FFB - The Shadow-Line

Joseph Conrad’s short novel, The Shadow-Line, is roughly the same length as his classic Heart of Darkness. Written in 1915, serialised in 1916, it was published in book form in 1917. The book is semi-autobiographical, echoing his first command some 27 years earlier. Its original title was indeed First Command. His son Borys was fighting in the First World War and Conrad comments, ‘It seems almost criminal levity to talk at this time of books, stories, publication’ and later added, ‘Reality as usual beats fiction out of sight’. He insisted that The Shadow-Line be published by itself, ‘because I did not like the idea of its being associated with fiction in a volume of short stories.’

The unnamed narrator is looking back on his youth, when a seaman in the Far East on a steam ship. He quits his position, feeling he needed something more, though he didn’t know what. Intent on returning to England, he is waylaid by the offer of his first command and jumps at the chance of becoming the captain of a sailing vessel. He goes to Bangkok to take command and immediately hits problems – his first mate Burns contracts a serious illness, and in the man’s lucid moments reveals that the previous captain lost his mind, cursing ship and crew before he died. Alarmingly, Burns believes he is possessed by the demon of the dead skipper. The young captain has no option but to set sail to meet his deadline but he is not at sea long before he learns that the majority of his crew have malaria. At about the same time, the wind drops and the ship is becalmed in the very waters where his predecessor was buried at sea. Only the young captain, the demented Burns and the cook, Ransome, who suffers from a dicky ticker, evade the onset of malaria. The youth’s mettle is sorely tested, but thanks to his innate humanity, gaining the respect and aid of his crew, he triumphs, appreciating that no man is able to stand alone.

At the outset, the story meanders, not going particularly anywhere. The young narrator is perceived as a competent seaman (highly thought of by his ex-Captain), but rudderless. ‘There was nothing original, nothing new, startling, informing to expect from the world: no opportunities to find out something about oneself, no wisdom to acquire, no fun to enjoy. Everything was stupid and overrated…’(p58) He is of sound character and mind, however, the youth observing, ‘… it flashed upon me that high professional reputation was not necessarily a guarantee of sound mind. It occurred to me then that I didn’t know in what soundness of mind exactly consisted, and what a delicate and, upon the whole, unimportant matter it was…’

As Conrad observed a long time before writing this book, ‘One always thinks oneself important at twenty. The fact is, however, that one only becomes useful when one realises the full extent of the insignificance of the individual in the arrangement of the universe.’(1892). He conveys this in the character of the narrator.

Of course the young captain gets his wish, and at the end of his two-week ordeal at sea he has gained wisdom and learned something about himself.

Conrad’s reminiscences about his time at sea inject realism into the story: ‘There is something touching about a ship coming in from sea and folding her white wings for a rest.’ (p64)

Deftly, he creates atmosphere: ‘The sparkle of the sea filled my eyes. It was gorgeous and barren, monotonous and without hope under the empty curve of the sky. The sails hung motionless and slack, the very folds of their sagging surfaces moved no more than carved granite… For a long, long time I faced an empty world, steeped in an infinity of silence, through which the sunshine poured and flowed for some mysterious purpose.’ (p113)

And when a storm approached: ‘The immobility of all things was perfect. If the air had turned black, the sea for all I knew might have turned solid. It was no good looking in any direction, watching for any sign, speculating upon the nearness of the moment. When the time came the blackness would overwhelm silently the bit of starlight falling upon the ship, and the end of all things would come without a sigh, stir, or murmur of any kind, and all our hearts would cease to beat, like run-down clocks.’ (p126)

The shadow-line of the title is a zone of transition between two states of being, youthfulness and maturity – the shadow-line that the young captain crosses.

This Penguin edition (1986) contains about 40 pages of introduction and notes (some of the latter mainly a glossary of nautical terms).

***

Note: One quotation from the book that could be applied to budding authors is:

 ‘All roads are long that lead to one’s heart’s desire.’ (p75) The moral is, persevere...

FFB - Spectrum of a Forgotten Sun

Fifteenth in E.C. Tubb’s ‘Dumarest Saga’ is a splendid fast-paced science fiction novel.

