Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin): A Memoir by Sly Stone with Ben Greenman

Sly accentuates the positive

Sly Stone, the leader, songwriter, and record producer for Sly and the Family Stone, passed away recently at the age of 82. Very late in life, Sly decided to get off drugs and write his autobiography. Entitled Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin), it was published in 2023. The book includes an introduction by Questlove, leader of the Roots (Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show band). Questlove was also the publisher of the book, through his company AUWA books.

In 1998, rock journalist Joel Selvin published Sly and the Family Stone: An Oral History, which contained first-hand testimony from many members of Sly’s band, family, and entourage. That book painted a very dark portrait of Sly. As he became more famous and wealthy, his drug use increased, and he became progressively more unhinged, at times allegedly threatening those close to him with violence. Sly’s Thank You reads like it was written in response to the stories told in Selvin’s book. Rather than own up to any wrongdoing, Sly either responds to such accusations with denial or ignores them entirely, opting for safer subjects. He discusses all of his recordings, album by album, with a sentence or two about most songs. He spends a few chapters giving detailed recaps of his talk show appearances. There’s a chapter about his wedding, which took place on stage in Madison Square Garden, plus a lot of name-dropping of celebrities he often hung out with or just met once.

Sly (and perhaps Questlove) wants you to come away from this book with the idea that he was an artist that was taken advantage of and creatively stifled by the music industry, but that’s a difficult theory to buy into. The book is filled with instances of people going out of their way to give Sly the opportunity to do what he does best (including Michael Jackson, for one), but Sly chooses to sabotage his own career with his drug use and his self-destructive behavior. Sly had a reputation for skipping out on scheduled concerts, not only dissing his fans but also his own band. Here he blames everybody but himself for those numerous no-shows. Sly confesses that he used a lot of drugs, and that he liked them, but he fails to mention much of the scary behavior that Selvin’s book discusses at length. In Selvin’s Oral History, there is a very harrowing story told by Sly’s ex-wife about how his unfed pit bull mauled their toddler son. Sly, however, dispatches the incident in two sentences. Much like Keith Richards’s autobiography Life, there’s much bragging about drug use, partying, and macho tough-guy brandishing of weapons. Richards, at least, seems to respect women, while Sly seems to view them as his sexual servants. Overall, Sly comes across as a child who never grew up. He wants what he wants, when he wants it, regardless of the consequences, and he needs managers and girlfriends to take care of his basic needs because he’s incapable of doing so himself. Sly mentions his friend Bobby Womack often in this book. Sly could have learned a thing or two from Bobby about how to write a memoir. Womack’s My Story is candid, forthright, and accountable, the exact opposite of Sly’s Thank You.

One thing this book does well is capture the conversational voice of Sly. Though I’m sure it required some unsung effort on the part of coauthor Ben Greenman, this memoir is written as if it came straight out of Sly’s mouth. Sly claims credit for initiating the phrase, “Different strokes for different folks” (from his song “Everyday People”), and this book is chock full of similar funky, pithy aphorisms, many of which rhyme. As an orator, Sly falls somewhere between Snoop Dogg and Nipsey Russell. The prose is enjoyable to read, but what it has to say isn’t always pleasant. I love the man’s music, but when all is said and done, I didn’t come away from this liking Sly. Maybe I’m wrong, and Sly was a wonderful human being, but that’s not the impression one gets from this book.

The Lottery Ticket by Jules Verne

Foregone conclusions in Norway

The Lottery Ticket is a novel by Jules Verne published in 1886. It was also published in English translation under the alternate title of Ticket No. 9672. Like most of Verne’s fiction, this novel is one of his Voyages Extraordinaires, a series that consists of about 60 books. Although Verne is largely remembered today as a science fiction writer, the one element that really ties all of his work together is a love of travel, geography, and exploration. The Lottery Ticket is not science fiction but rather one of Verne’s geographical adventures. To be honest, however, there really isn’t even much adventure in this one.

The Lottery Ticket is set in the Telemark region of Southern Norway. The Hansen family, consisting of the widow Dame Hansen and her young-adult children Joel and Hulda, run an inn in the village of Dal near the Rjukan Falls, a popular tourist destination. Hulda is engaged to a fisherman named Ole Kamp, who is off on a commercial fishing voyage to the Grand Banks off Newfoundland. The two young lovers’ wedding is set to take place when he returns. His ship, the Viking, however, misses its expected return date by over a month. The Hansens fear the vessel is lost at sea and Hulda may never see her betrothed again.

Like many a Verne novel, this one takes forever to get going. The story doesn’t really start until chapter 11 or 12 (out of 20). Everything prior to that is just getting acquainted with the characters and the setting. Through the daily lives of the Hansen family, Verne delivers a primer on Norwegian geography, culture, and scenery. Verne traveled to Norway in 1861, and I would assume many of the towns and sites mentioned here probably comprised his itinerary during that trip. He definitely visited the Rjukan Falls. The lottery ticket mentioned in the book’s title is really a ridiculous plot element that can only lead to a predictable conclusion. The novel would have been better without it. The one real opportunity for adventure in this novel is the search for Ole’s lost ship, but all of that happens “offstage.” The main characters are not involved in that manhunt, and the details are only relayed secondhand and after the fact.

