I've often looked for a gay murder mystery who done it. Finally I found something worth reading. It's not a dumbed down novel at all. It's full of plots twists and turns with characters who you really get to know. It's nice to see characters interacting with one another who are gay even if they do go for blackmale and the shady side of life sometime...okay most of the time. Very few women mentioned in the book, and I give it four stars because I was able to figure out who did it close to the end of the book and because the ending left me a bit speechless and upset.

In THIRD MAN OUT, the fourth Donald Strachey caper, Stevenson deals with the touchy issue of the forced 'outing' of gays (and their little dogs too) by other gays. Reluctantly, P.I. Strachey agrees to act as body guard to Queer Nation activist John Rutka, who has inspired mucho death threats following a conscienceless campaign of outings. Strachey gets disgusted, quits, and somebody burns Rutka to a crisp.

As usual Stevenson agilely juggles a variety of themes: hypocrisy within the Catholic church, euthanasia, the AIDS crisis, the right to privacy of public figures. These are topics addressed by many gay mystery writers with varying degrees of insight and sensitivity. Stevenson, as ever, manages to be funny and rational at the same time.

The only thing that keeps this entry in the Strachey sweepstakes from being an across the board winner, is my own personal predilection for more pages devoted to the Strachey-Callahan partnership. Don and Timmy remain (for me) the most fascinating couple in gay mysterydom (second only to the enigma of Dave Brandstetter and his long-dead Rod Fleming). They represent (as Strachey himself once facetiously put it) "two healthy, relaxed gay men more or less at peace with themselves and each other, secure in their loving relationship and in the knowledge that its evident riches were a goal nearly all gay men could aspire to and achieve." Anything resulting in unbroken paragraphs of Don and Timmy rates a 10 out of me.

Ironweed by WIlliam Kennedy won an abundance of awards and is on the list of the best 100 books ever written. Many are most likely surprised of the excitement over this book because of the difficulty Kennedy had trying to publish it. Kennedy immortalized the life of Albany in the 1930's, bringing unusual attention to all.

In the novel it discusses survival on an ordinary man whose bad luck brings him to rock bottom causing him to discover in himself on things he can not understand. During Francis Phelan's life he killed a scab driver with a rock, his infant son by holding him by the diaper and accidentally dropping him, and killing an insane bum for self defense.

Throughout the book the people he killed and others are ghost interacting with Francis as in the novel Hamlet.

Overall I felt this was a very well written book and would recommend it for reading on the enjoyment level because of Kennedy's use of real life in the Big Apple during the 1930's.

This Pulitzer Prize Winning entry in Kennedy's Albany Cycle of novels tells the story of Francis Phelan, an ex-baseball player, now bum, who is haunted by ghosts in Albany, NY in 1938. Twenty two years earlier Phelan picked up his thirteen day old son by his diaper and the boy slipped to the ground and was killed. He also killed a scab driver during a strike when he beaned him with a rock. In the intervening years, he has taken to the bottle. Now the ghosts of these and other figures from his past are coming back & Francis must try to reconcile with their spirits and with the remaining members of his family.

I happen to have recently read Sophie's Choice & Beloved (see review) which also deal with parental guilt over culpability for a childs death. I found them both to be hopeless. This book, on the contrary, like Fearless by Rafael Yglesias, offers hope of redemption and the reader inevitably ends up rooting for Francis Phelan and hoping he can exorcise the demons that drive him.

GRADE: A

I had to read this novel for my AP english class and i wasn't exactly looking forward to reading it. But once i got down to reading it, the book took on a life of its own. William Kennedy's brilliant prose and selection of words defined the character of Francis Phelan. The reader can truly feel sorrow, joy, disgust with each action of Francis, all through the excellent writing of Mr. kennedy. The book is a sad look on a depressing era, but it is also a novel that demonstrates the love and bond of family and the tenacity of human nature to hold on. A great book...highly recommended.

