Life in the Soil: A Guide for Naturalists and Gardeners by James B. Nardi

Inside the society of dirt

I fancy myself an amateur naturalist. I like to explore nature and see what I can see: birds, plants, mammals, fungi, butterflies, etc.—whatever I can identify. One aspect of the wild that I’ve never really known much about, however, is the soil. Seeing as how so much life springs forth from the soil, and it’s loaded with living organisms, I wanted to learn more about the ground and its inhabitants. I found what I was looking for with Life in the Soil, the 2007 book by James B. Nardi, a research scientist at the University of Illinois. Suitable for general readers (nonscientists), this book provides a detailed look at what goes on in the dirt beneath our feet.

What is soil made of? How is it formed? How long does it take rocks and plant matter to become soil? What living creatures are involved in this process? How do elements and minerals cycle in and out of the soil? What makes good soil vs. bad? Nardi answers all of these questions and more. The reader comes to a vivid understanding of the soil as a living, breathing, changing community of organisms and nutrients. On the one hand, this is a book that’s deep enough to detail complex chemical reactions and biological processes. On the other hand, it’s accessible enough to first provide elementary explanations of chemical notation and taxonomical hierarchy.

The bulk of this book is a field guide to all the creatures who live in, contribute to, or even just scratch the surface of the soil. The general arrangement is from smallest to largest, moving from microbes to invertebrates to vertebrates. This guide does not differentiate at the species level but rather at the family level. To include thousands of species would have been impossible, but this book will help you differentiate between true scorpions, pseudoscorpions, and microwhipscorpions, or between dung beetles, soldier beetles, tiger beetles, and ptilodactylid beetles, as well as different families of worms, flies, amphibians, rodents, and so on. There is no specific geographic range to this guide. In general, Nardi addresses an audience of American and British readers, but at times he might mention the land leeches of Guatemala, the shield-tailed snakes of India, or a stink badger from Indonesia. Within each family, Nardi discusses life cycles, feeding habits, and most importantly, the effect the organisms have on the soil. This guide is heavily illustrated with black and white drawings. The text makes reference to 69 color plates, but they are nowhere to be found in the ebook edition.

After the field guide portion of the book, Nardi outlines strategies for the creation and preservation of healthy soil, but at the same time he makes it sound like soil degradation is beyond the point of no return, and world famine is imminent. He encourages readers to start their own compost piles, but then he makes that process sound as difficult as possible, as if you need a PhD in biology and chemistry just to rot some vegetable matter. Finally, Nardi gives some tips for those who might like to collect and examine soil samples in order to view some of the creatures discussed in the book. The key audience for this book would be hobbyists in microscopy. Although the information in the book is scientifically comprehensive, the text is written in very simple vocabulary that even a junior high student can understand, so this would be a perfect gift for any kid or grown-up with a microscope. There is also some useful information here for gardeners, but again, without that microscope much of the book won’t apply to your average casual gardener.

Life in the Soil delivers a thorough entry-level education in soil science and biology that elevates the novice naturalist to an intermediate dirt-lover. I could have used those color plates, and at times the presentation of the information wavers between too elementary and not elementary enough. Overall, however, I learned a lot from this book and will likely refer to it on future hikes.

To a God Unknown by John Steinbeck

Young writer tries too hard

I have read quite a few of John Steinbeck’s novels and thought I had heard of all of them until I recently stumbled upon To a God Unknown. Published in 1933 when Steinbeck was in his early thirties, this was his second novel, after Cup of Gold. I was intrigued by To a God Unknown for the simple fact that any mention of it had somehow eluded me for fifty-plus years of my life. After having read the book, however, I can say with some certainty that the reason you’ve probably never heard of this novel is because it isn’t very good.

The time period of the novel is not specified, but it feels like the late 19th century. (I don’t recall any motorized vehicles.) Joseph Wayne is the third of four sons in a Vermont farming family. In bygone days of a century or more ago, the eldest son typically inherited the family farm after the father’s death, so Joseph decides to build his own future by striking out on his own and heading West to California. He finds some beautiful untouched land and establishes a homestead there. From Steinbeck’s descriptions of the surrounding countryside, it sounds like this would be located in what is now Monterrey County near the city of Soledad. 

Soon after Joseph establishes himself in California, his father dies back home. Hard times befall the Wayne family in Vermont, so Joseph’s three brothers and their families move out to California to join him. They build houses in close proximity to one another and work the surrounding land. The eldest brother, Thomas, is a rugged and likable common-sense farmer. The second brother, Burton, moonlights as a Protestant preacher and bears the judgmental attitude that comes with Christian fundamentalism. The youngest brother Benjy is the black sheep of the family, a heavy drinker and ladies’ man with a knack for inciting trouble. Joseph is the serious and moody member of the family. Being the pioneer in this California venture, he assumes the role of family patriarch.

The problem with To a God Unknown is that Steinbeck goes out of his way to load the story with religious imagery every chance he gets, often in a very heavy-handed and obtrusive manner. Joseph develops a love for the land that amounts to a form of pagan worship. He believes a certain tree on his land, for example, bears his father’s reincarnated soul. Burton, the Protestant preacher, naturally has a problem with this. Meanwhile, the family is surrounded by Mexican workers who are devout Catholics, though not without a few of their own pagan traditions. All of these religious cultures mix and clash. I like what I think is the book’s message: that we could learn a thing or two from the ancient pagans about how to respect and care for the land. I didn’t much care for, however, the way that message was delivered. In his early-career eagerness, Steinbeck seems hell-bent on convincing you that this family farming story is an epic of biblical proportions, to the point where he departs too much from realism. Contrast this with Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, an authentic realist novel about family farmers that rises to the level of an epic, but manages to do so in a seemingly effortless manner.

All of this ostentatious symbolism might be forgivable if you actually cared about any of the characters, but that’s hard to do when they all speak in very stilted, stage-play dialogue that doesn’t resemble real human speech. Joseph and his wife sound more like professors of philosophy than farmers, and Steinbeck belabors words like “sacred” and “holy” in order to hammer home his religious imagery. To a God Unknown is not up to the level of quality one expects from Steinbeck. It reads like the work of a young author trying too hard to prove he’s profound.

The Great God Brown by Eugene O’Neill

Heavy-handed symbolism as O’Neill goes artsy

Eugene O’Neill’s play The Great God Brown was first staged in 1926. O’Neill may have won the Nobel Prize in Literature, but not every one of his works is a masterpiece, or even good. Sandwiched between better-known repertory classics like Desire Under the Elms and Strange Interlude comes this oddity. I have almost worked my way through O’Neill’s complete works, and this is one of the weirdest dramas he ever wrote. It doesn’t read like O’Neill at all but more like something by Samuel Beckett. Beckett, however, would have done it much better. When The Great God Brown debuted, the New York Post called it “a superb failure.”

