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 by then 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 miniaturized 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 like 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. Now I found this later collection with 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 mould-boards 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 being 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.