Thurber, James. The Years With Ross. New York: Little, Brown. 1959. Print.
First Sentences:
Harold Ross died December 7, 1951, exactly one month after his fifty-ninth birthday....
Ross is still all over the place for many of us, virtually stalking the corridors of our lives, disturbed and disturbing, fretting, stimulating, more evident in death than the living presence of ordinary men.
Description:
Sometimes a writer's style is so smooth that it goes unnoticed. No vivid descriptors, over-long sentences, or odd structures that draw attention away from the subject at hand. Just clean prose, like a congenial conversation from a witty observer to be shared with a close friend.
Such a smooth writing style is used by James Thurber in his biography, The Years With Ross, depicting the life of his boss, Harold Ross, founder and editor of the New Yorker magazine from 1925 - 1951.
While a biography about a magazine editor may not sound like a fascinating story, remember that the magazine in question is the New Yorker, a unique voice of cleverness, sophistication, and humor for 90 years. Ross, as the man who founded it, nursed it through early years, recruited writers and cartoonists like Thurber, E.B. White, Alexander Woollcott, Charles Addams, Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, J.D. Salinger, John Cheever, and countless other literary luminaries, is a man of note and worthy of exploration by a clever writer like Thurber. The stories about Ross and these writers are priceless under Thurber's keen observation.
Thurber was an editor, writer and cartoonist in the earliest days the New Yorker starting in the 1920s and continuing for over 30 years. In The Years With Ross he starts with a short history of the founding of the magazine under Ross, the early struggles and commitment to quality humor, and the eventual success. Creating and enforcing the standards was Ross' role through thick and thin. He could be a demanding editor, seeking perfection in the humorous pieces submitted by writers hoping to be included in the New Yorker. As Ogden Nash put it:
He was an almost impossible man to work for -- rude, ungracious and perpetually dissatisfied with what he read; and I admire him more than anyone I have met in professional life. Only perfection was good enough for him, and on the rare occasions he encountered it, he viewed it with astonished suspicion.
Thurber, too, was often at odds with Ross who often did not understand the meaning of Thurber's cartoons. Still, Ross could give an backhanded compliment. One cartoonist asked Ross:
"Why do you reject drawings of mine, and print stuff by that fifth-rate Thurber?
"Third-rate," said Ross, coming promptly and bravely to the defense of my stature as an artist and his own reputation as an editor.
Ross had many quirks which made him one of the greatest editors and judges of quality writing.
Ross's keen, almost boyish, enthusiasm for novel bits of information could disarm, for a while, his mature shrewdness and skepticism which, on clear days when the mental visibility was good, functioned as sharply as any man's....His mind is uncluttered by culture.That's why he can give prose and pictures the benefit of the clearest concentration of any editor in the world
Thurber is also a master at pointing out other character traits of Ross that are peculiar, harmless, and incredibly funny, making Ross such a fascinating person to be around:
It was on that day in his office that Ross, discussing some guilty pair, said, "I'm sure he's s-l-e-e-p-i-n-g with her." He was the only man I've ever known who spelled out euphemisms in front of adults.
A wonderfully thorough portrait of Harold Ross and life for writers of the most famous humor and culture magazine in the world. The clarity and simplicity of Thurber's writing style should be the example for all writers. I loved it.
If this book interests you, be sure to check out:
Thurber, James. The Thurber Carnival
The best humorous stories from Thurber's career, most previously appearing in the New Yorker magazine. Includes The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, Have You Seen My Pistol, Honey-Bun? The Scotty Who Knew Too Much, and The Night the Bed Fell among many others.
Price, Asher. The Year of the Dunk: A Modest Defiance of Gravity. New York: Crown. 2015. Print.
First Sentences:
On a late winter afternoon in New York at some basketball courts by the Great Lawn in Central Park, my hands jammed into my hoodie pockets, I waited for my pal Nathaniel.
It was crisp, still cold enough to see the breath puff in front of your face, especially if you were winded. An old Spalding street ball, circa 1988, dug out from my childhood closet, sat on the ground between my feet.
