Claudius The God – Robert Graves, 1935 ★★★★

Perils of Absolute Rule

A sequel to any great novel faces a steep challenge measuring up, especially when the original works well enough alone. After barely surviving the perils of the world’s most dangerous family, only to be made Emperor of Rome, how can poor Claudius entertain us now?

With Claudius The God, it is no longer a matter of surviving, but reigning. Will Clau-Clau-Claudius, the stuttering, staggering, drooling leader of the greatest empire ever known, make a royal hash of his empire, or restore a measure of Roman sensibility and prosperity?

For much of the novel, he seems on the road to creating marked improvement for his people and his legacy. Then he realizes it isn’t good to be the king, not for him and not for his people.

The First Salute – Barbara Tuchman, 1988 ★★½

Helping America Happen

Creating the United States was the work of more than one nation. What commercial and strategic concerns went into its birth? And what really cost the British crown their 13 colonies?

Barbara Tuchman takes a long view in appreciating the forces at play in the struggle, for example spotlighting the Netherlands’ bloody overthrow of Catholic rule in the 1500s. Subtitled “A View of the American Revolution,” the book explains how French and Dutch support, along with British ineptitude, helped realize the United States.

If you can tolerate the author hopping approach to developing a thesis and multiple detours into 20^th century politics, you may enjoy this colorful, fast-moving-once-it-gets-going account.

80 Million Eyes – Ed McBain, 1966 ★★

Lights, Cameras, Murder

If a sign of a great author is making a book readable even when there is little in way of story, then here is Exhibit A in Ed McBain’s greatness. This book is fast-paced and gripping, capturing authentic moments of life on its margins. But the plotwork falls short of form.

If you are already familiar with and enjoy the 87^th Precinct series of police procedurals, you can find things to extend your engagement with the series. But if you are a newbie wanting to give McBain a fair shot, this is not the book to start on.

80 Million Eyes is more a killer-and-filler entry.

The Bill James Baseball Abstract 1988 – Bill James, 1988 ★★★★

Knowing When to Leave

Bill James often talked about baseball careers being like watermelons. Even with the best of them, you had what he called the meat of the melon, the center part that was the ripest and easiest section to enjoy, but to get to them, you have to deal with rinds.

“Whenever you sign a player over the age of 28, you are buying into a market that is certain to decline,” he writes about the 1987 Baltimore Orioles, a team with a fair number of 30-and-over players.

Age is the great killer of talent, James would say. Apparently, the same thinking guided James himself, who made the 1988 edition of the Bill James Baseball Abstract his swansong, just a dozen years after it began. In a postscript, he claims to have lost his joy.

Nine Stories – J. D. Salinger, 1953 ★★★★½

Living in the Material World

How many times does one pick up a well-read book expecting one thing only to be surprised? It’s less common for me as I get older, but there are surprises. One of the happiest of them came recently, re-reading this notoriously downgraded staple of suburban libraries.

What you get here is a case for the short story as the supreme form of fiction. Each piece is its own jewel of storytelling economy and creative ambiguity. And as thematically linked ruminations on the human condition, they take on added luster in the form of concept album.

His Vedantic philosophy may not be for everyone, but one doesn’t need to be an acolyte to appreciate J. D. Salinger’s finest hour.

The Citizen Kane Book – Herman J. Mankiewicz & Orson Welles with Pauline Kael, 1971 ★★★★

No Pain, No Kane

Great art isn’t always about betrayal, but the two go together more than you might expect. In the case of one of the world’s most admired films, the stab in the back went deep, and if you accept the backstory given here, reaped its karmic reward with interest.

The shooting script for 1941’s Citizen Kane is combined with a groundbreaking essay on the film and its creation by Pauline Kael, longtime movie critic for The New Yorker. While no substitute for watching the film, the book makes fascinating supplemental material.

Kael’s essay, originally published in consecutive issues of her magazine, got most of the attention when the book was published in 1971. While praising the film on the whole, Kael made clear its greatness in written form was the work of Herman J. Mankiewicz rather than the film’s director and star, Orson Welles.

