A Moveable Feast – Ernest Hemingway, 1964 ★★★★

Dining on the Past

Memory, like other intoxicants, has the power to delight, captivate, and leave a certain melancholy after the thrill goes away. That not-original notion came over me several times when reading A Moveable Feast, a collection of memories held dear by a famously unsentimental writer.

It must be said up front that of all Ernest Hemingway’s books, A Moveable Feast might be his most straight-up enjoyable. It combines his terse, declamatory style with a vibrant and at times colorful account of what it was like to live in Paris a century ago, when so much of our culture’s modern age was being formed.

Like In Our Time one of Hemingway’s most novelistic non-novels, A Moveable Feast’s narrative comes in the form of vignettes, each presenting a different aspect of the author’s time in Paris as a young writer. The end result is like popcorn to the Papa fan:

Tappan’s Burro – Zane Grey, 1923 ★★

Nature Gives and Takes

Nature writing has been with us longer than the printing press; whether it be by poets or philosophers it is one of the taproots of literary expression. Sometimes a nature book like The Hidden Life Of Trees will even sneak into the best-seller lists.

Zane Grey leveraged his popularity as a western writer to indulge his love for nature writing. His books teem with descriptions of natural wonder; he traveled the world seeking places unspoiled by men and considered the sea and the desert his religion.

If you follow the popular view, Grey was all about shootouts and dry gulching and riders of the purple sage. But read him and his true passion becomes clear. He was into rivers and mesas first, stories second, if that.

The Go-Go Years – John Brooks, 1973 ★★★½

Capitalism Takes A Trip

At the dawn of the 1970s, terms like “conglomerates” and “hedge funds” fell outside the typical business vernacular. Corporate raiders were a frightening novelty. Could Wall Street have been so innocent not all that long ago?

John Brooks, a financial-news reporter for The New Yorker, had fun explaining how much of the wider cultural craziness of the 1960s wound up trickling into the world of big business, stocks, and bonds. The Go-Go Years details a ten-year span where once-staid brokers began growing out their hair, wearing patterned ties to work, and endangering capitalism at its core by chasing trends and ignoring fundamentals:

Julius Caesar – William Shakespeare, 1599 ★★★★½

No Prize for Second Place

A play that needs no introduction, Julius Caesar is a terrific starting place for knowing the art and majesty of William Shakespeare. Whether read as tragedy or history, it is an easy way to begin a love affair with the Bard.

It was the Folger edition of Julius Caesar that grabbed me back in the ninth grade, seeking distraction while flunking all my classes. Something about its brooding cover – a lean Roman figure against a marble backdrop – drew me in. It had it all: Indelible characters, hard-hitting action scenes, layers of ambiguity, and text that you can grasp readily thanks to the Folger practice of laying out the tricky parts on the opposite page.

The Man Who Knew Too Much – G. K. Chesterton, 1922 ★

No Justice, Please, We're British

The biggest mystery in this collection of mystery stories is why G. K. Chesterton is so renowned for writing them. Going by the evidence of this book alone, building a mystery was not something the man did well.

The eight tales all feature Horne Fisher, a brilliant yet somewhat languid product of upper-class Great Britain, back when class still meant something. In each story, Fisher analyzes a particular situation, offers up a few paradoxical aphorisms, leaps to some bizarre conclusion that Chesterton strains to show as somehow exactly right, then explains to his reporter friend Harold March why he won’t do a single thing to right whatever wrong has been committed.

Bob And Ray: Keener Than Most Persons – David Pollack, 2013 ★★★

Two for the Show

These days, surrealism is well-established as a basis for comedy. You don’t even have to get laughs if you can twist what passes for reality in a uniquely enjoyable way. It wasn’t always so.

In the 1940s and 1950s, comedic premises were fairly square and straightforward. People did jokes and sketches and then played music or sold war bonds or whatever. There were cartoons and the Three Stooges, but those were widely seen as being for kids.

Then in 1946, two announcers found themselves on the radio together in Boston, Massachusetts, and American comedy began to change.

El Borak And Other Desert Adventures – Robert E. Howard, 2010 ★★★★½

Wilder, but not as Weird

What happens when you take classic Conan, strip out all that juicy weirdness and sorcery, and double down on the daring-do by making it even more bloody and kinetic? The answers are in these stories featuring another Robert E. Howard character, El Borak.

