Drums & Demons: The Tragic Journey of Jim Gordon by Joel Selvin

Legendary talent, infamous crime

Joel Selvin is one of the best writers working today in the rock-and-roll history genre. I thoroughly enjoyed his book on Sly and the Family Stone. When I found out about Drums & Demons, Selvin’s 2024 biography of rock drummer Jim Gordon, I was excited by what seemed to me like the perfect pairing of an excellent biographer with a fascinating subject, both of whose work I admire. With Drums & Demons, Selvin does not disappoint.

Jim Gordon was one of the greatest drummers of the late 1960s and ‘70s. Most classic rock fans will probably recognize his name from the rosters of the bands Derek and the Dominos and Traffic, but Gordon was also a highly sought-after session man who played drums and percussion on thousands of recordings, many of them rock and pop classics including the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations,” Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain,” Eric Clapton’s “After Midnight,” John Lennon’s “Power to the People,” Steely Dan’s “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number,” and Kermit the Frog’s “Rainbow Connection.” Rolling Stone put Gordon at number 59 of their 2016 list of the 100 Greatest Drummers of All Time, and, quite frankly, he deserved better. In this book, however, Selvin maybe expends too much effort in persuading the reader that Gordon was the G.O.A.T. of drummers, and after a while the hyperbolic praise grows somewhat tiresome.

Unfortunately, Gordon is not only famous but also infamous. After lifelong troubles with schizophrenia, which went undiagnosed, Gordon became psychotic and murdered his mother in 1983. He spent the remaining 40 years of his life in a prison for the criminally insane, where he died at the age of 77. Drums & Demons is a gripping biography that comprehensively covers both the soaring heights of Gordon’s music career and the crashing depths of his mental health struggles and substance abuse. This isn’t a tabloid account that revels in the horror story of the crime and the misery of its victims. Selvin writes with compassion, a genuine care and admiration for Gordon, and a sensitivity towards mental health issues that is commendable.

As a fan of classic rock, including Gordon’s music, and someone who delights in the minutiae of rock-and-roll trivia, I enjoyed the career retrospective portion of the book immensely. I find the stories of these great rock session musicians really fascinating. I similarly enjoyed Julian Dawson’s biography of the legendary rock pianist Nicky Hopkins. It’s just really interesting to read about all the illustrious artists these session men played with and learn about all the classic recordings to which they contributed their stellar talents. Who knew that Gordon’s best friend in high school was Mike Post, the composer of many classic television theme songs like The Rockford Files (on which Gordon played drums) and Magnum, P.I.? Selvin includes much fascinating detail on Gordon and the musicians with which he worked, including the Everly Brothers, Clapton, George Harrison, Glenn Campbell, Harry Nilsson, Joan Baez, Frank Zappa, and more. Whether in the studio or on tour, Selvin provides an inside look at the music industry that makes you feel like a part of the band.

The latter half of the book, which chronicles Gordon’s downward slide into insanity, is riveting. You can’t help but be moved by this terrible tragedy. Selvin compiled much of this account from interviews with those who knew Gordon, and you can feel both the love and the fear they felt towards this troubled artist. Selvin clearly did prodigious research in the making of this biography, and he writes with an authoritative knowledge and a personal pathos that make this a memorable book well worth reading for any fan of classic rock music.

The Dancer at the Gai-Moulin by Georges Simenon

Guest-starring Maigret

Published in 1931, La Danseuse du Gai-Moulin is the tenth novel in George Simenon’s series of Inspector Maigret mystery novels. In English the novel has appeared as Maigret at the “Gai-Moulin” or The Dancer at the Gai-Moulin. The title references the name of a nightclub in Liège, Belgium, the city of Simenon’s birth, where this novel takes place. Even though Maigret works for the Paris police, his investigations sometimes lead him farther afield, jurisdiction be damned.

Two teenage boys are hanging out at the Gai-Moulin one evening. René Delfosse, 18 years of age, is the wealthy child of a factory owner and somewhat of a juvenile delinquent. Jean Chabot, 16, is a poor boy, generally well-intentioned, who has fallen in with the wrong kind of friend. Both of them are enamored with Adèle, a dancer at the Gai-Moulin. She is friendly towards them, but treats them like pets and doesn’t put out for them. On this particular evening, Adèle can’t spend too much time chatting with the boys because she has to pay attention to a real big spender. This stranger has a Turkish look about him, which results in him being frequently referred to as “the Turk,” whether accurate or not. Unbeknownst to Adèle, Delfosse and Chabot have not come to the Gai-Moulin merely to drink cocktails. Their intention is to rob the place. They hide in the basement until after closing, then enter the bar to empty the till. Before they can do so, however, they find the body of the Turk dead on the bar floor.

