The Vancouver Sun from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada • 105

BOOKS H5 The Vancouver Sun, Saturday. April 23. 1988 Hunter's travel tales a rollicking tour de farce By STEVEN BROWNE ROBERT HUNTER. Mmn You mean Bob Hunter? The grand old man of Greenpeace, former Vancouver Sun columnist and, as he puts it; "snot-nosed quasi-intellectual Western aging enfant terrible For sure, it's the same dude. Old "Chicken" Bob hasn't been ruffling any feathers recently, but he's definitely been up to something if this nutty, rollicking, profane tour de farce means anything.

With no doping of the critical faculty, On The Sky is the funniest travel book writ-, ten here or anywhere else in a long time. Bob is a "Peace his version of travel writer. Time to hit "the lonely stratospheric trail" in quasi-literate would-be macho-man's Hemingway-Plimpton fantasy by running with the bulls in Pamplona, Spain. These are all fairly familiar venues. What makes them fresh is the straight-from-the-hip viewpoint of a fearlessly haywire Hunter.

Somewhere in the middle of all this, Bob takes a side trip to Colorado for the silver anniversary of the publication of Jack Kerouac's On The Road. Among 1,000 others are Ken Kesey, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Abbie Hoffman and Timothy Leary with the Venerable Rinpoche Marpa Kukuripa, a Tibetan Buddhist whose institute is co-sponsoring the event with none other than The Grateful Dead, pre siding over all. The affair is a sentimental journey back for Bob at a turning (40) point in his life. Time to reflect on a period when a "sincere-hearted ex-Catholic Zen Buddhist" wore black turtle-necks, a French beret, "jeans, sandals, and had a stringy little Dig? Unfortunately all is not well in the Buddha-field. The Venerable One is a drunken sot As the conference rolls on "Hoffman's ego is like a 10-storey steel Rubik's Cube.

Leary's rap begins to sound like an old Moody Blues record. Ginzo (Ginsberg) comes out of the closet so often that after a while you wish he would just go back in even old cynical Burroughs curries public favour, saying all the right weird things instead of telling us we're all a bunch of peanuts The last day of the conference, Bob, still wrestling with his past, tries to get a straight answer regarding the purpose of life from a Buddhist scholar. The scholar thinks about it "Well, it really has no particular purpose." The epilogue is far out. Some of these trips have a little too much of the oh no, here we go again, this is too crazy, oops, saved at the last second, feel to them. And let's face it, the title is derivative.

But whatever you want to say about On The Sky, you can't put it down. This a strong outing. Steven Browne is a Vancouver Freelance writer ON THE SKY: Zen and the Art of International Free-Loading. By Robert Hunter. McClelland and Stewart, Gibson, $24.95.

the "Golden Age of Jet Travel." This is how "Gaz" puts it. Hunter's longtime buddy and seasoned traveller and much published travel writer, as he ushers Bob into the world of the freebie. With the compliments of the appropriate national tourism departments they manage to check out the Bahamas, toddle off to Munich for the wild Fasching festival, cruise down the Thames on a hotel barge, partake of the delights of Bangkok, descend on Castro's Cuba, and wind up right in the eye of every HUNTER: nutty, profane Nixomi sees way to peace This rock and roll murder mystery misses the mark 6raiieinidiinis coifficf By C. LEIIMANN-HAUPT New York Times 1999: Victory Without War. By Richard M.

Nixon. Simon Schuster, $29.95 IN 1970 Billy Lion, lead singer of supergroup The Perceptions, dies in a. bathtub in a hotel room in Rome, murdered by his girlfriend. Now it is 17 years later and someone calling himself The Ghost of Rock and Roll is slicing and dicing members of the HERE are few surprises in Richard Nixon's latest book, 1999: Victory Without War. NOSTALGIA KILLS.

By Robert Westbrook. Crown, $24.95 out by at least the halfway mark of the book, if not a touch ear lier. Nostalgia Kills is so overwritten that it is devoid of suspense. Westbrook never has Rachmaninoff think only once about what he has seen or experienced when seven or eight times will do. Not only that, but huge chunks of the book are taken up with Rachmaninoff tedious personal; romantic life.

