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Thursday, February 27, 2014

The Death Penalty in the United States: A Complete Guide to Federal and State Laws, Second Edition by Louis J. Palmer Jr.

0786476605.01._SX140_SY224_SCLZZZZZZZ_This was a book I received as an Early Reviewer on LibraryThing.  I did not remember checking the box to say say I would read it, yet there it was in my mailbox.  I’m not going to lie, it is a very dry book, I am 99% sure it is aimed at being a text book.  I am not a legalese and if I hadn’t received this book the way I had I would not have read it.  It was very dry and hard for me to get through, and sadly I didn’t I made it to chapter 8 and just gave up.  I started just reading, but that didn’t work, I got lost and sadly had to start the book a second time.  On the second read I took detailed notes and underlined like a mad woman,  and it still didn’t work, although I did retain the information that I was reading.  Although I could not read this book as a lunch read or during other times that I didn’t have a chunk of time to devote to it.  There was just too much potential for loss of information if I didn’t read a whole chapter at a time.

In the intro, the author states that this book “aims to provide an objective review of how capital punishment works in the United States.”  He further states that “the primary focus of the book is upon issues that are resolved after a defendant has been convicted of a capital crime.”  Being the general populace I feel that he achieved his goal.  Again, not saying I would recommend this book to my book club, but it was an informative read.   The book is split into 6 parts. 

Part I lays out important foundation information. (5 chapters)  lots of law and history,  I made it through though.  Some of it was good, some of it was bad.  Some of the history was interesting, I think that is the only reason I kept reading.  It was just sooo dry and text bookish.

Part II examines specific issues involving the governmental office responsible for enforcing death penalty statutes – the office of the prosecutor. (5 chapters)  This is the section that lost me, it was all law and nothing of interest for me, and as much as I hate to say it, I just gave up.  My reading time is too precious to continue with something I am having this much trouble getting through.

Part III is an examination of substantive issues involving primarily the sentencing phase of death penalty prosecutions. (6 chapters)

Part IV is concerned with post-conviction remedies that a capital felon will try to obtain after being convicted. (4 chapters)

Part V outlines the laws involving execution of the death penalty. (4 chapters)

Part VI provides some discussion of diverse death penalty issues. (5 chapters)

Sunday, February 23, 2014

White Oleander by Janet Fitch (2/15-2/22)

white oleanderThis was a bit of a busy month for me, so I thought I would try to listen to the book on tape, and I watched the movie.  Not good, I got to my book club and they were talking about sections I had no recollection of at all.  I guess I really do need to read it to absorb it, not just listen.  So as a result, I picked up the book and read it.

This is the story of Astrid, a young girl who grows into a woman while in foster care.  When Astrid is 12, her mother Ingrid poisons her boyfriend and is sent to prison.  The book follows Astrid through various foster home as she grows, both physically and emotionally.  Ultimately, this is a story of a girl growing into a young woman and finding herself, while leaving the shadow’s of her Mother’s personality behind.

The imagery in this book is amazing, I get lost in Fitch’s descriptions of things, beautiful poetry that I could stay lost in for hours.  Everything is so organic, there are flowers and plants everywhere.   In the beginning everything is beautiful and mysterious “the blue of the evening , turn velvet, indigo lingering like an unspoken hope.” Astrid is 12 and on the verge of puberty.  She is still an innocent girl who worships her mother, she hasn’t yet discovered that her mother is imperfect and human.  Ingrid is Astrid’s goddess and she worships her wholeheartedly, and Ingrid likes it that way.  “She thought because I was her daughter that I belonged to her, that she could do anything she wanted with me.”  The world is about Ingrid, who is a selfish and manipulative woman that uses her “art” as a reason to not be held to societies same rules of conduct.  If Ingrid hadn’t been sent to prison, there still would have been conflict because Astrid was growing up and on path to becoming her own person, which her mother never would have understood.  “I felt on the edge of something, a mystery that surrounded me like gauze, something I was beginning to unwind.”

Finch describes every home that Astrid is sent to, and it foreshadows the events that will happen there.  The first foster home that Astrid is sent to is with Starr, and ex stripper, alcoholic, and born again Christian.   “A plastic garden pinwheel stood motionless in a patch of geraniums.  Spider plants hung from pots on the wide trailer porch.”  “there were no fringy jacarandas here, only oleanders and palms, pear cactus and a big weeping pepper.”  Astrid is still naïve, and she still sees the beauty that is possible, but there is a sadness to the place, a loss of childhood and innocence that will happen when Astrid and Ray’s relationship develops and drives Starr to shoot Astrid and loose all that she has worked for.

After Astrid is shot she is sent to live with Marvel and Ed, a bigot who only sees Astrid as a hired maid, that she doesn’t have to pay.  “It was the color of a tropical lagoon on a postcard thirty years out of date, a Gauguin syphilitic nightmare. It was the gap in the chain of deciduous trees that cradled every other house on the block, defiantly ugly in its nakedness.”  Marvel is cheerful on the outside, but inside she is full of hate, for her neighbors, for Astrid, and possibly even herself.  Here Astrid meets Olivia, a whore, and learns that as a woman, she can have some control of her life, if she just takes it.  But one Marvel finds out about Astrid and Olivia’s friendship, she sends Astrid away.