Despite being utterly predictable, The Lottery Ticket is a pleasant enough read. The characters are likable, and the setting is inviting. There is a satisfaction that comes from watching the events unfold in their obvious manner. Verne provides enough of a travelogue of Norway to maintain one’s interest. Verne was very good at writing about the scientific and geographical aspects of his fiction. He was able to get readers excited about those subjects. When he describes an exotic locale, he typically gives you enough of an education to make you want to go and visit those places. When it came to putting plots together, however, Verne’s efforts were often clumsy and formulaic, by today’s standards anyway. There are exceptions, of course, such as the excellent Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Even given his faults, I still think Verne was a better storyteller than H. G. Wells. The Lottery Ticket is certainly not one of the more extraordinary voyages in Verne’s Voyages Extraordinaires, but like almost all of his books, it’s a satisfactorily fun ride nonetheless.

The Snoring Bird: My Family’s Journey Through a Century of Biology by Bernd Heinrich

Intriguing memoir of father and son zoologists

Bernd Heinrich is a German-American entomologist, ornithologist, and professor of biology at the University of Vermont. In addition to his scientific papers published in academic journals, he has written quite a few books on science and nature for the general public. Bernd’s father Gerd Heinrich (1896–1984) was a self-taught naturalist, zoologist, and entomologist. The Snoring Bird, published in 2007, is a dual (auto)biography, written by Bernd Heinrich, about his father’s life as well as his own. The title refers to a rare Indonesian bird, the snoring rail or Celebes rail, that Gerd pursued on behalf of the American Museum of Natural History. This father-son memoir provides a revealing look into the lives and research pursuits of these two scientists. By following the arcs of their scientific careers, the reader gains an understanding of how practices and priorities in the field of biology have changed over the past century.

Bernd Heinrich’s upbringing was uncommon, to say the least. His father was involved in unconventional relationships with women that amounted to unofficial polygamy, with three—sometimes four, perhaps—wives/lovers living together in the same household. One of these was Bernd’s biological mother, but for all intents and purposes he was raised by three moms. Though the Heinrich family was German by heritage, they owned a feudal estate called Borowke, located at times (and currently) within Poland. When World War II broke out, the Heinrichs found themselves caught between the Germans and the Russians. Gerd, though firmly anti-Nazi, enlisted in the Luftwaffe (German air force) to avoid execution. When Bernd was five years old, the family fled to West Germany just ahead of the Communist invasion. Several years later they emigrated to the United States.

Throughout all this turmoil, one constant in the family’s life was a love of nature. Gerd Heinrich traveled all over the world gathering animal specimens, some for his own studies and many for natural history museums. In his personal area of expertise, ichneumon wasps, he named over 1,000 new species. Bernd Heinrich began assisting his father at a young age, gathering wasps and taxidermizing small mammals. After the family fled Poland, they lived for several years in a cabin on a West German nature preserve, where Bernd developed a love for the outdoors. Later the Heinrichs settled on a farm in Maine, where Bernd would spend all day out in the woods and meadows, engaged in entomological and zoological activities.

I had previously read A Naturalist at Large: The Best Essays of Bernd Heinrich, and I found it rather boring. Though I share Heinrich’s love for birds, I am less than fascinated by the minutiae of his insect research. Overall, however, I found The Snoring Bird quite captivating. I was more enthralled by the first half of the book (mostly about Gerd), because of its World Wars and exotic expeditions, than the second half (mostly about Bernd). Like just about every autobiography these days, there’s an element of “Daddy didn’t love me the way he should.” Bernd working out his father issues doesn’t become overly obtrusive or annoying, however, because the bulk of the book concentrates on the science. The interweaving of science writing and personal memoir provides an enlightening vicarious look into the life of a biologist. One really gets an understanding of the practical work behind the intellectual pursuits. This book also sheds light on science history—biology in particular—by relating how geographical exploration, taxonomy, and description (Gerd’s domains) fell out of favor, to be supplanted by experimentation, DNA analysis, and the formulation of theories on behavioral evolution (Bernd’s world). If you’re a natural scientist, or have ever dreamed of being one, The Snoring Bird is a very stimulating read.  

Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov

Inaction hero

Oblomov, a novel by Russian author Ivan Goncharov, was published in 1859. The title character, Ilya Ilyich Oblomov, is a member of the minor nobility (the English translation uses the word “barin” as the Russian equivalent of “baron”). He owns the family’s country estate, called Oblomovka, where he grew up. Oblomov resides, however, in a shabby apartment in St. Petersburg, where he lives the lazy life of a confirmed bachelor. Since Ilya has become the bearer of his parents’ estate, the Oblomov name has fallen in status, and the farm is not performing well financially.

The first few chapters of the novel are quite satirical. The running gag is that Oblomov refuses to get out of bed. From his prostrate position, he receives visits from a few friends who represent different segments of Russian society: a civil servant, a journalist, and fellow gentlemen, both Russian- and German-born. Oblomov’s failure to rise from his bed is indicative of the way he conducts his life in general. He is incapable of making decisions and committing to any form of action, neither in business nor personal matters. Like an overgrown man-child, he is utterly dependent upon his landlady, who takes care of his every need like a surrogate mother.

After this introduction, the novel flashes back to Oblomov’s childhood at Oblomovka. This is portrayed in heavily nostalgic realism. On the one hand, Oblomov enjoys his youth in an idyllic country setting. On the other hand, Goncharov pokes fun at this country-gentry life by exaggerating its quaintness, insularity, and simplicity. Growing up at his family estate, Oblomov’s every desire is catered to by his parents and servants, which contributes to his inactivity and ineffectualness as an adult. Following this trip down memory lane, the novel then takes another change in tone as it veers into a quite poignant romance. While at the beginning of the novel Goncharov wants the reader to laugh at Oblomov, over the course of the book one definitely comes to feel for him. As the novel proceeds, it becomes more realistic, less humorous, and as a result more compelling.

