The Story Of Henri Tod – William F. Buckley, Jr., 1984 ★½

Why Spy Fiction Should Be Left to the Professionals

Throughout the 1980s, while helming American conservativism’s flagship journal, National Review, William F. Buckley, Jr. also had going a lucrative and well-regarded side project. It involved CIA agent Blackford Oakes, who gallivanted about the globe dealing with trouble.

This foray into spy fiction offered Buckley a chance to do two things: Emulate Frederick Forsyth, whose Day Of The Jackal Buckley greatly admired; and commentate on his trademark political concerns from a different perch.

As a showcase for Buckley’s wit, and a means of getting his conservative faithful to fork over something more than their annual NR subscription fee, Oakes books seem an inspired stratagem, but how are they for actual reading? Having just finished The Story Of Henri Tod, I can’t say I was much impressed.

Without Feathers – Woody Allen, 1975 ★★★½

Woody the Gag Man, Getting (Somewhat) Serious

Hard to believe, there was a time when Woody Allen could be enjoyed purely as a comic genius. Without Feathers presents him at the zenith of his comedy career, when he was becoming more overtly concerned with what it all meant but not so much that he stopped being playful.

Allen is all over the map in this 1975 collection, most of which first appeared in issues of The New Yorker, Playboy, and The New Republic earlier that decade.

Don't Look Back: Satchel Paige In The Shadows Of Baseball – Mark Ribowsky, 1994 ★★½

Sadder Than It Needed to Be

Did you ever read a biography and decide it was a good read only when it avoided the subject himself? I felt this way reading Mark Ribowsky's 1994 biography of Satchel Paige.

Perhaps the greatest control pitcher of any era, Paige won a lot of games as a barnstorming Negro League veteran and lasted long enough to play a decade in the Major Leagues after the color bar was dropped.

Yet old Satch made his fame truly outsized as much with his mouth. He told great stories and fed the press masterful sound bites that were equal parts whimsy and philosophy. "Don't look back, something might be gaining on you" was a famous one, the first half of which forms the title of Ribowsky's book. Yet a core thesis of this frustrating bio is how little Paige let people in on his real life.