Day of the Dead Books

This wonderful calendar of GD events has as a forward the first known interview with Jerry. It was recorded at the Dead House at 710 Ashbury sometime early in 1967 either Feruary or March. It was just prior to the release of the Dead's first album. Areas discussed include, What is a hippie?,What is the San Francisco Sound all about?,long hair, drugs, the Hells Angels, comments on current groups like the Monkeys the British invasion, other SF bands, the Vietnam War, and of course music in general. Jerry's unrehearsed answers to these timely questions gives you a rare insight into the mind of a legend.

This book is very nice, i bought it whithout a lot of expectations... but if impressed me, lots of design of the day of the dead, which is a great party in Mexico and other countries, lots of allegories about the nice and fun skeletons, so many drawings, if you like the theme you should not let this one pass by, grab yours!

I took a chance on this book because I felt it could have some potential. It turned out to be a boring and underdone story that reminds me of a retelling of the Dawn of the Dead. A Wal-Mart for safety...Right (Mall in Dawn of the Dead)
I had to struggle to just make it to the end because it was so boring and two dimensional the characters even fell a sleep. The zombies were more of a nuisance to themselves then to the characters. The by the end the book left me asking why all the new people from no where.
The plot just got worse and worse the further I got in to it. I recommend you save your money and check out another book. I do see potential in this writer and hope he does better next time.

I bought this on a whim while searching for "zombie fiction" and was not disappointed at all in my find! I finished this book in two days, which is really fast for me. I passed it along to my girlfriend and she loved it too. It's a great read! Much better than a lot of the zombie movies out there. Read this book!

This book was very fast-paced with lots of action. The descriptions of zombies and the violence are quite gory, but this is a plus for us fans of the zombie genre. The story is reminiscent to that of Dawn of the Dead, which although makes it in a sense unoriginal, but if you liked Dawn of the Dead then you will most likely enjoy this book. And although the book is not likely to be deemed a masterpiece of literature, I don't think the author was aiming for that title. The novel is just was it says it is on the back cover - "pulp zombie fiction at its finest."

This book was a really great read! Being the fan of zombie films that I am, I could not put it down. I read it in three days. The author did a wonderful job of creating a post-apocalyptic world, and his depictions of the chaos that surrounded it was terrific. Very well written, and I would recommend this book to anyone who is a fan of the genre!

this book was the least impressive zombie apocalypse novel i have purchased from amazon.... the plot was one of many that seems to have been ripped right off the romero idea tree... seriously, why re-hash the same tired idea over and over??? i fully appreciate how much love and work it takes to write a novel, but come on! make it your own!

a little difficult to follow. all the spanish names and customs and types of people, this one needs a small glossary in the back. many words and phrases we just don't know.

The reason I can't give stars is because I didn't read the book. I love this series. I love the characters and the history and New Orleans and the writing. And I thought I could get on board in Mexico- especially because it was set during the whole day of the dead festivities but I lost interest within 30 pages. I'm sure it's not the book or the story but I started to lose big interest when all these relatives of the Soprano started to get introduced. I just did not care about them and didn't want to meet them. I really enjoyed her in the previous book but had no interest in her extended family.
I suspect this may not be a helpful review for anyone. Sorry about that.

As a lover of New Orleans, I enjoy the Benjamin January series. I especially enjoyed Days of the Dead as it was set in Mexico, and I love traveling to the colonial cities in Mexico. It was a nice change and a great read.

Now free from the grating poverty that beset them in earlier installments, Benajmin January and his new wife, Rose Vitrac January, travel to Mexico City to rescue Hannibal Sefton.

Hannibal is being accused of murder by the clearly unhinged patriarch of a powerful Mexican family, and it will take all of Ben's ability to clear his friend's name.

I adored this book--I loved the way historic Mexico was brought to life, how the ancient Aztec gods became such a presence in the story; it was a breath of fresh air with a touch of Zorro (or maybe it's Zorra--the rebellious daughter Vala would make a great masked heroine).