America In Search Of Itself – Theodore H. White, 1982 ★★½

Once More Unto the Breach with Teddy White

Before Ronald Reagan’s election as president in 1980, American politics had fallen into a rut. Elections had been between two clear known quantities who generally agreed on the state of the world and what the United States needed to do. Differences centered on process, not goals.

Reagan was different. While fellow Republicans saw some use for government, his view was far more negative. After decades of expanding federal reach, Reagan wanted not only to cut taxes but slash the bureaucracy that made Big Government big.

For many liberals, the arrival of Reagan in 1980 came like a slow-motion nightmare. With an incumbent president seemingly powerless under the grip of inflation and an embassy full of American hostages in Iran, Reagan’s ascendency had the makings of an existential crisis.

1984 – George Orwell, 1949 ★★★

Why I Don't Love Big Brother

Here is a book so influential you don’t need to touch it to know its grisly details. So many immediate associations come thick and fast, from the title itself to terms like Big Brother, memory hole, and Thought Police.

As a political treatise, it long ago passed the test of greatness: People still talk about it. But how does 1984 hold up as a novel? Would it make sense if I told you I came away both overwhelmed and underimpressed?

The book is a sweeping indictment of collectivist authoritarianism, its target Marxist but vague enough to encompass other totalitarian philosophies. The term “Ingsoc” is rolled out often, suggesting that what we are seeing at work is not far off from present-day English socialism.

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears,” Orwell writes. “It was their final, most essential command.”

The Twelve Caesars – Suetonius, c. 121 ★★★★★

When Bias Isn't Such a Bad Thing

Can a biased historical account be preferred over one that is more even-handed? It’s not an easy ethical question, but in terms of invigorating a reader with the spirit of a lost time, not to mention crafting a deep-dish narrative that pulls you in, the answer can be yes.

That’s even more true if the writer is Suetonius, and the work this account of the early rulers of the Roman empire.

Sharp character sketches and piquant social commentary make the First Century A. D. come alive in a way that makes you believe you are really half-back in time, reluctant to realize much of what he was writing was tabloid journalism for the stylus age. Not fiction, but likely blown well out of proportion for the sake of readability and old grudges.

So what!

Doll – Ed McBain, 1965 ★★★½

One of Our Detectives Is Missing

While the 87^th Precinct police procedural series was built on an entire squad of detectives working together as the main protagonist, this was not how it really worked in its 50-year run. Ed McBain couldn’t help but make his alter ego, Steve Carella, the star of the series. Most times, if they were lucky, the other plainclothes officers got to ride shotgun.

This time, McBain deliberately takes Carella out of the loop, missing and presumed dead. The rest of the team must figure out what he figured out back in Chapter 3, and save their comrade by solving a murder.

However bendy its approach, Doll is a fine example of the classic 87^th Precinct formula, a dark and compelling crime, detailed characterizations, clear insights into the processes of a criminal investigation, and a storyline that never slackens. It doesn’t always make sense, but the pages fly by too fast to notice.

The Bill James Baseball Abstract 1987 – Bill James, 1987 ★★★

Eyes on the Prize

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times for baseball in 1986.

On the one hand, you had infielders who defied gravity, power pitchers out of Marvel Comics, a postseason for the ages, and stolen bases dominating the game at a level they never did before or would again.

On the other hand, you had collusion by greedy owners watering down the game, recreational drug use wrecking careers and lives, and a growing realization our national pastime was losing ground to football.

Fortunately, Bill James was still producing annual Abstracts to lend his analytical perspective and a touch of humor to the situation.

Octopussy – Ian Fleming, 1966 ★★½

Bonds and Sods

The book that unnerved me more than any other, if only because I had to ask a female store clerk if they had it in stock, is this capstone to the career of one of my favorite authors. From the title to the usually hideous cover art, it remains a strange outlier in the Bond oeuvre.

