Stirling’s Desert Raiders – Virginia Cowles, 1958 ★½

A Puzzling Legend

Can a single individual change the outcome of something as epic as World War II? This account of a pioneering British commando taking on the Afrika Korps in Libya, Tunisia, and Egypt would have you believe it not only possible, but true. If only it were more convincing.

David Stirling was the son of a Scottish laird who found himself early in the conflict looking for something more stimulating than regular military duty. The result: inventing the Special Air Service, a commando unit still active today, known for their elite professionalism.

In Stirling’s case, however, it reads more like adventurism. As described in Stirling’s Desert Raiders, there was no risk too great, no chance not worth taking. A raid was something he looked upon as “pure relaxation.” While men under his command died following orders that were highly reckless, he kept on his path.

The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925 ★★★★½

Life with America's Most Wanted

The Great American Novel, it turns out, is a crime story. The Great Gatsby may be known now as refined literature or even worse, high art, but what makes it so immediate and enjoyable is the milieu it sprang from, of gangsters, flappers, body counts and bootleg gin.

That and the fact it is so much fun to read should divest it of any perceived responsibility for uplifting the mind. It has a message, deep if not especially brilliant, but the novel’s main takeaway is the setting and its people, aristocrats basking in the high life along Long Island Sound.

Nick Carraway is a striving bond salesman and Yale graduate who becomes enmeshed when his married second cousin Daisy takes up an affair with Nick’s rich neighbor Jay Gatsby. Gatsby is an enigma; no one seems to know how he got his money, only that he has a lot of it.

George Washington Slept Here – George S. Kaufman & Moss Hart, 1940 ½★

When the Well Runs Dry

Country life was a popular subject for American entertainment in the 1940s, with movies like Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, comic strips like “Li’l Abner,” even paintings like Andrew Wyeth “Christina’s World.” Why not screwball comedy, too?

The writing team of Kaufman & Hart, enjoying enough success from their collaborative playwriting to afford new homes in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, decided to make their next play about the experience of country living. George Washington Slept Here was the result.

While a good idea, the play suffers from all the triteness and contrivances of the pair’s earlier work with fewer sparks of originality. Perhaps because country comedies were not so popular in the beginning of the 1940s as they became in the end, there is a potted, been-there done-that feeling about the thing which maybe it doesn’t quite deserve.

Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency – Douglas Adams, 1987 ★★★½

 And Now for Something Slightly Different

Is it a mystery? A fantasy? A comedy? A spiritual satire? A free-range, deep-dish metaphysical contemplation of time itself?

The most fun readers may have with Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency is making guesses after every chapter as to what it is they are reading, then revising them after a few more pages.

Probably the happiest takeaway from reading this novel is the sneaking sense its author was having fun writing again. Douglas Adams leaves the increasingly dour Galaxy of his recent past behind to bring forth a distinctly different yet still engagingly silly Universe involving a fictitious British university and the ghost of a computer billionaire.

Robbery Under Law: The Mexican Object-Lesson – Evelyn Waugh, 1939 ★★

Taking Oil, Dumping God

Marxism is one of the most profound political movements in the history of mankind. Love it or hate it, the rise of the “workers’ revolution” has left few neutral observers in its wake.

Evelyn Waugh was one of the haters. He condemned Marxism for its negative impact on national economies, its removal of public liberties to serve a nebulous public good, and most especially its avowed atheism. In Mexico in the late 1930s, he called out this “object-lesson” for what he describes as its ruinous effects.

Waugh writes: “Just as the United States earned the gratitude of the world by ‘trying out’ prohibition, so the Mexicans may be said to be trying out Marxism.”

The Good Soldier – Ford Madox Ford, 1915 ★★★★★

A Different Kind of Mystery Novel

Reading The Good Soldier is like being trapped in a room with one of the windiest, endlessly digressive bores you can imagine. And then the penny drops and you realize you are in the middle of a rather fun mystery.

Who is this odd narrator, John Dowell, and why is he so in the thrall of a strange English couple, the Ashburnhams? What is the deal with Dowell’s wife? And why did Ford Madox Ford give this novel the title The Good Soldier, given there is nothing in it relating to the Great War then raging across Europe?

