Love Among The Ruins: A Romance Of The Near Future – Evelyn Waugh, 1953 ★★½

The Future is on Fire

World War II ended in Allied victory, but in its aftermath Evelyn Waugh still heard the toll of doom. Love Among The Ruins presents a future without faith, hope, or love, only the State.

Even 1984 gave readers a rooting interest. Here you get an arsonist.

Drifter's Vengeance – Max Brand, 1973 [1932] ★½

Playing with Western Conventions

Think “western fiction” and many ideas spring to mind.

Not all are flattering. With an emphasis on action, westerns cater to shorter attention spans. Action is emphasized, dialogue spare. Even more than other genres, plots conform to expected formulas. Outcomes are simpler, too: Even revisionist westerns are tough on bad guys.

The Art Of Alfred Hitchcock: Fifty Years Of His Motion Pictures – Donald Spoto, 1992 ★★

Sometimes a Bird Is Just a Bird

In the world of film criticism, few directors present target-rich environments like Alfred Hitchcock. You can delve into the stories behind his movies; the often-disturbing if genial persona he crafted both in front of and behind the lens; the evolution of his craft; the signature devices that established a film as distinctly his own.

Or you can do what Donald Spoto does here and point out all the symbolism until you’ve turned some of cinema’s greatest touchstones into amoebas in a microscope.

"Captains Courageous" – Rudyard Kipling, 1897 ★½

Fish Story Gets Away

The first thing that threw me about this novel when I encountered it as a boy was the title.

Glancing at it, I expected something like the Three Musketeers at sea. It was billed as an adventure tale. Author Rudyard Kipling was known for his war stories, often set in India. How could I have known it was a story about a youngster learning how to become a man by…catching fish?

The Zimmermann Telegram – Barbara Tuchman, 1958 ★★★

A Man, a Plan, a Telegram

The plan seemed perfect in its simplicity: Take out a prospective enemy in the middle of a global war without moving a single soldier or ship. What could go wrong?

For Imperial Germany in 1916, quite a lot. For the prospective enemy was the United States, the conflict World War I, and the plan used would prove just the lever to move a peace-loving American president to join in the carnage as an ally of Germany’s foes.