While not a great read, Octopussy is by no means terrible. Ian Fleming was always troubled by the outlandish nature of his character’s adventures, frequently pointing out real espionage is never so thrilling. Keep that in mind when reading this.

In each of the three stories, Bond deals in lower-key activities, seedy forays into the underbelly of humanity involving little to no personal risk. His job is putting an end to his government’s enemies, one way or another, but there is a sense of resigned boredom about it.

Once In A Lifetime – George S. Kaufman & Moss Hart, 1930 ★★★

Then Along Came Jolson

Hollywood didn’t fall in a day. It actually took just over a year, from the debut of the first feature-length picture with sound, Don Juan in August 1926, to that of a much more famous “talkie,” The Jazz Singer in October 1927. Very quickly, everything in moviedom changed forever.

Suddenly, as Norma Desmond would put it, actors needed more than faces. They needed voices, too. This had seeds of both tragedy and comedy. An early example of the latter marked the debut of one of American theater’s most successful writing partnerships, George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart.

As the powerful, short-sighted studio head Herman Glogauer puts it: “What did they have to go and make pictures talk for? Things were going along fine. You couldn’t stop making money – even if you turned out a good picture you made money.”

Breach Of Faith – Theodore H. White, 1975 ★½

From a History to a Screed

It begins at the conclusion, a few dry words from Warren Burger, the Chief Justice of the U. S. Supreme Court that ended a stalemate: “The generalized assertion of privilege must yield to the demonstrated specific need for the evidence in a pending criminal trial.”

With that, the curtain rang down on what had been one of the most consequential and popular presidencies in American history. What began as a counter to New Frontier adventurism and Great Society excess ended with genuine horror as well as displays of shocked virtue that would have embarrassed Captain Renault. Like this book.

In spinning his story, Theodore H. White often leaves key details unexplained, apparently figuring readers are also in the know and just want this recent tumult explained. He is not writing a history but a sermon, complete with hellbent evildoers and brave angels.

Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Critical Biography – Mark Van Doren, 1949 ★★★

An Imperfect Greatness

How to rank Nathaniel Hawthorne among the literary giants? He did so much to give serious fiction a uniquely American idiom and character. Yet how many Hawthorne masterpieces are there?

As Mark Van Doren sees it, there are just two. One is widely regarded as the first great American novel. The other, a short story, is just as powerful in the myriad ways it details the evilness of the human heart. Both are majestic, but after that, Hawthorne too often suffered from a willingness to err on the side of comfort, both his own and the reader’s.

Does Van Doren’s minimalist appreciation convince? I don’t think he even tries that hard. But he does offer a bracing way to consider Hawthorne’s deceptively genial legacy from a perspective of eighty years on, a legacy just as bracing eighty years after that.

Paul Revere’s Ride – David Hackett Fischer, 1994 ★★★½

Some Kind of Hero

Who is this Paul Revere guy and what do we really need to know about him? Is he just a one-hit wonder in American history who transformed an abbreviated horse ride into a ticket to immortality? Or was he actually great?

David Hackett Fischer’s short answer: Yes, he was. The longer answer is this nearly 400-page dive examining his life, world, and central role in helping set the stage for the American Revolution.

Fischer is successful in the main drawing attention to Revere’s personal courage and deeper contributions to his cause, but like with his other histories, the book really shines at taking a broader view. A lot more planning went into April 19, 1775 than how many lanterns to put in a steeple.

He Who Hesitates – Ed McBain, 1965 ★★

Not a Typical Trip into the City

Ed McBain liked to say he didn’t write whodunits, he wrote whydunits. In this case, what we have is a whatisit. What is the deal with Roger Broome, and what are the strange circumstances that make him think about going to the police?

What it winds up being is a break from a typical 87^th Precinct police procedural. Instead of a fresh corpse and a trail of clues, you have a quiet loner from out of town pondering a secret in real time.

Broome’s odd personality grabs you right away. His mind works along slow and offbeat tangents. Having sold some woodenware in the big and strange city of Isola, he plans to return to his mother, with whom there seems an oddly co-dependent bond. But there is something he wants to get off his chest first, something he thinks he should take to police.