Astrid arrives at her 3rd home, “A big wooden craftsman with a deep eaved porch, too nice for foster care.  Inside it was dark, the windows covered with heavy curtains.  The woodwork gleamed halfway up the walls, smelling of lemon oil.”  Amelia, looks picture perfect on the outside, nice house, nice person, but she isn’t she is cruel and vicious, taking the girls money from the foster system and remolding her house, all the while starving the girls.  Astrid learns here, that as cruel as it may seem, sometimes you have to look out for yourself and no-one else.

The home that Astrid finally found the love she had been looking for was with Claire.  “An old neighborhood of stucco bungalows and full-growth sycamores with chalky white trunks and leaves like hands.”  Claire was sick, and mentally unstable and Ingrid jealous of Clair and Astrid’s relationship manipulated her into committing suicide.  Astrid blames herself and feels that anything she gets after Clair is deserved.

When Clair dies, Astrid is sent to McLaren Children’s Center “Block walls, linoleum floors, the shadows of pines against the outside lights, and the sleeping shapes of my roommates under their thin thermal blankets.”  This is her own version of prison, where she must serve her time for allowing Clair to be touched and ruined by Ingrid.  Astrid has stopped worshipping her mother and has broken the connections as best she can.  But because of Clair’s death she doesn’t feel she deserves redemption or a good life and that is why she passes on a good family and instead chooses to go with Rena when she leaves the center.

Rena is a Russian immigrant who has a very selfish view of the world.  “A glum cocoa-brown Spanish bungalow with heavy plasterwork, dark windows and a patchy lawn surrounded by a chain-link fence.”  Rena is constantly asking “What is in it for me?”  She teaches Astrid to stand up for herself, and that she can demand things.  Astrid finally builds some defenses, not only against the world, but also against her mother.

In the final chapter, Astrid is living in Berlin with her boyfriend Paul , “It was crumbling and coal heated, but we could afford it most of the time.”  “I liked Berlin. The city and I understood each other.  I liked that they had left the bombed out hulk of the Kaiser Wilhelm Church as a monument to loss.  Nobody had forgotten anything here.  In Berlin, you had to wrestle with the past, you had to build on the ruins, inside them.  It wasn’t like America, where we scraped the earth clean, thinking we could start again every time.  We hadn’t learned yet, that there was no such thing as an empty canvas.”   I could see the wrap up for Astrid, free of her mother, still drawn to her, but not giving into the temptation.  I was however very confused about her and Paul’s relationship.  There was no real build up to it, yeah they met at McLaren’s and connected but then nothing until she is living with him in Berlin.  It didn’t fit with Astrid’s character.  The whole book was about her growing and becoming her own person, a woman strong enough to defy her mother, then boom she is a girlfriend trying to promote her boyfriends dreams and not pursuing her own.  How did that happen?  What was the point of the book if she just becomes another woman behind the man?  Not that there is anything wrong with that, but it wasn’t the way the character was going.  It’s like at the end, Finch said oops nope that isn’t what I meant to write lets do a complete 360.  I loved the book, the rawness, the beauty in the writing.  But I think if I ever re-read it, I will stop at chapter 31.

Thursday, February 13, 2014

The Gunslinger (The Dark Tower 1) by Stephen King Read 1/13-2/9

the-gunslingerThis is from my BOTM series, it is a second reading for me.  It was just as good as I remembered.  This is a fantasy novel meets the old west.  The main character Roland, is a “gunslinger” i.e. knight of his society.  The world has moved on, or is dying, it is full of mutants and empty landscapes.  I love the scenery, the old west and end of the world colliding.  Images of Mad Max fill my mind, but more Clint Eastwoody from The Good, The  Bad, and The Ugly.  The one town we encounter is a essentially a boarder town, that reminded me of Lonesome Dove, right down to the Saloon and piano player.  Don’t get me wrong, this is not like any other King series, there is no real jumpy parts, even when the mutants attack, it isn’t King’s normal scary stuff.  This is a nice quick read with limited main characters, Roland, Jake (enters half-way through) and the Dark Man.  After some of the more complicated storylines having just a few main characters to focus on was a really nice reprieve for my brain.  King does a great job setting up the series, he gives tid-bits of Roland’s past and the back story and the mission, without really telling us anything and making us want to read more.  This is a great start of the series.

