Gone Hollywood: The Movie Colony In The Golden Age – Christopher Finch & Linda Rosenkrantz, 1979 ★★★

Everybody Is a Star

Today a second-hand venue for comic-book characters and television comedians, movies once dominated western culture. Gone Hollywood offers a look back to Tinseltown in its Golden Age.

The 1930s and 1940s were a legendary time to work in Hollywood. While the world reeled from war and depression, a few square miles of California offered an imagined oasis of escape. Too good to be true, it was an illusion that endured for a long time, buttressed by easy money and a friendly press.

The Other – Thomas Tryon, 1971 ★★★

Tranquility Meets Terror 

Back in 1971, The Other was destination fiction for scare aficionados, a macabre tale with a surprise or two to spring on the reader. A popular and critical success, it twisted many young minds.

Since then, the horror genre has changed a lot, thanks to a guy named King, sexy vampires, and hordes of undead. The Other stands apart with its fine-grain prose and prim avoidance of the supernatural. Reading it, you can’t help but feel time’s passage.

The Shooting Star – Hergé, 1941-42 ★★★½

A Touch of the Surreal

Meteors hit the earth every day, science tells us; one as large as 66 feet in diameter will land about once each century. Ten volumes in, it was high time for a big one to collide with the world of Tintin.

How does Tintin handle this cosmic crisis? With his usual doughty good humor and more than a touch of the surreal. The Shooting Star may well be one of the more out-there entries in the entire “Adventures Of Tintin” series (giant mushrooms? melting streets?) but manages a satisfying landing despite all that and more.

The Triumph & Tragedy Of Lyndon Johnson – Joseph A. Califano Jr., 1991 ★★

LBJ Agonistes

Was Lyndon Johnson both the hardest-working and unluckiest man ever to inhabit the White House? Joseph Califano would have you think so.

A senior domestic-policy aide through most of Johnson’s presidency, Califano observed the 36^th President of the United States in times sunny (reelected by 44 states and 61 percent of the popular vote in 1964) and bleak (losing in Vietnam). Let others have at the negative; Califano’s admiration for his former boss overtakes all else.

The Taming Of The Shrew – William Shakespeare, 1590-1592 ★★½

What's Askew About the Shrew?

Not every “classic” work of literature makes great reading. Sometimes a work is overrated, a little or a lot. Sometimes the text fails to connect to a particular reader. And sometimes, every once in a while, the classic label is not a function of the text itself, but rather the work’s place in our larger culture. You respect it, see its imprint, and sort of shrug.

That is my subjective take on The Taming Of The Shrew, a pleasant comedy that in my view, promises more than it delivers.

Live And Let Die – Ian Fleming, 1954 ★★★½

A Second Debut for 007

While it is the second James Bond novel, Live And Let Die feels like a kind of debut, introducing what generations of readers and movie fans expect from a James Bond adventure yarn.

The first of Ian Fleming’s novels, Casino Royale, kept Bond penned up in a single locale playing cards, not physically hurting anyone. Live And Let Die gives us a more peripatetic and lethal hero, journeying from London to Harlem to Florida and finally Jamaica and leaving a trail of death behind.