The Bill James Baseball Abstract 1986 – Bill James, 1986 ★★★

In Search of Lasting Greatness

Over the brief run of his annual looks back on individual baseball seasons, Bill James was concerned with demarcating the difference between ordinary performance and true excellence. This is made clear in this, one of the last Abstracts which examines 1985.

It was a year like no other for James, because his team, the Kansas City Royals, finally won it all.

In the best and longest section of the book, James examines the history of baseball in Kansas City, from the dog days of the Athletics in the early 1960s to the Game 7 whipping of the Cardinals last October. It could have been a book of its own. Perhaps it should have been, because the rest of Baseball Abstract 1986 can only pale in comparison.

The Man With The Golden Gun – Ian Fleming, 1965 ★½

A Goodbye that Still Stings

Ian Fleming should have been taking his ease in 1964. The year before saw him endure a nasty lawsuit and nastier heart attack. Just relax and enjoy as his creation James Bond cemented his status as moviedom’s most famous superspy in Goldfinger, opening in theaters that September.

Fleming always wanted more. So he launched a new book project, not about Bond but a flying car. The “Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang” series became another lasting success, but one Fleming would never see to publication, as he died in August.

It was the sort of self-destructive impulse in pursuit of duty that Bond himself obeys in the other project Fleming allowed to consume his last year of life: the 13^th and penultimate Bond book.

Hamlet – William Shakespeare, c. 1599-1601 ★★★★★

The Ultimate Rabbit Hole

Yesterday someone on Reddit said they had just read their first Shakespeare play. To my surprise, it was Hamlet. Not that it isn’t the greatest thing ever. But it’s too long, dense in meaning, and full of subtext to be close to accessible.

Talk about skipping the bunny trail.

My advice: read something else by Shakespeare first. Then, if you are still up for a challenge, have at Hamlet. That way, you don’t risk putting yourself off the Bard by biting off more than you can chew. As the hero of our play says in Act I: “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio/Then are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

The Making Of The President 1972 – Theodore H. White, 1973 ★★★½

Nobody Loves a Winner

The problem with total victory is that victors often have a hard time overcoming them. It offers no moral guardrails, no ego checks to counter bad impulses, while falsely beguiling the victor into seeing only a clear road and an open horizon ahead.

All this was a problem for President Richard Nixon’s 1972 re-election campaign long before the votes came in. The fourth and final volume in Theodore H. White’s “Making Of The President” series examines what happens when four years of success becomes its own poison pill.

In so doing, White turns in an engaging book even while it struggles to get a handle on the elephant in the room: the arrests of men connected to the Nixon re-election campaign who had broken into Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate hotel.

The Marble Faun – Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1860 ★★

Mixing Life and Art in the Eternal City

The final novel by the first great American novelist has so much going for it in isolated moments that its undeniable dreadfulness as a whole winds up a thing of wonder.

Imagine a book so filled with magnificent vistas that one feels flush from the radiance of summer mornings that came and went 150 years ago. Imagine lengthy dialogues between a religious believer and a skeptic which genuinely respects the substance of both viewpoints. Imagine social and artistic discursions touching upon centuries of Western civilization.

Then imagine all this being secondary to a plot about whether a man has furry, pointy ears; how a glance can constitute complicity in a murder; and why two bland couples can somehow never find happiness together.

The Dangerous Summer – Ernest Hemingway, 1960 [1985] ★★

A Farewell to Death

Ernest Hemingway died in 1961 but that didn’t stop him pumping out product for the next 50 years. Only Jimi Hendrix’s estate was busier. In 1985-1986, Hemingway fans had three new books to choose from, a novel, a collection of early articles, and a late-in-life memoir.

Imagine how thrilling it must have been to learn the memoir detailed Hemingway’s rediscovery of bullfighting and the land which spawned it, Spain? Together, these are key ingredients in two of Papa’s most beloved works, The Sun Also Rises and Death In The Afternoon. What could possibly be wrong?

