The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin by H. W. Brands

Very informative but a bit on the dull side

The First American, published in 2000, is a biography of Benjamin Franklin written by H. W. Brands, a professor of history at the University of Texas who has published about 40 books, many of them, like this one, written for a general reading audience. The First American was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in history. Having previously read Franklin’s incomplete Autobiography, I was looking for a more detailed account of this Founding Father’s life, one accessible to a nonhistorian. I was satisfied with the education I received from this book, but it wasn’t as engaging of a read as some of the other Founding Father biographies I’ve read from among recent bestsellers.

Brands has clearly done his research. It seems unlikely he left any sizable stones unturned. This is a very comprehensive and informative account of Franklin’s life filled with much detail. I just found it rather boring. Of course, Franklin did not lead a boring life. The problem, therefore, is that Brands chose to focus on aspects of Franklin’s life that didn’t really interest me so much personally. I work in the printing and publishing industries, so I was happy to read about Franklin’s career in those fields. Brands, however, is so admiring of Franklin’s writing that he wants to reproduce every clever turn of phrase, allegorical anecdote, and bon mot that Franklin ever put to paper. In particular, Brands seems a little obsessed with Poor Richard’s Almanac, to which he devotes much ink. The result often reads more like a book of quotations than a biography. Brands states that, “The primary source for any life of Benjamin Franklin is Franklin himself,” and Brands has certainly diligently mined his subject’s published writing and correspondence. What the book could have used more of is perspectives on Franklin from his contemporaries.

Real estate deals and legal proceedings are also favorite subjects of Brands that are discussed at length, with every dollar or pound amount meticulously enumerated. During his lifetime, Franklin was the world’s most famous American largely due to his scientific achievements. Although Brands does occasionally touch on Franklin’s career as a scientist (or natural philosopher, as they used to be called), I really wish there had been more on that aspect of his life rather than the constant praising of Franklin’s literary endeavours and witty correspondence.

Another problem with the book is that Franklin often seems like a supporting character in his own biography. Brands supplies so much historical context that Franklin is absent from the book for too many pages at a time. Lengthy asides are devoted to William Pitt and George III, for example, and much more than I ever wanted to know about British Parliament. Obviously, Franklin played a major role in the founding of the United States of America. He did so, however, mostly in London and Paris, so the reader gets more on diplomatic history in Europe than on the Revolutionary War in America. When Brands does cover the Revolution, it often feels like an unnecessarily lengthy aside. Why do we need a blow-by-blow account of the hardships at Valley Forge or the Battle of Yorktown, for example, when Franklin was on the other side of the Atlantic?

Even having said all that, I have to admit I did get a thorough education on Franklin and some insight into his personality. I just never felt compelled to move on to the next chapter. Unlike, say, Ron Chernow’s book on George Washington, reading The First American felt more like a chore than a labor of love. Given the fascinating life that Franklin led, and the impact he had on American and world history, that really shouldn’t have been a problem.

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Life: A Natural History of the First Four Billion Years of Life on Earth by Richard Fortey

An excellent paleontological overview of our planet’s past

Richard Fortey is a senior paleontologist at London’s Natural History Museum. In addition to his output of academic research, he has written several science books for a general reading audience, including Life, originally published in 1997. In this book, Fortey provides a four-billion-year biography of life on Earth, following the course of evolution from our planet’s first molecules of living matter to we humans today. Fortey has delivered an intentionally nonacademic book with very few footnotes and almost no bibliography, but the subject matter is not drastically dumbed-down for the lay reader. This impressive, engaging, and comprehensive work likely amounts to an undergraduate college course worth of natural history.

Although this book is aimed at a popular audience, Fortey doesn’t just jump right into the crowd-pleasing dinosaurs, mammoths, and cavemen. Much like history itself, the majority of the book is populated by microbes and invertebrates. Fortey, an expert on trilobites, has no problem giving the Precambrian and Paleozoic species their due for having ruled the Earth far longer than we have. His ability to make these earlier, slimier periods of our planet’s history compelling and engaging is quite remarkable. He has a knack for drawing scenes of long-past environments that make the reader feel immersed in a live-action diorama of biological activity. Fortey manages to make Ordovician molluscs every bit as exciting as a museum display of robotic dinosaurs.

I wouldn’t say there were many surprising revelations in this book. Don’t expect a definitive answer to the origin of life, for example. Fortey seems disposed towards the cosmic seeding theory, in which organic molecules were deposited on Earth by comets or meteors. That may very well be possible, but whenever I hear that theory it just seems like a cop out to me, a theoretical passing of the buck. Even if life did came from space, somewhere in the universe, at some time, there had to have been a primordial soup, yet we still can’t come up with a viable explanation of how physics and chemistry created biology.

The cause of the extinction of the dinosaurs, as explained here, is no surprise either. Fortey does, however, provide some very interesting background on how the meteor theory was formulated and the history of resistance against it. That’s pretty indicative of the book as a whole. Most of us already know much about the history of life on Earth from school or science magazines or educational TV programs. Fortey makes the subject more exciting by fleshing out the basics with fascinating details and intriguing examples. He also frequently delves into the history of paleontology as a discipline, highlighting key figures, their momentous discoveries, and the major debates in the field. In addition, Fortey includes anecdotes of his own paleontological field work. The result of all this is like sitting in the study of a distinguished professor as he regales you with his encyclopedic knowledge of nature and evolution in a casual, conversational manner. I not only learned a great deal about natural history from this book, I also gained a much better idea of what exactly paleontologists do and how they work.

I had previously read Richard Dawkins’s The Ancestor’s Tale, which is a book with a similar scope and purpose as this one. Dawkins covers the history of life on Earth by moving backward in time, while Fortey starts at the beginning and moves forward. Of the two, Fortey’s writing is far better. His prose is more engaging, his asides more relevant, and his overall delivery of information more educational. If I had to choose one book to refer to on matters pertaining to paleontology and natural history, Life would be it. It is really an impressive achievement.

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A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

Too much style and not enough substance

A Clockwork Orange, a novel by British author Anthony Burgess, was first published in 1962. It is a work of dystopian science fiction set in a near-future London of unspecified date. Burgess may be considered a giant of letters in Britain, but most American readers likely only know his name from the famous 1971 film adaptation of this novel, directed by Stanley Kubrick. In my opinion, this is one of those rare cases where the film is better than the book.

