Book Review: Jeeves and the King of Clubs

Jeeves and the King of Clubs
Ben Schott
Humor

MIKE PHIPPS DO NOT READ THIS POST IT WILL CAUSE YOUR EYES TO BLEED PLEASE FOR YOUR OWN SAFETY PRETEND THAT YOU DID NOT SEE IT THANK YOU

Now that we've got the Surgeon General's Warning out of the way, I can say that I was pleasantly surprised by Jeeves and the King of Clubs. The author seems to have approached it in a suitably chastened spirit: "nothing can cap perfection," he notes in an afterword. Certainly it's a big improvement on Sebastian Faulks's Jeeves and the Wedding Bells, in which Wooster, B. actually ends up (God help us) engaged.

Not that Jeeves and the King of Clubs is entirely free from innovation. This is the curse of the pasticheur (as I have occasion to know). Imitate slavishly, and you end up with something that's at best dull and uninspired. Stray too far from the template, and the justified wrath of the true believers pours down upon you. In this case, Schott inserts Bertram Wooster into an actual, not-entirely-silly spy plot--one that's occasioned, not by the blundering of his chums, nor by the machinations of his family, but by what might loosely be called the real world.

It's not all that much of a plot, mind you. Nonetheless, it's a departure. Classically, Bertie is motivated by nothing more than his own desire to be a decent chap, aid his undeserving compatriots, stay out of trouble, and not get married. The plot obstacles that occur are of a social nature, no more. Placing him--however gingerly!--into a situation with politics and secret messages and consequences is . . . a little different. It not only features Bertie being almost competent at something; at one point he is right when Jeeves is wrong. Great Scott!

In matters such as this, I'm generally a purist. I liked Jeeves and the King of Clubs pretty well, all the same. There's a little tip of the hat to Lord Peter Wimsey--nicely meta, that man--and an informative section of notes, which will however confuse you if you don't know that Wodehouse's nickname was "Plum". The language is quite good (a sine qua non), and the secondary characters entirely consistent with the Wodehouseian oeuvre. It helps, too, to remember that Wodehouse himself adored detective stories. 

Put another way, Jeeves and the King of Clubs was good enough that I'd read a sequel. As pastiches go, that's high praise.

Book Review: Forever and a Day

Forever and a Day
Anthony Horowitz
Thriller

Anthony Horowitz is one of the better mystery writers working today, so I was mildly curious to see what he could do with the James Bond form. Forever and a Day is in the continuity of the written Bond, not the filmic one, and the written Bond is a more interesting character altogether. (Also, it's a good James Bond title.)

Well . . . it's not bad. It's not especially memorable, though. As an origin story for 007, it has the problem that Daniel Craig's movie version of Casino Royale does the same thing, only better. Often it puts Bond in a curiously passive role, with his love interest Sixtine taking the initiative.. The construction is a bit loose: there's a scene where Bond and Sixtine reconnoiter the enemy base, for example, for no reason whatsoever. And the big reveal--while it really does read like something Ian Fleming might have used around 1960--isn't all that shocking to a modern reader. Even Bond's character is underdeveloped.

On the other hand, the writing is smooth, the scene is alluring, the villain is very good in a very Bondian fashion, and the final chapter is outstanding. Forever and a Day isn't a book for everyone, but there are many worse ways to pass an afternoon.

Book Review: Race to Hawaii

Race to Hawaii: The Dole Air Derby and the Thrilling First Flights That Opened the Pacific
James Ryan
History, aeronautics

This isn't a bad book. The subject matter is interesting, and the writing is clear (if rather simple). On the down side, Ryan is too digressive; perhaps it's an attempt to give context to the air madness of 1920s, but if so it's too unfocused and too anecdotal. The picture of just how big a deal this all was gets presented very effectively--tens of thousands of people showed up just to watch the airplanes take off. The significance of these events in the larger history of air travel and technology isn't. 

What does come through is the absolute star-struck passion that the early aviators had. It's no wonder that primordial science fiction had as one of its staples the half-crazy, half-inspired rocket jockey who aims his untried craft at the moon: that's exactly what these guys were like. Their death rate was absurdly high. While they lived, though, they were touched with fire.

Book Review: In the Hurricane's Eye

In the Hurricane's Eye: The Genius of George Washington and the Victory at Yorktown
Nathaniel Philbrick
History

Nathaniel Philbrick is an outstanding writer. This is a good book. It's not Philbrick's best work, however.

The aim of In the Hurricane's Eye is to tell the real, de-mythologized story of the Battle of Yorktown. In particular, the battle would never have taken place without the intervention of the French fleet, and it wouldn't have succeeded without French troops. None of what happened was inevitable. Philbrick does a nice job of making a narrative out of the various strange contingencies--the arguments between Washington and the French, the misjudgments on all sides, the titular hurricane, and many more--that led to the astounding result.

All the same, there are so many aspects in play here that the book is somewhat fragmented. The main story has to do with the naval strategy, and the main theme concerns just how much the Americans owed the French; but there are a great many excursions and side trips, and the story of Yorktown itself is curiously divorced from the rest of the book. Perhaps it's necessary to understand the war in the southern colonies in detail, along with Benedict Arnold, Lafayette, the siege of New York, and so forth, in order to fully understand Yorktown. Yet in a narrative history, the narrative has to be king.

