No comments about Recollections: Early Days in Gentry County.

No comments about The Grande Ronde Valley and Blue Mountains: Impressions and experiences of travelers and emigrants, the Oregon Trail, 1812-1880 (Beckham and Associates report).

No comments about Livingstone (Headway Guides for Beginners Great Lives Series).

No comments about The North Pole: Its Discovery in 1909 Under the Auspices of the Peary Arctic Club.

No comments about Amelia Earhart Returns from Saipan.

No comments about Edward William Lane: A Biography.

1 comments about On His Majesty's Secret Service, Sydney Reilly Codename St1.

1. This is probably one of the best documented and solid accounts ever to appear about Sidney Reilly, a Russian Jew and a short time SIS agent, codenamed ST1, who became famous thanks to numerous books and articles that have been poping out for the past eighty years. The very last publication - three newspapers and six full pages long - appeared in Moscow in January 2003. Vladimir Abarinov, Washington correspondent of the KGB newspaper Sovershenno Sekretno, who now lives in Arlington, VA, where Rick Ames resided before his arrest in 1994, praised... Professor Spence for his work. Abarinov never mentioned Cook's book and tried to assure his readers that Spence's is the only TRUE account.
   Andrew Cook, a former aide to Britain's Secretary of State for Defense George Robertson, has done a marvellous job. He examined passport and birth records, academic transcripts, military records, Russian intelligence files, British intelligence files and other primary source to determine the most likely truth in each case. His work would be almost flawless, if not for one little mistake: Mr Cook chose Gordon Brook-Shepherd and Edward Gazur as sources for Alexander Orlov's quotations. Orlov (Nikolsky/Feldbin), a former NKVD official (never a General, but once Senior Major of State Security) was a notorious lier, who NEVER said a word of truth. Brook-Shepherd, generally a very reliable author, who died this year, made a great mistake with Orlov. Gazur, a retired FBI Special Agent, clearly chose to follow Orlov's path: to lie non-stop without looking back. Therefore, allegations about Maria Zakharchenko and Georgy Radkevich are not correct. Andrew Cook also missed to name ALL participants of the drama, called operation TRUST. On the other hand, it was not his aim. As a result, we finally have a book (first time after 1925), which qualifies as the definitive version of the life of this famous person. Hayden Peake says that 'Cook's account is both scholarly and fascinating reading', and so it is.
   N.B. The BROKER was a cryptonym given to Reilly by the Tsarist Okhrana, whose agents shadowed him in St.Petersburg. It may be interesting to note that Ukraine, seeking NATO membership, invited Mr Cook to present his book there. It was a clever move as Shlomo Rosenblum, as Reilly was known before the age of 18, came from Odessa.

No comments about Robert Louis Stevenson in Samoa: Home from the Sea.

5 comments about Big Motorcycle: A Story of Tokyo.

1. This novel has the slick plotting of John Sandford, the wild humor of Carl Hiassen, the erudition of David Foster Wallace, and the brutal bite of James Ellroy. It's a story of Tokyo, as the sub-title suggests, but Tokyo is a city of foreigners and natives trying to come to terms with each other. So any story of post-WWII Tokyo is a story of the world. Great characters in this book, terrific dialogue. One of the dust jacket reviews said simply, "Ride this Motorcycle." Exactly: this novel is the sleeper of the year.



2. Big Motorcycle is a frenetic ride into the weirdness of Tokyo that combines some of the post industrial hipness of William Gibson with the plotting intricacies of Elmore Leonard-all at a pace that makes Run, Lola Run seem like a stroll in the park. F.X. Donner, Viet Nam vet and former P.O.W., now a middle aged gaijin professor of English comp in Tokyo, has his generally sedate, mildly angst ridden life blasted into hyperdrive when he reflexively performs an act of heroism by catching a falling baby. From that point on, Donner finds himself drawn into the Tokyo underbelly of yakuza, religious cults, right wing and left wing revolutionaries, pop culture entrepreneurs, and a very disturbing serial killer. As the action races along, the individual weirdness converges in bang up race to stop a killer. Big Motorcycle is ghastly, cool, fast paced, exciting and...funny.



3. Big Motorcycle is at least a half-dozen books: pulse-pounding action, horror, wild humor, crime, social history of Tokyo, love and more love. Logan does on the page what the Cohen brothers do on the screen--in, for example, Fargo: there's slapstick and depravity and nobility all mixed together, but somehow working, as in life. And Logan can plot right alongside Joseph Heller: he's got at least seven stories happening simultaneously, weaving in and out of each other, building on each other. The characters, too, are fine: Americans and Japanese both. One of the early reviewers of this novel wrote that the reader "really cares about the people in this book, cares what happens to them." And it's true. Logan's got Elmore Leonard-grade dialogue too, and the sardonic brilliance of Jonathan Swift. Call him a sort of latter-day Nathaniel West--or, rather, East. Terrific, loved it, a real page-turner--with a whole lot of pages to turn. A classic.



4. Reads like a Coen Brothers movie. Humor with razor edges. Inadvertent violence mixed with good intentions. Big City weirdness, where the fringe jaggedly intrudes on the norm. But uniquely Tokyo - a Möbius strip of cute and creepy. Darkly comic. Funny stuff. Except for the villain; Logan doesn't invent a new monster, just chillingly describes the diminutive one that exists among us.



5. This book catches the reader's attention instantly. It is fast paced and exciting, violent and tender. Have you ever driven through a neighborhood at night and caught a glimpse into the homes that has left you wondering what the occupants' lives are like? Reading this book is like that. It's an intimate, almost indecent look into the hearts and minds of its facinating characters. Logan has an innate understanding of Japanese culture and the people who inhabit it. He has managed to weave together a story with people whose lives are interrelated. The result is amazing! This is great book!

No comments about Riding on the Wild Side: Tales of Adventure in the Canadian West (Amazing Stories).