The first aspect of A Clockwork Orange that strikes the reader from page one is that the book is written in its own idiosyncratic language. The novel is narrated by Alex, a juvenile delinquent, who speaks in a futuristic slang invented by Burgess. Alex leads a gang of four who spend their nights wreaking havoc in London—beating, raping, and robbing random targets. There is certainly more to the book than that, but for those who may not have seen the film, I won’t reveal any more of the plot. Burgess injects the book with satirical social commentary on everything from the justice system to the profession of psychiatry to middle class family values.

Many science fiction writers use invented words to denote everything from futuristic technology to alien races in their novels. Books such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World or Frank Herbert’s Dune require the reader to accustom oneself to the terminology of their fictional worlds. In A Clockwork Orange, however, the entire text is written in this slanguage in which every fourth or fifth word is replaced by an invented term, even common words such as “face,” “hand,” or “guy” (“litso,” “rooker,” and “veck,” respectively). At first this hits the reader like a barrage of Mad Libs using nonsense words. After a few chapters, however, one picks up the slang and can understand what Alex is saying with little trouble. It never really comes across as realistic, however, since the slang terms sound anything but natural. Burgess apparently used Slavic words to form many of the new terms, but yet there is never any explanation for this Slavic influence on London. By the end of the book, we find out that not everyone in future London speaks this way, just some teenagers, which makes it seem even more unrealistic and unnecessary.

The slang also has the effect of deadening any emotional impact the book might deliver. Scenes that should be scary, repulsive, or funny are seen through a filter of this slang that blocks out much of their power to shock or move the reader. Much like Kubrick’s film adaptation, Burgess’s novel is notorious for its scenes of violence and rape. The book, however, comes across as tame compared to the movie, likely because of this slang effect. As a dystopian future, A Clockwork Orange isn’t shocking enough, and as a satire, it’s not funny enough.

If you take away this slang, however, what’s left is a pretty simple and predictable plot. Like the Kubrick film, most of the exciting stuff happens in the beginning of the book, while the third act makes for a relatively dull and inevitable conclusion. The film, however, has the benefit of Kubrick’s vision (or his art director’s) in depicting Alex’s future world in far more detail than Burgess describes it. The milk bar, for example, amounts to little more than the phrase “milk bar” in Burgess’s novel, while Kubrick and company crafted it into an innovative and memorable environment. A Clockwork Orange has been hailed by various critics as one of the greatest novels of the 20th century, but if you read a lot of dystopian science fiction you would think there are other books in the genre more striking and influential than this one, like Huxley’s Brave New World, Orwell’s 1984, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, or Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Probably the only people who should read A Clockwork Orange are those obsessed with Kubrick’s movie, but that same demographic is likely to find the book disappointing by comparison.

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The Treasure of the Sierra Madre by B. Traven

Riveting and realistic adventure novel

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is the second novel by B. Traven, a German author who lived for years in Mexico, where most of his fiction is set. The novel was first published in German in 1927, then published in English translation in 1935. This is by far Traven’s most famous book, due largely to the 1949 film adaptation, which won three Academy Awards. The movie is quite faithful to Traven’s novel, so if you’ve already seen that film, don’t expect any plot surprises here. Nevertheless, the book is every bit as riveting as the movie, thanks to Traven’s skillful and suspenseful writing. Even though the novel was published over two decades before the film adaptation, Traven’s dialogue remarkably reads as if it were written for Humphrey Bogart and Walter Huston. If you haven’t seen the movie, how lucky you are that you get to experience this story for the first time in its original form.

The story opens in Tampico on the Gulf Coast. Traven introduces us to the white underbelly of this Mexican city—an assortment of unemployed gringo drifters who wander from town to town, looking for work with oil companies, mining companies, and other resource extraction industries (almost all of which, in the 1920s, would have been owned by American and European corporations). Two such drifters, Dobbs and Curtin, meet while looking for work. When spending the night in a fleabag flophouse, they meet an old prospector named Howard who regales them with stories of a lost gold mine. Sick of the grind of dead-end short term jobs of back-breaking labor for low pay, Dobbs and Curtin decide they want to try their hand at gold-hunting, and they invite Howard to be their partner and mentor. The three venture into the mountains of the Sierra Madre where they have some luck finding a promising dig site. As Howard points out, however, finding the gold is easier than getting it out of the ground and carrying it somewhere safe.

Adventure novels were ubiquitous in the early 20th century, but The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is one of the few that rises to the level of great literature. The story is very realistic and deliberately unromanticized. Only in three flashback stories-within-the-story does the narrative venture into something approaching folklore and legend. Traven’s depiction of Mexico bears the mark of someone who has been there and lived this drifter’s life. This is no tourist’s outsider vision of the romantic tropics. The Mexicans in the book are illustrated with the same perspicacity as the leading trio of American characters. Going back to Jack London and beyond, so many thousands of stories have been written about what gold does to a man’s mind and morals that the premise has become cliché. None of those stories, however, are as psychologically authentic as what Traven presents here. His characters think and behave like real flawed human beings, not storybook heroes and villains. With his intelligent insights into human nature and his realistic depiction of life-and-death drama, Traven’s novel reads as if it could have been written by one of the great naturalist novelists like Frank Norris or Emile Zola.

Traven often expresses socialistic, anarchistic, and atheistic views in his writings. Here such ideas are toned down a bit from the more overt statements and satire in his debut novel The Cotton-Pickers. Nevertheless, Traven still manages to work some anti-capitalist, anti-church, and anti-imperialist sentiments into The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. You won’t find much of that expressed in the Bogart film, which is another good reason to read Traven’s original text. Judging by what I’ve read in this novel and in The Cotton-Pickers, Traven is a writer who was way ahead of his time, both in terms of the blunt frothrightness of his realism and the fearlessness with which he deviates from the conservative mainstream literature of his time. Both of Traven’s first two novels are excellent, and I look forward to following his literary career further.
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Ferdydurke by Witold Gombrowicz

If Eugene Ionesco wrote Billy Madison

Witold Gombrowicz (1904-1969) is one of Poland’s internationally best-known authors of the twentieth century. Ferdydurke, published in 1937, is his debut novel, after having previously published some poetry and short stories. I have an outsider’s interest in Polish culture, and I like to explore Polish literature old and new. I had previously read Gombrowicz’s 1965 novel Cosmos, which I enjoyed quite a bit. Like Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, or Eugene Ionesco, Gombrowicz is known for his absurd sense of humor and for pushing the envelope of narrative form in his fiction. In Ferdydurke, however, his envelope-pushing challenged my attention span, and his absurdity failed to inspire laughter.