Earl Dumarest covers a lot of ground – and space – in this one! Fighting as a mercenary on the planet Hoghan, he ends up on the losing side and is captured. However, his abilities are recognised and he is offered a way off the planet, if he can assist in a little bit of interplanetary smuggling. And one of the main looters is the Lady Dephine (not Delphine as shown in the blurb and on Amazon). Some sci-fi writers can’t write good female characters; Tubb can: ‘Life alone is never enough. Always there is more, for unless there is, we are no better than beasts in a field. Our senses were given us to use; our ambitions to be fulfilled. How well you understand, Earl.’

The pace never lets up: there’s betrayal, a deadly plague on the spaceship, landfall on Emijar, a planet controlled by strict codes of conduct where transgressors can expect to be challenged to fight to the death, and here too are the olcept, nasty critters that are hunted for trophies and attaining manhood. The dead are mummified and deified, though it’s no comfort to them: ‘Time enough for the chemicals to penetrate the tissue, to harden soft fibres and dissolve points of potential corruption. To seal the flesh in a film of plastic, perhaps, or to petrify it, to protect the body against the ravages of time. To produce monuments to the dead.’

And there’s a grand passion between Dephine and Earl. Love: ‘Sweetness and pain, the ineffable joy of affection and the haunting fear of loss. The vulnerability of total surrender. The willing discarding of all defences and the embracing of the unknown…’

Not forgetting another possible clue to the whereabouts of the long-lost planet Earth. ‘Stowing away as a boy… The captain allowed him to work his passage and kept him aboard until he died. When alone, the boy had moved on, ship after ship, world after world, always deeper and deeper towards the heart of the galaxy. To regions where even the very name of Earth had become a legend.’

And the story has a neat twist at the end, too.

As always, Tubb provides us with glimmers of prose that is almost poetry: ‘Her faith had been strong and she had died happy. Now she would drift for eternity or be drawn by gravitational attraction into a sun and disintegrate in a final puff of glory. A minute flame which would, perhaps, warm some future flower, grace some unknown sky.’ And then we’re brought down severely with: ‘Fanciful imagery which had no place in a ship which had become a living tomb.’

And Dumarest’s philosophy, usually within a single paragraph, helps paint a picture of the man: ‘… No human being, no matter how insignificant, can safely be demeaned. Always there is present the danger of restraints snapping, of self-control giving way beneath the impact of one insult too many. Of pride and the need to be an individual bursting out in a tide of relentless fury.’

 
Over the years commentators have wondered why the saga has never been taken up as a TV series. Particularly these days; the CGI wizards could do a great job. Perhaps it’s because TV series have moved away from the lone protagonist – now it seems a series involves a number of regular characters, it’s an ensemble piece, rather than a one-man show with guests.

FFB - Jack of Swords

Jack of Swords (1976) is the fourteenth in the Dumarest saga by E.C. Tubb. The Dumarest series comprises 33 books, each story a self-contained adventure. However, throughout the series the protagonist Earl Dumarest searches for clues to the location of his home world, Earth. The series is set in a far future. By the time of the first adventure The Winds of Gath (1967) Dumarest has traveled so long and so far that he does not know how to return to his home planet and indeed no-one has ever heard of it, other than as a myth or legend.

It seems likely that Earth's location has been deliberately concealed. The Cyclan, an organization of humans surgically altered to be emotionless, seem intent on stopping him from finding Earth. They’re also keen to retrieve a scientific discovery that Dumarest possesses, stolen from them and passed to him by a dying thief, which would vastly increase their already considerable power.

‘At the heart of the web glowed the mass of Central Intelligence, the heart of the Cyclan. Buried deep beneath miles of rock on a lonely world, the massed brains absorbed knowledge as a sponge sucked water… His brain, removed, would join the others, hooked in a unified whole, all working to a common end: the complete and absolute control of the entire galaxy. The elimination of waste and the direction of effort so that every man and every world would become the parts of a universal machine.’

Dumarest has turned up on Teralde, an unwelcoming planet. Here, he is recruited on a quest for a nebulous ghost world. It may even hold the key to his search for Earth. He joins a motley crew and eventually they find what they seek, in more ways than one.

Tubb’s inventiveness never seems to flag, which is remarkable, considering his output.

 

And his descriptions are spare yet telling:

‘“Tell me,” [he said.] For her good, not his, a catharsis to ease her inner torment. Hurtful memories, nursed, could fester and gain a false eminence. It was better she should speak and, until she did, he was powerless to say or do anything which could help.’

