A FASHIONABLE INDULGENCE, Regency England romantic novel featuring men in love with each other

A FASHIONABLE INDULGENCE (Society of Gentlemen #1)
KJ CHARLES
Loveswept
$6.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: In the first novel of an explosive new series from K. J. Charles, a young gentleman and his elegant mentor fight for love in a world of wealth, power, and manipulation.

When he learns that he could be the heir to an unexpected fortune, Harry Vane rejects his past as a Radical fighting for government reform and sets about wooing his lovely cousin. But his heart is captured instead by the most beautiful, chic man he’s ever met: the dandy tasked with instructing him in the manners and style of the ton. Harry’s new station demands conformity—and yet the one thing he desires is a taste of the wrong pair of lips.

After witnessing firsthand the horrors of Waterloo, Julius Norreys sought refuge behind the luxurious facade of the upper crust. Now he concerns himself exclusively with the cut of his coat and the quality of his boots. And yet his protégé is so unblemished by cynicism that he inspires the first flare of genuine desire Julius has felt in years. He cannot protect Harry from the worst excesses of society. But together they can withstand the high price of passion.

My Review: Don't dismiss Romances without reading at least one KJ Charles romantic novel first. This Regency possesses all the charms of the best in the field at conveying the sense of an exquisitely beautiful lifestyle lived by rather dreadful people being, nonetheless, quite extraordinarily tempting an offer. Harry Vane, legitimate son of a pair of narcissists from wildly different social milieux, has that offer made:

No, I don’t want to be sober and restrained {like his older Vane cousin}. I want to be beautiful. Bright. Confident. Perfect. I want to be you.
he thinks of his mentor, Julius, lusting and admiring and trying so hard to please:
“Again. No. With grace.”

Harry bowed hopelessly, a clumsy movement. “I don’t feel graceful.”

“Of course you don’t. You aren’t. You resemble a cart horse attempting to caracole. Very well, stop.”

Harry's noble father ran away from power, money, position to marry his mill-owner's daughter of a mother, and neither was ever going to be welcomed home because they embraced the Ned Ludd radicalism that led to them racing ahead of the hangman's noose to France. Napoleon's France. The one still reeling from their aborted revolution. And at daggers drawn with England.

Harry, in short, was never ever going to feel safe anywhere...but then his fortunes changed when his paternal grandfather needed him, now that he's twenty-three and has lived hand-to-mouth in London (after the parents had the balls to die at the same time) to carry on the family name. And it is here, my olds, that the action springs to life.

Julius is a man in misery, sadly, and the kind that warps one's view of humanity as much as Harry's uncertain upbringing does: He is Other, a queer gent in a time when that was a hanging offense; he is not on good terms with his family, not for his sexuality (one receives the distinct impression that they are in the dark about the subject), but for a tragic accident that took place at Waterloo. (No, not talkin' about it here. Read it for y'all's selves.) These two men, so young...Julius turns thirty during the story, and that's a big, big part of the story...and so damaged, gravitate together.

And everything he hated, the saliva, the fleshiness, the taste of other people’s food and breath and teeth and sweat, was here. Harry’s skin was as flawed as anyone’s close up. He had wide pores and what looked like red pinpricks, hairs in his nostrils and the sharp brown points of stubble, the first hints of what would be wrinkles when he aged, and stray hairs under his thick brows that could have been plucked away. He was imperfect flesh, like any man, and Julius buried himself in that imperfection because it was alive.

Harry's imperfections bother Julius; Julius's perfection bothers Harry:

“When my namesake, the great Caesar, rode in triumph,” Julius said, “he was accompanied by a slave whose role was to whisper to him, You are but mortal. To remind him he was merely a man who would one day die like any other.

If I could, I should have you at my side to remind me that I am alive, because I have not felt alive in so damned long, and with you, I do. No, I don’t want you to marry, any more than I want you to return to your dirty democrats. I want to show you the world, and see you smile, and keep you with me while my soul grows back. Don’t gape like that.”

