Alan Brinkley’s review of Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side almost makes up for the indifference of the rest of this week’s issue.

Writer Joseph O’Neill had two grandfathers, just like everybody else. After that, it gets unusual. Grandfather Joseph (above, left) was a Syrian who found himself living in Turkey when that country came into existence. Grandfather Jim was born in that part of the United Kingdom that is known today as the Republic of Ireland. Shifts of sovereign boundaries contributed to putting both men in prison during World War II. Beyond that, the men had nothing in common — except grandchildren. Joseph O’Neill’s reconstructive memoir of their lives, Blood Dark Track, is a classic of modern life.

Morning

¶ Antikythera: I’m not sure what prompted the report in Nature (which prompted the Times), but the Antikythera Device is always cool. Hey, it’s the world’s first analog computer!

Noon

¶ Uncle Bobby: Jamie Larue, a librarian in Colorado, was recently asked to reconsider the shelving of Uncle Bobby’s Wedding, by Sarah S Brannen.  Aimed at children between the ages of two to seven, Uncle Bobby’s Wedding deals with a little girl’s fear of losing her favorite uncle when he gets married. Incidentally, Uncle Bobby is marrying another man.

Mr Larue’s thoughtful — and effectively all-purpose — reply appears at his Web lob, Myliblog.com. I urge all Daily Blague visitors to read it.

Night

¶ Lordly Hudson: Among New York City’s totally unfair stack of natural advantages is the mighty Hudson, an estuary posing as a highly scenic river that, for most of the Twentieth Century, was treated as a giant sewer. John Strausbaugh’s update on improved conditions features a flabbergasting image of the deserted  castle on Bannerman’s Island, which seems second only to Chicago’s Merchandise Mart in square footage.  

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After seeing the new Brideshead Revisited last Friday, I went to McNally Robinson and bought a copy of the novel. (I may still have the one that I read as a teenager in storage, but, if so, it has got to be unreadable: a ghastly old Dell cheaperback with, by now, pages of ochre.) I also bought a copy of Scoop — forgetting that I already had one, probably because I’ve never read it.

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Moral of the story: the Middle Ages did not exist until they were over! Read on at Portico…

Or perhaps this is the moral: what was originally the very stuff of history has now become a genre, popular with middle-aged men: Military History.

A lazy week at the Book Review….too lazy to inspire a complete sentence.

The next round of Morning Reads will begin on Monday, 18 August 2008.  

Here’s the line-up of books. Indispensably at the core are Don Quixote and Moby-Dick. It may take a while to figure out how much to plow through ever morning, but I’ll always read at least a few pages. If I’m slightly pressed, I may read no more than a bit of AN Wilson’s After the Victorians (a collection of shortish pieces) and a few of Noël Coward’s Letters.

Chesterfield and Rochefoucauld are garnish, for truly energetic mornings.

One thing that I like very much to do is to find an unheard-of book that has just been turned into a movie. Latest example: Winifred Watson’s Mrs Pettigrew Lives For A Day. The differences are always intriguing, especially when, as in the case of Bharat Nalluri’s adaptation, they’re largely a matter of tone.

As the weeks go by, I wonder when, if ever, the editors are going to get round to William J Bernstein’s A Splendid Exchange, a more important book than any covered in this week’s Book Review.

Morning

¶ Deck Chairs?: Something in Joshua Rosner’s tone, in “Goodbye capitalism,” his piece in the Financial Times,  makes me think of a cranky gent on one of the Titanic‘s lifeboats, complaining that passengers are no longer dressing for dinner.

Noon

¶ CrocEatDog: Sometimes, a picture is worth a thousand giggles. All right, ten giggles. Okay, a chuckle.

Night

¶ Lawn: This internal-exile/vacation thing is working so well that, after I dealt with the Book Review, I sat outside on the balcony and read. And read. And read. And then I decided to watch a movie…. But you know that prayer that Jewish men are said to begin the day with? My version goes like this: “Thank God I don’t own a car.” If I’m being really thoughtful, I add, “or a lawn.”
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This morning, I finished the few pages of Rachel Kushner’s Telex From Cuba that I didn’t read last night. I was sorry to say goodbye to K C Stites and Everly Lederer, the first a narrator, the second a viewer*, both of them American adolescents living in a Cuban-American version of the imperial Raj on the eve of Fidel Castro’s seizure of power. I wasn’t nearly as sorry to see the last of Christian de la Mazière, the decayed aristocrat and unsavory arms dealer whose swampy amorality oozes in rich counterpoint to the crispy oddness of the young Americans’ experience.

