”The tension between the armchair and adventure, between security and possibility, lies at the heart of Verne, as of his age--an age of scientific, te”The tension between the armchair and adventure, between security and possibility, lies at the heart of Verne, as of his age--an age of scientific, technical , industrial, colonial expansion, but also of questioning and reverie...The template of Verne’s great novels [is] a fusing of myth and the real; a new, modern, awestruck apprehension of the manmade and the natural; a dream--yet sometimes nightmare--of the possibilities of mankind, technology and the sublime.” ---From the introduction by Tim Farrant
As I was reading Journey to the Center of the Earth, I kept thinking to myself about those Victorian Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans, and Europeans of all stripes, who were feeling the thrill of adventure as they sat in their favorite reading chairs and cracked open the latest scientific thriller from Jules Verne. This particular book was first published in 1864. The Civil War in America was still raging to its bloody conclusion, and I’m sure there were many Americans of means who couldn’t wait to escape to wherever Jules Verne was willing to take them.
The Victorian age was an age of discovery. Men were tramping to the deepest heart of Africa, to the highest peaks in Tibet, and courting death in the Sahara Desert, all in an attempt to be the first to discover something. Nothing, of course, existed until a white man laid eyes on it. These days, nothing has been seen unless one has taken a selfie with it. Believe me, the great Victorian explorers would have loved to travel with an iPhone X to faithfully record all of their feats of valor and chronicle the dark mysteries they unraveled.
No one better exemplifies the Victorian explorer than the radical geologist, Dr. Otto Lidenbrock, who suffers strongly from an incurable case of bibliomania. He has discovered a pamphlet, hidden within another wonderful literary acquisition, a runic text written by an Icelandic writer that proposes that the center of the earth is not a fiery ball of flame, but a hidden world of wonders. He proposes to his nephew that they leave for Iceland immediately and begin a descent into the extinct volcano Snaefell. Axel, a much more cautious person than his uncle, would much rather laze about in his uncle’s study, sucking on his hookah and contemplating exactly how he is going to win the permanent affections of his uncle’s beautiful, young ward, Gräuben.
Of course, if his uncle dashes off to Iceland and becomes incinerated in the fiery hells of the Earth, it will hardly endear himself to the young lady.
Axel soon finds himself reluctantly caught up in his uncle’s mad adventure. With the help of their Icelandic guide, they descend into what Axel feels will be certain death.
Jules Verne writes with verve: ”The rain is like a roaring cataract between us and the horizons to which we are madly rushing. But before it reaches us, the cloud curtain tears apart and reveals the boiling sea; and now the electricity, disengaged by the chemical action in the upper cloudations; networks of vivid lightnings; ceaseless detonations; masses of incandescent vapour; hailstones, like a fiery shower, rattling among our tools and firearms. The heaving waves look like craters full of interior fire, every crevice darting a little tongue of flame.”
What made Verne so popular with readers during the later part of the 19th century was his gift for blending known facts with his very plausible flights of fancy. He must have subscribed to every scientific journal available at the time, and any article could prove to be the basis for his next book. The plausibility is such a key element because the armchair traveler he was taking along with him must be able to see himself in the midst of the action. A grocer dreaming of a life beyond potatoes and tomatoes, too, could descend into the bowels of the earth and hopefully return with a tale worth telling.
Next book in this Everyman’s collection is Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, one of my all time favorite Verne stories. I will definitely be rereading that one.
‘The smell,’ she said. ‘I suppose we are indirectly responsible for that.’
Jerry grinned at her somewhat ”’I think I’d like to leave London for a bit.’
‘The smell,’ she said. ‘I suppose we are indirectly responsible for that.’
Jerry grinned at her somewhat admiringly. ‘Well, yes, I suppose you are.’
‘This was a gift-wrapped, throwaway age, Mr. Cornelius. Now the gift wrapping is off, it’s being thrown away.’
‘It’s certainly perishable.’ Jerry wrinkled his nose.
‘Oh you!’”
Jerry Cornelius is a Renaissance man of all that is hip and cool, baby. There isn’t a hipper cat in all the kingdom. He is so stylish, so ahead of his time and place that the trends he sets are outdated before anyone else can catch the vibe. He is gay, straight, bi, and everything in-between. If it is physically possible, he has done it. To try and define him by his sexuality is an impossibility because once you put a label on it, baby,...it gets stale.