‘His face was a combination of disaster, the nose squashed, eyebrows scarred, the lobe of one ear missing. An ugly man with the appearance of a brutal clown but whose hands held magic when it came to dealing with machines.’

Edwin Charles Tubb died in 2010, aged 90. He was a British writer of science fiction, fantasy and western books - writing over 140 novels and 230 short stories and novellas. He used 58 pen names over five decades of writing.

FFB - Night Without End

In 1959, when Alistair Maclean published Night Without End, his fifth novel, he was on the crest of a wave of popularity. Surprisingly, perhaps, he switched from third-person narrative to first, and continued using this point of view for the next five novels.

It begins sedately enough, a long paragraph that introduces us to the almost superhuman Jackstraw, Nils Nielsen, an Inuit, while also imparting a slice of knowledge about faking fossils for collectors. Then all hell is let loose, as a BOAC airliner crashes near the scientific research base in the arctic wastes of Greenland.

The narrator is Dr Peter Mason.  

Mason is your typical Maclean hero, laconic, brave, and possessing a dry sense of humour. He and a fellow researcher set out to determine if there are any survivors from the crash.

 

They manage to bring back six men and four women: Reverend Joseph Smallwood, retired actress Marie LeGarde, Nick Corazzini, a businessman, Solly Levin, boxing coach, Johnny Zagero, boxer, Helene Fleming, the personal maid of London socialite, Mrs Dansby-Gregg, Theodore Mahler, Senator Hoffman Brewster, and Margaret Ross, air-stewardess. Classic Maclean, throwing together an assortment of individuals, each with some submerged history.

Not everyone is who they appear, of course.

 

Add the usual ingredients, murder, sabotage, suspicions, and imminent threat, combined with the unforgiving cold of the arctic, and you have a good page-turning yarn that still stands up very well even after fifty-six years.

FFB - Steel Gods

Scott Grønmark has written (as Nick Sharman, nothing to do with author Mark Timlin’s fictional character) books such as The Cats, The Surrogate, Switch and Next. Steel Gods (1990), under his real name, was his last novel to be published and it isn’t strictly horror, unlike its predecessors. It’s more a blend of horror-sci-fi thriller. It’s a bit like Dennis Wheatley without the verbiage, fast-paced, unputdownable, with plenty of plot-twists to keep the pages turning.

David Cauley is the father of Anna, whose unusual powers and talents make her the target of two bitterly opposed factions. The realisation that there are people with remarkable earth-shaking powers unfolds gradually for David and the reader: people who shaped – and still shape – the world, for good or ill, who thirsted – and still thirst – for power, for dominion over lesser mortals: Gods, steely gods pitched against each other, seemingly heedless of who they hurt in their titanic struggle. You can believe the gods were (or are) like these!

Among those gods is James Lord, an American destined for the White House – if he can survive the conniving faction led by the sinister Dragon Man, Spear. The brooding menace of Spear permeates the pages, his presence is felt even when he is pages away from the text you’re reading. The villain’s two henchmen are almost as reprehensible, evil ignorant killers. Certain scenes may not be for the squeamish, but Grønmark has created characters about whom you care.

Some of the plot twists may seem inevitable and can be out-guessed, but you will still carry on reading because you care about the people: the twists and turns are always logical, hardly ever contrived or strained.

Good value, a good chilling read. It would probably make an edge-of-seat movie.

The blurb tells us that Grønmark is a ‘chilling new talent’ – and so he was (though he’d produced eight horror novels under a different name!). A pity that he chose not to write any novel since.

***

Scott Grønmark is a retired broadcaster, writer, and online and interactive TV exec who lives in a pleasant part of West London with his wife and son.

He was born in Norway and spent the first six years of his life there, mainly on Air Force bases. After his family moved to London he attended King's College School in Wimbledon, and then read Philosophy at Cambridge.

His first job was with the publisher, Academic Press, in Camden Town. He  swiftly moved to New English Library in Holborn - a far racier proposition. He wrote some genre novels for them in his spare time, and after four years had enough saved to become a full-time writer. He did that for seven years, publishing nine novels in all.

 
Eventually, he ran out of ideas and, thanks to a friend, got a job with BBC Radio 2's John Dunn Show, which led to a research job with BBC TV’s Nine O'Clock News, where he ended up as a producer. He spent ten years with BBC News & Current Affairs, finishing as the editor of a live BBC2 political talk show, Midnight Hour.