Oblomov was a popular novel in Russia, and the title character came to represent a recognizable type of Russian gentleman, as in “He’s such an Oblomov.” What this novel has to say about Russian society circa 1859, however, was largely lost on me, and probably will be unclear to most English-language readers. Only Russians themselves, or scholars of Russian history, will likely comprehend the social commentary. There is much made here of the distinctions between gentlemen of the landed gentry or nobility, and the lower peasant and servant classes. The attitude toward the latter segments of society ranges from sympathy to condescension. The rather generalized interpretation that I came away with is that Oblomov represents the minor nobility clinging to old ideas that are out of place in modern society, and as a result the dignity and standing of Oblomov’s class is sinking towards obsolescence as it phases into a lower-middle class.

Regardless of any social or political content, however, Oblomov is a novel that can be appreciated simply as a drama of human nature. People from different walks in society are shown living their lives in accordance with the hands they were dealt in life. Towards the end of the book in particular, the characters feel real, and they inspire real feelings in the reader. I would have preferred more naturalistic realism and less satirical humor—more Turgenev than Gogol, if you will—but I still found Oblomov quite engaging.

Lazarus Laughed by Eugene O’Neill

Strange multi-masked biblical tragedy

Lazarus Laughed is a full-length drama by American playwright Eugene O’Neill, winner of the 1936 Nobel Prize in Literature. O’Neill wrote the play in 1925. It was published in book form in 1927 and first performed on stage at the Pasadena Community Playhouse in 1928.

Set in ancient times, Lazarus Laughed is based on the biblical story of Jesus Christ raising Lazarus from the dead. Or rather, it’s O’Neill’s speculation on what might have happened after that miracle took place. Christ does not appear in the play. He has already departed Lazarus’s house before the curtain opens, though he is discussed and debated in absentia. Here in O’Neill’s take on things, the resurrected Lazarus ascends to the height of a messiah to rival Christ himself. Lazarus defies Christian and Jewish teachings by leading a cult whose members deny the existence of death and live for laughter and pleasure. 

The drama begins in Lazarus’s hometown of Bethany, in present-day Palestine. Subsequent scenes take place in Athens and Rome, where Lazarus meets Emperor Tiberius and his successor Caligula. Stylistically, this drama is heavily influenced by Greek tragedy. O’Neill tries to evoke the experience of an ancient theatrical production. A chorus (actually more than one) chants narration and commentary throughout the play, and almost all of the actors are masked. Soon after completing Lazarus Laughed, O’Neill used such stylistic elements to again emulate Greek tragedy in The Great God Brown, a play set in modern times.

Lazarus Laughed has only been staged a few times over the past century, probably because O’Neill really didn’t make it easy to produce this drama. In some scenes, his stage directions call for as many as 150 actors on stage at once. Other than Lazarus and his wife, just about everyone else is wearing masks. One scene asks for 49 different male masks and 49 different female masks, and the actors change masks in each scene. O’Neill calls for masks varying in size, emotional expression, age, and ethnicity, and specifies multiple combinations of those characteristics, thus probably at least 500 detailed and well-crafted masks are required to pull this off the way he wanted it. I would imagine the few theatres and schools who actually staged this play likely cut corners in mask manufacturing because O’Neill’s specifications would be cost prohibitive and near impossible to follow to the letter.

Other than simply telling a story about Lazarus and Tiberius, what is the point of all this? I don’t know what literary critics might say about it, but for me personally, I get a message similar to that taught by the ancient Greek and Roman Stoics, that fear of death prevents us from truly living our lives. Lazarus’s repeated assertions in this play that there is no death can be taken two ways: 1) that eternal life in Heaven means there is no death, or 2) that death simply brings a nothingness that is neither to be felt nor feared, so enjoy yourself and live your life on Earth to the fullest. Based on the behavior of Lazarus’s followers in this play, and on how O’Neill lived his life, I’m guessing he meant the latter. There has to be a better way to get that across, however, than having Lazarus and his crowd of followers laughing and yelling, “There is no death!” many times over. If staged with all the grandeur that O’Neill intended, Lazarus Laughed might have been a sight to see, but on the page it mostly comes across as a bit silly.

The Flemish House by Georges Simenon

Ho-hum Maigret mystery

The Flemish House, first published in 1932, is the 14th book in Georges Simenon’s series of Inspector Maigret detective novels. Though the most recent paperback edition from Penguin Books is called The Flemish House, all previous editions were titled The Flemish Shop. The original French title is Chez les Flamands.

Maigret is invited to look into a case in Givet, a town on the border between France and Belgium, along the Meuse River. A friend of a friend, Anna Peeters, asks Maigret to help clear her family name. A young woman named Germaine Piedboeuf has gone missing. It is known that she has an illegitimate child by Anna’s brother Joseph, who is engaged to marry another woman. The locals feel that the Peeters family killed Germaine to get rid of her and any claims she may have on Joseph. Anna Peeters argues that there is no hard evidence connecting her family to the woman’s disappearance. They are merely the victims of prejudice based on nationality and class.