Another mystery less difficult to explain is the hold this elliptical book has had over generations of readers, only gaining stature in later critical surveys. The Good Soldier is a probing, devastating, subtly but persistently comedic examination of duty, religion, and so much else that falls under the heading of what one is brought up to believe.

The Cutie – Donald E. Westlake, 1960 ★★½

Even Bad Guys Get the Blues

Straightforward mystery or crime fiction? I go back and forth with this one. The plot centers on a murder, a series of them as it unfolds, with mysterious phone calls and lengthy interrogations that double as exposition. Your standard mystery, basically.

But what it really is about is the life of a criminal, a hoodlum who thinks he’s in the driver’s seat until things start going wrong. As a character study, The Cutie is involving, full-on crime fiction. Yet most of the way through, it is tied to this formulaic mystery that leaves too many holes.

Our protagonist, Clay, works as a top operative for Manhattan gang boss Ed Ganolese. One night, at home with his latest girlfriend, the doorbell rings. It’s Billy-Billy Cantell, a junkie who claims the police are after him for murdering a woman he swears he doesn’t know.

Lincoln’s Lieutenants – Stephen W. Sears, 2017 ★★★★

Epic Battles Led by Petty Minds

They were eventual victors in the highest-stakes battles their country ever fought, enduring gut-wrenching reversals and hellish casualties all the way. They also included enough whiny, bratty, narcissistic headcases to fill the cast of an ‘80s teen comedy.

With such leaders was the Union saved.

The main takeaway from this book, the first by Civil War historian Stephen Sears to cover the entire war rather than a specific campaign, is just how brutal a spectacle it was not just during specific battles but all the way through. Yet the prima donna aspect hits home, too.

The Burning Mountain – Alfred Coppel, 1982 ★★

The Longest Day that Never Was

For those who balk at the morality of using A-bombs on Japan at the end of World War II, The Burning Mountain presents a hellish alternative: mass waves of suicide boats and planes, gas warfare, hordes of crying children wearing explosives, and much more.

Between 150,000 to 250,000 people died at Hiroshima and Nagasaki; Alfred Coppel imagined a death toll at least as high in the hypothetical event of a failed detonation. The invasion of the Japanese Home Islands becomes a series of endless battles fought with bamboo sticks and flamethrowers; one side full of people eager to die, the other side worn out both by their own casualties and those they must inflict.

As a worst-case scenario, The Burning Mountain convinces. As a story, it mostly misses the mark with a handful of distinctive yet dull characters and an uninvolving, shapeless narrative.

All’s Well That Ends Well – William Shakespeare, 1598-1608? ★★★

Stand by Your Man

The verdict on this play over the years can be summed up in a single word: Meh.

Its existence went unnoticed from available evidence until 1623’s publication of the First Folio. Its origins are murky, at least as far as Shakespeare’s composition is concerned. Its performance history is rather slight for a comedy by the Bard; not even a movie adaptation.

Beyond that, it is a comedy that is not that funny and a romance which leaves a bad taste in many mouths. There are many fine things about it, particularly an engaging heroine and a villain who doubles as comic relief. It has an experimental quality about it one can either go with or not, trusting in the title not to be led astray.

Whether it delivers on that title isn’t clearly answered. Since that is the one thing people know about the play going in, let’s look into it.

The Dead Zone – Stephen King, 1979 ★★★★½

Wake Me When It's 1975

This was the novel that started it all for Stephen King. It wasn’t his first book, nor his first great book, but it was the first King book to top The New York Times bestseller list, a feat he has repeated over 30 times since. It’s the book where his reign of terror really began.

People say King is a sloppy writer, an indifferent craftsman, that he goes for big scares and brand-name placement in place of things like tone and character. Yes, sometimes I am one of those people. But The Dead Zone forces a reappraisal. It has a powerful human intimacy, a sense of what makes people tick, that makes for a very credible horror tale.

John Smith has a problem other people would kill for: An ability to see the future. Precognitive insight has been part of his life as long as he can remember; after a five-year coma it metastasizes to a point where he can discern the fates of other people by touching their hands.

Scoop – Evelyn Waugh, 1938 ★★

Fleet Street Follies

When it came to media bashing, Evelyn Waugh got his licks in early and often. Scoop is his acid take on the artful folly of foreign correspondents competing for the big story, not really caring if they have to invent it.