Life isn’t just about looking good and feeling good. A person must stretch their mind, not just with drugs, but with science. Jerry gets high on science. He writes about it. He plucks the strings of the known universe and then chains together some chords that open up new vistas of understanding. Oh, he’s a musician, too. You can call him a rock star, but he is really something more cosmic. The minute you decide he is one thing, he has become something else.
Jerry assassinates people. He doesn’t just carry that needle gun as a menacing accessory. Jerry has a brother named Frank, brilliant and demented, who is trying to build a super computer to either take over the world or destroy the world. It probably depends on his mood at the apex moment. Think super villain. Jerry has a sister named Catherine, the love of his life. I mean to say looovvveee of his life. Is he immoral or just refusing to be defined by something as mundane as morality?
Once the rest of us put a label on it...Jerry has moved on.
He has a partner, an arch-villain type partner...friend or foe? We’ll call her Miss Brunner because we have to call her something. She is constantly hiring new assistants because they mysteriously disappear. She wants to create a superhuman by merging a male and a female, and who is better suited for androgyny than Jerry Cornelius? Keep your needle gun close, Jerry. Those aren’t rubber teeth glinting in her mouth.
It is frustrating to see the future so clearly while everyone else is sinking in quicksand. ”Jerry sighed and thought that the true aristocracy who would rule the seventies were out in force: the queers and the lesbians and the bisexuals, already half-aware of their great destiny which would be realised when the central ambivalence of sex would be totally recognized and terms male and female would become all but meaningless.”
By the end of the book, we are venturing into a post-apocalyptic age. London is sinking. Jerry has evolved into something quite different. The 1960s are over, and a new party needs to begin. By the time we arrive at the festivities...Jerry will already be through with the 1970s and be looking longingly at the next decade. If we don’t evolve quicker, Jerry is going to lose patience with us.
What a mind bending blast it is trying to keep Jerry’s warp signature on the radar.
Before you decide to start reading this book, you’ve got to relax, man. If you don’t relax, you’re going to get all twitchy and self-conscious. You’re going to start trying to cram this book into that box in your brain that you call the known universe. It ain’t going to fit, no matter how you fold it or crush it. Disengage the gears, and let your mind glide for a while. Strip away all of your inhibitions, and let your tongue taste the bitter fruit of the unknown.
If you are too square, let Jerry round off your edges.
If you are saying to yourself right now, I’m not going to read some old book from the 1960s, you need to understand that you can’t put a date on this book, man. It’s time hasn’t come yet.
I’m a little giddy that there are three more books in the series. Where will we go from here?
Needless to say, Michael Moorcock struggled to find a publisher for this book. He wrote it in 1965 and finally found a publisher for it in 1968. That edition was censored by the American publisher; the ghosts of the Puritans still haunt us today. The book was later published in Britain in 1969.
Take a trip, man, blast back, blast forward. It doesn't matter. Time is all relative.
”If there’s a consistency in his work, it can only be his distinctive style. His titles are, in reality, nothing but subtitles. The real title of each”If there’s a consistency in his work, it can only be his distinctive style. His titles are, in reality, nothing but subtitles. The real title of each and every one of his books is Melville, Melville, Melville, again Melville, always Melville. I express myself; I’m incapable of expressing any being other than myself. I’m not obliged to create what other people want me to create. I don’t get caught up in the law of supply and demand. I create what I am. What I am is a poet.”
The French writer Jean Giono, with the help of his friend Lucien Jacques, a close friend, a poet, and a painter, decided that Moby Dick must be translated into French and that they were the duo to do it. From 1936 to 1939, they devoted their lives to the translation, but Giono spent many years before that with a copy of Moby Dick being his constant companion.
”I took it with me regularly on my hikes across the hills. As soon as I entered those vast, wavelike but motionless solitudes, I’d sit down under a pine and lean against its trunk. All I needed was to pull out this book, which was already flapping in the wind, to sense the manifold life of the seas swell up below and all around me. Countless times I’ve felt the rigging hiss over my head, the earth heave under my feet like the deck of a whaler, and the trunk of the pine groan and sway against my back like a mast heavy with wind-filled sails.”
Giono began to write an introduction for Moby Dick, and as happens with writers from time to time, his muse took possession of his pen, and the next thing he knew, his small introduction had grown to the size of a substantial composition. Some would call it a literary essay, but it was certainly much more than that. It was a fanciful mixture of nonfiction, half truths, and outright fabrications. It was an ode from one writer to another.
