The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett

Cripes! More than seven months have passed since I started this book, and I'm technically still reading it.... There's no excuse for this laxity, especially considering what a terrific book this is. Yet I still haven't finished it, being wrapped up with other distractions aside from reading... and because it's such a good book that I want to give it its due, I also haven't started any other books. Time to buckle down and wrap it up.

The French Connection: A True Account of Cops, Narcotics, and International Conspiracy by Robin Moore

The excellent 1971 film of The French Connection, starring Gene Hackman and Roy Scheider, has been running quite frequently on the Fox Movie Channel of late. Maybe it's the fact that it's usually on late at night, so my focus is fuzzy, but there's a major plot point in it that always had me confused.

The brown Lincoln Continental is brought into the country, loaded with concealed heroin, by the French connection. Then Sal Boca, the American connection, takes the car from a hotel parking ramp and parks it overnight on a seedy waterfront street, where it is nearly stripped by a roving chop shop gang. Popeye has the car impounded, the cops (finally, after hours of searching) discover the drug cache, then they close it back up good as new and return it to — the French connection, who later takes it to a desolate island in the East River for the deal to go down with Sal.

So here lies the confusion: why does Sal take possession of the car, full of drugs, before the deal — and then abandon it in a bad area? Why doesn't he just off-load the drugs right then?

The answer lies in Robin Moore's terrific non-fiction tale of, as he hyperbolically puts it, "the most crucial single victory to date in the ceaseless, frustrating war against the import of vicious narcotics into our country." As Moore explains, the car (in reality a tan 1960 Buick Invicta) was left by the American connection on that waterfront street because at that point it was loaded, not with drugs, but with the cash payoff from a previous import. The car soon disappeared from the street, picked up by an unseen accomplice, and returned to Montréal (and ultimately France) to begin the next, even bigger, drug smuggling operation.

The stake-out scene in the movie is tense and dramatic, and it makes sense that it was included virtually unchanged from the book. But because the filmmakers have conflated two separate deals into one big deal, the chain of events ceases to make any sense at all. I find this ironic, considering that The French Connection is one of the films that is lauded for its gritty realism, a hallmark of American cinema in the 1970s. It's a great movie — if for nothing else than the classic, nay, iconic chase scene between Popeye in a borrowed Pontiac Le Mans and his intended assassin in a commandeered elevated train — yet its five Academy Awards completely overshadow its excellent, worthy source material: Robin Moore's 1969 book.

Chuck Klosterman IV: A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas by Chuck Klosterman

A mixed bag of essays, some insightful and/or humourous, some just the wanking of a self-important rock critic (as if there's any other kind). To me, though, this quote makes up for most of the latter:

"There have been countless occasions when I've listened to a song and imagined what its words and sounds were supposed to represent, and I inevitably perceive each element to be complex and subtle and conscious. However, when the songwriter eventually explains his thought process during the music's creation, I often realize that (a) the musician barely cares what the song is supposed to mean, and that (b) I've actually invested more intellectual energy into the song than the goddamn artist."

The Dangerous Book for Boys by Conn Iggulden and Hal Iggulden

Brilliant. The authors take the premise that boys are hard-wired to take risks and confront danger, and that it's better to provide some guidance and an outlet for this energy, rather than find them walking on the railroad tracks later. The projects (everything from the "world's best paper airplane design" to a bow and arrow to a go-cart and beyond) are well-rounded and offer good advice and caveats, while the essays address historic battles, tales of triumph over adversity, and even a few simple hints for dealing with girls. There are plenty of useful lists, such as Latin phrases every boy should know, and an essential reading list. This book should appear on the latter itself — it should be required reading for boys of all ages, their dads, and perhaps especially their hyperprotective and risk-averse mothers.

The Chicago World's Fair of 1893: A Photographic Record, text by Stanley Applebaum

A slim book, filled with good quality photographic reproductions of the World's Columbian Exposition — mainly panoramas that give a good sense of the fair's overall layout and overwhelming scale. Interior images are more lacking, perhaps in part due to the capability of photography at the time. Applebaum's accompanying text provides interesting perspective about the Beaux-Arts movement, which gained wide popularity in the United States thanks to its use in the many buildings of the "White City" portion of the fair. Applebaum also makes some interesting points about Louis Sullivan, of whom I am a fan: first, that his fabled and contrarian Transportation Building caused him no end of headaches, and beyond its glorious "Golden Door" entryway was repetitive and dull; and second, that his oft-quoted pronouncement that the fair's adherence to classical styles "set back architecture fifty years" seems somewhat less prophetic when one notes that Sullivan made that comment more than thirty years after the fair closed.

First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong by James R. Hansen

A fine biography of the first man to walk on the moon. This book benefits greatly from the fact that Armstrong himself authorized its writing, granted numerous interviews, and provided unprecedented access to his personal papers, yet did not edit nor censor the final product beyond simple fact-checking. Parts of it are almost dull, though appropriately so — Armstrong was, after all, an engineer, not a risk-taker or glory-monger. Hansen gently tears open the hero-worshipping mythology that has accumulated over the past few decades to reveal the genuine human being within, putting Neil's life in perspective and explaining how a cautious attitude toward his fame could be misconstrued as being anti-social or reclusive. He even pokes holes in the various urban legends, both humourous (the Mr. Gorsky story) and pernicious (the ludicrous notion that the moon landing never happened), that never cease to find traction among the ill-informed. Recommended.

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

Older blurbs are available here.