Babylon Revisited And Other Stories – F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1960 ★★★★½

Going Long on Selling Short

Can one make the same basic point without becoming shrill or droning?

The answer is yes, if one is F. Scott Fitzgerald and the subject the hollowness of wealth. The best-known collection of Fitzgerald’s short fiction, Babylon Revisited And Other Stories, amazes and engages while beating its one-eyed message like a tom-tom.

The ten stories that make up this collection originally appeared in magazines between 1920-1937. From the first, “The Ice Palace,” to the last, “The Long Way Out,” these varied tales of lost youth and romantic disappointment are all filtered through the prism of wealth and privilege.

The Lost Ones – Ian Cameron, 1961 ★½

Adventure Served Cold

The world has become much smaller in the last sixty years. Satellites, smartphones, and the internet make global exploration more easily done in a comfy chair than on a boat or plane.

But imagine as recently as 1960 searching after someone lost on a distant Arctic island off northern Canada. What to do? In the case before us today, you get on a boat, a plane, and a dogsled in search of a fabled whales’ graveyard – if the Vikings don’t catch you first.

What The Lost Ones offers in imagination is more than offset by what it lacks in believability.

The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda And The Road To 9/11 – Lawrence Wright, 2006 ★★★½

Countdown to Ground Zero

We tend to overrate and then underrate real-life monsters. We build them up to hulking status when they still threaten us, only to shrug them off once they are safely gone.

Osama bin Laden was for a time Bondian in his supervillainy. Today it’s tempting to see him as a one-hit wonder with no second act. Before 9/11 he directed a bloody attack on the USS Cole, but after his final, biggest play he accomplished little else other than being tough to kill.

Easter – August Strindberg, 1901 [Translated by Elizabeth Sprigge] ★★★

Strindberg Does 'Porch Pals'

Here’s a happy, heartwarming story about a family under siege featuring a bitter man, his deluded mother, a sister who talks to God, and a straying fiancée; all threatened by an angry town and a creditor who could take their house at any moment.

And no, I’m not being sarcastic about that “happy, heartwarming” part, even if it is a play by that most dour of dramatists, August Strindberg.