The King’s Indian – John Gardner, 1974 ★½

Pondering Life and Death with John Gardner

Sometimes, death is just the trick to lift a literary figure to greater prominence. Christopher Marlowe, Edgar Allen Poe, and Sylvia Plath exemplify the notion of toiling in obscurity, dying young, and leaving behind a legend to inspire fresh generations of readers and scholars.

Often, though, death is just death. Case in point: John Gardner.

Knockdown – Dick Francis, 1974 ★★

Putting the Blood in Bloodstock

Dick Francis wrote very well. I feel confident in stating this, in part because I have read some fine Dick Francis novels and in part because he kept me reading this, a novel by no means fine. It is the mark of a superlative novelist to hold a reader’s attention even when firing blanks.

Knockdown begins with exactly that, a knockdown attack on our protagonist while he arranges a horse sale. As this is the livelihood of Jonah Dereham, he is both concerned and confused.

Why would a pair of thugs beat him up over the title to a non-sensational horse? And why would they attack him again when he acquires its replacement? Is it business? Is it personal? In time, Dereham discovers it is a bit of both.

Learned Hand: The Man And The Judge – Gerald Gunther, 1994 ★★★★

Courting Doubt

How does a man who essentially believed in nothing help hone a system of jurisprudence into the debatable envy of the Western World? Very well, as Gerald Gunther explains it here.

Being uncertain about the basic rightness and wrongness of everything in a world he believed the product of mere chance was the strength of Learned Hand’s outlook, as Gunther explains it, and why the once-legendary jurist deserves consideration well after the times he helped to form have run down history’s rear-view mirror.

“Skepticism and relentless probing came naturally to Hand,” Gunther writes in his preface. “Reflectiveness, intolerance of absolutes, and relentless searching for answers despite an abiding conviction that there were no permanent ones were well-ingrained traits by the time he became a judge.”

Measure For Measure – William Shakespeare, 1604 ★★★★½

A Comedy about Something

Roughly half the time I observed him in action, I figured the Duke at the center of Shakespeare’s satisfying Measure For Measure to be a stand-in for God. The other half, I thought he was the Bard’s answer to J. Peterman, the genially patrician, obtusely pompous character who is Elaine Benes’ boss on the TV series “Seinfeld.”

Well, it is a comedy.

The Land Of Hidden Men – Edgar Rice Burroughs, 1931 ★★½

Lost and Found in an Ancient Jungle Kingdom

Somewhere in my primordial past, decades before my birth, a man looked deep into some misty realm and espied the half-naked youth, bounding across a jungle just a half-step ahead of deadly peril, whom I would someday become, if only in my imagination.

That man was Edgar Rice Burroughs, who put pen to paper and crafted fantasies for a boyhood I had yet to reach.

Those Guys Have All The Fun – James Andrew Miller & Tom Shales, 2011 ★★★

Those Guys Play Rough

ESPN started out a good idea, but quickly became subsumed by ego, hubris, and testosterone.

To figure that out, you don’t need Those Guys Have All The Fun – an hour of their live coverage of any sports event reveals this well enough – but it certainly helps connect the dots. To succeed at ESPN takes a certain kind of mentality, James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales reveal in this 2011 book, where cutthroat tactics and crass individualism hold sway.

The Confidential Agent– Graham Greene, 1939 ★½

Spy vs. Spy

You can take the man out of a war, but can you take the war out of a man? Graham Greene uses the device of a spy novel to ask this question, foregoing such typical spy-fiction elements as plot and suspense in favor of mystery and atmosphere for a novel that takes a long time going (mostly) nowhere.

The title character, a middle-aged man known to us only by a letter, D., arrives in England from his war-torn homeland, also unnamed. His mission, explained after some bumping around and a beating, has to do with getting a British coal-mining concern to do business with his nation’s government. The nation is currently embroiled in civil war, and an agent from the rebel side, identified as L., is hot on D.’s trail.

President Reagan: The Role Of A Lifetime – Lou Cannon, 1991 ★★★★

Weighing the Reagan Legacy

Two things Lou Cannon wants you to come away thinking after reading this, his widely-respected account of Ronald Reagan’s presidency:

1) Reagan was a really nice guy who did some decent things in office.

2) Americans must never, ever elect someone like Reagan again.

The Afghan – Frederick Forsyth, 2006 ★

A Thriller Out of Time

Frederick Forsyth has owned me for over 30 years, since The Day Of The Jackal held me hostage for a sleepless week in boarding school. Forsyth has put me ringside while World War III is averted, powerful bad guys are chastened with vigor, and the value of committed individualism is repeatedly, gloriously affirmed.

