The Bastard – John Jakes, 1974 ★★★½

Come for the Sex, Stay for the Revolution

Sex sells. That’s an idea as old as history itself. Sex sells even when the subject is history, as John Jakes amply demonstrated with the release of this, the first of eight lusty novels tracing the history of an American family spreading their seed from just before the American Revolution to the dawn of the 20^th century.

Hitler's Spies – David Kahn, 1978 ★★

Keeping Hitler in the Dark

Titles are funny things. Sometimes they are disarmingly bland, suggesting nothing of the page-turning dynamite within.

Others are short and sweet and promise killer content, only to offer a damp squib. Such was the case with this, historian David Kahn’s promisingly-titled follow-up to his landmark examination of cryptography, The Codebreakers.

The Shawshank Redemption: A Shooting Script – Frank Darabont, 1996 ★★★½

Plotting for Hope

As revealed in the pages of this Newmarket Screenplay publication, the story of writer/director Frank Darabont resembled that of the protagonist of this, his breakout film, one Andy Dufresne. When you find yourself stuck in a hole, with everyone telling you there’s no way out, don’t give up hope.

Underworld – Don DeLillo, 1997 ★★

Everyone's a Philosopher

Can reality be both random chaos and yet somehow mapped out like some endless Fibonacci sequence?

Does the idea of dancing around possible answers to that question over the course of over 40 years and 800 pages strike you as time well spent?

Well, here’s a novel that takes on the whole second half of the 20^th century as it revolved around two concurrent events, the first aerial detonation of a Soviet A-bomb and a home run that decided a National League championship.