Random Notes

McPhee carries a tape recorder with him on the voyage, but it’s hard to figure out what he uses it for. Only the ship’s captain, Paul Washburn—a historian manqué who lives and dies by the Washington Redskins, holds intense and angry conversations with the Stella Lykes, and can parallel-park a 665-foot boat in a seven-hundred-foot space—has any depth at all. And how does McPhee always find the intellectual in any crowd—the Melvillean captain who describes a fellow sailor as “dark-visaged,” the boiler technician who could be mistaken for Demosthenes? Why does Andy Chase happen to be the great-great-great-grandson of the legendary nineteenthcentury mariner Nathaniel Bowditch?

Saddam and Prophecy. In Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf (Times Books) we learn that his favorite movie is The Godfather. And Judith Miller of the New York Times and Laurie Mylroie of Harvard are not shy about comparing the Iraqi dictator to Don Corleone. Their 85,000-word “instant book” was published nine weeks after Iraq invaded Kuwait.

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McPhee carries a tape recorder with him on the voyage, but it’s hard to figure out what he uses it for. Only the ship’s captain, Paul Washburn—a historian manqué who lives and dies by the Washington Redskins, holds intense and angry conversations with the Stella Lykes, and can parallel-park a 665-foot boat in a seven-hundred-foot space—has any depth at all. And how does McPhee always find the intellectual in any crowd—the Melvillean captain who describes a fellow sailor as “dark-visaged,” the boiler technician who could be mistaken for Demosthenes? Why does Andy Chase happen to be the great-great-great-grandson of the legendary nineteenthcentury mariner Nathaniel Bowditch?

Saddam and Prophecy. In Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf (Times Books) we learn that his favorite movie is The Godfather. And Judith Miller of the New York Times and Laurie Mylroie of Harvard are not shy about comparing the Iraqi dictator to Don Corleone. Their 85,000-word “instant book” was published nine weeks after Iraq invaded Kuwait.