But the Cold War verities which spawned Forsyth’s career have given way. 9/11 showed you don’t need a Politburo to direct large-scale destruction upon the West. Simple good/evil binaries between freedom and Communism have been replaced by self-loathing democracies fed up with their own capitalist excess.

New technology, like drones and instantaneous eavesdropping, has made Forsyth’s dependency on isolated men of action seem almost quaint, not to mention sexist and possibly homophobic.

The Autobiography Of Mark Twain – Mark Twain [Edited by Charles Neider, 1959] ★★½

Twain In Twilight: Disorganized, Dis-spiriting, Still Quotable

Mark Twain produced one of the most celebrated autobiographies in American literature. This was not his own, but rather that of Ulysses S. Grant, which Twain painstakingly midwifed to great commercial success and lasting popular acclaim. It still ranks high among presidential memoirs.

Twain also wrote an autobiography of his own, a very notable work even if it is hard to similarly declare a success. Four radically different versions of The Autobiography Of Mark Twain exist in print, without a clear consensus as to which, if any, should be considered definitive. 

But of the four currently extant, including a three-volume set completed this year, the autobiography edited by Charles Neider and published in 1959 may well be the most digestible.

A Man In Full – Tom Wolfe, 1998 ★★½

Half a Man Is Better than None

Tom Wolfe is a deft print pictorialist, crafting word pictures that crawl inside your skull and stay there –however forgettable the subjects of his prose may be.

Reading A Man In Full, his second novel, is to discover how even great writing, produced with vim and energy and a decade’s worth of research, can hit a wall when concerns of plot and character are ignored.

Yet you can’t help but enjoy the ride, however slow it becomes around the middle or how suddenly it stops at the end.

The Lincoln Conspiracy – Timothy L. O'Brien, 2012 [No Stars]

Other Than That, Mrs. Lincoln...

Historical fiction is one of my favorite literary genres, when it’s done well. The spinning nature of time is never better appreciated than when one sees a page from our past come into focus as if for the first time.

A thoughtful fictional treatment can lend a fresh and divergent perspective on what has become well-trod ground.

But when historical fiction is done badly, it makes for a rough trudge. Take this story set in the United States after the Civil War, centering on the mystery surrounding the country’s first presidential assassination. As fiction, as history, as action-adventure, the novel fails so badly as to defy reason.

The Night Of The Moonbow – Thomas Tryon, 1989 ★★★★

The Other Side of Summer

Adolescent summertimes frequently are the stuff for gentle nostalgia. Thomas Tryon’s The Night Of The Moonbow goes for a different effect. 

In this tale about a 14-year-old orphan who struggles to make a good impression at a Connecticut sleepaway camp in 1938, Tryon presents a chilling suspense story in the guise of a rustic coming-of-age experience at a lakeside paradise.

Shakespeare: Cardenio – Charles Hamilton, 1994 ★½

In Search of Lost Shakespeare

It’s perhaps the world’s most exclusive club. They let in 36 members back in 1623; since then only two more have been admitted. Others wait beyond the velvet rope, including a knight named Ironside, a saint named Tom, and a crazed Spanish wanderer named Cardenio no one has seen in 400 years.

A wonderful assortment of strange characters occupy what is known as the Shakespeare Apocrypha. Some of these plays are widely championed as being at least in part authored by the Bard, like an early work entitled Sir Edmund Ironside and a later work, Sir Thomas More, based on the life of the English saint.

All have champions. Only one, Cardenio, has both a distinct identity, an itinerant, lonely character made mad by lost love who features in Miguel de Cervantes’ epic novel Don Quixote; and direct attribution to Shakespeare in the form of a 1653 register entry for the play.

Sinatra: An Unauthorized Biography – Earl Wilson, 1976 ★★

Life in King Frankie's Court

A courtier’s life is never easy. Flatter too much, and you risk being taken for granted. Offer candor, and it may be resented.

You may benefit from great kindness in certain moments, but the higher one’s master rises in life, the more callous and cruel they are inclined to become.

Earl Wilson experienced this, and wrote a book about it.

Journey Into Fear – Eric Ambler, 1940 ★★★★½

A Phony War Gets Real

Popular in its day, Journey Into Fear deserves credit for helping popularize a more sophisticated type of spy novel. Reading it reveals something else, a stock-taking exercise just after the beginning of World War II when it seemed Europe might step back before beginning in earnest the century’s worst conflagration.

Eric Ambler’s message reads like a warning: Be ready for a rough ride, and be strong.

