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.