When In Doubt, Fire The Manager – Alvin Dark & John Underwood, 1980 ★★★

Winning on a Prayer

Most celebrity autobiographies follow a common format: here are the great things I did, here’s how and why I did them, and here’s how people misinterpreted me, especially the press.

Alvin Dark was different. When he put pen to paper at the end of a long and distinguished career, his mission was telling you just where he messed up.

The Cobra – Frederick Forsyth, 2010 ★

A Master on Auto-Pilot

A problem with writing great novels is that people expect you to continue writing them.

But what if you run out of ideas? What if you can’t make yourself care about your characters? What if your approach to yarnspinning has gone from months of careful plotting to Gimme my money!

That’s where Frederick Forsyth has wound up in the late autumn of a distinguished career. Every few years he shakes off the cobwebs, sees what hot topic is on CNN, ruminates on how to make it a story, and then sets to work researching the subject. When it comes to research, Forsyth has been a longtime master and still delivers. It’s the rest of his career that’s gone south.

Framed – Robert F. Kennedy, 2016 ★

Right Ta-Ta, Wrong Ho-Ho

It played at the time like some diabolical cup-and-ball trick. Everyone giving it more than a passing glance thought they had the answer, only to be surprised a quarter-century later when that answer was officially revealed as something else.

To quote John Candy in JFK: “You got the right ta-ta, but the wrong ho-ho.”

The Canterbury Tales – Translation by David Wright, c. 1387 ★★★★

Game Suspended on Account of Death

Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales is a lot of things; one it is less credited for is being the longest-suspended marquee competition in English literature.

A tavern owner announces a challenge to tell the finest story, “of best sentence and most solas,” as he puts it, whereupon seven-innings-worth of batters step up to the plate.

Generations have been able to judge the results for themselves, but Chaucer himself didn’t live long enough to declare a winner. In limbo, his characters wait.

Mystic River – Dennis Lehane, 2001 ★★

SPOILER WARNING: People Get Hurt

One big taboo when writing reviews is the spoiler. A reliable rule of thumb is to avoid it whenever possible. In most cases, avoidance is no big deal. But what if a “no spoiler” rule blocks you from discussing 75-80 percent of the work in question? Can you sensibly raise questions about an ending when even discussing the underlying framework of that ending risks telling the reader more than they want to or should know?

The Story Of The Malakand Field Force – Winston Churchill, 1898 ★★★

Making His Mark in the British Raj

For many great literary figures, a first book is like a declaration of principles, a bugle call with resonances that echo for posterity yet can be scarcely audible at the time of publication.

That was my main takeaway from reading this, the earliest book by one of the most famous figures of his century, published even before that century had begun.

Winston Spencer Churchill was many things in a lifetime so packed with incident he was very nearly of retirement age before he got around to doing the stuff people best remember him for.

Doctor Zhivago – Boris Pasternak, 1958 ★★

Forbidden Fruit Is Not Always Sweet

Does declaring a novel forbidden also somehow make it great? It’s a question I am left with after reading Doctor Zhivago, the novel that won its author a Nobel Prize which he couldn’t collect because he was under house arrest for writing Doctor Zhivago.

I can’t think of a better recommendation for a book than that; alas, making the right kind of enemy may be by far the best thing Doctor Zhivago has going for it.