Melville probably wouldn’t recognize much of himself from this essay, but it reflected the impressions of who the writer of these books must be from a reader’s perspective. It was impossible to separate Melville from his work. Every time I read a book by Melville, I saw him peeking at me from behind a capital M or lingering just behind my flickering eyes in the gutters between lines. I saw his naked footprints impressed in the white borders along the text. He was always there, maybe hoping for some of the praise he rarely received in his lifetime.
As a backdrop for his essay, Giono used a trip Melville took in 1849 to London to sell his latest book White Jacket to a British publisher. While there, he met the fictional Adelina White. ”He sees her eyes. They’re the color of tobacco, with green highlights.” He was struck dumb by her beauty. ”And as she was breathing in, perhaps (he thought wildly) her breast was touching me. He imagined her breast, warm, naked, sensitive, in the shadow of her corset. After that, there was no way in the world he could talk to her.” Wasn’t that just like a writer to imagine, in vivid detail, the pink flesh beneath those voluminous layers of clothes? His flushing face betraying his thoughts. His mind racing away from the images that he had created so that he could attempt to unravel his corkscrewed tongue and try to say something witty that would pull her attention away from his guilty eyes, his glistening forehead, and the blush that was threatening to turn him unnatural colors.
Let’s cock an ear in their direction and see if we can catch some of what they are saying.
”’The sound of those horns and trumpets,’ said Herman, ‘moved me deeply, I don’t know why.’
‘They were playing the opening bars of a Handel concerto.’
‘I’ve never listened to music,’ he said.
‘You have heard,’ she said, ‘the wind and the sea. Anyone who’s listened to the sounds of the elements has listened to music.’”
Clever Adelina. Who wouldn’t be enraptured with such a woman? A woman who had an understanding of a man’s world and saw the beauty nestled in the crevices of the brutality and the raw, muscular toiling. Man against Nature. Man against Man.
This was a strange essay, and there were certainly times when I lost the threads of the fanciful world that Giono was wanding to life. I couldn���t help smiling to myself, thinking of Melville reading this, shaking his head, and secretly wishing he had met this Adelina in London. Melville deserved to be mythologized, made larger than life, as many interesting people and fantastical creatures were in the vast collections of our collective memory. If you are a Melville fan and don’t mind being knocked about a bit as if you were on the deck of a ship weathering a squall, do give this a look through your spyglass. It is the edge of land, and beyond it lies the great expanse of Moby Dick.
May the white whale haunt your dreams, but only close enough to catch you in the glare from its murderous eye and not near enough to risk a flogging by the whip of its vengeful tail.
”He had to stagger backward, the lantern waving wildly. In its crazy orbits he saw an upturned face—brown and wizened—and a mouth whose lips and teeth”He had to stagger backward, the lantern waving wildly. In its crazy orbits he saw an upturned face—brown and wizened—and a mouth whose lips and teeth had been eroded by centuries of desert wind and sand. Bony hands clawed at the hem of his coat, and he had to back up again, just in time for the other creature to lurch out of the shadows and, arms outstretched, snatch at the light. Its eyes were open now, and the sundered stitches hung from its lips…”
When Bram Stoker sees a young woman hurl herself off a bridge into the turgent water below, he doesn’t hesitate to jump in after her. He hauls her brick laden body to the shore and has no idea that saving Lucinda Watts from drowning will have far reaching consequences in his life beyond wet clothes and the ensuing sniffle.
Lucinda recently lost her son and is dying from what is called a phosphorus jaw that was caused from working with dangerous chemicals in a matchstick factory. “She stuck a finger in her mouth and found the bad tooth wobbling in its socket. A painful jolt shot through her jaw, but she knew it would only get worse, and so she yanked on it. The tooth came away instantly, and she tossed it as far behind her as she could, spitting a wad of blood in the same direction.”For those who think that we don’t need unions and don’t need laws protecting workers, please do read about the working conditions of people before workers started demanding protection from greedy owners. You won’t have to go all the way back to Victorian England to find rampant exploitation and outright carelessness with the lives of workers to enhance already inflated profits.
The circumstances under which Lucinda’s son died are rather strange, and Stoker soon finds himself intrigued to find out what really happened to the boy. He joins forces with Mina Harcourt, who has recently returned from an archaeological exploration in the Carpathian Mountains with a mysterious Golden Box. Bartholomew and Winifred Thorne, the owners of the matchstick factory, are not only taking advantage of poor people for cheap labor but also seem to be taking something much more important from the weakest among them...their souls.