The above bio is taken from his blog: http://scottgronmark.blogspot.com.es/p/biography.html

 

 

FFB - A Hostile Place

Some writers just command attention, their writing steeped in authority for the period or locale and this is the case for John Fullerton’s story about Afghanistan after the downfall of the Taliban. Fullerton knows what he’s writing about because he’s been there, reporting for Reuters from both Pakistan and Afghanistan. Indeed, Fullerton’s book The Soviet Occupation of Afghanistan (1984) was cited in Ken Follett’s bibliography for his own Afghan adventure Lie Down with Lions (1985).

Fullerton’s style is reminiscent of Hammond Innes as the first person narrative suggests he’s been there and even done much that the hero Thomas Morgan relates. And Morgan is tough, a mercenary with links to MI6 and the tense fast-paced denouement has echoes of the sadly missed Adam Hall’s super-spy Quiller. On this outing alone, Fullerton could easily take on the Quiller mantle.

With a broken marriage, two children and an overdraft, Morgan, the former SAS soldier, sometime spy and occasional thief has to bargain for his freedom with the cold fish government man Quilty. One last job, to ambush the escaping Osama bin Laden and assassinate him in Afghanistan – and share the 25-million dollar reward.

Betrayed by his one-time associate Abdur Rahman, Morgan now finds he has to work with him as he’s the only one who seems to know the whereabouts of bin Laden. Morgan’s also helped by his case officer, Mathilde, his former lover.

Steeped in gun lore, trade-craft and an intimate knowledge of the land and its people, this is a riveting above-average thriller. Throughout, the story is peppered with little insider snippets to lend authenticity. ‘She pointed at me, using her thumb, because to point a finger directly at someone is considered downright rude, as it is in the Arab world.’ Reminds you of those HSBC adverts...

Afghanistan has always been a dangerous place, even when flower-power travellers went on the hippy trail to find enlightenment and drugs. It’s just moreso now. ‘This foreigner did not know her people. Did not know their cruelty, how easily and thoughtlessly, after twenty-four years of war, they could snuff out a life.’ Life is cheap here, but here too Morgan undergoes an epiphany when meeting the mysterious woman Amarayn.

It’s very satisfying to find a thriller writer who’s new to you, someone who engages you with the characters and the storyline, someone you can trust to get things right. Fullerton has published three other fiction books, The Monkey House (1996) and This Green Land (previously titled Give Me Death, 2004) and White Boys Don’t Cry (2007).

 

 

 

 

FFB - Wild Fire

My Friday's forgotten book is Wild Fire by Nelson Demille is the fourth Detective John Corey thriller, following on from Night Fall (2004). I’ve read and enjoyed all Demille’s John Corey thrillers up to his 5^th (see breakdown below; I've got his 7th on order now). They’re great because Corey’s wisecracking persona is so believable. Yes, he’s a bit coarse, big-headed and pig-headed, but he also laughs at himself and the human condition. He has immense courage and is a friend for life. When he got married to FBI agent Kate Mayfield, they became a match made in heaven. This pair just bounce off each other and are clearly in love, despite Corey’s many faults. Sometimes, Kate is a stabilising influence on John; but not nearly so much since 9/11.

‘Wild Fire’ appears to be a secret codename for a government response to a terrorist nuclear attack. That’s devastating enough. Yet somebody outside government knows about it…

When Corey’s pal is sent on a routine task to investigate the Custer Hill Club – a secret society of powerful men, the guy ends up dead: an unfortunate shooting accident. But Corey takes the death personally. As he should, since he was the first choice for the job. Why did his pal die? Taking along his wife, Corey starts his own investigation. As it’s in the first person, we’re pretty sure Corey will survive, but we can’t help but be fearful for his wife, brave as she is. The ending is very tense indeed.

Along the way there are many laugh-aloud moments, which I’ve come to expect of a Corey book; however, there are plenty of chilling scenes, with the odd dose of pathos and compassion thrown in. If you haven’t read a John Corey book, the best place to start is with Plum Island, where he first meets Kate. But any of them are worth the price – and become addictive reading if you can get past the ripe language.