Mr. Anthony and Mr. Brown are partners in a construction firm. Their teenage sons are best friends who have just graduated from high school. While Brown is the junior partner in the firm, often looked down upon by his partner, his son William shows far more promise than Anthony’s son Dion. William “Billy” Brown is a good student with the potential to become a great architect and take over the leadership of the family business. Dion Anthony, on the other hand, has the temperament of a tortured artist-poet and is a heavy drinker and philanderer. Both young men are in love with the same high school sweetheart, Margaret, but she only has eyes for Dion. While William is jealous, he resigns himself to bachelorhood and focuses on his career. 

Dion is a terribly overdone caricature of the artiste. His speech is just a series of random phrases, many of them biblical, which he spouts in an ostentatiously crazy way. He constantly refers to himself and others he’s speaking to in the third person. To some extent, O’Neill seems to be making fun of the artist stereotype, but at other times he’s clearly buying into it. Although there is definitely occasional humor in The Great God Brown, it also seems clear that O’Neill intended the play to be philosophically profound in much the same way that Dion thinks the relentless stream of non sequiturs that he utters is profound.

One of the odd things about this play is that the characters wear masks. The opening scene takes place at a dance, so at first I thought perhaps it was a masked ball, and the characters were wearing Mardi Gras or domino masks, but that’s not the case. The characters don their masks anytime, 24/7, at their discretion. O’Neill recycles this dramatic convention from ancient Greek tragedies or Japanese Noh theatre. The masks symbolize the difference between one’s true self (mask off) and the personality he or she projects to others (mask on)—what The Who once referred to as an “eminence front.” Confusingly, however, in The Great God Brown these masks function as more than just metaphor. The masks sometimes cause cases of mistaken identity, which means that the characters must literally see the masks just as we do, yet no one in the play seems to find the wearing of masks the least bit odd. The masks also exist as disembodied objects. When someone finds a discarded mask removed from its owner, they react as if they’ve discovered a corpse. This unresolved ambiguity between the reality and metaphor of the masks is just bizarre and clumsy. An avant-garde playwright like Beckett might have pulled it off, but this seems woefully heavy-handed and out of place in what is otherwise a pretty typical O’Neill play about relationships and morals.

The Great God Brown may be a terrible play, but it sure isn’t boring. It’s hard to tell what audiences of 1926 would have thought of this. They might have eaten up this pretentious drivel. For readers of today, however, there is some pleasure in watching this train wreck unfold. One can imagine what it would have been like to spend an evening in the theatre experiencing this strange presentation. It is somewhat kitschily entertaining in the same manner as one of those hacky movies that’s so-bad-it’s-good.

Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud by Peter Watson

The book about everything by the man who’s read everything

I had previously read Peter Watson’s book The Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century and liked it very much. His follow-up to that book, Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud is a prequel in the same vein that covers everything before the 20th century. The Modern Mind opened with Sigmund Freud, and Ideas ends with him. In both cases, Watson deliveries sweeping world histories comprised not of wars, monarchs, and governments, but rather of important developments in the arts, sciences, and humanities. Both books are eminently fascinating and enlightening works, but Ideas is even more impressive and captivating than The Modern Mind.

According to Amazon, the print edition of this book is 850 pages. According to my ebook copy, however, it’s 1850 pages, which seems more accurate when one contemplates just how much content is crammed into this volume. Yet crammed it never feels. Watson has to be one of the all-time greatest summarizers in history. Our grandparents had Will Durant to provide them with an overview of the world’s knowledge. We’ve got Watson, and I think we win. When you look at the sources that Watson cites for this book, typically he’s not going back to the original texts written in ancient Greece, Renaissance Italy, or 19th-century Germany. Rather, he is drawing on the most recent scholarship—histories, biographies, critical studies—that have been published by eminent scholars about the people, -isms, and -ologies that he’s discussing. He doesn’t limit himself to Western civilization either, but includes contributions from Islamic, Indian, Chinese, Japanese, and Native American thought as well. Watson seems to have read everything, and he miraculously assimilates it all into a coherent whole. He demonstrates an encyclopedic knowledge in a variety of fields: history, science, literature, art, music, sociology, psychology, archaeology, and more. The task of assembling such a synthesis must have been herculean, yet Watson glides seamlessly from one topic to the next, explaining complex concepts in clear and accessible prose. That’s not to say that the text is dumbed down for a popular audience. The intelligent reader walks away from this book having acquired a great deal of knowledge.

What surprised me most about this history of ideas is that, for the most part, it’s also a history of religion. Metaphysical and mythological conjectures on God and the universe are just as much ideas as any scientific theory, and religious thought has dominated mankind’s intellectual development for most of homo sapiens’ existence. (Look at the pre-Enlightenment selections in any art museum or library, for example.) The history of human knowledge, as Watson tells it, is a history of overcoming religious superstition. Watson is not an atheist with an axe to grind like Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens. He just tells it like it is with a very objective account of how religion has stifled intellectual progress since ancient times. It seems like every major discovery had to go through a centuries-long probationary period during which it was repudiated, prohibited, and persecuted by religious authorities—the punishments of Galileo, for example, or the arduous process of establishing (via fossils) that the real world is older than literal Biblical time. The Catholic popes are famous for this sort of anti-intellectualism, but Watson shows that all faiths to some degree have worked to hold back the progress of learning: ancient polytheists, Buddhists, Muslims, Protestants, and others are all guilty of this crime. Reading this book really makes you wonder what mankind could have accomplished by now if we hadn’t wasted so much time fighting over theology. Of course, as Watson shows, ideas don’t always mean good ideas: White supremacy, social Darwinism, and eugenics are just a few examples of very wrong ideas that have nonetheless proven too influential in human history, and Watson covers such fallacies as well.

Watson is so good at kindling your curiosity, one walks away from his books with an extensive list of topics and readings for further study. Watson himself has written more narrowly focused intellectual histories on The French Mind, The German Genius, and The Great Divide between the cultures of the Old World and the New. Regardless of where and when he might take you, with Watson as your guide you are bound to be fascinated, amazed, enlightened, and entertained.

The Master of Jalna by Mazo de la Roche

Hard times on the family farm

The Master of Jalna, published in 1933, is the fourth book of 16 in Canadian author Mazo de la Roche’s series of Jalna novels (the fourth novel to be published but the tenth novel in the Jalna chronology, because of all the prequels). These books take place mostly in rural Southern Ontario, along the shores of Lake Ontario. The Jalna novels are in the family drama genre, much like Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women series, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie books, or the old TV show The Waltons. Sometimes the Jalna books venture into romance novel territory, but like the aforementioned examples, they can’t really be classified as romance novels. The family that stars in these books is the Whiteoaks. Their farm is named Jalna. The “Master” in this case is Renny Whiteoak, the eldest brother who manages the farm (The parents died prior to the first novel). As this novel opens, Renny is now married to his brother’s ex-wife, and they have a toddler daughter.