Bram and Mina find themselves battling zombie mummies, giant scarabs, an ancient demonic presence, and the viciousness of the Thornes, who feel they are entitled to take whatever they desire. Bram may have been a frustrated writer before these adventures began, but by the end he has more than enough paranormal experience to stir up his imaginations.
“Death be all that we can rightly depend on . . . Maybe it’s in that wind out over the sea that’s bringin’ with it loss and wreck, and sore distress, and sad hearts. Look! Look!” he cried suddenly. “There’s something in that wind and in the hoast beyont that sounds, and looks, and tastes, and smells like death. It’s in the air; I feel it comin’.” —From Dracula, published 1897
I recently read Something in the Blood by David J. Skal, which put some flesh on the bones of the mysterious Bram Stoker. Unfortunately, his wife burned a lot of correspondence, so there are gaps in what can be known about Stoker, which does allow a novelist room to fill in the gaps. Robert Masello mentions in the afterward that he had read Skal’s book as well, and most likely that book inspired this book. Normally, I don’t have any issue with real life people playing themselves in the land of fiction. I can even tolerate a novelist changing certain events to fit what they need. I felt that, towards the end of the novel, Masello went over a line with how he used Stoker as a fictional character. (view spoiler)[Masello places Stoker at the sinking of the Titanic, which is just simply too big of a historical event to put someone as famous as Stoker there when he couldn’t possibly be there. In fact, Stoker was too busy dying while the Titanic was sinking. Even my vivid imagination had a hard time setting aside what I knew to be completely impossible to enjoy the penultimate scene. (hide spoiler)]
Otherwise, I had a jolly good time racing about Victorian England with Bram Stoker and his feisty companion Mina Harcourt working to thwart the plans of the villainous Thorne siblings.
***Now you can watch the series inspired by the book on Starz.***
”In England they’re filled with curiosity and keep asking, ‘Why doesn’t he come?’ Be ***Now you can watch the series inspired by the book on Starz.***
”In England they’re filled with curiosity and keep asking, ‘Why doesn’t he come?’ Be calm. Be calm. He’s coming! He’s Coming!” --ADOLF HITLER, September 4th, 1940
Even though I know Hitler never made it to the shores of Britain, I still get a chill just reading those words. Winston Churchill eloquently told the runt corporal in Berlin to bring it on and, when you do come, know that every inch of British soil you take is going to be bathed in German blood.
In Len Deighton’s nightmare novel, the Nazis have won in 1941, before the Americans can decide to quit dithering and come help their brothers and sisters across the sea. It is a chilling thought because it came oh so close to being true.
If not for Churchill, Britain would have capitulated. So in an alternative universe where the Nazi’s do win, what do you suppose is one of the first orders of business once they have taken control of Britain?
They stand that erudite, inspiring man, grinning like a baboon, flashing the V sign for victory, up in front of a firing squad and fill him full of holes. Churchill would be simply too dangerous alive, and he would be damned proud he is too dangerous to be allowed to live.
King George is in the Tower, and fortunately, the Queen and the two princesses escaped to Australia.
It is a bloody mess.
Douglas Archer, Archer of the Yard, is an inspector at Scotland Yard, a near celebrity for the astuteness he has shown for solving cases. His boss is General Fritz Kellerman of the German army. His other boss is SS-Standartenfuhrer Dr. Oskar Huth, who is from Heinrich Himmler’s personal staff. His Detective Sergeant is Harry Woods, a surrogate father who is a member of the resistance. His secretary Sylvia, who he was having a torrid affair with, has disappeared. Archer soon discovers that she too is a member of the resistance.
To say that Archer is at the center of a crossfire is really an understatement. The German Army and the SS are not playing nice. Kellerman and Huth are tugging and pulling him in opposite directions, and both want his complete loyalty. They don’t really have anyone to fight so why not fight each other. The resistance insists that Archer needs to join them or be considered a German sympathizer. Archer believes the only way he can help his British people at all is to keep solving crimes and find a way to work with the Germans so he can keep doing his job.
Who will be the winning side in the war after the war?
”’It was easy to see the Nazis would win,’ said Huth. ‘The Nazis were the only ones with the brains and determination. And the only ones with the organisation. I like winners, Archer. Nazis are winners, Archer, don’t be tempted into working against them.’
Douglas nodded.”
When his son Douggie is threatened, he knows that his days being able to tightrope between the conquerors and the resistance is coming to an end.