Don't get me wrong. I read this book in a couple of gulps, enjoyed it, and will be back for more. It's a good read for anyone with a basic grounding in the facts of the American Revolution. If it's a little undirected at times, that at least accurately reflects the confusions and concerns of Washington and his contemporaries.

"Holmes on the Range" RETURNS!

It's no secret that I like Steve Hockensmith's writing. Heck, I shamelessly ripped off lovingly borrowed his main characters.

Now, after a long hiatus, they're officially back. The Double-A Western Detective Agency is on Amazon even as we speak. Short summary: I liked it a lot, and not just because I had the chance to see an early draft of the manuscript. This is an actual Adventure, with quick pacing and a good deal of action. There's a nice intertwining of multiple plot threads at the denouement, too. There's even an honest-to-God theme about going it alone vs. relying on others.

If you liked the prior books in the series, you'll like this one.

Book Review: Leadership in Turbulent Times

Leadership in Turbulent Times
Doris Kearns Goodwin
Biography

Doris Kearns Goodwin is an outstanding writer. Team of Rivals is a classic for a reason. Wait Till Next Year is a wonderful memoir. The Bully Pulpit is an insightful and sometimes moving triple portrait of Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the progressive press.

Leadership in Turbulent Times is a business book.

It's not bad. As a reading experience, in fact, it's pretty good. It serves as an interesting four-way parallel biography of four presidents--Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson. It proposes an interesting thesis, which is that these represent four different types of leadership (transformational, crisis, turnaround, visionary). But the business book is a fundamentally limited endeavor, and Goodwin doesn't transcend those limitations.

The weakest part of Leadership in Turbulent Times, in fact, is its most business-book-y part--the third of its four sections. The first two sections are narrative and descriptive, describing her protagonists' childhood and formative political experiences. She goes one president at a time, in chronological order. That works fine. It lets her compare and contrast each man at analogous points in their lives. 

But in the third section Goodwin veers down into the swamp of distilling the biographies into maxims, and the four-way structure doesn't cut it. She should have organized section by leadership practice, and then show how the four presidents applied them--differently, similarly, or both. Instead,  every president is treated in sequence. There are a lot of problems with this, but here are the killers:

1. It's shallow. By drawing on each leader's life individually, Goodwin's text is reduced to a series of platitudes. Of course it's good to "Lead with your strengths," to "Bring all stakeholders aboard," and so forth. Did anyone doubt it?
2. It's not coherent. Any litany of this sort is bound to be littered with contradictions, of the "don't look before you leap" vs. "he who hesitates is lost" variety.
3. It's forgettable. By the time you get to "Know when to hold back, know when to move forward" (Lyndon Johnson), you've probably forgotten about "Acknowledge when failed policies demand a change in direction" (Lincoln).
4. It doesn't support Goodwin's own taxonomy. If you want to establish that transformational leadership is actually distinct from crisis leadership, for example, you need to establish that the "transformational" rubric "Tell the truth" doesn't apply, or at least applies differently, in the "crisis" case. Using silos doesn't do that.

Regrettably, this is what business books do: provide a series of shallow, easily-parroted buzzwords that simple minds can easily turn into shibboleths (and bumper stickers). I'm not a fan of the genre. I'm still a fan of Goodwin's; I just don't think Leadership in Turbulent Times plays to her strengths.

Book Review: On Grand Strategy

On Grand Strategy
John Lewis Gaddis
History, politics, warfare

It's not often that I have a hard time describing my reaction to a book. On Grand Strategy is not exactly a military-history book, not exactly a philosophy book (in spite of heavily referencing Isaiah Berlin), not exactly a political-theory book, not exactly a descriptive book, not exactly a prescriptive book, not exactly an analytical book. I'm not entirely sure who the intended audience is, in fact; it's too popular to appeal to academics, and too academic to appeal to the public. Smart undergraduates, maybe?

Gaddis's thesis is that large scale strategy--whether political, military, economic, or what have you--is always a balancing process. If you fix your eyes on your ultimate ambition, you can lose sight of the practical necessities. If you keep your mind firmly on what's realistically achievable, you can narrow your vision to the point where you don't actually achieve much. Aspirations can be limitless; resources can't; to engage in grand strategy is to establish a meeting point. Or, in Berlin's famous formula, "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing."

To this end, the book proceeds largely as a series of parallel lives. Usually Gaddis picks out one historical personage who failed to negotiate this balancing act, and contrasts him with another one (either a contemporary, or someone else in a similar situation) who succeeded. These case studies are interesting, but they don't add up to a conclusion. That the tension cited exists is plain; a series of examples doesn't constitute any kind of explanation, much less a theory. Woodrow Wilson at the end of World War I, for instance, was obviously a prisoner of his ambitious ends. He didn't compromise on his means, and so his ends went unachieved. Okay, true. And . . . ?

The real weakness, to put it another was, is that it's all hindsight. Given a taxonomy and 20-20 postdiction, it's always easy to fit your cases into your structure. Whether that really explains anything, much less accurately reflects how the real historical figures thought or worked or acted, is a much more doubtful question.

I should stipulate that there's much to admire in On Grand Strategy. The scholarship is deep, wide, and erudite. The writing is quite fluid. The content is intellectually challenging, ambitious, and thought-provoking. All the same, when you write a thick book that effectively boils down to "good leaders know how to match means and ends," you haven't quite fulfilled your promises.