The primary reason this story of a race horse, his owner, jockey, and especially, his trainer, became a best seller is Hillenbrand’s ability to create drama and especially suspense. She writes well enough that for everyone of Seabiscuit’s horse races I felt like gripping the rail and screaming my head off as he came around the backstretch. I was wracked by despair each time Seabiscuit inflamed a tendon. I learned more about thoroughbred racing than I knew there was to learn and can hardly wait for an opportunity to get to a track. Additionally, the book is interesting because the horse was the most famous person in the U.S. in 1939, moreso than Roosevelt, Hitler, or Mussolini, and I’d never heard of him. It reminded me of A Civil Action, by Jonathan Harr in the way the book read like a suspense novel, rather than a dry nonfiction piece about horses. June 2006.
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Paris to the Moon by Adam Gopnik ** (of 4)
Great writing, but plotless, so it was hard to keep reading. They were better when they were New Yorker Letters from Paris.
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Oracle Bones by Peter Hessler **** (of 4)
Normally when a magazine writer — Hessler is a New Yorker correspondent — assembles a book it feels like a compilation of previously published articles. Not so for Oracle Bones because Hessler manages to hold together the fine details of daily life in China — the smell of soup, the dust in Tiananmen Square, the rumble of trucks — with the global signficance of China’s headlong rush into industrialization and capitalism. Throughout it all he uses plot generated by three or four characters whose stories intertwine leaving me with only a minor, though forgiveable, sense of contrivance. In sum Hessler has given me an impression of China in the first decade of the 2000s that is built on jiade, false or bootleg versions of everything from DVDs to college diplomas, and a culture just beginning to wonder what the consequences of mass capitalization is having on the spiritual core of its people. A surprisingly easy read for such a long, detailed book. December 2007. -
The Lost Painting: The Quest for a Caravaggio Masterpiece ** (of 4)
Harr is a wonderful writer and does his best to create a mystery story around the search for and ultimate discovery of a Caravaggio painting that’s been lost for a couple of hundred years. It’s a fascinating insiders view of art historians and art conservators. Harr does a good job of locating and expressing the eccentricities of a couple of main characters, building a modicum of suspense as he goes. In the end, however, you know the painting will be found and that dispenses with the mystery, leaving only a story about a brilliant young art history student and an isolated conservator honing in on the same painting. It’s not a long read; it’s certainly worth a couple of afternoons. December 2005.
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Going with the Grain by Susan Seligson ** (of 4)
Eight travel stories about bread in Morocco, Jordan, Brooklyn, the Wonder Bread factory in Massachusetts and so forth. Seligson writes well enough. Her stories are cute, you get to know places, but there doesn’t seem to be a point to it all. It’s like reading a blog. I’m sure her family loved the book. March 2009. -
Game Time by Roger Angell *** (of 4)
A collection of Angell’s best stories about baseball. Vintage Angell. He’s one of the greatest writers in the English language on any topic.
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The Founding Fish by John McPhee ** (of 4)
Classic late McPhee. Dense, exquisitely written, and plotless.
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Fire by Sebastian Junger *** (of 4)
This is a series of reports from the late 90s, magazine articles originally, about dangerous jobs and dangerous people: smokejumpers, jihadists in Afghanistan, blood thirsty rebels in Ivory Coast, massacres in Kosovo. Junger displays two traits that have become his hallmark. One is his fascination with danger that he brings to life because of his fearlessness as a reporter. The second is his extraordinary attributes as a writer. A series of articles that could have become monotonous instead were riveting in every aspect by their understated sense of place and time. There isn’t an extra word in his text, nor ever an exclamation mark, yet his impact arrives like a boxer’s punch. February 2008.
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A Death in Belmont by Sebastian Junger **** (of 4)
In the early 60s the Boston Strangler attacked, murdered, and then raped eleven women in and around the city. A black man with a criminal record was arrested, tried, and convicted for the murder and rape of the aged Bessie Goldberg on the basis of circumstantial evidence. Years later a shady handyman who worked in Junger’s home while his mother was home alone with him admits to the murders, also without providing concrete evidence. Junger recounts the stories of the two potential murderers and leaves it to the reader to draw conclusions. The story is more terrifying than any fictional murder mystery and simultaneously a strong lesson in the principles of the rule of law: better to have ten guilty men walk free than a single innocent man wrongly convicted. September 2008. -
The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs, and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries by Marilyn Johnson * (of 4)
The book is deadly boring. It might have made a decent one-pager in a fluffy magazine. Johnson is obsessed with obituaries, which, admittedly, can have their appeal, but the book focuses instead on obitiuary writers. As a group they aren’t any more interesting than orthodontists or reporters that follow the daily fluctuations of treasury bonds. September 2006.