The last line is directed at a completely overawed, overjoyed Harry, slackjawed that someone who opens his mouth and just spills this kind of guff verbiage would consider taking him as a pupil, still less as a lover!

So there are plot twists; Harry is banished forever (lasts about two weeks) from Julius's side because he wasn't completely honest once; Julius and the other men in their circle rally round Harry as some exceedingly horrible events transpire; a murder, a suicide, a long-awaited restoration of ma'at all occur. In short, it's a romance. And a fine one, replete with period details (look up "gamahuche"! Haw), and like all Author Charles's books, agreeably smutty and louche. (Straight-straight people: NO.)

I'd be deeply remiss if I didn't mention one major thread running through the read: Harry's parents flight from England cost one of their very staunchest supporters a flogging, which is no small matter in today's world but could then, if the flogged was unlucky, be fatal in the form of infection. Their supporter, Silas, nonetheless opens his home and his seditious printing shop to orphaned Harry when he has no one (certainly not his noble relatives!) to turn to. Harry, after being fished out of this cesspool of democratic radicals, leaves them all behind but with many a guilty twinge. He does finally go back after being Banished Forever by Julius (as if!), to talk to Silas:

He planted a thick, ink-stained finger on the table in front of Harry. “And here’s Mr. Aristocrat Vane, the clothes on your back enough to feed a family for a month, I’ll be bound, come crying to me because you’ve squabbled with a fop over a pink coat. Because you’ve sold yourself and you don’t like the price. Is that the best you can do?”
–then–
“If you can’t be happy, then be something else. Be useful, that would be good. Decorative, if you like. Selfish, if you must. But don’t whine about it.” He scowled, rubbing his hand over his short-cropped, brindled hair. “And be careful.”

It is that last that shows Silas for what he truly is: A mother hen of a man, always taking good care of whoever needs it and be damned to his own needs.

The usefulness of any read is what the reader needs from it at the time of the reading. I needed something to help me combat crippling wretchedness by reminding me that there is love, compassion, and commitment in the world. This story was exactly that for me. Is it Dostoevsky? No. I didn't want Litrachure and its many, many tedious foibles, as I needed to be convinced that the world has always been filled with better people than I am used to seeing on the news.

Success!

WHY IS THE GLOBAL ECONOMY LIKE THIS?, a damned good question too few seem to ask themselves

WHY IS THE GLOBAL ECONOMY LIKE THIS?
CORNELIS BAL
Partridge Publishing Singapore
$3.92 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: Have you ever wondered just how our current global economy came about—and how its laws and regulations rule and influence our lives?
In this commonsense discussion of world economics, author Cornelis Bal presents a brief exploration of these questions and offers suggestions for how we might change our economic system in order to improve our lives. His explanation draws a comparison between the laws of nature and the laws of economics, considering how the rapid development of technology in the last century has drastically affected how we work and live and these technological developments will continue to influence our lives beyond imagination in the very near future. Rather than presenting elaborate mathematical models to support his conclusions, he relies on straightforward language and observations that anyone might make. Bal explains that the present global economic system does not seem to have a sustainable future unless we make drastic changes, we will continue to experience increasing anarchy.

My Review: Super basic, entry-level discussion of a complex problem aimed at complete novices to the topic.

Although the economy is growing, the number of people and corporations involved in the money-generating process is shrinking. This means that the number of people depending on the people generating money will grow, leading to an imbalance.

See? We're talkin' basic-basics here. Most anyone reading my reviews will smirk and pass on, utterly uninterested and unmoved.

BUT!

Author Cornelis takes us on a whirlwind tour of the world as it is. The concepts are barely sketched in. The issues are skeletonized. The usefulness of the piece is to present barebones basics to the absolute novice to the topic.