While the last Jalna novel, Finch’s Fortune, ventured as far as England, this installment in the series takes place entirely on the Jalna estate or its near environs. Wayward brothers Finch and Eden have returned from Europe to the family manor, wherein resides the Whiteoak siblings and their spouses, children, elderly aunt and uncles, and a few servants. The family’s circle of friends is limited, which means just about any woman the Whiteoak brothers meet is a potential mate. The dramatic events in this book are the universal dramas of many families: marriages, births, illnesses, deaths, funerals. This novel also brings in the element of financial hardship. The Whiteoaks are land-rich but cash-poor, and Renny, in his role as manager of the farm, is having trouble making ends meet. The family might have to sell some of its beloved acreage. It’s kind of hard to take such financial woes seriously, however, considering that this large family owns a lot of property, few of them work, and they always seem to indulge in lavish feasts of food and drink. A couple of the family members are actually borderline wealthy. The Whiteoaks have never been filthy rich, but they enjoy a prestige as a founding family of the region. Because of this, they often come across as having an inflated sense of pride and entitlement, particularly the elder generation.

Whether intentional or not, masculinity is a recurring and overt theme in these books. De la Roche uses the Whiteoak brothers to compare and contrast competing conceptions of masculinity. I expanded on that in my review of Finch’s Fortune, so I won’t go into it too much here. Though a woman herself, and possibly a lesbian, de la Roche really doesn’t give equal time or importance to her female characters. As the title indicates, Renny is the main focus of this book. He’s always seemed to be the author’s ideal of a man’s man. His marriage is far from ideal, however, as he and his wife Alayne are positively rude to each other throughout the book. Alayne was depicted sympathetically in earlier books, but her she’s just a constant whiner.

Much like a television series, the pleasure of the Jalna books comes from just seeing what these familiar characters are up to, even if it’s nothing earth-shattering. The other main attraction here is the atmosphere. These novels take you back to a wholesome, idyllic time and place in Canadian history. I recently made a visit to the Niagara region of Southern Ontario, where the farms extend right up to the shore of the great lake. Nowadays, this countryside is mostly occupied by wineries and tourism, but driving through the area it’s not hard to imagine what Jalna might have been like a century ago. The storytelling in these books is almost an afterthought, and mostly predictable. The first novel, Jalna, is quite good. The second and third books, however, did not impress me much. I’m glad I hung in there for this fourth novel though, because The Master of Jalna is an improvement over the last couple installments.

The Dark Mother by Waldo Frank

Annoyingly overwrought relationships spoil promising prose

Waldo Frank

The Dark Mother, published in 1920, is the third novel I’ve read by American author Waldo Frank. After completing it, I’ve come to the conclusion that I like the idea of Waldo Frank better than I actually like Waldo Frank’s writing. Frank was a leftist, avant-garde American writer who was active in Jazz Age Greenwich Village, decades before the beat poets of the ‘50s or the hippies of the ‘60s. I keep hoping I will discover some obscure, unconventional, and unsung masterpiece among his oeuvre, but I always come away from Frank’s books feeling somewhat disappointed. Such is my reaction to The Dark Mother, as it was with City Block (1922) and Chalk Face (1924).

David Markand’s father died when he was 10. He grew up in a small town in upstate New York. As The Dark Mother opens, David is 19, and his mother has just died. His sonless uncle in New York City offers to take David into his home and give him a start in his tobacco business. Just prior to leaving for the city, David meets a young man slightly his senior, Tom Rennard, a New York City lawyer who is vacationing upstate. The two strike up an immediate friendship. After David moves to the city, the two reconnect and continue getting to know one another. Tom is unmarried and lives with his sister Cornelia, with whom David also becomes close. Despite his relative youth, Tom is a jaded cynic who knows how to play the game of social climbing and career advancement while realizing that it’s all just a pointless game. He admires and envies the innocence, naiveté, and optimism of David, a literal babe-from-the-woods. While the two form a close friendship, even fraternal love, Tom’s self-hatred makes him resent David’s contentment to the point where he desires to corrupt the younger man and tarnish his enviable innocence.

Tom and David’s relationship is like that of an old, bickering gay married couple, but without the benefit of actually being gay. Their friendship consists mostly of discussing, analyzing, and arguing over their friendship and love for one another. Rarely, if ever, do we see the two having fun or enjoying each other’s company. Tom is the more annoying of the two, often badgering David with complaints about how David doesn’t pay him enough attention, or David doesn’t give himself up completely to their friendship, or David wasn’t there when Tom got home from work. In the desire to depict intense emotions and make profound statements about human nature, Frank really goes overboard with the intensity of the friendship, even for a century ago. It’s hard to imagine a couple of buddies as codependent as these two. Again, David and Tom are not gay, as evidenced by the fact that many women throw themselves at the two young men—married women, single women, young women, older women—to an extent that defies belief.

One admirable aspect of the book is Frank’s fine command of the English language. He tells the story in very poetic prose that’s experimental in style. Calling to mind Harlem Renaissance writers like Jean Toomer and Ralph Ellison, who were his contemporaries, Frank’s writing does what modernism was supposed to do, before modernism pretentiously went off the deep end. His semi-abstract voice does not obscure the story that’s being told, but it’s unconventional enough to make you view the world and human nature in new and different ways.

Over the course of the book, Frank keeps introducing supporting characters who distract from the narrative arc of David, Tom, and Cornelia—the three leads, all of whom are rather annoying themselves. After a while, you kind of hope one of them will commit suicide (they think about it enough) just so something momentous will happen in this story that otherwise just drones on. 14 years after The Dark Mother, Frank published a sequel, The Death and Life of David Markand. I don’t fine David interesting enough, however, to want to read a second book about him.

Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History by Stephen Jay Gould

A fascinating biological saga somewhat tediously presented

Paleontologist and evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) wrote many books on natural history and evolution for a popular audience. His book Wonderful Life, published in 1989, focuses on fossils collected from the Burgess Shale, a geological formation in British Columbia, Canada. The remarkably preserved fossils of the Burgess Shale (I saw some in a Toronto museum last week) comprise the best illustration of the Cambrian explosion, when early invertebrate life exhibited a wide diversity of anatomical forms. Eminent paleontologist Charles Doolittle Walcott (1850–1927) discovered the Burgess Shale and for several decades monopolized the interpretation of the fossils. In the 1970s, however, three British paleontologists—Harry Whittington, Simon Conway Morris, and Derek Briggs—re-examined the Burgess Shale fossil record and ascertained that many of Walcott’s findings were erroneous. Walcott “shoehorned” several unique creatures into existing phyla, thus shortchanging the biological diversity and anatomical disparity of the Cambrian explosion. The three Brits revealed that many of the Burgess Shale arthropods belong to newly discovered phyla that led to evolutionary dead ends. Gould uses this scientific saga to illustrate his own theories of evolution and natural historiography.