The Hollywood version: Ms Kushner has imported Scout Finch (of To Kill A Mockingbird) into a novel by Alan Furst.

A few weeks ago, I read one of the most beautiful novels in the world, possibly the most beautiful, Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland. Although not a lengthy read, it struck me as too immense for a casual write-up. Novels often do — and I end up writing nothing about them. (Last summer’s read-agog, Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games, is still waiting for a few words from yours truly.) As a rule, I’m quite comfortable dashing off some quick impressions of a book that I’ve liked — in this age of information overload, a sketch seems more than enough. But deeply impressive novels demand more thoughtful, more “worthy” responses. The danger of sounding like an intolerable gasbag is sharply increased.

So here’s my idea: reading Telex From Cuba, I was struck by how I wasn’t struck by the beauty of the prose — and yet there was no denying that Ms Kushner’s prose is extraordinarily effective. I soon saw that the it strengths were the opposite of Netherland‘s. Whereas Mr O’Neill demonstrates an uncanny gift for wrapping up an intense and complex impression in the lace of a few brilliantly chosen words, Ms Kushner creates corners that her characters can’t see around, although we can. Dramatic irony and understatement dictate her language no less rigorously than a fine but very masculine sensuousness dictates Mr O’Neill’s. 

Compare and contrast. When I get around to it.

* as in, “owner of one of the novel’s points of view.”

Kate Christensen’s fourth novel is, in my opinion, her best to date. It’s good to have gotten round to writing one up! In the Drink came out before I had a Web site, and Jeremy Thrane before I had a Web log. I don’t know what happened with The Epicure’s Complaint, but I remember finding it puzzling, as though something were going on beneath the straightforward-seeming surface. No such confusion clouded my reading of The Great Man. I was reminded, for what it’s worth, of Diane Johnson, Brian Morton, and even, a bit, Alice Adams. A great New York read.

Detail from Conrado Massaguer’s poster: I could look at this design all day. It’s both gorgeous and very, very clever.

A tolerable issue, at least by Book Review standards; no Noes. Walter Kirn’s piece on the new James Frey novel may not be his best review ever, but it’s extraordinarily amusing — in a non-LOL way.

One of the last things that I read during yesterday’s marathon of magazines was a piece by Edward Mendelson in The New York Review of Books (LV 10, p 54). A review of Richard Cook’s biography of Alfred Kazin, it began with a passage that felt like a glance in an unexpected mirror: (more…)

Morning

¶ Mean Money: Leona’s money is going to the dogs — and so is Dicky Grasso’s.

Noon

¶ DIRL: What with following one link to another, I came across a nice, long comment thread (at Marginal Revolution) proposing books to take to Africa on a research project that will take a year, with only visit home. Somebody asked for advice.

Night

¶ Pectavensis: How’s your Latin? It doesn’t have to be very good, to read Gregory of Tours, a Sixth-Century bishop who wrote pretty good history, considering it was the Dark Ages and all. Plus, he writes about a scandal at a convent in Poitou (in monasterio Pectavense). Nudge, nudge!

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Now, here’s an idea. Reviewing the new collection of Frank O’Hara’s poetry, William Logan writes,

He was always looking for some vivid stimulus, preferably one a little outlandish — not a bad thing for a curator of modern painting, perhaps, but not necessarily a good one for a poet (O’Hara treated contemporary art with far more deliberation than he treated poetry). He began to make poetry from whatever happened around him — today, he might have written a blog.

Thought for today!

What a treat The James Boys, by Richard Liebmann-Smith, is turning out to be. Among many other publications, the author has written for The National Lampoon, which alone may explain his ability to invigorate his turgidity-risking mélange of neo-Victorian and contemporary academic prose by stirring in the occasional up-to-date vulgarity.

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Sometimes a cigar is just a Kennedy accessory. Good reviews by Richard Holbrooke, Michael Hirschorn, Emily Mitchell, Anthony Julius, and Joel Brouwer.

Oops! Did get round to posting this vital link until this morning.

Are there still people out there who believe that the best judge of something is someone who doesn’t like it? Aside from the folks at the Book Review, that is.