With Rommel In The Desert – Heinz Werner Schmidt, 1951 ★★½

Running with the Fox

During its brief lifespan, victory and defeat were close companions for the German Afrika Korps. Experiencing both firsthand was one young officer who would fight on the front lines and ride in a staff car with the unit’s legendary commander, Erwin Rommel, a. k. a. the Desert Fox.

As a memoir, With Rommel In The Desert offers color and a fair amount of candor, but is a loss when it comes to context or depth. If you grew up like me watching World War II movies or TV shows like “The Rat Patrol,” this is engaging if somewhat breezy and episodic.

Despite the title, Rommel is a background figure most of the time.

For Your Eyes Only – Ian Fleming, 1960 ★★★½

Cherchez la femme

Other than being insanely hot, Bond Girls are not all of one type. For Your Eyes Only is a chance to experience some of their variety in a collection of five short stories that feature Agent 007.

This was the first Bond book of a new decade, a decade Bond helped define but hardly rated in this soon. For Your Eyes Only is a quiet book that way, and for its lack of baroque storycraft or campy exaggeration. For once, Ian Fleming was writing carefully and on the level; the result is a fine short-story collection that may even please some non-fans.

Nose To Nose – Joe Klecko, Joe Fields & Greg Logan, 1989 ★★★

Trench Warfare with Jets

Touchdowns may be its public brand, yet American football is ultimately more defined by brute force, broken bodies, and the battle of attrition that goes on at the line of scrimmage. And in the long run, no one beats Father Time.

That’s the version of the game experienced by professional linemen as related in Nose To Nose, the story of two such linemen who each played for over a decade on the same team, the New York Jets.

Asterix And The Goths – René Goscinny & Albert Uderzo, 1963 ★★

Taking It on the Road

After keeping it French for the first two Asterix adventures, creators Goscinny and Uderzo took their heroes out of the country for the first of many times in this third installment of the series. This time the destination is Germany.

How did it work? Okay, I guess. You get another dose of the humor and visual splendor that still captivate young and old, including me. The story is a soft one, but it did set a successful template for the series it would return to again and again, of visiting a foreign land and having fun with its customs and culture.

Fanshawe – Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1828 ★★

The Debut that Wasn't

If American literature were allowed its own debut novel, it would have been The Scarlet Letter, bursting with quintessential Yankee ingenuity and Puritan wrath. Certainly if Nathaniel Hawthorne had his way, that would have been his debut.

But it’s not. More than 20 years before publishing what he claimed was his first novel, Hawthorne produced a shorter fiction book. So traumatic was its memory that he not only disowned it, but burned every copy he could find. Despite his efforts, Fanshawe still exists to be read today.

Though not in the class of Hawthorne’s best-known works, Fanshawe is hardly worthy of the pyre. A creaky romance overdone in some places, underbaked in others, it does have its charms.

By-Line: Ernest Hemingway – Ernest Hemingway, 1967 ★★

Artist on a Deadline

For generations, Ernest Hemingway was like a patron saint of newsrooms. Reporters aspired to be like him in manner and style. His writing persona was whittled down to a few essentials, whispered like rosaries: Write what you know. Eschew verbiage. Direct is better.

But what is his legacy? Today we know him for his books, fact-based but usually fictional. Yet articles he actually wrote for newspapers and magazines do exist, and were collected by William White in this collection published six years after Hemingway’s death.

As pieces of writing, Byline: Ernest Hemingway showcases much of that lean, terse style reporters once held dear, for better and for worse. As reportage, however, they are often bloated, meandering, and focused to a fault on a single subject, Papa Hemingway himself.

The Big Nowhere – James Ellroy, 1988 ★★★★

Nice Cops Finish Last

Even some mystery-book fans short-change the subgenre known as the police procedural. Who needs all that cop detail and minutia taking focus away from the killer? Mysteries work best when the investigator is someone outside the system, no?

But James Ellroy is after bigger game than a cozy afternoon whodunit. In The Big Nowhere, he pushes the police-procedural formula into a dizzying array of social, sexual, and racial tilt zones. The amazing thing is not his hubris but how well it comes off.