If someone set out to write a parody of Kennedy's works, it would read a lot like Quinn's Book. Hard to put down, yes; telling details, of course; but undermined by preposterous characters and an offensive kind of magical realism. Billy Phelan's Greatest Game and Legs were much better.

Fifteen-year-old Daniel Quinn doesn't know his life is about to change on a wintry day in 1849. An orphan, the result of a particularly bad cholera epidemic which wipes out his whole family, Daniel apprentices himself to the boatman, John the Brawn, as a helper in lieu of living in an orphanage. But when the boat containing the actress Magdelena Colon, her maid, and niece, Maud Fallon, is upset by a large block of ice, fate intervenes, causing Quinn's fortunes and fate to be interwoven with Magdelena, Maud, and John the Brawn.
This was a wondeful novel, full of rich language, and subtle humor, which portrays the life of the Irish in the mid-nineteenth century with startling realism. Daniel's family seems to have arrived in America well before the parade of famine Irish, so starkly portrayed by Kennedy in all their squalor. While not attempting to stereotype the Irish immigrants, we see them as the white, upper-class citizens of New York did, a scourge and pestilence bringing filth and disease with them. At one point in the novel they are herded on railroad cars and transported away from Albany as undesirables, dumped on some less fortunate area of the state.
Though the fate of the Irish immigrant is not the main theme in the novel, Quinn's background of being a penniless Irish orphan doesn't increase his chances of gaining the hand of Maud, though she declares her love for him upon their first meeting when she is but thirteen to his fifteen. Fate throws them together over the years, but it is not until he is a grown man that he finally seems worthy of the precocious Maud.
Besides the obvious love story the historical perspective works well. We are treated to a look at the anti-Catholic Know Nothing Pary, the forerunners of the modern Republican Pary, Abolitionists, the Underground Railroad, and the New York City Draft Riots. A very enjoyable story.

I came late to William Kennedy's work and may have to take other reviewers at their word that this is not his best. But it's certainly pretty good, and I'll find out if the rest is better. He captures a kind of crazed picaresque worldview which is something like E.L. Doctorow on drugs. His disasters are gigantic, larger than life, and so are most of the characters. It's hard to tell if it's magical realism or just totally unlikely, but it's funny as hell and a tremendously fun and quick reading experience--in spite of the mass violence and misfortune and desperate poverty it describes.

Very good illustrated survey of Colonial Military sites in in the Lake George, Champlain area. Nicely illustrated with a brief history of each site. A true bargain at the price!!!! The only flaw I found was the author repeats the old misinformation regarding the excavation of the HMS Invincible site in England. This warship sunk in the 1750s which was excavated along with late 18th and 19th Century military buttons that washed into the wreck afterwards leading Archeologists to believe British military buttons were regimentally marked in the 1750s. It shows how Archeology can sometimes provide misleading history when the excavators have little knowledge of material culture.

The Great Warpath is a comprehensive integration of archaeology and history, the type of book history needs more of to make past subject matter more tangible and believable. Ironically, there are surprisingly few works which supplement history with archaeology or vice-versa. With The Great Warpath Starbuck fills the vacancy as he carefully balances the two fields and raises archaeology to a new level of importance. Specifically, the book deals with British Military history in the late 18th century as Starbuck interprets it from his many years as an archaeologist. All the major sights of the French and Indian War in New York State are covered, as well as a few sights from the American Revolution. The Great Warpath refers to the Hudson River, the main corridor in New York State, along which military engagements of the French and Indian War, and the American Revolution occured. Undoubtedly, The Great Warpath has something to offer every military historian who is not satisfied solely with the limits of written history.