In this border town, animosity and resentment exist between the French and Flemish residents, which, here on the French side of the border, amplifies the locals’ dislike of the Peeters family. The Peeterses run a successful grocery store/bar serving mostly Flemish customers, and as a result they are relatively well-to-do, financially. The Piedboeufs, on the other hand, are a family of working-class factory employees, so Joseph Peeters’s seduction of Germaine leaves a bad taste of the rich man exploiting the poor girl. All this fuel added to the fire contributes to Anna Peeters turning to Maigret for help in clearing this matter up.

Beyond the mystery, these Maigret novels are often enjoyable for what Simenon shows us of French life of the time period in question. The River Meuse is a thoroughfare for barge traffic, and Givet one of its more popular stops, so Simenon once again gives some glimpses into the lives of the bargemen and families who ply this trade. Canal life is also covered in Lock 14, Maigret and the Headless Corpse, and Maigret and the Bum. In The Flemish House, the Meuse is “in spate,” with high flooding and strong currents that have halted any boat traffic and left the barges stranded along the riverbanks. The depiction of Givet is similar to that of other provincial towns in Maigret novels (The Grand Banks Café, for example). The majority of the residents are shown as close-minded conspiracy theorists. The Belgian border adds a touch of uniqueness to this novel, as the reader gets an inkling of insight into Flemish culture through the daily lives of the Peeters family in their home and shop.

Upon finishing the book, I really have no idea how Maigret solved this case. He just kind of hangs out with the suspects until he gets a feel for them. There’s no case-cracking clue that tips the scales in his favor. The reader can make an educated guess as to who may have committed the crime, and in the end it seems like that’s just what Maigret does. The solution is neither obvious nor surprising. When the perpetrator is revealed, the reader just feels apathy. Habitual readers of Maigret novels know that the inspector always solves his case, but he doesn’t always subject the culprits to the full extent of legal justice. Sometimes he makes a moral judgment that the crime was justified or committed under extenuating circumstances, and he cuts the criminal a break. In this case, however, it is difficult to understand why Maigret would exercise leniency to the extent that he does. The Flemish House failed to capture my attention the way most Maigret mysteries do. This is just an average mystery novel, and a below-average book for Simenon.

The Metropolis by Upton Sinclair

Lifestyles of the rich and stupid

The Metropolis, a novel by Upton Sinclair, was published in 1908, just a couple years after his controversial breakthrough book The Jungle. The two novels are written in a similar muckraking, pro-socialist style, but The Jungle is much more eye-opening, compelling, and insightful than this tepid successor. By comparison, The Metropolis feels shallow and poorly thought-out.

Allan Montague is a lawyer born and raised in Mississippi. Despite his Southern upbringing, his father fought in the Civil War on the side of the Union. After Dad’s death, Allan moves to New York City, along with his mother and cousin Alice. Allan hopes that, through his deceased father’s connections, he can find some profitable work in the big city. Allan’s younger brother Oliver already resides in New York. He lives the life of a wealthy man, but it is unclear what exactly he does for a living. Oliver is active in high society, and he introduces Allan, Alice, and Mom into his high-dollar social circles. The Montagues attend a series of lengthy and lavish parties in which no frivolous expense is spared. The hosts of these parties expend enormous amounts of money in an attempt to outdo one another. It’s unclear why exactly these millionaires would welcome the Montagues into their circle, since the family from Mississippi are merely upper middle class. Nevertheless, Allan Montague is the reasonable man through whose eyes we view the outrageously extravagant lifestyles of these kings and queens of New York society. 

The bulk of this book is just Sinclair rattling off examples of insane things the rich spend their money on, and how much those luxuries cost. This goes on for chapter after chapter. For example, a woman had a million-dollar coat that was made from the feathers of rare Hawaiian birds. Is this really the problem that’s plaguing American society? Not until Chapter 11, when Allan is hired as a lawyer to work on a lawsuit, does some semblance of a story actually begin. That plot thread, however, barely goes anywhere. If Theodore Dreiser wrote this novel, he would concentrate on the business, legal, and financial aspects of the story, perhaps to the point of inducing boredom. Sinclair, on the other hand, rushes through the legal case rather sketchily because he just wants to rant about the rich. He succeeds in getting his point across that the wealthy waste a lot of their money on stupid and useless stuff. There is a brief passage on the idiocy of fashion that’s rather well-said, but then Sinclair just resumes his catalog of expensive oddities: “There was a woman who had her teeth filled with diamonds; and another who was driving a pair of zebras,” and so on and so on.

Sinclair never acknowledges the fact that all this expenditure of wealth might trickle down to the artisans who make these luxuries, the merchants who sell them, and the servants who clean and maintain them. He will try to shock you with the fact that a rich old woman employs 32 servants, but that’s 32 people who have jobs. (I’m a liberal, and I’m making these arguments. That’s how annoying this novel is.) Sinclair’s typical modus operandi would be to contrast his exaggerated rich people with some exaggerated poor people­—i.e. look at what the wealthy are doing while these workers starve—but in this book he never gets around to the poor people, other than a few brief comments the aristocrats make about labor strikes. Sinclair is too busy reciting all these Ripley’s Believe-It-or-Not examples of extreme wealth and waste.

In general, I like Sinclair’s work (The Jungle is a masterpiece, in my opinion), but at times he can get carried away with his exaggerated black-and-white socioeconomic rhetoric to the point of campiness. Such is the case with The Metropolis, and it’s not even fun.