Based on his recent experience as a war correspondent covering the 1935 Italian invasion of Ethiopia (then known as Abyssinia), Waugh presents Ishmaelia, an East African land of no cultural or material importance. Here is sent, completely by accident, one William Boot, nature correspondent for the Beast.

Can this gormless rustic bumpkin accustomed to writing about great-crested grebes possibly land the big story? To quote Mr. Salter, a toady to the Beast’s overbearing publisher Lord Copper, “Up to a point.”

Green Hills Of Africa – Ernest Hemingway, 1935 ★★½

The Hangover Strikes

The 1920s gave us Hemingway’s legacy, the 1930s left us the legend. Green Hills Of Africa is how that legend is often remembered, opinionated, self-glorifying, often a mean drunk toting a loaded gun.

How much you enjoy this travel/hunting memoir depends on your tolerance for its brilliant but often solipsistic prose. Sure, there are quotes aplenty, but also a reason for seeing in it the beginning of serious decline.

For one thing, the man was letting himself go:

The Frumious Bandersnatch – Ed McBain, 2004 ★★

Late McBain Leaves Bitter Taste

Pop music has always been a rough business, but how about this: a young singer’s major-label debut is transformed into a violent kidnapping. Despite the Lewis Carroll-inspired title, this is one of the grimmest and edgiest 87^th Precinct novels Ed McBain ever penned.

Did he go too far this time?

I think so, though I didn’t hate this one as much on a second read. It has a clever, suspenseful plot once it gets going and offers some memorable highlights. It’s just that McBain’s increasingly bleak outlook and his willingness to indulge himself too much on matters away from the main story make this one tough to like.

Gettysburg – Stephen W. Sears, 2003 ★★★★½

Teaching Lee Humility

It began a brazen demonstration of contempt and wound up a history-altering mistake. In between, over three days, came intense carnage. Still, who won Gettysburg was not decided immediately; much of the how and why parts of the battle are still being debated.

Today we see Gettysburg as the turning point in the bloodiest of American wars. Back then, concrete conclusions were harder to reach. Stephen W. Sears offers readers something the people who fought at Gettysburg didn’t have: clarity.

For the Confederates, what was at stake was clear enough. They needed to stay on the attack and put the fight to the North. The commander of their Army of Northern Virginia, Robert E. Lee, explained: “There is always hazard in military movements, but we must decide between the positive loss of inactivity and the risk of action.”

The Mysterious Island – Jules Verne, 1874 ★½

What a Setting, Shame about the Plot

Do you like novels where character development, subjective perspectives, and multi-layered narratives are replaced by detailed explanations about how metallurgy and explosives work?

Do you want a main protagonist who doubles as a pontificator on the meaning of life, liberty, and everything else?

Do you enjoy big reveals featuring inexplicable interventions by characters from other novels that shut down storylines just as they begin to get exciting?

Jules Verne was a celebrated literary pioneer whose fantastic visions still enchant readers, but what grabs you about this legendary example of his prodigious output is a total stiffness in characters and plot.

The Man Who Came To Dinner – George S. Kaufman & Moss Hart, 1939 ★★½

Rudeness is Its own Reward

Let no one claim the class system was confined to other parts of the world: The Man Who Came To Dinner shows it in full effect here in America. A media celebrity takes over the house of an Ohio family, throwing them into chaos. But never mind them; the celebrity and his friends are all that matters.

A successful screwball comedy by the team of George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, The Man Who Came To Dinner was a long-running hit on Broadway and a popular movie starring Monty Woolley and Bette Davis. Unlike Kaufman and Hart’s even bigger earlier comedy, You Can’t Take It With You, this offers an inventive plot, some wicked one-liners, and a lead character right out of Falstaff.

But as the play rolls along, it plays up the patrician sensibilities of its authors in a smug, hard-to-take way. Kaufman and Hart seem to think if they enjoy rubbing elbows with the like of Noel Coward and Harpo Marx, so should you. Meanwhile, if you are like me, you may find a little of Sheridan Whiteside winds up more than enough.

Troilus And Criseyde – Geoffrey Chaucer, c. 1382-1387 [Translation by Nevill Coghill, 1971] ★★★★½

Love's Misfortune, Straddling Time

It’s a case of being almost too enjoyable to read without drawing some guilt. This is Chaucer, yet a boldly modern translation. It lays out medieval thinking and customs in a smooth way while delivering a crackling good story. If only it felt less easy going down.