Gilder wanted to title this book "Sam Beau" but the editors, he said, wouldn't let him. It is doubtful to me that Gilder has any genuine interest in the welfare of the nation's underclass, but he does have a strange fascination with delinquency and depravity. Gilder is attracted by Sam as some derelict version of genuine masculinity, and takes delight in enumerating all of his failures and pinning the blame on the well-intentioned liberals who put him there. More specifically, welfare reverses the relation between men and women: the woman, as the welfare breadwinner, supports the man, who lives off her income and becomes dependent on the "welfare queens," moving from one to other when they turn him out, impregnating each so that they will remain tied to him, and avoiding work so that his wages won't be garnished. For the liberals, he is a father so far as he earns money, and for the woman and her children he is a father only in the biological sense. For the unemployed father watching tv in the afternoon, masculinity can seem restricted to nonconjugal sex (perhaps there is another word for that) and set-to's on the street or in the bar. Again, this fascinates Gilder (or else he wouldn't have written such a quickly forgotten book), and perhaps part of the attraction is being a white man interloping in a largely black world.

Though the book is non-fiction, it at time reads like a quirky novel, with memorable charactors like Buddy the overweight lesbian.

Now that the nation's welfare system is in its final years, its interesting to see the effects of New York State's extreamly generous welfare benefits had on a low-income neighborhood and its residents in the first few years, which is the background of the story, which concerns a black man falsly accused of raping a white woman.

The books is very well-written and engrossing. I read it in only two sittings.

Now that I've finished the series, I'm disappointed it wasn't as promising as the first book, but not nearly as bad as the second.

Molly is just plain unlikable. She's nosy and annoying, and it's a wonder Tommy hasn't just thrown her in jail already. There's no reason whatsoever for her to be sticking her nose into these murders and putting herself into dangerous situations, and the author's done a terrible job at showing us her motivation for doing so. Instead she's just made her come off as simply meddlesome and stupid.

Also, for a series, it's disappointing that the secondary characters haven't been more developed. In the six years the series has spanned, we barely know her best friend Lauren. Jim is just kind of there. And with all they've been through, you'd think by now Stephanie could've been softened just a bit and made a bit more human, instead of continuing to be such an overblown adversary.

Ms. O'Kane has good potential for a well-written series, but she really needs to work on character development. Oh, and she needs to cut her use of the word "trot" -- no one "trots" around as much as Molly and her friends and family do.

At Carlton Central School parents like Molly Masters participate in a fund-raiser. Molly and six other people are going to dress as clowns, disrupting a beautiful woman singing a torch song as one of the festivities to raise money. At the dress rehearsal, the clowns wait in the wings for a magician to finish his act when one of them shoots and kills Corrine, a high schoolteacher.

Molly, an eyewitness to the event, is the only clown not under suspicion because someone can state where she was during the shooting. Molly learns that several of the suspects have motives to want the teacher dead including a former lover and the mother of the student she was having an affair with despite the rules. Having solved homicides in the past, Molly decides to do her own brand of investigating that places her in jeopardy from an individual who wants the killer's identity to remain anonymously hidden behind greasepaint.

In Leslie O'Kane's fictionalized school, the parents and the administration seem more dangerous than the students are as violence permeates the system. While not realistic, it allows for escapism from the real world. WHEN THE FAX LADY SINGS is an intriguing novel that is characterized by Ms. O'Kane's distinct style of humor.

Harriet Klausner

This is a book in which the author bares her unbelievably selfish soul, apparently without a trace of self-consciousness.

After obsessively following a Spanish lover around for years, she fails to make the ultimate commitment of marriage, since it becomes obvious that this will involve a lot of floor -scrubbing and drudgery, and much less sex.

She marries (Michael Chaplin, son of Charlie) and gives birth to two children in quick succession, but cannot give up the idea of the Spanish lover. She spends the next twenty years dashing across to Spain, abandoning husband and subsequent lovers to renew the Spanish dream. Sometimes the unfortunate two children are dragged with her. She fights against raging alcoholism successfully, but cannot resolve her passion.

Eventually, Spanish lover finds a suitable bride ("I never knew what you were going to do next" he tells the author). She is consumed by jealousy, and does her best to steal her love back, with such conspicuous success that his new wife tries to poison her. But he never actually leaves the new wife, and eventually old age diminishes his charms and kills the passsion that nothing else could kill. The author falls for a sado-masochistic Hollywood mogul who is shot dead and leaves her a fortune.