Like much of its content, the word “Ferdydurke” is simply nonsensical, and isn’t even used in the text. The narrator of the novel is Johnnie, a 30-year-old writer whom critics have accused of immaturity. Such criticism is taken very literally when a professor named Pimko, an old acquaintance of the narrator, demands that Johnnie relive his youth. Pimko sends Johnnie to a school for boys, where everyone inexplicably perceives him as roughly a 15- or 16-year-old. Also inexplicable is why Johnnie doesn’t just say no to Pimko and refuse to be demoted to youthdom, but then there wouldn’t be much of a story to tell. Eventually, Johnnie becomes infatuated with a teenage girl and vies for her affection with other suitors, young and old, with comic results.

Ferdydurke is a satirical novel. In fact, it satirizes just about everything—the young and the old, the rich and the poor, the liberal and the conservative, the urban and the rural, literary criticism, the educational system, class distinctions, the pretensions of intellectualism, love, nostalgia, conventions of masculinity, so-called modernity, and the fetishizing of youth. Unfortunately, I found very little of this satire to be actually funny, and only small portions of it to be mildly amusing. Maybe with some good comic actors and some rapidly paced direction, this might amount to a somewhat entertaining movie, but on paper it felt like a witless waste of time.

What I do like about Gombrowicz’s writing is that even though it’s experimental and intended to be humorous, he does tell his story through actual sentences with correct syntax. It’s not an anything-goes modernist language game like something by James Joyce or Gertrude Stein. As he did in Cosmos, Gombrowicz does repeat a few choice words over and over again like a beat poet beating a bongo. In this case, those words are “thighs,” “youthful,” “stable-boy,” “fraternize,” and “bum” as in buttocks (from the English translation by Eric Mosbacher).

Ferdydurke is now considered a cult classic, which probably means many people like to think they’re cool for liking it whether they understand it or not, something like the Polish equivalent of William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch. I suspect probably the only people who really understand Ferdydurke, however, are Poles or their European neighbors who lived through the 1930s or thereabouts. Rather than a satiric masterpiece, I thought this was just a self-indulgent exercise in nonsense. It didn’t offend me with its self-indulgence like, say, Gunter Grass’s The Tin Drum. Instead, Ferdydurke just bored me. It was like listening to a silly children’s song repeated over and over again until it just makes you want to go to sleep. Cosmos was also innovative and goofy, but I felt it had a purpose, whereas here the satire just seemed simplistic, pointless, and unfunny.
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The Labyrinth of Solitude by Octavio Paz

Insightful analysis of a national psyche

In 1990, Octavio Paz became the first (and only, thus far) Mexican writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. His literary output includes over two dozen books of poetry. A volume of essays, however, is likely his best-known work among a worldwide readership. El laberinto de la soledad was first published in 1950. In 1961, it was published in English translation as The Labyrinth of Solitude. As indicated by the book’s subtitle, Life and Thought in Mexico, Paz analyzes the national character and spirit of his homeland, encapsulating not only the political but also the psychic state of the nation at the time of publication.

The original edition of The Labyrinth of Solitude is divided into nine chapters, each of which could be a free-standing essay on one or more aspects of Mexican culture. (Later editions, after 1970, may include an additional essay.) Because the book is now over 70 years old, some of its content may unavoidably be a bit outdated, but for the most part Paz’s observations still bear a timeless ring of truth. This is largely due to the fact that so much of Paz’s elucidation of the Mexican character revolves around the Mexican people’s coming to terms with their past—with their pre-Colombian history, the myths and religion of their heritage, the Spanish Conquest, Catholicism, the War for Independence, the Revolution, and the historical role of women in Mexican society. Born during the Revolution and writing less than four decades after that momentous upheaval, Paz illustrates how the mindset of the modern Mexican was forged from the country’s turbulent history. Paz’s attitude toward the Spanish Conquest, and Catholicism in particular, is not entirely negative and comes across as relatively lenient by today’s standards. We now regard European colonization as unilaterally evil and tragic, but Paz (and others of his era) seem more resigned to the brutal past as if it were an ugly contaminating ingredient that nevertheless proved essential in forging the strong and resilient alloy of an enduring racial and national spirit.

The scope of Paz’s text is not strictly confined to Mexico. Much of what he has to say about the Spanish Conquest and colonialism applies more broadly to Latin America in general. Also, in one of the latter chapters, Paz presents a very interesting and thoughtful perspective on twentieth-century world history, focusing primarily on the political and economic ramifications of numerous third-world revolutions and liberations from imperial colonizers. In the final chapter, Paz also addresses issues of gender roles, women’s rights, love, marriage, and sexuality with statements that shed light on Mexican attitudes but also speak of humanity as a whole. Paz is first and foremost a poet, not a historian, philosopher, or sociologist, so unlike writers in those disciplines he can get away with making bold metaphorical or opinionated statements without necessarily backing up his assertions with hard empirical evidence. Nevertheless, his arguments here are soundly reasoned and articulately stated (at least in the English translation by Lysander Kemp).

I read this book as an outsider with an interest in Mexican culture. I was hoping for insightful glimpses into Mexican life from one of that nation’s greatest intellectuals and men of letters, and in that regard, Paz did not disappoint. This book will no doubt be more meaningful, however, to readers of Mexican or Latino heritage. The Labyrinth of Solitude is a concise yet deep examination of the Mexican cultural and political zeitgeist as it existed almost three-quarters of a century ago. Much has changed in Mexico since then, but many of Paz’s conclusions are still very relevant today.  

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Six Characters in Search of an Author by Luigi Pirandello

Innovative for its time, but an underwhelming read today

Italian writer Luigi Pirandello won the 1934 Nobel Prize in Literature. He is best-known and highly acclaimed as a playwright, though he also published novels, short stories, and poetry. His play Six Characters in Search of an Author was first staged in 1921. At that time, the audience responded with jeers. History has been kinder, however, and the play is now regarded as a groundbreaking work in theatrical history. For its time, the play pushes the envelope of what was acceptable on a stage in a way that presages the works of later “Theatre of the Absurd” playwrights like Eugene Ionesco and Samuel Beckett.

