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 it isn’t there.

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 beginning to let 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, put it so: “There is always hazard in military movements, but we must decide between the positive loss of inactivity and the risk of action.”