One can't like the author, but one is spell-bound by her zest for life and her greed for sensations, evoked with startling clarity, like she is in the next room.

This is every seventies dropout you ever knew, plus some and succeesful too, in the end.

Gripping and addictive reading, I have now ordered the two novels she wrote based on Spanish lover and Hollywood mogul respectively. Both are out of print, but the former "Siesta", has apparently been made into a film.

The year is 1988. The good old days of minor league basketball before the NBA's power and popularity took over. This book chronicles a year in the CBA, following the Albany Patroons. I highly recommend this book to those who like a "real life" view of sports. This book highlights what the CBA was all about, from players dealing with their demons (substance abuse, attitude problems, wrong body types for their positions), to the horrendous travel conditions, to the turbulence of a team where players come and go in a matter of days.

For myself, I enjoyed the writing style (paragraphs organized by calendar date) and seeing the past lives of famous people. The coach of the Patroons is George Karl. Some of the other notable characters in the book are Kelvin Upshaw, Vincent Askew, Eric Musselman, Dan Levy, and Flip Saunders. For those of you whose favorite show is Making The Video and favorite sports video is The Secret Life Of The NBA, this book is for you.

A terrific read! A well formed story that gets and holds your attention. The accuracy and detail that Ms. Michaels evidences about the life of a nun is impressive in its accuracy. Do yourself a favor and get this one.

Roscoe is the seventh novel in Kennedy's "Albany" cycle, the most notable other book of which is the excellent Ironweed, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. It's the only other book by Kennedy I've read, but I liked it well enough to want to pick up the new one, and for the most part am glad I did.

Ironweed is one of those rare novels that translated well to the Big Screen--I thought the adaptation, with Jack Nicholson, Meryl Streep and Tom Waits was terrific. Much of the reason why is perhaps that Kennedy is among the most "cinematic" of "literary" novelists, a quality in evidence with the present book, too--in a way that somehow reminds me of D.H. Lawrence, Kennedy is capable of vivid lyrical flights which never detract from an otherwise conventional narrative, and which evoke an overtly visual panoramic landscape. As in Ironweed, Kennedy weaves the surreal in with the realism of the prose, creating a convincing and often brilliant effect where the reader is able to step into the actual conciousness of a character--"hearing" dead people "speak", for example--without missing a beat of the forward motion of the plot.

But that is where the novel becomes a little weighty. Much of the motion of the book is slow and cumbersome, and at times a bit predictable, as we enter the lives of a post-WW II Albany small-time polititian and his world of other politicians, complete with the lack of character one might expect from such characters.

Not that we're supposed to especially like Roscoe, the man, but one never really gets a very clear sense of him or of any of the many other characters in this novel. It's easy to say that this is because Kennedy is suggesting that there's not much to them, but I don't buy the imitative fallacy. We're introduced, mid-stream, to such a plethora of people and their lineages in a mere 291 pages that all the characters, even the principals, are drawn far too thinly to sustain a narrative about events that are less disagreeable than rather tedious and boring. Perhaps I'm missing something because I haven't read all seven books of the cycle, but a novel should stand on its own.

Vivid, lyrical writers like Kennedy, and at times Lawrence, seem to often fall into this predicament. Kennedy is at times wryly funny in a way Lawrence never was, but he seems to want to create a microcosm of America a bit...obviously, a bit too much.

But the actual writing, save for some episodes of forgettable dialogue, soars. At his best, Kennedy is spectacular, a surreal prose-poem stylist who's worth reading simply for the tightness of the imagery and the energy that bursts out of his sentences like atoms splitting in the middle of a consonant. There is no American fiction writer alive who can come close to William Kennedy in this aspect of his prose.

Which is why Roscoe is finally a success. The prose itself creates a narrative of its own, and makes me wonder if conventional standards of character and narrative should even be held to apply to such a vigorous, fresh way of telling a story.