The play consists of three acts. The scenes take place on a stage during rehearsals for a play, so the sets present a behind-the-scenes look at the theatrical process, from a relatively bare stage to some apparently unfinished stage decorations for the future performance to come. The members of a theatre troupe are gathered on the stage, rehearsing for the production of a play (also by Luigi Pirandello). Then, in through the backstage door wanders a family of six unnamed individuals, led by a father figure who explains that they are six characters looking for a playwright to dramatize their story for the stage. The manager of the theatre company resents the interruption of his rehearsal and demands that the interlopers leave immediately. The six characters, however, manage to relate enough of their story—involving extramarital affairs, a broken marriage, and prostitution—to pique the director’s interest. He decides to adapt the family’s story for the stage and produce it as a play to be performed by his company.

This sort of meta-drama would have been very novel and even shocking to Pirandello’s audience of 1921. A century later, however, such plays-within-plays have become commonplace in theatre, television, and film. Actors in today’s biopics frequently collaborate with their subjects on the development of their characters (if those subjects are still living), much like the relationship between the stage director and the family depicted here. In the postmodern era, the boundaries and intersections between fiction and reality have been explored to much more extreme lengths than Pirandello has done here. Charlie Kauffmann’s films Being John Malkovich and Adaptation spring to mind, or even some episodes of Seinfeld. By comparison to these and many other recent examples, Characters in Search of an Author feels relatively pedestrian. But someone had to break every boundary first, and thus the value of this play relies on its historical precedence and subsequent influence. There have been plays-within-plays going back to Shakespeare and likely earlier, but Pirandello certainly takes a leap forward here in terms of thinking outside that box.

When performed on a stage, Six Characters in Search of an Author might very well be a lively and entertaining play. When read from the page, however, it is far from enthralling. The dialogue consists largely of the theatre company and the family disagreeing about how the story should be told. One side will say, “It should be done like this!” and the other responds, “No, that’s wrong, let’s do it this way instead!” over and over again for 70 to 90 minutes. To today’s readers, the play isn’t absurd enough to be funny and isn’t serious enough to be compelling drama. It may have historical significance, but you’d be better off reading works by those “Theatre of the Absurd” writers who built on Pirandello’s idea.
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Mathematics in Twentieth-Century Literature and Art: Content, Form, Meaning by Robert Tubbs

Case studies of math’s influence on the arts, some more pertinent than others

The late Robert Tubbs was a professor of mathematics at the University of Colorado. In his book Mathematics in Twentieth-Century Literature and Art, published in 2014, Tubbs explores instances where math and art intersect. Although the book delves into some complex mathematical concepts, the text is accessible to a general reader with an interest in math, the arts, or both.

This book consists of ten chapters, each of which follows a similar structure: (1) Tubbs opens with a simple, obvious example of how mathematical concepts were employed in the creation of a work of art or literature. Kazimir Malevich made paintings of geometric shapes, for example. Jasper Johns used numbers in his paintings. Poet André Breton included mathematical imagery in some of his surrealist writings. In these examples, the artistic connections to mathematical concepts often seem tenuous at best and leave the reader thinking, “Well, duh!” (2) Tubbs, proceeds, however, to discuss the work of a particular mathematician and explain his concepts and theories to the reader, such as David Hilbert’s explorations into non-Euclidean geometry, Gotlieb Frege’s use of set theory to define what a number is, Eduard Zeckendorf’s theorem involving Fibonacci numbers, and Charles Howard Hinton’s books on the fourth dimension. (3) Finally, Tubbs then caps the chapter off by presenting a work of art or literature with a more complex relationship to the mathematical concept at hand. These examples are often by a lesser-known artist, for example painter Alfred Jensen, writer Albert Wachtel, or poet Paul Braffort. These works, however, bear a more integral relationship to math than the more obvious examples covered earlier in the chapter. Tubbs frequently draws upon works by dada and surrealist artists. The experimental musical compositions of John Cage are also discussed. In the literature category, many of the works covered are by members of the Oulipo group, a French movement whose members often employ mathematical structures in their work.

In considering this tripartite division of each chapter, the third portion was really what I expected when I purchased the book, and the second part of each chapter taught me much about mathematics. In the opening portions of each chapter, however, the loose connections between the art discussed and mathematics often felt forced and sometimes pointless (e.g. Are Johns’s number paintings really math?). In his preface, Tubbs states that he hopes “this book will appeal to non-mathematicians interested in literature or the arts who are curious about twentieth-century trends and the occasional glimpses of mathematical ideas in those trends.” That would be me. My education was in art, not in math, so naturally I learned more about math from this book than I did about art. Tubbs does a commendable job of explaining higher-level mathematical concepts and theories to lay readers. The beginnings of chapters at times feel too elementary because Tubbs is starting at square one for the general reader, but by the end of the chapter some intellectual heavy lifting may be required. I will confess I found the math confusing in a couple passages, but not so much that I lost my bearings as to what Tubbs was saying about the art.

This book is not so much a comprehensive history of the use of mathematics in art but rather a collection of interesting case studies. The ten chapters somewhat call to mind Martin Gardner’s old Mathematical Games columns in Scientific American, but with a focus on the arts. Like “mental floss” for Mensa candidates, Tubbs draws the reader’s attention to artistic and literary curiosities and trivia while teaching them complicated mathematics along the way. The coverage has more breadth than depth, but Tubbs brings up a lot of intriguing works that artists and writers seriously interested in this topic will want to track down for further investigation.

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Showcase Presents The Witching Hour by Alex Toth, et al.

Great art, terrible writing

Showcase Presents is DC Comics’ line of trade paperbacks for classic comic reprints, similar to Marvel’s Essentials series. Showcase is the title of a DC anthology series that featured different characters in every issue. The Showcase Presents books, however, don’t necessarily have anything to do with that series. Showcase Presents The Witching Hour was published in 2013. It reprints issues #1 to 19 of DC’s old horror anthology series The Witching Hour. These issues were originally released from February 1969 to March 1972.

