The Night Of The Moonbow – Thomas Tryon, 1989 ★★★★

The Other Side of Summer

Adolescent summertimes frequently are the stuff for gentle nostalgia. Thomas Tryon’s The Night Of The Moonbow goes for a different effect. 

In this tale about a 14-year-old orphan who struggles to make a good impression at a Connecticut sleepaway camp in 1938, Tryon presents a chilling suspense story in the guise of a rustic coming-of-age experience at a lakeside paradise.

Shakespeare: Cardenio – Charles Hamilton, 1994 ★½

In Search of Lost Shakespeare

It’s perhaps the world’s most exclusive club. They let in 36 members back in 1623; since then only two more have been admitted. Others wait beyond the velvet rope, including a knight named Ironside, a saint named Tom, and a crazed Spanish wanderer named Cardenio no one has seen in 400 years.

A wonderful assortment of strange characters occupy what is known as the Shakespeare Apocrypha. Some of these plays are widely championed as being at least in part authored by the Bard, like an early work entitled Sir Edmund Ironside and a later work, Sir Thomas More, based on the life of the English saint.

All have champions. Only one, Cardenio, has both a distinct identity, an itinerant, lonely character made mad by lost love who features in Miguel de Cervantes’ epic novel Don Quixote; and direct attribution to Shakespeare in the form of a 1653 register entry for the play.

Sinatra: An Unauthorized Biography – Earl Wilson, 1976 ★★

Life in King Frankie's Court

A courtier’s life is never easy. Flatter too much, and you risk being taken for granted. Offer candor, and it may be resented.

You may benefit from great kindness in certain moments, but the higher one’s master rises in life, the more callous and cruel they are inclined to become.

Earl Wilson experienced this, and wrote a book about it.

Journey Into Fear – Eric Ambler, 1940 ★★★★½

A Phony War Gets Real

Popular in its day, Journey Into Fear deserves credit for helping popularize a more sophisticated type of spy novel. Reading it reveals something else, a stock-taking exercise just after the beginning of World War II when it seemed Europe might step back before beginning in earnest the century’s worst conflagration.

Eric Ambler’s message reads like a warning: Be ready for a rough ride, and be strong.

The Heart Of The Order – Thomas Boswell, 1989 ★★

Baseball's Boswell at Less than His Best

It happens to nearly every sports columnist who becomes a public figure. The price of personality-centric journalism begins to infiltrate their copy until it is as much about the writer as it is the games being covered.

Thomas Boswell had been one of baseball’s most prominent scribes for twenty years when this book came out. His snarky, witty, probing style established him as a worthwhile voice for analyzing changes in the game, like free agency and the rise of the running game. Baseball characters like Pete Rose and Reggie Jackson made regular and welcome appearances in his columns, and got off good quotes.

By the time of the period covered in The Heart Of The Order, 1983 to 1988, baseball was beginning to move into a different space.

The Price Of Politics – Bob Woodward, 2011 ★★½

The Deal that Failed

Access to the powerful is Bob Woodward’s stock-in-trade, his formula for turning somewhat pedestrian and shallow accounts of current affairs into commercially viable, relevant books.

But what happens when demonstrating that access trumps a thesis or storyline? The Price Of Politics got me thinking about that.

Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day Of The Locust – Nathanael West, 1933 & 1939 ★★★½

Bleak and Bleaker

Misery, it is said, loves company, but the reverse is certainly not as true.

Take the case of Nathanael West, who made human misery the centerpiece of his work. Beloved among the American intelligentsia, he is pretty much ignored by everyone else. 

Reading this, a paperback that brings together his two most famous works, I understand why. There’s dark fiction; this is coal-black.