ClimbingSky

Why Baseball, Books, and the Grateful Dead matter

BOOK REVIEWS

  • THROWBACK THURSDAY: “In Dubious Battle” by John Steinbeck

    Throwback Thursdays” at ClimbingSky feature posts I wrote over a 15 year period for various blogs. This was first posted on April 30, 2020. On the edge of Butte, Montana, in the Mountain View Cemetery, there is a gravestone for labor organizer/martyr Frank Little. On August 1, 1917, he was pulled from a boarding house Read more

  • Hardboiled Coffee Manners

    I was about to apologize for having disturbed him in the middle of the night, then decided it would be better to play it tough. Big John had said I had “manners.” A certain amount of manners would be okay. But guys just didn’t come real polite in the heavy rackets and courtesy could be Read more

  • FRIDAY FOOD FOR THOUGHT: P.D. James on The Art of Short Stories

    The scope of the short story is inevitably restricted and this means it is most effective when it deals with a single incident or one dominant idea. It is the originality and strength of this idea which largely determines the success of the story. Although it is far less complex in structure than a novel, Read more

  • THROWBACK THURSDAY: “Cannery Row” by John Steinbeck

    Throwback Thursdays” at ClimbingSky feature posts I wrote over a 15 year period for various blogs. This was first posted on April 26, 2020. When I was in 8th and 9th grade (50 years ago now!) I read a lot of John Steinbeck. Everything the small Broadwater County Library had. The library. which was cramped Read more

  • Hardboiled Coffee On the House

    “You want a cup of coffee?” “I wouldn’t mind.” Phoebe returned to the urns and drew a cup and brought it back. Purvy watched her broad hips going and coming under the white uniform, but he didn’t get the pleasure out of it that most fellows would have got. He stuck his nose into the Read more

  • FRIDAY FOOD FOR THOUGHT: Stephen Jones on Silence

    During my first few visits [to the Sand Hills of Nebraska] I experienced a persistent ringing in the ears as my hearing adjusted to the absence of background noise-the roar of cars, airplanes, and machinery that has become a subliminal part of our daily lives. – Jones, Stephen R.. The Last Prairie: A Sandhills Journal. Read more

  • Hardboiled Coffee Shock

    In the kitchen, she found the note on the table and read it several times, as if it were in code and had to be deciphered. Finally, she left it where she had found it and went outside. She was gone a long rime. When she came back to the kitchen, she read the note Read more

  • Hardboiled Coffee & Steak

    I didn’t get out of town the next day until ten o’clock. It was three hundred fifty miles by highway to Amity. In my old clunker, allowing time for a couple of stops, I did well to average forty miles an hour. Figure it for yourself. It was almost exactly eight and a half hours Read more

  • SHORT STORY REVIEW: “The Girl Who Loved Graveyards”by P.D. James

    P.D. James (1920-2014) had to leave school at the age of 16 to take care of younger siblings and because her father did not believe that women needed higher education. Anyone who has ever read P.D. James knows that this early departure from formal education does not appear to have hampered her ability to become Read more

  • THROWBACK THURSDAY: Reviewing Ross Macdonald

    Throwback Thursdays” at ClimbingSky feature posts I wrote over 15 year period for various blogs. This was first posted on April 23, 2014 “(The) American private eye, immortalized by Hammett, refined by Chandler, brought to its zenith by Macdonald” — New York Times Book Review “… the Archer books, the finest series of detective novels ever Read more