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Daniel Alef
Maxit Publishing $15.95
Hold onto your historical hats. Daniel Alef's new dual
novels, Pale Truth and Measured Swords, are that good. They are
also frightening--as in frighteningly good--and inspiring. The reader stands warned.
Don't read these books unless you can put the rest of your life on hold. And hold
on. You'll love the ride. These are great stories. In
the school of Robert Doctrow's classic, Ragtime, Mr. Alef has spent 10
years crafting these tales that venture with historic authenticity and page turning
passion into a past world. The reader is transported to San Francisco in the 1800s.
The City is on the cusp of transformation. Unprecedented wealth and criminal chaos
are twin contestants vying against each other and with each other for the city's
control. Rampant raw human ambition rules the day. Power, excess and cruelty define
men. Fortunes are made in a day. And lost. New worlds are being born by the moment
and lives snuffed in the same moment. The one vital monetary currency is gold
dust. But the currency of power is the barrel of a gun. Or a stuffed ballot. Alef's
historical realism exceeds historic imagination. The literary detail navigates
us through America's Babylon by the Bay during the Golden Rush era. The author
draws upon absolutely authentic forces that shaped characters and the period's
dramatic action. The stories are further thickened somehow,
and successfully, by also tying into the tale the ruthless operations of Tammany
Hall in New York, the rural hamlet of Cincinnati (yes, it once was a rural hamlet),
and romance on the rustic streets of New Orleans. Daniel
Alef in so wonderfully telling a tale of yesterday tells us a tale of today. These
are real people with real struggles. The truths are timeless. The passions run
as red today as yesterday. The characters of the mysterious Mary Ellen, the powerful
and power-driven Colbraith, and the indomitable Texan Davey mirror our own life.
It's just that in Alef's mirror the characters all stand taller. Or appear darker. This
is a book of windows and mirrors. It allows us to see the world and ourselves.
Take the time to enjoy the view. If you do, you will.
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