A group of aristocracy have approached Archer with a plan to liberate the king. Meanwhile, he is investigating the murder of an antiques dealer who appears to be much, much more than what his identity papers would presume. A sultry American reporter, providing quite the distraction for Archer, is mixed up in the intrigue and the murder. Archer soon realizes that everything is connected, and that every side is insisting that it is impossible for him to remain neutral.
SS-Huth is always kind enough to explain to Archer what the penalties are for any infractions against the SS.
”’Would the shooting or the hanging come first?’ said Douglas.
‘We must always leave something for the jury to decide,’ said Huth.”
The shocking, unexpected conclusion adds one last layer of tantalizing betrayal.
The TV series is following the book very closely. Much of the dialogue is lifted right from the book. I watched two episodes before I realized that I’d never read the book, so I postponed watching the rest of the series until I could finish the book. The actor, Sam Riley, who plays Archer looks like he was born to wear the noir shades of blue, black, and gray. His raspy voice adds extra nuance to everything he says. Kate Bosworth plays the distracting American reporter and proves to be a beautiful distraction for all of us.
If you want more alternative history, pair this book with Fatherland by Robert Harris.
”There are dogs and kids, great books and great paintings and good music all over the White House,” he said. “It’s human again, the way it must have b”There are dogs and kids, great books and great paintings and good music all over the White House,” he said. “It’s human again, the way it must have been under Franklin Roosevelt.”
The power of John F. Kennedy didn’t just rest in his Hollywood good looks, or his youthful vibrancy or his beautiful wife or his inspiring speeches, but that he exuded this idea that anything seemed possible. Even something as crazy as landing an American on the moon. He was tougher than he looked. During the Cuban Missile Crisis he held firm and it was Nikita Khrushchev who blinked. The war against the spread of communism was heating up in Southeast Asia and Vietnam was becoming a country that more and more Americans could find on a map.
[image]
Ngo Dinh Diem, the brother with the camera ready suits.
Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu are having PR problems. The country was destabilizing under their rule. They had more enemies than friends. The war against the North was going poorly. Buddhist monks were lighting themselves on fire in the street in protest against their dictatorship. These were all plenty of problems to deal with, but when the United States started to see the brothers as an impediment in the war against communism it would prove to be the final straw. The Americans gave the go ahead to a group of generals to take control of the country. A coup d’etat happened on November 2nd, 1963 when Diem and Nhu are riddled with bullets. The country celebrates.
[image]
Ngo Dinh Nhu, he was the cool, badass brother.
Not Paul Christopher. He is a long serving CIA operative who doesn’t have to dig too deep into the data to know the United States changed the game. Assassinations breed assassinations and Christopher fears that hearing the first shoe drop will quickly be followed the thump of the second shoe. It is even bigger than he could have expected.
President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on November 22nd, 1963. It had been 62 years since the last presidential assassination. President William McKinley was shot and killed in 1901. There was a lot of problems with the trip to Texas. First of all Dallas was a known hostile city to the president. The secret service wanted him in a closed car, but Kennedy was trying to win over voters. He wasn’t going to do that by putting his light under a bushel. The crowds of people needed to see him and be swept away by the visual promise of Camelot.
In the emotion of the moment Paul Christopher discovers something about himself.
”You’re crying. Would you like to pray with me?”
“No, Father. I don’t believe.”
“It’s a frightful thing.”
Christopher thought the priest was talking about his rejection of faith. “For some,” he said.
“For all. President Kennedy was a great man. That death should come like that to him--he was like a young prince.”
“Yes, it’s a great shock.”
“You must have loved your President.”
“I love my country,” Christopher said.
“It’s the same thing, perhaps.”
“Ten minutes ago I wouldn’t have said so, Father. Now I think you’re right.”
I remember as a child when I was reading through the encyclopedia set that some shady salesman had sold my parents when I was still too young to read them, and had come across the entry about John F. Kennedy. I asked my mom why John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
She started crying. It was as raw for her in the mid-1970s as it was the day it happened.
The budding investigative reporter part of my developing personality sensed I was on to a big story. She was at Ma Bell working a switchboard when it happened. Anybody alive at the time can tell you where they were when it happened. “I don’t know why they killed him, but they took him from us.”
[image]
That look on LBJ’s face gives me a chill every time I see it. As if he is calculating something nefarious. Bundy said after working for both presidents that Kennedy was most worried about looking stupid. Johnson was most worried about being looked on as a coward.