Friday, January 17, 2014

Odd Hours (Odd Thomas #4) by Dean Koontz

This is the fourth book in the Odd series.  Odd left the monastery at the end of book three and headed off to the Coast with Frank Sinatra and his ghost dog Boo in tow.  When he gets there he gets the job of an in house chef for an reclusive actor from the 40's or 50's, his employer has a very small part and really adds nothing to the storyline.  In fact not many of the characters introduced add much to the storyline, every character is weirder than the last and I'm not sure what value they have other than that Koontz wanted to write about them.
The flow if this book wasn't as easy as the first one or even the second one, this book took me almost three times as long to get thorough just because I couldn't seem to get invested in the storyline.  And on top of that, every time I picked the book up I had forgotten what had gone on before, the story just didn't stick in my mind.
There is something happening, Odd saw it in a dream, but what oh what is it?  Man have we seen that storyline before, and it would be fine if he wants to keep up that premise, but that means there has to be a bit more development to Odd as a character, and he has turned out to be rather flat.  Oh so sad his girl is dead, oh so troubled that he sees dead people, his only ambition in life is to sell tires because it seems easy.  Really isn't it time for Odd to have some growth?  And in this book, I think Odd only saw one other dead person besides Frank Sinatra, whom he helped move on.  What famous singer will haunt Odd now?
I think Koontz tried to do something larger with the good vs. evil and Annemarie, but he just didn't make it.  It del choppy and incomplete.  There was too much vagueness, and what I assume Koontz thought was foreshadowing and not enough real story.  I think Koontz tried to hard, wanted to make what I assume started out as a fun story about a guy who sees dead people, into a larger, deeper story.  When he should have just stuck to a kooky book about a guy who sees ghosts, and left the deeper meaning of life to another storyline or another writer.

Saturday, January 4, 2014

Brother Odd (Odd Thomas #3) by Dean Koontz

This is the third book in the Odd Thomas series.  Odd has taken himself off to a monastery in the Sierra Nevada's, and big bad thing comes to play.  the Baddie in this book is a new creation, not a Bodach or a bad person in general.  I still got through the book very quickly, but it had parts that were slower than in the first two books.  There were times when I had no problem putting the book down at all.  Don't get me wrong, it was still really good, there were just times that I felt I would be more inclined to clean or do something besides read.  Whereas with the first two books I just wanted to read and find out what the heck was happening.
We really get a chance to understand Odd a bit more and his character is developed nicely in this book.  At the end we finally see Elvis off to the next plane, which is nice for Elvis, but I was sad to see his character go.  I like how even though Koontz killed Stormy in the first book, she still never really leaves Odd behind, I think their love shaped Odd more than could have been known while Stormy was alive.  Odd still takes risks and does dangerous things, but now his goal is to be reunited and he doesn't want to step out of line in this world for fear it could make their separation more permanent.  He is still grieving but slowing healing.  There were some characters in this book that I really liked and I hope we see again later in the series, the Russian Romanovich mainly.  I love his character and I hope he become a recurring character.  I fully admit, at the end when it turned out that Boo was a ghost dog, threw me for a loop.  I had no idea, I thought he was just special and saw ghosts (i.e. Elvis) because he was a dog, not a dead dog.  There was a lot of spirituality and science mumbo jumbo that I suspect are setting something up later on in the series, but I am not sure.  So we will just have to wait and see how it turns out.  But in the end I say another hit by Koontz.

Forever Odd (Odd Thomas #2) by Dean Koontz

I enjoyed the first Odd Thomas so much that I decided not to wait for my book club to finish the series in a year or so.
In this second installment  Odd is still reeling from the events of book one, mainly Stormy's death.  A good friend is kidnapped and it is up to Odd to search and rescue him before it is too late.
Because I was reading this book as a side book to my book club books I could read at my own pace when I had time.  That being said I seemed to fly through it.  As usual Koontz's writing is solid and the characters are well developed and maintain the same level of believability that they did in the first book.  The main baddie is a wealthy psycho named Datura, who thinks Odd has the power to let her see ghosts, I'm sure if Odd had that power he would share without having a good friend threatened.  The book is still set in Pico Mundo and we get a lot more history of the area around the town.  I think Koontz thought this story through more as a part of a series than as a stand alone like the first book.  I should have written my review before I started the next one in the series, because I can see the set up for the next book so clearly and the two kind of blend.  It was a super quick read and easy to follow.  There wasn't any shocking endings or crazy mass murders and I missed the Bodach's presence.  But there were some pretty strong poltergeist, and nice set up for book 3.  It wasn't as good as the first but, still good.

The Secret Keeper by Kate Morton

This is another time jumping book, which usually drives me crazy but I was ok with in this book.  Part of the book takes place in the WWII England during the Blitz and the other part of the book takes place in the present.  At the age of 16, Laurel Nicholson witnesses her mother Dorothy kill a man, Laurel pushes this memory to the back of her mind until her mother essentially lay on her death bed unable to answer questions.  What a better time for Laurel to try and find out what really happened right? So part of the book is Laurel's search to discover her Mother's history.  The other part is her mother's history and why she killed the man when Laurel was 16.  Of course Laurel never really gets the full picture of her mother's life, but she does learn quite a bit.
I really enjoyed the mystery and the writing.  There were some twists and turns and a surprise ending that I did't see coming at all!  
I have never read a Kate Morton book before this one, but it was so good that I have added her other two novels to my want to read list!  She is a fantastic story teller, she keeps the reader engaged and interested, and actually knows how to switch between timelines flawlessly.  There were parts of the story that weren't as interesting as other, which I was glad of because I could take a break digest and come back excited to finish the read.  I defiantly recommend reading this book!