The centerpiece of the book is a step-by-step recounting of Whittington, Briggs, and Conway Morris’s work with the Burgess Shale fossils. The reader follows along and joins in the excitement as they make new scientific discoveries. One thing Wonderful Life does very well is it really gives laymen like me an idea of what exactly paleontologists do and how they do it. I also learned quite a bit about the anatomy, evolution, and taxonomy of prehistoric arthropods, topics I surprisingly found fascinating.

What I didn’t like about Wonderful Life is the way that Gould continually hammers home his thesis. It reads as if he’s saying: “These three scientists discovered something marvelous, and I discovered them! Now wonder at the revelations I’m about to impart to you!” Gould keeps stressing how groundbreaking this interpretation of the Burgess fossils is, but I never fully grasped the big deal. I never really thought that our present world was any more biodiverse than earlier eras, so in my case that’s one myth Gould didn’t have to bust. Gould does make a good point that evolutionary trees are often drawn in a way that makes it seem like homo sapiens were the teleological god-given foregone conclusion in the process, but it’s not like intelligent science-minded people can’t see around that. Anyone who’s ever done any genealogical research knows that family trees are more like unruly bushes than neatly pruned trees. The same holds true for taxonomical cladograms.

The other half of Gould’s argument is his assertion that contingency plays a big role in evolution. Again, I met this hypothesis with a resounding “Duh!” Contingency, as Gould vaguely defines it, is something like what most of us might call “the butterfly effect.” Small random or haphazard incidents amount to big changes over the course of hundreds of millions of years. Gould states over and over that if we “played back the tape” of evolution with different random catastrophes, then humankind would have never evolved. That seems like a no-brainer, at least to an atheist. What Gould fails to point out is that if humanity never evolved, then there wouldn’t be any humans around to contemplate evolution. Intelligent human life may have been a one-in-a-million chance, but it’s a prerequisite for the very discussion we’re having.

Some other scientists have taken issue with Gould’s arguments here, in whole or in part, such as Richard Dawkins and Richard Fortey. Obviously, I’m not in a position to argue evolution with the late great Stephen Jay Gould. I can, however, say that Fortey is the best writer of the three, while Gould and Dawkins are rather full of themselves. I like the science that Gould presented in Wonderful Life. I just got tired of him telling me how amazed I should be at his conclusions.

The Producer: John Hammond and the Soul of American Music by Dunstan Prial

One of jazz and rock’s most influential tastemakers

As a fan of classic rock music, I know of John Hammond as the record producer and Columbia executive who discovered Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and Stevie Ray Vaughan. (It’s Hammond’s grinning visage, looking like he could be Stevie Ray’s dad, that graces the back cover of Vaughan’s debut album Texas Flood.) Journalist Dunstan Prial’s 2006 Hammond biography The Producer, however, has taught me that there was much more to Hammond’s long and influential career in the recording industry.

The bulk of this book is concerned not with the history of rock but with jazz. In fact, Hammond’s first encounter with Dylan in the early 1960s doesn’t occur until chapter 12 of 16. Hammond’s career started way back in the 1930s working with artists like Benny Goodman (who eventually became his brother-in-law), Billie Holiday, and Count Basie. Through his work as a critic for DownBeat magazine, a talent scout and producer for record companies, and an all-around jazz impresario, Hammond helped launch some of the biggest stars of the swing era. On the tail end of the jazz age, he also discovered Aretha Franklin and produced her first two albums.

John Henry Hammond Jr. decided at a young age that he wanted to work in the music industry. One of the reasons he was able to make that dream a reality is that he was independently wealthy, being a great-great-grandson of railroad and shipping tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt. (Gloria Vanderbilt, more famous in recent years, was his first cousin.) To establish himself in the music business, Hammond often worked for free or for little pay, just for the joy of making music. He would often use his own money to finance a record, a concert, or to keep a hungry musician afloat. He had no musical talent himself (at least none is discussed in this book), but he had great taste and a keen eye for spotting future superstars. In The Producer, Prial argues convincingly that Hammond’s taste was instrumental in shaping American popular music in the 20th century.

In addition to his contributions to the music industry and popular culture, Hammond was active in the civil rights movement. Seeing jazz music as a means to further the integration of Blacks into American society, Hammond was the first music producer/promoter to put Black and White musicians together on the same stage. When, at Hammond’s urging, Benny Goodman added Black musicians Teddy Wilson and Lionel Hampton to his band, it was a milestone moment in racial integration that preceded Jackie Robinson’s debut in Major League Baseball by a decade. Hammond was also a long-time board member of the NAACP before resigning in protest over the organization’s disagreements with Martin Luther King Jr.

Prial interviewed Hammond’s sister and sister-in-law, some industry associates like Atlantic Records’ Ahmet Ertegun, and a few musicians such as Hampton, Springsteen, and the surviving members of Vaughan’s band Double Trouble. Most of Prial’s research, however, comes from previously published biographies, interviews, and some archival documents—sources into which he has dug admirably deep and wide. Springsteen’s vivid and exuberant recollections of Hammond’s benevolent guidance are really the highlight of the book for rock fans. Much of the Dylan material comes from Dylan’s Chronicles memoir. Prial’s narrative highlights about ten or twelve big stars that Hammond discovered and/or championed. There is much praise here for Hammond’s major accomplishments, but this is not a unilaterally positive, hero-worshipping biography. Hammond had his faults and difficulties as well. The reader gets a balanced and comprehensive sense of Hammond’s personality from Prial’s well-researched and well-written account.

The Shadow Puppet by Georges Simenon

Only murder in the building

First published in 1912, The Shadow Puppet is the twelfth novel in Belgian author Georges Simenon’s series of mystery novels starring Parisian police detective Jules Maigret. The original French title of this novel is L’Ombre chinoise, meaning literally “the Chinese shadow,” which refers to a certain type of shadow puppet. This novel has also been published in English under the titles of Maigret Mystified and The Shadow in the Courtyard, the latter title being the most accurate. If this were a Hardy Boys mystery, the story would actually involve a shadow puppet, but here the title is strictly metaphorical, referring to a human silhouette viewed through a window shade.