Gosh, I'm getting tired of middle aged who keep on having onagain offagain romances with their for- mer I The motivation of The Ghost of? Rock and Roll, when finally revealed, is explained in page after page after page of mean- dering dialogue filled with the most obvious popular psychology. And what should be a tingling cli- max at the Grammy Awards is thrown away through lazy, loose Perceptions. "There have, of course, been rumors that Billy didn't really die, that he has hidden him-self away from an adoring public. The rumors are similar to those that fji 1 r-nwp mm 1 ft' $wfa ttfc BOOKS PETER WILSON and Nicaragua have overtaken his text, although doubtless he would counsel reading the fine print of impending peace agreements in either area, on the theory that for Moscow and its clients (which he asserts both the Kabul government and the Sandinistas to be), "peace is a continuation of war by other. means." He never unveils completely the logic by which he views the Soviet Union as the source of the world's evil while at the same time considering China one of the great hopes for the United States' future.

Both are Communist countries; he keeps reminding us, and Communism as an ideology is not only bad, but also "has lost its appeal." Yet the Soviet Union must be defeated, while productive Chinese-American reta- tionship could move the world to unprecedented heights of peace and He sounds disingenuous when he writes: "If the people of the Third World think we are interested only in winning the Cold War with the Soviet Union, we will lose the war for their hearts and minds. These people have tremendous problems; At least the communists talk about problems. Too often we talk only about This seems an odd statement to make in a book mainly devoted to the trouble with Communists. And when in his final chapter he attacks the "new negativism" that he sees as becoming rampant in "the upper crust of America in terms of education, money, and power," and begins to stress all that is promising about this country, he not only loses the fact-dense reasonableness that has characterized his book up until this point, but he also begins to sound hollow and cliched, like the soundtrack of a grade-school documentary film. which he describes in an author's note as "the product of a lifetime of study and on-the-job training in foreign policy," and which he apparently intends as a how-to guide for whoever is elected the new U.S.

president this November. But Nixon makes the subject of geopolitics dramatic in 1999. Partly this is because he raises all the timely questions about the present state of the world, and then answers them both systematically and thoroughly. Partly it's because of the coherence of his world view. Conflict is "intrinsic to mankind," he believes.

"Real peace is a means of living with unending conflict." The Soviet Union is the ultimate enemy in that conflict, and it has grown more dangerous than ever with the ascendancy of Mikhail Gorbachev, who, though sincere in his desire for peace, is nevertheless still dedicated to the triumph of Communism, Nixon insists, and who as a leader is in a league with Churchill, de Gaulle, Adenauer, de Gasperi, Yoshida, Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, among the great ones Nixon has met in his lifetime. To thwart Gorbachev's aims, the U.S. needs a new "comprehensive policy that combines deterrence, competition, and negotiation," By such means we can defeat the Soviet Union peacefully by the end of the millennium, or, as he puts it in his subtitle, achieve "victory without war." Every detail of his master plan follows from this grand scenario from his advocacy of proceeding sprang up around Jim Morrison, lead singer of The Doors after his death. In any case. The Ghost of Rock and Roll is killing (or causing the deaths of) the golden lads of the psychedelic '60s.

First to die is former Perception, Jay Jeffries, now an aging VJ for The Rock Channel. And the Rock Channel is, surprise, part of a business empire put together by former business manager of the Perceptions and not terribly nice guy, Bo Daniels. The Ghost of Rock and Roll, it seems, is unhappy with the way the music business has gone since and tensionless writing. Nostalgia Kills has a post-mod- ernist cover similar to those on Robert Campbell's two exciting and grisly La-La Land novels. But that's where the similarity ends.

And speaking of Robert Camp- -bell, let me recommend, if you ha- ven't already read it, The Junkyard Dog (Signet, for which Campbell won the Edgar Award for best paperback original in 1986. the 60s all that crass corrup-tion and making of money. NIXON: "Peace is a continuation of war by other means" with the Strategic Defense Initiative, if only to limit marginally the potential damage of a Soviet first nuclear strike, to his call for a settlement of the Palestinian question, if only to "forge closer with the countries in the region of the Persian Gulf that will act as a buffer against a Soviet push to the south. Of course there are faults here and there in the wholeness of Nixon's argument. Events in Afghanistan The Junkyard Dog is the deftly written account of a bomb blast that kills a girl and an old woman in an abortion clinic in Chicago.

