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In my opinion, this is the best book ever written on the horror film. Even if you don't particularly like scary movies, it's a fascinating study of the 20th century's love affair with the deformed and the grotesque, and the author can flat-out write.
Even
though it looks like a cheap fanzine, this is probably the best bartender's
guide for tropical and rum drinks ever published. The authors are Tiki-bar
enthusiasts who have gone to great lengths to unearth the precise original
recipes for such rum concoctions as the Fog Cutter, Hurricane, Missionary's
Downfall, and the Polynesian Paralysis. The authors have added a few inventions
of their own, rated the strength of each drink (light/medium/strong),
and gone to great lengths to specify the specific glass, mug, or bowl
needed to serve each concoction. But most valuable of all is their advice
on which rums to buy, as well as liqueurs, syrups, and mixes. They've
actually made drinks cheap and accessible that are normally considered
too complicated to make at home. An outstanding little book and obviously
a work of passion.
There are hundreds of poker stories about fortunes made from "tells," or physical traits that consistently gave away the strength of a player's hand, but I've always wondered how many guys bet "tells" and then lose. The subject never interested me that much until I read this book by the personable poker pro who holds court at Hollywood Park Casino in Inglewood, Calif. He first published a version of this book in 1984, when he was the top five-card draw player at the Rainbow Club in Gardena, Calif., and some of the original photos survive. The rest were reshot at Palace Station in Las Vegas. What he studies is not so much quirky behavior — although he covers that — but the universal gestures and postures that people assume when they're attempting to disguise their true intentions. Using some of the world's top poker pros as his "models," Caro's photos reveal gestures so subtle, and yet so obvious once you know what to look for, that I can't imagine any serious poker player not needing this book. Most of the tells are the sort that save you money — by giving away strong hands you shouldn't be betting into — as opposed to "magic keys" that will win you big pots. But most players lose most of their money with weak calls anyway, so this book should be worth money to anyone who reads it.
This
book is hard to find because it kind of got overlooked when it first came
out. It's a fascinating study of the early days of New York's penny press
— the forerunners of the tabloids, but also the inventors of "objectivity"
— and that story is told by examining two celebrated criminal trials
of the 1830s and 1840s. The intriguing thing about the book is that both
crimes are not treated as events in themselves but as fodder for the newspapers
of the day, especially the New York Herald of James Gordon Bennett
and the New York Tribune of Horace Greeley. Then as now, reporting
was influenced by the tastes and prejudices of the particular readers
that were considered most desirable, and the result was less a search
for truth but a massaging of half-truths to arrive at whatever mythical
version of events society seemed to want at any given time. This is a
masterful under-appreciated book by a former Clinton speechwriter who
produces the Twentieth Century documentary series for ABC News.
Beneath its polished portrait of Britain on the eve of and then in the middle of World War II is an uncanny story about crimes of the heart. It is postmodern Jane Austen (the Austen of Northanger Abbey, not Sense and Sensibility) and probably disturbing to conservatives because it proposes that art can engineer redemption where God fails.
This is an amazing memoir that remakes the genre. It is also a tremendous father and son story involving cheap shots, impacted love, fatuous 60s politics, and a genuine appreciation of The Other. While Amis's fiction tends to be too geometric for me, this book is filled not only with wit and irony, which is to be expected, but with humanity, which is not.
Read this and see old sly boots at work. In the last analysis, the work is even better than the son's portrait. Kingsley once said that nice things are nicer than nasty things. This book is a nice thing.
I
love this book. It also must be said that I published it. The portraits
of the men who drove (and were driven by) the socialist ideal, if you
can call it that, are amazing. Muravchik manages to place himself exactly
at the intersection of biography and history. Move over Paul Johnson. Other than paid reviewing work, I've had precious little time to read anything but biographies of obscure 19th-century mathematicians this past few months. I am guessing that the appeal of those biographies is...limited, and so shall not include any of them on my list. Here are a few good, interesting books that did get through the force shield.
Some years ago I discovered Elmore Leonard. I read every book of his I could find, till one day I found myself 50 pages into one, thinking: "That Albanian seems familiar." I realized that I had read my way right round the Leonard oeuvre and had started again at the beginning. Well, if you like Leonard and can't wait for the next one, try Dave Barry's Big Trouble (from which a movie has now been made). It's not Leonard — what could be Leonard? — but it's almost as good. Plenty of belly laughs and clever word-play.