A concierge at an apartment building on the Place des Vosges calls the police to report a murder, and Maigret reports to the scene of the crime. Passing through an arched entryway, he enters the large courtyard of this apartment complex. On one side of this courtyard resides the laboratory of a serum manufacturer (medical elixirs, I presume). The owner of the company, Monsieur Couchet, has been found seated at his desk, shot to death, and his safe emptied of its contents, estimated to be 360,000 francs. Couchet, a very wealthy man, doesn’t actually reside in this building, but through an unfortunate coincidence, his ex-wife does. Both have remarried since their divorce. Couchet also had a mistress, not much of a secret, for whom Maigret develops a sympathy. Although on the surface this crime appears to be a typical armed robbery killing, Maigret comes to suspect that the murder may have been committed by one of the building’s residents. As he delves into the case, he uncovers the secret lives of these tenants and their tangled web of relationships.

The fact that an industrial pharmaceutical laboratory would exist on the ground floor of an apartment building is one of those little historical details that makes Maigret novels interesting. From reading these mysteries, you learn a lot about what life was like in Paris, and France at large, in the early twentieth century. The reader gets to see aspects of Parisian life they’d never find in a tourism brochure. One facet of French society that Simenon often addresses in these novels is class consciousness and social status. In The Shadow Puppet, differences in financial status—between the rich Couchets in their mansion on Boulevard Haussmann, the middle-class tenants of the apartment block at the Place des Vosges, and the hard-up mistress and her peers living in Montmarte—play an important part in the story. As usual, Simenon goes beyond mere stereotypes and caricatures to create complex characters with realistic psychological motives.

I became very involved with the lives of these characters; that aspect of the novel is expertly done. The mystery story itself, however, is not one of the most artfully constructed puzzles in Maigret’s casebook. To set up this unusual web of relationships between the characters, Simenon had to rely on maybe one too many coincidences. It is a little hard to believe that some of these people just happened to end up as next-door neighbors to each other. This murder also suffers from a shortage of viable suspects, leading to a conclusion that’s not unforeseen, though there are some creative revelations in the details of the crime. As always, this Maigret novel is a compelling read, thoroughly entertaining, but would it make a top-ten list of Maigret books? Probably not.  

The Night Land by William Hope Hodgson

Boring horror quest with creepy marital advice

English author William Hope Hodgson (1877-1918) got his start writing nautical adventure stories for pulp fiction magazines, then eventually moved on to fantasy and horror fiction. He is best remembered today for his two novels The House on the Borderland (1908) and The Night Land (1912), both of which span the science fiction, fantasy, and horror genres.

The Night Land opens in the “present day,” at least as far as the narrator is concerned, but to us the world depicted seems rather medieval, like something from a William Morris novel or a pre-Raphaelite painting. The narrator writes in a sort of antiquated Yoda-speak, in which every sentence begins with “And,” or, on rare occasions, “Then.” The unnamed hero falls in love with his neighbor, Lady Mirdath the Beautiful. They marry, but she soon dies in childbirth. That all happens in chapter one. In chapter two, the narrator is inexplicably transmigrated to a world millions of years in the future. The sun has died, leaving the Earth in perpetual night, but heat and some light are provided by geothermal energies. This dark world is filled with monsters and evil. The surviving humans have retreated to a giant pyramid, miles wide and tall, containing over a thousand cities. The narrator begins receiving telepathic messages from a woman named Naani, who lives in another stronghold of human holdouts in a distant unknown location. He suspects that this Naani may actually be his deceased love Mirdath, so he sets out alone upon the Night Lands to find her.

The Night Land is slightly better than The House on the Borderland, simply because House was a messy assemblage of spooky imagery with no rhyme or reason to it, while the happenings in The Night Land actually obey a fictional logic. But boy, is this book boring! While Hodgson seems to have put a lot of thought into the creation of this world, it reads as if no forethought whatsoever was put into the story that takes place there. Random events just happen without building upon each other, and the text is unforgivably repetitive. The narrator wanders through the land, eats, and sleeps. Occasionally he sees a monster, which he either avoids or fights. Certain phrases are repeated over and over again, to the point where you’ve gotta wonder if it’s intended to be a joke: “I ate two of the capsules and drank some of the water.” “I saw x number of fire pits,” and “I lie down and rest among the moss bushes.” While reading The Night Land, you could space out for a half an hour and not miss anything, because each chapter is pretty much the same as the one before. There’s only chapter towards the end that could be called exciting.

And then there’s the love story . . . ugh. A large portion of the book is basically a marriage manual for troglodytes: If you’re woman is “naughty” and doesn’t know who’s boss, flog her. Because the novel was published before World War I, popular morals wouldn’t have allowed the hero and his female companion to have sex (because there’s no marriage in the wildernesses of the Night Land). Nevertheless, there are all kinds of clumsy, gooey love scenes in which Hodgson hints at his own propensity towards foot fetishism and S&M fantasies. Such intimate moments are not only creepy but also boring, because they’re just as repetitive as the rest of the book. H. P. Lovecraft greatly admired this novel, but then again, H. P. Lovecraft died in 1937. Given all the talk of wife-whipping, I’m not sure how one can justify admiring this novel in the 21st century.

Fool me once, Hodgson, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. I gave him a second chance after The House on the Borderland, but The Night Land really wasn’t much better. This might appeal somewhat to the Dungeons & Dragons crowd, but I would imagine most avid readers of sci-fi, fantasy, or horror would find this book to be a rather dull and clumsy foray into those genres.

My Life as an Explorer by Sven Hedin

Deadly treks through Asia with a Swedish adventurer

When Sven Hedin was a young boy in Stockholm, he dreamed of being an arctic explorer. As a young man, however, his early career led him to far Eastern Europe. There he realized that he could still be an explorer, but he directed his sights eastward to Asia instead. From 1885 to 1890, Hedin made two trips into Iran and several of the “Stans” of the Near East. He then organized a series of more extensive expeditions deeper into Asia, where his journeys took him to India, China, Tibet, and Nepal. Hedin’s main goal was to fill in the “white spaces” on European maps, to chart uncharted territories. He was one of the first, if not the first, European to set foot in many of the sites he explored. In fact, Tibet didn’t want Westerners in their country, so Hedin had to sneak in. Often he and his all-Asian crew would go two months without seeing another human being, and they once went two years without seeing another European. Hedin’s explorations made him the undisputed firsthand authority on the mountainous region known as the Transhimalaya. In his autobiography My Life as an Explorer, Hedin recaps his daring, adventurous, globe-trotting life. I believe the book was written in 1924, and the first English edition came out in 1925. Despite all the amazing achievements catalogued within, this is not even a complete career memoir because Hedin continued to explore Asia for another decade after this book was published.

