Jesus Through The Centuries – Jaroslav Pelikan, 1985 ★★★

A Savior for all Seasons

For many centuries people strived and died to embrace Him. Today, they often struggle as hard to quit Him. All the time, His image keeps popping up like that of some genial, persistent old boyfriend.

Just how does one see the world through the prism of Jesus Christ?

A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess, 1962 ★★★★

The Boy’s Not Right in the Head

A Clockwork Orange is something that shouldn’t exist in nature but does: bracing social comment that also works as pure pulp fiction. Should man be free to choose; or if not, does he cease being a man? Never mind that, what about all that ultra-violence!

When reading A Clockwork Orange today, two other things jump out. One is the unique lingo of the narrative, the so-called “Nadsat” slang of our juvenile-delinquent protagonist, Alex. The other is it being made into an even more famous Stanley Kubrick film.

More on that later.

The Teamsters – Steven Brill, 1978 ★★

Married to the Mob

When it comes to the history of the American labor movement, the biggest question for many of us is not the interests of workers or what constitutes a fair wage. It’s what happened to Jimmy Hoffa.

James Riddle Hoffa was no ideologue, but even before he became the most famous missing person in my lifetime he was the most notorious and consequential labor figure of his century. In The Teamsters, Steven Brill examines the union and its Hoffa imprint in the immediate aftermath of his 1975 disappearance.

Henry IV, Part II – William Shakespeare, c. 1597-98 ★★★

Tubby Takes a Hike

For decades, if not longer, many critics have argued that what you get in Henry IV, Part II is not a sequel but a clone.

Certainly you see Shakespeare reacting to the success of his first Henry IV play by giving audiences more of the same. More rebel plotting, more Prince Henry antagonizing the squares, and especially more hijinks from Sir John Falstaff, who proved a comic sensation in his debut.

Henry IV, Part I – William Shakespeare, c. 1597 ★★★★½

A Prince by any Other Name

There is a Shakespeare quote that springs to mind when reading Henry IV, Part I, but not from that play. Rather, it’s from As You Like It.

“All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players; they have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts…”

In Henry IV, Part I, that man is Prince Henry, heir to the throne held by our title character. The Prince will play many parts in the course of his career, most notably two he develops in tandem here: a dissolute ruffian inspired by his friendship with the disgraced Sir John Falstaff; and a bold knight modeled on Hotspur, who leads an army against his father.

A Taste For Death – P. D. James, 1986 ★½

Too Many Notes

Reading this brought to mind a line in that great Mozart movie Amadeus, when Wolfgang asks the Habsburg court why their emperor doesn’t like his latest piece. One courtier answers: “Too many notes.”

It’s a comic scene, and on the face of it ridiculous, particularly directed at Mozart. But I kind of knew what that hapless lackey meant. There can be too much of a good thing, at least as I see it, a surplus of invention, particularly when it comes to writing mysteries.

Thus came my wonderment and annoyance about this novel. P. D. James’ ability to create involving, multi-dimensional characters and settings ultimately gets in the way of what a mystery should be about.

Final Cut – Steven Bach, 1985 ★★★½

Living and Dying with the Ayatollah

If it is true that what one loves in life are the things that fade, at least fading is a process that doesn’t happen overnight.

But it literally did just that for the golden age of maverick film directors, barreling through Manhattan on the night of Wednesday, November 19, 1980, bearing a title very appropriate for the many career deaths it would reap, Heaven’s Gate.

Steven Bach, who greenlit this overpriced art film for United Artists, was out of work by 1981. In his memoir about the experience, he explains how good life was, how fast it went, and the razor-thin line between genius and crazy he discovered in Heaven’s Gate director Michael Cimino, known on-set as the Ayatollah and in the corridors of UA by less friendly terms.

When Eight Bells Toll – Alistair MacLean, 1966 ★★½

Requiem for an Airport Thriller

If Alistair MacLean isn’t the godfather of that once-popular genre known as “airport fiction,” then he is at least a capo in high esteem.

For decades, people – mostly male business travelers – picked up MacLean novels with a newspaper and a pack of cigarettes in preparation for a long flight or train ride. These books featured garish covers where lean, muscular men fired machine guns in front of impressive explosions. For a pre-teen like me, they offered a glance at the world where I liked to imagine adults really lived.

As a thriller writer, MacLean was not subtle. But he was effective.

