Books

It is early in the morning on the “day of infamy,” Sunday, December 7, 1941. Two hundred and fifty miles north of Hawaii, six Japanese aircraft carriers are preparing to launch more than 350 aircraft in a surprise attack on the United States Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. The fleet’s commander-in-chief, Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, had told a reporter the day before that the Japanese would be “damned fools” to attack the United States, ignoring the warnings that war was imminent. Around 7:30 a.m., the lead Japanese pilot fires a single flare, giving the pilots the “final go” signal. “Within an hour... the US Pacific Fleet was in ruins.” The American public, writes espionage historian Ronald Drabkin in Beverly Hills Spy, quite rightly demanded: “Whose fault was it?

One of the Ukraine war’s minor celebrities is Ramzan Kadyrov, a Russian politician and Islamic hardliner who rules his native province of Chechnya as a personal fiefdom. Kadyrov and his combative underlings have been active on social media from the beginning of the conflict, posing with guns and trophies and boasting about their martial prowess.  Before they became villains in the Western press, tarred by their association with Russian aggression and Islamic fundamentalism, the Chechnyan mountain clans’ struggle for independence was a Victorian cause celebre, akin to Western support for Ukraine today.

Many magicians have passed through Las Vegas since its inception somewhere around the early 1940s: David Copperfield, Penn and Teller, Criss Angel. But possibly its most renowned, yet least acclaimed, trickster was a woman named Gloria Dea.   Dea performed traditional magic — the sleight of hand stuff — but she had a specialty in billiard ball manipulation, tossing the balls so that they seem to multiply and then disappear. A prodigy, you could say — and one of the first magicians, let alone a female one, to set foot on the Strip. In 1941, Dea, who was born Gloria Metzner in Oakland, California, appeared at the Round-Up Room at the El Rancho Vegas. She was not yet twenty years old. Dea lasted a year before Hollywood recruited her into D-movies.

Green-eyed Gertrude Bell belongs in Charles Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta, that slab of velvety antique that enthralled the English (they were not yet British) in the love-affair phase of their relationship with the Arabs. County Durham-born to a wealthy industrialist father, Bell (1868-1926) was a key player when the Powers tried ineptly to mould the Middle East, as the Ottoman Empire crumbled. She is well covered in the literature and appears in a large hat alongside Churchill in conference photographs. But as Pat Yale announces in this new book: “Her time in Turkey has been largely overlooked.” Bell traveled extensively in that country before the first world war (starting in 1899) and in its aftermath.

Manhattan-based literary magazine the New Criterion has published its first ever piece of fiction in its forty-two-year history. The author may raise an eyebrow: it’s legendary and controversial filmmaker Woody Allen. Allen has penned the short story “Breakfast Special” for the magazine's February 2024 edition. Appropriately enough, for both the magazine and the author, it takes place in Manhattan and stars Murray Tempkin, "a slim, bespectacled thirty-year-old writer, who on a good hair day resembles a scientist or an intellectual but should the weather turn humid looks more like some kind of meshuggener." The tale, which centers on a meetcute gone very, very wrong, bears all of Allen's hallmarks: neuroses, humor, romance, social awkwardness.

It was too dark to see, and the painting was upside down. In 1877 John Ruskin, the leading art critic of Victorian England, attended an exhibition that included paintings by the American-born artist James Abbott McNeill Whistler. He hated them — and said so. In print. “I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.” Whistler sued. The following year the argument came to court, on a dark day in a gloomy and gaslit courtroom. The canvases that Ruskin had so disliked were propped up against a wall and barely visible; one was the wrong way up, and another was dropped unceremoniously onto an elderly gentleman’s balding head.

Ah, welcome back. In our previous look at some of the major books of the year, I highlighted titles that went on to be acclaimed bestsellers and the most talked-about volumes of the past twelve months, as well — inevitably — as a few that failed to live up to the high expectations that we’d placed upon them. It is interesting that, just as Prince Harry’s Spare was indeed the most discussed book of last year, another hotly tipped memoir is undoubtedly the major release of 2024.

I visited Sicily in May 2005, when the airlines were still requiring all checked luggage to be left unlocked. After the flight from Paris touched down at Palermo, my wife and I went to collect our luggage at an apparently quiet and unrushed airport to discover my suitcase opened partway and an expensive dressing gown missing. Eighteen years ago, il Commissario Salvatore Montalbano was quite unknown to me. Otherwise, I should have immediately thought of the Sinagra family at the eastern end of the island, though the word “mafia” did come to mind as I rezipped the bag.

Call it a gift from the book gods: my literary coming of age coincided with the last decade when the existence of good bookstores could be taken for granted. In the mid-1990s, when I was an adolescent who read every new novel by Updike, Roth and Vonnegut, Amazon was still a novelty. Chain bookstores, such as B. Dalton and Waldenbooks, were as ubiquitous in shopping malls as food courts, cheap jewelers and eyewear vendors. And growing up in a suburb of New Orleans, I also had access to an astonishing number of antiquarian bookstores, including what is still officially my favorite bookstore: Faulkner House Books, the teeny-tiny bottom level of a townhouse in the French Quarter in which William Faulkner set down on paper what became his first novel, Soldier’s Pay.