While engaged in his expeditions, Hedin surveyed and mapped the terrain and gathered geographic, geologic, zoologic, and ethnographic information. The problem with My Life as an Explorer, however, is that you don’t really get to learn a lot about his discoveries in the places he explored. Hedin published that sort of data in more specialized volumes, such as Scientific Results of a Journey in Central Asia, 1899–1902 (12 volumes). My Life as an Explorer, however, is devoted more to tales of survival and adventure aimed at general readers: nearly starving to death or dying of thirst in the desert, nearly freezing to death in the mountains, nearly drowning in rivers and lakes, nearly suffocating in sandstorms, etc. You will be amazed at the scores, nay hundreds, of horses, camels, mules, and dogs, and even about a dozen humans, who perish over the course of this book. The tenacious Hedin plows ever forward, regardless of body count. The last quarter of this memoir, in which he recounts his third expedition to Tibet (1905–1908), is the exception to this adventure-only style of narrative. There he does go deeper into what he observed of Buddhist culture in his visits to Tibetan holy sites. The first half of the narrative is a bit slow, but the book finishes on a high note.

It’s not too easy to follow along with where Hedin is at any given moment or where he’s going. Many of the place names he uses aren’t current, though a Wikipedia search can usually clear up such uncertainties. The book includes a few simplified cartoony maps, but they don’t help much. Hedin’s detailed, professional maps are printed in other books like the Scientific Findings mentioned above. In addition to the maps, this autobiography is loaded with illustrations drawn by Hedin himself. With his sketchbook, he chronicled the people, places, and memorable moments encountered along the way. He’s a pretty good artist, but his drawings don’t come across very clearly on a Kindle Paperwhite. (He also took photographs, but they’re not in this book.)

Armchair explorers will envy Hedin’s travels but not his hardships and near-death experiences. If you like to read historical explorer accounts, this is a good one, though maybe too long and arduous for casual readers. Reading this autobiography makes me want to look into Hedin’s previously published reports of each individual expedition. They’re probably less exciting than this book, but I think one would learn more about the places visited.  

The White Rose by B. Traven

Home sweet hacienda 

The German author who went by the pen name of B. Traven (real name unknown, or at least unconfirmed) made a career out of writing fiction set in Mexico and Latin America. In novels such as The Cotton-Pickers and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Traven painted socially and politically realistic images of life in Mexico in the years immediately following the Revolution. His works often express his anarchist views by criticizing American imperialism and the capitalist exploitation of resources and people. In his novel The White Rose, Traven continues to explore these themes. The White Rose was originally published in Germany in 1929 and wasn’t published in English translation until 1979.

In the state of Veracruz, Mexico, near the state capital of Jalapa, lies la Rosa Blanca, the White Rose, a beautiful hacienda run according to generations-old Mexican traditions. The owner of this fertile land is neither a Spanish colonist nor a White opportunist, but a man of Indian (Native Mexican) heritage, Jacinto Yañez, who presides over the land that was his father’s, his grandfather’s, his great grandfather’s, and so on. Several multi-generational families live on and work the lands of Rosa Blanca, all of them likely related to Jacinto by blood. He presides over this extended family like a benevolent godfather, and though the work is hard and modern comforts are few, the people are happy. The Condor Oil Company, an American firm, has bought up all the surrounding land to drill for oil. They want Rosa Blanca in order to fill the empty hole in their lucrative dominion. No matter how much money they offer Jacinto, however, he refuses to sell, insisting that though by law he may be the official owner of the hacienda, it is his moral obligation to steward the land and pass it along to his descendants. This refusal to play ball really sticks in Condor’s craw, and they are not used to taking no for an answer.

The first two chapters of the book, in which la Rosa Blanca and its inhabitants are introduced, immediately draws you into the pleasant life of this hacienda. Traven really understands Mexican culture and is able to capture the philosophy and mindset of a Mexican perspective. No other White author writes about Mexico with the same insightfulness and authenticity as Traven (and unfortunately, too few Mexican authors have been translated into English). He has obviously spent some time in that country, not just as a tourist but as a drifting laborer, not just in cities but in rural areas as well, among both capitalists and peasants, and his experiences inform his fiction. When this novel is set in Mexico, it’s a superb five-star read.

The problem is, most of the story doesn’t take place in Mexico, but in San Francisco. Traven devotes more chapters to the American capitalists and their oil company than he does to the Mexican farmers or their hacienda. The bulk of the book is a character study of Mr. Collins, the president of Condor Oil. At least four or five chapters are solely devoted to his extramarital affairs (Traven seems to imply, maybe not intentionally, that capitalism and its excesses are the fault of womankind). There are also a few dry chapters on stock market manipulation. These portions of the book are more predictable and less enlightening than Traven’s perspective on Mexico. They read more like an average Upton Sinclair novel than a Traven book.

All that said, I am a big fan of Traven’s writing, both as a Mexicophile and as a lover of realist literature. I am usually quite impressed by his work and have yet to be truly disappointed. The White Rose is not as excellent as The Cotton-Pickers, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, or The Bridge in the Jungle, but it is still a very good novel. Traven deserves commendation for this eye-opening indictment of the injustices of economic imperialism in Latin America at a time when few European or American writers were concerned with such matters.

The Novels of Clifford D. Simak

Career overview of a sci-fi grand master

Clifford D. Simak

A few months ago, I finished reading and reviewing the complete works of American science fiction author Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988). Since he’s been a favorite here at Old Books by Dead Guys, I think it’s time for a summary look at his literary career.

Simak was born in Millville, Wisconsin, a small town in the southwest of the state, near Prairie du Chien. For over three decades, Simak worked as a reporter and editor for the Minneapolis Star and Tribune while building a successful career as a fiction writer on the side. Simak published his first short story in 1931 and his final novel in 1986, with a prolific and steady output in between. He won three Hugo Awards (for the novel Way Station, the novellette “The Big Front Yard,” and the short story “Grotto of the Dancing Deer”) and one Nebula Award (also “Grotto of the Dancing Deer”). In 1977, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association named Simak a Grand Master of the genre, and he has also been honored with a lifetime achievement award from the Horror Writers Association.

Critics have often referred to Simak’s science fiction as “pastoral” because his stories often take place in rural and small-town locales. Rarely is a Simak story set in New York or Washington, DC. The bulk of his fiction is set in Wisconsin and Minnesota. His protagonists, even the nonhuman ones, often take part in outdoor activities like hunting, fishing, camping, and farming. He also wrote quite a few quest novels featuring cross-country treks in which the characters sleep around campfires and live off the land. Also in the write-what-you-know department, Simak often casts newspaper reporters and editors as the heroes in his stories. Despite the frequent small-town Midwestern atmosphere, Simak’s science fiction concepts are as innovative and mind-blowing as any big-city writer. His works run the gamut from laugh-out-loud comical to deadly serious and often engage in philosophical contemplation on mankind’s destiny, our relationship to nature, and our place within the universe. 