Strange News from Another Star by Hermann Hesse

Modern-day fables for grown-ups

Hermann Hesse (1877–1962), winner of the 1946 Nobel Prize in Literature, was born in the Black Forest of Germany. He eventually emigrated to Switzerland and became a Swiss citizen. Hesse is best known for novels like Siddhartha, Steppenwolf, and The Glass Bead Game, but he also published two volumes of short stories. His collection entitled Strange News from Another Star was published in 1919. The eight stories contained within were written from 1913 to 1918. Despite the book’s title, there’s no science fiction here. These tales do, however, exhibit a touch of fantasy like one would find in fairy tales or an episode of The Twilight Zone.

The stories here read like Aesop’s Fables if they were written for adults of the modern world. Hesse’s writing could be characterized as neo-romantic, meaning it is heavily influenced by, but slightly more realistic than, the old-school German Romantics like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and company. In these stories, Hesse never aims for a realistic portrait of what life was like in a specific region of Germany. Instead, he strives to express universal truths about human nature. Hesse’s fiction tends to take place in vaguely unspecified quasi-medieval settings that could be anywhere in Europe. Often his characters don’t even have names, they’re simply “the young man,” “the girl,” or “the old man.” Hesse frequently presents a utopian vision of a simpler life, one where intellectual pursuits and an appreciation of nature take precedence over the more realistically pressing concerns of earning a living. Within these idyllic surroundings, however, the characters act out dramas in which peace and contentment are disturbed by the darker forces of human nature and modern life, thus forcing the protagonist to embark on some sort of soul-searching quest.

In the title story, “Strange News from Another Star,” a citizen of one of such Hessian utopia makes a journey to our real world of post–World War I devastation, contrasting the paradise of peace that might have been with the death and destruction of modern Europe. Although the word “star” is used, there is no space travel involved. “Star” could easily be rephrased as “another country” or “another [metaphorical] world.” Hesse was a writer who was always searching and experimenting, and as a result, his experiments don’t always pay off. In “Hard Passage” and “A Dream Sequence,” for example, the stories start out well enough but then veer off into too much surrealism that obscures the moral of the story. “A Dream Sequence” is just that, a dream scene that feels as if it were lifted out of some novel and presented out of context.

The strongest entries in the collection appear at the end of the volume. In “Fuldam,” residents of the titular town gather for their annual fair, where a mysterious stranger appears who has the power to grant everyone one wish. In “Iris,” a young boy spends his time daydreaming, studying flowers, and observing the natural cycles of the seasons. When he grows into a man, he loses his childish spirit and grows dissatisfied with life. These two stories, and most others in this volume, successfully combine elements of romanticism, fantasy, and realism. If this book had been published a half century later in Latin America, the style might have been dubbed “magic realism.”

Hesse’s other collection of short stories, entitled Stories of Five Decades, was published after his death in 1972. It is a career retrospective of sorts, containing 23 stories from over the course of his long career. That volume is every bit as good as Strange News from Another Star. Though Hesse is best known for his novels, he was a quite masterful practitioner of the short story, as evidenced in both of his fine short fiction collections.

Stories in this collection

Augustus

The Poet

Flute Dream

Strange News from Another Star

Hard Passage

A Dream Sequence

Fuldam

Iris

Lessons in Pictorial Composition by Louis Wolchonok

Forgotten gem of a how-to art book

If you habitually haunt used bookstores, then you are no doubt familiar with the publications of Dover Books. This is doubly true if you are to any degree an artist. Dover publishes cheap, no-frills reprints of a wide variety of old books, from the greatest classics in world literature to wordless books full of clip art. The Dover catalog includes many obscure and forgotten old books, one of which is Louis Wolchonok’s 1961 book Lessons in Pictorial Composition. As an art school graduate and occasional would-be artist, I find most how-to books on art to be pretty useless. Not so with this book from Wolchonok, however. Although it’s an odd duck in the genre, this book actually has some really useful content for painters and draughtsmen.

Wolchonok (1898–1973) was a professional artist in New York City and taught at City College of New York. There is hardly any information on him to be found online except auction records of his works. He doesn’t even have a Wikipedia entry. Both the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the National Gallery of Art have works by Wolchonok in their collections. To my knowledge, he published three books on art, the others being Design for Artists and Craftsmen and The Art of Three Dimensional Design.

Over 700 sketches by Wolchonok illustrate his Lessons in Pictorial Composition. Almost all of these are entirely black and white, using only line-art hatching effects for shading. Only a few of the illustrations use halftone grays. Although Wolchonok does discuss color towards the end, the book contains no color illustrations. The 700 sketches in this book exhibit a wide variety of styles, from non-objective abstractions similar to something Wassily Kandinsky, Robert Delaunay, or Werner Drewes might produce, to realistic landscapes and figures reminiscent of Ben Shahn, early Stuart Davis, or Reginald Marsh. Are they all beautiful? No, but they are all very well thought-out. Each one of these little drawings, most smaller than a credit card, could serve as the basis for a completed painting. I’ve seen some of Wolchonok’s paintings online, and I don’t like them much. These sketches, however, though dated to an earlier modernist period, are quite impressive. It would be difficult for any artist to fill a sketchbook with such a high quantity and wide variety of potentially productive thumbnails. Any artist who can learn from Wolchonok’s workmanlike example would no doubt experience a notable increase in inspiration and productivity.