This is one I reviewed, so I shall not repeat myself here. Dalrymple turns the Cold Eye on modern Britain's underclass, and the rotten, corrupt ideologies that drive them to, and keep them in, their misery.
I am a sucker for historical fiction. Julian Rathbone gives an account of the last days of Saxon England, seen through the eyes of a retainer to Harold Godwinson. Written in an odd and not always agreeable style laced with anachronisms (which, to be fair, Rathbone apologizes for up front) and modern British slang, The Last English King yet succeeds in bringing to life some of the flavor of the time. It also confirms one's worst suspicions about Edward the Confessor. Finally,
if it is not out of line to do so, I'd like to recommend two splendid
books by National Review colleagues: Jeff Hart's Smiling
Through the Cultural Catastrophe and Rick Brookhiser's America's
First Dynasty. Jeff's book belongs on the bookshelf of every educated
American, and is the absolutely ideal thing to give to an intelligent
18-year-old of your acquaintance. Rick is a grand master at finding ingenious
new perspectives on American history, showing you things in a way you
had never thought of them before. Here he delivers the goods on the Adamses:
John, John Quincy, Charles Francis, and Henry. The story spans 150 years
in the life of our nation, and is told with the confidence and light grace
that can only come from long reflection on a vast, deep store of historical
knowledge. For
worthwhile reading any time I would highly recommend Coloring
the News, by William McGowan. Were it not upstaged somewhat by
the near-simultaneous release of Bias,
which covers the CBS network only, this book would have shot to the top
of the best-seller list. I especially appreciate McGowan's research and
revelations on biased reporting on military-personnel issues that are
in the news constantly, such as gays in the military, the Air Force B-52
pilot Kelly Flinn imbroglio, and the truth about double standards in naval
aviation training that may have contributed to the death of pioneer female
F-14 pilot Lt. Kara Hultgreen. McGowan's book exposes deliberate mischaracterizations
of these stories and many more by the New York Times Magazine,
the Washington Post, Newsweek, NBC Dateline, CBS
60 Minutes, and National Public Radio. If you liked Bias,
you will love Coloring the News.
A harrowing paean to the Marines who won the Pacific War. Often simplistically dubbed an anti-war memoir, it is that but far more as well — ending with Sledge's final curt last line that, "With privilege goes responsibility."
A Norwegian tale of the farmer's elemental struggle to carve a living from the land, and the realization that such a brutal and solitary existence puts him an odds with, and in some ways free from, most others of modern society.
Ostensibly about the 1967 War, Michael Oren's just published brilliant and riveting chronicle, drawing on previously unknown archives, is about the best primer on the current crisis available; a valuable reminder that Middle East Wars #1-3 were not over the West Bank, but over the very existence of Israel itself.
Perhaps Conrad's best novel about European rogues and heroes abroad in the age of colonialism, in which a few tough but disenchanted characters find some type of morality in pitting themselves against the majority of profiteers, criminals, and get-rich scoundrels.
A rambling, often self-indulgent memoir about the clash between rural values and the chic world of urban New York that deals honestly with the brutality of the Depression and its effects upon ordinary Americans. For all the criticism of Wolfe's indulgence, few wrote better English prose or understood as well the paradoxes of class in the United States.
I've never been able to really settle in with anything less than a novel — or with a history that reads like a novel. So here are some summer choices for those of us who like stories:
Moving, sad, sweet; a great story about growing up and being a friend.
We all read it years ago, but there's something especially delicious about rereading a great book on the beach.
I know, I know, lefty politics — but he writes beautifully... Or, still, anything by Eric Ambler, but especially The Light of Day and Passage of Arms. It's impossible to go wrong with an old Balzac novel thrown in. This is perfect summer reading — they're all about sex and money, which are the most summery of summer topics. Especially A Harlot High and Low, which explains, for anyone who is interested, precisely how many francs and louis it took in 19th-century Paris to keep both a wife and a mistress. Short answer: a lot. Anything by Anne Tyler, especially Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. Anne Tyler has been writing beautiful, touching novels for so long, we just take her for granted. She writes luminous, funny sentences, and the books just seem totally effortless and magnetic. Why isn't she our national literary heroine, rather than that dreadful Toni Morrison? Who knows? Well, actually, we know. But it's summer and so let's not get all hot and bothered. Just enjoy her work. Have you made a stately progression through Anthony Powell's great, enthralling, funny, sad, satirical, loving, bitter, uproarious, long, long 12 novel series A Dance to the Music of Time? If not, there's no summer like the present. You will not — absolutely will not — regret reading one perfect word of this great big bath of a story. Finally,
why not Conversations
with My Agent, by Rob Long? I'll tell you why not: because it's
out of print. So instead of that, two hilarious travel books that are
still around. In
Trouble Again, by Redmond O'Hanlon — a trip up the Orinoco
River in Brazil — and News
from Tartary by Peter Fleming. The former is hilarious and contemporary;
the latter is hilarious and from the 1930's.
