Hellhound on his Trail (History) Hampton Sides.

 

So impressed was I by the previous book that I sprinted to the library and grabbed another one by the same author. It was nearly as good. It tells the intertwined stories of Martin Luther King and James Earl Ray in the period leading up to Ray’s murder of King and their almost equally fascinating denouements. Some parts of it (the Ray thread) reminded me of Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song and that is high praise from me.

My most poignant memory of this book is the scene where King and his brother talk to their mother on the telephone and play what seems to be a traditional game in their family of taking on one another’s identities to confuse her. So very human. 

King was the only orator of international status since Winston Churchill and I find it infinitely depressing that his great “I Have a Dream” speech has now been sidelined by the sneers of the “woke”.

Something has to be done about the plague of subtitles that has infected the publishing industry.   Sadly, Mr Sides seems to have caught the bug. This book's is "The Electrifying account of the Largest Manhunt in American History" while the previous one's was "The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette".  At least neither of them  includes the word “genius” (as an adjective) or “epic” or "adorable". Perhaps there’s still hope.

In the Kingdom of Ice. (History). Hampton Sides

 

It’s not so often that you come across a book that genuinely deserves to be described as a ripping yarn. This is one, about an American expedition that aimed at being first to the North Pole. I found the whole story engrossing and well told. I had never heard of this voyage before and I was intrigued by the weird and wonderful geographic theories that were current in the late nineteenth century and by what the explorers hoped, consequently, to find. I love a book that tells me things I hadn’t previously known.

Night, Sleep, Death, the Stars (Novel). Joyce Carol Oates

I really  like  the novels of Joyce Carol Oates. I admire her ability to expose the tensions within a group of people who think of themselves as a community, whether they are members of a family, residents of a town, citizens of a nation or, as in this case, all three.

At one level the story is simple. The paterfamilias of a prosperous,  middle class family, acting on a decent impulse,  intervenes in a situation on which he has stumbled. A spiral of conflict ensues: brother against sister, children against mother, conventional family against the civic order.

This is one of those novels where you find yourself having one-sided conversations with the characters:  "Oh for Christ's sake!  Don't do that!  Can't you see where it will lead?"  In that sense, as in many others, it is a faithful portrait of the contemporary United States.