When I went to art school decades ago, we were required to take many drawing and painting classes, of course. We were also required to take “design” classes, in which we worked through visual exercises to learn about concepts like line, shape, color, form, tension, balance, etc. Lessons in Pictorial Composition would be a fine textbook for such a course. Wolchonok’s Lessons only applies to good ol’ fashioned two-dimensional art—drawings, paintings, prints—not to today’s artworld landscape of found-object sculpture, conceptual art, and other high-falutin gallery fare. Theoretically, however, Wolchonok’s lessons could apply to digital art, which is also 2D.

A lot of how-to art books try to idiot-proof the creative process by telling you where to put your brush and what color to choose. The best books in the genre, and there are few, actually help you to think like an artist. Wolchonok’s writing in this book will not excite you, but he does competently get his points across. The images do most of the talking. Much like Edgar Payne’s Composition of Outdoor Painting, Lessons in Pictorial Composition largely succeeds as a visual reference of examples that artists can learn from, emulate, and build upon.

Memories of My Melancholy Whores by Gabriel García Márquez

Dirty old man finds inappropriate love

Memories of My Melancholy Whores is a novella by Colombian author and Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014). It was published in Spanish in 2004, and an English translation was released the following year. This is a very short work that really belongs in a collection of short stories rather than a stand-alone book. This novella is not set in the fictional village of Macondo where many of García Márquez’s other works take place, like his famous novel One Hundred Years of Solitude and his other three novellas. Instead, Memories of My Melancholy Whores takes place in an urban setting. The city is unspecified, but based on the names of streets, parks, newspapers, etc., it’s a safe bet to say the story is set in Colombia. 

The novella is narrated by an elderly man who I believe is unnamed. Some refer to him as “the scholar.” He appears to be a writer and perhaps a former academic of some sort. He writes a weekly column for his city’s newspaper. This man has never married. He states that in his entire life he has never been in love and has only slept with prostitutes—around 500 different prostitutes by his count. On his 90th birthday, this man decides that he wants to celebrate the landmark event by deflowering a young virgin, so he calls up his favorite madam, who agrees to procure the virgin for him. When he shows up at the whorehouse, he is led into a room where he finds a naked 14-year-old girl lying asleep. Rather than claim the service he paid for, the old man decides to simply watch the girl sleep. The way this is presented, García Márquez seems to want us to find this charming, but the old man also fondles the girl while she sleeps, which is not charming. Even though the two do not speak, the man falls in love with the girl, or so the author would have us believe. The scholar returns to the bordello for repeat rendezvous with this girl, who remains a sleeping beauty during their encounters.

Obviously, there’s some problematic subject matter here. Even García Márquez, one of the most highly acclaimed authors of the last 75 years, did not get a free pass on this creepy sex fantasy. The work was met with some critical and public backlash upon its publication. This is not really an erotic tale, and the sexuality is more implied than graphic. García Márquez uses the whore scenario to comment on old age, lost youth, masculinity, and mortality. The story is told with an attempt at humor that includes dirty-grandpa jokes about the old man’s sexual prowess. Prostitution, even child prostitution, is romanticized in this book as if it were some kind of cultural touchstone. Love between old men and young women has been a common theme in literature since ancient times. The way García Márquez tells this story has a feeling of mythology or fable about it, like when Zeus used to come down from Olympus and deflower virgins. It’s not quite the clueless pedophilia one finds in a lot of Victorian novels, but it’s pedophilia nonetheless, and García Márquez should have known better. An esteemed author might have gotten away with this in 2004, but two decades later it’s unlikely a man could publish a story like this without it inspiring some well-deserved outrage.

Regardless of its controversial subject matter, Memories of My Melancholy Whores just isn’t that great of a read. It’s not only offensive but also feels inconsequential. It just left me wondering what’s the point?

Hombre by Elmore Leonard

A riveting classic Western

Elmore Leonard is famous for his crime novels, many of which have been adapted into popular films in recent decades, but back in the 1960s and early ‘70s Leonard was known for his Westerns. Leonard’s fifth novel Hombre, published in 1961, is likely his best-known Western, due largely to the 1967 film adaptation starring Paul Newman, one of the best American-made Western movies of the 1960s—a decade that was full of great Westerns. The film Hombre changes some of the characters’ names and relationships, but the overall story is very faithful to the novel. Just as the movie is one of the all-time classics in the genre of Western film, Leonard’s novel is an outstanding work that holds a similar position in the Western genre of literature. Hombre the novel is riveting from start to finish.

For various reasons too complicated to explain here, a half dozen folks are riding in a stagecoach headed South towards Bisbee, Arizona. Among them is John Russell, whom some call by the nickname of Hombre. Russell is three-quarters White, one-quarter Mexican. As a child, he was abducted by Apaches and lived with them for several years, becoming accustomed to their way of life. As a young man, he reentered White society, but many of the townspeople still consider him an “Indian,” which, among most Whites in those days, was not a compliment.

When the passengers in the stagecoach find out about Russell’s Apache background, they decide they don’t want him riding in their presence anymore, so he is asked to sit outside with the driver. When the stagecoach encounters trouble, however (as stagecoaches often do in Western stories), and lives are in danger, to whom do they turn to save their bacon and guide them to safety? Russell, of course; he being the most capable man in the party. Russell hasn’t forgotten, however, the insult and ill treatment from his fellow passengers, and it’s unclear how much he’s willing to help them. As for the trouble encountered by the stagecoach, that’s better left unspoiled. The danger is multiplied, however, by the fact that this party is in the middle of the Arizona desert, and water is scarce.

