The Great Cat Massacre And Other Episodes In French Cultural History – Robert Darnton, 1984 ★★

How the Past Is a Foreign Country

As a product of the 20^th century who finds himself deep into the 21^st, I know a little about temporal dislocation. Whether it’s the politics, the music, or adjusting to casual swearing, mobile texting, or calorie-count signs at McDonalds, it’s like my head is in then; my body in now.

Imagine trying to make sense of a time that exists entirely outside living memory. This is the challenge Robert Darnton takes on in this collection of historical-anthropological essays looking back at 18^th century France.

Icebreaker – John Gardner, 1983 [No Stars]

007 Faces His Greatest Threat...a Sneering Novelist

Who in their right minds hires a novelist to flip off his audience?

In the early 1980s, the answer to the above question was Glidrose Publications Ltd. A production company owned by the family of Ian Fleming, Glidrose held literary title to Fleming’s famous fictional spy, James Bond. To carry on the Bond novels after Fleming’s death, they contracted a novelist, one John Gardner. By the time of his third Bond novel, Icebreaker, it had become clear Gardner not only disliked James Bond the character, but resented his audience, too.

Trade Him! – Edited by Jim Enright, 1976 ★½

Wheeling and Dealing as Strength and (Mostly) Weakness

Two bad things came out of being a New York Mets fan this season. The first was watching my team stumble out of the gate and never right itself. The second came later, as the injury-riddled franchise traded off name players with expiring contracts in hope of getting something – anything – in return.

Such is the nature of the market. It wasn’t always so. In the old days, baseball trades were not about heading off free-agency but establishing, or maintaining, franchise relevance in a Darwinian world of rapidly-aging stars and diamonds in the rough. In those days, baseball executive Branch Rickey opined: “It’s better to trade a player one year too soon than one year too late.”

It was the sort of world captured, if fitfully and vaguely, in this 1976 collection of essays about famous baseball trades compiled and edited by Jim Enright.

And Tyler Too – Robert Seager II, 1963 ★★★½

Evaluating America's Imperfect 10

Try naming American presidents, and chances are good you stumble on “Tyler.” Was his first name “James” or “John?” Was he president before or after Millard Fillmore? The kids at Springfield Elementary School on “The Simpsons” once did a musical number about “caretaker presidents.” Sure enough, he gets a mention:

There’s Taylor/There’s Tyler/There’s Fillmore and there’s Hayes/There’s William Henry Harrison/‘I died in thirty days.’

Cigars Of The Pharaoh – Hergé, 1934 [Revised 1955] ★★★

Learning Elephant in Four Easy Pages

The magic of life one experiences as a child dissipates too quickly, to the point where it can be hard to recall, let alone recapture. At least I have found it so. Finding artists who don’t seem at all encumbered by adulthood that way is thus a rare pleasure. Such is my feeling for Hergé.