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STERLING HAYDEN
P.J. O' ROURKE
Malcolm Muggeridge
George Orwell
Ideas Have Consequences by Richard M. Weaver
Desperate Voyage by John Caldwell
Riddle of the Sands - By Erskine Childers
Ideas Have Consequences by Richard M. Weaver
Lonesome Dove - By Larry McMurtry
Len Deighton - The Early
Spy Novels, Winter,
and the Bernard Samson Trilogies
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In the 40's and 50's Sterling Hayden was a Hollywood movie star. However, prior to his film career, Hayden was a working sailor, and had been a member of the crew that sailed the Gloucester schooner Gertrude L. Thebaud in the last epic international schooner racing series against Nova Scotia's legendary Bluenose in 1938.
Hayden devotes a chapter of his autobiography, Wanderer, to that topic, along with many other fascinating sailing anecdotes. His "novel of 1898," Voyage, is a fictional companion piece to Wanderer, and those who read them in succession will note how Hayden wove threads from his real-life experiences into the novel's narrative.
Both are highly recommended for anyone with a love of the sea and a good, salty yarn.
Like Rush Limbaugh (and me), P.J. O' Rourke is a baby-boomer right-winger. However unlike Rush, who was born into conservatism in small-town Missouri (and claims to have never owned a pair of jeans in his life), all the leading indicators in O' Rourke's life pointed to his becoming a neo-liberal like most of his chronological and cultural peers.
O' Rourke was an enthusiastic participant in the '60s peace/love/dope hippie scene, and became Editor-in-Chief of National Lampoon in the '70s as well as creating a journalistic niche with his automotive humor pieces for Car & Driver and Automobile magazines. Few of O' Rourke's NL or car-buff fans would've predicted his metamorphosis into one of the most articulate and insightful neo-conservative voices in America.
P.J. made his literary mark with several light but wickedly hilarious books published during the '80s; EG: his "Modern Manners: An Etiquette Book For Rude People," and "The Bachelor Home Companion : A Practical Guide to Keeping House Like a Pig." In 1982, on assignment for Harper's magazine, P.J. found himself in the Soviet Union, which he characterized as "Lower Slobbovia run on central planning and nonsensical political beliefs." He became "exhausted with the crumminess, clumsiness, and gross mismanagement... a country that combines the charm of Newark with the efficiency of Chad."
P.J.'s Russian trip marked a personal watershed, leaving him "disgusted with government -- not just with the Soviet perversion, but with government of every kind." He concluded that the really big difference between liberal Western governments and the (then) Soviets was that "in Russia, the dimwit government runs everything, not just the government."
Nine years later, O' Rourke picked up this theme in his first "serious" book, "Parliament of Whores," in which he deconstructs the venal, hypocritical, corrupt reality of governance in the late 20th century. "Authority has always attracted the lowest elements in the human race," he writes, "All through history mankind has been bullied by scum..."
O' Rourke followed "Parliament..." with "Give War A Chance: Eyewitness Accounts of Mankind's Struggle Against Tyranny, Injustice, and Alcohol-Free Beer," picking up where he left off, and continued the thread with "All The Trouble In The World, The Lighter Side of Overpopulation, Famine, Ecological Disaster, Ethnic Hatred, Plague, and Poverty," and "Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence, and a Bad Haircut"
P.J. O' Rourke never disappoints. Enjoy.
CM
Malcolm Muggeridge led one of the most extraordinary lives of this century, starting out from childhood as a consummate Fabian socialist, at one point even moving to Russia, and ending up a Christian and ardent apologist for Roman Catholicism.
In between, he was a journalist, a British intelligence operative, editor of the British humor magazine, Punch, a world traveler, a television personality, and a university lecturer, among other things. He also found time to write several excellent books, which you can browse by clicking the link above.
George Orwell once wrote that "Every writer who is honest is motivated by two things: one, the desire to show off; and two, the habit of noticing unpleasant facts." Orwell himself wasn't much of a show off, but he was a master of noticing and writing about unpleasant facts.
He is of course most famous for his anti-totalitarianism opus, 1984, but Orwell was a socialist in the 1920's and early '30s. He was also visionary enough to begin having doubts about leftist utopianism by the mid-'30s. His work that marked this watershed is The Road To Wigan Pier, which was commissioned by the Socialist Book Club. Indeed, Orwell's description of the poverty, squalor, and horrific working conditions endured by coal miners and their families in the north of England between the wars is ample explanation why the British working classes looked to the left to deliver them from their misery.