Just as EC Comics’ Tales of the Crypt had its Crypt-Keeper as host or MC, The Witching Hour has its own trio of hostesses in the form of three witches named Mildred, Mordred, and Cynthia. The first two are traditional ugly old-crone witches, while their step-sister Cynthia is a hot modern witch. In each issue they have a contest to see who can tell the best stories. This doesn’t really work to the series’s advantage, however, since three to five pages of each issue are wasted on this filler material. The witches frequently bash each other’s stories, complaining about how terrible they are, which unfortunately rings often far too true. The only bright side to these interludes is that they are often drawn by Alex Toth.

As one would expect from this genre, every story ends with a “surprise twist.” In almost all cases, however, the twists are clumsy and disappointing. It’s kind of like when a comedian spends a fair amount of time setting up a joke and then flubs the punchline. And for the better part of the book, every story is like that! You would think from the law of averages that they couldn’t be all bad, but in the first 17 issues there isn’t a single story that deserves to be singled out as impressive from a writing standpoint. Only in issues 18 and 19 does the level of quality start to pick up a little.

The art, on the other hand, is fabulous. I assume The Witching Hour was originally printed in color, but the Showcase Presents series only reproduces the black and white art. Here, however, that’s great, because these stories look beautiful in black and white, and the film-noir feel is appropriate to the genre. This is ‘60s and ‘70s comic art at its best, with old-school masters like Alex Toth, Jack Sparling, Gray Morrow, and Jerry Grandinetti making frequent appearances. Neal Adams and Bernie Wrightson show up a couple times, and Wally Wood once. Not every artist in the volume is a genius, but the majority of the stories are very well illustrated, and even the worst artists in this book are a cut above the average Curt Swan-ish DC style of this era.

I’m not a fan of DC’s superhero universe, but I do enjoy their old comics in other genres, such as their science fiction stories in Strange Adventures and Mystery in Space. (Strange Adventures has two volumes in the Showcase Presents series, Mystery in Space has none.) I thought I would give this horror anthology a try, but I found the quality of stories vastly inferior to the old EC Comics from the 1950s. I really did enjoy the art in these Witching Hour stories though. DC has also published Showcase Presents volumes of their horror titles House of Mystery, House of Secrets, and Tales of the Unexpected. Perhaps one of those books contains more compelling stories than this one.

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Odd John by Olaf Stapledon

An X-Men precursor from the 1930s

British science fiction writer Olaf Stapledon (1886-1950) is far from a household name these days, even among habitual readers of science fiction. Though an inductee into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame, he is one of those figures who has faded into obscurity over time, even though he had a profound influence on subsequent authors in the genre. His writings have been acclaimed by literary figures as diverse as Arthur C. Clarke, Jorge Luis Borges, and Winston Churchill. Stapledon also wrote several nonfiction books of philosophy. His novel Odd John was published in 1935.

Odd John is based on the same premise as J. D. Beresford’s 1911 novel The Hampdenshire Wonder. Both novels are about a strange child born with superhuman intelligence. The narrator of Odd John mentions The Hampdenshire Wonder as if it were historical fact. Stapledon takes the idea much farther than Beresford, however. As a child, John Wainwright, the Odd John of the title, exhibits slow physical development but extremely rapid intellectual development. It soon becomes apparent that his mental abilities far surpass anyone he encounters, even some of the so-called great minds of England. John considers himself superior to, and in fact “more human,” than Homo sapiens. His unnatural intelligence also comes with strange behavior. John exhibits a stoic lack of emotion and a pronounced amorality. Stapledon even delves into John’s kinky sex life with Freudian gusto. John does not consider himself bound by the moral code of regular humans and looks at Homo sapiens more as cattle than as people. The one normal human he befriends is the narrator, a journalist and friend of the family. Beyond this one relationship, John finds normal human society disappointing and alienating, and he begins seeking out others of his kind.

Odd John reminded me a lot of Marvel Comics’ Uncanny X-Men, even to the point where it makes you wonder if Stan Lee or Jack Kirby read this novel. John’s manner of speech immediately called to mind the villain Magneto, especially his use of the term “Homo superior” to describe mutantkind. Both characters also have white hair. As more “supernormals”are discovered, they are of various races and with various enhanced skill sets—mind-reading, time travel, predicting the future, etc., calling to mind the “psionic”-powered mutants of Marvel Comics. Telekinesis—moving objects with the mind—is only hinted at in one scene. Almost all of Odd John’s fellow mutants are juveniles, and when they come together, the older adolescents instruct the younger children, much like at Professor Xavier’s Academy. They found an independent mutant republic reminiscent of the X-Men’s island nation of Genosha. Mankind is frightened of these young mutants, seeing them as the next step in evolution bound to render our kind obsolete and extinct, much like Homo sapiens eclipsed the Neanderthal.

What bothered me about Odd John is that Stapledon’s writing is just so long-winded. He gets so involved in his psychoanalyses of these characters that there is little room left for any actual action to take place. Everything is overexplained, to the point where it seems like Stapledon makes the same point five or six times in a chapter. While I admired the ambitiousness of his futuristic ideas, his lethargic storytelling was a chore to endure. I frequently found it difficult to stay awake while reading this novel. I do think, however, that Stapledon’s sci-fi vision shows enough promise to make me want to investigate more of his work. Considering the science fiction greats who cite him among their influences, he’s bound to have a few good novels in his body of work.

Star Trek Memories by William Shatner with Chris Kreski

More of a TV production history than a personal memoir

Star Trek Memories was published in 1993, after the completion of the sixth Star Trek motion picture, the last to focus exclusively on the original Star Trek cast. Seeing his career as Captain Kirk coming to an end, Shatner felt inclined to wax nostalgic by publishing his recollections of the making of the original Star Trek television series. A sequel published the following year, Star Trek Movie Memories, covers the making of the film franchise. I’m not a Trekkie who obsesses over all the trivia on each episode, but I do enjoy the show, and I like Shatner.

Star Trek Memories is packaged like a Shatner memoir, but that’s not really what it is. This is a behind-the-scenes history of the production of the first Star Trek television series. It begins with Gene Roddenberry’s childhood, and ends in 1968 with Star Trek’s cancellation after three seasons. Shatner doesn’t even get involved with the series until a quarter of the way through the book. Although there are plenty of first-person interjections, this doesn’t really read like it was written in Shatner’s voice. One suspects coauthor Chris Kreski had a heavy hand in this. If you are expecting a lot of secrets and gossip about the cast of the show, you’re not going to find much here. The crew actually gets more coverage than the cast. You learn more about the set decorator and the script editor than you do about any of the actors, with the exception of Leonard Nimoy. He gets a fair amount of ink, even more than Shatner himself. The rest of the cast members pretty much get one good anecdote each. There are several tales of practical jokes among the cast and crew that strike the reader as being surprisingly unfunny, and in some cases just mean.

