Alvah's Books

Commercial Break
By Keith Harmeyer
Hollywood2Hollywood Enterprises 2009
301 pages
$11.99

Reviewed by Randall Radic 

There’s a guy named Keith Harmeyer, who lives in New York. He used to be in advertising. Keith decided to write a book. Taking the old adage “write about what you know” to heart, Keith wrote a novel called Commercial Break. And what a novel it is!

Commercial Break is a combination of Carl Hiaasen, Kurt Vonnegut, and Joseph Heller. Which means it’s laugh-out-loud funny, replete with cynicism and verbal pyrotechnics. It’s the story of Adam Glassman, who, along with his partner, Carlo Fiore, runs a successful New York advertising agency that goes by the fitting name of Hot Posse. Adam’s marriage is on the rocks and he flamed out a long time ago. He’s sick and tired of overcompensating in his life. He feels like a fraud.

Adam’s looking for a way out of his miserable life. Utilizing the incredible virtuosity of his creative and organizational genius, he devises a plan that will provide him with enough money so he can retire forever. The plan has two tiny, little, teeny-weeny drawbacks. Mere hiccups, really: he can’t do it alone, and it means breaking the law.

The plan involves selling the same Super Bowl commercial to six of his clients. One commercial, six fees. The risk is significant, but the payoff is enormous. Adam recruits his partner, Carlo Fiore, who feels that the undertaking by definition entails a certain diminution of dignity. Rather than make a moral choice, Carlo decides to resolve his dilemma by placing it in the hands of a woman. This will relieve him of the tedium. By the way, Carlo’s luck with the fairer sex is not anything to write home about. He has a girlfriend who is the prototype of the new woman – she’s a pangynic nightmare. In short, she lacks that provocative warmth which draws man to woman.

Meanwhile, Adam has his own female problems. He gets romantically involved with a young woman – an employee – who is not only a dire and frightening female, but sucks down wine by the gallon.

One of the funniest parts of the book is the commercial that Adam is peddling to all and sundry. Composed of “six, magnificent blondes in patent leather bikinis sitting on a black iceberg,” with Bobby Darin singing ‘Mack the Knife’ in the background, the commercial is a gelatinous mass of rhodomontade and piffle, which just adds to the insane humor, because it’s so indicative of contemporary marketing and advertising.

It’s one of those things that has to be read to be believed. And Keith Harmeyer pulls it off without a hitch. This guy can write comedy. In fact, Commercial Break should be a movie. It’s got all he necessary ingredients for a blockbuster.

The reviewer refuses to spoil the book by revealing what happens along the way, as the “big idea” is implemented. Needless to say the author mixes in poetic paradoxes, bracketing oxymorons, morons, and a few tawdry magician’s tricks as he demonstrates how, in the final analysis, the masses are the final tyrants in today’s advertising world. Which means this novel can be read at a number of different levels. On one level, there’s an amusing story of white-collar crime. On another level there is a social commentary that points out how the hoi polloi seem to confuse standard of living with quality of life, and equal opportunity with institutionalized mediocrity. And how the scorn of the intellectual elite blinds it to the vast primitive power of mediocrity.

Commercial Break is the funniest and most entertaining book the reviewer has read in years. Readers will not be disappointed.

PATCHES OF GREY
By Roy L. Pickering, Jr.
M.U.D. House Books
329 pages.
$12.95

Reviewed by Randall Radic

Roy Pickering is a writer who lives in New Jersey. Roy wrote a book called Patches of Grey. It’s a coming-of-age novel, which is set in the projects of New York City. Most, if not all, of the people who live in the projects occupy a zone known as below-poverty-level. They are on welfare, live in subsidized housing, own nothing, have nothing and hope for nothing. Their daily lives revolve around drugs, violence and survival.

Patches of Grey is the story of Tony Johnson, who is a high school senior. Tony is bright and ambitious, and Tony wants out. Tony recognizes that there’s a great big world out there. He can’t imagine what it’s like – not really – but he knows it’s there. He has his sights set on a college scholarship as his magic carpet to a new life. Then he meets a girl. She is white. Tony is black. Which means Tony’s status – the amount of melanin in his skin – becomes a focal point of tension. And racial tension exists because people, who differ in skin-color, exist.