Nevill Coghill’s translation leans into the modern idiom, recasting the 14^th century narrative poem with some 20^th century expressions like “Nuts” and “that makes them tick.” At the same time, the poem’s rhythms and expressive discourse are recognizably direct from Chaucer, here coming into full form as the premier English writer of his time.

The bones of the poem remain: In ancient Troy a hero named Troilus and a widow maiden named Criseyde fall in love while their city is besieged by angry Greeks. After a period of pursuit and apparent despair by Troilus, the two achieve a blissfully erotic union only to find their romance becoming another victim of war.

Waugh In Abyssinia – Evelyn Waugh, 1936 ★★

Hooray for Fascism

Evelyn Waugh’s most famous travel book is celebrated more than it is actually read, a good thing for the writer’s reputation as actually reading Waugh In Abyssinia exposes his worst traits: indifference to human suffering, a tendency to boredom, and a badly blinkered mindset.

It’s not only how he comes out strongly in favor of the Italian occupation of the land known today as Ethiopia, but the bland, superficial way he makes his points. As fascist apologia, it’s rather wan.

Reading it today does sting, as he justifies Mussolini’s broadly condemned 1935 invasion as the natural result of Abyssinian truculence and lassitude. Waugh exposes here a disdain for non-European people he did better to conceal in other writings, even if his main target is the European liberal elite who condemned the invasion after their own countries enriched themselves the same way decades before.

The New! Improved! Bob & Ray Book – Bob Elliott & Ray Goulding, 1985 ★★

Curtain Call

The Bob & Ray era was winding down when this third and final volume of their collected sketches came out in 1985. More a hit and miss compilation than their first two books, The New! Improved! Bob & Ray Book at least starts out on something of a roll.

In a broadcast studio, a man in the audience introduces himself as “one of the very few people in America with a name that is completely unpronounceable,” which he spells W-W-Q-L-C-W: “I’d like to say hello to my brother on your program, but I don’t know how to pronounce his name, either.”

A hard-luck would-be anthropologist explains how he spent all his money trying to discover a tribe of uncontacted natives somewhere in New York City: “My brother-in-law was here about a year ago. And he said he ran into some people out in Queens who seemed awfully crude to him. But I haven’t found any trace of them yet.”

Fat Ollie’s Book – Ed McBain, 2002 ★½

Side Character Takes Over

Ed McBain wrote two kinds of 87^th Precinct novels. In one he details a single story that more or less takes over the entire book. The other is when he hops around, juggling multiple plots.

Fat Ollie’s Book is very much in the latter mold, a novel that dances around quite a bit keeping you trying to keep up, playing multi-layered games of who is fooling who, and even favoring us with fictional writing from one of the series’s most despicable characters.

It should be fun, since McBain knew how to tweak his established formula for humor and thrills. But somewhere along the line, he lost interest in providing the very thing readers expect when they pick up one of his books: a tight, involving police procedural.

Controversies & Commanders: Dispatches From The Army Of The Potomac – Stephen W. Sears, 1999 ★★

War is Hell on Generals, Too

Throughout the first half of the Civil War, the U. S. Army on the field performed like beer-league backups against a team of All-Stars. It is natural a series of essays about its leadership would present a dispiriting chronicle of utter ineptitude. Mostly it does.

Stephen W. Sears, who has written about those early years of the Army of the Potomac across several campaign-specific books, takes stock of Northern leadership performance during the war as a whole. He would seem the right author; yet for all his expertise Controversies & Commanders is not as satisfying as his other works.

It may just be that much of this book is ground he covered before, in chapters of other books. Or the brevity of his essays, or the lack of their originality as he mostly plumbs secondary sources and offers non-controversial conclusions.

Puppet On A Chain – Alistair MacLean, 1969 ★★★

 A Nastier Sort of Thrill Ride

Alistair MacLean knew how to write exciting adventure stories. Deep into the second decade of his bestselling career, he had it down to a formula. Kick things off with a deadly encounter in chapter one, keep raising the odds in every chapter, and never let up on the wisecracks.

Interpol agent Paul Sherman just arrived in Amsterdam. Before he can even leave Schiphol Airport he has already witnessed the gunning down of his main contact, been knocked half-unconscious by an assassin, tangled with a mysterious woman, and clashed with local authorities who can’t believe he’s a lawman.

