This is True®
by Randy Cassingham

Randy Cassingham's Honorary Unsubscribe Recognizes the Unknown, the Forgotten and the Obscure People who Had an Impact on Our Lives

Jack Lord

Lord played "Steve McGarrett" of Hawaii Five-O, which ran on CBS from 1968 to 1980. Lord also played parts in various films, but his "Book-'em, Danno" Five-O tagline made him a star. Jack Lord died of congestive heart failure in Hawaii on January 21 at 77.

From This is True for 18 January 1998

Suggestions for further reading:

The Emperor of Ocean Park
By: Stephen L. Carter
List Price: $14.00
Amazon Price: $11.20
Editorial Review:
A complex, smart mystery filled with intrigue, drama, and more than a little danger awaits in Stephen L. Carter's engaging debut novel, The Emperor of Ocean Park. After the funeral of his powerful father (a federal judge whose nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court became a public scandal), Talcott Garland, an African American law professor at an Ivy League university, is left to unravel the meaning of a cryptic note and carry out "the arrangements" his father left behind. Armed with fortitude and familial devotion--though paranoid of his wife's fidelity--Talcott soon finds himself in an investigation that entangles him with a number of questionable Washington, D.C., denizens, including attorneys and government officials, law professors, the FBI, shady underworld figures, chess masters, and friends and family. All the while Talcott tries not to hurt his attorney wife's chance for a judicial nomination--and their fragile marriage--but the closer he comes to unraveling his father's dark secrets, the more dangerous things become.

Clocking in at over 650 pages, the novel could easily have been streamlined; many of Talcott's thoughts are unnecessarily repeated. But Carter's storytelling skills are adept: tension builds, surprises are genuine, clues are not handed out freely. The prose, while somewhat meandering, can be crisp and insightful, as demonstrated in Carter's description of the misguided paths of young attorneys who sacrifice all on the altar of career... at last arriving... at their cherished career goals, partnerships, professorships, judgeships, whatever kind of ships they dream of sailing, and then looking around at the angry, empty waters and realizing that they have arrived with nothing, absolutely nothing, and wondering what to do with the rest of their wretched lives. --Michael Ferch In his triumphant fictional debut, Stephen Carter combines a large-scale, riveting novel of suspense with the saga of a unique family. The Emperor of Ocean Park is set in two privileged worlds: the upper crust African American society of the Eastern seabord—families who summer at Martha’s Vineyard—and the inner circle of an Ivy League law school.

Talcott Garland is a successful law professor, devoted father, and husband of a beautiful and ambitious woman, whose future desires may threaten the family he holds so dear. When Talcott’s father, Judge Oliver Garland, a disgraced former Supreme Court nominee, is found dead under suspicioius circumstances, Talcott wonders if he may have been murdered. Guided by the elements of a mysterious puzzle that his father left, Talcott must risk his marriage, his career and even his life in his quest for justice. Superbly written and filled with memorable characters, The Emperor of Ocean Park is both a stunning literary achievement and a grand literary entertainment.An extraordinary fiction debut: a large, stirring novel of suspense that is, at the same time, a work of brilliantly astute social observation. The Emperor of Ocean Park is set in two privileged worlds: the upper crust African American society of the eastern seaboard -- old families who summer on Martha's Vineyard -- and the inner circle of an Ivy League law school. It tells the story of a complex family with a single, seductive link to the shadowlands of crime.

The Emperor of the title, Judge Oliver Garland, has just died, suddenly. A brilliant legal mind, conservative and famously controversial, Judge Garland made more enemies than friends. Many years before, he'd earned a judge's highest prize: a Supreme Court nomination. But in a scene of bitter humiliation, televised across the country, his nomination collapsed in scandal. The humbling defeat became a private agony, one from which he never recovered.

But now the Judge's death raises even more questions -- and it seems to be leading to a second, even more terrible scandal. Could Oliver Garland have been murdered? He has left a strange message for his son Talcott, a professor of law at a great university, entrusting him with "the arrangements" -- a mysterious puzzle that only Tal can unlock, and only by unearthing the ambiguities of his father's past. When another man is found dead, and then another, Talcott -- wry, straight-arrow, almost too self-aware to be a man of action -- must risk his career, his marriage, and even his life, following the clues his father left him.

Intricate, superbly written, often scathingly funny, The Emperor of Ocean Park is a triumphant work of fiction, packed with character and incident -- a brilliantly crafted tapestry of ambition, family secrets, murder, integrity tested, and justice gone terribly wrong.


