This is a thoughtful and well done translation of the second edition of Pinel’s treatise, which is generally known in English as the Treatise on Insanity. The translators note that Daniel Davis’ 1806 translation of the book’s first edition was poorly done, and that the second, expanded edition was never translated into English until this edition was published in 2008.

The translators include an introduction describing how they translated certain terms from the French, and why they chose the words they did. This helps the reader understand nuance and avoid misunderstanding, and it shows how seriously the translators took their job.

John and Rae Ingram are on their honeymoon, sailing across the Pacific towards Tahiti in their private ketch, Saracen. Stuck for days in dead calm, twelve hundred miles from land, they spy another craft, Orpheus, listing on the horizon. John Ingram, an experienced sailor, can tell by the sluggish way Orpheus rights itself in the rolling swell that she has taken on water. He fires up Saracen’s auxiliary engine and heads toward the other boat to see if anyone needs help.

Before he gets there, he encounters a young man rowing furiously toward him with all his strengh. When Hughie Warriner reaches the Saracen, Ingram and his wife pull the young man aboard. He appears to be in shock, as if fleeing some terror.

A good book leaves you with lots of questions. This book left me with three: 1) Why was it written? 2) Who would want to read it? And 3) Why was it included in The Library of America’s Classic Crime Novels of the 1960’s?

My best guess regarding number three is that the editors wanted to preserve it as a cultural artifact, like something an archeologist found in a dig that gives us insight into the mindset of an ancient civilization. It says, Yes, this is what they read back then, and then leaves us to puzzle over what life must have been like for them and what it might have been like to live in such a world.

Fredric Brown’s 1962 crime novel, The Murderers, takes place in Los Angeles around 1960. Willy Griff, a twenty-seven year old struggling actor, lives in the basement of a boarding house known as the Zoo. Griff and his friend Charlie, who lives upstairs, eke out a living with bit parts on TV and in film, plus an occasional television commercial.

The other inmates of the house, as Griff calls them, are mostly beatniks and misfits who have no interest in making a traditional living. They drink, play music, read bad poetry aloud, have sex and generally live the kind of carefree, bohemian life that the squares of the suburbs would never approve of.

Meredith Angwin’s Shorting the Grid primarily covers what the author calls “the policy grid.” As opposed to “the power grid,” which is a physical entity delivering electricity from generation facilities through transmission and distribution infrastructure, the policy grid refers to the collection of organizations that regulate the production and distribution of electricity. These include the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), Regional Transmission Organizations (RTOs), state utility regulators, and state and federal legislatures.

These regulations, layered one on top of the other, often work at cross purposes to defeat the goals they’re supposed to promote. Angwin gives a prime example early in the book.

Black Rednecks and White Liberals is a collection of six essays by American economist and social philosopher Thomas Sowell. Sowell is a traditional conservative in that he views moral character, cultural values, and individual habits as the primary determinants of one’s fate in society. He is sharply critical of the liberal notion that group identity and inter-group social dynamics primarily determine one’s fate.

Each of the six essays refutes, with varying success, the traditional liberal interpretations of history. Whether you agree with Sowell or not, he will make you think about events and issues that are generally not even addressed in current history and cultural studies courses. Though at times he seems to cherry pick facts to support his preferred interpretations, he nevertheless forces readers to confront historical facts that are difficult to reconcile with the current canonical liberal interpretation of history.

Ava Gardner, The Secret Conversations, is a book about a writer trying to write a book about Ava Gardner. In 1988, Gardner was recovering from a pair of strokes that had left her with a limp and immobilized one side of her face. She was sixty-five years old, nearly broke, and living as a recluse in her London apartment. The damage from her strokes had ended her acting career, and it looked like her last shot at earning money was to write a memoir.

Peter Evans, a veteran London journalist, was assigned to be her ghostwriter. This book chronicles Evans’ many intimate conversations with the actress. By then, Gardner was an alcoholic suffering the ill effects of decades of heavy smoking.

Fourteen-year-old Mattie Ross sets out to avenge the murder of her father in 1880s Arkansas. She hires the hardened and hard-drinking US Marshal Rooster Cogburn to track the murderer, Tom Chaney, through Indian country and bring him to justice. Along the way, they pick up a Texas Ranger named LaBoeuf who is seeking Chaney for crimes committed in Texas.

Mattie is iron-willed, single-minded, guileless and pure in her intentions. She comes from a salt-of-the-earth Christian family, which puts her at odds with the jaded Cogburn who has spent his career hunting down men who have proven themselves immune to ordinary justice. Both characters are practical and unsentimental, though their temperaments have evolved from very different experiences.

This book is a classic among fans of hard-boiled crime fiction. Stephen King called it the hardest of the hard-boiled, and I have to agree with him on that. The plotting is relentless and so is the main character. I’ve never seen a character who so purely embodies animosity and determination.

The story opens with Earl Drake and his partner Bunny robbing a bank in Arizona. Things go awry halfway through the job, and Earl shoots several guards before getting shot himself. To make things worse, their getaway driver loses his nerve just as they’re exiting, and he winds up taking a bullet too.

I’m not sure why this book is called The Beach Girls. It actually takes place at a marina and it’s not really about girls.

The setting is the ramshackle Stebbins Marina in fictional Elihu, Florida, on the Gold Coast just north of Miami. The time is 1959. The owners of most of the boats on D dock live aboard their boats year-round. For various reasons, they have rejected the staid, conventional lifestyle of the middle class in favor of a more carefree bohemian existence that involves lots of drinking and lots of sex.