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, you know, 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.