One of Hambly's greatest strengths is her ability to make you feel as if you're really there, shooting it out with bandidos or gambling and gossiping at the Opera. Old Mexico is a vividly rendered blend of ancient native culture with its newly-applied European overlay.

This was a welcome change of pace. For this outing, I was glad to trade the sultry swamplands of New Orleans for a visit to the dusty high desert plateaus of Mexico.

Days of the Dead (2003) is the seventh novel in the Benjamin January series, following Wet Grave. In the previous volume, Ben and Rose are trapped by an abortive slave revolt, discovered an impromptu leper colony, survived a hurricane, caught a murderer, and found a pirate's treasure. Some days later, Ben assisted in the delivery of Dominique's baby and, that afternoon, married Rose in the St. Louis Cathedral.

In this novel, Ben receives a letter from his friend Hannibal Sefton just prior to the wedding. Hannibal has been accused of killing the son of his host in Mexico City, but is being protected from the police by that same host. Ben and Rose spend their honeymoon traveling, first by sailing vessel to Vera Cruz and then by diligence -- i.e., stagecoach -- to Mexico City. This journey takes several weeks and they are continually afraid that they will arrive too late.

As they approach Mexico City, the diligence is ambushed by bandits and one passenger is killed, but the others manage to drive off their attackers. Ben is almost killed himself by the black leader, El Moro. After clearing customs outside the city and reaching the stage office, Ben and Rose take a buggy to the town house of Don Prospero de Castellon, where they are met by Consuela Montero, Don Prospero's illegitimate daughter and Hannibal's lover. There they are informed that Hannibal is being held against his will by Don Prospero because he is the only decent conversationalist available and he also plays the violin like an angel. Don Prospero is waiting for the spirit of his son Fernando, the victim, to come back on the Day of the Dead to accuse his murderer and, in the meantime, he will keep Hannibal close by for the company.

Don Prospero is apparently mad as a hatter, but quite shrewd enough to have become richer while all around him others have been ruined by the two and a half decades of civil war. His son was sent to Prussia for military school and had become enamored with German methods and manners. He was such a cold-hearted monster that other members of the family have forgiven Hannibal for poisoning him.

Even Consuela is sure that Hannibal is guilty, but is quite willing to smuggle him out of the country. When Ben begins to question the family and other interested parties, everything he finds only makes Hannibal look even more guilty. Moreover, Capitan Ylario, a local police official, is so convinced that Hannibal is guilty, and so angry at the way Don Prospero and General Santa Anna are protecting him, that he has made arrangements with a local judge for a quick trial and execution as soon as he can get the murderer to the courtroom, but so far he has been frustrated by Don Prospero's men.

This novel portrays Mexico City and environs as they were before Santa Anna lead his army against the Texian rebels at the Alamo. The cast includes the hacendados -- the rich ranchers of the time -- and their families, Europeans of various nationalities, Americans (and one Texian), and a host of others including the leperos (only a few of which are actually lepers; most are merely impoverished farmers).

This era was a time in which great fortunes were made and lost, a time of great corruption, and a time of grinding poverty. Most of the woes of that time could be directly attributed to Santa Anna, who changed his loyalties as another man would change his gloves. However, there were plenty of others at this time who were willing to sell spavined horses and adulterated corn to the Mexican army quartermasters. This milieu made contemporary New Orleans seem positively genteel.

This series is hard to classify and the books are often found is odd places within a store. These novels are mysteries in a historical context or historical fiction with a suspenseful plot or early 19th century black detective stories. Personally, I would place them on a shelf near Poe's mysteries. One wonders if Ben was anywhere near the Rue Morgue when the first fictional detective was investigating a murder there.

Highly recommended for Hambly fans and anyone else who enjoys black detective stories set in the historical context of New Orleans (and Mexico City) during the 1830's.

-Bill Jordin

Not a bad read. Short stories on many celebrities, some of whom are interesting, not much dirt though, a quick read.

I have just started reading and it is very well written. The author sticks to that facts and notes who he got the information from.

If you're into this sort of reading, this is not a bad way to spend an afternoon. The author has apparently done a great deal of interviewing and research to write these stories, and they are well and thoughtfully written. I, personally, wasn't interested in everyone in the book, but the stories of the last days of the people in which I was interested made me realize afresh that we are all, celebrity and non-celeb alike, common in our humanity, and are all traveling the same road to the same destination.

