The Savage Tales Of Solomon Kane – Robert E. Howard, 1998 ★★★½

Wrath of a Godless Puritan

Many action heroes offer at least some depth of character; few put their gut-wrenching angst on display like Solomon Kane.

A Puritan unable to rest while there is evil to confront and defeat, whatever the odds, Kane makes for uneasy company, torn between steadfast religious convictions and violent engagement with a world which mocks his belief in a compassionate Creator.

Robert E. Howard is best known today as the creator of Conan, but Kane may be his most enigmatic character, certainly his most existential one. Del Ray presents every original Kane story Howard produced between 1928 and 1932, along with some fragments and poems that only deepen his mystery.

The Liar’s Club – Mary Karr, 1995 ★★★★½

Texas Is a State of Mind

Does memory ever reflect reality? Is it instead a mixture of nostalgia, cerebral junk-drawer scrounging, and lies you sell yourself into believing? And if fact and fiction wind up jumbled, are you better off?

The title of this memoir about growing up in East Texas at the dawn of the 1960s begs those questions. I guess it also gives an answer, which is print the legend. No doubt Mary Karr lived the life she writes about. But did she remember every detail of it, like the texture of her mother’s bedquilt, or the brand of coffee can her father spit tobacco juice in?

Color me skeptical, but so what. Karr’s ability to enrich this recounting of her childhood in such fulsome detail enhances a reading experience that becomes very soon not at all like paper and paste but rather a piece of living soul quivering in your hands.

Candyland: A Novel In Two Parts – Evan Hunter & Ed McBain, 2001 ★★★★½

Tag Team of One Makes Winning Combination

If schizophrenia is not merely talking to yourself but answering, what is it when a famous novelist partners up with his own nom de plume? 

Evan Hunter wrote some popular novels around broad social themes like juvenile delinquency, homophobia, and racism. Ed McBain wrote the famous 87^th Precinct crime novels and countless other mysteries. Candyland brings the pair together, for the first and only time.

It is a nifty idea for a novel which delivers on the page, Hunter’s faculty for writing in sensational, pinpoint detail about a particular human ill developing naturally into McBain covering its criminal aftermath. As a bonus, you get a suspenseful underlying meta-mystery of how and/or if these two plot threads will come together in the end.

Harry Hooper: An American Baseball Life – Paul J. Zingg, 1993 ★★

Shout Out to a Forgotten Legend

Baseball stars flash across the sky so quickly you often not only miss them, but never know they were there. Take Harry Hooper.

A key piece of four World Championship teams when he played for the Boston Red Sox, Hooper was still overshadowed by two other outfielders. Master of the sliding catch and stealing bases, he still holds the record for the most assists at his position yet statistically falls a bit short of the greats of his era. Everyone admired him, but despite his smarts he got passed over for manager jobs after retiring.

Paul J. Zingg asks some questions about why Hooper is so obscure among the players enshrined in baseball’s Hall of Fame, and unknowingly provides answers, too. Hooper had a stellar career, alright, but he also makes for dull copy.

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.”