Lesser known, yes, but in terms of pure escapism and satisfaction, this Texas gunfighter turned Middle Eastern troubleshooter plays second fiddle to no one. Del Ray’s 500-page collection of El Borak tales blazed past my eager eyes in a blur of viscera, censer fumes, and sandstorms.

The collection features seven stories Howard penned near the end of his short life featuring Francis Xavier Gordon, known to people in the hills in and around Afghanistan whom he either fights or befriends as “El Borak,” meaning “the Swift.” Four other desert-set stories of earlier vintage feature two other Howard protagonists, Kirby O’Donnell and Steve Clarney.

The Bill James Baseball Abstract 1985 – Bill James, 1985 ★½

Phoning It In

People who complain about the use of sabermetrics in baseball miss the art of the matter. Statistics tell a story, lots of stories, all awaiting a chance to delight and deepen your appreciation of the game.

Normally this is where I bring in Bill James as my guru, whipping out often amusing, sometimes astounding facts from endless seas of data. So what can I say when he delivers a book so tiresome that it makes the naysayers seem like they have a point?

Lord Jim – Joseph Conrad, 1900 ★★★★

The Price of Dreams

Nearly everybody grows up with ideals; few of us can even try to live up to them. Adulthood is tough enough without that little fact thrown in. Joseph Conrad puts us on a very dark journey by examining how one young man’s failure to measure up costs him everything he had.

The result is a gripping read of probing psychology and cultural displacement that simultaneously raised the bar for naturalistic adventure fiction at the dawn of the 20^th century.

At the root of everything is the man called Jim. Is he a hero, a coward, or just, as we are often reminded, “one of us,” a man stuck in the middle who can only ever see himself at opposing ends of the bell curve of human conduct? Conrad keeps us wondering.

To The Gates Of Richmond: The Peninsula Campaign – Stephen W. Sears, 1992 ★★★½

An Overlooked Bloodbath

Even for many American Civil War buffs, the Peninsula Campaign and its climactic Seven Days Battles are undiscovered country.

For concentrated blood and fury stretched out over an entire week, the Seven Days’ intensity is unrivaled. The Peninsula Campaign saw the first armored engagement – between the Merrimack and the Monitor – and the origin of “Taps,” yet people know the name “Bull Run” more than “Malvern Hill,” despite the latter’s higher body count and import.

Perhaps the campaign eludes easy comprehension because there wasn’t a clear winner. The North lost most of the battles, but the South lost most of the men. Fear trumped opportunity, while leaders of varying abilities all to varying degrees wilted under the spotlight.

Gettysburg it was not.

Ivanov – Anton Chekhov, 1887 [Translation by Ann Dunnigan] ★★★

Hell Is Other People

Whether it be garden parties or the bonds of matrimony, social conventions carry oppressive connotations in the plays of Anton Chekhov. This is established in the first and least famous of his multiple-act plays, Ivanov.

Despair is a common thread running through his plays, making them tough for me to enjoy the way others do. But for all its angst and despondency, Ivanov does have some things going for it, like humor and an active plot, that make for a more positive reading experience.

If only the title character wasn’t so much of a pill, even if his character is what makes this a full-blown tragedy.

Thunderball – Ian Fleming, 1961 ★★★½

Bond Discovers Health Food...and SPECTRE

Why do people say movie adaptations are never as good as the books? Bond movies are nearly always better than the books, even when the books are pretty good. Take this one, Thunderball.

Ian Fleming sets James Bond up against a quicksilver plot and a new villain to take the place of the tired Soviet Union. Just in time for the new decade, 007 is also challenged by an independent Bond woman. The undersea descriptions are immersive, the core mystery developed in an ingenious manner that creeps up on a reader who may think they know what is going to happen.

Thunderball is for the most part great fun, keeping the outlandish vibe of Bond novels since Fleming failed to kill 007 in From Russia, With Love but grounding it somewhat more firmly in reality. Add to it the debut of Bond’s arch-nemesis Ernst Stavro Blofeld, and you have a second life for a series that lasted the rest of Fleming’s lifetime – and beyond.

