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Book Reviews

Inferno, for those who haven’t read it, is a revisiting of Dante’s playground, only in this case it’s an untimely dead mid-grade SF writer dealing disbelievingly with a somewhat updated Hell, led by a mysterious figure who promises the way out can be found at the bottom. Great satire, fun SF, and some decent philosophy, too.

The “Authors’ Preferred Edition” introduces a bit more text — mostly explanations and expansions on the philosophical musings, plus an Afterword. I wouldn’t say that it’s a vast improvement over the original, but it feels a bit more solid, less of a “let’s hurry on to the next cool idea” sort of setup. Buy it if you’re a fan, or if you’ve never read it before. (The sequel, Escape from Hell, was just released this spring.)


The latest Atticus Kodiak novel, Patriot Acts brings the former bodyguard deeper into the world of covert operations and assassination-for-hire. I’ve long regretted that direction, but Rucka handles it beautifully, spanning multiple continents, realistic blocks of time, and telling a very human story of bloodshed, tenderness, betrayal, loyalty, conspiracies, and the “spy stuff” that he so excels in. 

The tone continues to remind me of Parker’s Spenser novels, at their peak — complex, philosophical, bloody, personal, dealing with folks who are perhaps unrealistically competent, but who take their bloody lumps in showing it. 

Not the last Kodiak novel, no matter how much the protagonist might desire or deserve it.


Poltergeist is the second of Kat Richardson’s Greywalker novels, and a reasonable improvement on them. She continues to avoid making ghost-seeing Harper too uber as a PI or as a psychic, and the problems she face are certainly dire but world-shattering. The story is fast-paced, but with plenty of loops and whorls. Harper’s personal life doesn’t get as much attention as before, but there’s a broad supporting cast that takes up the slack.

Richardson also does a fine job of grounding her novel in its setting, her own Seattle. I now kind of want to go there and share the scene. Failing that, the third volume is queued up to be read next.


For everyone who bitched last election about not knowing “who Barack Obama is,” the answer was as close as his memoir, written in 1995 when he became the first black man elected president of the Harvard Law Review, before his rise into politics (the audiobook was recorded — with an additional preface, while he was Senator; I got a copy of the unabridged version, which also includes his 2004 DNC keynote speech).

The book tells of his childhood in Hawaii and Indonesia, his family’s history, his time at Occidental and Columbia College, his oft-maligned “community organizing” time, and his eventual extended trip back to Kenya to visit his father’s kin.

Along the way, Obama’s search for meaning, for purpose, for a solid concept of family, and for what his place, as a man of both black and white heritage, was in the world. It’s all gripping in its relative simplicity, and left me feeling I better understood the man who came to be president.

Obama is, not surprising, an excellent narrator. He certainly has another job to fall back on if his present one doesn’t pan out. Recommended reading (or, in Obama’s own stirring voice, listening).

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