In Cold Blood – Truman Capote, 1966 ★★★★½

Tru Grit

Famous for mainstreaming two genres, true crime and New Journalism, In Cold Blood is perhaps even more remarkable for how it turned a squalid, non-mysterious quadruple murder into a rare book-driven sensation that remains as powerful over fifty years on.

Truman Capote called his best-known work a “non-fiction novel,” which sets off all sorts of warning bells but sums up its approach: an immersive mix of multiple points-of-view, shifting narratives, even verb tenses.

The more I read it, the more gutted I feel for the victims and the rest of humanity. Then I want to read it all over again.

Twice-Told Tales – Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1837 & 1842 ★★★

The Iron Tissue of Allegory

Allegory in stories is unpopular for many reasons.

They are moralistic. They present cardboard characters and a restricted point-of-view. Critical aspects of fiction-writing like tone and voice are lost when it all boils down to imparting a lesson.

So in noting that Twice-Told Tales presents Nathaniel Hawthorne as master of allegory, I realize this is like praising with faint damns.

Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game? – Jimmy Breslin, 1963 ★½

Who’s On First? Who Cares!

Here’s a thought: A book has to be about something. Find an interesting topic and really delve into it, examine it from different angles, give it a beginning and an ending and build a thesis around it.

Legendary newspaper columnist Jimmy Breslin found a way around that and wrote what is hailed by many as one of the best baseball books ever. I don’t even think it’s the best book about the 1962 New York Mets.

Richard II – William Shakespeare, c. 1595 ★★★★

Bad King Makes Bad Choices

Kicking off the second and more famous of William Shakespeare’s “Henriad” history plays, The Tragedy Of Richard II makes the most sense when read after the three plays which chronologically follow it: Henry IV, Part 1; Henry IV, Part 2; and Henry V.

That’s because while this play is concerned with the same basic question, how to be a good king, it does by presenting a type of worst-case scenario the kings of the later plays take pains to avoid.

That is after the first of these Henrys caused the problem leading to that scenario. Or did he? Welcome to the conundrum that is Richard II.

Scott-King's Modern Europe – Evelyn Waugh, 1947 ★★

Not Taking the Scenic Route

Brevity is the soul of wit, but the same can’t be said of satire. One needs to toy with the target like a spider with her prey. So what to say about a satire when its approach is as over-and-out as this?

Evelyn Waugh was in the habit of producing short novels during the second half of his career, beginning with Work Suspended (1942) and concluding with Basil Seal Rides Again (1962). All have charm; none play out as thin and desultory as this.

Tintin And Alph-Art – Hergé, 1986/2007 ★½

Dining on Table Scraps

A chance to rifle through the waste basket of a favorite artist sure sounds fun; is it? The publication of a so-called “24^th volume” in the legendary Tintin comic-book series gave fans a chance to find out.

The year was 1986. The man behind Tintin, the great Hergé, had been dead three years. But he left behind some sketches and long sections of dialogue for a new Tintin book. By most surviving indicators, it would have been a very different one from what fans were used to.

Having battled pirates, smugglers, and generals, Tintin would face the challenge of the “Alph-Art.” Would it prove his final undoing?

The Bunker: The History Of The Reich Chancellery Group – James P. O'Donnell, 1978 ★★★½

The Finality of Evil

Adolf Hitler wasn’t one for back-up plans. If he couldn’t conquer the world, he’d just as soon die in a stagnant hole with anyone he could pull down with him. The Bunker is an absorbing account of Hitler’s last days as seen by those who shared it with him in his Fuhrerbunker.

Author James P. O’Donnell, a Harvard man who liked to tout his classical education, pulls out a Nietzsche quote: “Many men die too late and some die too soon. Few manage to depart at just the right time.”

Doctor No – Ian Fleming, 1958 ★½

A Surprising Slog

Doctor No is a transitional novel for the James Bond series. Gone is much of the moral queasiness, realism, and psychological turmoil of earlier 007 stories. In their place: a Walther PPK, vodka martinis shaken not stirred, and a supervillain living in a hidden fortress.

Given all that, Doctor No should be fun. It’s not.

Sailing Alone Around The World – Joshua Slocum, 1900 ★★★

Playing Solitaire with Neptune

You have to be one tough fellow to sail around the world all by yourself in an age before radio communication, let alone satellite navigation. Yet it happened for the first time ever on June 27, 1898, when New Englander Joshua Slocum returned to Boston after more than three years circling the globe on his 37-foot-long sloop, the Spray.

