himself into these lives and it shows and yet my prejudice, from wherever it comes, against that type voice, made it difficult at all times to enjoy the stories.

Nevertheless some of these stories stood out for me. They nearly stopped me in my tracks. There is a story here of a sagebrush that takes the place, for one woman, of a child, after she has lost so many of her own human children. The sage is of such a shape that it reaches its "arms" to the sky and it is so well treated that it reaches an astonishing size. It becomes a legend in its territory. It even becomes the subject of mysterious disappearances.

Another story, near the end, is of a man and woman who get into a fight, escalating until neither can back down. The man leaves, the woman heads out the next day for a long hike, one she had intended to do with the man. She hikes past a sign that says "trail closed" and continues on, knowing she is likely to be on her own the entire way, yet keeping in mind that her former lover might see the signs and come after her. When she makes a mistake and gets caught in some rocks we get to know how each day, each hour, each minute feels for her. And how her mind goes back to that fight.

There are several long stories here, each of which I wanted to be a book in itself. The first one left me long before I was ready to go. In fact, when I realized I was listening to a batch of short stories and not one long one I initially felt cheated, because I wanted so much for that first one to continue. Would I have the same impression if I simply came to the last paragraph of a printed page? I am not sure. Perhaps in some ways audio does have an advantage (in addition to being able to occupy my mind while I travel).

These are earthy, real, unwincing stories of the west, spanning several generations. People live and die and have hard lives and we are treated to details you almost had to be there to know. Better than any history book, this set brings the west, the real west, truly alive. The details are inscribed in the faces we imagine, in the actions the characters take, in the sense of relentless fate that seems to weigh everything down. Overall, the stories feel uncomfortably real while at the same time are frequently relieved by what may be called a kind of Wyoming humor.

Redemption, by Nathan J. Winograd

The primary message of this book is that animal shelters and humane organizations in the U.S. have lost their way. They have become killers of animals. The author takes an approach to the killing that I had never considered, that the shelters themselves are responsible for the killing, not the general public.

Winograd indicts the leaders of several major animal protection societies, including those that have never maintained shelters of their own, because these societies set standards and make pronouncements that support the killing. The reasons these leaders have not embraced “no-kill” are varied but do not stand up to scrutiny. Over the years leaders of shelters and humane organizations have resisted change to the status quo to protect the profits of veterinarians and breeders, because they don’t want to accept responsibility for their previous wrongheadedness, because they “have always done it this way”, because they simply don’t believe true no-kill is possible. Along the way they have forgotten why they were formed - for the protection of animals.

Early in the book he notes that the head of the SPCA in San Mateo, CA went public with the killing of animals. She chose to show the killing on television. To many, including the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) this was a courageous act. I happen to agree with this position in one respect: I believe that whenever our society condones the killing of people or other animals such killing should be in our face. We should know about it, no mistake. When such acts are hidden from the public people can forget it happens and convince themselves they have nothing to do with it. A friend of mine, for example, tells herself that the meat she eats comes from cows who died of old age. Such fabrications may make people feel better but they certainly do not advance any animal cause.

So I believe when animal shelters kill they should do so openly so that we can see our failure. I have been persuaded, however, by Winograd, that the failure is not ours alone. Winograd's objection to the publicized killings is that it appeared to condone the killing, to suggest that it is inevitable, and that the citizens, not the shelter, are ultimately responsible.

I honestly believe that the intent of the shelter leaders who performed these executions live was to raise awareness, in the hope that the actions would bring about behavioral change in the public. The error in their ways was in ignoring the part the shelters themselves play. Blaming us instead. By doing so they not only attacked the very people who would be their most likely supporters, financially and otherwise, but they managed to give some of us a sense of guilt that it is impossible to overcome alone. I have lived for years with the sense that I have not done enough to save the animals in shelters, yet I have believed that only a change in attitude by the public could possibly make a difference. I did not see a way that I could bring about that change, except on an individual level, and that never seems to be enough.

Winograd says that the shelters have been blaming the citizens for what they consider to be the overpopulation of companion animals and what they consider the necessary killing of many healthy animals while in fact the shelters themselves deserve the blame. My personal position is that the killing is a shared responsibility. However, the examples of a few committed shelters make it clear that shelters can end the killing without needing to rely on some vague time in the future when "the public" becomes "more responsible". Shelters can end it right now. Even in parts of the country where the public is supposedly too ignorant or poor to get their animals neutered or to provide veterinary care to them.

