Target Blue: An Insider's View Of The NYPD – Robert Daley, 1973 ★★★½

Walking the Thin Blue Line

You are the new liberal police commissioner of the biggest, toughest city in America, and want a fresh look for your scandal-ridden department. So you give a local reporter a gun and a badge and tell him he’s now your deputy commissioner. What do you think happens next?

The Story Of American Golf: Its Champions And Its Championships – Herbert Warren Wind, 1956 ★★★★

Before Arnie Came

Golf’s elitist tag is long out of date; it was back in 1980 when Caddyshack came out but lingers still. Yes, the sport can be expensive and there are clubs for rich golfers only, but so what? They have clubs like that for other sports like tennis and swimming; no one considers those pastimes “exclusive.”

Another ugly word may have more merit in its application: Stodgy. People associate golf with tradition, with a sense of personal honor bordering on rectitude, and with boring stories told by a crusty old-timer who rounds his vowels like John Houseman. If you were to imagine a book written by such a fellow, it might well resemble something like what’s before us today.

Different Seasons – Stephen King, 1982 ★★★★

Reclaiming the Lost Art of the Novella

During his first seven years as America’s biggest-selling author, Stephen King took readers into all kinds of forbidden, frightening territory. Haunted hotels, apocalyptic ruins, teenage hormones, he ran the gamut. In 1982, King ventured into a dead zone of a different kind: Novellas.

The Interpreter – Alice Kaplan, 2005 ★★½

Separate and Unequal

Two different American armies marched through France in World War II, united only in name. One was all-white, the other black troops led by mostly white officers. An injustice in itself, the practice led to other kinds of injustice that is the subject of this book.

The Interpreter presents two cases in which a Frenchman was shot to death by an American soldier. One killer was African-American, the other white. The black killer was hung for his crime. The white killer went free.

Franz Kafka: The Complete Stories – Edited by Nahum N. Glatzre, 1971 ★★

Kafka: Thinking Outside the Bug

The term “Kafkaesque” is part of our language. What does it mean? This comprehensive collection of Franz Kafka’s short fiction begs more questions than it answers.

One common definition is “darkly surreal.” In “The Metamorphosis,” Kafka’s best-known story and one included in this book, a guy wakes up one morning to discover he is a giant bug. Dark and surreal, right?

The Simpsons Uncensored Family Album – Matt Groening, 1991 ★★★½

The Way They Was

You can’t hurl a dead Snowball I across the internet without hitting an online debate around the question: When did the longest-running sitcom in American history jump the shark? Everyone knows “The Simpsons” today is no longer the show it was; when did the rot set in?

As a former bigtime Simpsons fan whose devotion fled sometime between the rise of Britney Spears and the fall of Enron, I feel I have company in my lack of clarity. Some cite specific episodes as their turn-off points; for me it is not that simple. Re-discovering the early Simpsons, in the form of this tie-in book published in the second year of their 28-years-and-counting run, brought that home.

The Black Mountain – Rex Stout, 1954 [No Stars]

A Mountain Not Worth Climbing

There are two kinds of challenges reading a mystery novel. One is figuring out the guilty party. The other is soldiering through when the plot doesn’t gel, characters are dense and/or unsympathetic, the setting is bland and thin, and you don’t give a damn whodunit. The Black Mountain proved a textbook example of this latter experience.