The refreshing thing about this TV memoir is that it’s not just a relentlessly positive lovefest for the show or a pat-on-the-back “look what we accomplished” story. There is a surprising amount of negative criticism of the show and the people involved with it, including some directed towards Shatner himself. It is forthrightly acknowledged that while some of the Star Trek episodes are masterpieces, quite a few are terrible schlock. The book recounts the constant struggles between the Star Trek production team and its parent studio, who demanded that this ambitious science fiction program be made under a paltry budget. The network also often interfered in the creative direction of the show by censoring stories, pushing for dumbed-down content, and trying to shape the characters to their liking. At the beginning of the book, Gene Roddenberry is portrayed as a veritable saint, but by the end of the narrative he has morphed into a sort of villain. His widow was still alive when the book was published, however, so one gets the idea that Shatner and Kreski had to hold back on any unflattering revelations of the Star Trek creator.

This book is kind of like reading a rock and roll autobiography where the star doesn’t talk much about his famous bandmates but instead says more about his manager, publicist, lawyer, and accountant (I’m looking at you, Pete Townshend). This book wasn’t quite what I expected, but I found it all very interesting nonetheless. Star Trek was first broadcast shortly before I was born, but I did grow up on old-school television, back when there were only three networks. This book gave me a good idea of how shows were made in those days, for better or for worse.  

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Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatán by John Lloyd Stephens

Dueling presidents and Mayan ruins

John Lloyd Stephens (1805-1852) was an American diplomat and travel writer. In 1839, President Martin Van Buren appointed him Ambassador to Central America. Soon after, he traveled to Central America to assume his new post. It’s unclear what exactly his mission was, however, since Stephens just seems to travel around doing whatever he wants. Stephens’s journey lasted several months, during which time he also ventured into Mexico. His account of his expedition, Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatán was published in two volumes in 1841. This book should not be confused with his 1843 publication Incidents of Travel in Yucatán, which covers a second trip Stephens made to Mexico.

In 1839, the several nations of Central America were united under one government, the Federal Republic of Central America. When Stephens arrived in Central America, however, the presidency of that government was in dispute between two warring generals, Rafael Carrera and José Francisco Morazán. Stephens doesn’t seem to favor either would-be presidente but rather curries the favor of whichever he happens to be facing at the time. Stephens spends much of the book chronicling the political and military conflict between these two figures. He met with both generals and witnessed some battles fought and atrocities committed by both parties. Although borders may have been different back then, I believe Stephens’s travels took him through every country in Central America except maybe Panama. He doesn’t venture into Mexico until halfway through Volume 2.

Stephens also explored the ruins of several Mayan cities, three of which are discussed at some length: Copán in Guatemala, Palenque in Chiapas, and Uxmal in the Yucatán. Accompanying him on these explorations was the artist Frederick Catherwood, who documented the sites in drawings and paintings. Stephens had no archaeological training, so his discussions of the Maya don’t really hold up to today’s standards. Catherwood, on the other hand, is the real deal. His illustrations of Mayan ruins are quite remarkable in their attention to detail, particularly when you consider he had almost no precedent to build upon. This book contains dozens of engravings of Catherwood’s drawings, but he also published his own book Views of Ancient Monuments in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan with color lithographs. I don’t want to overemphasize the archaeological content of the book, however, because it’s really only a small portion of the text. The bulk of the two volumes deals with the politics and military matters of Central America, which will likely be of interest mostly to historians of Latin America.

There’s also quite a bit of complaining about unsavory accommodations, incessant mosquitos, and unsatisfactory hired hands. Stephens is more interested in getting to know wealthy Spaniards than the poor Indigenous population, because the former can offer him better lodgings and dinners than the latter. As an explorer and travel writer, Stephens is no Alexander von Humboldt. You’re not going to get a really liberal and enlightened account of Latin American culture and politics, but Stephens is at least a conscientious observer and chronicler of what he sees.

This book is valuable as an outsider’s historical account of what Central America, Chiapas, and the Yucatán were like during this time period. Much of the information imparted, however, won’t hold much interest for today’s reader. Before reading this book, one really needs to consider if it will be worth roughly 24 hours of your reading time. For those only interested in the archaeological sites, just read the illustrated chapters on the Mayan cities.
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The Experimenters: Chance and Design at Black Mountain College by Eva Díaz

A very academic study of three Black Mountain faculty

Robert Rauschenberg is one of my favorite American artists, and I’ve done much reading on his life and artistic career. By association, I’ve also learned a fair amount about his colleagues John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and Buckminster Fuller. At one point circa 1950, they all converged at a mysterious institution in North Carolina called Black Mountain College. Though a small school in an obscure location, Black Mountain had a profound influence on American art. What the Bauhaus was to modern European art, Black Mountain could be thought of as the equivalent force in late-twentieth-century American art. I have always been rather fascinated by this nexus of creativity, but accounts I’ve read of the school have been rather vague and sketchy. I was happy, therefore, to stumble upon Eva Díaz’s 2015 book The Experimenters, hoping it would shed some insightful light on the goings-on at Black Mountain.

The Experimenters is not a comprehensive history of Black Mountain College. From what I gather from this book’s notes, that story may have already been written and published. This, rather, is a narrower monograph focusing on the ideas and careers of three members of Black Mountain’s faculty: Joseph Albers, John Cage, and Buckminster Fuller. While their time at Black Mountain is emphasized, this study looks at their entire careers, including the time before and after their semesters at the North Carolina college. In this book, one doesn’t learn much about the students who studied under these teachers. Black Mountain alumni like Rauschenberg, Willem de Kooning, and Cy Twombly are mentioned briefly but not much delved into, save for a few quotes about their time at the school. One learns more about the influences of the three central figures of the book—Erik Satie as a precursor of Cage, for example, or Laszlo Moholy-Nagy as a colleague of Albers’s at the Bauhaus. Only on rare occasions does the reader really get an idea of what it would have been like to be a student at Black Mountain, attending one of Cage’s theatre productions, for instance, or assisting Fuller with the erection of one of his geodesic domes. Instead, the text focuses more on the intellectual development, artistic philosophies, and pedagogical techniques of the three protagonists, drawn largely from their own published writings and statements from prior interviews.