Right away, the reader groans. Not another version of West Side Story steeped in the quandary of race relations and gangs and loss of innocence and heartache and teenage angst and blah, blah, blah. Yawn. Been there, done that.

Actually, Roy Pickering pulls it off without sliding down the slippery slope into the miasma of the same old same old. He pulls it off because he’s one heck of a writer. His metaphors are wonderful, and far from cliché. And he moves from scene to scene smoothly and avoids making the reader feel like he’s being dragged along against his will. Pickering accomplishes this feat through restraint, unobtrusiveness, and delicacy of allusion. Which is a pretentious-literary-reviewer way of saying that the guy can really write.

Patches of Grey deftly immerses the reader in a world that, according to some, is black and white. Good and bad. Rich and poor. The haves and the have nots. Law-breakers and law-abiders. But in the end, the world isn’t that simple. Really, the world is made up of lots of grey patches – those areas where human beings compromise. Human beings compromise because they don’t know what else to do. And when compromise enters the picture, a sense of tarnish oozes across the panorama.

In Patches of Grey, many of the characters are tarnished. Tony’s father has black skin, but he’s a grey person. His bitterness and hatred of everything and everybody, especially of himself, make him grey. Janet, who is Tony’s white girlfriend, suffocates in cloudy thinking, which results in grey actions. She tries to please everyone and doesn’t please anyone, not even herself.

In the end, Tony steps out of the grey patches and walks into the light. Which means the conclusion of the story is far from cliché. In fact, it’s unpredictable. And this alone recommends the book – because in the end, Patches of Grey is about the cost of loss, the cost of being human, the human cost of life not turning out the way it should.

All that being said, the reviewer would make a suggestion to Roy Pickering, who has written an admirable novel in Patches of Grey. Roy should ramble on in his next book. Choose a meandering story of Roberto Bolano-like aspect, and let his tremendous talent seize control of him, rather than him trying to control his talent. For as Nicole Kidman told Tom Cruise in Days of Thunder – another coming-of-age-story – “control is an illusion.” And if/when that artistic surrender happens – to quote Led Zeppelin – “ramble on.” Let the words flow. And because Roy Pickering’s talent is astonishing and ignores every precedent, he doesn’t need to be bound by the constraints of a traditional novel. With his literary gift, he can jump out of that box and nurture his advantages. He can produce an epic novel as vast and as powerful as the tundra of Siberia.

THE CANAL BUILDERS: Making America’s Empire at the Panama Canal
By Julie Greene
The Penguin Press.
475 pages.
$30.00

Reviewed by Randall Radic

Remember the movie The Ten Commandments? Charleton Heston squared off against Yul Brynner, and in between them were all those Hebrew slaves? Millions of them. All working fourteen hours a day, building magnificent edifices in honor of Pharaoh. And not because they want to, but because they’re slaves, who are whipped and starved if they don’t. In other words, the Ten Commandments showed us the way the world worked in those days – thousands of years ago. Slaves did the manual labor and died, while the Pharaohs got the glory.

Not very long ago—about a hundred years—a similar event took place. Historians called it “a stupendous undertaking.” Only this time, instead of an arrogant Pharaoh’s visage gazing out over his empire, it was a photograph of Theodore Roosevelt hoisting himself into the cab of a giant steam-shovel-driver, pretending to run the machine himself.

This was the updated version of the way the world worked. The people who did the real work were no longer slaves. Now they got paid. However, they still lived in squalor and they still died from overwork. The person in charge was no longer a Pharaoh, now he was called a President. But the high-muckety-muck, no matter what he was called, still got the glory.

Some things never change. Or do they?

Julie Greene has written a stupendous book about the building of the Panama Canal. Only instead of focusing on the great feat of engineering that the Canal encompassed, Ms. Greene’s book focuses on the people who actually did the work. As she says regarding the photo of President Theodore Roosevelt in the Prologue: “Absent from the picture are the thousands of workingmen who actually dug the canal.”