Killer’s Wedge – Ed McBain, 1959 ★★

Squadroom in the Soup

A key difference between mysteries and crime fiction is that the former are about solving crimes, while the latter focuses on committing them.

Like if a dangerous robber was sent to prison, and he dies there, what will his wife do if she’s the kind of person that wants revenge?

The Ghost Sonata – August Strindberg, 1907 ★

Doing the Swedish Limbo

One reason August Strindberg appeals so much to scholars is because he was so many different people in the course of his life. He’s like getting to study a half-dozen writers in one.

He started out composing history plays, became a father of modern drama, an authority of that oxymoron called theatrical naturalism, and finally a pioneer of stage expressionism and surrealism.

By the time we get to The Ghost Sonata, he has reinvented himself again, this time as the metaphysically-focused developer of what are known as “chamber plays,” productions performed in a small space by a handful of actors. The ground he covered was varied and impressive; yet the shape of his work is hard to gauge.

McCartney – Chris Salewicz, 1986 ★★

Portrait of an Artist as a Young Ted

Pain can be a midwife to great art. So it was with Paul McCartney and the Beatles. At least that’s the theory Chris Salewicz offers in this engaging if thin biography.

McCartney was just 14 when his mother died from cancer. The loss cut him deep, but the lad hid it well. Less than a year later, he would meet an older boy, John Lennon, soon to lose his own mother. From that shared anguish came an outpouring of music that would shape a generation and change a world.

Still the pain continued.

Asterix And The Golden Sickle – René Goscinny & Albert Uderzo, 1962 ★★½

Partnering up in Paris

Something is different very early in the second volume in the Asterix The Gaul comic-book series: Asterix is joined for the first time on an adventure by a roly-poly boar-devouring buddy named Obelix.

Even before that, in the very first panel, something else about Asterix And The Golden Sickle stands out: The art. Simply put, it’s amazing, exhilarating in perspective and detail, and consistently amusing. Another partnership came together here, that of writer René Goscinny and illustrator Albert Uderzo, who emerges as the real star of this affair.

Who Goes Here? – Bob Shaw, 1977 ★★★★

Dying for Shrimp Sauce in the 24th Century

Science fiction and comedy are not genres I associate with each other unless it’s Douglas Adams or another Robot Chicken Star Wars parody. Give it up for someone who did it earlier, and did it well.

His name was Bob Shaw.

Imagine a future where young men are sent off to distant planets to fight man-eating trees in the cause of selling shrimp sauce, signing away their life so that they (and the law) can forget a past crime via a patented process called an engram erasure.

Winston Churchill: An Informal Study Of Greatness – Robert Lewis Taylor, 1952 ★★½

Winston Triumphant

Can greatness actually inhibit one’s appreciation of a fellow human being? If you are a biographer, oh yes, indeed!

Robert Lewis Taylor’s enthusiasm for Winston Churchill is boundless, from first page to last. His Churchill divides his time between running governments, fighting wars, and writing best-sellers, then for an encore goes on to save the world from the horror known as Adolf Hitler.

Meanwhile, whatever exists of an inner man slips away unnoticed. For such a public figure with so much written by and about him, Taylor’s Churchill feels a bit thin.

Libra – Don DeLillo, 1988 ★½

Conspiracy? Lone Gunman? Why Not Both?

If only every awful moment in history was as suited for fictionalization as the assassination of John F. Kennedy, with its strange characters, bizarre circumstances, and world-changing events.

Of course, many – perhaps even a majority – of Americans say that already happened with an outlandishly false and ridiculous piece of writing called the Warren Commission Report. In Libra, Don DeLillo dubs the Report “the Joycean Book of America…the novel in which nothing is left out.”

October 1964 – David Halberstam, 1994 ★★★½

How Success Got Untrenched

Some World Series mark time; others define them. The 1964 World Series belongs in the latter category; David Halberstam explains why.

Players were still regarded as property then; their careers dictated by greedy, sometimes capricious owners. Television amplified and monetized their success. Pitchers were becoming more dominant as the strike zone was expanded and raised.

Most importantly, the racial divide of the game was changing, if slowly. Nearly 20 years after Jackie Robinson integrated baseball, there were still many whites who didn’t care for blacks, including some American League club owners.

