Five Days In November – Clint Hill with Lisa McCubbin, 2013 ★★★★

So Close and Yet So Far

Like a few professional athletes and pretty much nobody else I know of, Clint Hill’s worst day at work unfolded before an audience of millions and echoes across posterity.

No wonder he waited so long to write about it.

“Could I have reacted faster?” he wonders. “Run faster? For the rest of my life I will live with the overwhelming guilt that I was unable to get there in time.”

High Stakes – Dick Francis, 1975 ★★½

Hard-Charging Mystery Hangs on at the Turn

If you know Dick Francis already and want more of his mystery fiction, here’s another gripping if formulaic excursion into the underside of life, connected in this case rather firmly to Francis’s home turf, the world of horse-racing.

If you are a Francis novice, High Stakes isn’t exactly the type to make you a fan.

A feeling of being run through the motions hangs over this crime novel, not unlike finding yourself inside one of the wheel-driven devices with which, we come to discover, the main character has made himself a mint.

Life On Earth – David Attenborough, 1979 ★★★★

Mother Nature Displays Her Charms

Phylum-hopping from microbes to coral reefs to orangutans, David Attenborough offers what may well be one of the most engaging tours ever taken of the natural world in this, a companion volume to his celebrated BBC series. The book details the evolutionary path of all earthly life, from prehistoric plants to present-day man.

Do you know that orchids may attract pollen-carrying insects by impersonating sex partners, or even carrion?

That a frog chorus can fill a swamp with a greater diversity of sound than one would get in a concert hall?

That a shearwater bird was taken from Wales to Boston and managed to fly itself back home?

The Story Of Henri Tod – William F. Buckley, Jr., 1984 ★½

Why Spy Fiction Should Be Left to the Professionals

Throughout the 1980s, while helming American conservativism’s flagship journal, National Review, William F. Buckley, Jr. also had going a lucrative and well-regarded side project. It involved CIA agent Blackford Oakes, who gallivanted about the globe dealing with trouble.

This foray into spy fiction offered Buckley a chance to do two things: Emulate Frederick Forsyth, whose Day Of The Jackal Buckley greatly admired; and commentate on his trademark political concerns from a different perch.

As a showcase for Buckley’s wit, and a means of getting his conservative faithful to fork over something more than their annual NR subscription fee, Oakes books seem an inspired stratagem, but how are they for actual reading? Having just finished The Story Of Henri Tod, I can’t say I was much impressed.

Without Feathers – Woody Allen, 1975 ★★★½

Woody the Gag Man, Getting (Somewhat) Serious

Hard to believe, there was a time when Woody Allen could be enjoyed purely as a comic genius. Without Feathers presents him at the zenith of his comedy career, when he was becoming more overtly concerned with what it all meant but not so much that he stopped being playful.

Allen is all over the map in this 1975 collection, most of which first appeared in issues of The New Yorker, Playboy, and The New Republic earlier that decade.

Don't Look Back: Satchel Paige In The Shadows Of Baseball – Mark Ribowsky, 1994 ★★½

Sadder Than It Needed to Be

Did you ever read a biography and decide it was a good read only when it avoided the subject himself? I felt this way reading Mark Ribowsky's 1994 biography of Satchel Paige.

Perhaps the greatest control pitcher of any era, Paige won a lot of games as a barnstorming Negro League veteran and lasted long enough to play a decade in the Major Leagues after the color bar was dropped.

Yet old Satch made his fame truly outsized as much with his mouth. He told great stories and fed the press masterful sound bites that were equal parts whimsy and philosophy. "Don't look back, something might be gaining on you" was a famous one, the first half of which forms the title of Ribowsky's book. Yet a core thesis of this frustrating bio is how little Paige let people in on his real life.

The Daughter Of Time – Josephine Tey, 1951 ★½

Reconstructing Richard

What history got wrong Josephine Tey attempts to make right in this polemic disguised as a police procedural. Your miles may vary, but for me this was a tedious read even when I found worthwhile Tey's arguments regarding the nature of one of Great Britain's most infamous rulers.

Inspector Alan Grant, laid up with a broken leg after pursuing a criminal and stuck staring at the ceiling, kills time by investigating a double murder that occurred nearly 500 years before. Using a number of books at his bedside, as well as the research abilities of an able assistant, he probes the question of Richard III.

Was he really as bad a fellow as history said? What was the real story of his most famous crime, murdering two boys, his crown's rightful heir Prince Edward and his younger brother Duke Richard, in the Tower of London?