However, Orwell recognized that the promises of socialism were hollow, and that in the end trading one brand of industrialism for another would ultimately just create other sorts of injustices. His withering critique of socialism in the second half of Wigan Pier dismayed the publishers so much that they added a lengthy disclaimer.
Click on the link above to browse an Orwellian library.
This brilliant little book, which should be required reading at every college and high school in North America, was written in 1947 by English professor and farmer Richard Weaver.
With uncanny prescience, Weaver identified the liberal humanist cancers that were already eating away at the vitality of Western culture, and accurately predictedtheir consequences: the distempers of the postmodern era.
Weaver masterfully debunks the sentimental, half-baked shibboleths and egregious lies of liberal humanism. He is, like this writer, deeply suspicious of all post-medieval philosophical innovations, and prescribes what amounts to neo-medievalism as the antidote to the poisons of post-Enlightenment thought.
If Desperate Voyage were an adventure novel, it would be a jolly good one. However, the story of John Caldwell's nautical odyssey happens to be true.
In 1945, Caldwell, then a merchant seaman, found himself on the beach in Panama, with no transportation avaliable to return him to his recent bride, an Australian army nurse.
Caldwell proceeded to buy a small sloop, Pagan, and resolved to teach himself to sail en route across the Pacific--a plan that did not pan out especially well. However, its execution does make entertaining reading, and Desperate Voyage is a page turner.
The last I heard of John Caldwell, he and his wife were operating a hotel on a small island in the Caribbean.
Larry McMurtry's epic Pulitzer Prize winning Lonesome Dove is My favorite western novel, and the six + hour television mini-series dramatization is acclaimed by many to be the best western movie ever filmed, with superb performances by Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones as as aging Texas Ranger captains Gus McRae and Woodrow Call, and a great supporting cast.
Both the book and the movie (on videocassette) are available here, as are several other Lonesome Dove related publications. Mr. McMurtry is an inconsistent writer, and some of his books are, quite frankly, awful, however, Lonesome Dove is a masterpiece. The movie is faithful to the book, including much of the dialogue verbatim.
Charles W. Moore
Riddle of the Sands is considered by many to be the greatest yachting novel ever written, and by others to be the prototypical British spy novel that pioneered the genre popularized by Ian Fleming, Len Deighton, John Le Carre, et al., some 60 years later.
It is both, and all the more noteworthy for the fact that its author,Erskine Childers, lived a real life even more dangerous and exciting than that of the fictional characters he created in "Riddle."
This book was written at the turn of the Century, and first published in 1903. It is more demanding of the reader than a contemporary thriller, but the effort is handsomely rewarded. Not to be missed.
Charles W. Moore
Spy Novels, Winter,
and the Bernard Samson Trilogies
I consider Len Deighton to be the best of the three big English spy novelists, the other two being Ian Fleming and John Le Carre. Deighton wrote a highly successful series of spy novels in the 1960s and '70s with complex plots and a unique style. His heroes were not swashbucklers like Fleming's James Bond, but rather ordinary people who occasionally did extraordinary things.
Bernard Samson, the protagonist of Deighton's second series of nine spy novels written in the 1980s and '90s, is the quintessential Deighton hero--a man of blue collar instincts, sardonic, and wearily resigned to dealing with the ideosyncracies and foibles of his upper crust masters at MI6.
Winter, a "prequel" to the Samson trilogies, is a more conventional narrative novel that introduces some of the characters found in the the Samson books. Winter is a standalone story with a beginning, a middle, and an end, so my suggestion is to read it first, and then proceed to Game, Set, and Match; Hook, Line, and Sinker; and finally--Faith, Hope, and Charity, if you get hooked.
Bomber and Goodbye, Mickey Mouse are well-crafted war novels with no relationship to the Winter/Samson books.
Ernest A. Hooton
Ernest Hooton was the Dean of Anthropology at Harvard University during the 1920, '30s, and '40s. He was also a wonderful, entertaining writer.
Hooton's books are difficult to categorize adequately. While nominally on anthropological topics, they range widely into philosophical musings, social commentary, and most delightfully--humour. They are a treat to read, even if you don't give a hoot (sorry) about anthropology. More likely, you will discover that anthropology is more interesting than you thought.
Ernest Hooton is one of those rare writers who make you laugh out loud. The prefaces to his books "Twilight of Man," and "Why Men Behave Like Apes, and Vice Versa" are two of the most hilarious bits of short prose I've encountered.
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