The further I got into the book the more I came around to Winograd's position. And the more I came to the sickening conclusion that the organizations that are supposed to be protecting our animals are not only needlessly killing them, but are at the same time attacking those shelters that have indeed achieved a real no-kill status. It is this resistance that forms the core of the message, because the means are available to make this a no-kill country. Now. Virtually overnight.

Paramount to understanding why this can be done is knowing that in fact that pet overpopulation is a myth. This simple fact, illustrated in this book, knocks all other arguments on their heads.

Winograd's method, which he calls the No-Kill Equation, includes several actions that any shelter can take:

* Neuter all animals that enter the shelter except those that are incurably and painfully ill and must be euthanized for that reason.
* Support and even operate Trap-Neuter-Release programs for feral cats in the community.
* Use volunteers to socialize and foster animals to make them more readily adoptable and to create additional space in the shelter.
* Provide medical care and isolation as needed for sick animals
* Use the media to bring the animals and their needs to the public
* Expand shelter hours and offer off-site adoptions to meet the needs of the public
* Allow animal protection groups to take healthy animals for adoption at their shelters or off-site adoptions
* Get rid of employees who can’t get with the program and bring in those who can.

Winograd currently accepts the killing of dogs that are considered irretrievably vicious, because to date there are not enough sanctuaries for these dogs. I have difficulty with this position because these are innocent dogs who deserve to live. They may not be suitable companion animals but there are not a lot of them (by his own calculations) and I suspect there are enough sanctuaries who can accommodate them. Best Friends Animal Sanctuary always finds a way to keep animals alive, including those with behavior problems. This one issue is a type of quibble, though, in the face of the astonishing success Winograd outlines here.

In the cases Winograd outlines in this book, media attention on the activities of true no-kill shelters (those that are not selective in the animals they take in) quickly brought in the money needed to undertake all of the above actions, and eventually the aggressive actions reduced the number of animals brought into the shelters. It's a win-win all around. But it only works, Winograd reminds us again and again, if the shelter is absolutely committed. His three-step program:

* Stop the killing
* Stop the killing
* Stop the killing

Unless shelter directors and staff are fully committed to stopping the killing it will go on. It is unfortunate that at this time it takes special directors to achieve no-kill status, but even this situation can and likely will change. Winograd sees a change in the public perception of animal shelters based on greater visibility, and accordingly the public will no longer accept the standard operating procedures that are so common today.

I don't feel as hopeless now. I know what tools can be used at the shelters and I know I can demand that these tools be used.

Every shelter should have this book. Every governing board that regulates these shelters should read this book. And every humane society leadership should read this book. And honestly pay attention to it.

book rating: 10 out of 10

The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak

The story, of Liesel, a young German girl during world war II, is told by Death. And Death has an odd way of speaking. It’s a combination of sly, often grim, humor in the storytelling, and interjections of bold-face explanations, sometimes translations of words, sometimes descriptions of a character’s thinking process. For example,

*** HE SURVIVED LIKE THIS ***
He didn’t go into battle that day

Often the inserts are simply definitions. Emphasizing them in this way draws attention:

***A NECESSARY EXPLANATION ***
LSE
Luftwaffe Sondereinbeit
Air Raid Special Unit

The language is often in the passive voice, as

When the coughing stopped, there was nothing but the nothingness of life moving on with a shuffle, or a near-silent twitch. A suddenness found its way onto his lips then,which were a corroded brown color and peeling, like old paint. In desperate need of redoing.

The story is also told, in part, with staccato, telegraph-like bursts. As:

“Mixed candy again?” She schmunzeled, to which they nodded. The money splashed the counter and Frau Diller’s smile fell slightly ajar.

“Yes, Frau Diller,” they said in unison. “Mixed candy, please.”

The framed Fuhrer looked proud of them.

Triumph before the storm.

“Figurative language,” they call it. Initially I found the style so irritating that I wasn’t sure I’d get through it. It felt like I was being bludgeoned with fact after fact, metaphor after metaphor. But I thought there may be gold here somewhere so I kept on and found that I was better able to ignore the style as I moved through it.

I also notice that the book is categorized as “young adult”, which initially surprised me, but which may help explain why I found its constant obvious explanations annoying. Perhaps they are not so annoying to younger adults? Or people who think like younger adults?

The story of Liesel, a nine-year-old girl when she is thrown into a foster home, is a story of words. From her first book theft to her efforts to read to story-reading in an air raid shelter to the spreading of words in her own hand, she is acutely aware of the power of words. More than once the story slips into a comparison of her use of words with that of Hitler, who used them as weapons to kill. Her theft of the written word is a metaphor, as I see it, for her theft of power from the more common story told among Germans to themselves.