The economic laws have been created by a relatively small number of people who had and have both the power and selfish interest to create the rules and regulations as we now know them. ... The first question I ask is this: why do we continue to accept current economic rules and regulations without question?

Do you begin to sense the reason I wanted to bring this to your attention? And, for the persons not of a progressive bent, the author offers this self-assessment: "I want you to know that I am not a socialist; I am a realist!", and to prove it, he goes on, "The design parameters of any new system must include greed and envy otherwise it is bound to fail." This, he asserts, is what sunk the "communist" experiment in the Soviet bloc. Since I agree with that assessment of the USSR's primary failure, I am willing to suggest an audience for this short, inexpensive piece.

Is your high-school kid or college freshman driving you bonkers about how awful everything is (like this is a newsflash to adults, but hey, we all start somewhere)? Give them this short, readily understood piece. Then they can go to bat with better questions. And really, isn't that all we can ask of each other? Ask better questions and find better answers, case by case and bit by bit?

SPRIG MUSLIN, Georgette Heyer's 1956 Regency romantic novel

SPRIG MUSLIN
GEORGETTE HEYER
Sourcebooks Casablanca
$9.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Finding so young and pretty a girl as Amanda wandering unattended, Sir Gareth Ludlow knows it is his duty as a man of honour to restore her to her family. But it is to prove no easy task for the Corinthian. His captive in spring muslin has more than her rapturous good looks and bandboxes to aid her - she is also possessed of a runaway imagination...

A typically enthralling historical novel, Sprig Muslin shows the skill which has kept Georgette Heyer a huge and devoted readership to this day.

This is an entry in the 1956 Club group of reviews.

My Review: I confess it true: I am such a noddycock that this is the first of the estimable Miss Heyer's trashy novels that I e'er did peruse. Dash it all, how was I to know she was a veritable caryatid of culture, a purveyoress of fine wordsmithing, an artiste?

Yeah, so she invented the Regency romance, or close enough to it. Yeah, she was an English homemaker. And by today's "so what did you smell like after you murdered those teenagers, Mr. Dahmer?" celebrity standards, she was a complete nonentity. Never gave an interview, never went on tour, never so much as blew a kiss to a crowd.

And still her legend lives on. I imagine the Regency period of English history would still be a giant snorefest for the youth of America if it were not for Miss Heyer's Regency-set romances. They spawned myriad imitatrixes to mine the rich seam, from the time she started out at age nineteen until this good day. And beyond, I suspect. She wrote well over 50 titles, she had a half-century career, she was a commercial powerhouse. She was a game-changer for the publishing industry. She was, in short, JRR Tolkien but female (and fun to read).

You won't spot historical inaccuracies in her books. You won't spot infelicities of style. You won't see violence or mayhem, though the odd lord does get shot or sliced with a sword.

What you will see is simple, direct, and graceful writing, not precious or cutesy-poo drivel. You will see implausible-but-consistent plotting. You will see clearly and concisely drawn characters, people one can believe really went to Almack's and faught in the Peninsular campaign and made their debuts to the ton. You will, if you climb down off your preconceived notions, get a rare treat...a book that's a pleasure to read and a disappointment to finish, but is just exactly the right length.

Yes yes yes, regressive social attitudes, emphasis on male privilege (even while the females are scheming to use the men to their own advantage, the minxes), society = Society and the Lower Orders in their place...if those givens are not to your taste, why are you reading a Regency-set romantic fiction? Still less one published in 1956. Really, don't. One isn't required to attend every fight to which one is invited.

That said I found the rising-forty hero falling in love with the seventeen-year-old heroine a bit rich for my blood, hence the not-quite-four-star rating. All of Heyer's romances are good, some are excellent; this is good(ish) and it's got that spark of wry wit that can, at times, become cruel in Heyer's hands. The Chicklaids, in this book, skate close to the snark line, uncomfortably so; it seems almost no thought was given to the way they're slotted into the plot to serve. But it's a cavil. Minor characters seldom get the fine brush. But Heyer, gifted quite beyond the ordinary, can and has done better, less lorgnette-goggling minor characters.