This book tries to sell itself as a Hollywood Babylon, slezy stories, dead celeb type of book - but open it and find a dreary book indeed. It's got no real information in it, in the case of Orson Welles, the author simply transcribes his last intervew. It's a dull book that tries to sell itself as something different. Don't buy it.

I was away for a convention for four days and this book consumed all my airplane time to and from the destination city. I finished it and gave it to my mother when I got home, and now she can't put it down. What surprised me were the sensitive, first hand accounts of these celebrities from people who were with them in their final days or knew them. But mostly those who were there. It was very first person as a read, as opposed to third person, from the outside of their world looking in.

And it reminded me how real these celebrities are. They do dumb things, or great things, but have normal moments or occasional hissy fits and then die. I know the topic is rather grim and someone voyeuristic, but I highly recommend this book.

I loved the first book, and this second is quite different. It follows the continuing story of Boy and Willow from the first novel. But the story from the first doesn't really continue with them, I think only because when Valerian died, it was a closure to that story for the most part. But it's still a wonderful sequal and if you've read the first, I strongly suggest you read this one too.

This book's predecessor was a fantastic book and after reading this one I feel as if the magic of the first has been slighted. The Book of Dead Days promised much, and unfortunately did not deliver. It did not seem to have the ending or the answers that it should and at the end I was dissatisfied with the way the author took the books. I would definitely recommend the first book, but to me, the sequel did not hold the same mood that the first was able to capture.

Marcus Sedgwick follows up his chilling "Book of Dead Days" with a less chilling, but far more compelling sequel, "Dark Flight Down." He left a lot of plot threads untouched at the end of the first book -- especially Boy's past -- but wraps them up as he tells a compelling, sometimes chilling story.

Boy now works for the scientist Kepler, but while running an errand to the Yellow House, he's captured by Imperial soldiers and taken to the palace, where the decaying, mad emperor is waited on by power-hungry courtiers. The emperor wants to be immortal, and his right hand Maxim hopes to use Boy to somehow find the Book of Dead Days.

To make things worse, the bloodthirsty Phantom is still at large -- and Boy soon realizes that it dwells in the palace. Surrounded by treachery and Machievellian lies, Boy's only hope is that his friend Willow will rescue him. But then he learns the horrific truth behind the Phantom and the emperor -- and the connection they have to his past.

There's less magic and more mystery in "Dark Flight Down," compared to its predecessor. The Book of Dead Days only shows up occasionally, and the focus is mostly on Boy's struggles to escape Maxim, and find out his identity. And since the horror is all human, it's even more frightening than demons.

With his sparse prose and icy descriptions, Sedgwick does a remarkable job of wrapping up the story, revealing Boy's mysterious past and the identity of his family. The Phantom's identity is a complete shock, and one that is really horrific. Although Sedgwick does fumble a bit with Bedrich the amnesiac, and Kepler's plotting; these things should have been fleshed out.

Boy himself grows by leaps and bounds here, as he realizes that it's who you are, not your name or parentage, that defines you. Willow is still like a refugee Lloyd Alexander heroine, although she appears less in "Dark Flight Down." And romantics will be pleased by the dark, if pleasing end for this novel.

Wrapping up the story he started in "Book of Dead Days," Marcus Sedgwick crafts a chillingly beautiful, intricate little story, about the boy named Boy. A fitting end.

While I did like Marvel Zombie Dead Days, I think it felt a little rushed given the content and magnitude of the fall of this Marvel Universe. As the original WHAT IF series pointed out, readers are often drawn to the fall of their heroes - stepping through the looking glass - and seeing what could have been. The difference here is that in most of those stories, there remained a kernal of hope. Such hope does not exist in this undead world or its heroes, and as the series starts out, we knew they were doomed.

Still, there were moments the comic book shines, with Spider-Man's undead urges overwhelming him (most notably), so I have to commend the effort on the book, giving it a solid three stars.