Iberia: Spanish Travels And Reflections – James A. Michener, 1968 ★★★★½

Stuffing an Entire Nation into One Big Book

James Michener was known for producing doorstopper tomes, phone-book sized novels that spanned decades and generations while taxing reader attention spans to the limit. But sometimes bigness is a virtue, as with this memoir of his travels around Spain.

Spain may get ignored by many, including me, when considering the sweep of Western civilization. Then I think on this: In 1966, while Michener was in Spain gathering material for this delightful book, Sergio Leone was there directing The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly and John Lennon was there writing “Strawberry Fields Forever.”

The Savage Tales Of Solomon Kane – Robert E. Howard, 1998 ★★★½

Wrath of a Godless Puritan

Many action heroes offer at least some depth of character; few put their gut-wrenching angst on display like Solomon Kane.

A Puritan unable to rest while there is evil to confront and defeat, whatever the odds, Kane makes for uneasy company, torn between steadfast religious convictions and violent engagement with a world which mocks his belief in a compassionate Creator.

Robert E. Howard is best known today as the creator of Conan, but Kane may be his most enigmatic character, certainly his most existential one. Del Ray presents every original Kane story Howard produced between 1928 and 1932, along with some fragments and poems that only deepen his mystery.

The Liar’s Club – Mary Karr, 1995 ★★★★½

Texas Is a State of Mind

Does memory ever reflect reality? Is it instead a mixture of nostalgia, cerebral junk-drawer scrounging, and lies you sell yourself into believing? And if fact and fiction wind up jumbled, are you better off?

The title of this memoir about growing up in East Texas at the dawn of the 1960s begs those questions. I guess it also gives an answer, which is print the legend. No doubt Mary Karr lived the life she writes about. But did she remember every detail of it, like the texture of her mother’s bedquilt, or the brand of coffee can her father spit tobacco juice in?

Color me skeptical, but so what. Karr’s ability to enrich this recounting of her childhood in such fulsome detail enhances a reading experience that becomes very soon not at all like paper and paste but rather a piece of living soul quivering in your hands.

Candyland: A Novel In Two Parts – Evan Hunter & Ed McBain, 2001 ★★★★½

Tag Team of One Makes Winning Combination

If schizophrenia is not merely talking to yourself but answering, what is it when a famous novelist partners up with his own nom de plume? 

Evan Hunter wrote some popular novels around broad social themes like juvenile delinquency, homophobia, and racism. Ed McBain wrote the famous 87^th Precinct crime novels and countless other mysteries. Candyland brings the pair together, for the first and only time.

It is a nifty idea for a novel which delivers on the page, Hunter’s faculty for writing in sensational, pinpoint detail about a particular human ill developing naturally into McBain covering its criminal aftermath. As a bonus, you get a suspenseful underlying meta-mystery of how and/or if these two plot threads will come together in the end.

Harry Hooper: An American Baseball Life – Paul J. Zingg, 1993 ★★

Shout Out to a Forgotten Legend

Baseball stars flash across the sky so quickly you often not only miss them, but never know they were there. Take Harry Hooper.

A key piece of four World Championship teams when he played for the Boston Red Sox, Hooper was still overshadowed by two other outfielders. Master of the sliding catch and stealing bases, he still holds the record for the most assists at his position yet statistically falls a bit short of the greats of his era. Everyone admired him, but despite his smarts he got passed over for manager jobs after retiring.

Paul J. Zingg asks some questions about why Hooper is so obscure among the players enshrined in baseball’s Hall of Fame, and unknowingly provides answers, too. Hooper had a stellar career, alright, but he also makes for dull copy.

Mother Courage And Her Children: A Chronicle Of The Thirty Years’ War – Bertolt Brecht, 1941 [Translation by Eric Bentley] ★★★

How a Character Hijacked a Play

Sometimes a fictional character becomes something bigger than its creator intended. John Milton didn’t want readers coming away from Paradise Lost admiring Satan. Norman Lear expected viewers of “All In The Family” to laugh at Archie Bunker, not sympathize with him.

It is hard to watch a person, however flawed, struggle through life and not feel something akin to affection, even identification.

Bertolt Brecht was annoyed how people took to the main character of this play, Anna Fierling. How could they miss her crass exploitation, her blithe ignorance of war’s cruel folly, her willingness to put her offspring in harm’s way? Instead, they liked her down-to-earth manner and sympathized with her struggle to make ends meet. How bourgeois!