By now, you might be asking yourself, “What does all this have to do with Maigret?” The odd thing about this Maigret novel is that Maigret himself doesn’t even appear until halfway through the book. Even then, he largely confines himself to the sidelines while the Liège police do all of the leg work. The absence of the book’s star for much of the novel’s length seems an odd choice on the part of Simenon, but I guess when you write around 500 novels you can afford to experiment. This book kept calling to my mind Arthur Conan Doyle’s book The Valley of Fear, a Sherlock Holmes mystery in which Sherlock Holmes barely plays a supporting role. That Doyle book, in my opinion, was definitely a failed experiment, but this Maigret novel fares a little better with the absentee detective strategy. The final chapter of the novel, in which Maigret does his thing, is really very good as Simenon rolls out one of the more ingeniously intricate crime-solution plot webs in the series.

The notable absence of Maigret for much of the novel, while unexpected, does not ruin the book. I wouldn’t recommend this novel for Maigret newbies, because one learns almost nothing about the main character, but if you’re already a fan of the series then this mystery will not fail to satisfy. It’s not one of the best books in Simenon’s consistently high-quality series, but it’s better than many Maigret cases and far above average when compared to the novels of other 20th-century mystery writers.

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

Nigeria at a crossroads

Nigerian author Chinua Achebe’s 1958 novel Things Fall Apart is likely the most widely read work of Black African literature among English-language readers worldwide (as opposed to white African writers like Algerian Albert Camus or South Africa’s J. M. Coetzee). Achebe wrote the novel in English, and it was published by Heinemann as the first novel in their African Writers Series, a series that would eventually encompass about 300 books. Things Fall Apart takes place in a rural village of the indigenous Igbo people (sometimes spelled Ibo), when Nigeria was a British colony (1914–1960).

Okonkwo lives in the village of Umuofia. Though he came from humble beginnings, through hard work, ambition, and physical strength, he has elevated himself to a position of high status within his clan. He lives with his family of three wives and several children in a mud brick-walled compound of several huts, where they raise crops and some livestock. To settle a conflict with a neighboring village, a boy from another clan is given to Umuofia as a hostage. The leaders of the Umuofia clan charge Okonkwo with the care of this boy, Ikemefuna, whom he raises as if the boy were his own son. In a twist worthy of a Greek tragedy, however, this act ends up setting in motion a chain reaction of karmic retribution that threatens Okonkwo’s downfall.

The second half of the novel deals with the encroachment of British culture into this isolated village. Christian missionaries and government bureaucrats arrive, a few of whom are white, the rest being Nigerians from outside the clan. Achebe describes how Christianity wedges its way into the Igbo people’s lives, garnering some earnest converts, while others cling to the traditional gods and customs. Okonkwo is firmly on the side of the old-schoolers who resist the influence of the whites. As depicted by Achebe, Igbo culture places high importance on a traditional conception of masculinity, and Okonkwo considers any man who deviates from the old ways to be “womanly.” In this clash between tradition and modernity, Achebe lets the reader see both sides of the argument. On the one hand, he clearly shows the iniquity and brutality of British colonialism in Nigeria. On the other hand, he implies that elements of Christianity offer a more compassionate alternative to some of the restrictive superstitions, prejudicial thinking, and more violent aspects of traditional Igbo culture. Achebe’s views on Nigerian independence are clear in this book, but his feelings towards the Christian church are not so clear cut.

In Things Fall Apart, Achebe gives readers a vivid look at traditional indigenous life in Nigeria. This contrasts with his fellow Nigerian author Wole Soyinka, winner of the 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature, who writes mostly about urban intellectuals in Nigeria. Achebe grew up amid both Igbo and Christian traditions and went on to become a university professor and one of his nation’s leading man of letters. For most of the book, Achebe’s writing gives the reader a feeling of being a member of the Umuofia clan. The last few chapters on Christianity and imperialism, however, feel a little more like they were written from the perspective of a university professor looking at Igbo culture from the outside.