The Heart Of The Order – Thomas Boswell, 1989 ★★

Baseball's Boswell at Less than His Best

It happens to nearly every sports columnist who becomes a public figure. The price of personality-centric journalism begins to infiltrate their copy until it is as much about the writer as it is the games being covered.

Thomas Boswell had been one of baseball’s most prominent scribes for twenty years when this book came out. His snarky, witty, probing style established him as a worthwhile voice for analyzing changes in the game, like free agency and the rise of the running game. Baseball characters like Pete Rose and Reggie Jackson made regular and welcome appearances in his columns, and got off good quotes.

By the time of the period covered in The Heart Of The Order, 1983 to 1988, baseball was beginning to move into a different space.

The Price Of Politics – Bob Woodward, 2011 ★★½

The Deal that Failed

Access to the powerful is Bob Woodward’s stock-in-trade, his formula for turning somewhat pedestrian and shallow accounts of current affairs into commercially viable, relevant books.

But what happens when demonstrating that access trumps a thesis or storyline? The Price Of Politics got me thinking about that.

Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day Of The Locust – Nathanael West, 1933 & 1939 ★★★½

Bleak and Bleaker

Misery, it is said, loves company, but the reverse is certainly not as true.

Take the case of Nathanael West, who made human misery the centerpiece of his work. Beloved among the American intelligentsia, he is pretty much ignored by everyone else. 

Reading this, a paperback that brings together his two most famous works, I understand why. There’s dark fiction; this is coal-black.

The Cave Girl – Edgar Rice Burroughs, 1913-17 ★

All Perspiration, No Inspiration

The strongest feeling you get, from both reading Edgar Rice Burroughs and reading about his amazing career, is how critical the principle of flow was for him.

There’s narrative flow: Keep everything moving all the time, so the reader keeps reading.

There’s concept flow: Always work in new ideas in your fiction, even when they closely resemble older ones.

Then there’s product flow: Never stop writing, because you need the money.

Killing Patton: The Strange Death Of World War II’s Most Audacious General – Bill O’Reilly & Martin Dugard, 2014 ★½

Death Comes for the General

He came, he saw, he conquered. Then, some months after, en route to a pheasant hunt just days before his scheduled return home, he died.

Was it really an accident? Or did certain powers-that-be rule Gen. George S. Patton, Jr. too dangerous to live?

The latter notion is entertained in this, the most recent release in the Killing series of books co-authored by Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard.

Roscoe – William Kennedy, 2002 ★★★

Politics and the Art of the Lie

The only two sure things in life are death and taxes; that’s no less true for those who collect the taxes. 

William Kennedy takes a sympathetic look at a wheeler-dealer who ran one of America’s most powerful and longest-lived political machines while he takes on the prospect of his own mortality.

Fleetwood – Mick Fleetwood, 1990 ★★

Rock 'n' Roll Sometimes Forgets

How does one spend two decades in one of pop music’s biggest bands, and emerge eight million dollars in debt?

For Mick Fleetwood, drummer and only original member of Fleetwood Mac, it took a score of rotating fellow band members, numerous messy romantic entanglements, and a Tony Montana-sized mountain of cocaine.

No wonder this memoir Fleetwood proves such a disappointing read. How could he possibly have remembered anything!

MacBeth – William Shakespeare, c. 1606 ★★★★★

Something Wicked This Way Comes

One remarkable thing about MacBeth is that there is no one here to like. No one.

The protagonists are thorough evil, showing only the slightest, most self-serving pangs of conscience as they conduct their villainy. Those arrayed against them are likewise shifty characters.

If you are looking for something to warm up to, buy a dog. You won’t find it here.

The Little Rascals: The Life And Times Of Our Gang – Leonard Maltin & Richard W. Bann, 1992 ★★★★★

The Gang's All Here

Childhood is over too quickly, even when it lasts 22 years. That’s how you feel reading the last pages of this extensive overview of one of Hollywood’s most enduring creations. 

Popular movie critic Leonard Maltin and co-author Richard W. Bann tell how a gang of lovable kids survived everything from talking pictures to puberty to unite generations, both older and yet-unborn, in laughter.

The Nine Tailors – Dorothy L. Sayers, 1934 ★★★

Ask Not for Whom the Bells Toll...

Classic English murder novels of the early 20^th century are sometimes called “mystery cozies,” conjuring up notions of tea at a warm fireplace, damask upholstery, and a pair of turned-up boots politely protruding from the farthest corner.

I’d like to call The Nine Tailors a “cozy,” in that it is an utterly English novel of strict social conventions and consummate discretion, except I was hardly cozy while reading it.