All that notwithstanding: Recommended. Most heartily. Damme if it's not.

WHY SAVE THE BANKERS?, a question I ask myself every time new economic disasters emanate from them

WHY SAVE THE BANKERS?: And Other Essays on Our Economic and Political Crisis 
THOMAS PIKETTY (tr. Seth Ackerman)
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
$15.99 trade paper, available now


Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Incisive commentary on the financial meltdown and its aftermath, from the author of the bestselling global phenomenon Capital in the Twenty-First Century 

THE DOCTOR'S DISCRETION, a still-rare example of transgender representation in romantic fiction

THE DOCTOR'S DISCRETION 

E.E. OTTOMAN 

Pronoun 

$3.99 Kindle original, available now

 Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: New York City, 1831.

Passion, medicine and a plan to break the law ...

When Doctor William Blackwood, a proper gentleman who prefers books to actual patients, meets retired Navy surgeon Doctor Augustus Hill, they find in each other not just companionship but the chance of pleasure--and perhaps even more. The desire between them is undeniable but their budding relationship is disrupted by the arrival of a mysterious patient at New York Hospital.

Mr. Moss has been accused of being born a woman but living his life as a man, an act that will see him committed to an asylum for the rest of his life. William and Augustus are determined to mount a rescue even if it means kidnapping him instead.

Their desperate plan sets William and Augustus against the hospital authorities, and the law. Soon they find themselves embroiled in New York's seedy underworld, mixed up with prostitutes, spies, and more than a lifetime's worth of secrets. When nothing is as it seems can they find something real in each other?

My Review: Transgender persons have been among us throughout time, just like lesbian or gay persons have. What is different now is that we have the vocabulary to identify, to label them; this is both a blessing and a curse. I know, from my own experience of growing up Other in a world (South Texas in the 1970s) and in a family of mostly unsupportive women, the incredible power of naming yourself: "I am gay. Not a faggot, not a queer. I am gay."

What, then, is one to do when a transgender person has the clawing need to name themself? How to find the courage and the model? For millennia, that wasn't on offer; there was no way to explain a transgender person to themself. With few exceptions, societies where the trans people came out and lived as they ought to have had the freedom to live were reviled, subjected to psychological and physical violence at even greater rates than the merely homosexual. Most of us who are cisgender but queer (and it took a long time for me to warm back up to that label, let me tell you) can, at a pinch and for a minute, hide it well enough to pass if trouble looms. Not so a man in women's clothing, or a woman trying to pass as a man.

This is becoming a thing of the past. Bodies are plastic; we are able to sculpt and mold them in many ways once impossible. We understand the endocrine basis of gender a great deal better than ever before. How we're failing the transgendered persons in our midst is less and less medical and more social, political. MANY folk feel they are being abused by being asked to refer to and address the trans community by the gendered pronoun of their identity, not their biology. These are usually also the people whose faces turn red and mouths spew hate when asked to wear masks to help keep everyone safe during a plague whose causal virus is *demonstrated* to be airborne.

Idiots, in other words; deeply ignorant and utterly unworthy persons without a shred of worth or value to add to society.

That being both self-evident and inarguable, the book I review here is one in which a transgender person is "discovered," arrested, and subjected to the full brunt of the hateful and misguided legal and medical regimes in place in the US during the 1830s. These truly are enlightened times, as much room for improvement as there remains; we should all be grateful we live in them as well as practice kaizen, the path of pride in accomplishment melded to continual striving for improvement.

Mr. Moss, the person in question, is lucky enough to be rescued by Dr. Augustus Hill, a gay Navy veteran without a hand due to combat injuries. Dr. Hill's maiming hasn't disabled him; he practices medicine at New York Hospital. He must, given his limitation, accept the other work that comes to him. For example, as we meet him, he is busily cataloging and organizing a collection of medical books and objects. With him in this task is Dr. William Blackwood, a trained physician of free African descent. The men meet in the book stacks, sparks fly, they begin what must be a clandestine relationship of great tenderness, passion, and intimacy.