A Pocket Book Of Robert Frost's Poems – Robert Frost [Edited by Louis Untermeyer], 1961 ★★★

Pondering Seasons and Reasons

Once upon a time, Robert Frost seemed the most important poet in the world, America’s answer to Shakespeare, standing over us Mount Rushmore-like with his thick shock of snowy white hair, his quotations decorating every classroom door at my Connecticut boarding school.

Then I grew up, and just like that, Frost’s stature seemed to dip. Like the Eagles or Judy Blume, his outsized success became the very reason not to take him seriously. Since I’m not a poetry lover, I have no idea how prevailing a view this might be; I just sense his stock is not what it was.

The Spoils Of Poynton – Henry James, 1897 ★★★

Too Good for Her own Good

If only people behaved in an ethical, upright fashion, bad stuff would never happen.

Right?

Not so fast. Henry James, a writer whose work was nothing if not concerned with moral principles, suggests such a thing as overconcern about being good. Take Fleda Vetch.

Tintin And The Picaros – Hergé, 1975-76 ★★

Tintin Takes his Time

The last completed Tintin adventure is a minor dud, not terrible but deflating. You do get some of the character-based charm and striking visuals characteristic of prime Tintin. What’s lacking is engagement.

Eight years had passed since the prior album, and with that long gap you sense an author tired of his creation. Hergé still has enough in the tank, though; the finale blends humor and suspense, a Tintin trademark.

Getting there is the problem.

The Murder Of Bob Crane – Robert Graysmith, 1993 ★★★

Too Much Sex Can Be Hazardous to your Health

He played the lead role in one of television’s strangest sitcoms, a farce about Allied soldiers imprisoned by the Third Reich. A few years later, Bob Crane was a prisoner himself, of a swinger’s lifestyle that was not only pathetic and ruinous, but as Robert Graysmith posits in his book The Murder Of Bob Crane, ultimately fatal.

A sleeping Crane was bludgeoned to death in a Scottsdale, Arizona apartment one June morning in 1978. This brought into sharp focus how he had lived, using the dregs of a once-flourishing career to hook up with all the women he could find. Suspicion quickly centered on John Henry Carpenter, Crane’s wingman during his sexcapades, yet the case was circumstantial and the horizon of others with motives too vast.

A Dream Play – August Strindberg, 1902 [Translated by Elizabeth Sprigge] ★★½

When Sleep is not Rest

Genius and success often make strange bedfellows. For some artists, nothing can be more destructive than commercial or critical acclaim.

Consider August Strindberg. At the dawn of the 20^th century, he was seen by Europe’s intelligentsia as not only comparable to Shakespeare but, as Sean O’Casey exclaimed, “the greatest of them all.” Yet decades of naturalistic dramas left him burnt out. The more success he got, the more he hungered to do something more ambitious.

Thus came into being A Dream Play, one of the oddest works written for stage by a major playwright.

A Pictorial History Of Radio – Irving Settel, 1967 [Second Edition] ★

Something in the Air

Mass media may seem a dominant part of our culture now, yet it is a relatively recent flutter in civilization’s long march, and for much of the time it has been around, not all that dominant. Centuries after the invention of the printing press, after all, most people still couldn’t read.

Getting around that roadblock, not to mention others like distance and cost, happened only with the advent of radio. Today it may strike us as a quaint, old-fashioned device, but it can be said that it was the invention most responsible for American society as we know it today.

The Shining – Stephen King, 1977 ★★★★

Not Better than the Film, Just Different

Some novels launch careers; others do more: They give birth to legends. There is no better example of this in my lifetime than The Shining.

Stephen King was already a successful novelist in 1977 when he took his first detour from eerie goings-on in Maine to introduce a spooky hotel in Colorado. Its success resounded first as a book, then as a movie, and finally as an urban legend. Everyone knows what goes on in The Shining – including things that don’t happen in the novel at all.

The Glory Of Their Times – Lawrence S. Ritter, 1966 ★★★★½

Scraping Off the Sepia

Sometimes they still call baseball Our National Pastime; in the early part of the 20^th century it really was the only game in town. Yet what went on in the Major Leagues then seems impossible today.

Cy Young threw 511 career victories, and 750 complete games. In 1909, Ty Cobb led the majors both in batting average (.377) and home runs (9). Cobb’s teammate Sam Crawford hit over 300 triples in his career.

When Rube Marquard and Babe Adams pitched against each other on July 17, 1914, both went the distance – 21 innings.

Requiem For A Nun – William Faulkner, 1951 ★★½

More Misery for Temple

Many novels can be said to have split personalities; few wear them as open and proud as Requiem For A Nun.

