Daddy’s Boy – Chris Elliott with Bob Elliott, 1989 ★★½

Man-Child Looks Back in Anger

What’s it like being the product of an overbearing celebrity parent? You know the type, pushing you into the public eye and molding you into their own image, to the point of dressing you in an ascot and shaving your head to match their own receding hairline.

This was the fate of one Chris Elliott, son of fabled entertainer Bob Elliott, as he relates in this no-holds-barred pity party of a memoir, subtitled “A Son’s Shocking Account Of Life With A Famous Father.”

Before the short memoir is completed, Chris has survived morbid obesity, a capsized ocean liner, a humiliating thumb-wresting match, and his father skipping his high school graduation to get his neck hair trimmed at the barber shop next door.

Outland – Alan Dean Foster, 1981 ★★

In Space, No One Can Hear You Yawn

In an alternate future, people still smoke in public and sit at desks to telecommunicate. They also live in constant fear of decompression and being sucked into Jupiter’s gravitational pull.

Rest assured, evil mega-corporations and hating on peace officers are still things, so it’s not all that unrecognizable a future.

In 1981, Sean Connery adapted his movie persona to play the hero of what amounted to a space western, a remake of the classic Gary Cooper film High Noon, but employing a setting similar to Alien two years before. Outland was a vehicle designed to work off established success.

Winchell Exclusive – Walter Winchell, 1975 ★½

The Airing of Grievances

Once he ruled the world, or a significant portion of it he helped to create. Near the end, he had fallen so far that even those who followed his path remembered him but faintly, and with a shrug.

Another person might take stock. Walter Winchell took umbrage. In this posthumous memoir, the proudly pugnacious pundit has some bones to pick, and spends a lot more time venting than explaining:

Before I go to hell – which can’t be too far off – I want them all to know that I’ve wearied of the mutual deception. I have forgiven, but I don’t have to forget. I’m not a fighter, I’m a “waiter.” I wait until I catch an ingrate with his fly open, and then I take a picture of it.

Journey’s End – R. C. Sherriff, 1928 ★★★★

Where Poppies Blow

War is hell. A hell of a bore, for one thing. Imagine endless days sitting in a trench somewhere while the rain and muck and rats have at you, trying to think of anything to take your mind off the prospect of sudden, violent death. Maybe even getting numb from it after awhile.

World War I had a reputation for that, on account of the long-static lines of the Western Front and the work of writers who survived, men on both sides including R. C. Sherriff, who ten years after getting wounded in combat wrote a play about both the dying and the waiting.

Old New York – Edith Wharton, 1924 ★★★★½

Casualties in Crinoline 

Short-story collections can be like concept albums where individual pieces flow together to create a thematic whole. At their best, these collections contain dialogues not only within the stories, but between them.

I have seen it happen with Hemingway’s in our time and James Alan McPherson’s Elbow Room. In Old New York I got to see it again, in perhaps its most successful version yet. Here are four novellas that, terrific as they read in isolation, develop when read together a unity of setting and message that transports you to another place and time.

A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century – Barbara Tuchman, 1978 ★½

All Pain, No Gain

War, plague, poverty, religious doubt, the rich being totally evil and getting away with it… If you think this century has it bad, just imagine all that in the 1300s. Barbara Tuchman takes us through the ordeal of life in Europe just before the Renaissance; the result is pretty painful.

Also messy, confusing, and not at all fun to read. In fact, this is Tuchman at her toughest and most pedantic, a book lacking a thesis or character to latch onto.

Tuchman offers snark instead, lots of it: “If the fiction of chivalry molded outward behavior to some extent, it did not, any more than other models that man has made for himself, transform human nature.”