"Among the most remarkable fiction debuts in recent years... [The Emperor of Ocean Park] is full of musing about God, family, chess, the politics of Supreme Court appointments, loyalty, unhappy marriage, the media, depression, race, and academic infighting... [Carter] is a scholar and a lawyerly commentator who has penned a rip-roaring entertainment."
   BOSTON GLOBE

"The year's hottest summer read and a surefire bestseller... Carter does for members of the contemporary black upper-class what Henry James did for Washington Square society, taking us into their drawing rooms and laying their motives bare... However The Emperor of Ocean Park is categorized, beach reading doesn't get any better than this."
   TIME OUT NEW YORK

"The Emperor of Ocean Park is a delightful, sprawling, gracefully written, imaginative work, with sharply delineated characters who dwell in a fully realized narrative world... Carter deserves comparison with such successful practitioners of the crime novel as Scott Turow."
   THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

"The Emperor of Ocean Park is an intricately plotted work... a novel that is both thriller and commentary on American racial relations."
   DAN CRYER, NEWSDAY

"[A] complex literary thriller. Carter deftly weaves together several strands, from the relationships of father and sons and husbands and wives to the politics of the Nixon and Reagan eras."
   BOOKPAGE

"The Emperor of Ocean Park is no ordinary fiction debut...Carter has produced a thoroughly original mystery-thriller... that also explores the brave terrains of race, family, power, paranoia, and the law... If I may join the hype, <


 
CSI: Nevada Rose (CSI: Crime Scene Investigation)
By: Jerome Preisler
List Price: $7.99
Amazon Price: $7.99
Editorial Review:
"Nevada Rose" Demille was one of the most beautiful and desired sports groupies in Las Vegas, a fixture at the trendiest casinos and clubs on the Strip. But the endless party came to a tragic end the morning her nude body was found bound and gagged in her home. As crime scene investigators Catherine Willows and Warrick Brown dig deeper, all roads (and a growing media circus) lead to Mark Baker -- a.k.a. "The Fireball" -- a hard-throwing, Cooperstown-bound major-league pitcher and fancier of gorgeous women who recently conducted a very public affair with one "Nevada Rose" Demille....

Meanwhile, miles away on the grounds of a world-class championship golf course, Gil Grissom is probing the macabre discovery of a John Doe -- an intense investigation that will unearth a bitter sibling rivalry twisted by jealousy and distrust over a "Nevada Rose" of a very different nature....


 
The Master and Margarita (Penguin Classics)
By: Mikhail Bulgakov
List Price: $14.00
Amazon Price: $11.20
Editorial Review:
Surely no stranger work exists in the annals of protest literature than The Master and Margarita. Written during the Soviet crackdown of the 1930s, when Mikhail Bulgakov's works were effectively banned, it wraps its anti-Stalinist message in a complex allegory of good and evil. Or would that be the other way around? The book's chief character is Satan, who appears in the guise of a foreigner and self-proclaimed black magician named Woland. Accompanied by a talking black tomcat and a "translator" wearing a jockey's cap and cracked pince-nez, Woland wreaks havoc throughout literary Moscow. First he predicts that the head of noted editor Berlioz will be cut off; when it is, he appropriates Berlioz's apartment. (A puzzled relative receives the following telegram: "Have just been run over by streetcar at Patriarch's Ponds funeral Friday three afternoon come Berlioz.") Woland and his minions transport one bureaucrat to Yalta, make another one disappear entirely except for his suit, and frighten several others so badly that they end up in a psychiatric hospital. In fact, it seems half of Moscow shows up in the bin, demanding to be placed in a locked cell for protection.

Meanwhile, a few doors down in the hospital lives the true object of Woland's visit: the author of an unpublished novel about Pontius Pilate. This Master--as he calls himself--has been driven mad by rejection, broken not only by editors' harsh criticism of his novel but, Bulgakov suggests, by political persecution as well. Yet Pilate's story becomes a kind of parallel narrative, appearing in different forms throughout Bulgakov's novel: as a manuscript read by the Master's indefatigable love, Margarita, as a scene dreamed by the poet--and fellow lunatic--Ivan Homeless, and even as a story told by Woland himself. Since we see this narrative from so many different points of view, who is truly its author? Given that the Master's novel and this one end the same way, are they in fact the same book? These are only a few of the many questions Bulgakov provokes, in a novel that reads like a set of infinitely nested Russian dolls: inside one narrative there is another, and then another, and yet another. His devil is not only entertaining, he is necessary: "What would your good be doing if there were no evil, and what would the earth look like if shadows disappeared from it?"