Alternately a series of narrative prose-poems detailing the history of a Southern American town, and as acts in a play about the murder of an infant, Requiem For A Nun demonstrates William Faulkner’s willingness to push against boundaries of culture as well as genre. The result is a mess, if sometimes a moving and involving one.

Flight 714 – Hergé, 1966-68 ★

Hergé Don't Want to Play No More

Reading this reminded me of a childhood friend who grew suddenly disaffected by the games we played. Going through the motions with obvious contempt, he made clear what a drag he now found it all to be. That same sorry vibe hangs over this Tintin adventure.

The story has promise, a tropical adventure set in the south Pacific which introduces Laszlo Carreidas, eccentric tycoon whose comical nastiness serves as a recurring plot point. The art is splashy and sometimes even engaging, incorporating Hergé’s signature ligne-claire style with more shading and texture than usual.

But the more stuff happens, the more you realize the author doesn’t care about the book. Playtime is over; Flight 714 is the glum result.

Sanctuary – William Faulkner, 1931 ★½

Southern Gothic Overdrive

Seeking out an accessible William Faulkner novel is like hunting Bigfoot, except nobody yet has definitively disproved Bigfoot.

I haven’t read every Faulkner novel, but all those I have read present varying degrees of outrageous difficulty. They include this, often touted by lit-buffs as entry-level Faulkner.

Maybe so; just don’t call it easy.

Kon-Tiki – Thor Heyerdahl, 1948 ★★★

Riding the Pacific

In 1947, five Norwegians and a Swede cast themselves 4,300 miles into the world’s largest, stormiest ocean on a raft of wood and hemp to prove a scorned ethnographic theory. Never mind about the theory; their resulting adventure would inspire generations.

For 101 days the Kon-Tiki risked storms, sharks, and ill-advised dingy excursions to make a point. Not about whether ancient Peruvians settled in Polynesia many centuries ago, as Kon-Tiki’s leader Thor Heyerdahl believed, but about the nature of life and man’s place in the world.

Up Country – Nelson DeMille, 2002 ★½

Back in Nam

Up Country is a thriller with few thrills, a cross-country jaunt that goes nowhere and sets up a finale that lands flat as a pancake after 700 pages.

Nelson DeMille had the craft to deliver much better. God knows he had more experience to draw upon than he wanted.

Paul Brenner is a retired U. S. Army investigator summoned back into service in 1997 to solve a 29-year-old crime committed during the height of the Tet Offensive in Vietnam. A Tet veteran himself, Brenner overcomes much reluctance to journey back to the land where he lost both his innocence and many comrades, a nation with its own deep wounds and a marked ambivalence about Americans.

Plain Speaking: An Oral Biography Of Harry S. Truman – Merle Miller, 1974 ★★½

Cocktails with Harry

While written as an oral history of Harry S. Truman, Plain Speaking flows like a morality play in which a hero imparts life lessons and reveals his inner self to one gradually won over by his goodness. But can you trust what you read?

Merle Miller was hired in 1961 by television producer David Susskind to interview Truman for a documentary. Miller had been a published critic of Truman, in particular his decisions to drop atomic bombs on Japan. Yet over time, as the two had a series of meetings to discuss this Truman TV project, Miller found much to like about Give ‘em Hell Harry.

The Trial – Franz Kafka, 1925 ★★★

Welcome to my Nightmare

It is a tad perverse recommending a book you don’t enjoy reading, yet The Trial makes a worthy exception. The crazier life gets, the more relevant it becomes.

But if you happen to think surrealism is something best enjoyed in the abstract, think again. The Trial is both abstract and surreal, but in such a way to render it less dreamlike than frustrating. Even its chapter order is up in the air.

A Midsummer Night's Dream – William Shakespeare, 1595-96 ★★★★

Love as a Mental Disorder

There is a book waiting to be written about literature’s worst employees. Near the head of this list I would like to nominate one Robin Goodfellow, better known as Puck of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

After botching a big assignment, he has the cajones to look at his boss, no mere mortal but the fairy king Oberon, throw up his hands, and exclaim: “Lord, what fools these mortals be!”

Yet he doesn’t even get a reprimand, let alone a performance review. Just a mild “Stand aside” as Oberon sets about fixing Puck’s mess. Such is the ease of life as practiced in this easiest of Shakespeare’s plays.