In recent years, Open Road Media has released just about all of Simak’s novels in inexpensive ebook editions, so it’s no longer necessary to hunt down old paperbacks in used bookstores or on ebay. Below are brief summaries and ratings of Simak’s 27 novels. Click on the titles below to read the complete reviews.

Short Fiction
This overview of Simak’s novels does not cover his short fiction. Simak’s short stories and novellas are even more consistently good than his novels. The Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak series collects all of Simak’s fiction into 14 volumes. Each book contains about eight or nine science fiction stories plus one Western story or World War II adventure, genres in which Simak published a few pieces early in his career. The stories in these 14 volumes are not arranged in any kind of chronological or thematic order, so each volume is as good as another, and they are all very good collections. The ebooks often show up for three dollars or less on Amazon.

 

Novels

Cosmic Engineers (1939) - 3.5 stars
In the year 6948, mankind has colonized other planets in the solar system but has yet to venture to another star. Scientists working in a base on Pluto receive messages from the far-off edge of the universe. One human holds the key to understanding these cosmic messages and communicating with the beings of profound intelligence who sent them. An ambitious debut, though Simak has not yet reached his mature style.

Time and Again (1950) - 4.5 stars
The year is 7990. Humanity has spread throughout the galaxy and conquered a multitude of planets. Twenty years ago, astronaut Asher Sutton was sent to the 61 Cygni star system as one of many advanced scouts sent to make first contact with other worlds. Now, a government functionary is visited by a being claiming to be from the future, who informs him that Sutton will soon be returning to Earth, and when he arrives, he must be killed, or mankind will suffer grave consequences. A complex and ingenious time-travel mystery thriller.

Empire (1951) - 3.5 stars
Centuries in the future, humans from Earth have established colonies, mines, prisons, and industrial plants on all the planets in the solar system. This is made possible by an advanced technology that harvests great quantities of energy from the Sun. The tycoon who holds the monopoly on this energy source is the de facto dictator of the solar system, until a rival billionaire comes up with an alternate and superior source of power. Not one of Simak’s better works, with too much sketchy science and subpar storytelling.

City (1952) - 4.5 stars
The book that Simak is best-known for, City is actually made up of previously published short stories that have been adapted into a unified novel. Simak explores the philosophical question of what would happen if mankind had the benefit of communicating with another intelligent species? How would this help or hinder our development? The narrative encompasses tens of thousands of years in the future history of life on Earth, a future that humanity shares with Martians, robots, mutants, and talking dogs. A complex, epic saga that makes for a challenging read, but worth the effort.

Ring Around the Sun (1952) - 4 stars
The story takes place on Earth, perhaps a few decades in the future. The Cold War is still raging, inspiring fears of nuclear Armageddon. Recently, the American market has been mysteriously glutted by inexpensive goods of impeccable manufacture and unknown origin. Could this abundance of technological wonders be an attempt by some secret cabal to subvert our capitalist system and destroy our economy? Despite the title, the novel has nothing to do with space travel. 

Time is the Simplest Thing (1961) - 4 stars
In a not-so distant future, mankind has abandoned space travel. Instead, certain humans have developed the power to explore other star systems through a form of telepathic projection. But what might such a traveler inadvertently bring home from an interstellar journey? This novel is not so much about space or time travel, but more about the paranormal powers of these special individuals. Simak gets a little farfetched here at times, but it’s an exciting adventure novel. 

They Walked Like Men (1962) - 3 stars
A Midwestern newspaper reporter uncovers a sinister plot that threatens the world. The book’s title, as well as an alien encounter in the first chapter, give away that this is a mystery/thriller in which the villains are nonhuman invaders. The aliens are interesting and scary, but their plot to take over the world defies logic. The book contains some thrilling and suspenseful scenes, but overall feels half-baked.

Way Station (1963) - 4.5 stars
One of Simak’s best and best-known works. Enoch Wallace, veteran of the American Civil War, is chosen by an extraterrestrial governing body to serve as a galactic innkeeper for interstellar travelers teleporting through our solar system. His rural Wisconsin home is a layover stop for myriad alien species and cultures. Enoch’s neighbors begin to get suspicious of the fact that he never ages, which leads to the CIA putting him under surveillance. Classic Simak!

All Flesh is Grass (1965) - 3.5 stars
Set in Simak’s hometown of Millville, Wisconsin. A local man is on his way out of town for a fishing trip when his car strikes an invisible, impenetrable barrier. Further investigation reveals that this mysterious barricade completely encircles the town, closing it off from the rest of the world. This plot sounds remarkably similar to Stephen King’s Under the Dome, but Simak beat him to the idea by over 40 years.

The Werewolf Principle (1967) - 5 stars
500 years in the future, a space capsule is found with a John Doe astronaut sealed inside, under suspended animation. When awakened, he has no memory of his past or identity. He is obviously a space traveler from Earth’s past, but how far in the past? The Werewolf Principle is not about werewolves at all but rather about space travelers that are bioengineered to transform and adapt to varying conditions on other worlds. A constantly surprising, entertaining, and though-provoking thriller.

Why Call Them Back from Heaven? (1967) - 4 stars
In the year 2148, scientists are on the verge of cracking the secret to immortality. Billions of people have chosen to have their bodies frozen after death, waiting for a future “revival day” when they will embark on their “second life.” In an already overpopulated world, How will humanity cope when the billions of dead are revived? An innovative and thought-provoking dystopian thriller with interesting philosophical implications. 

The Goblin Reservation (1968) - 3.5 stars
At an unspecified time in the future, space travel throughout other star systems has acquainted mankind with various life forms, some of whom have emigrated to Earth. Time travel is also possible, and a Time College has been established in Madison, Wisconsin, devoted to the study of the past. Humans have also discovered that many of the creatures we thought were mythical or supernatural are in fact real, and many of them now reside in the Goblin Reservation outside Madison. The main plot of the novel deals with time travel, not so much goblins. This is a humorous novel in which Simak throws everything but the kitchen sink. It’s sometimes nonsensical, but it is fun.

Out of Their Minds (1970) - 1.5 stars
A minor celebrity returns to his rural hometown to write a book. When he gets there, he is confronted by all kinds of bizarre and dangerous phenomena, such as a charging triceratops. The title Out of Their Minds could refer to persons who are insane, but in this case it primarily pertains to characters and events from people’s imaginations that manifest themselves in physical reality, literally arising out of their minds. This premise leads to an anything-goes plot that defies all logic and just allows Simak to throw in random imagery without any rhyme or reason. His worst novel, in my opinion.