Alas, I wanted so much to like this one-shot. It was described as detailing the origins of the Marvel Zombie-verse; ie: how the heroes of this particular world became infected, and it just didn't deliver. I was expecting an ORIGIN TALE in the "mighty Marvel manner" and THAT would've made for a great read, I'm certain. But what was served up was merely what I'd regard as a bit of a "filler" issue. Events that had been referred to in the initial MZ stories were shown and while it was enjoyable to read, it just left me wanting for more. Maybe next time. And that's just it. It's obvious that, given the success of the MZ books, that Marvel are going to milk it for all it's worth until it, too, becomes as stale and unpalatable as a Marvel zombie body is to another marvel zombie.

Great gate-fold cover, though!

Dead Days # 1 is a one-shot comic that tells the beginning of the Marvel Zombies and is a MUST for anyone that picked up Marvel Zombies and liked what they saw. It doesn't show the initial infection of The Avengers or the spread that happens amongst the population, but it does pick up days after "the event" took place in New York and it covers many of the characters that were covered in Marvel Zombies before they get infected. The thing with Spidey and his family? Its there. The thing with the Fantastic Four? Its there. The thing with the hacksaw and the person "on ice?" Everything is there and everything is punctuated with a smile. Amongst the best things in the book are how this started, how the "heroes" try to stand and what happens therein, and why Magneto becomes involved in the fall of humanity.
Its such a good read.

I personally found the work of Kirkman a step up from his work on The Walking Dead, and much of that work was interestingly bizarre. The thing is that you have the self-professed "zombie guy" (a title he doesn't want, mind you, but that he seems to have gotten) being given total control over the Marvel Universe in the middle of a Zombie Holocaust. When you take this comic and you add it into the Marvel Zombies hardcover, you have a story that is actually pretty unique, that is surprisingly gory, and that doesn't pull any punches.

One thing about this series - there is nothing for the kids here. The series is really gruesome, allows itself to target anyone and anything, and repeated shows the things that zombies like to do. That said, Dead Days is a 48 page comic that isn't OOP, that isn't going to go OOP any time soon, and that has a cover price under 5 bucks. Combine that cost into the Marvel Zombies cost and you have a picture that paints the world in a way you never thought you'd see - you have heroes turning on the world because they no longer have control of themselves.
It comes HIGHLY recommended and is WELL WORTH obtaining.

I must say that I didn't really understand this story until I read the description of the Day of the Dead on the last two pages of the book. When I reread the story knowing the background of this Mexican belief, I was able to better enjoy the story for what it was. The author/illustrator throws weird words together such as, "Buenos noches, story time, shiver-jitter, gee" and illustrates them with expressive lively skeletons. Young children would probably like the sounds of the silly words on each page, but I didn't. I did appreciate the small amount of education I received about this holiday, again from the last two pages, about the dead loving the lives they had, kids included. If you decide to purchase this book, read and understand the concepts, truths and beliefs on these last two informative pages so that you and the child you read it to/with can understand this tradition.

My 3 1/2 year old found this at the library and was very excited by the cover: "Mommy, can we get this skeleton book?" I, being a former goth-y 80's metalhead, encourage the love of the macabre in my young children, strange as it may seem, so we took it home and both my daughters LOVED reading it and looking at the colorful illustrations, but especially my younger one (who found it). We read it over and over again, and she had EVERY word memorized by the 3rd day. I knew returning it to the library would be a problem, so I ordered it from Amazon so she would have her own copy. The cutest thing is listening to her say the Spanish words in the text. At the end, she yells out "El Dia de los Muertos!" and claps her hands. I can't say that EVERY kid would love it, but mine definitely do, and I love reading it with them.