The Canal Builders zeroes in on the human factor – the lives of the 60,000 laborers who traveled to Panama to build the Canal. Some came seeking adventure, drawn to the activity like moths to a flame. Others came because they needed a job and couldn’t find one in their native country. Still others were searching for a new life in a new place. They were bored and something of historical significance was occurring in Panama.

They all came for one reason or another.

As Ms. Greene details in her book, most of these toilers came from the Caribbean nations, especially Barbados and Jamaica. They were recruited and promised big money, which was true. They made more than they ever could have at home. What they weren’t told was how many of them would die. No one told them that they were expendable. No one mentioned that the grand goal was the building of the Canal. No one told them what the cost would be in human lives.

Lots of white imperialists from the USA showed up too, looking for big paychecks. And they found them — $200 a month, paid in gold. Everybody else was paid in silver.

They all—no matter what their skin-color —lived in Panama City, which overnight turned into a heaving mass of multi-hued human flesh—Americans, Chinese, Jamaicans, Barbadans. And as one would expect—for that was the way the world worked—segregation took place. There were affluent neighborhoods and poor neighborhoods. Inequality was rampant.

The story Ms. Greene tells in her book is one of exploitation, misery, money, and, sometimes, even kindness. The picture presented is that of the foundation of today’s American Empire, where the USA dominates the world economically and militarily. And Ms. Greene castigates America for its participatory role in this evil dominion. “Strategies devised during the canal construction project have reached across the decades to the current day. We can see them…in the persistent notion that citizens deserve certain rights that are denied to aliens…the exercise of U.S. power around the world.”

Her viewpoint is valid, even depressing. But there might be more to the story. A different pair of sunglasses might dim the glare. Ms. Greene might have missed one or two things. And a couple of those things might be: that rather than evil exploitation, what was taking place at the Canal was globalization, which is a work in progress. The world is growing smaller and smaller, which – maybe – is better, because there will be less and less exploitation. Hope springs eternal.

Also missing is the hard-to-accept truth that that’s the way the world works. To paraphrase Jesus, “Exploitation you will have with you always.” Jesus didn’t mean ‘get used to it.’ Rather, he meant there’s always scope for change. Constant vigilance is required to make things better. The poor will always be around, so there will always be the opportunity to give.

It simply means that everything is a work in progress, and that progress can be seen in the fact that wonderful books like The Canal Builders are written, read and talked about. Books like this one can have an impact on the way the world works, because they’re about people, not about “stupendous engineering feats.”

About Randall Radic
Randall Radic, a former Old Catholic priest and a convicted felon, lives in Northern California where he reads, writes and smokes cigars. He is the author of A Priest in Hell: Gangs, Murderers and Snitching in a California Jail, and the forthcoming Gone To Hell: True Crimes of America’s Clergy.

ALMOST A MIRACLE: The American Victory in the War of Independence
By John Ferling
Oxford University Press, 2007
$29.95

Reviewed by Randall Radic

The title of John Ferling’s unrestrained work is Almost A Miracle. Drop the adverb from the title and the sheer virtuosity and genius of the book is accurately expressed. For Ferling’s book is indeed ‘a miracle.’

Almost A Miracle takes the reader inside the War of Independence, and reveals the difficulties faced by commanding officers on both sides of the conflict, along with the courage, steadfastness and suffering of common soldiers – the men who did most of the dying. And die they did, in astonishing numbers. Until the book is digested, the average reader probably has no frame of reference for the pure bloodiness of the war. Much of the blood was shed in the South, Georgia and the Carolinas – a theater rarely mentioned in most histories of the war – which was where, according to Ferling, that the war was actually won.

Ferling points out that, in effect, the British were fighting a battle on two fronts: the northeast and the southeast. The defeat of the British in the South – a defeat that cost both sides dearly – led to Cornwallis’ surrender at Yorktown.

