Measure For Measure – William Shakespeare, 1604 ★★★★½

A Comedy about Something

Roughly half the time I observed him in action, I figured the Duke at the center of Shakespeare’s satisfying Measure For Measure to be a stand-in for God. The other half, I thought he was the Bard’s answer to J. Peterman, the genially patrician, obtusely pompous character who is Elaine Benes’ boss on the TV series “Seinfeld.”

Well, it is a comedy.

The Land Of Hidden Men – Edgar Rice Burroughs, 1931 ★★½

Lost and Found in an Ancient Jungle Kingdom

Somewhere in my primordial past, decades before my birth, a man looked deep into some misty realm and espied the half-naked youth, bounding across a jungle just a half-step ahead of deadly peril, whom I would someday become, if only in my imagination.

That man was Edgar Rice Burroughs, who put pen to paper and crafted fantasies for a boyhood I had yet to reach.

Those Guys Have All The Fun – James Andrew Miller & Tom Shales, 2011 ★★★

Those Guys Play Rough

ESPN started out a good idea, but quickly became subsumed by ego, hubris, and testosterone.

To figure that out, you don’t need Those Guys Have All The Fun – an hour of their live coverage of any sports event reveals this well enough – but it certainly helps connect the dots. To succeed at ESPN takes a certain kind of mentality, James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales reveal in this 2011 book, where cutthroat tactics and crass individualism hold sway.

The Confidential Agent– Graham Greene, 1939 ★½

Spy vs. Spy

You can take the man out of a war, but can you take the war out of a man? Graham Greene uses the device of a spy novel to ask this question, foregoing such typical spy-fiction elements as plot and suspense in favor of mystery and atmosphere for a novel that takes a long time going (mostly) nowhere.

The title character, a middle-aged man known to us only by a letter, D., arrives in England from his war-torn homeland, also unnamed. His mission, explained after some bumping around and a beating, has to do with getting a British coal-mining concern to do business with his nation’s government. The nation is currently embroiled in civil war, and an agent from the rebel side, identified as L., is hot on D.’s trail.

President Reagan: The Role Of A Lifetime – Lou Cannon, 1991 ★★★★

Weighing the Reagan Legacy

Two things Lou Cannon wants you to come away thinking after reading this, his widely-respected account of Ronald Reagan’s presidency:

1) Reagan was a really nice guy who did some decent things in office.

2) Americans must never, ever elect someone like Reagan again.

The Afghan – Frederick Forsyth, 2006 ★

A Thriller Out of Time

Frederick Forsyth has owned me for over 30 years, since The Day Of The Jackal held me hostage for a sleepless week in boarding school. Forsyth has put me ringside while World War III is averted, powerful bad guys are chastened with vigor, and the value of committed individualism is repeatedly, gloriously affirmed.

But the Cold War verities which spawned Forsyth’s career have given way. 9/11 showed you don’t need a Politburo to direct large-scale destruction upon the West. Simple good/evil binaries between freedom and Communism have been replaced by self-loathing democracies fed up with their own capitalist excess.

New technology, like drones and instantaneous eavesdropping, has made Forsyth’s dependency on isolated men of action seem almost quaint, not to mention sexist and possibly homophobic.

The Autobiography Of Mark Twain – Mark Twain [Edited by Charles Neider, 1959] ★★½

Twain In Twilight: Disorganized, Dis-spiriting, Still Quotable

Mark Twain produced one of the most celebrated autobiographies in American literature. This was not his own, but rather that of Ulysses S. Grant, which Twain painstakingly midwifed to great commercial success and lasting popular acclaim. It still ranks high among presidential memoirs.

Twain also wrote an autobiography of his own, a very notable work even if it is hard to similarly declare a success. Four radically different versions of The Autobiography Of Mark Twain exist in print, without a clear consensus as to which, if any, should be considered definitive. 

But of the four currently extant, including a three-volume set completed this year, the autobiography edited by Charles Neider and published in 1959 may well be the most digestible.