Das Reich – Max Hastings, 1981 ★★½

When Evil Got Taken Too Far

Can the end justify the means even when those means are wholly evil? Leaving aside moral, philosophical, and theological quibbles, can one look at wholesale murder from the perspective of getting something done and call it wrong simply on the basis of logic?

Yes, you can. Take the actions of a German SS armored division who, in order to cow rebellious French civilians en route to Normandy in June 1944, committed two massacres and numerous atrocities to gain a clear road to the front line.

This they did, proving in an immediate way the efficacy of terror as a tool of war, but also the limitations of same, for reasons explained by Max Hastings in this 1981 account of the division’s bloody march.

Helena – Evelyn Waugh, 1950 ★★★½

Something Better than History

History stops for no one, but occasionally makes detours. Helena tells of one such detour brought on by an old woman which changed the world.

Helena was the ex-wife of one emperor and the mother of another. More to the point, as Evelyn Waugh presents her, she crystalized the dawn of the Christian era in Europe with an act of faith that magnified the role of religion in the future of the West.

Imbued by the spirit of the Magi, Helena offers up a simple prayer: “For his sake who did not reject your curious gifts, pray always for all the learned, the oblique, the delicate. Let them not be quite forgotten at the throne of God when the simple come into their kingdom.”

Bran Mak Morn: The Last King – Robert E. Howard, 2005 ★★★

Requiem for a Forgotten Race

There is much to love in this collection of short fiction and poetry centered around a doomed race of pre-Celtic warriors, but mainly if you are a fan of the author going in.

Underneath Robert E. Howard the professional pulp writer of the 1920s and 1930s was a fighting primitive who rebelled against civilized constraints even though he knew he could only lose. In that light, Bran Mak Morn: The Last King, from the classy continuing series of Howard story collections published by Del Ray, presents Howard in his element.

People who love Howard will want this book, for the different ways it highlights one of the writer’s signature characters, Bran Mak Morn, and more at the core, the Pictish race from which he sprang. But as Spinal Tap’s manager once said, their appeal is selective.

What Really Happened To The Class Of ’65? – Michael Medved & David Wallechinsky, 1976 ★★★½

Boomers Go Boom

The social upheavals of the late 1960s caught a lot of people by surprise. Nobody was ready for the madness and revolution on the way, least of all the graduates of Palisades High School’s Class of 1965.

Those California kids were nestled in sunny comfort and luxury, alive with the promise of great things to come. They weren’t the only ones who saw that promise. Time magazine that year sent a team to profile this class on the cusp of graduation, dubbing them “smarter, subtler, and more sophisticated.”

It turned out rather differently. Or as a popular sage of that era, George Harrison, would later observe. “When you don’t know where you’re going/Any road will take you there.”

The Stainless Steel Rat Sings The Blues – Harry Harrison, 1994 ★

When Sci-Fi and Comedy Don't Mix

Comedy is hard enough under normal circumstances. Being funny while writing in a genre as demanding and conceptual as science fiction must be even more so. Yet we know it can be done.

Sci-fi fantasy readers often sing the praises of “The Stainless Steel Rat,” which for decades mixed adventure and laughs in the far-flung future. The series features Jim diGriz, also known as “Slippery Jim,” one of very few active criminals left in a universe where such impulses are controlled by technology and social engineering. Even the thought of crime is inconceivable to most.

But Jim is nothing if not determined to think for himself. He may be a thief, but he’s got a good heart, and in a cosmos dominated by bland conformity, offers a real rooting interest for readers.

In Search Of History: A Personal Adventure – Theodore H. White, 1978 ★★★

Prioritizing the Political Over the Personal

Tragedy nearly struck journalist Theodore H. White twice in November 1963. Right after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, White’s aged mother suffered a heart attack while White was visiting her in Massachusetts.

At that very moment he had a summons from the President’s widow, Jacqueline. She wanted White’s services immediately for an article to honor her husband’s legacy in the next issue of Life magazine. He asks: “[I]f the widow of my friend needed me and my mother needed me, what should I do?”

The answer: He left Mom to await a doctor with his wife, and sped off to Hyannis Port where Jackie told him how her husband’s Presidency reminded her of the popular musical Camelot. White dutifully made the comparison in his article; a myth was born.