What makes Ferling’s book so real is his portrayal of the leading players in the war. Men like Washington, Hamilton, Lafayette, and Franklin. When gazing at these historical figures, Ferling doesn’t just narrate facts. He goes deeper, examining and analyzing personalities and abilities. As Ferling states in his Introduction, “I came to see both more flaws and greater virtues in Washington’s leadership, arrived at a deeper appreciation of Nathanael Greene, and grew to see Charles Lee as an especially tragic figure, a man at once possessed of superlative soldierly qualities and laden with ruinous character defects.”

Indeed, Ferling provides Benedict Arnold with one of the most fair and accurate appraisals ever written. He rightly points out that Arnold was probably a military genius and a master manipulator of men. Benedict Arnold was a man full of energy and determination. Sadly, though, along with tremendous talent, Arnold swarmed with a whole congerie of neuroses.

Such insights take Ferling’s book beyond merely being adequate and make it wonderful. Because wars are fought by people, and it’s the human aspect – in all its immediacy and emotion – that gives history meaning and pizzazz. People, with all their flaws and strengths, are what make the story interesting. If the stories that come out of the War for Independence were not populated by real people, who would care?

Ferling’s book makes readers care, that’s how absorbing it is. And because they care, they cavil.

Some reviewers have taken Ferling to task for his insights, saying they are a biased example of shallow hero-bashing. Such assertions are balderdash. Ferling has the intestinal fortitude to call it as he sees it, which in other terms is called “academic honesty.” The historian’s job is not to candy-coat history so it tastes sweet can be swallowed easily. Rather, the historian opens the doors and windows to past events, exposing them to light and fresh air. Ferling accomplishes this task.

Not only does Ferling unmask his subject matter, telling it like it is, but he then writes about it in a clear lucid style. He avoids the usual stuffy, boring academic phraseology, eschewing recondite terminology. Ferling is not trying to impress the reader with his vocabulary. Instead, he communicates, which is what good writing is all about. Shunning long, convoluted sentences, Ferling uses what was once the gold standard of the English language: subject, verb, object. And every so often he throws in some adverbs and adjectives to add action and color to the text.

Almost A Miracle is a stunningly good book, one that every student of the War for Independence should read. More than that, it’s a book that any amateur historian will love, because it’s entertaining to read. In fact, for anyone who wants to know how and why and when and where America to be America, this book is essential reading. Besides that – it’s got zest. Which means it’s rated E for everyone.

About Randall Radic

Randall Radic, a former Old Catholic priest and a convicted felon, lives in Northern California where he reads, writes and smokes cigars. He is the author of A Priest in Hell: Gangs, Murderers and Snitching in a California Jail, and the forthcoming Gone To Hell: True Crimes of America’s Clergy.     

A Look Back at LOLITA by Randall Radic

In one of the most beautiful places on earth, or at least in Europe, is one of the most beautiful ‘walks’. Kind of like the boardwalk at Santa Barbara, California, or the cement sidewalk along Mission Beach near La Jolla, California. Only much longer. The ‘walk’ goes all the way from Villeneuve to Vevey. Along the way you pass the Place du Marche’. And there, disconcerting to some and admired by others, stands a statue of a rock star. Freddy Mercury, facing the brilliant blue waters of Lake Geneva. And why not? The rock band Deep Purple made the city famous in their song ‘Smoke on the Water’.

The city is Montreux, Switzerland. Numerous small villages surround Montreux, including La Tour-de-Peilz, Clarens, Territet, and Villeneuve.

The grave marker is large and rectangular, cut from a single piece of purplish stone. The façadeof the stone is very rough, like just-poured cement that hasn’t been smoothed. Behind the marker, carefully trimmed, stands a hedge of white oleanders, flat-faced with flowers. In front of the grave marker is a single, double-wide slab of cement, which covers the graves. The slab is smooth and surrounded by green grass and flowering plants.

This is the Cimitiere de Clarens, the Cemetery of Clarens, Clarens being one of the villages near Montreux.

The two names engraved on the rough face of the purplish stone are Vladimir Nabokov, and just below it, in somewhat smaller font, Vera Nabokov. Vladimir and his wife, Vera, lived in a suite at the Montreux Palace Hotel from 1960 until 1977. They now live together in a somewhat smaller suite in the Cemetery Clarens.

