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?
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.
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.
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.
