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.