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.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