Tracking down the killer is Jimmy Flannery, a minor member of Chicago's political machine. For those used to the La-La Land novels, this should be a surprise. Campbell handles the Chicago material and milieu as well as he does the settings and situations in Los Angeles and New Orleans. A Diamond Before You Die by Chris Wiltz (Mysterious Press, $4.95) is set in New Orleans, but other than local color doesn't provide much in the way of excitement. Private eye Neal Rafferty plods through a tired plot that always seems as if it is on the verge of becoming interesting.

It never does. There's just no heart, no love and no real rock and roll anymore. Even so, there's lots of sex. Sound like a good premise for a mystery novel? Well, it is. Just think of the opportunity to do something exciting with the death of Jim Morrison and to put it in to murder mystery form.

All those chances to satirize today's moribund music business, all those chances to make fun of rock videos so filled with symbols that they symbolize nothing, all those chances to let loose with sex, drugs and rock and roll. Unfortunately in Nostalgia Kills, Robert Westbrook lets all these opportunities dribble away. His hero, Nicky Rachmaninoff of the Beverly Hills murder squad and master of the blues piano (natch), takes at least 60 pages too long to solve a case that most readers would have figured Exposing the tricks of psychic phonies By KERRY REGIER EXTRASENSORY DECEPTION. By A11 of tne feats of the so-called psy-Henrv Gordon Mar.miiian of Can-. chics have been exposed as ordinary HE days are over when William James, Thomas Edison, 1 i-1 1 1 A 1 ada, $19.95.

and Carl Jung, in their inno cence, could accept "paranormal phenomena" as real. A tidal wave of firm contrary evidence and the complete absence of unambiguous support for astrology, reincarnation, ESP, flying saucers, spirits, mental spoonbending, and so on, has destroyed any claim to reality maintained for these epiphenomena. Uri Geller has been clearly and repeatedly demonstrated to be a fraud, by James Randi and others. NEW YORK TIMES Office Surprise Meigiu 01 naiiu lcus, easily implicated by anyone. Famous predictions of world disasters never come true; and what psychic can honestly claim to have accurately predicted the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle, the IRA attempt to blow up the British cabinet, the disastrous Mexican earthquake or the October 17 stock market crash? Yet millions of people continue to Henry Gordon, a columnist in these matters for the Toronto Star, has gathered together his work in book form under the dramatic title Extrasensory Deception.

An electronics engineer by training and a professional magician, Gordon knows precisely the tricks employed by mediums, psychics and faith healers to accomplish their apparent miracles, and explains many of them in his book. For example, "intuitionist" Earl Carley claims to have solved a famous child murder in Atlanta. The FBI told Gordon that Carley's work had "no impact on the case." In a survey of police departments around North America, including Miami, Los Angeles, and New York, Gordon found no successes by psychic detectives. A veteran police reporter for the Toronto Star told Gordon he'd "never heard of a psy- 34 Cubic meter 35 Cone-shaped dwelling 38 Summaries 41 Charge 42 Aujourd'hui's forerunner 43 Electronic pulse maker 44 "The the wise are as goads. Eccl.

