Category: Books & Writers

John Wilkes Booth, meet Jack Bauer. That’s the recipe of “Manhunt,” an engrossing blend of history and thriller that pulls off the heady feat of creating edge-of-your-seat narrative even as its conclusion is inevitable. And the ride? Like Bauer’s TV show, “24,” James L. Swanson’s tale of the search for President Abraham Lincoln’s killer rivets because of its pacing – and because its shifting scenes and characters are juggled with sure hands.

Lincoln is gone within the first quarter of the book, leaving center stage for his assassin, the celebrity-actor Booth. All but the most avid Lincoln followers will be surprised by the numerous twists and turns surrounding the president’s death, as well as Booth’s motley crew of co-conspirators, many of whom escaped severe punishment.

From a review in the Christian Science Monitor

This Peter Benchley story isn’t about Great White sharks.

Benchley was hired away from Newsweek in 1967 to be a speechwriter for President Lyndon Johnson. The White House speechwriters were used to deadlines, demands and long hours, yet Benchley (in his mid-twenties) worked at a different pace, still finding time for tennis and other pursuits.

As the story was told to me in 1975 by former speechwriter, and then Johnson Library Director Harry Middleton, the writers finally went to Chief of Staff Joseph Califano and insisted he do something about the fact that Benchley was not working as hard as they. One thing lead to another and Califano eventually told Benchley he was fired.

Benchley refused to be fired. He said, “I was hired by the President of the United States, and only the President can fire me.”

Califano went to the President. The timing couldn’t have been worse. Califano had been featured in Time or Newsweek as “the second most powerful man in America.” LBJ told Califano, “You’re the second most powerful man in America, and you can’t even fire a speechwriter.”

As Middleton told it, Califano went back to Benchley, who still refused to be fired. And so it continued. Benchley working less-and-less, but staying adamant that only the President could fire him. LBJ having too much fun with Califano to step in and actually fire Benchley.

Benchley lasted until the end of the Johnson Administration.

I asked Middleton what he thought about Benchley. His reply was that the speechwriters all resented that he was a slacker and that they had to work all the more to take up that slack, but they sure all had to admire his ability to stand up to Califano and Johnson.

RIP Peter Benchley.

Regular readers of NewMexiKen know that I am a fan of Malcolm Gladwell, author of “Blink” and “The Tipping Point.” There was an interesting profile of the journalist in this past Sunday’s New York Times Book Review. I found this background about the 42-year-old writer particularly interesting:

On his Web site, Gladwell offers an apologia pro vita sua: “If I could vote (and I can’t because I’m Canadian) I would vote Democrat. I am pro-choice and in favor of gay marriage. I believe in God. I think the war in Iraq is a terrible mistake. I am a big believer in free trade. I think, on balance, taxes in America — particularly for rich people — ought to be higher, not lower. I think smoking is a terrible problem and that cigarette manufacturers ought to be subjected to every possible social and political sanction. But I think that filing product liability lawsuits against cigarette manufacturers is absurd. I am opposed to the death penalty. I hate S.U.V.’s. I think many C.E.O.’s are overpaid. I think there is too much sex and violence on television.”
…

When Time magazine and other media outlets declared an attention-deficit hyperactivity epidemic in America, Gladwell argued that people were no more distracted than they’d ever been, but that Ritalin had replaced nicotine as a socially acceptable focusing stimulant. While others were vilifying the pharmaceutical companies over the cost of prescription drugs, Gladwell’s New Yorker article on the topic mapped out a broader codependency. “It is only by the most spectacular feat of cynicism that our political system’s moral negligence has become the fault of the pharmaceutical industry,” he wrote. And in an article on intelligence reform published when the country was in a furor over the failings leading up to Sept. 11, 2001, Gladwell proposed that free-market-style competition between the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. might actually be good for intelligence gathering. Lately he’s been investigating racial profiling. At first, “I had a reasonably benign attitude toward it. I felt that under certain circumstances it was justifiable — like looking for terrorists. But now I think that’s wrong,” he said. “I think it’s never justifiable. And not on ethical grounds but on pragmatic grounds. I just don’t think it works.”

It’s not that often NewMexiKen supposes that one Nobel laureate reviews a new work by another (with references to the influences of yet a third laureate — and Faulkner, a fourth). That’s what J. M. Coetzee has done with his review of the most recent fiction by Gabriel García Márquez, Memories of My Melancholy Whores.

To make it easier, here’s another link to Coetzee’s review.

100 Best First Lines from Novels

A little bit about Harper Lee from The New York Times An excerpt:

The recipient of the Pulitzer Prize in 1961, “To Kill a Mockingbird” remains the only book Ms. Lee has written. It is difficult to overestimate the sustained power of the novel or the reverence with which Ms. Lee is treated here: it is not uncommon to find live staged versions of the story, hear of someone who has devoted his life to playing Atticus Finch in road shows, or meet children named Scout or ones named after the author herself.