Much Ado About Nothing – William Shakespeare, 1598-1599 ★★★★

Blinded by Love

There is no such thing as a B-plot in a Shakespeare play.

In Midsummer Night’s Dream, Bottom’s antics with the fairies is better remembered than those Athenian kids falling in and out of love with each other. In The Merchant Of Venice, the hatred both generated by and from Shylock makes you forget the other part that’s a comedy.

Much Ado About Nothing centers on young lovers Hero and Claudio, and whether their new love can survive the cruel suspicions and designs of others. But ask people who have seen the play what it’s about, and they recall the pair bickering on the sidelines: Beatrice and Benedick.

The Dogs Of War – Frederick Forsyth, 1974 ★

A Thriller That Never Thrills

You know things are going bad when a book is down to its last few pages and that big attack built up since chapter two still hasn’t come.

Will our mercenary protagonists drown before making landfall in the tiny African nation whose government they are trying to overthrow? Will they run afoul of Soviets or the conniving capitalists who put them up? Will they ditch their assignment and make off with the loot?

At risk of spoilers, no, no, and no. What happens instead is a white-knuckle journey to nowhere. After much bump and grind, Frederick Forsyth lamely drops us off with a shrug. Dogs Of War is more than a disappointment; it is a brush-off.

Blue Highways – William Least Heat-Moon, 1982 ★★★★★

America Off the Beaten Path

What makes America? In 1978 a laid-off teacher of Anglo-Sioux ancestry drove across the United States to discover a land that reflected the dynamic, sometimes schizoid, multiplicity of its people.

Named after the secondary highways so-marked on road maps, Blue Highways details the state-by-state experiences of the newly separated and unemployed teacher William Least Heat-Moon. He freely admits he had no clear reason for starting his journey, other than general restlessness. But the book that came from it shows how great things can sometimes come without a clear plan:

A man lives in things and things are moving. He stands apart in such a temporary way it is hardly worth speaking of. If that perception dims egocentrism, that illusion of what man is, then it also enlarges his self, that multiple yet whole part which he has been, will be, is.

Kull: Exile Of Atlantis – Robert E. Howard, 2006 [Edited by Patrice Louinet] ★½

First Forays into Fantasy

It can be tempting to review a book by reviewing the author, especially when the author is famous for other books. How does this compare to those? It’s sad sport, and brutally unfair, but here I go anyway.

This Del Ray short-story collection presents Robert E. Howard’s first fantasy hero, Kull, who escaped a dead-end life on the island of Atlantis to become king of Valusia, “Land of Enchantment,” and mighty champion against threats both human and otherwise.

So let’s get it out of the way now: Kull is Howard’s initial attempt at establishing a barbarian conqueror, very much a rough draft, with not nearly the same depth or vitality as Conan. But Kull came first.

Gorky Park – Martin Cruz Smith, 1981 ★★★★½

A Mystery Wrapped inside an Enigma

Gorky Park dances on the narrow boundaries of genre fiction, a mystery that slides into straight crime fiction where a psychotic killer is pursued by a detective who runs an entire police force but can trust no one. And it is set in Soviet Russia, so there is much social commentary, too.

The challenge for me came not in enjoying it but wondering how its author managed to hold everything together all the way to its bloody, satisfying conclusion. Gorky Park is not a thrill ride – it is much too deliberately paced – but it delivers satisfaction across genres and some unexpected insights into the human condition.

Not to mention stark Russian atmosphere. I can’t think of a novel that sucked me so completely into another time and place as this one did.

Asterix In Switzerland – René Goscinny & Albert Uderzo, 1970 ★★

A Flower for Caesar

Moving into its second full decade, the Asterix series had settled into not one but two formulas: adventure spoofs and travelogues. Asterix In Switzerland employs the latter as it veers between mild fun and meh.

Goscinny and Uderzo deliver this tale of our favorite Gaulish rebels with a strange twist: instead of frustrating the efforts of their arch-enemy Julius Caesar, Asterix and his buddy Obelix must save Caesar’s auditor Vexatius Sinusistus from poisoning by a corrupt governor.

The First Frontier: The Indian Wars & America's Origins – David Horowitz, 1978 ★½

Exposing America's Birth Pains

At its best, The First Frontier is a gripping if scattershot account of the first steps taken by English settlers in New England and Virginia. Only the author can’t decide what it is he wants to write.