Hombre is a revisionist Western, in that it takes a nontraditional approach to heroism and a more honest look at the status of Native Americans and Mexicans in American society than you’re likely to find in an old John Wayne movie of the 1940s or ‘50s. Although there is still a touch of Wild West romanticism to this story, for the most part Leonard’s novel is very realistic. There are no white-hatted saints among this cast of characters, and no one performs any heroic feats of gunplay that are outside the realm of reason. Unlike many Westerns of the 1960s, Leonard chooses not to ramp up the violence. In fact, the objective of the characters in this book seems to be to fire as few shots as possible and make them count. The plot is a cat-and-mouse game between Russell and his adversaries. Everyone’s actions and reactions are realistic and ring true to the natures of the individual characters. My eyes were glued to the page as I couldn’t wait to see what would happen next. As is often the case in Leonard’s books, the dialogue is pitch-perfect—clever and sharp without being ostentatiously so, and with a slight touch of humor that doesn’t belie the peril of the situation.

I’m not a habitual reader of Westerns, but I love Leonard’s work in this genre. Hombre is one of the best Westerns I’ve ever read, up there with Charles Portis’s True Grit. Leonard’s novels Valdez is Coming and Last Stand at Saber River are also top-notch entries in this genre.

The Later Life by Louis Couperus

Midlife crises in The Hague

The Later Life is a novel by Dutch author Louis Couperus (1863–1923). It is the second book in a four-novel quartet called Small Souls or The Books of Small Souls. (The first novel in the series is also titled Small Souls). The Later Life was originally published in the Netherlands in 1902, which is the time period in which the novel is set. It was first published in English in 1915.

Small Souls introduced us to the extensive Van Lowe family of The Hague, and the family drama continues in The Later Life. This second novel begins about two months after the end of Small Souls. In that previous book, Constance van der Welcke (née van Lowe) had a confrontation and a falling out with the rest of the Van Lowe family. After fleeing to Paris to be alone for several weeks, she returns to her husband and son in The Hague. Soon, the Van der Welckes patch up relations with Constance’s relatives and resume attendance at the family dinner parties.

The Later Life seems quite a bit shorter than Small Souls, and there is less going on in this second outing. Instead of bouncing around the entire Van Lowe family, here the focus remains primarily on the Van der Welckes: Constance, her husband Henri, and son Adriaan. Shortly after returning from Paris, Constance comes to the realization that her husband and her niece Marianne are in love with each other, though so far the interaction between the two has remained innocent. Meanwhile, an old school chum of Henri’s named Brauws returns to The Hague and becomes the frequent dinner guest of the Van der Welckes. Despite his history with Henri, Brauws forms a closer bond with Constance, and she falls in love with him. Much like her husband’s budding romance, there has been no physical affirmation of the relationship, just conversation. Will either of these harmless infatuations develop into full-fledged infidelity?

The title “The Later Life” may seem to imply that the novel is about senior citizens, but the three main players in this love quadrangle only range in age from their late thirties to their early forties (Marianne is about 19 or 20). Constance, Henri, and Brauws, however, all go through some sort of midlife crisis in this book and find themselves contemplating their lost youth. They are all dissatisfied and depressed by their present state of living. They’re lonely, trapped in loveless relationships, and/or depressed by the lack of meaning in their lives. Each wonders if he or she can finally find true happiness in later life, or is it too late to make a fresh start?

The phrase “small souls” is brought up more than a few times in the first two novels of this series. Couperus uses these words to signify the restrictive societal conventions under which these characters have developed and continue to live their lives. While somewhere in the world surely people are truly living lives that matter, the Van Lowes’ lives revolve around petty aristocratic concerns over what is proper or what people might think. “The world is full of mighty problems; and we . . . we are pigmies . . . in the tiny world of our own selves. . . .” says Brauws. Whatever was the equivalent of the Victorian era in the Netherlands, Couperus’s novels don’t so much rebel against it as rather critically acknowledge it as a pervading fact of life. Constance is the only one in her family who even questions the established order of things—whether these dinner parties or social engagements even matter. At 43, she realizes that she’s never really been in love, that she’s never even really lived. In the Small Souls series, which has proven a great read so far, Couperus reveals the existential angst beneath the veneer of upper-class respectability.

Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time by Dava Sobel

My kingdom for a clock!

Long before the days of ubiquitous GPS devices, when sailors first started voyaging to distant parts of the world, it was very difficult to determine just exactly where one was. While latitude could be determined by measuring the height of the midday sun above the horizon, longitude was quite a bit trickier. Without an accurate determination of longitude, ships could not only get lost aimlessly at sea but also wrecked on the shorelines of unforeseen islands and continents. This was such a costly and frustrating problem that in the early 18th century, England, the world’s leading maritime power, established a Board of Longitude to encourage efforts to find a solution to the longitude puzzle. The Board promised a large cash prize to whomever could come up with a reliable and accurate method for determining longitude. The book entitled Longitude by science writer Dava Sobel, published in 1995, recounts the story of the long and arduous quest to solve the longitude problem and claim the prize.