The problem wasn’t the goriness of the main crime, though a dead man found in someone else’s grave with his hands lopped off and his face bashed in is pretty gory territory, however discretely described. Nor was it the uneasiness of the setting, a small church in the English fenlands peopled by a community with dirty secrets to hide.

Pure Baseball – Keith Hernandez and Mike Bryan, 1994 ★★★½

Breaking Down Balls and Strikes

It's one thing to watch the game of baseball. Understanding the ins and outs of your typical major-league contest is something else: The more you see, the deeper and trickier it gets.

Explicating the strategy that results in balls and strikes, and how those balls and strikes in turn require strategic adjustments on the fly, is the focus of this detailed analysis of two Major League Baseball games played in June of 1993.

Marathon: The Pursuit Of The Presidency 1972-1976 – Jules Witcover, 1977 ★★½

The Election that White Forgot

The United States tried something a little different on the 200th anniversary of its creation.

The candidates for president that year were two men who had never before run for national office; in fact, the incumbent had never run for anything larger than a congressional district. The challenger had only run for state office on a couple of occasions, winning the second time to become a one-term governor of Georgia.

Something new was happening when it came to documenting that 1976 election, too: For the first time in 16 years, the premier writer of election histories, Theodore H. White, celebrated author of The Making Of The President series, was taking a break. He'd be back in 1980, but in the meantime, it was open-mike night for willing commentators. Jules Witcover does his best to fill White's breach by taking the nation's political temperature in dispassionate style.

I, Claudius – Robert Graves, 1934 ★★★★★

Surviving Your Family

There once was a Roman named Claudius

Whose family was rather quite naughtius,

Their dispositions so cruel,

He would stutter and drool

To keep them from thinking him haughtius.

It's been a television miniseries, a radio play, a stage production, even an aborted movie starring Charles Laughton. So why not a limerick? I suppose not. You really need a goodly amount of space to tell the story of this runt who would become emperor, at least as it is related here in this fictional reconstruction of his life by Robert Graves, a British World War I veteran who was both a celebrated poet and a Classics scholar in civilian life.

This story is a cacophony of plots and counterplots ranging across more than three generations of a family with life-and-death command over the whole of the known world.

Boys Will Be Boys – Jeff Pearlman, 2008 ★★★½

Rise and Fall of an NFL Juggernaut

In his acknowledgements for Boys Will Be Boys, author Jeff Pearlman thanks a number of people for their cooperation, including 146 current or former members of the Dallas Cowboys organization. He then thanks others, including his young son, whom I suspect was a toddler at the time.

At the end of his mention of the young lad came a word that caught me short at first, before realizing it summed up the entire spirit of the book. The word is “fish!”

Mamas don’t let your babies grow up to be Cowboys, and Daddies should pay that some mind, too. Not if those Cowboys are like the crowd featured in Boys Will Be Boys.

Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming's Jamaica– Matthew Parker, 2015 ★★★★

007 in Jamaica

[This review comes from a copy of the book provided by its publisher, Pegasus Press.]

The origins of James Bond are fairly murky, being as he was the product of a Scottish father, a Swiss mother, and a peripatetic upbringing only dimly illumined by the Bond novels Ian Fleming wrote.

Much more is known about the origins of Bond as fictional construct; this new book by Matthew Parker puts it all together by paying special attention to the tumultuous tropical setting where 007 was conceived and nurtured.

Lady – Thomas Tryon, 1974 ★★★

Soft-Lit Nostalgia Bath Packs Punch

It’s not a Thomas Tryon novel unless someone is looking back with a mixture of sadness and nostalgia upon life-changing mistakes.

Lady is the ultimate backwards glance from an author whose oeuvre suggests chronic neck pains from same. Tryon’s intentions are so noble here, and his attention to detail so exact, you want him to pull off a masterpiece. At least I did, considering that he made my home state the setting; there’s not enough prize fiction celebrating the Nutmeg State.

Killing Jesus – Bill O'Reilly & Martin Dugard, 2013 ★★★½

The Greatest Thriller Ever Told

For centuries, The Greatest Story Ever Told has been retold as medieval passion play, as oratorio, as cinematic spectacular, as business primer, as Marxist parable, as Monty Python spoof, and even, if my English composition teacher was correct, as One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.

Why not a potboiler thriller, too?

Killing Jesus, Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard’s 2013 installment in their series of books on famous deaths, debuted atop the New York Times’ best-seller list, and remained on that list for the next 51 weeks. An expensive miniseries produced by the National Geographic Channel debuts today, on Palm Sunday, and is expected to draw strong ratings. It’s also a great conversation-stimulator, as close to 9,000 reviews drawing as many as a hundred comments apiece on Amazon.com would indicate.