If you like Paul Johnson, you will love this colorful history of a bizarre idea and the bizarre personalities who advanced it.
Intellectual history of the highest order, a first-rate introduction to the men who gave us relativism, progressive education, and modern liberalism.
A superb biography of one of the few entrepreneurs in history whose achievements in philanthropy have been as impressive as their achievements in business.
Classic
detective fiction set in the ghostly wasteland of the Swedish welfare
state.
Every summer for the last few years, I've read a Preston-Child book. Their thrillers are pure mind candy, but I'm addicted to their better-than-Crichton blend of science and adventure. (Preston, by the way, is the excellent archaeology correspondent for The New Yorker.) This new title doesn't come out until June, but it features characters from their best book, Relic, and I'll definitely get to it during the hot months.
A murder mystery set in 1964 Nazi Germany — the bad guys won the big war and a cop in Berlin is on the verge of making an astonishing discovery. A smart and exciting thriller.
One of the problems with books in the presidential-assassination genre is that you already know the ending. This one, set during the Kennedy years (but before November 1963) is different. The conclusion is brilliant, consistent with the known facts, and thoroughly satisfying.
A romance set in small-town Michigan, with the 1948 presidential race as a backdrop. Mallon is an occasional NR contributor and one of the great novelists of our day.
Okay,
I'm a geek, but as a college student I really did like this 13th-century
poem, written in a difficult dialect of Middle English. In anticipation
of the forthcoming translation by the renowned poet W. S. Merwin, I plan
to reread the J. R. R. Tolkien version.
A comic novel with sharp writing and a great story — shlumpy woman writer agrees to ghostwrite a bio of ritzy lady. Lipman's prose is bright, and her observations are hilarious.
Haven't read it yet, but this send-up of the Park Avenue parenting/nanny scene sounds so juicy, I'm taking it on vacation with me.
This is the story of a troubled man (who wins a card game in a brothel and gets to keep one of the establishment's ladies) as he makes a life for himself in a hardscrabble New England settlement circa 1838. I never expected to like this book, but I found myself fascinated by the characters and the perfectly paced story. N.B: There are some really gross parts.
An
excellent novel that deserves every award and palm frond it has garnered.
There's history, romance, friendship, everything. Books for the beach, eh? A childhood of summer holidays in the far north of Scotland meant that, for many years, umbrellas, raincoats, and cups of hot tea were what I used to take to the seaside. Nevertheless, here are a few ideas for reading material to go with all that wonderful American sun, sand, and ocean. Jaws, of course. With its smooth prose and brutal shocks, this tale of Moby Dick's crankiest competitor is salutary reading on a warm, complacent afternoon. What's more, the shark menace is yet another excellent excuse for avoiding any exercise of any description: that dip, dear, could just be too dangerous. Those in search of more chills on a hot day can always turn to the ever-reliable Stephen King. His finest novel, The Shining, once left me looking over my shoulder in the ghost-free calm of a trans-Atlantic flight and it still makes me nervous. When it comes to horror, King is no M. R. James, but his combination of cleverly crafted everyman prose and a very nasty imagination makes him the ideal supplier of beach unease. For those who prefer something more cheerful, how about opting for two masterpieces from 19th-century England? The first, The Pickwick Papers should need no introduction, but it's worth re-reading just to remember how laugh-aloud funny Charles Dickens can be. The second, The Diary of A Nobody by George and Weedon Grossmith is the diary of a late-Victorian Dilbert, but the Grossmiths' hero, Mr. Pooter, is Dilbert without the irony. Blithely unaware of the absurdity of the story that he thinks that he is telling, Pooter is ridiculous and admirable, both hero and anti-hero. He is well worth meeting. Something serious? Well, we all ought to be reading and re-reading Bernard Lewis, but for an intelligent book focused on a somewhat less grim subject, try Paul Cantor's Gilligan Unbound: Pop Culture In The Age of Globalization. It's a thought-provoking (and occasionally amusing) work that uses a few key shows (Star Trek, The X-Files, and so on) to demonstrate how television has changed over the last thirty or forty years, and what that says about this country. Like many academics, Professor Cantor pushes his arguments too far, but unlike many academics he writes clearly and with a light touch. Like Gilligan, he would be good company on a beach.
