The Master Builder – Henrik Ibsen, 1892 ★★½

Make Way for Youth

Henrik Ibsen was not the most playful of playwrights, but he did pull off an occasional head fake to confuse his audience. Case in point: The opening act of his later work, The Master Builder.

King Ottokar's Sceptre – Hergé, 1938-39 [Revised 1947] ★★★

Eih Bennek, Eih Blavek

Welcome to Syldavia, land of beauty, intrigue, and one of the craziest regime-change mechanisms ever put on the books. You are flying in the company of an intrepid young reporter, his pet dog, and a noted sigillographer who’s not been himself lately. Before landing, let’s take a moment to appreciate the lovely scenery. Here, the pilot shall drop you in lower for a closer look…

Oops! Sorry! Good thing we attached a parachute to your seat. Well, happy landings, and see you at the palace.

The Selected Poetry Of Keats – Edited by Paul de Man, 1966 ★★★★

The Long and Short of John Keats

Near his end, John Keats took a line from his hero Shakespeare: “Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it.”

         

Just as he was winding down one of literature’s greatest too-brief careers, Keats put pen to paper and wrote a poem about exactly that, not in anger or grief but rapt serenity. Considered one of the greatest poems in English, “To Autumn” is impossible to top as a swan-song:

Casino Royale – Ian Fleming, 1953 ★★★★½

Giving Birth to Bond

Did any cultural icon ever make an entrance as brilliant and yet as strange as Bond James Bond?

For a long time I had an odd relationship to Casino Royale. I was not alone. It took over a half-century for the movies to get it right, long after putting on screen nearly everything else Ian Fleming wrote, even the kiddie book about that car.

All The Words, Vol. Two – Monty Python's Flying Circus, 1989 ★★★

Monty Python: The Spam Years

Genius is hard to capture, and hard to sustain. The impulse to keep doing what works often misleads; so too can the desire to change things up. If you do something that makes a large portion of your audience uncomfortable, the challenge can be that much greater, particularly if you are dependent on government sponsorship while honing your craft.

All this comes into play when reviewing this second, final volume of one of television comedy’s most legendary achievements, “Monty Python’s Flying Circus.” Vol. Two collects transcripts for the last 22 episodes of the famous series, those airing from December 1970 to December 1974.

Walter Winchell – Michael Herr, 1990 ★½

Unfinished Novel about an Incomplete Man

There is a scene in Walter Winchell where the title character is about to get the old heave-ho from show biz. “Pep you got, but pep ain’t talent,” his agent tells the song-and-dance man. But pep will change everything for Winchell; mass media will never be the same.

Down And Out In Paris And London – George Orwell, 1933 ★★★

Before Becoming an Adjective

When your last name becomes an adjective, it means you left a mark. George Orwell has rare company that way, but when looking at his first book, the term Orwellian feels off.

Paranoia and a brooding kind of prescience are my standard Orwellian associations. They go out the window reading Down And Out In Paris And London, Orwell’s memoir of a destitute life in France and England. Big Brother is no longer watching; nobody even cares. Yet there are compensations. Given how dry and gloomy 1984 and Animal Farm are, I wasn’t expecting the humor or characterizations I got here.