Othello – William Shakespeare, c. 1603 ★★★½

Shakespeare's Least-Great Masterpiece

Shakespeare’s tragedies are recognized to be enduring classics above and beyond even the most celebrated literature. Of them, Othello maybe has the strongest case for contemporary resonance. The themes of irrational enmity and racial hatred have certainly kept it fresh.

But the case for Othello doesn’t ring as solidly to me as Shakespeare’s other three top tragedies: Hamlet, MacBeth, and King Lear. The main plot is constrained and deterministic. Its characters are relatively few and mono-dimensional, lacking for life. The comedic interludes are slight to the point of pointlessness. While Shakespeare tragedies deliver a kind of catharsis amid the Act V tears, here you get just bitter silence.

You get a great villain, one of the greatest of all time, and scenes of deep complexity and wit worth turning over in one’s head. But I never enjoy this one like I do the others. It only commands my respect.

White Noise – Don DeLillo, 1985 ★

Embracing the Chaos

Some books I read for enjoyment, others for a challenge. Then there are books like White Noise I read as a kind of secular penance, because every now and then I need something to more or less kick my teeth in.

Punishment literature, I call it. Post-modern literature is the more accepted term. It’s not my scene, but there are post-modern books, even a couple by the same author, that I can find pleasure in reading. White Noise is such a death-obsessed, narrative-splintered drag that I can’t even fake a baseline appreciation for it.

Jack Gladney is a college professor who chairs a department in Hitler Studies at a geographically isolated college. He is married to Babette, with whom he shares responsibility for a number of children (who are either his or hers but not theirs) and an all-consuming fear of dying.

A Handful Of Dust – Evelyn Waugh, 1934 ★★★★★

Achieving Perfection Imperfectly

There may be no such thing as a completely perfect novel. Yet few achieve greatness despite missing perfection quite like this one. What makes A Handful Of Dust a classic are the same things that catch readers like me short on a first read. It’s the grittiness that grabs you.

Take a set of cold, seemingly unknowable characters. A radical tone shift from comedy to drama. A dire third act with an O. Henry twist out of nowhere. An abrupt finale that can’t be anything but anticlimactic.

If I was a book publisher in the 1930s with this manuscript in my hands, I would have sent Evelyn Waugh back for a rewrite, probably grumbling at him on his way out. Thus the world might have missed out on one of the century’s greatest literary works.

From Approximately Coast To Coast…It’s The Bob And Ray Show – Bob Elliott & Ray Goulding, 1983 ★★★

Taking On The Eighties

A new decade brung with it a second collection of Bob & Ray sketches. By this time the comedians had become enshrined in that temple of culture, National Public Radio, who platformed the pair throughout the 1980s less for ratings than as a kind of public service.

Would the duo who built their reputation darting from one commercial broadcaster to another every other year or so become stuffy and dull with their non-profit status?

It doesn’t seem that way. The material here is at times sharper and funnier than what was in the first book, though you do feel time beginning to pass them by with their continued parodying of overstocked surplus sales and soap operas.

Kiss – Ed McBain, 1992 ★½

A Policeman's Lot

Solving murders, it turns out, is a lot easier than stopping or prosecuting them. In this late installment of the 87^th Precinct police procedurals, series hero Steve Carella gets shoved hard against the limits of his job.

Meanwhile, author Ed McBain inches ever-closer to full-on despair. Whether it be criminal justice, race relations, or the capitalist rat race, Kiss is a novel reeling in misery. Perhaps because of this, it lacks the usual series springiness, stretching out a thin plot for over 350 pages.

At least the author was inspired enough to write original song lyrics to justify the book’s title. But like the book, it’s not a song you remember.

Mr. Clemens And Mark Twain – Justin Kaplan, 1966 ★★★½

Balancing a Man and a Myth

The central thesis of this critical biography is a tricky one laid out in its title, that being the dual identity of its celebrated subject. As author Justin Kaplan explains it, there were always two sides when dealing with Mark Twain.

He was an avowed atheist who took part in seances and embraced Christian Science, a celebrated voice of the South who lived in Connecticut, a critic of business who eagerly embraced the Industrial Age, a consummate insider who could never resist mocking authority.

“He wanted to belong, but he also wanted to laugh from the outside,” is how Kaplan puts it.