So when Hill impulsively rescues Mr. Moss from the humiliations and horrors attendant on being shown to be a "transvestite," he is by no means sure Dr. Blackwood will assist him in arranging an escape. This is a romance, so we all know that he will; but the author effectively conveys the uncertainty of Hill's anguished waiting for Blackwood to decide.

In the end, the to-ing and fro-ing of this rescue-cum-escape is resolved a bit too neatly; the idea of their assistance to a wanted fugitive possibly rebounding on them is snipped at the same time. One can see the appeal of such a symmetrical bounce of the ball. It wasn't particularly satisfying to me.

What worked very well was the atmosphere, the world-building of sights and sounds and customs and coping skills. I was immersed, I was enfolded, and I was invested in the Happily Ever After that must follow such a lot of stress and battling of demons.

What gave me great pause was, in this deeply unenlightened passage in US history, the fearful recognition that this story could become a cautionary tale and not just a thumping good read if too many people, for whatever reason, do not get themselves up off their hindquarters and vote 45 and his fellow kakistocrats out of office on 3 November 2020.

THE PURSUIT OF..., an interracial gay love story between an English aristocrat and a Revolutionary War Black soldier

THE PURSUIT OF... 

COURTNEY MILAN (The Worth Saga #2.5) 

Self-published 

$2.99 Kindle edition, available now 

Rating: 4* of five 

The Publisher Says: What do a Black American soldier, invalided out at Yorktown, and a white British officer who deserted his post have in common? Quite a bit, actually.

• They attempted to kill each other the first time they met. 

• They're liable to try again at some point in the five-hundred mile journey that they're inexplicably sharing. 

• They are not falling in love with each other. 

• They are not falling in love with each other. 

• They are… Oh, no. 

The Pursuit Of… is about a love affair between two men and the Declaration of Independence. It’s a novella of around 38,000 words. 

My Review: Courtney Milan has caused waves in the small, tightly-knit world of romantic fiction writers. Her relentless pursuit of a plagiarist, her #MeToo advocacy and personal, public acknowledgment of its relevance to her, and her battering down the racist gates kept within the Romance Writers of America, all conspire to make it close to inevitable that she would write this novella of men in love across multiple cultural barriers. In keeping with the norms of the genre, they live Happily Ever After...a thing few of us meatspace folk ever manage, but do we love to read about people who do! 

Milan clerked for Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and Justice Anthony Kennedy, as well as on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal. Did you imagine that, with that kind of résumé, she would shy away from fighting the battle of queer representation in a field where it's been sorely lacking? It's true she isn't an #OwnVoices writer, but she is and always was an ally of the QUILTBAG community. So here she is, using her storytelling and her best-selling author star power, to make this novella of an English aristocrat and a freed Black Revolutionary soldier happen. 

Lord Henry's long-tongued prattle gets him into boatloads of trouble, from before we meet him to the worst possible moment: he's a British aristocrat behind enemy lines, a man's been murdered, and he's in the wrongest place possible. 

The more loquacious...possibly he's better described as "an oyster"...John, a Black freedman in the Rhode Island Regiment (real thing, Author Milan explains in her Author's Note), also in the wrong place at the wrong time, finds himself saddled with a redheaded enemy chatterbox for a five-hundred-mile WALK home to Rhode Island! 

John trusts no white people (one finds it hard to blame him) and Henry, emotionally abused child of parents who ignored him, never met a stranger. Along this long walk they acquire and lose many things, including a cheese of truly repellent odor, flavor, and existence. This misbegotten milk product, ever riper and less appealing to the senses, grows more rank as Henry talks more and more sweetly, saving the men from trouble, managing to open his ever-more exasperated oyster's mind and heart, and generally making himself necessary to John's world. 