DAY OF THE DEAD was my first Brandon Walker and sad to say the last one J.A. Jance has written in this cold case series. We know how it is to be bored with retirement when one's spouse has entered a new and challenging career. Golf holds no interest for Mr. Walker and he is given a second chance when an invitation arrives to join The Last Chance group of former law enforcement officers who study unsolved murder cases.
Thirty years have passed since the body of a young girl was discovered baking in the Arizona sun, which reminds one of the child who was ashore on the Texas coast. There have been no answers for her family. Brandon Walker steps into a world of evil that still exists after 30 years.
A good read from the annals of cold-cases.
Writing as a Small BusinessQualifying Laps: A Brewster County NovelUnder the Liberty Oak

The book starts off quickly & holds it's suspense throughout, with a very good ending. I enjoyed the Brandon Walker character, though not as much as JP Beaumont. The fact that the wearisome, shallow & played out character of Joanna Brady is absent here is a God send. Take a long marriage which is rooted in hell & you have your 2 villains which are so sick they keep your attention. The mystery plays itself out & comes together very nicely toward the end. I felt the book to be a little long in the tooth with the time spent on the characters living on the reservation. The characters are good, but they depart too much from the storyline. I think you'll enjoy it. I gave it an extra star for not having Joanna Brady in it

I've been a fairly loyal reader of Jance's Brady and Beaumont books. I don't think I will be in the future. In buying this one I feel was trapped by my past loyality. I struggled with this to page 175 and then quit. Now I'll probably use it for fireplace kindling as I'll NOT give this book to anyone I know. The subject's Ugly, many of the people are Ugly and the writting is contrived and predictably Ugly.

Why in the world would Ms Jance impose this uglyness on her readers.

Nice cover though.

Day of the dead was an entertaining crime novel. I didn't care for any of the characters very much. It is a B mystery.

I am a huge fan of the Joanna Brady and J. P. Beaumont series, so I was looking forward to curling up with this book. I never read the first two of the Walker series but I was sure I was going to like this one. My goodness! What a horror! The description of the torture perpetrated on the orphan was so disgusting that I had to leave the book alone. I never went back to it. I like to read for pleasure and this was no pleasure. I will only read the Brady and Beaumont series from now on unless they get very gory.

I purchased this book some time ago, based on the other revs (both here and in Amazon UK) hoping it was another Penrose-type wonder, but didn't read it until yesterday.

1) IMHO, the book is an overwarmed collection of essays written at different times, roughly stitched together and rushed to printing and publishing. The seams show.

2) Now, Chown should know what he's writing about. If he really is a former astronomer (but of what kind?), and the New Scientist's "cosmological consultant", he must -or should I say 'should'?- be competent. He cites a couple of papers that, if he was able to read and understand, as I think he did, put him in the class of lesser scientists, or at the very least, serious amateurs.

3) This said, the book doesn't show it. I repeat a question I sometimes ask myself: for whom is the book written? For the layman genuinely interested in science? Or for people interested in showing off with friends (but who, outside a very restricted community, talks seriously about these matters?) their 'knowledge' about some 'sexy' topics?
To the former, avoid like the plague (strange how customs change: were I to have written "HIV" instead of "plague" I'm sure I'd have been labeled an insensitive Neanderthal). To the latter: pick up the concepts you're interested in from better books, of which, with the cut and paste (rendered now so ridiculously easy by the current state of IT) epidemic raging in our midst, there must be hundreds. Any 'popular' book by Thorne, Penrose, Whittaker, Ghirardi, Chaitin, Feynmann, Gell-Mann, Davies (except the last, "Goldilocks"), Rucker (only his very good book about infinity), Gribbin, Rees, Kauffmann, Pagels, Rees, Tipler, Lindley, Greene, Kaku, Deutsch, Smolin, Prigogine, Guth, Linde, Gross, even Susskind, etc. etc. etc.) will give you a better, sounder idea of the topics this one rushes through so breezily and incorrectly (not by ignorance but by distorted and contradictory dumbing down to a level where brane attraction through the fifth dimension -of a Calaby-Yau manifold, presumably?- is as easy and familiar as fish 'n chips). Of course, every book treats some themes in preference to others, so youll' nowhere find a balance similar to the one chosen by Chown; to achieve that, you'd have to read five or six of the above-mentioned authors. But you'd have a much sounder knowledge of topics that the book mangles (for example, the explanation of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle in page 178 of the PB edition: "The HUP actually states that for any microscopic event, there is a minimum value of particular quantity - the duration of the event multiplied by the energy of the event. An oscillation has a characteristic time associated with it -the duration of a single oscillation- so the HUP dictates it must also have a certain minimum energy associated with it" [everything sic, except for the acronims]. If I hadn't known what decoherence is and supposedly manages to accomplish I wouldn't have understood a word of Chown's explanation in his Chapter 4 "Keeping it Real". The strange thing is, Chown in the Glossary at the end of the book (page 273) gives a clearer and far more conventional definition of the HUP. This reinforces my impression that the book is a collective, badly harmonized effort.