The surest method for finding longitude is to compare the solar time (noon, for example, the point when the sun is highest in the sky) of a known point (usually the port of departure) with that of your present location. Just as modern time zones tell us that New York is roughly an hour ahead of Chicago, the difference in minutes and seconds between point A and point B can be converted to a measurement of degrees indicating how far east or west you’ve traveled. The only way it is possible to measure this, however, is if you have an accurate timepiece that can remain synchronized to the exact solar time of your home port. Up to the early 1700s, this was not possible because there weren’t any clocks that could keep sufficiently accurate time when subjected to shipboard motion and temperature changes. What was needed was something we take for granted these days: a reliable timepiece. An English carpenter and self-taught clockmaker named John Harrison (1693–1776) set about to create such a marine chronometer that could withstand seaborne conditions and allow for accurate and reliable navigation. Harrison would end up devoting decades of his life to the project. 

Longitude was a New York Times bestseller and won several prestigious book awards. It is deliberately written for an audience of general readers, perhaps too deliberately at times. This is a very small and short book that one can read in a day or two. It’s written at about a high school vocabulary level. Wherever possible, complex scientific concepts are explained in layman’s terms, and there are no footnotes or endnotes. Longitude is at its best when it’s discussing the biography of Harrison and all of the politics behind the awarding of the coveted prize. It’s not so great, however, at explaining how exactly geographical coordinates are measured or what mechanical advancements made Harrison’s clocks so special. In the interest of simplification, such topics are glossed over in a sentence or two so as not to strain the brains of casual readers. Some simple black and white diagrams might have been helpful, but the book has no illustrations. Perhaps such diagrams would intimidate prospective readers by being too “sciency.” The result of too much popularizing is that the science and mathematics behind this story get inadequate and what feels like half-baked coverage. This is science history that succeeds as history; it’s about scientists but not so much about science.

The story of John Harrison is really fascinating, and this book made me want to learn more. Longitude is much like a National Geographic article (albeit a long one). You know you’re not getting quite the full story because the account has been condensed for reasons of space and accessibility. Nevertheless, you still learn a lot, enough to satisfy most curious general readers and pique the interest of those willing to pursue the subject further.

The Fate of the Corps: What Became of the Lewis and Clark Explorers After the Expedition by Larry E. Morris

The later lives and deaths of America’s intrepid explorers

I’ve read a few books recounting the 1804–1806 expedition of Lewis and Clark and their Corps of Discovery across America to the Pacific Coast and back. Stephen Ambrose’s Undaunted Courage is an excellent summation of the voyage, and the original 1814 published account of the journey, edited by Nicholas Biddle and Paul Allen, certainly yields many interesting details. The most complete account to date would be the 13-volume edition of the Journals of the Lewis & Clark Expedition edited by Gary E. Moulton, which you can either buy for a few hundred dollars or read online for free. Following up on all of these accounts of the expedition, Larry E. Morris’s 2004 book The Fate of the Corps takes a unique and interesting look at the Corps of Discovery by asking what happened to all these guys after the expedition was over?

In addition to Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and the men they assembled for the journey, the scope of Morris’s study includes Clark’s slave York, as well as Native American guide and interpreter Sacagawea and her French-Canadian husband Toussaint Charbonneau, both of whom joined the expedition in midstream. Morris considers 34 people to be the core of the Corps, and he investigates each of their post–expedition lives. Along the way, many other recognizable historical figures who associated with Corps members are brought into the narrative, including Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, Stephen Austin, Sam Houston, and about a half dozen U.S. Presidents. Lewis and Clark’s team members took up a variety of roles after the Corps split up—fur trappers, farmers, soldiers in the War of 1812 and the Mexican-American War, lawyers, politicians, and more. In learning about the lives of these Corps members, one learns quite a bit about the broader history of 19th-century America, Western expansion, and Native American relations.

While the lives many of these figures led were quite fascinating, their deaths are often equally intriguing and sometimes poignantly tragic. The best-known case is the death of Lewis himself, who exhibited signs of mental illness and committed suicide (or, as some argue, may have been murdered). Clark, on the other hand, lived a longer life in which he held important political positions in the West and also served as the guardian of Sacagawea’s children. Morris examines Clark’s attitude toward Native Americans (somewhat progressive for his day) and his problematic relationship with his slave York (not the least bit progressive).

I recently read Robert M. Utley’s 1997 book A Life Wild and Perilous, a history of “mountain men” that covers similar subject matter and several of the same individuals as Morris’s book. I found Utley’s storytelling very confusing and rather boring. Morris, on the other hand, really brings these characters to life. The biographical scenes are lively, often exciting, and sometimes moving. Morris’s accounts are grounded in fact, but they don’t read as simply a relentless barrage of facts. Morris does jump around quite a bit, chronologically and geographically. There a lot of life threads intertwined here, which can sometimes be disorienting. Unlike Utley, however, Morris assists the reader by providing a useful chronology up front and an appendix that recaps the pertinent details of each member of the Corps. As a result, you come away from this book knowing exactly what happened to these men and woman (except in cases where nobody knows exactly what happened to these men and woman). When there are conflicting views among historians about the ultimate fates of, for example, Lewis and Sacagawea, Morris explains the pros and cons of each side’s arguments.

If you want a history of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, this isn’t it. Read Ambrose or Biddle’s books. If that’s not enough to satisfy your interest, however, and you’d like to follow the ripple effects of that landmark journey through subsequent American history, then Morris’s The Fate of the Corps is a great read that will tell you everything you want to know and more.