Description:
It's a dream probably most men have: to be able to dunk a basketball into a 10' (regulation- height) hoop. Oh, sure, we can slam it into our kid's plastic mini-hoops, toss Nerf balls into office back-of-the-door rings, or even occasionally stuff a tennis ball over the rim. But putting a real basketball into a real hoop is always the holy grail. Even Barack Obama has this dream:
In 2008, candidate Barack Obama was asked whether he'd rather be the president of Julius Erving, the great dunker of the 1970s and early 1980s, in his prime. "The Doctor," he said like a shot. "I think any kid growing up, if you got a chance to throw down the ball from the free-throw line, that's better than just about anything." [Obama first dunked when he was 16]
Asher Price, author of The Year of the Dunk: A Modest Defiance of Gravity, does more than just think about dunking. He pledges to pursue every means possible to get his 33-year-old, 6' 2", 21% body fat body up high enough to actually stuff the basketball on a regulation goal. He gives himself one year to train using any means possible except using "medical-grade material to make myself jump higher."
The book follows his months of preparation, from being measured and evaluated by the Performance Lab of the Hospital for Special Surgery to identify "capabilities" and "deficiencies," to formulating diet and exercise plans to lose 25 pounds, to lowering his body fat to 10%, and finally adding five inches to his vertical jump.
And he is dogged in his commitment to do this. Page after page describe his pursuit of this goal in a variety of ways, including interviews with experts in physical and dietary fields, working out with former athletes, and generally turning over every stone to improve his body. He writes of the exploits of noted jumpers like Dick Fosbury (high jumping Olympic gold medalist), Spud Webb (5"8" NBA dunk champion), Michael Jordan (NBA all-time great dunker), and Brittney Griner (6'8" WNBA player, the first woman to dunk in a college game).
Along the way, he makes several discoveries about himself, training, and the dunk itself. He describes the history of the dunked basketball, the silly NCAA rule banning the dunk from the college game for 10 years, and the creativity and power behind the dunks perfected by Black players. He tries shoes which are banned by the NBA for giving a jumping advantage to their wearers (they didn't work for the author). He eliminated carbs, alcohol, and sweets from his diet, and made his drink of choice "Hell's water" (non-fat milk).
Price is a personable, everyman sort of writer who draws you into his quest with his skilled writing and complete honesty in sharing both his hopes and frustrations. He paints a clear picture of each new endeavor, each new technique that might bring him closer to his goal, and of course each frustration with his own age, body, and gravity.
Mentally Price has no doubts he will succeed, although the improvements are slow in coming. But they do come. But will they be enough to finally, after 365 days of work, to slam dunk a basketball? You'll have to wait until the final pages to read the results of his dunk test - I won't tell).
Stephenson, Neal. Seveneves. New York: HarperCollins. 2015. Print.
First Sentences:
The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason.
Description:
OK, now that's a gripping first sentence! Is it a joke, a real situation, or just a fantasy in someone's mind? In Neal Stephenson's science fiction novel Seveneves, the moon actually is inexplicably destroyed, leaving only a few large chunks and a scattering of small rocks where our friendly satellite used to be. Then Stephenson sets out to portray a credible scenario of what would happen to Earth and its people without a moon. Who can stop reading after such an opening few pages?
Then Stephenson inserts a kicker. When the world's scientists crunch numbers and patterns, they discover that the orbiting debris of rock from the destroyed moon will start to collide repeatedly with other pieces until Earth's blue sky is made white by the clouds of large and small rock particles. On a mathematically predicted date, these rocks will fall to Earth in a Hard Rain, bringing fire and destruction to the entire planet and people. Earth has two years to prepare for the end of all life.
Stephenson definitely takes this destruction of the moon and the consequences seriously. He follows the thinking and actions of scientists and astronauts on the International Space Station who explore every conceivable aspect of this deadly scenario carefully. The world arrives at the only logical, acceptable conclusion: an international effort must be made to create a spaceship Cloud Ark (small, hastily constructed pods) to preserve physical and DNA representatives of the world's diverse populations.
How is such spacecraft to be designed? How are the 2,000+ survivors to be chosen? Can it survive the Hard Rain of destruction and the five thousand years before the Earth is habitable again? And can people on board the Cloud Ark actually get along to survive as the last representatives of Earth?
