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With the help of a cloaked Washington contact, high-stakes mission pilots Frank and Zoot find themselves up to their cockpits in trouble in the middle of the Iraqi conflict and are charged with retrieving a priceless object before the Gulf War starts. ... Read more

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Originally published by Bantam Books, here is a love story that begins with the divorce: a riotous, colorful, nostalgic tale of an unusual girl's coming of age amid the swirling adult world of New York nightlife, with its Runyonesque mix of gamblers, showgirls, and Zoot-suited mobsters.

Christie Klein isn't fazed by the wild parties thrown by Leo, her utterly lovable, charmingly irresponsible father, while her mother, Tina, spends yet another night in jail for illegally picketing Leo's Seventh Avenue dress factory. Christie and her sister, Ruthie, are accustomed to the liquor and the smoke, the raucous laughter - and always, the wonderful music.

For Christie, music means her mother's newest quest: stardom for Negro singer, Ivory Joe, in a world dominated by white singers and mob-controlled record companies.By necessity Ivory Joe is a boxer.But by calling he is a heart-busting singer and pianist who practices his craft nightly in dusty backrooms.With his group, The Classics, Ivory Joe is ushering in a strange, pulsating, erotic new music that would come to be known as rock 'n roll.

Through it all Christie tells us the tangled love story of her parents, who met in a 52nd Street nightclub when Leo came in to shake down Tina's date for an overdue gambling debt.Leo grew up in the Bronx along with other street kids who pushed garment racks on Seventh Avenue before going into loan-sharking for the Mafia.Tina grew up in a shabby Brooklyn walk-up, smart and tough enough to do anything: road-managing Ivory Joe and The Classics in the bitterly divided deep South, succeeding at photojournalism, organizing unions - even keeping the affection of an irrepressible rake of an ex-husband.

Now Christie and Ruthie- who longingly comparetheir pre-adolescent womanhood to the voluptuous nudes on the back of Leo's gambling cards - earnestly scheme to put their parents' rocky marriage back together.But the girls have plenty of growing up to do themselves before they can help the wildly incompatible Leo and Tina - or cope with Ivory Joe's turbulent ascent to success.

In this warm, witty novel set in a more innocent time, 1950's America, Martyn Burke establishes himself as a writer with a sure voice all his own.Burke's evocation goes far beyond nostalgia. He conjures up unforgettable characters and achingly real personalities who linger long after the last page has been turned.
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Customer Reviews (1)

A Meaningful Relic
The hardcover copy of this book that I have came out in 1980, a good year for me (I was 33) to be thinking about what I was going to be doing for the rest of my life.Nobody was expecting my life to be so much like this book, and I have no memory of what year this book actually became mine.As the intellectual level of televised life has declined to reflect the lack of thoughtfulness of the media which bring us the most important information we have to go on, I must have figured that this book would be about Nam, as soon as I saw it.Crimes against humor (a network cancelled the Smothers Brothers comedy hour) were so common during the war itself, when laughing at Nam was supposed to be much worse than going to Nam to fight, LAUGHING WAR by Martyn Burke had to be about the great tension required for seriously maintaining an activity that became increasingly absurd.I was once in Nam to escalate the winding down, and finding myself in disagreement with the army (like having my own secret plan for peace) was perfectly natural, as in this book.

Comedy has become such a business that the information in this book which might still be considered most useful relates to how a comic routine must reflect a particular character to connect with an audience and be successful.There are chapters on Barney ("Most of Barney's comedy material came from watching the war"), Donna ("the Garbo of the Catinat, coming and going when few people saw her"), Isaacs ("Bitterness wells up inside Isaacs and he decides that he prefers the enemy at the front to the enemy behind him. . . . It is Abbie Hoffman, exhorting his multitudes with anarchistic wisecracks that sound to Isaacs like treason"), Jokes, and finally, Laughing War itself.If there is a possibility that something like Nam will crop up again, with the help of this book, people who want to be comedians will be able to spot it first and tell everybody about the hard times that are about to come down.Anyone who is trying to make sense of civilization will be hard pressed by the case which this book makes against the foolishness of using all of its destructive power in an attempt to wipe out all opposition.

