I’ve got to believe that Bob Moore, marine engineer and author of Don’t Call Me a Crook! A Scotsman’s Tale of World Travel, Whisky, and Crime, would find Jan Smith’s photographs of abandoned ships in Mauritania’s Nouadhibou Bay both fascinating and horrifying.  They’d no doubt remind him of his ill-fated stints on a yacht on Long Island Sound, a river boat carrying kerosene along the Yangtze, and the cruise ship s.s. Vestris.

Like Dissident Books’ beloved Glaswegian, Mr. Smith is quite an adventurer and risk-taker.  From MSN’s Good:

When Smith attempted to venture into Mauritania in 2008, he encountered no shortage of struggle. “I was turned away at the border, slept in a mine field, and was accused of espionage. No one believed I would travel to the remoteness of Nouadhibou to simply take pictures of rotting ships.”

Well, whatever Bob might or might not of thought, I love the pictures.  To my eyes these vast behemoths are dead dinosaurs, rotting in a primordial lake.

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Justin Logan, associate director of foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute today called Notes on Democracy: A New Edition “the best for-pleasure book I read (so far!) in 2009.”

Mr. Logan, we at Dissident Books congratulate you on your superb taste.  You are a gentleman and a scholar.  We thank you, and Mr. Mencken thanks you!

You might recall my August 23 post (“Booklust takes ‘Don’t Call Me a Crook!’ on a trip”).  Well, Booklust is back, and has written a review of Bob Moore’s pickled, globetrotting and illegal memoirs.  We’re pretty stroked to see she gave it a rating of 7.5 out of 10–not bad!  Personally, we think Mr. Moore’s memoirs rate an 11 out of 10, but we have an admittedly biased opinion.  “I don’t know if there are any thoroughly unapologetic, charmingly devious con men out there in the world like him any more,” Booklust writes.  “The author embodied the spirit of the Roaring 20s, of a world thrilled to be done with WWI and happily ignoring the inevitability of WWII, a world that had not reached the Great Depression, and was riding high on waves of lawlessness and corruption on the cusp of the modern age. . . .  It’s hard to admire him, but it’s impossible to dislike him. He has a certain roguish, rakish charm.”

Booklust also comments wisely on Moore’s racism.  In the book’s third part, “Mitchell and China,” “Moore’s racism and bigotry shine through a little too much for my liking,” she remarks. “However, it made the book very real. I think now, a lot of historical fiction tends to glaze over the racial relations of the past, sidestepping the complications and possible negative reactions that those situations can create. But when you read books that were written in those eras, by people who lived them. . .  well, it’s just there. Innate. In the pores, as it were. Yes, it is hard to read, but it’s worse to ignore it, and worst to pretend it never happened, I think. Moore had opinions and he stuck by them, regardless of how narrow-minded or slippery his ideas were. I can’t help but respect a man who sticks to his guns. And when he does it in such a hilariously self-righteous and interesting manner. . . well, that just makes the going that much easier.”

We completely agree.  How often in movies and books about the past do you find whitewashing of discrimination and strife?  The good old days weren’t so good.  Like today, there was hatred and racism.  Like Booklust, we prefer reality to lies.

Booklust ends her review with an equally perceptive summary: “Don’t Call Me a Crook is a fun and interesting look at what life was like for the working class of the 1920s–unapologetic, realistic and true, it sheds light on what must have been a fascinating time to be alive.”  She’s absolutely right to stress that Don’t Call Me a Crook! is a proletarian memoir.  As The Scotsman (Edinburgh) pointed out, “Moore’s book is one of relatively few accounts looking at the Roaring Twenties from the point of view of a Scot who was, if hardly at the bottom of the social order, at least not born with a silver spoon in his gob.”  It might break the hearts of politically correct folks to read that a laboring man didn’t feel class solidarity (just the opposite: he wanted your job!), and saw the world through a sexist, racist, and greedy lens, but that’s their problem.  Again, we’ll take truth over fairy tales.

From Associated Press, updated 11:43 p.m. ET, Sat., Aug 29, 2009

FERNDALE, Michigan – A first date went from bad to worse when a man skipped out on the restaurant bill, then stole his date’s car, police said.

Police say 23-year-old Terrance Dejuan McCoy had dinner with a woman April 24 at Buffalo Wild Wings in the Detroit suburb of Ferndale. The woman said the two met a week earlier at a Detroit casino and she knew McCoy only as “Chris.”

The woman told police that McCoy said he left his wallet in her car and asked for keys. He then sped away in the 2000 Chevrolet Impala.

Not terribly romantic…  A descendant of Bob Moore, perhaps?  Same sense of chivalry.

For more click here.

Booklust takes Don’t Call Me a Crook! with her on a trip to India!  Bon voyage!

How appropriate to bring the globetrotting Bob Moore on a voyage halfway across the earth…  But should you really trust him as a traveling companion?

Here’s a very helpful article from Joanna Penn’s thecreativepenn.com on how Wired For War does all the right things to attract readers.   I find this piece both inspirational and pratical: I constantly need to remind myself that the days of sending advance reading copies to magazines and newspapers and hoping for a review are over!  There are better and more effective ways to get the word about your releases.

I’ll give more thought to video and audio marketing…  definitely.

The Man Overboard:  How a Merchant Marine Officer Survived the Raging Storm of Alcoholism and Drug Addiction by Darryl Hagar,  $29.95, www.themanoverboard.com

What if Don’t Call Me a Crook!‘s Bob Moore found God and got his life together?  It might be like The Man Overboard:

The Man Overboard is the dramatic story of Darryl Hagar, a twenty-five year veteran of the Merchant Marine.  This  “drunken sailor” was charged with the daunting responsibility of safely navigating 900-foot supertankers through the dangerous and unpredictable oceans of the world, including refueling the U.S. Navy during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s and again during the Persian Gulf War in 1990-91–all the while living a double life.  Within a professional life of discipline and order, Darry led a clandestine, chaotic existence of alcoholism, drug abuse, and crime.