The Castafiore Emerald – Hergé, 1961-63 ★★

Held Captive by a Nightingale

The joy of a Tintin story often centers less around the story than the surrounding hubbub: goofy introductions, mistaken identities, Captain Haddock’s tantrums, the gags and pratfalls, an ever-shifting plot.

So why not forgo the story and just focus on hubbub? That’s what we get with The Castafiore Emerald: A story without a story.

Does it work? Not really. Certainly it isn’t one for newbies, and it hardly compares to the first-rate adventures of yore. More a mulligan, really.

Champlain's Dream – David Hackett Fischer, 2008 ★★

Bouquet for a New World Man

Say what you will of the human condition, but biographies are often more fun, and usually more readable, when written with an ax to grind.

David Hackett Fischer, a marvelous writer and a great historian, takes one of America’s most likable explorers and spends over 600 pages explaining just how magnificent Samuel de Champlain was. The result is sprawling, convincing, and dull.

From Russia, With Love – Ian Fleming, 1957 ★★★★½

Saying it with Roses

The novel that put James Bond on the cultural map holds up amazingly well. Other 007 books feature better remembered villains or Bond girls; From Russia, With Love gives you the best Bond story and, for maybe the first and last time, a fully invested author.

What can you say about a Bond novel that holds our interest for 100 pages while keeping the man himself offstage? I’m used to haphazard plotting in other Bond books; here the story builds effortlessly and ruthlessly from strength to strength until one is ready for Bond like a corrida is ready for the matador.

The Professor And The Madman – Simon Winchester, 1998 ★

Notes from an Asylum

There are good and bad kinds of crazy. This book features both.

The notion of capturing every word of the world’s dominant language from “aa” (an obsolete term used in the 1400s meaning “stream” or “watercourse”) to “zyxt” (Old Kentish for “to see”) with little more than a nib pen and foolscap paper has a germ of madness at its core. But there was more than sober, willful monomania in the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary. There was a certified lunatic at work as well.

My Ántonia – Willa Cather, 1918 ★★★★★

Nostalgia's Sweet Spell

American novelists of a certain time liked framing devices. Before beginning a book, they employed an involved prelude detailing how this story came into their possession, what led them to pass it along, some thoughts about their breakfasts or sleep habits, etc.

It happens with the “Custom House” introduction to Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. It happens again in My Ántonia, where we begin with a female narrator, perhaps author Willa Cather herself, telling us about a male friend she knew growing up in Nebraska.

The Bill James Baseball Abstract 1983 – Bill James, 1983 ★★★

A Banquet of Numbers

Is it possible to be so steeped in knowledge that you lose all sense of proportion explaining something? Are there factoids so trivial you risk getting buried by them when you take them too seriously?

I mean, how exercised can one get about stolen bases?

If you are Bill James, and the year is 1983, when stolen bases were all the rage and no one noticed their lack of value when it came to winning or losing ballgames, you took a stand and chanced the consequences.

Basil Seal Rides Again – Evelyn Waugh, 1963 ★★★

Last Laugh

Evelyn Waugh’s final published fiction is utterly free of ambition, a recycling of familiar characters in service of amusing dialogue and a diverting if meandering plot.

Even the way in which it was originally published, as an ornately bound, personally-signed limited edition, suggests more a celebrity cash grab than anything creative. As a final word from Waugh the author, it isn’t much of a signpost, yet taking time to read it hardly damages the fellow’s legacy, either.

Tintin In Tibet – Hergé, 1958-60 ★★★½

On Top of the World with Tintin

I don’t know about you, but when I see Tintin reviews that use terms like “spiritual,” “mature,” and “deeply personal,” I get nervous. I know what I like about Tintin, and those ain’t them.

So I came to Tintin In Tibet with trepidation, not only because it came while author Hergé began losing interest in his towheaded brainchild but also because it has the reputation for being very different from those earlier volumes that entertain me so.

Here’s the thing: Tintin In Tibet is different, yet very enjoyable. And despite what critics say, it’s still Tintin; at times jagged and at other times very efficient, yet consistent in delivering the same joys as yore. So dig in!

Lady Killer – Ed McBain, 1958 ★★★

Killing Time

Detective work is tough enough when trying to solve a murder. How about solving a pending murder?

That’s the challenge members of Isola’s 87^th Precinct face in this early installment of Ed McBain’s long-running series of crime-fiction novels. A note written in cut-out letters handed to the desk sergeant by a young boy warns: “I will kill the Lady tonight at 8. What can you do about it?”