The John Corey thrillers in sequence:

1. Plum Island (1997)
2. The Lion's Game (2000)
3. Night Fall (2004)
4. Wild Fire (2006)
5. The Lion (2010), direct sequel to The Lion's Game
6. The Book Case (2011) – Kindle Single, 54pp short story
7. The Panther (2012)

 

FFB - The Unknown Soldier

This was published in 2005 and was Gerald Seymour’s twenty-second thriller and it’s up there with his best, though my favourite is still Archangel, a moving story about a man’s doomed yet glorious fight against the authorities in a Russian Gulag. 

As ever, Seymour was up-to-date with the world’s headlines at the time of writing.  The story begins in Afghanistan while various followers of Al Qaeda are being ‘mopped-up’. 

There’s an interesting mix of characters whose lives are going to converge - and every one of them is believable, as are the subordinate characters, whether Arab, Israeli or American; a sure sign of thriller-writing of the highest order.

Caleb seems to have denied any past beyond two years ago.  He survives an American ambush and is shipped off to Guantanamo Bay for processing; yet he doesn’t seem to be a terrorist and after many months of interrogation he’s returned to Afghanistan ...

Marty and Lizzy-Jo are two young Agency whizz-kids who fly the unmanned spy-planes, the Predators; they’re being shipped out to Saudi Arabia.

Here already is Beth Jenkins, a school-teacher and amateur meteorologist and Bart, a doctor with a distinctly shady past, who happens to be one of several spies garnering any titbits for Eddie Wroughton, the Saudi MI6 man.

Back in London is Lovejoy, an old spy, who sits through briefings to understand the psychology of today’s terrorists: the men Al Qaeda want to recruit for their dirty work are not loners, they want men who are tough, persistent, determined and bright.

Jed Dietrich is an interrogator in Guantanamo; while he was on vacation, Agency know-alls let Caleb go.  On his return, he managed to unmask Caleb as a liar - too late, the man had beaten them all... 

The manhunt was on for someone wily enough to bide his time and beat the interrogators.  Someone Al Qaeda would like to use, probably as a mule to deliver a lethal package to any city in the West...

‘The explosion would cause thirty injured and three deaths, but unseen in the air heated by the detonation and moved on the wind - particles of caesium chloride...’  The fear of a dirty bomb.  Panic would ensue.  And the creation of panic is the terrorist’s principal aim.

Inner cities would be abandoned.  ‘The panic caused would initiate a new Dark Age.’

The manhunt leads to the Empty Quarter - sand dunes and shallow mountains that cover a quarter of a million square miles of emptiness.  And through the fire of the sun’s unrelenting heat is a caravan with Caleb getting nearer to Al Qaeda and an appointment with immortal fame.

Unless he can be stopped.  Thoroughly researched, Caleb’s journey becomes your journey and you can’t help rooting for this brave young man who seems determined to blot out pain and other emotions just to reach his goal. 

FFB - The Man Who Drew Tomorrow

This large-format colourful book (published in 1986) is sub-titled ‘How Frank Hampson created Dan Dare, the world’s best comic strip’. Obviously, some purist comic collectors may argue over the word ‘best’, but there’s no denying that Frank Hampson exhibited a remarkable flair for invention and draughtsmanship, with incredible detail and colour in a period when post-war austerity still held sway (1950).

Dan Dare appeared on the front page of the

British comic Eagle on 14 April 1950.

In retrospect, Frank rationalised his creation of the famous pilot of the future: ‘I felt the prognostications about technology were too gloomy. Attitudes were too pessimistic, with The Bomb, the Cold War and rationing in the forefront of everyone’s mind. I wanted to give hope for the future, to show that rockets and science in general could reveal new worlds, new opportunities. I was sure that space travel would be a reality… Dan was the man I always wanted to be; Digby, his batman, was the man I saw myself as…’

In the early days, the Dan Dare strip was sent to Arthur C. Clarke to check that the sci-fi details were believable, but this arrangement lapsed when Clarke pointed out that the art studio was wasting its money on getting him to check it, the details were always authentic – so much so that an aeronautics engineer for RAF Farnborough asked for source material to help in the designs then of a space-suit!

From the beginning when the Reverend Marcus Morris approached Frank with the idea for a revolutionary boys’ comic of the highest calibre, Frank was inflamed with the ideals set. It was to have a morally uplifting tone, Christian in outlook, educational, and with artwork of superior craftsmanship. He set up a studio and hired associates and together with his father, Pop, Frank created Dan Dare.