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov wrote many novels, including the controversial Lolita, and demonstrated how a memoir should be written in his Speak, Memory, which may be the best memoir ever produced. Nabokov was also an accomplished lepidopterist, and a master of chess.

His childhood, which he himself called “perfect,” was spent in St. Petersburg (Stalingrad), Russia. The family spoke three languages, Russian, English and French on a daily basis, and enjoyed the privileged lifestyle of their aristocratic heritage.

With the revolt of 1917, the blue-blooded Nabokovs fled Russia for the relative safety of Crimea. After eighteen months in Crimea, the family moved to England. Vladimir became a student at Trinity College. He graduated from Cambridge and moved to Berlin, where a large ghetto of Russian emigres resided. Taking the nom de plume of Vladimir Sirin, he began writing and married Vera Slonim.

Tragic and mysterious events chaperoned the family: Nabokov’s father was assassinated by Russian monarchists in 1922, a case of mistaken identity. Nabokov himself, like Kandinski, was a synesthete, which, in Nabokov’s case, means he not only associated letters with colors, but that the letters were actually colored. Later on, Nabokov’s brother, Sergei, who was homosexual, died in a Nazi concentration camp.

Vladimir Nabokov moved his family to Paris in 1937. Then because of Germany’s invasion of France, Nabokov fled to the United States in 1940. He taught comparative literature at Wellesley College, simultaneously working as a curator of lepidoptery at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Biology. In his spare time, he wrote.

Then Lolita, after much hesitancy on the part of publishers, was published. This hesitancy, due to obscenity laws and potential lawsuits, once overcome, eventually resulted in Lolita becoming an international bestseller. The story of the twelve-year old girl’s affair with an older man provided Nabokov with fame and financial independence. He continued to write, producing many other fine novels, and devoted much of his time to studying the blue butterfly, Polymmatini Lycaenidae, his favorite.

Lolita, to the average, ignorant-white-trash-tornado-bait reader, is detestable, and described as the disgusting story of pederasty glorified. It is not. Actually, Lolita is the story of obsession, the obsession of humanity with love. It is the strange, sad story of one man’s search for love, initially, through sex with a twelve-year old girl. Here, then, is the – still – common contemporary confusion of sex with love.

Finally, at the end of the story, Lolita is older, has a child and is not lovable. She is used up, ugly and hard. Yet it is at this point that Humbert Humbert, the older man, falls truly in love with her, and comes to appreciate love for the wonderful thing it is. He loves the unlovable.

Like Joseph Heller’s Major Major in Catch-22, Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert is an example of reduplication. Reduplication, in linguistics, means to double a word, so as to form an inflected or derived form of the word. It’s a grammatical change, which indicates a change of relationship. Thus, Humbert the lover of the unlovable at the end of Lolita, is the derivation of Humbert the pederast at the beginning of the story. The relationship has changed. Humbert has changed. And Lolita is the elegant production of that process: a nasty worm entering its chrysalis and coming forth a splendid butterfly, someone new and different both in the story and in the repetition of the name.

Lolita, then, is an instance of symmetry, two stories within one story. There is a dividing line in the story. In the beginning there is no love, confusion about what love is, and ugly pederasty. At the end there is love, the confusion has disappeared, and the beauty of love reigns.

The genius of Nabokov.

In person, Nabokov was a handsome man, tall and well-formed, who radiated an aristocratic air. He loved detail and contemplation. However, he was boring, as if all his parts were subtly tightened from within. This tightness of being is evident in his memoir Speak, Memory, and probably explains his being a sentimental, but meager father.

Nabokov definitely failed his siblings, shrugging off the vaunted Russian sensibility of family ties. This is clear from his guilt over his relationship with his brother Sergei. Nabokov couldn’t get around his brother’s homosexuality. His mood toward Segei was tightly complex, composed of sour indifference, flippant disdain, and a deeper zone of doubt and foreboding: all the product of three basic factors: his own aristocratic snobbishness, the security provided by his fame and wealth, and the simple fact that Nabakov could not imagine any other response. Such as forgiveness, understanding, tolerance and love. It never entered his mind to be anything but judgmental and disapproving. Yet when Sergei died, Nabokov felt as if a piece of his own flesh had been torn from him. He realized he loved his brother and that if had tried, perhaps he could have done something for him. Too late.