This is the most outrageous autobiography you will ever read, I guarantee it, full of sex, violence, money, power, murder, knavery, and egomania. A nonfictional thriller (or perhaps it is mostly fiction), written more than 400 years ago by the famous Renaissance sculptor and goldsmith, but still fresh and fascinating to a modern reader. Trust me, this is no dusty academic tome. I just read it and I'm astonished I hadn't discovered it earlier.
This book is on the best-seller list for a very good reason: It is a masterpiece. It is a thriller in the sense that it cannot be put down and that it deals with sex, deception, and war. On the other hand it has extraordinary literary value that elevate it into orbit above the usual thriller fare. I believe McEwan is the greatest English writer alive today. The book was short listed for the Booker, but why those crusty old Brits didn't award it the prize is a mystery to me.
You may remember O'Brian as the man who wrote the Aubry-Maturin series of sea adventures. This is one of the novels he wrote before he started it all with Master and Commander. It's a dark, atmospheric book set in Wales.
Frayn,
who wrote Noises
Off and other plays, tells the story of a greedy art historian
who discovers (or thinks he discovers) a priceless painting in an ignorant
neighbor's country house. Headlong describes his increasingly desperate
and convoluted efforts to relieve his boorish neighbor of his prize. Headlong
also describes the frantic pace with which the reader devours this book
to find out what happens in the end...
Originally published in the 1950s, this is one of my favorite military memoirs. Masters went on to fight the Japanese in Burma in World War II, and later became a best-selling novelist. But he spent part of the 1930s fighting Pushtun tribesman in Waziristan, on the Afghan-Pakistani border, where U.S. forces now are engaged in chasing al Qaeda fighters. I have just started Carlo d'Este's new biography of Eisenhower the soldier, which I am enjoying enormously, which I expected, as I loved his life of Patton. Also,
I plan to reread Eliot Cohen's new Supreme
Command, which I read before publication and think is the best
book I've ever read on how good political leaders oversee wartime militaries.
It examines the leadership styles of Lincoln, Clemenceau, Churchill, and
Ben-Gurion, and concludes that the best civilian leaders are those who
meddle and ask tough questions of subordinates. I've never read a book on a beach. (I don't even like beaches.) If I absolutely had to, though, it'd probably be a mystery — not a postmortem-in-the-parlor whodunit, but a 20-minute egg by Richard Stark, the alias used by Donald Westlake when he writes about Parker, a totally amoral heister whose criminal capers are so insidiously absorbing that they always make me wonder why I'm rooting for such a comprehensively bad guy. One of the best is Backflash, in which Parker knocks over a casino boat with the aid of a slightly cracked ex-bureaucrat who hates gambling. I'm also fond of Elmore Leonard, one of the few hard-boiled writers of the male species whose women characters sound like they'd be fun to know (that's a euphemism). LaBrava, the well-turned tale of a Florida photographer who gets mixed up with a retired film-noir actress who sounds suspiciously like Jane Greer, the irresistible femme fatale of Out of the Past, is a good introduction for first-timers. My favorite under-50 mystery writer is Laura Lippman, whose books are set in H. L. Mencken's home town. Having just written a biography of the Sage of Baltimore, I have good reason to know how well Lippman catches the tone and tint of that deliciously characterful city. Her novels are a series and should be read in order, so start with Baltimore Blues. Like so many disenchanted folk who don't much care for most contemporary fiction, I find myself increasingly inclined to read biographies for pleasure, and one that I particularly recommend is Park Honan's Shakespeare: A Life. If you're one of those unfortunates who think that Shakespeare Didn't Do It, Honan won't change your mind, but I can't think of another book that packs so much information about the man and his times into so elegantly compact a package. Finally,
a high-fiber essay collection that has the dual advantage of being short
and lucid, Mark Lilla's The
Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics, in which the moral follies
of Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, Alexandre Kojeve,
Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida are laid out on a slab and dissected
with a sharp scalpel. OK, maybe you don't want to get sand in this one,