Is it about the displacement and slaughter of Native Americans? Or is it about how a new nation invented itself by first resisting, then selfishly rising up against the proper authority of its European overlord?

Published in 1978 when David Horowitz was a well-known leftist academic, The First Frontier echoes the social studies teacher in Dazed And Confused telling her class the upcoming Bicentennial is celebrating “the fact that a bunch of slave-owning, aristocratic white males didn’t want to pay their taxes.”

The Cherry Orchard – Anton Chekhov, 1904 [Translation by Ann Dunnigan] ★

What a Bringdown

Chekhov did comedy like Capone did Valentine’s Day.

Further proof of this comes in the form of The Cherry Orchard, a play so non-comedic it was advertised as a tragedy in its Moscow debut, causing Chekhov to blow up.

A Farewell To Arms – Ernest Hemingway, 1929 ★★★

Making the Case for a Subjective Classic

Some books carry associations that have nothing to do with their literary merits. So it is for me and A Farewell To Arms.

Ernest Hemingway’s sprawling tale of love and war was required reading in my final weeks of boarding school. For me, shellfire in Italy and a boozy convalescence became one with cinderblock dorm walls and muddy trails that stretched to and from my classes. Like Frederic Henry at mess hall I watched people I lived with vigorously rag on each other, sensing as he did that I would somehow come to love and miss these days, but wishing in that moment I was somewhere else.

Guests Of The Ayatollah – Mark Bowden, 2006 ★★★

So Much for Diplomacy

For many of us, Orwell’s 1984 is arriving later than advertised. For Iran, it came five years early.

In the newspeak of the Islamic Revolution, “freedom” meant total adherence to rigidly-interpreted doctrine, “peace” was squashing anyone who thought differently, and 66 Americans became “guests” when their nation’s embassy in Tehran, Iran’s capital, was attacked on November 4, 1979.

For most of them, liberation came after 444 days. For the country they were trapped in, it is taking much longer.

The Conquering Sword Of Conan – Robert E. Howard, 2005 [Edited by Patrice Louinet] ★★★½

Farewell to the Hyborian Age

Artists sometimes are most inspired when the world is caving in around them. The need to make sense of the suffering and chaos, or simply wail against the tide, can manifest itself in outstanding work.

Is that why it seems in writing his stories of Conan the Cimmerian, Robert E. Howard saved the best for last? Brilliant as his Conan stories typically are, I don’t know any that holds up as well as “Red Nails,” his final work which caps this third Del-Ray collection of Conan stories.

Yet I still prefer the first volume, The Coming Of Conan, and middle volume The Bloody Crown Of Conan over this. Howard may still offer Conan in all his glory, but the barbarian has shed his familiar world of prior creations for a starker, deeply alien setting. And the yarns Howard spins, while every bit as taut, are more gnarled and knotty.

Zodiac – Robert Graysmith, 1986 [2007 Paperback Edition] ★½

Getting Away with It

It is better sometimes to be first than right.

Take Robert Graysmith and his book Zodiac, a bestseller in its first printing and basis for the 2007 film of the same name. An entire generation of readers got pulled into the true-crime genre thanks to this sprawling tale of a California murder spree which officially ran from December 1968 to October 1969.

Yet the book itself is deeply confused, full of bizarre and absurd claims its author neither substantiates nor connects. Zodiac experts frequently play piñata with Graysmith’s version of the facts. Still, it is this account which dominates popular understanding of this absorbing mystery.

Waverley – Walter Scott, 1814 ★★★

Putting on the Plaid

History is full of accidents. For example, this novel. If not for a missing tackle box, no one would ever have gotten to read it.

In the preface to his 1829 edition of Waverley, Walter Scott explains how he wrote the first few chapters of this, gave it up, and put the manuscript in a garret room where he kept lumber. Poking around said room trying to find a tackle box to lend to a friend, he came across the manuscript, read it, was surprised to enjoy it, and decided to finish it.

And thus history, or rather historical fiction, came to be.

The Whiz Kids And The 1950 Pennant – Robin Roberts and C. Paul Rogers III, 1996 ★★½

And Now a Word from the Rest of the Country

For much of the 20^th century, American baseball was largely the property of one city. So when another city’s ballclub, one shut out of the World Series for 35 years, finally did play in one, it made for a season to remember, regardless of the final outcome.