To me, the value in this story is the insight it offers into a poor German neighborhood during World War II. While non-Jewish Germans obviously did not suffer the same way Jews did, the truly poor were usually the first to be forced into service and to accept sacrifices not required of wealthier Germans. They were also the least powerful, essentially unable to effect any change in the political climate. The story brings home that simplistic notions of what went on in Germany during that war need to be revised.

The Cloud of Unknowing, by Thomas H. Cook

The Cloud of Unknowing was a book written in the 14th century, a "spiritual guide". It urges a young monk not to search for knowledge about God but to know God through love (I simplify, of course). There is nothing in this book, the one by Thomas Cook, that makes direct reference to the earlier work, except the way of knowing, of getting through that cloud, getting there through love.

We begin in the office of Detective Petrie. We begin with confusion: one death, two, three, four? And a promise to tell the whole story. This chapter is written in the second person, as if an unseen person is telling your story for you. The "you" in this case is David Sears.

The office conversation - or interrogation if you want to call it that - is intertwined with the story told in the first person by David Sears. The short detective chapters simply keep us in place, bring us back to the present.

Through this means Cook leads us gradually into the family of David, his sister Diana, and their father. He takes us through the drowning death of Diana's son Nathan, a child who was full of fear and who seemed to have inherited some kind of mental illness. The path then leads back to David's father, whose own struggle with what was diagnosed as "paranoid schizophrenia" escalated in later years.

I use the quotation marks only because my own knowledge of this condition tells me that there are no physical tests for it and there is, further, no proof of genetic descendency, however long such assumptions persist. Nevertheless, we have to assume in this book that, genetic or not, this family is somehow afflicted. That affliction may come as much from the cruel emotional cuts inflicted by David's father as by any kind of real illness.

We learn that Diana is not "getting over" her son's death. More, we learn that she is suspicious of the means of his death, yet her avenues of investigation defy normal categories. Instead of looking for physical or even circumstantial evidence, she looks backward thousands of years to ancient deaths, ancient myths, as well as more current stories. She tries to draw in her brother, his daughter, others.

Yet oddly nothing is every really overt. Nowhere do we have the direct conversation where people learn from each other. More, we see accusations and assumptions and an unwillingness to move in different directions. And thus I found myself at times frustrated, wondering why David does not consider other options, why Diana is not more specific. Yet isn't it often true that family members do not hear each other?

In the end we do have deaths, each one questionable - what made it happen? We don't have all the answers. We do have siblings torn by deaths but with a true loyalty to each other that survives the worst kinds of visions. Certainly this is less about the underlying mystery than it is about David and Diana and the bonds of childhood.

Kept, by D. J. Taylor

First, what this book is not:

* A romantic novel. The cover and name might suggest that it is one of those dark romantic novels involving a maiden subject to the whims of her master. Not so. Even though there is a young woman locked up.

* A journey into an England that never was. Mr. Taylor takes great pains to create an England that really was, in fact, although the main characters did not exist. He relies on a great deal of research and even includes excerpts from actual journals from the time.

And what it is:

It's fundamentally the story of a woman who, after losing a baby in childbirth, appears to become depressed and unhinged. After her husband's sudden death she is moved to the house of a friend of her husband's where she is, in fact, "kept". Her removal is for some reason not advertised so family members and friends do not know where she is. A few of them choose to find out and to find out why it is a secret.

This story, though, is blended with the stories of others, intertwined and woven with these others. We get to meet each character in turn and to watch how he or she progresses and eventually how each is connected to the widow Isabel Ireland. Most particularly we are presented with the unsavory character of Mr. Pardew. We occasionally see the world from his point of view; more often we see him go about his business as he might have been seen by some fictitious observer ("An onlooker...would perhaps have noted..."), a literary device frequently used in Victorian writing.

The novel is, in fact, written in much the style of England in the 1800s, but references and comparisons often have an ironic or humorous bent that likely would not have been seen in such literary works.

Mr. Pardew becomes a major character by way of his indulgences in various nefarious schemes that bring him money and others grief. He even goes so far as to develop a plan to rob a great deal of money from a train - a robbery that did, in fact, take place and with similar details (The Great Train Robbery of 1855).

Richly peopled with interesting characters, this novel is one to be savored, one that can be enjoyed bit by bit over several days. Better this way, I think, than read quickly in one long sitting.