Romeo And Juliet – William Shakespeare, 1591-95 ★★★★½

Love and Other Bad Ideas

Clicking through random web pages the other day, I came across a quote by the noted French author André Maurois that immediately set me to thinking about this play:

"We owe to the Middle Ages the two worst inventions of humanity - romantic love and gunpowder."

I don't know if M. Maurois was referencing Romeo & Juliet in the above quote, but why not? It's the play for many when it comes to romance, featuring "archetypal young lovers" as Wikipedia's entry for the play puts it. Yet actually reading it reveals one of the most subversive depictions of the folly of love in Western literature.

Gil Hodges: A Hall Of Fame Life – Mort Zachter, 2015 ★★★½

Brooklyn's Favorite Dodger

Gil Hodges was by almost all accounts a great man and baseball player. 

He became a legend first as a slugging star for the Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1950s, then added to it by managing the New York Mets to their first World Series championship in 1969. Too soon after, he died, and people seemed to forget about him.

Mort Zachter makes a case for why Hodges should be remembered.

Pirate Latitudes – Michael Crichton, 2009 ★

Dead Captain, Leaky Vessel

Did Michael Crichton even read Pirate Latitudes, at least in the form we have it today? I wonder. He died more than a year before the book saw publication, and it reads like an outline for a novel rather than a fleshed-out example of one.

The storycraft is patchy, the typical Crichton invention uneven. Perhaps he worked on this as an exercise between more serious efforts, thinking he'd have time to give it the fresher perspective it needed. 

Alas, death has a habit of catching one unawares.

Papa Hemingway – A. E. Hotchner, 1966 ★★★★½

The Legend and the Man

Ernest Hemingway is probably at least as well known for who he was as for what he wrote. He's not the only writer you can say that about, but he's certainly one of the most pronounced examples of that species known as Literanius Leonicus.

A. E. Hotchner, a frequent travelling companion during Hemingway's latter days, brings you inside the lion's den in this engaging, subjective memoir.

At its root, Papa Hemingway forms a kind of final testament on the writer's calling, as lived and observed by one of the most famous exemplars of that calling in our time. Hemingway talks a lot about writing as an art and craft, and the importance of sticking with it even when one feels empty or distraught.

Gerald's Game – Stephen King, 1992 ★

Recalling a Forgotten King

Ever notice how so many fresh-looking but aged Stephen King hardcovers fill shelves at consignment shops?

It's fascinating, if you are a fan of King's like me, to note which novels they are. I never see the ones people talk about, like It or Misery. What I always see are those books he wrote between the late 1980s, when he was supposedly churning out manuscripts in a drug-induced frenzy, and 1999, when getting run over put him out of action for a while.

They are the King books Time forgot, books that cumulatively topped the best-seller lists for months but didn't become popular movies and which no one remembers outside of a few of his most loyal Constant Readers. Books like Gerald's Game.

Into The Wild – Jon Krakauer, 1996 ★★½

Act Naturally

Escaping from civilization is a time-honored fantasy most of us manage to shake off somewhere between the television set and the refrigerator. But for some, the fantasy of chucking it all and living on one's own terms in the Great Outdoors dies harder than for others.

In the case of Christopher McCandless, subject of Jon Krakauer's Into The Wild, it was to prove fatal.

Billy Liar – Keith Waterhouse, 1959 ★★★½

He Feels as if He's in a Play

Before the 1960s created a new reality, Great Britain was a bleak and unpleasant land of rigid social structures, obtuse attitudes about life, and narrow opportunity, where the only escape was via the imagination.

This is the Great Britain that is the subject of Keith Waterhouse's landmark 1959 novel, which became more influential as a play and even more influential as a movie.

Does it hold up today as something other than a period piece?

Case Closed – Gerald Posner, 1993 ★★★★

Mr. Oswald...in the Depository...with the Rifle

He is at the core of one of America's darkest mysteries, yet the case can be made that Lee Harvey Oswald isn't all that hard to understand.

He was a habitual outsider who carried with him big dreams but, like so many of us, lacked the gumption and/or talent to turn them into reality. He was hypersensitive yet prone to seeking out conflict, and capable of harboring resentments more than he was of holding a job.

Add to this more than a smattering of sociopathy inherited from a crazy mother and a resilient dash of Marxism, and you have the recipe for the man who killed the 35th President of the United States all by his lonesome.