Roscoe Conway, a fixture of the Albany political machine for 26 years, from post-World War I through the Depression and Prohibition and World War II, wants out. As the country celebrates V-J Day and the end of the war, Roscoe finds himself weary of wheeling and dealing. Unmarried and still pining after his first love, who married his best friend, Elisha Fitzgibbon, Roscoe questions the meaning of it all.

"I have to change my life, do something that engages my soul before I die," Roscoe tells Elisha, who observes that Roscoe has kept his discontent hidden. Roscoe explains, "I have no choice. I have no choice in most things. All the repetitions, the goddamn investigations that never end, another election coming and now Patsy wants a third candidate to dilute the Republican vote. We'll humiliate the Governor. On top of that, Cutie LaRue told me this afternoon George Scully has increased his surveillance on me. They're probably doubling their watch on you, too. You'd make a handsome trophy."

This statement establishes William Kennedy's mid-century Albany in the seventh book of his Albany cycle - a city run by a small, closed circle whose primary function is to maintain power, constantly besieged by similar cabals whose goal is to grab that power for themselves. The weapon of choice is the scandal, of which there are plenty to go around, real or manufactured. And the best defense is a ferocious boomerang of a spin, at which Roscoe excels. The reasons he wants to retire are the same reasons why he can't. Roscoe's life is inextricably entwined with the Democratic Albany machine and both Roscoe and his city are ailing.

Albany is run by a triumvirate of boyhood friends - Roscoe, Elisha Fitzgibbon and Patsy McCall, none of whom hold office. Hours after Roscoe announces his intent to retire, his friend Elisha commits suicide. Puzzled and shocked, Roscoe's political antenna tells him Elisha had a good reason, probably to do with protecting his family. He postpones his retirement to help Veronica stave off a nasty family scandal, his youthful hopes of romance rekindled.

As the Republicans position themselves for attack, and Roscoe plies his skills, Kennedy splices the teeming past into the melodramatic events of the present, history repeating itself with infinite variation. Roscoe's World War I experiences (and his first foray into "spin"), the numerous internecine battles among New York state's and Albany's democrats, the roles of big politicians like Al Smith and FDR and the big criminals like Legs Diamond, the opportunities of Prohibition and the ever-present dangers from muckrakers and power grabbers from outside the machine and feuds and jealousies within among the cops, judges, civil servants and vice purveyors who keep things volatile, all of it feeds the machine. The cast of characters is big and the novel's scope is vast but Kennedy engages the reader with his own fascination for history and ambitious, unscrupulous men.

Kennedy, an Albany native and winner of the Pulitzer for "Ironweed," gives us a portrait of a man and a city, mirror images, both full of heart and wit and delight in clever scheming. Roscoe is Albany, his fate rooted deeply in the city's. His father before him was a cog in the machine and Roscoe's first steps were orchestrated by (and a tribute to) his father's ambitions. When Roscoe says he never had a choice, it's the truth. He can no more escape the clutches and drive of Albany than Albany can shed the machine that makes it run. As the reader recognizes this, Roscoe is driven to greater feats of political brilliance and sleight-of-hand. But no man can control the passions of others or the quirks of fate.

Kennedy's prose is as big and ebullient as his sprawling story. In Kennedy's hands Albany history has a legendary, mythic feel. Though the cast of characters and dizzying panorama of events sometimes taxes concentration, Kennedy's black humor, sharp irony and the perverse likability of rascally Roscoe continually enthralls, right up to the final irony of the perfect ending.

Epic in sweep, but overall an intimate story of an aging corrupt politician's final days of glory as he confronts the suicide of a close friend, a bittersweet resumption of a longed-for love, the fall of his political machine, a particularly acrimonious child custody case, and his own mortality.

William Kennedy's seventh novel of his Albany series is full of sublime prose, beautifully rendered characters who are oddly sympathetic despite their less-than-wholesome tendencies, and a pervasive aura of unmistakeable sadness.

This is the first novel in this series I've read, and while there are references galore to characters and plots from previous novels, I had no difficulty following or appreciating what was developing here.

Surely to be one of the finest novels published in 2002.