This is an 860-page sci-fi novel, definitely not a frothy light-weight fantasy. Each page is packed with interesting characters and scientific theory that sounds so plausible (to me, at least) that I felt myself deeply entrenched in the uncertainty, logic, and planning of a what seems a real life situation. Predictions, orbits, machinery, robots, living environment, construction in space, conflicting personalities - a hundred problems are faced and addressed, many successfully, some complete failures.
Stephenson definitely is a writer's writer, with compelling data for every scenario that could possibly occur should our Moon actually blow up. But who cannot be surprised when, as you are deeply absorbed in the characters and plot, you turn the page to reveal the next section titled, "Five Thousand Years Later"? Huh? What happened to those people you had grown to love and the challenges they were facing?
Major characters die unexpectedly as time marches on and the world's surviving population falls off to numbers in the single digits. Seveneves is chock full of shocking twists, scientific solutions, and ever-increasing challenges facing people asked to hold on and create a new civilization 5,000 years in the future.
A fantastic, detail, plausible, and thoroughly engrossing book.
If this book interests you, be sure to check out:
Weir, Andy. The Martian
A member of the Mars first astronauts is accidently left behind by his crew. Now he must try to contact the rescue ship and survive for six months by his wits and the few supplies left in their station. Fantastic MacGyver-like hero and seat-of-his-pants solutions to problems. (previously reviewed here)
Swyler, Erika. The Book of Speculation. New York: St. Martin's Press. 2015. Print.
First Sentences:
Perched on the bluff's edge, the house is in danger.
Last night's storm tore land and churned water, littering the beach with bottles, seaweed, and horseshoe crab carapaces. The place where I've spent my entire life is unlikely to survive the fall storm season.
Description:
Know what a "swimmer" is? A swimmer is a performer in a circus sideshow who can hold his/her breath for long periods of time, over 10 minutes in most cases, while swimming underwater posing as a mermaid. The narrator of Erika Swyler's captivating novel The Book of Speculation, Simon Watson along with his sister Enola learned this technique from their mother, a swimmer for a travelling sideshow company... someone ironically who committed suicide by drowning.
Simon, a small town librarian, receives an ancient book written in the 1700s full of notes, drawings, and rambling notations about a travelling sideshow circus. While interesting in itself as a rare book, the crumbling record also mentions Simon's great grandmother, grandmother and other relatives who all were swimmers with this show.
Fascinated, Watson researches these names and finds the odd coincidence that each of these swimmers committed suicide on the same date, July 24 - all by drowning just like his own mother. Impossible for a swimmer, but it happened. Of course, Watson has to get to the bottom of it to understand what actually occurred and to prevent his eccentric sister, currently drifting about as a fortune-teller with a travelling show (and also a swimmer), from possibly repeating her ancestor's actions.
I have a week. The book is a beautifully broken window with an obstructed view of what is killing us, and something is definitely killing us.
Jumping between the 1700s life and people of the travelling show, and then the present day, author Swyler keeps the story absolutely captivating. There are mysterious elements that span both time periods, from ancient tarot cards and fortune-tellers, to horseshoe crabs, floods, portraits, and even a tattooed man who can turn on electric lights with his fingers.
Those who long to live in [the] past dream just as much for the future.
I loved the oddities of the circus life and its unusual performers, the element of mystery for each generation, the dusty research Simon pursues to unravel the story, the romance he finds with an old friend, and the tension when July 24 finally arrives in Simon and Enola's life.
We carry our families like anchors, rooting us in storms, making sure we never drift from where and who we are. We carry our families within us the way we carry our breath underwater, keeping us afloat, keeping us alive. I've been lifting anchors since I was eighteen. I've been holding my breath since before I was born.
A wondrously beautiful, gripping, and magical book. Highest recommendation.
If this book interests you, be sure to check out:
Davies, Robertson. The World of Wonders
Fantastic telling of one boy's rise from a tragedy in his childhood to becoming an internationally famous magician, but still finds he must face his past and friends. (previously reviewed here)