Nothing, so long as the reader doesn’t expect the same kind of transportive experience. The Dangerous Summer mostly delivers the goods, a summer highlighted by a pair of brilliant matadors. It manages to be straightforward, amusing, piquant, and somewhat dull.

Regina – Leslie Epstein, 1982 ★

Play It Again

An attitude in search of a story, any story, Regina is a frustrating case of an author too much in love with his main character. He uses her to tug at the possibility for hope amid a landscape of harsh desolation. Even if real hope doesn’t exist anywhere, he concludes, at least there is Regina.

Regina Glassman is a moderately famous Manhattan stage actress who has retreated to a life of magazine writing and raising two sons. That is until she is asked to join the cast of a major revival of Chekhov’s The Seagull. Regina made her name playing the ingenue Nora in an earlier production; she can’t say no to a chance to relive the role.

How young she was when she played teenaged Nora back then! How much more, she knows, can she bring to the part now.

Cop Shot – Mike McAlary, 1990 ★★★

A Helluva Drug

Every decade has its representative criminal activity: bootlegging in the 1920s; draft-dodging in the 1960s; dedicated disruption of service attacks in the 2020s. In the 1980s, crack cocaine was all the rage. Especially in the cities, its casualty rate had the quality of a pandemic.

Early one February morning in 1988, in the Jamaica section of Queens, crack claimed the life of rookie police officer Edward Byrne. He was in a marked squad car, guarding the home of a crack-crime witness when five bullets were fired directly at him. He was dead instantly.

As journalist Mike McAlary describes it in his account of the crime, Cop Shot, it was a murder that jolted a city, awoke a nation to the insidious nature of the crack trade, and triggered a rage-fueled hunger for justice. “This had only become the city’s biggest police investigation since Son of Sam,” he writes.

You Only Live Twice – Ian Fleming, 1964 ★★★½

Death in the Face

Death has a way of losing its celebrity and becoming a less obtrusive if ever-annoying companion as one ages. It seeps into everything, closing off future hopes and replacing them with grim resignation.

Ian Fleming was nearing the end of his life when he wrote You Only Live Twice; you feel that from the way it reads. There is a sense of wan completion in Bond’s journey this time around. Frantic pace and knife’s-edge tension is replaced by philosophic contemplation.

And yet despite a sepulchral tone, this manages to be quite a gripping spy thriller most of the way through. For over half of it, Bond is immersed in an unusually realistic and low-key diplomatic mission involving a crash course in Japanese culture. Just as you settle into that, you are plunged into an utterly phantasmagoric personal mission involving one of the most bizarre yet familiar villains of the 007 canon.

The Seagull – Anton Chekhov, 1896 [Translation by Ann Dunnigan] ★★★

Stop Being So Dramatic

Forming a judgment on any work regarded as a classic by so many can be tricky. Enjoy it, and expose your conformity. Don’t, and acknowledge the possibility you are the problem.

I get the latter feeling whenever I read Chekhov, one of world literature’s most revered names. His drowsy narratives and lifeless characters leave me so cold. Yet the critical elite extol his plays as spellbinding works of deep emotion and unique stagecraft.

This has confused and annoyed me for quite a while. Yet re-reading his first multi-act and most famous play, The Seagull, something clicked. Not so much that I enjoyed it (I don’t think Chekhov wrote for that purpose), but at least I began to suss out why he matters to so many.

The Making Of The President 1968 – Theodore H. White, 1969 ★★★★

There's a Riot Going On

That saying back in 1968, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows,” clearly didn’t apply where Theodore H. White was concerned. When it came to that year’s presidential election, he handed you the whole meteorological report.

White’s “Making Of The President” series was three books into its four-book run when this 1968 edition came out, at over 500 pages by far the fattest and most sprawling of them all. He goes on too long in several places, data maven that he was, but when he’s done filling you in on the election’s many twists and turns, you get a strong sense of living through one chaotic year, and of why it turned out the way it did.

