Mother Courage And Her Children: A Chronicle Of The Thirty Years’ War – Bertolt Brecht, 1941 ★★★ [Translation by Eric Bentley]

How a Character Hijacked a Play

Sometimes a fictional character becomes something bigger than its creator intended. John Milton didn’t want readers coming away from Paradise Lost admiring Satan. Norman Lear expected viewers of “All In The Family” to laugh at Archie Bunker, not sympathize with him.

It is hard to watch a person, however flawed, struggle through life and not feel something akin to affection, even identification.

Bertolt Brecht was annoyed how people took to the main character of this play, Anna Fierling. How could they miss her crass exploitation, her blithe ignorance of war’s cruel folly, her willingness to put her offspring in harm’s way? Instead, they liked her down-to-earth manner and sympathized with her struggle to make ends meet. How bourgeois!

Das Reich – Max Hastings, 1981 ★★½

When Evil Got Taken Too Far

Can the end justify the means even when those means are wholly evil? Leaving aside moral, philosophical, and theological quibbles, can one look at wholesale murder from the perspective of getting something done and call it wrong simply on the basis of logic?

Yes, you can. Take the actions of a German SS armored division who, in order to cow rebellious French civilians en route to Normandy in June 1944, committed two massacres and numerous atrocities to gain a clear road to the front line.

This they did, proving in an immediate way the efficacy of terror as a tool of war, but also the limitations of same, for reasons explained by Max Hastings in this 1981 account of the division’s bloody march.

Helena – Evelyn Waugh, 1950 ★★★½

Something Better than History

History stops for no one, but occasionally makes detours. Helena tells of one such detour brought on by an old woman which changed the world.

Helena was the ex-wife of one emperor and the mother of another. More to the point, as Evelyn Waugh presents her, she crystalized the dawn of the Christian era in Europe with an act of faith that magnified the role of religion in the future of the West.

Imbued by the spirit of the Magi, Helena offers up a simple prayer: “For his sake who did not reject your curious gifts, pray always for all the learned, the oblique, the delicate. Let them not be quite forgotten at the throne of God when the simple come into their kingdom.”

Bran Mak Morn: The Last King – Robert E. Howard, 2005 ★★★

Requiem for a Forgotten Race

There is much to love in this collection of short fiction and poetry centered around a doomed race of pre-Celtic warriors, but mainly if you are a fan of the author going in.

Underneath Robert E. Howard the professional pulp writer of the 1920s and 1930s was a fighting primitive who rebelled against civilized constraints even though he knew he could only lose. In that light, Bran Mak Morn: The Last King, from the classy continuing series of Howard story collections published by Del Ray, presents Howard in his element.

People who love Howard will want this book, for the different ways it highlights one of the writer’s signature characters, Bran Mak Morn, and more at the core, the Pictish race from which he sprang. But as Spinal Tap’s manager once said, their appeal is selective.

What Really Happened To The Class Of ’65? – Michael Medved & David Wallechinsky, 1976 ★★★½

Boomers Go Boom

The social upheavals of the late 1960s caught a lot of people by surprise. Nobody was ready for the madness and revolution on the way, least of all the graduates of Palisades High School’s Class of 1965.

Those California kids were nestled in sunny comfort and luxury, alive with the promise of great things to come. They weren’t the only ones who saw that promise. Time magazine that year sent a team to profile this class on the cusp of graduation, dubbing them “smarter, subtler, and more sophisticated.”

It turned out rather differently. Or as a popular sage of that era, George Harrison, would later observe. “When you don’t know where you’re going/Any road will take you there.”

The Stainless Steel Rat Sings The Blues – Harry Harrison, 1994 ★

When Sci-Fi and Comedy Don't Mix

Comedy is hard enough under normal circumstances. Being funny while writing in a genre as demanding and conceptual as science fiction must be even more so. Yet we know it can be done.

Sci-fi fantasy readers often sing the praises of “The Stainless Steel Rat,” which for decades mixed adventure and laughs in the far-flung future. The series features Jim diGriz, also known as “Slippery Jim,” one of very few active criminals left in a universe where such impulses are controlled by technology and social engineering. Even the thought of crime is inconceivable to most.

But Jim is nothing if not determined to think for himself. He may be a thief, but he’s got a good heart, and in a cosmos dominated by bland conformity, offers a real rooting interest for readers.

In Search Of History: A Personal Adventure – Theodore H. White, 1978 ★★★

Prioritizing the Political Over the Personal

Tragedy nearly struck journalist Theodore H. White twice in November 1963. Right after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, White’s aged mother suffered a heart attack while White was visiting her in Massachusetts.

At that very moment he had a summons from the President’s widow, Jacqueline. She wanted White’s services immediately for an article to honor her husband’s legacy in the next issue of Life magazine. He asks: “[I]f the widow of my friend needed me and my mother needed me, what should I do?”

The answer: He left Mom to await a doctor with his wife, and sped off to Hyannis Port where Jackie told him how her husband’s Presidency reminded her of the popular musical Camelot. White dutifully made the comparison in his article; a myth was born.