but I read it on a nice slow train and didn't look out the window once. First, the fun books: Carry On, Jeeves, by P.G. Wodehouse The master of English prose introduces his greatest creations, the foppish twit Bertie Wooster and his gentleman's gentleman, Jeeves, in a series of short stories. (Backup: Weekend Wodehouse, the best of many compilations from all the Wodehouse sub-genres — Jeeves, Uncle Fred, Mr. Mulliner, etc.) Flashman by George MacDonald Fraser. First in a long series of hilarious historical novels set as the flashback memoirs of an utterly appalling swine — sort of Bertie Wooster from an evil alternative universe — who despite his drunkenness, cowardice, lechery, and a host of other vices becomes by ludicrous good fortune a hero of Victorian England in wars and skirmishes around the world. As a bonus, this first novel is set in Afghanistan. Black Mischief and Scoop , by Evelyn Waugh. Though best-known for his melancholy Brideshead Revisited, Waugh was screamingly funny, and these two novels, both set mainly in ill-governed Africa, are his funniest ever, especially for conservatives and press-bashers. (More serious backup: Everyman Library's 1-vol. reissue of Waugh's Sword of Honor trilogy, the finest novels of World War II ever written.)
One of the greatest and most delightful books ever written about the best and most delightful books you should read, at the beach & elsewhere. For a sampling of this Jesuit priest's thoughts on sports, wisdom, Plato, the ChesterBelloc, natural law, and much more, try his website. Or read this book's full subtitle: "Selected Contrary Essays on How to Finally Acquire an Education While Still in College or Anywhere Else: Containing Some Belated Advice About How to Employ Your Leisure Time When Ultimate Questions Remain Perplexing in Spite of Your Highest Earned Academic Degree, Together with Sundry Book Lists Nowhere Else in Captivity to be Found."
Memorial Day should include some serious reflection upon the sacrifice of those who have risked and often given their all so that the rest of us could lie around on beaches over holidays. Any novel by James Webb (esp. A Country Such As This) would do well, and so would these vivid memoirs of a humble, 19-year-old Marine grunt, who endured with honor almost all the sanguinary battles of World War I.
The late Wallace Stegner is one of the greatest of modern contemporary American authors and "Crossing To Safety" is one of the greatest American novels of the twentieth century. This book is quietly eloquent, masterfully crafted, deeply dignified, and poignant. It is at once about the lives, the loves, and the aspirations of two couples, but at the same time a luminous rendition on friendship, marriage, and the ebb and flow of life. Stegner is also a rare bird: a Pulitzer Prize and National Book award winner about whom one can say, "aha, he truly deserved it!" I've loaned this book to friends so often that it is worn down like an old catcher's mitt. I cherish it still.
I stumbled onto the book last year while on vacation in Santa Barbara — actually, my wife loaned it to me. Ehrlich, in deceptively soft but often elegant prose, writes about life in the high plains of Wyoming: of hermits and cowboys, of changing seasons and wind, of the extraordinary grandeur and the unremitting harshness of natural forces in the remotest reaches of the West. There is something very American about her subjects. If you love the West and love the outdoors, you may well love this book too.
True, I'm partial, as Chris is a good friend. But this book is marvelous, a delicious, witty send-up of the ways and mores and men of the Beltway. I had first picked it up with some trepidation: I had been suffering from a bad flu and feared nothing could keep my attention. Not a chance. I read it in one sitting, forgoing much-needed sleep as I feverishly turned one page after another to race to the end. You will laugh and laugh — I certainly did; and quite probably never see DC in the same way — I know I don't. You will also see why Chris is one of the nation's great humorists.
I haven't read it yet, but I read everything by Johnson, one of our time's very foremost historians. Everything he does is terrific, insightful, often (wisely so) against the grain, and invariably "must reading." This book is on my summer pile right now.
I'd be hopelessly (if not shamelessly) remiss if I didn't plug my own book. More seriously, a number of my readers wanted to know when it came out in paperback, so they can give it as a gift. You can now indeed. For those also interested, it will be a two-hour feature documentary next year, by A&E and the History Channels. |
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