Men At Arms – Evelyn Waugh, 1952 ★★★★

War Is Swell

Which post-World War II Anglo-Catholic trilogy you prefer may depend on whether you are a glass-half-empty/full kind of person. Young at heart? Positive thoughts? Faith in a greater good undergirded by a sense of better times ahead? Have a look at J. R. R. Tolkien’s “Lord Of The Rings” trilogy, if you haven’t already.

The Hits Just Keep On Coming – Ben Fong-Torres, 1998 ★★

Reeling in the Ears

Once upon a time radio could sell anything: Stereos, pimple cream, Starland Vocal Band, New Coke. Then rap came to crush our aural unification. At least that’s my take from this pleasant if tepid account of Top 40 radio’s heyday in the second half of the last century.

Ben Fong-Torres, a former editor for Rolling Stone magazine perhaps best known as a character in the movie Almost Famous, pulls together people and places from four decades of Top 40 radio dominance, from the birth of rock n’ roll to the emergence of modern-day narrow-casting which sped its demise.

The Bill James Baseball Abstract 1982 – Bill James, 1982 ★★½

Behold My Greatest Treasure

The Gutenberg Bible of my old book collection, it turns out, is not a first-edition Notes Of A War Correspondent (1898) by Richard Harding Davis, nor the autographed hardcover autobiography Minnie Pearl. Rather, it’s a slim paperback written by a cannery security guard turned baseball-numbers geek.

Grifter's Game – Lawrence Block, 1961 ★★

Pulp Does as Pulp Is

Paperback readers want simplicity. Never mind flowery titles; give ‘em a generic description with an author’s name up front. Call it Nelson DeMille’s Globetrotting With Guns V or Dan Brown’s Made-Up Historical Facts To Play With Your Head IV. Makes choosing easier.

The Best Humor Annual – Edited by Louis Untermeyer & Ralph E. Shikes, 1952 ★

Laffs on Not Quite Every Page

Read some old books, and you wonder what they ever did to deserve consignment to a quick obscurity. Other old books show Father Time tough but fair. Take this exhaustive but underwhelming compendium of humorous writings published in 1951-1952.