A bust of Dan Dare, Southport, England

Almost every frame of the strip was sketched in rough first by Frank – he also wrote the storyline – and then photographs were taken of various team members to act as models for the finished strip drawings (Joan Porter, Greta Tomlinson, Robert Hampson, Harold Johns, Don Harley, Peter Hampson, and Eric Eden - Harley and Eden with Keith Watson were also artists on the strip). Most of the team members commented that even Frank’s rough sketches were good enough to be the finished article, but Frank was a perfectionist and this attitude often entailed the team working into the early hours of the morning to finish the strip: eight people to produce two pages of artwork may seem extravagant, but time has vindicated the approach – Frank was voted the best post-war writer and artist of strip cartoons in 1975 by an international jury of his peers.

This was in fact a long-overdue accolade, for prior to this he spent virtually fourteen years in the wilderness hiding from the fans that pursued him and suffering from a series of debilitating illnesses. He hid because he was deprived of the copyright to Dan Dare, his creation. Under the terms of his contract he was not allowed to draw Dan Dare after leaving. After completing the remarkable strip about Jesus, The Road to Courage in 1961, Frank left Eagle never to return.

My drawing, 1986

Eagle lasted from April 1950 until April 1969, 991 issues. It was reborn in 1982, though a pale reflection of itself, yet survived some 500 issues before its demise in 1994. Having just turned sixty in 1979, Frank was presented with his Open University BA, something he did to fill in the empty hours, though the studying of art was a lifetime love too. In July 1985, at the young age of sixty-six, he died.

Crompton’s book is very well illustrated, using pages from the old Eagles and studio photographs and sketches, plus glimpses of Hampson strips that were n ever taken up by Fleet Street. Dan Dare was a team effort, but the driving force was undoubtedly Frank Hampson. His treatment by Fleet Street, its accountants and editors, seems tragic, even if his personality and work methods didn’t suit them. This book, even now, is a must for anyone who remembers Eagle with a fond glint in the eye; it is useful to art students and comic enthusiasts alike, and is invaluable as an object lesson in the dangers of signing away copyright.

[Case in point: Jerry Siegel in 1975 launched a public-relations campaign to protest DC Comics’ treatment of Joe Shuster and himself, as in the early years they’d signed away their rights to Superman. Ultimately, Warner Communications, DC’s parent company, awarded Siegel and Shuster $20,000 a year each for the rest of their lives and guaranteed that all comics, TV episodes, films, and, later, video games starring Superman would be required to carry the credit that Superman was ‘created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’. The first issue with the restored credit was Superman #302 (August 1976)].

 

 

FFB - PORTENT

Now we have some experts telling us that in a matter of decades most of Earth will be uninhabitable due to man-made global warming – unless we act soon. I suspect the earth might throw a proverbial spanner in those predictions… Even so, this Friday Forgotten Book may be considered timely. Published in 1992, Portent is one of the late great James Herbert’s best.

The cover warns that ‘The world will never be the same again.’ The story begins with newspaper clippings of penguins committing mass suicide in 1990, then in the next two dozen pages ranges to the near future, to the Great Barrier Reef, the Gulf of Mexico, and British Columbia, where we witness the catastrophic demise of some interesting characters; it’s as though the world’s gone mad, the weather and tectonic systems in concert with the appearance of eerie bright lights, are causing untold devastation, swamping islands, killing thousands of people.

One survivor from an earlier disaster, Rivers, a climatologist, is summoned to the home of a strange family; here, he meets Diane, her two mysterious adopted children and the academic who believes the world has had enough with the depredations of mankind and is fighting back…

James Herbert, R.I.P.

Portent is a superior disaster novel, and maintains a tense suspenseful pace throughout. The vignettes are well researched – some of the disasters recognisably extrapolated from recent events (1990s) – and divulge a great deal of interesting detail. The many characters we encounter from numerous countries are believable and evoke sympathy. The action and disaster sequences are graphic but not gratuitous, credible and, because of that, quite horrifying. The various disasters are portents: auguries of the death-throes of a planet? Ultimately, the book is about good and evil, in all their guises. A Green plea which deserves to be heard – and read. Highly recommended.

[Note to politicians – just don’t use this to try to make us feel guilty and tax us even more!]