Reader’s Diary

Harold W. Coyle

A grab bag of NATO special forces attempt to destroy Russian missile silos in the wake of a meteor strike that has triggered a doomsday mechanism in Harold Coyle’s latest novel. The silos are defended by a crack team of Russian commandos and the book tells the story of the inevitable battle for control of the ICBMs.

Coyle is one of the strongest writers in the techno-thriller genre. His characters are believable and interesting, which makes the reader care about what happens to them. His battle scenes are vivid, realistic, and better paced than those of authors like Dale Brown and Tom Clancy. “Dead Hand” is not as good as some of Coyle’s earlier work, but it is a good read and is far better than most recent books in the genre.

Jon Hassler

It may be that the three most famous towns in Minnesota are fictional: Gopher Prairie, Lake Woebegon, and Staggerford. This little book is Jon Hassler’s account of Staggerford’s creation in his novel of the same name. Hassler wrote “Staggerford” during a 1975 sabbatical from teaching; at the beginning of the sabbatical he was a community college English teacher, at the end he was a novelist. His recounting of that transformation is a engaging and sometimes inspiring read.

Hassler’s fans will enjoy learning of the origins of some of his characters, and anyone interested in the writing process will learn something from this book.

D. D. Guttenplan

This is an account of the libel case brought by David Irving, author of “Hitler’s War”, against Deborah Lipstadt, who, in her book “Denying the Holocaust”, had claimed that he deliberately distorted history in order to deny the Holocaust. What separated Irving from the typical fringe Holocaust denier is that he was a popular author whose books had been well-received. Though most serious historians didn’t accept Irving’s claim (in “Hitler’s War”) that the Holocaust had been conceived of and carried out solely by Nazis other than Hitler, they generally recognized him as a skilled archivist who had done valuable original research.

The trial became a trial of the reality of the Holocaust and this is the focus of “Holocaust on Trial”. There is a tendency to dismiss the deniers’ claims out of hand, since “everyone knows all about” Hitler’s genocidal plans. As Guttenplan explains, there are enough gaps in the historic record that there is room for a clever person (like Irving) to make the most outrageous claim seem superficially credible. In addition, the cause of truth has been ill-served by those who, while not denying the Holocaust, would use it for their own political ends.

The book is a good brief account of the trial the issues it raised. Irving, who lost the case, comes across as a bigot disguised as a reasonable man. He is revealed as a grandstanding fraud whose work, on the Holocaust and on other World War II subjects, was often seriously flawed and deliberately deceptive. Reading this short book about the trial will save the reader from spending any time with Irving’s so-called histories. I would have been interested in more coverage of the ways in which the Holocaust has been used by everyone from neo-Nazis to lawyers to Zionists, but Guttenplan can’t be faulted for the limited space devoted to that topic since it wasn’t part of the trial.

Stefan Fatsis

“Word Freak” is an insider’s look at serious Scrabble. It profiles a number of highly ranked players, describes the world of organized Scrabble, and covers the history of the game, For somebody like me, who thinks tacking “th” to “at” is a big Scrabble play, and who hadn’t even heard of tournament Scrabble, this book is a revelation

To become a competitive Scrabble player means committing thousands of words to memory and spending hours analyzing games. To be really good takes more time than most people can afford to devote to a game. This dedication seems to produce - or attract - the same kind of obsessive misfits as chess. Fatsis, while researching the Scrabble subculture and its denizens, got caught up in a quest to earn an “expert” rating at the game. The resulting book is a fascinating mix of reporting and Fatsis’ memoir of his own Scrabble obsession.

Adam Barr

In ten years at Microsoft, Barr learned to doubt the company’s recruiting methods and concluded that API “evangelism” (promotion) is the key to its success. His book doesn’t tell us much about the projects he worked on, the people he dealt with, or the methods that Microsoft uses to develop software. He makes some interesting comments about Linux, fills some space with a superficial history of the PC, and totally misses the point about Java (which he incorrectly refers to as “middleware”). Barr may have some interesting inside stories to tell about working for Microsoft, but they don’t appear in this book.

Allen Steele

In “Chronospace” time-travelling researchers from the 24th century visit the “Hindenburg” and accidentally change history. The book is the story of the resulting paradoxes and the protagonists’ attempts to deal with them. I’m a sucker for time travel stories but this one ignores the very thing that makes them so interesting, namely the characters’ experiences and observations of eras other then their own. This is a time travel book that hardly pays any attention to time travel as an experience, but merely uses it as device to set up the paradoxes that drive the lackluster plot.