4) Closely linked to the preceding point is the question of the book's quality, which I frankly found wanting.
Besides careless writing (or editing; as one of many examples consider a possible message left by the Creator in the CMB, page 210 on the PBE: "This is how up I built the Universe"), Chown apparently can't bring himself to think coherently. For example he repeatedly presents the Big Bang as the moment everything started, and was concentrated in a singularity, once he even cautions us against likening it to an explosion that happened in space and time; at other times he states that it happened all at once in all of (I suppose infinite) space; most of the time he refers to it as caused by inflation's leftover energy that had nowhere to go except to power the creation of mass-energy and so cause the BB. Since for all we wnow almost anything might be true, one couldn't fault him for presenting ONE idea as true, but this is nowhere done: he writes as if he weren't even aware of his inconsistent statements. (Well, perhaps the book WAS after all put together by helpers and he hurriedly stitched the parts together: have you noticed how often he publishes -and presumably it mustn't be his main occupation-? And the huge number of footnotes and sentences of the type "as we already saw in Chapter ... ", or "for a more thorough treatment refert to Chapter ... ")?.
He also jumps from one argument to another without rhyme or reason: rather in the middle of the book, he defines several times for the presumably least-lower-bound-average reader what are frecuency, amplitude, etc. Yet before that, in pages 57 ff., he presents the brane collision scenario, in a chapter where he breezily "discusses" incredibly advanced conceps (without saying that some of them are more akin to hard science fiction than to science), and even employs exponential notation without explaining it!
He also fails even to mention how (or at least that) physicists categorize leptons, gluons, hadrons, bosons, etc., which he bandies about freely but without once explaining how they fit into the general picture, and what the terms mean.

5) The only, for me, good point of the book: his discussion on the origin of mass, in a language more sober and reflective than usual for him, and his thinly veiled but, one feels, rather heartfelt opposition to the Higgs mechanism (let's hope that CERN'S LHC doesn't find the boson too soon!).


So, abstain if you're a complete layman.
In general, avoid unless you're the type that can't resist the chance of finding about a new glamorous field that you hadn't heard about and interests you. In that case, skim through cursorily in one/two days maximum and buy and read toughtfully the bibliography, or surf the articles.
As for me, this is the last (it was the first) book I buy from this author.

Once in a while comes along a book with breathtaking speculation. Marcus Chowns latest "Dispatches from the frontline of science" certainly fits the description of being "breathtaking". In the words of Brian May (Queen guitarist): "Marcus Chown rocks".

We sometimes forget how big and how weird the universe really is. And then it is nice that we have Marcus Chown around to remind us.

There is only a finite number of ways of arranging protons in a given volumen of space. Just as it is possible to estimate how many oranges that can be stacked together in a box, it it possible to estimate how many protons you can have in a given volume of space. Because of its quantum graininess, the obervable universe has "only" 10^118 locations where a proton can be. When we further assume that the distribution of galaxies in the observable universe and beyond is the result of random processes that went on the first split seconds of the Universe existence.
It follows: Try out enough places in the universe and eventually you come to a part that looks exactly like our observable universe, but is somewhere else. Somewhere out there a copy of you is walking around reading a book that also looks like your book.
- Infinite turns out to be a pretty weird thing.

It gets worse - or better - with Nick Bostroms simulation argument, which suggest that our universe is really some experiment set up by some super advanced civisisation. And with Frank Tiplers resurrection of all humans in the big crunch at the of time (in the universe) - things gets really weird.

Surely, you don't wanna miss the ride. Pick up the book asap.

-Simon