In the chapter on Isaacs there is a paragraph about a sergeant who was "bored by the jokes.They remind the sergeant too much of the kind he used to hear at the strip shows with the traveling carnivals.They were all hick comedians in those shows.With corny jokes."That is all most people expect, and it was great to read this comic effort to bring people to another level.More than just liking this book, I try to live it. ... Read more

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The Shelling of Beverly Hills
Martyn Burke captures the lunacy of a culture self absorbed. I was laughing so hard at various times during the book that I had to stop reading. Anyone who thinks they know what people in Beverly Hills think, feel or act like when stressed or relaxed should read this book. ... Read more

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Originally published by Houghton Mifflin Company.THE COMMISSAR’S REPORT begins deep in the doldrums of the 1950’s.Stalin’s in the Kremlin shooting intellectuals, Ike’s on the golf course shooting above par, the KGB and CIA are shooting each other, the Cold War is getting hot, and Dimitri is in love with Enemy Number One.He’s simply bonkers about all the things that make America great; the Brooklyn Dodgers, Cadillac convertibles,Bloomingdale’s, “Life,” “Time,” “Fortune,” and pink flamingos.His first problem is that, as a Russian spy, he’s supposed to bee hatching plots to conquer the good old U.S.A.Worse still, he’s becoming, through no fault of his own, one of the wealthiest capitalists in the world.

Dimitri’s dilemma is rooted in the dark, deadly days of post-war Stalinist Russia when his father, a member of the secret police, smuggled home contraband copies of “Life” magazine.While Dad was at the office liquidating his rivals, Dimitri and his brother were furtively reading “Life” at home in the Worker’s Paradise.

“From every photograph, Enemy Number One drew us into its secrets and mysteries and its power.We soared in its planes and raced in its Buicks…Suddenly we were in Florida, where the nightclub echoed to Latin music and gangsters with blondes sat in velvet chairs…It was the women of Enemy Number One that sent us into ecstasy.The brassiere ads totally wiped us out, as they say. We sat there gaping at these nearly naked creatures with their two white shiny cones beckoning us to illicit thrills. There was nothing like them in our city.All the women were like our mother.Shaped like wood stoves.”
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Customer Reviews (3)

Amusing, but hardly brilliant
It's an amusing look at what might have happened if a son of the steppes hit Manhattan, but hardly biting satire or even particularly well-written. A writing style that includes a sentence that says '... fill him full of bullets...' can be called functional at best.
However, if you can get past the succession of coincidences and completely improbable events that fill the narrative (the protagonist grows incredibly rich because he's able to use intelligence gleaned by the Soviet spy machine to pick stocks - really? An apparatus that seems otherwise hilariously incompetent and obsessed with staying on the right side of Moscow's whims is still able to gather so much accurate corporate information that he can pick a succession of winners in the stock market?) after a while, you care for the hapless but lucky Dimitri enough to finish the book.
A light cleanser for your palate between more challenging reads.

Spy vs. Spy
It's been a while since I've picked up a Mad Magazine, but this novel has often reminded me of the black and white comic strip characters who symbolized the struggle of the Cold War. For those who are unfamiliar, or like me, only vaguely remember the premise of Spy vs. Spy, there are two spies who are constantly hatching up plots to eliminate the other. The plots vary in complexity and are usually countered by the opposing spy in a way that backfires on the original plotter, or ends in a draw. In any case, you never knew who was likely to be the victor until the last frame. Such is the case with Burke's story.

The Commissar's Report is a brilliant tale that highlights two characters on opposite sides of an ideological battle. And, to complicate things, they have a history together going back to early childhood.

Burke employs a very simple and entertaining writing style that manages to quickly develop characters to a point where you either love them or hate them, and sometimes both at the same time. Yet they are humanized to a level where you feel empathy for them all.

If you are a fan of "Catch-22" or "A Confederacy of Dunces", you will absolutely love this novel.