Destiny Doll (1971) - 3.5 stars
a.k.a Reality Doll
A freelance spaceship captain is hired by three individuals to transport them into deep space. One of them has been hearing voices he believes are interstellar transmissions from a long-lost legendary Earth adventurer who is rumored to have found a paradise on a distant unknown planet. The first half of the book is a little too weird-for-weird’s-sake, but it improves over time and offers some interesting philosophical conjectures about the destiny of humankind, multiple realities, and alien intelligences.

A Choice of Gods (1971) - 4 stars
In the year 2135, the vast majority of humanity mysteriously disappears from the Earth, leaving only a few hundred people behind in the vicinity of Minneapolis. These survivors discover that they have stopped aging, and some have developed advanced parapsychic abilities like interstellar telepathy. A band of Native Americans and some sentient, masterless robots round out the cast of this thoughtful post-apocalyptic tale that asks some deep, dark questions about the purpose of mankind.

Cemetery World (1972) - 3 stars
Thousands of years in the future, mankind has colonized many planets throughout the galaxy. Though few humans have set foot on the planet, Old Earth has become an object of fond nostalgia, and billions of people want to be buried there. An artist travels to Earth to create a multimedia piece that encapsulates the essence of Earth. When he uncovers a sinister plot by the Cemetery corporation, who run the funerary tourism industry, the artist is forced to flee for his life. High on imagination but low on logic, this novel is just so-so.

Our Children’s Children (1973) - 4 stars
Five centuries in the future, mankind faces an alien attack. Unable to defeat the invaders, the human race flees their enemies by time traveling to the past, becoming refugees in our present-day world. These unexpected billions place a heavy burden on our already overpopulated and overtaxed world. Though these uninvited visitors are our distant descendants, do we have the means or the wherewithal to help them? Not one of Simak’s best, but it’s a brisk and engaging read.

Enchanted Pilgrimage (1975) - 3.5 stars
The first of three novels that Simak published in the Dungeons & Dragons/Lord of the Rings fantasy genre. In medieval times, Mark Cornwall, a university scholar, discovers a mysterious page of manuscript hidden in the school’s library. When others find out about this discovery, they are willing to kill to get their hands on the parchment. To decipher the text, Cornwall must leave civilization and venture out into the Wastelands. For the journey, he assembles a team of adventurers including a goblin, a gnome, and an intelligent raccoon. I don’t consider this type of thing to be Simak’s forte, but this is the best of his three novels in this genre.

Shakespeare’s Planet (1976) - 4.5 stars
In the 25th century, Carter Horton was sent on a mission to find planets habitable to humans. He awakes from suspended animation to find that a thousand years have passed, and his human crew are dead. The good news is he’s found a habitable planet, but he’s stranded on it. With the help of his robot companion and some local alien inhabitants, can he find a way off of this mysterious world? Rather than settling for mere interspecies conflict, Simak emphasizes  friendship and cooperation between intelligent life from different worlds and expresses a kind of interstellar environmental ethic.

A Heritage of Stars (1977) - 3.5 stars
Two thousand years in the future, Earth is now a post-apocalyptic world in which mankind has reverted to barbarism. In a fit of worldwide rage, humans rebelled against their technology and destroyed it. One bastion of intelligent civilization still holds out on the campus of the former University of Minnesota. When a member of this community comes across a millennium-old history mentioning a Place of Going to the Stars, he leaves the safety of the university and heads West on a quest to find this mythical site. This story has its fair share of flaws, resulting in a mediocre work by Simak standards.

Mastodonia (1978) - 5 stars
On a farm in Western Wisconsin, a professor of paleontology discovers a time tunnel through which he can walk 100,000 years in the past. He and his colleague decide that in order to fully explore the scientific research potential of time travel, they must first develop it into a commercially viable business, one centered around prehistoric safaris. First, they declare their prehistoric haven an independent nation, dubbed Mastodonia. The pleasant surprise of this time-travel story is that instead of focusing on adventures with saber-toothed tigers, Simak explores the ethical, legal, and logistical complications of time travel.

The Fellowship of the Talisman (1978) - 2 stars
The second of Simak’s D&D-flavored novels. In this alternate history, it’s the 20th century, but Europe has yet to emerge from the Dark Ages. The progress of civilization has been halted by hordes of evil nonhuman beings known as the Harriers. A manuscript is discovered that purports to be an eyewitness account of the life of Christ. A young nobleman is tasked with delivering this document to a scholar who can translate and authenticate it. Not only is this novel filled with some silly sword-and-sorcery clichés, it also has a very preachy Christian message that’s not even historically accurate.

The Visitors (1979) - 4.5 stars
An immense black box descends upon the small town of Lone Pine, Minnesota, hovering just above the ground. The unexplainable nature of this object leads to speculation that it may be of extraterrestrial origin, but is it a living being or a mechanical probe? The box moves around, “eating” trees and ignoring humans. No one can find a way of communicating with it, until one fly fisherman feels a momentary telepathic bond with the visitor. A riveting close-encounters tale that is really less about the aliens and more about humanity’s reaction to them.

Project Pope (1981) - 3.5 stars
In the distant future, a physician stows away on a spacecraft headed to a planet on the very outskirts of our galaxy. There he finds a society established by robots from Earth, who have created a center of theological research named Vatican 17, complete with a supercomputer as pope. These robot clergy employ humans with telepathic powers to gather information on alien cultures and faiths. When one of the listeners claims to have found Heaven, it causes turmoil within the vatican hierarchy. While investigating the dichotomy between knowledge and faith, Simak both criticizes organized religion and respects spiritual faith.

Special Deliverance (1982) - 3 stars
A half dozen individuals find themselves mysteriously transported to an unknown world. They figure out that they have all been abducted from different universes—Earths with alternate histories. But abducted by whom, and why? Convinced that they have been brought together to undertake some mission by which they might return to their homes, the six characters set out to look for clues to the mysterious purpose behind their involuntary journey. A rather meandering plot in the Twilight Zone fantasy vein.

Where the Evil Dwells (1982) - 2 stars
Simak’s third sword-and-sorcery novel takes place during the Roman Empire. In between the Romans and the Germanic barbarians of the Earth lies a zone called the Empty Land, inhabited by a horde of evil creatures and mystical monsters. A young man embarks on a quest to rescue a holy relic from the Empty Land, accompanied by a motley crew of companions, of course. Typical Dungeons & Dragons fare, and rather boring.

Highway of Eternity (1986) - 3 stars
Two individuals with the inexplicable abilities to see and move through alternate worlds stumble upon an 18th-century English manor house that exists in an isolated bubble outside of time and space. There they meet a group of refugees from the future. The rest of the novel follows them as they hop through time and space fleeing the persecution of a foe that threatens the end of humanity as we know it. This premise is vague enough to allow Simak to throw just about anything into this kitchen sink, and he does, resulting in something that reads more like fantasy than hard sci-fi.