Stranger in a Strange Land: The Controversy
Stranger in a Strange Land. Robert A. Heinlein. G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1961. 408 pages.
My first finished book of 2026 is a classic. Published in 1961, Stranger in a Strange Land is an iconic science fiction novel that has had a huge influence on modern culture and has been a subject of controversy ever since its publication. It was awarded the Hugo Prize for best science fiction novel in 1962, it became the first the first sci-fi novel to enter the New York Times Book Review's best seller list, and it has been included as a "Book That Shaped America" by the Library of Congress. I'm pretty sure my ninth grade English teacher recommended it, and I was a huge sci-fi reader throughout high school, but I'm not sure if I read it then. It's one of the oldest stories known to man: the fish out of water, a strange innocent who is thrust into a wicked world, observes the foibles and follies of humanity, is changed by humanity, acquires followers and admirers, and is then destroyed by the world, leaving the possibility of a better world in his wake. The story's been told a million times, including in the New Testament. In this case, the Christ figure is Valentine Michael Smith, a human survivor of a Mars expedition as a baby that was raised by the Martians and returned to Earth as a spy, but a spy with tremendous powers of the mind including telepathy, telekinesis, and teleportation, just to name a few. After his tutelage under a surrogate father figure, Valentine begins his transformation into a kind of messiah. His exceptional abilities lead him to become many things to many people: freak, scam artist, media commodity, searcher, free love pioneer, neon evangelist, and martyr. Controversy? First, there were objections to the perceived attacks on religion in general and Christianity in particular. Second, it was one of the first mainstream sci-fi novels to include sex, and not just sex, but lots of nudity and free love, Finally, there were rumors that the book was a huge influence on Charles Manson and his murderous Family, and these rumors led to the book being removed from libraries across the country. (Although Manson did make himself into a messiah who demanded free love and group sex for his followers, it is unlikely that he ever read the book since he was functionally illiterate. However, it is quite probable that some of his better-educated followers had read it, and they used the word "grok" - a word created by Heinlein for the book to mean a thorough and complete understanding or grasping of a concept. More recently, Elon Musk decided to name his artificial intelligence app "Grok" - for whatever reasons.) Some sixty years later, the book is controversial for another reason: sexism, based on its portrayal of women and relationships. Sure, but I would argue that you have to look at the time it was published. Second wave feminism was just blossoming with Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem still unknown. The sexual revolution was just underway with sexologists like Kinsey, Masters, and Johnson becoming public figures, Hugh Hefner was attempting to create a Playboy world, and the birth control pill was first used in 1960. Sex was emerging into public discourse like never before. Actually, I think the portrayal of women and sex in the book is very progressive for the time, and, in many ways, women enjoy a state of equality in Heinlein's world that did not exist in 1961 America. The book is a deeply insightful and thought provoking take on America and American institutions.
Double Whammy. Carl Hiaasen. Putnam, 1988. 320 pages. Book 1 of 7 in Skink series.
If there was a Mount Rushmore of writers of the "Florida Man" genre of fiction, the faces would be those of Tim Dorsey, Carl Hiaasen, Dave Berry, and Randy Wayne White, authors who excel at creating incredibly ridiculous and exciting stories about heroic, but flawed, Floridians and the assorted crazies that complicate their lives and threaten their friends. Their stories are all based in and inspired by real events and real history that can only have happened in the Sunshine State, and then they add their own brand of twisted elaboration that makes the genre so unique. This Hiaasen novel is the first to recount the adventures of private detective R.J. Decker and his partner Skink, a 6' 6 " tall bearded misanthropic hermit who lives in the Florida Everglades and subsists on a diet of roadkill. While Skink is a legendary character in his neck of the woods, almost no one knows that Skink was actually once the Governor of Florida, Clinton Tyree, the most honest man ever to be governor of any state, so honest, in fact, that he couldn't take the pressure of politics, snapped, and ran away from office to become a crusading environmentalist, carrying on a one-man fight against evil developers. Skink and Decker find themselves entangled in the dangerous, high-money-stakes, life or death world of professional bass fishing. A major cheating scandal turns deadly, and bodies pile up/ Oh, and there's a murderer who talks to the dead head of a pet bull that is clamped to his right arm. Insanity. Or just another Florida Man story.
