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.”