Lolita, too, despite the genius of the story’s construction and its depiction of the sublime quandary of love, is banal. The story does not have the staying power of Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables. Lolita, because of the very symmetry previously exposed, has no magnetism, and thus fails to engage the reader on any level but the intellectual. There is no visceral response in the reader.

Controversy imputed life and longevity to the book, not the sheer majesty of storytelling. Lolita, as a story, lacks emotional breadth; it is neutral. And I, for one, believe this neutrality stems from Nabakov himself. For he was neutral in his emotions, which explains why he moved to neutral Switzerland, where passion is controlled, shoved down to subterranean levels. There will be no political upheavals in Switzerland, nothing worth fighting over that’s for sure, and none at all in Nabokov either. Both the writer and the country he chose to live in put a premium upon gentility, which they considered high among the virtues.

Like Rumpelstiltskin, who turned straw into gold, Nabokov transformed words into works of art. But like the King in Rumpelstiltskin, Nabokov had no zest for life, no real personality. He just played his part, then when things went his way, lived happily ever after. The King remains outside, aloof from, the struggle in Rumpelstiltskin. And so did Nabokov. Unlike the blue butterflies, which were his favorites, he remained trapped in his pod. The blue butterflies twitch and spasm their way out of the pod, escaping the casing. Once out, they can expand their wings and fly. If they don’t fight their way out of the pod, they can’t fly, and if they can’t fly, they can’t mate. Even if they do get out and fly, if they’re not pretty, they get rejected.

Nabokov mated, and he was pretty. But he didn’t fly the way he could have.

Randall Radic, a former Old Catholic priest and a convicted felon, lives in Northern California where he reads, writes and smokes cigars. He is the author of A Priest in Hell: Gangs, Murderers and Snitching in a California Jail, and the forthcoming Gone To Hell: True Crimes of America’s Clergy.     

I recently reviewed A Priest in Hell: Gangs, Murderers, and Snitching in a California Jail by Randy Radic for The Internet Review of Books. I had some questions concerning the book, but Randy, who has contributed to this site, took my comments very gracefully and viewed them as constructive criticism. Below is the opening paragraph of the review.

A PRIEST IN HELL:
Gangs, Murderers, and Snitching in a California Jail
By Randall Radic
ECW Press
342 pgs 
$17.95

In early November 2005, Randall Radic, the former pastor of the First Congregational Church in Ripon, California, was arrested for fleecing his flock. The specific crime: Radic sold his parsonage and the church for more than $725,000. With the loot, he went out and bought himself a spanking brand new BMW valued at $100K, wined and dined at exclusive California restaurants, and smoked pricey and aromatic Hoya cigars. When he made a sizeable deposit in his bank account, he writes, “…somebody flushed the toilet.” The bank became suspicious and all bets were off-Radic’s accounts were frozen before he could transfer the dough down to San Diego and make a swift getaway. The church has its main building back, but still owes huge transaction fees.

To read the rest of the review, please visit the April issue of The Internet Review of Books.

Within the next week, I’ll post an interview with Randy about his life, writing, jail, and his plans for upcoming books.

I’m so excited about this new book because it was reviewed by a very special guest–Randall Radic author of A Priest in Hell: Gangs, Murderers and Snitching in a California Jail.  

Target: Patton — The Plot to Assassinate General George S. Patton

By Robert K. Wilcox

Regnery Publishing,

November 2008

444 pages$27.95

Reviewed by Randall Radic
Certain people – upon hearing some incriminating but not very conclusive bit of gossip –  shake their heads sadly and remark, “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”  As far as they are concerned, the world operates on a simple principle:  cause and effect.  The effect known as smoke is caused by only one thing – fire.  Robert K. Wilcox has written a book about one specific historical event around which there still remains a cloud of smoke – the death of General George S. Patton.  Was Patton’s death an accident?  Or was it something much more sinister – the result of a conspiracy?