Caravaggio Documentary
Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane. Andrew Graham-Dixon. W.W. Norton & Company, 2012. 544 pages.
Inspired by a great exhibition focusing on Caravaggio and baroque art at St. Petersburg's (Florida) Museum of Fine Arts, I purchased this biography and found it to be a truly great one. Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, usually known simply as Caravaggio, was, and is, the greatest artist of the baroque, and his influence continues to resonate throughout the artistic world. Filmmaker Martin Scorsese recognizes often describes the huge influence Caravaggio is on his own films with the look, the stories, and the characters very visibly reflecting elements of the painter's life and world. Caravaggio pioneered the use of light and dark as key elements in his work, and his paintings are full of life, action, and vibrancy. The paintings all tell vivid stories. Since his patrons were often Catholic Church officials who sought to use the power of art as propaganda, designed to win the hearts and devotion of the people who might otherwise be tempted by the Protestant Reformation, he often painted gritty, often bloody, scenes of Old Testament battles and violence and of the horrific martyrdoms of saints murdered for spreading the gospels of the New Testament, often shocking his patrons and other viewers with their graphic brutality. His personal life was equally profane. He was either homosexual or bisexual at a time when that was punishable by death. He was known for engaging in drunken, violent brawls, roaming the city with like-minded young troublemakers, and associating with prostitutes and pimps. Sentenced to banishment and death for killing a rival in a duel, he was forced to live a life on the run, before he himself died, under mysterious circumstances, at a very early age. He still managed to create a revolutionary body of work. This bio covers his life and his works thoroughly and is equally as masterful as his work.
White Shadow. Ace Atkins. Putnam, 2006. 384 pages.
This is the second work of historical fiction based on a real-life crime written by Ace Atkins that I've read. Devil's Garden was about Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle's trial for the death of a would-be actress in 1921. White Shadow is about the 1955 murder of Tampa Florida organized crime boss Charlie Wall. Living in Tampa Bay, this book is of particular interest because of the connections to history and locations in Ybor City in particular and the area in general. I've read several books, attended talks, and taken tours on the subject of the organized crime that dominated much of Tampa's 20th century history, so a lot of this book is very familiar, and it's always fun to make historical connections as I travel around the city. Having read two Atkins books, I've drawn some conclusions. In Ace Atkins' world, the 1920s and the 1950s were very similar, whether the location was San Francisco or Tampa. Everybody was always depressed, angry, miserable, and morally ambiguous. Everybody had lots of really bad and unpleasurable sex with lots of different people, and that sex usually involved tears, violence, and lots and lots of alcohol and/or drugs. Love doesn't exist, but drugs, alcohol, guns, gambling, prostitution, and many other vices were openly available everywhere. Everybody talked like Rocky and Mugsy, the gangsters in the Bugs Bunny cartoons, all of the time (In Tampa, though, it was with a Cuban or Italian accent.). I know Atkins is a huge admirer of the detective noir genre and especially Dashiell Hammett, but it's just soooo much for sooooo long - the books go on and on and on, far too long. I really want to like his books more than I do. His most recent book, a Cold War spy thriller, is set in Atlanta in the 1980s. I haven't decided if I'm up for reading what Atkins does to make that setting depressing for me.
Author talk
King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion, and Catastrophic Miscalculation. Scott Anderson. Doubleday, 2025. 512 pages.
