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.