Was General George S. Patton murdered?

Target: Patton examines the question from every angle.  A bizarre car wreck took place in 1945.  The car in which Patton rode collided with a U.S. Army truck, leaving Patton partially paralyzed from the neck down. Transferred to a German hospital, Patton received excellent medical care and, after a few days, seemed to be making a miraculous recovery.  Then, unexpectedly, a sudden series of embolisms occurred, and Patton died.  No autopsy was performed.

The circumstances of the car crash and Patton’s death are suspicious.  First, of three people in Patton’s vehicle, only Patton received serious injury.  Second, the other vehicle involved in the crash had no business being where it was, and seemed to abet the collision.  Third, official investigative reports concerning the car crash vanished.  Each of these three mysteries demands examination and explanation.  Adding to the confusion is the fact that long after Patton’s death, two witnesses walked out of the smoke of history and pointed their fingers backward in time to the fire of a conspiracy.  Witness number one was Douglas deWitt Bazata, a former OSS agent, who admitted that he participated in a plot to murder General George Patton.  Witness number two was Stephen J. Skubik, a CIC agent, who stated bluntly that the Soviets wanted Patton dead.  Skubik actually wrote a book about the Soviet plot.  Of the two, Skubik seems to be the most credible.  Bazata’s story might be a little too fantastic. On the other hand, there is no reason for Bazata to fabricate such a story especially sixty years after it took place.  Target: Patton probes the lives and testimony of Bazata and Skubik and concludes that both men are either big fat liars, or something is going on.  While looking for confirmation, Wilcox even implicates General William J. “Wild Bill” Donovan in Patton’s death. And based on the evidence set forth in the book, “Wild Bill’s” participation in lethal skullduggery seems to be highly possible, even probable.  

As the central chapters of Target: Patton unfold, other big shots emerge from the haze surrounding Patton’s death, such luminaries as the President of the United States, FDR; and Generals Dwight Eisenhower and George C. Marshall.  These three men had cogent reasons for wanting Patton to go away.  The primary reason was Patton’s anti-Soviet stance, which Patton was not shy about voicing.  And there were other reasons.  Politically and militarily, Patton embarrassed and threatened the powers-that-be.  Patton knew too much about the way the war had been conducted, and the mistakes that were made – mistakes that resulted in the deaths of thousands of U.S. soldiers.  And if that wasn’t bad enough, Patton had another irritating trait.  Patton was morally courageous, which meant he didn’t know how to go-along to get-along.  Which meant Patton could destroy the careers and political ambitions of a number of powerful men.  

But there was one other reason:  at the end of WWII Patton’s Third Army captured the Nazi’s hidden vaults – billions of dollars worth of priceless art and gold bullion.  A lot of which went missing and has never been recovered.  Patton didn’t steal it.  So who did?

As Wilcox unties this Gordian knot of possible motivations for the elimination of Patton, he exposes personalities, plots, sub-plots and intrigue.  Target: Patton reads like a modern-day thriller, not like a boring academic treatise that gets bogged down in the muck of history.  There’s only one misstep, which occurs in chapter two, where too much detailed information about the car crash is mixed up with too much speculation.  The result is a mish-mash that leaves the reader in a fog.  Almost immediately, though, Wilcox re-balances his story and the reader feels comfortable. In the end, Wilcox does not provide incontrovertible evidence that Patton was murdered.  All the proof is circumstantial.  That being said, it is important to ask one question:  under what circumstances was the proof gathered?  The answer provides the locus point where the evidence intersects – the death of General George S. Patton.

Perhaps it’s time to exhume the body of General Patton, so that the matter can be put to rest.

About Randall Radic

Randall Radic, a former Old Catholic priest and a convicted felon, lives in Northern California where he reads, writes and smokes cigars. He is the author of A Priest in Hell: Gangs, Murderers and Snitching in a California Jail, and the forthcoming Gone To Hell: True Crimes of America’s Clergy.