One main reason why I read the literature of foreign nations is in hopes of gaining an understanding of the lives, cultures, and perspectives of people from other parts of the world. Things Fall Apart is certainly satisfying in that regard. This isn’t just the Western literary tradition transplanted to an exotic locale. This is a quintessentially African work of literature and a very fine novel by any standard of world literature.  

The Wayward Bus by John Steinbeck

A memorable road trip

John Steinbeck, winner of the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature, is one of America’s all-time literary greats, known for such highly acclaimed novels as The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men, East of Eden, and Cannery Row. In any list of his major works or ranking of this top ten books, one title you are unlikely to see is his 1947 novel The Wayward Bus. Nevertheless, Steinbeck is one of those writers who is so good that even his minor works shine. The Wayward Bus may be an obscure and forgotten entry in his body of work, but I enjoyed it very much.

In the small crossroads town of Rebel Corners in the Salinas Valley of California, Juan Chicoy, a Mexican-American, and his wife Alice run a service station and diner for travelers. Juan also drives a passenger bus from Rebel Corners to San Juan de la Cruz, a connecting line between two Greyhound routes. As the story opens, Juan’s bus has broken down, and a handful of passengers have been stranded at Rebel Corners. Juan and Alice and their two employees, who all live at the site, have given up their bedrooms to these delayed travelers. As the sun rises, Juan and his young mechanic, Pimples Carson, repair the bus in order to get their fare-paying passengers back on the road. The weather reports are not good, with speculation that the San Ysidro River might flood, which would put everyone in an even more inconvenient or even dangerous situation. The passengers are itching to go, however, and Juan is tired of listening to their complaints, so he decides to risk it and get the journey underway.

What this book does really well is bring to life the gas-food-lodging culture and atmosphere of 1940s travel. Of course, I wouldn’t know what it was like to ride a long-distance bus in the ’40s, but I made my share of Greyhound trips in the ’80s and ’90s. This book vividly brings to mind that atmosphere of wanderlust and fatigue, the collection of characters you meet on such trips, and the seemingly random locations where the bus makes its periodic stops. Before the installment of the interstate highway system, road travel had a more rustic, anything-can-happen feel to it, which this book captures really well. Also, as one would expect from Steinbeck gives the landscape of California much consideration and describes it in vivid, loving detail.

The bus and highways and diner pie, however, merely serve as the backdrop for a story that is really about an assortment of human beings momentarily thrown together by their intersecting itineraries. It is the realism of the characters, their thoughts and behaviors, that really makes this a captivating read. The drama is heightened by the fact that in this bygone pre-internet age, an adventurous traveler could change his or her entire life by simply turning a different corner, not looking back, and deciding to be someone else. These are people the reader will recognize from their own lives, and Steinbeck is very insightful about what’s going on in their heads: what men want from women, what women want from men, how men see themselves through their work, how different personalities conflict with and influence one another. When a beautiful blonde woman, traveling alone, walks into the diner, the reactions of the other characters, man and woman alike, are realistic variations of lust, envy, hostility, and bumbling foolishness. A successful business man, traveling with his wife and daughter, brings a touch of the capitalist criticism of Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt. Steinbeck is also to be commended for treating Hispanic characters as real human beings rather than the common stereotypes of the time.

The Wayward Bus isn’t the kind of book that wins prizes or inspires critical plaudits. It’s not about starving farmers fighting for survival; it’s about middle-class Americans with prosaic problems, hopes, and desires that to them (and us) often feel like romantic, monumental crises. Steinbeck does a beautiful job of illustrating the crucial dramas in everyday lives, in a way that is as real as life itself yet as compelling as literature should be.

Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World by Nicholas Ostler

Bites off more than most general readers can chew

Nicholas Ostler is a British scholar with degrees in linguistics, Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit, among others. He is currently the chairman of the Foundation for Ancient Languages. The publisher HarperCollins says Ostler has “a working knowledge of twenty-six languages.” His book Empires of the Word was published in 2005.