Perhaps that was why they called the 1950 Philadelphia Phillies “the Whiz Kids,” not just because they were so young but because they whizzed across the sports landscape for a bright, quick moment.

Robin Roberts was a young pitcher on that National League Champion team. Forty-six years later, he published a memoir with co-writer C. Paul Rogers III about the experience which serves as a serviceable sports history of a team easily overlooked amid the behemoth legacies of Yankees, Giants, and Dodger teams from that era.

Orpheus Descending – Tennessee Williams, 1957 ★★½

Hot for the Hired Help

Some authors test your tolerance for excess. Because they work at a higher pitch than more realistic writers, you know better than complain when that approach comes off as a bit extreme, even for them.

Tennessee Williams didn’t write normal plays, whatever those are. He wrote plays about desperate, decadent people struggling for love trapped in social orders that refuse to understand or accept them. Understand this, and you can see Orpheus Descending for what it is, a template for everything that followed in his glorious career.

For that, it is fascinating and revealing. Never mind it is a hot mess, too.

This Side Of Paradise – F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1920 ★★

Chasing Girls and Glory

“I don’t know how to run a newspaper, Mr. Thatcher, I just try everything I can think of.”

I kept flashing on this classic line from Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane reading this debut of another young man eager to make his mark. This Side Of Paradise is someone trying everything he can think of.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel runs the gamut from the meaning of life to capitalism. Snappy phrases and clever barbs are in ready supply, as are finely-drawn settings so sumptuous you feel enveloped by them. Yet very much unlike Citizen Kane, there is an overall unpleasant, chaotic feeling about this debut, a preening eagerness to impress by trying to do too much too soon, rather than settle on telling a story.

George B. McClellan: The Young Napoleon – Stephen W. Sears, 1988 ★★½

General Delay

Terrible military leaders grab history’s attention like a car wreck on the highway, albeit with a much higher body count. Whether as monuments of supreme idiocy or just poor luck, they live on in a way only the best of the good leaders do.

Think of Custer or Crassus or Conrad von Hötzendorf, who all married bad judgment and wanton disregard for life to leave us eternal reminders of the folly of war. But there are others not as spectacular but every bit as deadly.

Take, for example, George McClellan, whose leadership can be blamed for extending the U. S. Civil War. This at least is the impression left by Stephen W. Sears in this biography of McClellan.

The Bloody Crown Of Conan – Robert E. Howard, 2003 [Edited by Patrice Louinet] ★★★★½

A Barbarian Takes Command

Killing people is easy; leading them is not. In this middle volume collecting the original stories, Conan the Cimmerian demonstrates he has the right stuff for both tasks.

Conan creator Robert E. Howard reveals similar adaptive skill. The first Del Ray Conan volume, The Coming Of Conan The Cimmerian, showcased the vast range of Howard’s imagination; in this second volume we see the depth of his storycraft and world-building powers.

“From death to death it came, riding on a river of human blood. Blood feeds it, blood draws it. Its power is greatest when there is blood on the hands that grasp it, when it is wrested by slaughter from its holder. Wherever it gleams, blood is spilt and kingdoms totter, and the forces of nature are put in turmoil.”

Once In Golconda: A True Drama Of Wall Street 1920-1938 – John Brooks, 1969 ★★★½

The Man Who Broke Wall Street

Sometimes history delivers up revolutionaries in deceptive packages. Take Richard Whitney.

Whitney was the pluperfect American aristocrat: boasting all the right connections; demonstrating a correct, gentlemanly bearing; and, as leader of the New York Stock Exchange in the 1930s, exemplifying all his fellow wealthy saw as proper and admirable in life.

But while pushing back against the forces of reform, he wrote checks he couldn’t cash and stole money from friends, thus setting up his financial establishment for a moral crisis that changed how Wall Street worked.

Animal Farm – George Orwell, 1945 ★½

Grimm and Grimmer

Have you ever re-read one of those books they used to assign you back in school? Did you ever notice how almost-uniformly unpleasant they are to read today?

The Painted Bird is the most wretched of them, but there were a host of suicide stimuli on offer back in my day: The Lord Of The Flies, A Separate Peace, Crime And Punishment, The Bell Jar, The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter and of course this story about what happens when an oppressed group of animals take over a farm.