At a book signing after the ceremony on Friday afternoon, a little girl in a velvet dress approached Ms. Lee with a hardback copy of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” announcing that her name was Harper. “Well, that’s my name, too,” Ms. Lee said. The girl’s mother, LaDonnah Roberts, said she had decided to make her daughter Ms. Lee’s namesake after her mother-in-law gave her a copy of the book during her pregnancy. Another girl, Catherine Briscoe, 15, one of the essay contest winners, had read the novel six times. She trembled and held her hand to her heart as she spoke of its author: “It was breathtaking to meet the most important person in my life.”

Sandra Bullock plays Ms. Lee in the upcoming Truman Capote flick “Infamous.”

NewMexiKen enjoys Beats Per Minute’s First Impression book reviews almost as much as the Five Minute Stories.

Read the review of Cloud Atlas.

A review of Dr. Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham in The Wall Street Journal includes this:

The second way to interpret the book is as a celebration, albeit a mischievous one, of two particularly American traits: salesmanship and open-mindedness. Sam-I-am is the consummate entrepreneur, although, clearly, he does not believe in soft-sell. He is convinced of his product’s attractiveness, and the evangelism of his pitch is evident. He wants the Protagonist to “see the light.” However annoying one might be tempted to find Sam-I-am, he retains our sympathy for as long as his interlocutor refuses to try his product. How could he know that he doesn’t like green eggs and ham? Has he tried them? Why won’t he try them? What if we all refused to do things simply because we haven’t done them before?

It’s actually an interesting essay on the book.

From a New York Times review of Beyond Coincidence: Amazing Stories of Coincidence and the Mystery and Mathematics Behind Them:

A woman in Alabama decided to visit her sister. Her sister, unbeknownst to her, decided the same. They hit each other head-on on a rural highway. Both died. And both drove Jeeps. That counts as a rare coincidence, although not as rare, perhaps, as the case of Roy Cleveland Sullivan, a Virginia forest ranger who was struck by lightning seven times, or the existence of an ice dealer named I. C. Shivers.
…

On the other hand, it is deeply satisfying to know that a Canadian farmer named McDonald has the postal code EIEIO, and there is at least half a screenplay in the tale of a bank robber who, hitting the same bank and the same teller a second time, escaped because the bank guard and the managers were in a back office reviewing videotapes of the first robbery.

National Book Critics Circle award nominees:

Fiction
William T. Vollmann, “Europe Central”
E.L. Doctorow, “The March”
Mary Gaitskill, “Veronica”
Kazuo Ishiguro, “Never Let Me Go”
Andrea Levy, “Small Island”

General Nonfiction
Joan Didion, “The Year of Magical Thinking”
Orhan Pamuk, “Istanbul”
Francine du Plessix Gray, “Them”
Judith Moore, “Fat Girl”
Vikram Seth, “Two Lives”

Biography/Autobiography
Doris Kearns Goodwin, “Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln”
Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, “American Prometheus”
Carolyn Burke, “Lee Miller”
Jonathan Coe, “Like a Fiery Elephant”
Ron Powers, “Mark Twain”

Poetry
Simon Armitage, “The Shout”
Manuel Blas de Luna, “Bent to the Earth”
Jack Gilbert, “Refusing Heaven”
Richard Siken, “Crush”
Ron Slate, “The Incentive of the Maggot”

Criticism
John Updike, “Still Looking”
Arthur Danto, “Unnatural Wonders”
Hal Crowther, “Gather at the River”
William Logan, “The Undiscovered Country”
Eliot Weinberger, “What Happened Here”

NewMexiKen finished Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest this morning. That’s five books in just less than five full days.

I chose Red Harvest because I had previously decided it would be worthwhile to try and read as many of Time’s 100 best English-language novels as possible. (The list was mentioned on NewMexiKen in October.) At first I thought I would tackle the 100 in roughly chronological order — it provided structure to the project and seemed an interesting way to watch the progression of styles and genres. Something in me began to balk, however, at the prospect of getting through 10 novels from the 1920s, 14 from the 1930s, and so on. Reading one from each decade, then cycling back somehow seemed like a better plan.

Among the ten 1920s novels on the Time list were nine I’ve never read. Hammett’s Red Harvest seemed a good beginning.

Where did we first hear the voice of the world-weary American tough guy in its purest distillation? In Dashiell Hammett, a former Pinkerton detective, and in this book, his first novel. Though less famous than The Maltese Falcon or The Thin Man, which both have the advantage of their pitch-perfect movie adaptations, this tale of omnidirectional treachery is the man at his deadly best. … Here the Op finds himself in a corrupt western town where there’s a power struggle among contending factions. Virtually all of them, the hoods, the lawmen, the lowlifes, the local grandees, are lying and corrupt. Short, overweight, often a little drunk, the Op is no movie star. He’s a hero all the same, a man on his own, maneuvering among the crocodiles, frequently with fists and firepower, always with a brutal and amusing efficiency.

“He wasn’t the sort of man whose pocket you’d try to pick unless you had a lot of confidence in your fingers.”

“‘You’re making a fine pair of clowns of us. Be still while I get up or I’ll make an opening in your head for brains to leak in.'”

“She watched him with a face hard as a silver dollar.”

“The Agency wits said he could spit icicles in July.”

Great reading.