In this book, Ostler writes about what he calls “language dynamics,” that is, how languages are born, proliferate, migrate, and die. Why does one language succeed in dominating large portions of the world, through millions of native and secondary speakers, while many others languish and disappear over time? Ostler explains how these rises and falls have played out numerous times over the course of world history due to causes such as military conquest, imperialism, trade relations, economic influence, religious conversion, government bureaucracy, mass media, and perceived status and prestige. Ostler doesn’t provide a unifying thesis as to how languages survive and thrive. Rather, he examines the spread and decline of languages over the course of history and examines each pivotal turning point on a case-by-case basis, often drawing parallels between the trajectories of ancient and modern languages. He focuses much attention on the languages that are most prominent in the world today, and how they got that way.

As for the intended audience, I’m guessing this is a history book written for linguists. Ostler certainly assumes a lot of prior knowledge of history and languages on the part of the reader. I was hoping for something a little more accessible to general readers, like Gaston Dorren’s books Lingo and Babel, which cover many of the same topics as this book but in a much more user-friendly manner. Empires of the Word is such a relentless barrage of detail it is difficult to see the forest for the trees. Ostler’s prose often reads like a text composed entirely of footnotes. Foreign words discussed in the text are often accompanied by a phonetic approximation of pronunciation, yet there is no key provided as to the system of phonetic notation used, so the reader is simply expected to know that. Even if the notation is a standard with which linguists would be familiar, the reliability of the phonetic transcriptions is called into question by typographical issues with font glyphs and diacritics (in the ebook, as discussed below). The only thing that might make me think this book is meant for general readers is Ostler’s repetitive summarizing of his points and conclusions. By the time you get to the end, it feels like you’ve read the same book three times.

Ostler likes to quote from historical texts. He presents these quotes in their original language (often non-Latin alphabets) and then in English translation. It is often interesting to see the comparison between the two writing systems. Early in the book, however, Ostler uses the French phrase “coup de grâce.” In the ebook edition, the “a” accented with a circumflex is replaced by an “s” with an hacek. This is a font error that likely does not occur in the print edition, but this caused me to question the accuracy of the spelling and diacritics of all the foreign words, of which there are many, throughout the ebook. How do I know if what I’m seeing is correct? The “s” with an hacek appears quite frequently, and some words have dollar signs in them. Of course, a font problem is no fault of the author’s, but rather a production issue that is the publisher’s responsibility, so Ostler is not to blame. Near the end of the book, there’s a chapter about the top twenty languages in the world today, in terms of number of speakers. Throughout the chapter, Ostler repeatedly refers to “the list,” yet the list itself is not provided to the reader. My guess is that the list was formatted as a table, and that table was excluded from the ebook. Perhaps that’s also what happened to the pronunciation key. HarperCollins really did not do a very good job of putting this ebook together, resulting in a rather annoying experience for the reader.

Collected Novellas by Gabriel García Márquez

Colombia’s Faulkner

Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez won the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature largely on the strength of his highly esteemed novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. The book Collected Novellas, first published in 1991, brings together three lesser-known works of shorter fiction that complement that bestselling classic.

Leaf Storm, García Márquez’s first book, was published in 1955. He uses the phrase “leaf storm” to signify the influx of foreign interests that turned a small Colombian village into a boom town for the fruit industry. Against this backdrop, the story deals with the death of a citizen who was far from beloved by his fellow townspeople. The narrative is related through the alternating first-person perspectives of a father, daughter, and grandson who knew the deceased. Through a series of chronologically jumbled scenes, García Márquez reveals the back story of the dead man, from his arrival in town to his demise, as well as the private secrets of the family of narrators. Stylistically, this novella bears much resemblance to the writing of William Faulkner in novels like As I Lay Dying. I would have also sworn that Leaf Storm was influenced by Mexican author Juan Rulfo’s novel Pedro Páramo, but the two books were released in the same year, so any cause-and-effect relationship between the two seems unlikely.

The next selection, No One Writes to the Colonel, was first published in 1958. An aged and destitute veteran of a previous civil war (the Thousand Days’ War of 1899–1902) awaits the military pension he was promised. The current regime has placed his village under martial law. Again, death and funerary matters play a prominent role in the story, as the Colonel attends the funeral of a local musician. The final selection, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, published in 1981, is the best-known of the three works in this volume and the most compelling. In the opening pages, an Arab Colombian named Santiago Nasar is murdered. García Márquez then flashes back to reveal the story behind the killing, which he relates in a nonlinear fashion through the perspectives of various witnesses. Perhaps the most shocking aspect of the crime is that everyone in town, except the victim, seems to see the murder coming, and most simply accept it as a foregone conclusion.