We don’t know what Kennedy would have done if he had lived. McGeorge Bundy insists that Kennedy was not going to escalate the war in Vietnam. Some theorists think that may have been why he was killed. Big contractors knew that LBJ would be more amenable to getting things rocking and rolling in Vietnam. It could have been the mob after his brother Bobby had harassed them in court case after court case. It could have been Cubans who felt betrayed over the Bay of Pigs. It could have been the Russians for any number of reasons. The Vice President wasn’t particularly fond of Kennedy either. John had amassed a lot of enemies in a very short presidency.
Paul Christopher thinks it has to do with the Diem and Nhu assassinations. He starts to investigate, puts together a pretty compelling case and submits it to his superior. His superior submits it to the Johnson administration.
[image]
Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald. What did you know Lee?
Wait. What are you doing. This Kennedy Dallas mess had been wrapped up in a big bow after Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald. Christopher is told to desist, take a vacation, sort out his priorities.
He quits.
He keeps digging until he has all the pieces assembled.
One thing I like about Charles McCarry novels is that he always works into the storyline the books that Paul Christopher is reading.
”In the darkened lobby of a hotel, Christopher drank mineral water and read the two Simenons, dirty and swollen by the rainy climate, that he had bought from a street vendor.”
Lee Harvey Oswald may not have known anything, but damn I wish we’d had a chance to find out what he did know. The alarming number of people connected to the Kennedy Assassination who died shortly afterwards and under sometimes bizarre circumstances makes my conspiracy flag unfurl. The majority of Americans still believe that it was a conspiracy to kill John F. Kennedy.
Maybe we just don’t want to believe that a lone nut job can change the world.
I grabbed this off the shelf after watching the documentary style film Parkland which was excellent. I still read books about Kennedy and the assassination. I watch films. I watch clips. I read articles. I put it aside, but ever so often I unearth it like a dog’s favorite bone and gnaw on it some more. I guess I’m still the 8 year old boy wanting to know who made my momma cry....more
You may ask yourself how in the world did a wife beating, mental degenerate, and multiple country defecting (USA, RUSSIA and an attempt at Cuba) littlYou may ask yourself how in the world did a wife beating, mental degenerate, and multiple country defecting (USA, RUSSIA and an attempt at Cuba) little shit like this
It doesn't make any sense. It never has made any sense. Oswald just does not fit the profile for a guy that could pull off an assassination of this magnitude. He's a semi-educated hillbilly, but he's surprisingly crafty."
Kennedy provided a golden opportunity to every disgruntled crazy out there by deciding to ride in an open car through the hostile city of Dallas, Texas. His swoon-inspiring smile, his wavy hair, and his beautiful wife would not win him votes hidden behind bullet proof glass. A tough election was coming up and Texas was again critical for the Kennedy/Johnson ticket. The parade route was even published in the paper. When Lee Harvey Oswald noticed that the route passed right by the Texas School Book Depository, his place of work, he felt the universe was talking to him. A president riding in an open car sounds insane, but the reality is that a president had not been assassinated since McKinley in 1901. I could see how Kennedy, weighing the risk, would have felt reasonably safe. We all know how that turned out.
Jake Epping, an unassuming English teacher, is given an opportunity to go back in time. The time portal, located in the back room of a greasy spoon, will take him back to 1958. A year tantalizingly close to one of the most traumatic events in American history. Jake, now George Amberson, just had to lay low and wait for 1963 to roll around and use that time to come up with a plan to stop the before mentioned Lee Harvey Oswald. King explores the well traveled road of the potential devastating effects of changing the past to influence the future. What if Kennedy had not been killed? My liberal leanings would have me believe that the world would be better today. There are piles of documentation showing that Kennedy had no intention of escalating the war in Vietnam. As he proved with The Cuban Missile Crisis, he was a man that understood the bluff without committing the hardware. He was a man that had been to war, and I find it hard to believe he would have committed American kids to die in the jungles of Southeast Asia.
One of Stephen King's strengths is that despite the fact that he is wealthy man and one of the most successful writers in the world, he really understands common everyday people. I found myself developing a real fondness for Jake. I winced when he failed. I whooped when things went well. His romance with Sadie is spun out so nicely that the Kennedy assassination almost becomes a back ground plot.
King placed a Japanese proverb at the front of the book and also used it so wonderfully in the plot. Every time I read it I find a smile on my face.
"If there is love, smallpox scars are as pretty as dimples."
The number on the back page does say 849 pages, but King's writing style makes reading this book effortless. The margins are wide and the print large, so don't let the size of the book keep you from reading this charming book.
I'm off to turn my time travel machine, nearly finished, back into something a little less dangerous to the world like a cappuccino machine.
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