Did the country really go through a period of dramatic leftist radicalization and come out of it electing Richard Nixon? Yes, and the two things were closely related. White, a genteel liberal himself, makes clear a candidate touting law and order had considerable appeal when cities were ablaze with riot and campuses under student siege.

The Blithedale Romance – Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1852 ★★★½

Subjectivity Triumphs Over All

Unconventional people went by different names in different eras. In more recent history, they were known as “beatniks” or “hippies.” In the mid-1800s, they were known as something else: transcendentalists.

What they were transcending was wide-ranging and amorphous, but their commitment to living in a world free of conventions was clear. For them, nature was a source of truth more powerful than any human creed. Who cared about money or class when there was eternal beauty?

Nathaniel Hawthorne was for a time one of these seekers, making his home for a few months in a utopian community called Brook Farm just outside Boston. While his time there wasn’t long, its impact went deep enough to form the basis of perhaps his most personal novel.

Kings And Vikings – P. H. Sawyer, 1982 ★

Epic History Made Dull

It takes a class-A killjoy to take a true-life story as violent and bloodthirsty as that of the marauding Norseman of the early Dark Ages and turn it into a treatise on place name derivations and burial mound archeology. But that is what you get here.

P. H. Sawyer was a longtime authority on the history of the Vikings by the time he got around to writing this book. Whatever unique, bold insights he offered in his field had clearly been spun out in other books. Here, what’s left is a good deal of chaff, without a central thesis or even an organizing principle behind it.

This is a short book, but don’t let the size fool you. It’s a chore to read.

Elbow Room – James Alan McPherson, 1979 ★★★★

A Masterclass in Miniature

When short stories work, it’s not in the way of compressed novels. They follow a different logic, setting in motion more open-ended explorations of the mind. Often, what results is not a concrete conclusion so much as a broader reconsideration of a specific feeling or idea.

At least that is the case in this collection of short stories by James Alan McPherson. A man is embarrassed by the rough life of his cousin. A barber struggles to adjust to a changing marketplace. A naïve woman displays unexpected cunning to beat a drunken-driving charge.

McPherson’s stories center around problems of social isolation. Sometimes they are told in ways that suggest an unreliable narrator at work. Often, there is an aspect in dealings with others that smacks of outright rudeness. A woman in a doctor’s office is accosted by a stranger: “As a concerned person, and as your brother, I ask you, without meaning to offend, how did you get that scar on the side of your face?”

Blue Blood – Edward Conlon, 2004 ★★★★

To Serve and Protect

A life in the New York Police Department is a kaleidoscope of the crazy, the deadly, and the profound. That’s even more true when you take on a generational view of the experience. Edward Conlon details his own time as well as those he has known among New York’s Finest.

Conlon came to police work seeing it as a unique type of employment, a vocation more than a job. People he grew up knowing, on both sides of his large Irish family, inspired him to think big:

I didn’t want to hear the story as much as I wanted to tell it, and I didn’t want to tell the story as much as I wanted to live it.

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service – Ian Fleming, 1963 ★★★★

The Quality of Being Human

Is James Bond a good spy? Is he at best competent, and often quite inept? Does a dumber 007 make for a better reading experience?

These questions kept popping into my head as I read again this brilliant, poignant but somewhat perplexing novel, the one in which Bond goes head-to-head with the greatest villain of the series and becomes the willing prisoner of a woman he loves.

For action and suspense, it is hard to beat On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, though it works very well as an emotionally driven character piece, too. Ian Fleming sets up one of his most brilliant plots, executed with violence and cunning. Yet when it is over, the resolution of Ernst Blofeld’s latest fiendish scheme is not what you are left thinking about.

Summer And Smoke – Tennessee Williams, 1948 ★★★½

Here's To The Losers

Love isn’t horseshoes; there’s no scoring for landing near the mark. No one knew this better or communicated it more incessantly than Tennessee Williams, whose plays were epics of romantic frustration. One of his accessible and endearing, and at the same time perhaps the most depressing, is this.

