That Summer in Paris by Morley Callaghan

As a follow up to Shakespeare and Company by Sylvia Beach and A Moveable Feast by Hemingway, this completes a set - each perspective a little different, but the players the same - at least the major ones.  Callaghan does not make it into the other two books, but his role and interactions with Scott and Hemingway are fascinating and his insights into the Paris scene add to my overall impression of this creative age.

I am glad to discover Callaghan who is Canadian and therefore does not get as much attention, but it is the subtle personalities and insecurities of the Two Great American Authors that really makes the book valuable.

It is a memoir and as such has most value to those of us curious about these individuals what the muse was that had them revolving around Joyce, Stein, Ford, and other lesser known, but important figures.

Shakespeare and Company - Sylvia Beach

 

I know of  know institution in Paris that captures the Lost Generation - Hemingway, Joyce, Eliot, Stein, MacLeish, and Fitzgerald - than this small bookstore and the memoir of the bookstore by Sylvia Beach who owned and operated it is a classic peak into that era and literature.

Monnier in front of Shakespeare and Company

Sylvia Beach inside Shakespeare and CO. 

Across the street from Monnier's French bookshop Sylvia had a friend and partner in the book trade.  They collaborated and brought together the artistic stars of their era. Shakespeare and Company sold books, but it seems that the primary importance was serving as a subscription lending library.   For a fee customers could take home and read and enjoy the books without buying them.

Writers, like Hemingway, used this library service to hone their skills, study style and words, and educate themselves.  Each of those "Customer - client - friends" is featured in this book and their portrait  provides and excellent insight.

But the most engaging effort was the publication of James Joyce book - Ulysses.  Beach published no other book, but this was an effort that for love, not for money - Joyce burnt through all the money that came in for the book.  James Joyce has a special place throughout the book and this complex Irish Writer comes through the simple, but insightful short essays that serve as chapters.

James Joyce

Rawhide Justice - Max Brand

I have to read 2 -3 westerns a year for relaxation and nostalgia. Most Westerns follow a formula that is predictable, but still fun. In Rawhide Justice Brand created an unusual set of characters and tweaks the formula to make a very enjoyable storyline. A hero who is slim and wiry instead of muscular, who carries a rope instead of a gun, and a number of amoral characters who spice the book up. There are gypsies, a jailbreak,horses, and a set of three challenges that the hero - Reata must face. Like Hercules he must take a different tact to solve and survive each.

It is a clever story and despite the fact that it could never be considered great literature, it was still engaging.  Max Brand's most famous book and one I really enjoyed too was Destry Rides Again which was made into a movie.  Frederick Faust was a prolific writer who published over 500 books and 300 hundred of them were under the Pen Name - Max Brand. 

Born in Seattle (1892), Faust moved to the San Joaquin Valley California at a young age where he became orphaned and raised by High School Principal Thomas Downey.  Downey introduced him to classical literature which added to the romantic adventure books he had been devouring and influenced how he would eventually write. 

In 1921 he developed a heart condition that threatened his life.  A contemporary and competitor with Zane Grey, he was able to be independent in style - the Grey formula was not yet set for the genre - and yet, in pursuit of lifestyle he also followed Grey - lavish spending, acquiring lots of showy items and finding both a wife and a set of lovers. 

His Westerns were turned in to Tom Mix movies and his doctor series under another pseudonym was the source of a series of Dr Kildare movies.  He died as a War Correspondent in Italy in 1944.  

Ty Cobb - A Terrible Beauty by Charles Leerhsen

I read this to learn more about the first of the modern era superstars (Cap Anson had been the deadball era superstar). In my brain Cobb would be followed by Babe Ruth, Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, Mays, Aaron, McGwire, and Bonds as the icons of their age.

But I soon found that there was a second story that was just as fascinating.  If Cobb was not quite the monster that was in the movie and if he was not the man who was featured in the previous biography, how did we swallow this myth?  Why did we believe it?

The book does tell about Cobb's life, especially his baseball career, but it also lets us in on a secret that has been kept for decades - Al Stump, the previous biographer was a liar.

He lied in many ways throughout his life and as Leershsen tries to fact check the Stump story he finds that one lie leads to another and then another.  Stump saw gold in the lies he told and he also got fame.  His follow up article in True Magazine got him his biggest pay day and added layers of lies to what he had already written.

The difficult and well handled truth of this biography is that Ty Cobb was not particularly lovable.  He was complex and he did have a hair trigger temper, but he was not the racist, killer, spike sharpening ghoul that many of us had been taught.

His popularity was up and down with the fans and the other players like Barry Bonds and Alex Rodriguez, but his play on the field was always intense and it was a style that no one else has had, except maybe Rickey Henderson.  It was a psychological style of intimidation on the bases.  Henderson had this too and unnerved many pitcher and player, but he could not get on base like Cobb, a .366 lifetime average.

Cobb played against Ruth and lived to see the long ball take over.  It was hard for him to accept the change, but that is true of many of us "old-timers".

Through the biography you will meet many of the stars and characters of the early stage of modern baseball and it is a fascinating and well written journey.