Unsurprisingly--in view of its frequent, scarcely disguised references to interrogation and terror--Bulgakov's masterwork was not published until 1967, almost three decades after his death. Yet one wonders if the world was really ready for this book in the late 1930s, if, indeed, we are ready for it now. Shocking, touching, and scathingly funny, it is a novel like no other. Woland may reattach heads or produce 10-ruble notes from the air, but Bulgakov proves the true magician here. The Master and Margarita is a different book each time it is opened. --Mary ParkMikhail Bulgakov's devastating satire of Soviet life was written during the darkest period of Stalin's regime. Combining two distinct yet interwoven parts-one set in ancient Jerusalem, one in contemporary Moscow-the novel veers from moods of wild theatricality with violent storms, vampire attacks, and a Satanic ball; to such somber scenes as the meeting of Pilate and Yeshua, and the murder of Judas in the moonlit garden of Gethsemane; to the substanceless, circus-like reality of Moscow. Its central characters, Woland (Satan) and his retinue-including the vodka-drinking, black cat, Behemoth; the poet, Ivan Homeless; Pontius Pilate; and a writer known only as The Master, and his passionate companion, Margarita-exist in a world that blends fantasy and chilling realism, an artful collage of grostesqueries, dark comedy, and timeless ethical questions.

Although completed in 1940, The Master and Margarita was not published in Moscow until 1966, when the first part appeared in the magazine Moskva. It was an immediate and enduring success: Audiences responded with great enthusiasm to its expression of artistic and spiritual freedom. This new translation has been created from the complete and unabridged Russian texts.


 
CSI: New York: Four Walls (CSI: New York)
By: Keith R. A. DeCandido
List Price: $7.99
Amazon Price: $7.99
Editorial Review:
Detectives Mac Taylor, Danny Messer, Sheldon Hawkes, and Don Flack are called in to investigate a double homicide at a medium-security facility on Staten Island. Racial tensions turned the prison into a pressure cooker that finally boiled over in an all-too-lethal fashion, leaving two inmates dead. One of the killings is an open-and-shut case, complete with eyewitnesses; but the other, the murder of a former cop, defies easy answers. Initial investigation of the crime scene points to one cause of death, but the CSI team's scientific methods uncover something completely different -- and wholly unexpected....

On the other edge of the city, Stella Bonasera and Lindsay Monroe look into the murder of a young woman who worked at a popular Italian bakery in the Bronx. They find the perfect suspect almost immediately: a frequent customer who spent a lot of time flirting with the victim and who previously had been arrested for a violent crime. Yet Stella can't help but think that their perfect suspect is just a little too perfect for such a messy murder....

Nothing is as it seems as New York City's dedicated crime scene investigators piece together the clues and examine the evidence to discover the true killers in their midst.


 
Never Suck A Dead Man's Hand: Curious Adventures of a CSI
By: Dana Kollmann
List Price: $14.95
Amazon Price: $10.17
Editorial Review:
"Informative, witty...Kollmann delivers terse commentary and gory detail while puncturing common misconceptions about forensics." --Booklist

Step past the flashing lights into the true scene of the crime with this frank, unflinching, and unforgettable account of life as a crime scene investigator. Whether explaining rigor mortis or the art of fingerprinting a stiff corpse on the side of the road, Dana Kollmann details her true, unvarnished experiences as a CSI for the Baltimore County Police Department.

"Riveting." --M. William Phelps, author of Murder in the Heartland

Unlike the popular crime dramas proliferating on today's television networks, these forensic tales forgo glitz for grit to show what really goes on. Kollmann recounts stories that the cops and the CSI's usually leave in the field, bringing the sights, smells, and sounds of a crime scene alive as never before.

"Raw and real." --Connie Fletcher, author of Every Contact Leaves a Trace

Unveiling the process and science of crime scene investigation in all its can't-tear-your-eyes-away fascination, Never Suck a Dead Man's Hand takes you into the strange world behind the yellow tape, offering a truly eye-opening perspective on the day-to-day life of a CSI.

"Gritty, witty, and heartfelt ... a must-read." --Aphrodite Jones, New York Times bestselling author of A Perfect Husband


 
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