Though stand-alone works in their own right, these three novellas are set in the same fictional universe as One Hundred Years of Solitude. Leaf Storm and No One Writes to the Colonel both take place in Macondo, the same fictional village in which One Hundred Years is set. Macondo is García Márquez’s equivalent to Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, another fictional setting that unifies multiple related novels. Chronicle of a Death Foretold does not mention Macondo, but, like the other two novellas included here, García Marquez does drop the name of Colonel Aureliano Buendía, a character from One Hundred Years of Solitude who figures prominently in the history of this fictional vision of Colombia, much like Faulkner often refers to the Snopes and Compson families in his Yoknapatawpha novels. I use Faulkner here merely as a stylistic comparison and don’t mean to imply that García Márquez’s writings are in any way derivative of or inferior to those of Faulkner. In fact, I prefer the writings of García Márquez. He uses the same modernist techniques of stream-of-consciousness, nonlinear chronology, and varying narrative perspectives, but unlike Faulkner he doesn’t overly indulge in deliberately obscure wordplay. Chronicle of a Death Foretold impressed me even more than One Hundred Years of Solitude, and the other two novellas in this collection are also very fine works worthy of a Nobel laureate.

Novellas in this collection

Leaf Storm

No One Writes to the Colonel

Chronicle of a Death Foretold

A Naturalist at Large: The Best Essays of Bernd Heinrich

Assorted investigations in natural science

Biologist Bernd Heinrich was born in Germany and emigrated to Maine with his family as a young boy. He is now a professor emeritus at the University of Vermont, but he lives in Maine and has a cabin there where he seems to spend a lot of time. Heinrich first came to my attention for his investigations into the intelligence of ravens, but he is primarily an entomologist who has done extensive research on bees. Heinrich’s father Gerd Heinrich was also an esteemed entomologist.

A Naturalist at Large: The Best Essays of Bernd Heinrich was published in 2018. It is a collection of articles that Heinrich wrote for various periodicals. Almost all of the selections come from the magazine Natural History, where he appears to have had a regular column. Other than that, there are two articles each from Audubon, Outside, and the New York Times, and one from Orion. The majority of these essays are about observations and studies of nature that Heinrich made on his land in Maine. The rest take place in locations around the world where he has conducted research, such as the Canadian Arctic, the Judaean Desert in Israel, and the Okavango Delta in Botswana. In a typical chapter, Heinrich observes a pattern of animal behavior and comes up with an idea of how and why such a behavior would evolve. He then conducts further observations or experiments to test the validity of his hypothesis. Some examples of his inquiries include how bumblebees regulate their body heat, why water beetles gather in clumps, how the structure of tree branches determines their ability to survive ice storms, how tiny Golden-crowned Kinglets survive icy Maine winters, why there is a predominance of red flowers in the Middle East, and why all plant growth seems to twist in a counterclockwise direction.

Despite the title, I find it hard to believe that these are the best essays of Bernd Heinrich. If they titled the book Assorted Odds and Ends by Bernd Heinrich, however, it probably wouldn’t sell very well. This is basically a collection of magazine articles from mainstream periodicals (not scholarly journals), most of which are not feature articles but rather the sort of short articles and columns you find in the front of most science magazines before you get to the meatier fare.

I have a lot of respect for Heinrich’s work as a naturalist, but I was a bit bored by these writings. He makes the science seem moderately interesting but far from fascinating. Heinrich presents a very nuts-and-bolts approach to natural science: I noticed this. I formed a hypothesis. I tested it thusly. I came to these conclusions. Don’t expect the philosophizing of Thoreau in these Maine Woods. I was anticipating something more along the lines of A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold, another naturalist who wrote about the wilderness surrounding his cabin (in Wisconsin rather than Maine), but even Leopold’s essays on wildlife conservation policy read more poetically than Heinrich’s articles. What’s missing is any sense of what it feels like to be present in the wild places that Heinrich is describing. These essays read more like they were written in a laboratory. My guess is that Heinrich’s long-form books are more satisfying than these short essays. His workmanlike prose could benefit from some more room to breathe. I’d like to give his A Year in the Maine Woods a try, to see if there might be a little more Thoreau in him after all.