Hub – Robert Herring, 1981 ★½

Reflections on a Childhood Deferred

Sometimes childhood feels like a present that never quite got unwrapped. I had that feeling twice over with Hub.

Our title character is a pre-teen boy who lives in a river town in Arkansas. He seems the product of a loving, relatively successful family, but his life is centered around two other people.

One is Uncle Ethel, a wise old man who lives on an isolated island, alone but for his aged dog and his shotgun. The other is a trouble-making pal named Hitesy, who badgers Hub to do things he knows he shouldn’t, goading him with the magic word “chicken” whenever Hub hesitates. Hitesy brags his father doesn’t care what he does, and dares Hub to follow his example.

The Deceiver – Frederick Forsyth, 1991 ★★★★½

When a Man's Got a Job to Do

Sometimes it requires a shorter format for a craftsman’s quality to shine through. Not to take anything away from the novelist behind such classic long-form spy-fiction exercises as The Day Of The Jackal and The Fourth Protocol, but with Frederick Forsyth, there's something to be said for the merit of small packages, which is just what The Deceiver delivers.

Published in 1991, just as the Cold War was winding down, The Deceiver is designed as a look back at a series of cases late in the career of a top British spymaster. It’s oddly similar to another book published the same year.

In The Secret Pilgrim, John le Carré had his most famous spy character, George Smiley, deliver an informal dissertation regarding lessons learned to a group of English espionage students, which unspooled as a series of short stories. The same is true here, except in this case it's no casual gathering that's the setting, but a tense tribunal to determine whether to ashcan our protagonist as part of a best-forgotten past.

The Diary Of A Young Girl – Anne Frank, 1952 ★★★½

All She Wanted Was to Live Forever

Anne Frank belongs to the world, something truer today than ever before. Seventy years after the year of her confirmed death, her famous memoir of a life in hiding fell out of copyright law on January 1, 2016, meaning it can now be printed by anyone.

“I want to go on living even after my death!” she wrote in one of her diary entries. And now she shall, in cyberspace, with people free to arrange her thoughts and dreams with hypertext links and perhaps a GIF animation showing the five seconds when Anne poked her head out a window and was caught on a home movie.

The King’s Indian – John Gardner, 1974 ★½

Pondering Life and Death with John Gardner

Sometimes, death is just the trick to lift a literary figure to greater prominence. Christopher Marlowe, Edgar Allen Poe, and Sylvia Plath exemplify the notion of toiling in obscurity, dying young, and leaving behind a legend to inspire fresh generations of readers and scholars.

Often, though, death is just death. Case in point: John Gardner.

Knockdown – Dick Francis, 1974 ★★

Putting the Blood in Bloodstock

Dick Francis wrote very well. I feel confident in stating this, in part because I have read some fine Dick Francis novels and in part because he kept me reading this, a novel by no means fine. It is the mark of a superlative novelist to hold a reader’s attention even when firing blanks.

Knockdown begins with exactly that, a knockdown attack on our protagonist while he arranges a horse sale. As this is the livelihood of Jonah Dereham, he is both concerned and confused.

Why would a pair of thugs beat him up over the title to a non-sensational horse? And why would they attack him again when he acquires its replacement? Is it business? Is it personal? In time, Dereham discovers it is a bit of both.

Learned Hand: The Man And The Judge – Gerald Gunther, 1994 ★★★★

Courting Doubt

How does a man who essentially believed in nothing help hone a system of jurisprudence into the debatable envy of the Western World? Very well, as Gerald Gunther explains it here.

Being uncertain about the basic rightness and wrongness of everything in a world he believed the product of mere chance was the strength of Learned Hand’s outlook, as Gunther explains it, and why the once-legendary jurist deserves consideration well after the times he helped to form have run down history’s rear-view mirror.

“Skepticism and relentless probing came naturally to Hand,” Gunther writes in his preface. “Reflectiveness, intolerance of absolutes, and relentless searching for answers despite an abiding conviction that there were no permanent ones were well-ingrained traits by the time he became a judge.”

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.