12:11 48 Sea eagle 49 Preserve 50 Roundabout 54 Doctors' org. 55 Traders 57 Roman magistrate 58 Luge 59 Kin of bush-bucks 60 Used a mangle 61 Better 62 I ACROSS 1 Flashy squawkrr 6 "Chorchp la 1 1 Goya's duchess 15 NeiRhlxirof 18 Inspiration for a canzone 19 Celestial hunter 20 Pseudologisl 21 Form by carving 23 Groups of masseurs? 25 Foremost 27 Raphael birthplace 28 Execute a slalom 29 Deposit on a wedding band? 30 Connects 32 Jolson's river 64 Windshield hazard 65 Diplomatic oasis 67 Dictum 68 Classical odisl 70 Slowpokes 71 Fleece 72 Rake over the coals 73 Allotted. British style 76 Wright wing 77 Manufactures 78 Chills 79 Workers' gp. 80 Puccini's "Manon 82 Parts of calyces 84 Box 85 Branch of learning 86 Petrol 89 Bully's prey 90 Addis 93 Swift's forte 94 S. Korea's first president 96 Simple litigations? 98 Industrial tub 101 Straying 105 A town between Boston and Lowell 106 Johnson as a scorer? 108 Noble, in Nurnberg 109 Components of psyches 110 Colette's "The One" 111 Author of "Common Sense" 1 12 Sullivan and McMahon 113 Dwindle LI 4 Pall 115 Feudal peons is rmp fi ho "'Ji I '2 pa i 16 I VT T5 73 7T 27 75 TT I 1 1 13 ST TS 1 "34 3S 57" 45" 4i IF" Sj 44 fi?" 47 3 4T" 53 51 152 I S3 "iT- 57- riss -r-j tr tr wpT" pT srST 57 -srlr pr -r-j -J- 17 yj- -yj- S3 si I 1 1 13 iu" ,1, 1, pnsrjir L'jii Ri 5T" sr sr rirwr tbt- wrTuTU? -ft.

-TT3T TT3" TTT JTiT TTT TTT TTT URI GELLER: fraud chic helping to solve a criminal? case," and a former Ontario Proving cial Police Commissioner of 4 IS years' experience flatly stated that no psychic has ever solved a cases Much more seriously, Gordon decries the frequent claims of psy-j chics to discover illness where none? exists, or falsely heal real sometimes even misleading severely ill clients to believe they've been cured; some have died believing noj further medical attention neces-j sary. An excess of inyective mars Extra-J sensory Deception when morel; detailed exposition of evidence would be more convincing, and the reader is often just told that? "research has shown" or "science tells us" without sources or explana- i tions. In a few places Gordon is sim-ply wrong in his facts, as when he misattributes afterimages to persis- tence of vision instead of retinal fati- gue, and there's no discussion of how people come to believe improbable things. But Gordon makes up for these shortcomings with a wealth of enter- taining anecdotes. Kerry Regier Is a Vancouver freelance writer LAST WEEK'S SOLUTION DOWN 1 Word on a Japanese ship 2 Asiatic bordei river 3 The Georgia Peach 4 Judge 5 Hot dog 6 Watch chain 7 Precambrian and Paleozoic 8 Coveted pelt 9Couturiere 10 Annapolis grad.

11 Goal or butterfly 12 Woody climbers 13 Erie Canal vessel 39 Elements 40 Martinique et St. -Pierre 41 Polo team 43 Tolerate 44 Impassive monarch? 45 Errors at the cash register? 46 Auguries 47 Like a craze 49 "Can't! Don't! Kipling 51 Irregular 52 Out let 53 Bronx followet 56 Hen's comment 58 Diminutive 60 Fit lo be I led 61 Irish Rose" 14 Kuwaitior Omani 15 Faced 16 Summa cum 17 Lou Grant portrayer 22 Raisond' 24 Brooklyn's Preacher 26 Penny pinchers 29 Butter at Fordham 31 Additional bedding? 33 Editor? 35 Oales novel 36 Joyce's homeland 37 Fresh load of pigs? 62 Confederate, eg. 63 Office Cato onre held 64 Frosh-rushing group 66 Medieval clubs 69 Anglo-Saxon currency 70 Author (if "The Dragons of Eden" 72 Medieval English chronicle 73 Conductor Genarro 74 Greek mil. group of W. II 75 High sided little boat I I i To 5 Hi 2.0 ill ill TT I CJ in MOO 1H I 0 77 Water holder 86 Boaster-81 Author James 87 Sergeant's and command 91 Needlework 99 Turkish com- 103 Hawaiian loop mander goose 93 Russian ante- 102 Related 107 Hue partner lope 95 Border 88 Sonny's sibling 89 Mexican blanketlike shawl ballplayer Enos 83 Hoist 84 Mountain ranges 90 Title Liszt held 97 Aquatic team.