The Iranian Revolution and the resulting American hostage crisis happened exactly because of the reasons cited in this book's title: hubris, delusion, and miscalculation. Add stupidity, incompetence, impotence, and entrenched bureaucratic insanity. Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was one of the most ill-suited men ever to be called "King of Kings." He was not that bright and had led a totally isolated and exalted life from his birth that separated him from reality. He had almost no competent advisors that ever dared to tell him the truth. Negative reports and statistics were routinely changed to positive ones before they were presented to him. He was incapable of making decisions, especially under duress. Instead, he relied on others to take action and, consequently, to take the blame if the action failed. Jimmy Carter was an inept, incompetent boob, totally in over his head from the second he stepped into the White House. Like the Shah, he was far too involved in petty details, didn't have competent and honest advisors, but he was further handicapped by his outsider status that made him the subject of ridicule, mistrust, and derision by the Washington bureaucrats and professional politician class who actively kept information from him and had no interest in carrying out his policies. Neither man saw the world as it was. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was a provincial hard-line religious zealot who had no idea about or interest in how a country should be run. His small group of advisors rallied around him simply because he was a viable alternative for the people's support and ignored his brutal medieval core philosophy. A coalition of wildly disparate factions including socialists, communists, modernists, republicans, and religious fundamentalists came together, only united by their desire to depose the Shah, and they each thought Khomeini could be used to attain their goal and then discarded, but almost none of them had any real confidence that a revolution would be successful. The CIA was totally incompetent (as usual), reporting to the White House, even days before the revolution, that the Shah was secure in his position for decades to come. The US Ambassador to Iran was an idiot, and embassy and consulate officials in Iran were not Iranian experts and couldn't even speak the language, just marking time until their next ill-fitted posting. They routinely ignored and buried the reports and observations of the one staffer who saw what was happening well before it did, and he was threatened with dismissal and frozen out of any meaningful role within the staff. Scott Anderson does a fantastic job of explaining what happened and why in this book, and it is incredibly readable. This is the book to read if you want to know about modern Iranian history and the history of the revolution, the effects of which still resonate almost 50 years later.
Author Talk
Recipes From the American South. Michael Twitty. Phaidon Press, 2025. 432 pages.
This book is a must-have addition to any cookbook or southern history or southern food library. It's the southern version of Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking in terms of scope and importance. Michael Twitty has become one of America's greatest culinary historians. He started out as a re-enactor, researching and demonstrating the foods and foodways of the American South that resulted from the blending of West African, Caribbean, Native American, and European cultures that resulted from the African diaspora and slavery. His work illustrates both the importance of food history and the power of food to cross boundaries, erase differences, and unite people. However, the region is vast, and even southern food is not monolithic. Twitty presents 260 recipes that cover the entire breadth of southern cuisine. The recipes are tested and prove, the photos are beautiful, and there are short histories of each dish. Cooks will discover familiar recipes for dishes that their families have made for generations, but they will also discover new recipes and learn things about the old and the new in the process. I've made some of the recipes and I will be making more, and the book has already become a first reference for me. It is definitely a classic that should be on any southern cook's shelf.
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter. Stephen Graham Jones. S & S/Saga Press, 2025. 448 pages.
Stephen Graham Jones is apparently a very successful writer of western horror fiction, lauded by authors like Stephen King and Tommy Orange and often compared to Cormac McCarthy, but I had never heard of him until his newest book appeared everywhere, including on practically every "Best of 2025" list that I saw. A diary written by a Lutheran minister in Montana in 1912 is discovered and examined by an academic who happens to be his direct descendant. The minister recounts stories told to him by a Blackfoot Indian named Good Stab, stories of a flesh-eating, blood-sucking supernatural vampire roaming the plains out for revenge. What's not to like, right? It's my first Did Not Finish of the year, after about a fifth of the way through. It is - incredibly - mind numbingly BORING. First of all, it's a story within a story within a story, so there is a huge gulf between the reader and the "action." Secondly, the language is stilted and tedious. The creature doesn't just attack and eat animals, it eats "big mouths," "little mouths," "prairie runners," "whitehorns," "blackhorns," "long legs," "dirty faces," "moving shadows," and "wags-his-tails." What? What's that? Huh? Finally, its pace is not slow; it's plodding and ponderous, a real slog. Multiple times, I realized that the creature was eating, and I thought "Wait, what happened?" I see references in reviews and summaries to extreme violence and gore and found myself in the middle or at the end of such scenes without knowing how I got there. This is a terrible book.