Set deep in his classic time and place, the American South in “the first few years” of the 20^th century, Summer And Smoke spotlights a pair of star-crossed next-door neighbors, she a uptight minister’s daughter, he a hedonistic heir to his father’s medical practice. She believes in God, he believes in medicine, but somehow these opposites not only attract but are impelled toward each other.

As Williams takes us from him teasing her in childhood to their adult selves having deep conversations about choosing between self-gratification and social obligation, you begin to wonder: should I root for them to be a couple, or to break free of each other’s spell?

The Making Of The President 1964 – Theodore H. White, 1965 ★★★

Over Before It Began

Theodore H. White lost more than a president and friend in 1963. He also lost a chance to follow up his Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the 1960 U. S. Presidential election with something nearly as riveting.

It wasn’t a race in 1964 but a coronation. The question wasn’t if Lyndon Johnson would be re-elected president, but by how wide a margin. Johnson’s campaign themes of peace and prosperity resonated with voters. After the shocking assassination of John F. Kennedy, Americans were not ready to have a third president in just over a year.

Meanwhile, Republican challenger Barry Goldwater was barely trying to win over the undecideds. He delivered instead a bold libertarian message in a tone White likens to an Old Testament prophet, adopting a slogan that seemed unconvinced by itself: “In your heart you know he’s right.”

The Snow-Image And Other Twice-Told Tales – Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1851 ★★

Hawthorne's Final Grab Bag

There is not enough fiction by Nathaniel Hawthorne; life kept getting in his way. But he wrote more tales and sketches than I once thought.

Much better known are two other short-fiction collections. The first is a recognized classic of American literature, Twice-Told Tales. The second, Mosses From An Old Manse, may be his greatest book. Just recently I found this later collection containing some of the last short pieces Hawthorne wrote.

Just how essential is The Snow-Image, anyway?

Roman Britain: Outpost Of The Empire – H. H. Scullard, 1979 ★★½

Ruling Britannia

Long before Great Britain became the world’s greatest empire, it was for 400 years a colony of another empire called Rome. What did Rome ever do for the British? Plenty, according to H. H. Scullard, including introducing moldboards to plows, paving to roads, and cats to homes.

There was also the creation of cities, specifically one at the mouth of the Thames River known today as London. If it wasn’t for war, famine, and slavery, all of which all had existed before the Romans came, one can see why the British regarded their colonization to be a blessing.

Especially when it was all over in a relative blink of an eye.

A Bend In The River – V. S. Naipaul, 1979 ★★★½

Western Civilization Rules

The unique voice of V. S. Naipaul has both blessed and cursed his literary legacy. Often celebrated for his outsider view of Western civilization, he is also lambasted as a crude, sexist apologist for same.

One thing he could never be accused of was sentimentality. His books take shots in all directions, ridiculing progress, tradition, Marxism, capitalism, religion, ethnocentrism, even multiculturalism. When considering a book that encapsulates his iconoclastic cynicism as well as A Bend In The River, it’s important up front to accept and even appreciate the author’s desire not to play nice.

That doesn’t make A Bend In The River a great novel for me; I don’t rate its story or characters that high. But it is powerful to read.

Casey: The Life And Legend Of Charles Dillon Stengel – Joseph Durso, 1967 ★★

A Winning Personality

The only man in baseball to have had his uniform number retired by both the New York Mets and the New York Yankees, Casey Stengel won those honors for entirely different reasons.

For the Yankees, he managed a team to an unmatched five straight World Series Championship seasons, and notched two more World Series wins and three further appearances in just 12 years. For the Mets, he diverted attention from epically bad baseball with a unique gift of gab and invigorating showmanship.

That the Mets retired #37 four years before the Yankees seems appropriate. Stengel’s personality often overshadowed his performance. You sense this reading Joseph Durso’s biography of the man, which was published between those two events and commemorating Stengel’s induction in baseball’s Hall of Fame as a case of winning personality.