The Boys of Summer isn’t quite what you expect. Though it covers the familiar ground of the great Brooklyn Dodger teams of the ’50s, the author’s unique position and the hybrid framework of this memoir create a little gem of a book that is full of the stuff of life. Heartbreak, struggle, accomplishment, valor, friendship, bigotry and death all arising from a child’s game played by adults. Kahn served as the Herald Tribune’s beat reporter for the Dodgers for a few seasons in the early […]
Amusement with a Capital “A”
In the six stories and one novella that make up his debut collection, the inimitable Saunders pokes and prods at the nagging difficulties of living an ordinary life in an utterly insane world. The protagonists of these stories are people who for the most part just want to go about their day and provide for their families without running into too much trouble, but the zaniness and frenetic pace of American life, recognizable as a fractured possible future version of our own, complicate their lives […]
It Probably Can’t Happen Here, Right?
This 1935 novel about the elevation of a populist con-artist with fascistic tendencies to the highest office in the land is just the sort of escapist reading to really take your mind off your troubles these days. In all seriousness, depending on your perspective this is either the worst or the best time to cross Sinclair Lewis’s late-career polemic off your to-be-read list. The description of the fictitious Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip’s rise to power will in most respects feel all too familiar to anyone who […]
War on Film
Five Came Back is a look into the wartime experiences of five famous film-makers who took major hiatuses in the middle of their careers to lend their talents to the American war effort during World War II. While their contributions and their exposure to danger varied significantly, each of the five men, Frank Capra, John Ford, William Wyler, John Huston, and George Stevens made sacrifices and had experiences that would forever alter their films and their lives. It’s a compelling story, which may explain why […]
A Long Short Story
George Saunders’s short stories are perhaps the most celebrated in America today, and rightly so. They are fascinatingly strange and full of unique insights. They remind me of Kurt Vonnegut, only weirder. In light of this there was no way I wasn’t going to rush out and buy his highly-anticipated first novel on the day it came out. True to form, Lincoln in the Bardo is just about the weirdest idea for a novel I’ve ever encountered. After the death of his beloved son Willie, […]
Moments of Zen
This oral history of the Jon Stewart years of The Daily Show is a mostly-entertaining look behind the scenes of the influential show. It is also a backdoor history of the last 17 or so years. Seriously, if you’re too young to really remember the Bush v. Gore election or the invasion of Iraq, you could learn a bit from reading this book. As an oral history, one of the more impressive attributes of the book is the many luminaries they got to speak. Senator […]
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