Scene from "The Reivers" 1969
The Reivers. William Faulkner. Random House, 1962. 320 pages.
The other day, I noticed Turner Classic Movies was airing 1969's "The Reivers" starring Steve McQueen, and I tuned in for a few minutes. I decided to make the book my second classic read of the year. Published by William Faulkner in 1962, it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1963, making Faulkner only the fourth author to win two Pulitzers. I've read a few Faulkner classics, and admire his work, but The Reivers is different. Perhaps Faulkner's most accessible book, it's a comedy, a picaresque novel, that is an adventure story in which a naive or roguish, or both, hero goes on an adventure, encountering unusual characters and real world issues and corruption along the way. In this case, it's 11-year old Lucius Priest, a resident of Faulkner's Yokanaptawpha County Mississippi, who unwittingly gets dragged into Boon Hogganbeck's crazy scheme. Boon works for Lucius' grandfather, but one day he decides to steal or borrow the grandfather's car, one of the only cars in town at the time, and go to Memphis. A few miles out of town, they discover that Ned McCaslin, a black man and fellow employee of the grandfather and an actual blood relative of Lucius, had stowed away in the car. Together, they head off to Memphis, landing at a brothel run by Miss Reba, and Boon gets reacquainted with his favorite girl, Miss Corrie. Long story short, Ned trades the car for a race horse, and they plan to run a race in order to win the car back. Hijinks ensue. It's not a bad story and a very different side of Faulkner. Probably 3 or 3.5 out of 5 for me, mainly because I 'm not really a fan of horse racing.
CBS Sunday Morning segment
The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi. Wright Thompson. Penguin Press, 2024. 448 pages.
Place. It is one of the most vital elements of the study of history. It acts as a physical, emotional, and cognitive anchor, a three-dimensional primary document that transforms abstract events from the distant past into tangible, relatable experiences, providing invaluable context to the events that happened upon it and to the lives of the people who lived there, worked there, fought there, loved there, and died there. "Place" provides a connection that is not possible otherwise. Think about the feeling you have on a battlefield or in a home or site, when your senses take it all in and often both a new understanding and a new curiosity arise. I've read very few books in my life that capture place as well as this book does. Wright Thompson has mastered the craft and can teach lessons on the subject. I've had this book ever since it was released, but I've only read it in the past few days. After all, I knew the story of Emmett Till, I taught the story of Emmett Till every year, and I knew it would be a tough read emotionally. And it definitely is. It makes you despair and lose all hope for humanity (if you had any at the start). If you know it, it makes you hear Nina Simone's song "Mississippi G*****n" on a constant loop in your head, and makes you believe that the world and country would be much better off if Mississippi had never existed, or at least hadn't been settled by any new humans after 1600, that Mississippi is hell on earth, populated by the moat deranged and depraved "people" in history. (And when a native Georgian now living in Florida says that, that's saying something.) It is not all depravity, however. The reader is introduced to some truly brave and heroic people that are usually not a part of the story: friends and relatives of Emmett and his mother, witnesses who were previously ignored by the law and by the media, and people who have devoted their lives to keeping the story alive in the 7 decades since. This is not only a new history of the kidnapping and murder of a 15-year old boy and the intense and coordinated effort throughout the state over the ensuing decades to erase it from history and from the minds of white and black Mississippians, but it is also a history of Mississippi, the place, going back to before European contact and encompassing every aspect of its history. The barn in which Till was tortured, mutilated, and murdered is like an epicenter of that history. The Delta Blues were born, King Cotton thrived and collapsed, Indian villages were decimated, and the Archie Manning football dynasty was born, all within a few miles of the nondescript farm shed. All of that comes to life in this book. This book should be the required textbook for Mississippi state history classes. It should be required reading for all Americans.
