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.