The Wright Brothers by David McCullough

David McCullough just demonstrated how little I knew about these two important brothers and their unknown sister.  Almost everyone remembers that they made bikes and flew the first flight at a place called Kittyhawk.  And that is all most of us know.

But there was much more to their story than waking up and telling each other, lets build a flying machine.   They did research, they connected with the leading men in the small aviation world, and they did prototypes and gliders.

They not only built a plane, they also learned how to fly.  They used gliders to hone their skill and they build small scale wind tunnels to test ideas.  These men were engineers and scientists as well as the first pilots.

Then the big moment happens and the first reaction in the US was a yawn, but this did not discourage them.  They believed in what they were doing and even though they had to travel to France to get the encouragement they needed and some financial reward, they knew that eventually the US would discover and act on their work.

Their persistence with their own time and their own money to build this plane was amazing and well documented in a McCullough classic.  No write today does research better than this author and the writing is so clear and factual that you finish the book feeling like you know the subject.

Well organized and thorough, flight is the fourth character in this book, its early history and people like Langely who headed the Smithsonian and had lots of money and resources, but was secretive and did not share with the brothers and Octave Chanute, born in Paris, an American Civil Engineer, who did encourage and share his knowledge are part of the flight story.

Wilbur and Orville Wright almost come out as one character.  They were so close and stayed that way, unmarried except to their project, we start to see the subtle differences in the two dedicated men.

And ultimately the cast of characters will have the man they hired to run the shop and do their mechanical engineering as well as the sister who takes a prominent role after the flight.

The final important character is their father, the bishop, who is in the background of the story, yet is the key to the inspiration through a toy he gave the boys when they were young.

Great read and

A Nice Little Place on the North Side by George Will

I was disappointed.  George Will is a strong baseball fan and some of his writing is excellent, but this is low on the list.  As he says at the end he is gushing, but more than anything this story of Wrigley Field went in so many directions that it lost the most important direction - a narrative from beginning to end.

We learn about psychological and sociological studies, the text includes Shakespeare, Goethe, and quotes from Great Expectations and William Butler Yeats.

There are baseball references - a trivia distributed throughout text - which is fun, but too short to satisfy the baseball fan who wants to wallow in the suffering of cubs fans.

It is short and part of it are really enjoyable, but overall it is for those in love with the stadium.

River-Horse by William Least Heat-Moon.

Because I have walked around Lake Superior and taken the entire Mississippi River I really looked forward to this book. I did enjoy it, but I wanted more of the places, the scenery, the rivers and the lakes. 

It was a personal adventure and perhaps a quest so it focused on the passengers and the problems. It was fun and there were some real challenges that they surmounted.

All adventurers can relate to a crazy dream like this and the effort it took to boat from the Atlantic to the Pacific.  Imagine - he went up the Erie Canal, he boated the length of the Ohio and the Missouri rivers and came out where Lewis and Clark met the Pacific Ocean.  It is quite a feat. 

For light enjoyable reading I recommend it.

The Adventures of Arthur Conan Doyle by Russell Miller

I have always been a fan of Sherlock and I knew of the antipathy of the author towards his star creation, so, of course, I have been curious about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and this book answered all the questions.

Unfortunately, it answered much more than I really wanted to know. It is exhaustive and exhausting.  Still it is a biography I am glad I read.  Doyle is a fascinating tragic figure.

He tries to live the adventurous life and has grandiose dreams.  Here is a man who creates Challenger in the Lost World, Sherlock in a grand series of mystery stories and yet he loves his creation Sir Nigel and assesses almost forgotten novels as his prize creation.

He travels to South Africa where he is Watson in the Boer War and throughout his life he travels the world.

In the end, this man who can create the intellectual detective - Holmes - who possesses no patience with the frills of mysticism, finds himself the world's foremost advocate of spiritualism.

He is deceived in a way that will mark the final decades of his life, ruin friendship, and lose him both money and respect.  He dies happy and rich so it does not destroy him, but he cannot see through the trickery.  This pits him against Houdini, the great magician, who wants to expose the fraud and from friendship they grow to competitive opposites like Holmes and Moriarity.

Animal Wise by Virginia Morell

For too long humans have sought to reinforce our egotistical place as elite among life. We have insisted only we can make and use tools, but now we find many species, genera, and families of life can use tools.

We thought only we had feelings, thoughts, language, but as the scientists in this book discover, all animals have thought and many have abilities that actually exceed ours.

To those who like the old ladder of life with us on the top rung it is time to change. It is time to acknowledge that life of all forms and shapes has the values and abilities that make them special.

True, we have a language that allows writing and preservation of facts and knowledge, but that is where our genetic development has accomplished the most.

The issue is that when we respect the fact that animals can speak, learn, communicate, feel emotions, feel pain we develop an empathy for them. Most important we develop a respect. And then we know that their loss is a loss for the planet and for us. 

Human treatment, like cleaning the air and the water is not a burden, it is what we should expect if we as a species have the highest order of thought - ethics. 

Each chapter is a different thread, each story from ants to fish to birds to apes to dogs is insightful, entertaining and educational.