The writing of this book is very academic. That doesn’t mean you need a PhD to understand it, but you may need a PhD to enjoy it. It is written as if the intended audience were a dissertation committee or a tenure board, not a general reading audience. Díaz’s introduction is very jargon-heavy, to the point where you may find yourself wondering if you really want to go through with the rest of the book. She spends much time contemplating the meaning of the word “experiment.” The average art lover, however, probably couldn’t care less and just wants to know what went on at Black Mountain. Thankfully, the chapters that follow are less esoteric and more engaging as one learns about the work of these three featured artists. Still, the thesis is reiterated constantly throughout the book, and the same points are repeated again and again to support that thesis. One wonders how much more information could have been delivered without so much tedious repetition of the same conclusions.

An art historian might very well find this to be a five-star read. I certainly have no problems with Díaz’s scholarship, and I am not qualified to argue with her if I did. I merely offer the perspective of the general reader who’s interested in the history of American art, as I’m sure many of the people who read this review may, like myself, fall into that category.
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The One-Act Plays of Eugene O’Neill

Short sketches from a master playwright

Eugene O’Neill

One-act plays are the short stories of drama. These are brief stage plays lasting perhaps 15 to 30 minutes. American playwright Eugene O’Neill, winner of the 1936 Nobel Prize in Literature, is best-known for his full-length plays like The Hairy Ape, Desire Under the Elms, and The Iceman Cometh, but he also wrote 21 one-act plays. I don’t know if any book has ever been devoted exclusively to these short plays, but they can be found in complete-works collections of O’Neill’s writings, or in the three volumes on O’Neill published by the Library of America. In O’Neill’s day, one-act plays would have been staged for theatre festivals and variety nights, which served as opportunities for up-and-coming playwrights to establish a reputation and perhaps win some awards. Nowadays, one-act plays seem relegated to high school and college students performing them in theatrical competitions. While you are unlikely to ever see most of these short plays performed on an actual stage, they are worth a read. O’Neill is one playwright whose works come across well on the printed page. His well-crafted dialogue and detailed and descriptive stage directions often read like prose fiction, calling to mind the works of novelist contemporaries like John Steinbeck or William Faulkner. 

With the exception of the final play on this list, Hughie, all of these works were written early in O’Neill’s career, before he achieved fame and critical acclaim with plays like Beyond the Horizon (a Pulitzer Prize winner) and The Emperor Jones. The first four plays listed below comprise a series with recurring characters, the crew of the ship Glencairn. Many of O’Neill’s early plays deal with nautical travel or the lives of sailors, either at sea or on shore. Seafaring tales were more popular in the early twentieth century than they are today, and the genre allowed O’Neill to deliver popular dramas to the audience while honing his craft towards more mature sailor plays like Anna Christie. In the later plays on this list, one can see the development of O’Neill’s interest in dysfunctional families and their psychological problems, which would lead to later, greater plays like Mourning Becomes Electra and Long Day’s Journey into Night. Through no fault of O’Neill’s, many of his one-act plays present scenes that will seem very familiar from films of the last hundred years, so familiar that they often come across as predictable and clichéd now. It’s hard to tell, however, how they would have been received by theatre audiences a century ago.

Bound East for Cardiff (1914) - 3.5 stars
The first of a series of four one-act plays set on the ship Glencairn. This one presents a death scene in the ship’s forecastle. One crewman lies dying, injured from a fall, while his shipmates converse around him.

In the Zone (1917) - 3 stars
Set during World War I, the ship Glencairn is carrying munitions and has entered “the war zone.” The crewmen are suspicious that one of their own, Smitty, may be a German spy. Not badly written, but utterly predictable to anyone who’s seen enough old war films.

The Long Voyage Home (1918) - 4 stars
Men from the Glencairn stop in a waterfront tavern in London, where the barkeep and his friends hope to shanghai an unsuspecting drunk into servitude on another vessel. This is a familiar scene from literature and film—such as the nautical writings of Jack London or Robert Louis Stevenson, for example—but well done here.

Moon of the Caribbees (1918) - 2 stars
The Glencairn is docked in the West Indies. The crewmen wait for some Black women to show up bringing liquor and sex. Drinking and dancing ensues. The women represent the exotic temptations of the nautical life and wanderlust amid the tropics, but the depiction is racist and the plot is pointless for the most part.

A Wife for a Life (1913) - 2 stars
Two partners work a gold mine in Arizona. The younger of the two gets a telegram from an old sweetheart summoning him home. This leads to a conclusion that is not at all surprising. The dialogue is bogged down with a lot of clumsy explanation.

The Web (1913) - 3 stars
A New York prostitute with a child lives at the mercy of her abusive boyfriend/pimp. At first this reads almost like a piece of muckraking realism, but it gets very heavy-handedly melodramatic towards the end. Again, this is like a scene you’ve seen in countless movies.

Thirst (1913) - 3.5 stars
Three survivors on a life raft are dying of hunger and thirst and fighting off insanity. There’s some racism here, not uncommon for the era, but it is a decently written melodrama. This reads as if it were written for film because the set directions seem as if they would be impossible to execute on a stage.

Recklessness (1913) - 2 stars
An ugly marriage scene, perhaps foreshadowing O’Neill’s later dysfunctional family dramas but not very successfully. A rich older man with a lovely young wife finds out she is cheating on him with their chauffeur. The depiction of the woman is deliberately cruel, indicative of a woman-is-the-root-of-all-evil mindset that plagues some of O’Neill’s other plays.

Warnings (1913) - 3 stars
A telegraph operator for a steamship discovers that he is losing his hearing. He decides to sail on one last voyage, even though he knows his deafness might endanger the ship and its crew. This features a good family scene up front, worthy of O’Neill’s better efforts, but a pretty straightforward, expected ending.

Fog (1914) - 2.5 stars
Another lifeboat drama. Two men talk while a poor woman hugs her dead child. One of the men is a businessman and one a poet, and they carry with them all of the clichés that go along with those professions. This play is ambitious for its supernatural ending.