Did they want to put us off reading forever? Did they want social media to take over the planet before it had even been invented?

Saturday Night: A Backstage History Of Saturday Night Live – Doug Hill & Jeff Weingrad, 1986 ★★★★

When The Kids Broke Free

It was the show that launched a thousand catch-phrases, dozens of comedy legends, and hype so outsized it engendered feelings of inadequacy long before its original cast left the premises.

How does one get a handle on Saturday Night Live?

If you are Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad, you start at the beginning, with an aging talk show host who wanted to rest his show on weekends, a declining broadcasting network left with a large hole in their programming, and a hungry young producer named Lorne Michaels who wanted to make TV for Baby Boomers like himself.

The Merchant Of Venice – William Shakespeare, c. 1596-1597 ★★★

Shakespeare's Thorniest Play

Shakespeare didn’t make this one easy. Try to enjoy The Merchant Of Venice as a crafty comedy, and you risk being insensitive. See it as a subversive tragedy, and you trip over author’s intent.

Pretend as many do that the play isn’t anti-Semitic, and there is still a lot of weirdness to navigate, like a rich dead father forcing his daughter to marry the first man who guesses which coffin hides her portrait, and a man so lustful and greedy he risks his best friend’s life to hook up with that daughter (we are supposed to root for this guy, by the way.)

As for me, I like it, even more once it gets going. I just don’t feel good about saying so.

The Odessa File – Frederick Forsyth, 1972 ★★★★

A Humane Thriller

Introducing his first three novels in a 1980 omnibus edition, Frederick Forsyth called The Odessa File “the humane one,” to distinguish it from the pure craft of his debut and a nastier tone in his third novel.

More than 40 years later, I don’t think anyone has summed up Odessa File nearly as well. It is a very humane sort of thriller, all the more involving and exciting for that.

Take one modern fellow trying to right a terrible wrong, throw in a terror plot that realistically threatens an entire nation, and incorporate a knowledge of politics, bureaucracy, and automotive mechanics, and you have another Forsyth winner, but with more than a bit of heart this time.

Edmund Campion: A Life – Evelyn Waugh, 1935 ★★½

A Saint in Shackles

Evelyn Waugh doesn’t exactly exude humble piety. His fiction sneers with acid contempt at the foibles of his fellow man. So a serious, earnest, ever-so-respectful biography from this famous cynic about a saint martyred over 350 years before is a bit of a detour.

Waugh was Catholic; it is part of his legend. But mostly his faith is a matter of being against things: modern architecture, sex outside marriage, loud parties, and so on. Edmund Campion: A Life is a rare occasion for seeing Waugh putting forward faith as positive action.

As a book, it is minor Waugh. But as a glimpse at what made Waugh tick, Edmund Campion engages and reveals between its lulls.

The Coming Of Conan The Cimmerian – Robert E. Howard, 2002 [Edited by Patrice Louinet] ★★★★

Loving, Slaying, and Being Content

Where to begin with Conan the Barbarian? You have movies, comic books, computer games. A number of fantasy writers have taken their hacks and stabs at detailing the Cimmerian’s gore-soaked adventures, either under the Conan name or else a thinly-veiled alternate moniker.

But forget all that. Real Conan begins here with Robert E. Howard’s original stories, set in a mythical long-lost age, which Howard churned out for the pulp-fantasy market. They drench you with a spirit of adventure and appreciation for the splendor and squalor of a unique world:

Torchlight licked luridly from broken windows and wide-thrown doors, and out of those doors, stale smells of wine and rank sweaty bodies, clamor of drinking-jacks and fists hammered on rough tables, snatches of obscene songs, rushed like a blow in the face.

The Years Of Lyndon Johnson: The Passage Of Power – Robert A. Caro, 2012 ★★★★

Free at Last

It is amazing how each of Robert Caro’s four (so far) books on the presidency of Lyndon Johnson manages to create its own distinct identity, interlinked to the others yet separate.

In The Passage Of Power, LBJ’s story finally moves to the White House, where he is trapped for years as forlorn vice president playing stooge to the man who beat him for the Democrat nomination in 1960, only to win the office he craved for so long as the result of an assassin’s bullet and then do things with that office that would amaze detractors and allies alike.

Passage isn’t perfect, but it’s a fascinating, detailed account of and about flawed greatness.