A Kim Jong-Il Production -- by Paul Fischer

 Author Paul Fischer did quite well in his debut. A Kim Jong-Il Production was largely journalistic in nature, and structure, noting facts and sources all the way to the end.

Some readers might ask why there wasn't more balance, more from the North Korean side of events. The answer is the dark nature of North Korea: speak ill of the Great Leader, and you would likely wind up imprisoned or dead. Or both. If there were any sources to enlighten us on things in The Hermit Kingdom, remember that the dead don't talk.

Kidnapped South Korean moviemakers Shin Sang-Ok, and off-and-on, wife Choi Eun-Hee were thrown back together to make good films for dictator Kim Jong-Il, and for about three years they did. They might've made more, but Shin was delayed in meeting with Choi, due to his propensity to try and escape, sending him to prison. Both had been kidnapped separately out of Hong Kong.

Fischer, and his sources didn't spare us on the horrors of North Korea's prisons and justice system that rivaled anything Nazi Germany ever had. Cruelty was the norm. 

A reader learns a lot about the Koreas, and moviemaking in this one. A lot about people, too.

Ironically, I found this book on the cheap rack at Dollar Tree. It deserved much better.

Cow People -- by J. Frank Dobie

 

J. Frank Dobie saved the best for last, but that might be debatable. The book was filled with so many stories of good, bad, ugly, unusual, and hard-to-describe people associated with the cattle business.

Charles Goodnight was the subject of the last chapter. He was co-founder of the Goodnight-Loving Trail, and wisely and judiciously chose to use his gifts, decision-making, and broad experiences to better those around him. Charlie Goodnight is still quite revered in several places, not just in Texas, but pretty much wherever he went. He was only bad to the bad guys. 

Dobie kept the reader entertained and reading until it was time to sleep, or some other priority got in the way. He tried to quote some of the stories just as he heard them, but seldom used quotation marks. Some of the content was quite gritty, and not meant for those that can't understand how exclusive much of our world was during the 19th Century, mostly after the Civil War. It takes a while longer for some people to get civilized and live peacefully with others.

Cow People was sociological, historical, violent in places, and very colorful with plenty of character development. But just enough. It is a pretty good book. I got a lot out of reading this one I think my mother had been saving for me. I caught myself getting very nostalgic for those times back in the 1980s when I ranged about the sports fields and arenas in and from Alice, Texas. I could hear the quiet down there. Something, a therapeutic thing, that I could only find in a few places around the world. Unless someone honked a horn miles away, I was in some on the best stress relief known to mankind. Yes, anyone might miss that, and it was a strong trait of J. Frank Dobie's South Texas Brush Country.

I'm sure it helped him become the writer he was. He entered Alice High School in 1904, and I was sports department at the Echo-News 80 years later. 

Thanks again mom, and to J. Frank for educating me about the Cow People world, and that instant when I could distinctly remember the quiet.

You really feel like you've been somewhere after reading Cow People. 5/5 stars...

Under A Darkening Sky, The American Experience in Nazi Europe 1939-1941 -- By Robert Lyman

 

Robert Lyman is one smart Kiwi. The New Zealand native, and one-time major went to that path least taken by most everyone else. He researched and wrote about those happenings in Germany, and Europe, that might have been covered largely between 1939 and 1941 then but were swept out of mind once the U.S. entered the war after Pearl Harbor.

There was plenty of American involvement in those obscured days leading up to WWII. Too much for me to cover here. 

And Lyman's Under A Darkening Sky was up to the task. His writing could be fast and action-packed, or more fact-filled and carefully informative. He's good, and I want to read more like this explosive cheapy I found down low at Ollie's some time ago. I need to quit hiding good books from myself.

Lyman also made it personal, bringing in testimony from people I grew up watching on TV like younger versions of Eric Sevareid and Howard K. Smith. This was some very good journalism. 

Important to a story which happened so many years ago were the summaries. The Battle Of Britain in 1940, still called the Blitz there in London, noted the community approach shown by most Londoners.

Lyman put it like this, in Sevareid's words:

"When this all over, in the days to come, men will speak of this war, and they will say, I was a soldier, or I was a sailor, or I was a pilot; or others will say with equal pride: I was a citizen of London."

I lived in London, studying for my master's, and saw the markings and scars from this fight from 2001-through most of 2002. Very moving.

Lyman summed up that period of seemingly endless Nazi victories very well in one sentence.

"Early successes in the East and West not because of Wehrmacht brilliance but because Germany's neighbors naïvely believed that the Great War had been fought to end all wars and failed to protect themselves."

There's still a lot of potential for more books, movies, and such in these pages. I believe Herman Wouk's The Winds Of War captured some of it. If I was teaching anywhere, I might approach my department chair with this book in hand. It's many years after the facts, but a young freshman journalist would immediately improve by reading it.

I also noted that there is a city in Ukraine bearing the author's name. Maybe that's a connection we'll read about someday.