Truman – David McCullough, 1992 ★★★★

Historian as Cheerleader

When does an author’s enthusiasm for a subject bleed into full-blown boosterism while still holding together? I submit David McCullough’s Truman. It’s a fine history and marvelous narrative that nevertheless gets tinny and strained by giving Give-‘em-Hell Harry every break.

Shroud For A Nightingale – P. D. James, 1971 ★★★½

Death Visits the Nurses's Wing

A mystery can be too good to properly enjoy when one of two things get in the way: 1) Getting too invested in one possible outcome to the point of resenting another the author goes with instead, or 2) Being so caught up that you race through the final pages and miss key details.

I think Shroud For A Nightingale might have been for me an example of the first. I definitely did not rush the ending, but it still caught me short. I found myself more interested in the red herrings than the final solution.

Clapton! – Ray Coleman, 1986 ★★★

Swapping Out the Man for the Legend

There’s something to be said in favor of a biography of a living person. What you get is incomplete, but unless it’s a book about Hitler or someone like that, less depressing as you get to the end. Here, in the case of guitar hero Eric Clapton, you have the additional benefit of capturing the subject at a high point in his celebrity.

Marco Polo, If You Can – William F. Buckley Jr., 1982 ★½

Great Title, Shame about the Book

Can a capitalist lackey catch a break after crashing a spy plane in Khrushchev’s Russia? Will he effect a secret plot to tilt the balance of power for the free world, still reeling from Sputnik and the rise of the Iron Curtain? Or will ruthless interrogators wear him down?

I wish I could have cared more this time than the last time I read one of William F. Buckley Jr.’s spy novels starring his dashing alter-ego Blackford Oakes; that being The Story Of Henry Tod. Unfortunately, while the problems encountered this time were different, the end result was the same: a flat tale pocked by stale characters and coincidence.

Kill The Dutchman! – Paul Sann, 1971 ★★★½

Who Was Dutch Schultz?

The book sat in my father’s den cabinet for years; I knew its title back when Richard Scarry and Crayola were my reading companions. Forty-six years later I finally got around to reading Kill The Dutchman!, wondering after just one thing: What took me so long?

Unconditional Surrender – Evelyn Waugh, 1961 ★★★★

Reclaiming One's Soul

By any conventional benchmark, Unconditional Surrender is a depressing way to wrap a trilogy. Materialism triumphs over spirituality and humanitarianism. People we care about come to bad ends. Long-suffering protagonist Guy Crouchback suffers more. Yet the novel manages to be uplifting, at times even amusing.

What is it about Evelyn Waugh that makes misery positive company?

Officers And Gentlemen – Evelyn Waugh, 1955 ★★★

Resigning One's Manhood

The middle volume of any trilogy is heavy lifting. Either the author makes a case for triple the usual reader investment, or weaknesses in plot and character manifest themselves as unclearable hurdles.

Evelyn Waugh’s Officers And Gentlemen makes it over this challenge, just. It builds up the conflicts developed in his prior “Sword Of Honour” installment Men At War, introduces new characters to replace ones lost, and plunges protagonist Guy Crouchback into real combat.