Hagar also has a The Man Overboard comic series.  The drawings are very detailed and add to the sense of horror of Hagar’s once out-of-control life.  As he says in the comic’s intro:

Some of the stories contained are funny, some are sad, and indeed some are very disturbing. . .   much like life itself.

And much like Don’t Call Me a Crook!  I’m looking forward to reading this.  I expect it’ll give me some new insight into sailors’ lives, and why they’re so often drunken.

And here’s our first review:

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4404736.Notes_on_Democracy

We were so happy and proud that this was our first release and that it turned out so well.  Mencken’s words read like they were written today.  And they’re just as shocking–maybe more so–as they were when “Notes” was first published in 1926.  Marion Elizabeth Rodgers’ introduction and annotations open up fascinating vistas on the Sage of Baltimore’s prose that otherwise would go unnoticed by the average reader.  Anthony Lewis’ afterword is passionate and a fine nightcap to an evening (or week or month) spent with “Notes.”

Libertarian Nation: The Call for a New Agenda by James Walsh, Silver Lake Publishing, $19.95

I’m really looking forward to reading this.  I like this extract from the book featured on the front flap:

The current political debate that you see on TV and online is not a real exchange of ideas. [Emphasis mine]  It’s bread and circuses.  They say that generals are always fighting the last war…   well, the same is true for TV producers and newspapers editors.  This nation has spent and borrowed its way to a crisis point.  We’re losing our position as a world leader.  And we need to get back to the philosophical roots on which the nation was founded.  This won’t be good news for the smirking neo-cons… or self-righteous liberals.  They’re both yesterday’s partisans.”

Six years ago I organized a talk co-sponsored by the New York alumni clubs of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism and Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications.  It was entitled “Monotone Media and Voices on the Margins,” and it examined the lack of true diversity and vigorous political discourse in the mass news media.  Rather than bringing the usual talking heads, I invited journalists from “fringe” backgrounds: a neo-pagan, a conspiracy researcher, and a Marxist.  There was also a business reporter and an analyst from the media watch group FAIR.  I wish I knew Jim back then so he could’ve sat on the panel. 

It’s interesting that Jim mentions “bread and circuses”:  Mencken repeatedly uses that phrase throughout Notes on Democracy.  According to HLM, the masses don’t want real freedom: they want a safe, secure prison, with regular servings of Wonder Bread and “Gilligan’s Island.”  Or Sour Dough and “Lost,” if you prefer.  Jim also talks about the “philosophical roots” upon which America was founded.  I don’t know his position, but Mencken argues that the founders were not at all in favor of universal suffrage, and had a real fear of the mob.  I’ll be curious to know what Libertarian Nation says on this. 

One last thing…  Why should it be surprising that the people Jim condemns as “yesterday’s partisans” be TV producers and newspaper editors?  They’re men and women knee-deep in technology and modes of communication from the last century, indeed, in the case of newspapers, the 19th century.  If the media is the message, then what else could their message be except for yesterday’s news? 

See http://www.silverlakepub.com/

Fugue State by Brain Evenson, art by Zak Sally, US/CAN $14.95, Coffee House Press 

Oh, now this looks good.  From the back cover:

Hallucinatory and darkly comic, these tales of paranoia, pursuit, sensory deprivation, amnesia and retribution [sounds like my life, says Dissident Books editor Nicholas Towasser] rattle the cages of the psyche.  And through the illustrations of graphic novelist Zak Sally, this unsettling world is brought to life.

From sadistic bosses with secret fears to a woman trapped in a mime’s imaginary box, and from a post-apocalyptic misidentified messiah to unwitting portraitits of the dead, Brian Evenson’s mind-bending fiction peers fearlessly into the shadows.

You better believe I’m looking foward to reading this!   Sounds like this generation’s H.  P.  Lovecraft!  And Sally’s illustrations are excellent.  See http://www.amazon.com/Fugue-State-Brian-Evenson/dp/1566892252 and http://www.brianevenson.com/fugue.html

Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong by Terry Teachout, $30, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.  Terry Teachout is one cool guy.  He wrote a The Skeptic, great bio of Mencken, and was kind enough to pen some words of praise for the back cover of Notes on Democracy:  A New Edition.  I caught him at his autograph signing and gave him three copies of Notes plus a copy of Don’t Call Me a Crook!  Did I ask him to sign a Pops ARC?  You better believe I did.  And I’m looking forward to reading it.  See http://www.amazon.com/Pops-Louis-Armstrong-Terry-Teachout/dp/0151010897 and http://www.artsjournal.com/aboutlastnight/

Undone by Karin Slaughter, US$26/CAN$30, Delacorte Press

The opening caught my attention:

They had been married forty years to the day and Judith still felt like she didn’t know everything about her husband.  Forty years of cooking Henry’s dinner, forty years of ironing his shirts, forty years of sleeping in his bed, and he was still a mystery.  Maybe that was why she kept doing all these things for him with little or no complaint.  There was a lot to be said for a man who, after forty years, still managed to hold your attention.

I’m reminded a line from from Henry Hill’s wife in Goodfellas:  “All the other girls would’ve gotten outta there the minute their boyfriend gave them a gun to hide. But I didn’t. I have to admit, it turned me on.”  This is a sequel to Slaughter’s Faithless and Fractured.  See http://www.amazon.com/Undone-Grant-County-Karin-Slaughter/dp/0385341962 and http://www.karinslaughter.com/undone.shtml.