Brilliant!
I read this book many years ago before the fall of the Soviet Union and it has always remained one of my absolute favorites. If anyone remembers the old Soviet era, you'll be tickled pink. If you don't remember the Soviet era, it's an interesting peek into those times.
One of my favorite books of all time. ... Read more

Product Description
This is nonfiction commentary.Chapters: Pirates of Silicon Valley, Power Play, the Clown Murders. Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 18. Not illustrated. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: Pirates of Silicon Valley is a 1999 film based on the book Fire in the Valley: The Making of The Personal Computer by Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine. It is a made-for-television docudrama written and directed by Martyn Burke which documents the rise of the home computer (personal computer) through the rivalry between Apple Computer and Microsoft. The film stars Anthony Michael Hall as Bill Gates and Noah Wyle as Steve Jobs. In 1984, Steve Jobs (Noah Wyle) is speaking to director Ridley Scott (J. G. Hertzler), who is in the process of creating the 1984 commercial for Apple Computer which introduced the Macintosh personal computer to an American audience for the first time. Jobs sees the commercial as a poetic statement of consciousness-raising, but Scott is more concerned at the moment with its technical aspects. Flashing forward 1997, Jobs has returned to Apple, and announces a new deal with Microsoft at the '97 Macworld Expo. His partner, Steve Wozniak (Joey Slotnick), is introduced as one of the two central narrators of the story. Wozniak notes to the audience the resemblance between "Big Brother" and the image of Bill Gates (Anthony Hall) on the screen behind Jobs during this announcement. Asking how they "got from there to here," the film turns to flashbacks of his youth with Jobs, prior to the forming of Apple. The first flashback takes place on the U.C. Berkeley campus during the period of the early seventies student movements. Jobs and Wozniak are shown caught on the campus during a riot between students and police. Jobs and Wozniak flee the riot, and after finding safety, Jobs states to Wozniak that it is they...http://booksllc.net/?id=404122 ... Read more

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This digital document, covering the life and work of Martyn Burke, is an entry from Contemporary Authors, a reference volume published by Thompson Gale. The length of the entry is 926 words. The page length listed above is based on a typical 300-word page. Although the exact content of each entry from this volume can vary, typical entries include the following information:

• Place and date of birth and death (if deceased)
• Family members
• Education
• Professional associations and honors
• Employment
• Writings, including books and periodicals
• A description of the author's work
• References to further readings about the author

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Originally published by Doubleday. Bien Hoa airbase, outside Saigon, wasn't a very funny place, but Barney's job had one advantage:he always played to a packed house. The soldiers
flocked to his shows, and the war-zone comedian coaxed his battle-weary audiences first into chuckles and then into guffaws of healing laughter with material drawn from the lunacy around
them: the little old VC with the single-shot rifle taking potshots at the jets, the international "peacekeeping" mission,the Vietnamese "car wash" racket, the numbing routine of army life,
the officers...

.. .One officer in particular: Colonel Isaacs, the blood-and-guts commander of the base, a driven man whose soldiers pay the price of his obsessions.Barneyoften ridiculed his authority
from in front of the footlights, and afterhours he wooed the colonel's woman, Donna, a beautiful singer with a secret.
So far, he had gone unpunished...

. . . the band began blasting out an off-key Colonel Bogey
March. The audience went wild. But at this point in the eve-
ning they usually went wild over almost anything…….
And so Colonel Bogey races across the flatness like a
tide seeking shore. It is louder than even the laughter and the
strange yelling that comes from the Club and is momentarily
lost in the unearthly whine of the F-lOOs as they return from
bombing whatever it is that has to be bombed. Colonel Bogey
washes over the lone sentries and rushes on into the darkness
that lies beyond the perimeter. The darkness stretches on and
on, beyond the wretches lying soaked and bloody in the swamp
near Cambodia listening to the metallic voices in the headset
that tell them why the F-lOOs cannot come back until dawn,
and listening to the noises in the nearby jungle that might be
metal grating on metal. The darkness goes on forever. But the
nineteen-year-old from Georgia can no longer hear the curling
chords of Jimi Hendrix s guitar as the Armed Forces Radio
brings him the Best in Rock.The nineteen-year-old from
Georgia can hear none of this. A long thin knife protrudes from
his chest at the place where his flak jacket should have been
buckled. Thin bubbles of blood drip from his mouth. In his
final act as a sentry, he has died with his eyes wide open.



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