For his own part, Henry's decided that John is everything he wants in life: quiet, proud, honorable, and deeply focused on the success of the Revolution that earned him his freedom. Henry needs to return home to England or risk being shot as a spy. John needs to reconnect with his own family. Parting is most definitely not sweet, but a great sorrow to them both; any 18th-century parting, let alone one that involved an ocean and warring nations, was as likely as not to be permanent. 

It's a romance! You already now that's not The End. But the way they come back together was rushed, since this is a novella. I forgave it for that reason, and for the better reason that the men didn't compromise so much as accommodate each other's realities. It feels very good when people of true hearts come together, which is why romances exist at all. That this one features a color divide, a Revolution of one's country against the other's, and an inventive solution to the societal disapproval of gayness issue, all harmonized to make this a pleasurable read for me. 

It is sex-free, so the eww-ick homophobes may enter this world without that sandbar awaiting them. At all. Ever. For $3, and with The Plague running us all through our TBRs at lightning speed, bookhorn this one in and see what the fuss is about.

CHRYSLER'S TURBINE CAR, a history of squandered opportunities to reduce carbon emissions

CHRYSLER'S TURBINE CAR: The Rise and Fall of Detroit's Coolest Creation 

STEVE LEHTO 

Chicago Review Press 

$9.99 ebook editions, available now 

 Rating: 3.5* of five 

  The Publisher Says: The fascinating story of an almost-forgotten automotive phenomenon 

 In 1964, Chrysler gave the world a glimpse of the future. They built a fleet of turbine cars—automobiles with jet engines—and loaned them out to members of the public. 

The fleet logged over a million miles; the exercise was a raging success. These turbine engines would run on any flammable liquid—tequila, heating oil, Chanel #5, diesel, alcohol, kerosene. If the cars had been mass produced, we might have cars today that do not require petroleum-derived fuels. The engine was also much simpler than the piston engine—it contained one-fifth the number of moving parts and required much less maintenance. The cars had no radiators or fan belts and never needed oil changes. 

 Yet Chrysler crushed and burned most of the cars two years later; the jet car's brief glory was over. Where did it all go wrong? Controversy still follows the program, and questions about how and why it was killed have never been satisfactorily answered. 

 Steve Lehto has interviewed all the surviving members of the turbine car program--from the metallurgist who created the exotic metals for the interior of the engine to the test driver who drove it at Chrysler’s proving grounds for days on end. Lehto takes these first-hand accounts and weaves them into a great story about the coolest car Detroit ever produced. 

I BORROWED THIS BOOK FROM MY LOCAL LIBRARY. SUPPORT YOUR LIBRARY, FOLKS! 

 My Review: A short, concise history of the very thing the title declares: The coolest creation ever to come out of Detroit!

Oh wow! Oh cool! Oh my GOD why didn't they make this?!

Well, after reading this book, I know why: It was too far ahead of its time, and when its time came, the company was on the ropes. 

The author spoke to everyone he could find still living who participated in the most amazing PR campaign of all time: Chrysler made 50 of these babies and, over the course of 1964-1966, lent them out to 203 drivers for 90 days apiece. The 50 cars racked up over 1 million miles of travel, and had less than 1% downtime in all of that driving. Reliability was clearly not a huge issue. But what *was* a huge issue was the way the turbines needed to be manufactured, basically each one by hand. There was, in that pre-computer-control era, no way to automate the process of making the engine parts. 

But then the what-if machine kicks in: The cars didn't need to use gasoline, or even petroleum products...they ran one car on tequila, and another on peanut oil. Had manufacture gone ahead, perhaps advances in technology would've speeded up computer-aided design and production. This kind of technology could've reduced carbon emissions....

Imagine a world where the car smells like a deep fryer and sounds like a jet, leaving water as its exhaust. Lost chances. The very source of all good fiction. *turns on private bubble machine*