Abortion (1914) - 4.5 stars
A college baseball star cheats on his fiancée and gets another girl pregnant. His father helps him pay for an abortion. When the girl dies, her brother comes looking for revenge. Surprisingly dark and risqué subject matter for the time. 

The Movie Man (1914) - 2 stars
A comedy set in the Mexican Revolution. A movie director has a contract with a rebel general to film all of his battles. The general is a thinly veiled parody of Pancho Villa. The humor isn’t very funny, and the depiction of the Mexicans is a bit racist.

The Sniper (1915) - 4.5 stars
Set in Belgium during World War I, in a cottage destroyed by shells. A peasant mourns over his dead son, a soldier killed by the Prussians. The peasant vows vengeance against the Germans, but a priest tries to dissuade him from rash violence. Brief but powerful.

Before Breakfast (1916) - 2 stars
A trashy alcoholic shrew of a woman bitches at her husband, a poet (who is offstage, never seen). Reading as if it were written to punish some ex-girlfriend, this is another woman-as-the-root-of-all-evil story, yet it still might be provide a meaty monologue for some character actress.

Ile (1917) - 3.5 stars
In the arctic, a whaling boat is blocked by ice. The captain refuses to turn back until his ship is filled with whale oil (“the ile”). The crew, starving and overworked, threaten mutiny. The captain’s wife, also along for the ride, pleads with her husband to turn the ship back towards home as the voyage weighs on her sanity.

The Rope (1918) - 4 stars
A dysfunctional family drama, heavy on the white trash. A bitter old man is losing his sanity. He keeps a noose hung in his barn so that his estranged son can someday return and hang himself with it. Meanwhile, his daughter and her husband scheme to get the old man’s farm and money. A good surprise ending.

Shell Shock (1918) - 2.5 stars
A World War I hero suffers from PTSD after some horrific trench warfare, as evidenced by his compulsive obsession for hoarding cigarettes. This feels a bit like an after-school special with a rather simplistic take on its issue. It hints at a bleak and cynical ending that would have risen it above the mediocre but ultimately backs out in favor of a crowd-pleasing expression of patriotism.

The Dreamy Kid (1918) - 3 stars
A blaxploitation film in one-act play form. An elderly Black woman lies ill on her death bed. She waits for her grandson Dreamy to show up before she succumbs to death. Dreamy, however, is a hoodlum on the run from the law. The dialogue is penned in heavy Black accents, but otherwise this isn’t noticeably racist.

Where the Cross is Made (1918) - 3.5 stars
A former sea captain, obsessed with a buried treasure, is losing his sanity. He has built a replica of a ship’s cabin on the roof of his house and confined himself to it. His son wants to get him committed to a mental institution. 

Exorcism (1919) - 2 stars
Two roommates live a drunken existence in a squalid New York apartment. One is depressed over his impending divorce and considers suicide. It’s hard to see the point in this one.

Hughie (written in 1941, first performed in 1959) - 3 stars
A boisterous professional gambler lives in a run-down hotel in New York. In the wee hours of the morning, he accosts the new night clerk on duty and bombards him with conversation. Mostly, he regales the new kid with tales of his night clerk predecessor, the recently deceased Hughie. Written later in O’Neill’s career, this is a fine character study, but rather devoid of plot.

Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke

Everything you’d want to know about living in a cylinder

Arthur C. Clarke’s novel Rendezvous with Rama was first published in 1973, and it won just about every major science fiction award for that year. It was Clarke’s first published novel after the book and film combo of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Rendezvous with Rama is unrelated to the 2001 series, but it likewise tells a story of mankind’s first encounter with an alien intelligence.

The novel begins in the year 2131. By that time, mankind has established colonies on several planets and moons in the solar system. The government of Earth has also developed a system to track the trajectories of asteroids that may potentially impact with Earth or its colonies. (We now have the beginnings of such a warning system, but none existed when Clarke wrote the book in the ‘70s.) The Spaceguard system detects an unusual object heading toward the inner solar system. This celestial body is named Rama, after a Hindu deity. A calculation of Rama’s trajectory indicates that it has come from outside our solar system—a true interstellar visitor. Scientists deem Rama worthy of investigation and divert an existing unmanned space probe to perform a flyby. The first photos taken by the probe reveal that Rama is more than just an unusual asteroid. It is a rotating cylinder, fifty kilometers long and twenty kilometers in diameter, so geometrically perfect it could only have been created by an advanced intelligent civilization.

The nearest manned spacecraft, the Endeavour, is sent to investigate. The crew only has a short period of time to examine Rama before its course takes it out of our solar system. Landing on one of the flat ends of the cylinder, the crew finds an entrance to the spacecraft and proceeds to explore its interior. Though technologically advanced, Rama appears to be uninhabited, but the expedition nevertheless searches for archaeological evidence of the spacecraft’s creators.

The problem with Rendezvous with Rama is that it never really lives up to its philosophical potential. This isn’t really so much a novel about what it would be like to find evidence of an intelligent alien civilization. The bulk of the book is just Clarke describing what it would be like to live inside a giant rotating cylinder—the gravity, the climate, the atmosphere, the logistics of getting around, and so on. For example, there are three or four chapters devoted entirely to descriptions of staircases and the astronauts’ challenges in traversing them. Is that really necessary? And is that really what anyone is hoping for when they pick up a book like this? Clarke is so obsessed with the physics of this cylindrical spaceship that the idea of alien intelligence or extraterrestrial archaeology doesn’t seem to hold much interest for him.

Mankind underwent a Rendezvous with Rama moment in 2017, when an interstellar object with unusual characteristics, dubbed ‘Oumuamua, was discovered in our solar system. Rather than a cylinder, it was shaped more like a pancake. This is not the year 2131, however, and we don’t have a surplus of spacecraft out studying the solar system, so we’ll never know for sure if ‘Oumuamua could have been our Rama. The opening chapters of Rendezvous with Rama provide a commendably realistic look at how the process of investigating an interstellar craft might actually proceed. As the novel goes on, however, it starts to dilute its realism by accumulating sci-fi novel cliches, like the captain’s space romance with a buxom female scientist and an act of war between feuding planets. Such tropes prevent the novel from being entirely satisfying, but there is still enough interesting, serious science in Rendezvous with Rama to make it well worth reading.
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