Boomsday

Christopher Buckley should be called the cotton candy novelist: The books taste good, if a bit cloying, but are utterly forgotten 10 minutes after consumption.

Highcastle

Stanislaw Lem's reminiscence of his childhood in Lvov, Poland, in the 1920s and 30s is refreshingly devoid of retrospective reinterpretation. The child's life is explained from a child's eyes. Lem, like many children, was a tinkerer, but more unusually he was also a young bureaucrat, drawing up documents and passports and certificates with his own seals and using a clock part to make perforations. The imagination becomes constricted with age, but some can slip the noose.

Heroes Like Us

By the end of this novel by the East German Thomas Brussig, the pfennig, as he would say, drops. "How could our society have endured for decades if all its members had been as discontented as they claim?" This sentence, in common with what seems to be half the sentences in the novel, takes the interrogatory form and is answered only indirectly. The comic story of a daydreaming young Stasi agent, preoccupied with sex, ends with the breaching of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Behind the satire lurk some uncomfortable truths.

The Selling of the President 1968

Forty-five years after its publication, this account by Joe McGinnis of the TV advertising campaign to get Richard Nixon elected president is both quaint and startling. Quaint, because today all candidates use the image-building techniques detailed in these pages. Roger Ailes was proven entirely correct when he said that this was the way campaigns would be run "forevermore." But the book is also startling because of the candor from Nixon's team and the access they gave McGinnis. It is hard to imagine any of this material today escaping from the closed conference rooms of public relations or advertising firms. And what was true in 1968 seems even more true today: If the voters have become hypnotized by this kind of substance-free politics, it is because they want to be.

Cakes and Ale

Somerset Maugham has never disappointed me, not once. He is one of those writers whose books do not need page numbers because readers never have cause to look for them. As the paragraphs and chapters flow smoothly by, the character studies are always astute, the settings keenly observed. This tale of the early years of a grand old writer, seen from various angles, offers both Maugham's usual satisfactions and several surprises.

Not to Disturb

Muriel Spark's example of writing short novels is one that should be followed more today, even when the result, as here, is middling. Short, sharp and sprinkled with puns beats long, lugubrious and laden with imagery every time.

As I Remember Them

Nostalgia is a trap, but it's hard to get away from the idea that in some far-off "Golden Age" there were performers, not just celebrities. This reminiscence by Eddie Cantor contains chapters on well-known vaudeville and movie personalities like W.C. Fields, Will Rogers, and Jimmy Durante, plus capsules of a few performers like Bert Williams and Bea Lillie who won't be known to most readers today. The jokes are corny but produce a laugh, and the anecdotes, while mostly light-hearted, can turn poignant, as when Cantor tells how Rogers was so affected by a complaint from a clergyman about the morality of a play he was in that he dropped out and accepted an invitation from Wiley Post to fly around the world.

The Visit

You don't have to scratch too deeply below the surface of noble sentiments (justice, democracy) before the grubbier human instincts (greed, revenge) appear, Friedrich Durrenmatt suggests in this play.Yet the frequently funny drama also hints that material desires may be as lofty as any other human aim. Splitting the difference happens all the time in real life, but Durrenmatt seems to be saying it's not that easy.

Steaming to Bamboola

Christopher Buckley's account of a voyage aboard a tramp freighter in 1979 is sharply observed, funny, and full of sea lore.

The Safety Net

Heinrich Boll's 1979 novel is a time-release prophesy. What affected a prominent business family of the day in West Germany — surveillance, security, disappearing privacy — now affects everyone. One character warns that "this constant surveillance was causing mental distress leading to psychic damage." Another imagines drone warfare with flocks of mechanical birds carrying explosives. Other themes that resonate 35 years later include the rich who rail against socialism while ignoring that concentrated wealth dismantles the middle class, and the consolidation and trivialization of media. In the blink of an eye, Boll can take in the whole wide world.

Mad as Hell

The book can't compare with the movie, in this case, but Dave Itzkoff's Mad as Hell manages to throw illuminating light on the making of Network and the life of its angry screenwriter, Paddy Chayefsky. Directed by the brisk and businesslike Sidney Lumet, Network comes off in this telling as a largely trouble-free shoot, with the exception of some nonsense from Faye Dunaway. The real drama came earlier as Chayefsky negotiated for control over the project. Itzkoff is especially good when he delves into the life of Peter Finch, who was an extreme long shot for Howard Beale when casting began but who performed the role unforgettably.

Pietr the Latvian

Penguin is publishing new translations of Georges Simenon's Inspector Maigret books, of which this is the first. The inspector leaps off the page, fully formed and in three dimensions. I suspect the pleasure of the succeeding stories will be derived less from the detecting and plotting, which are first rate in any event, than from the portraiture of this instantly likable policeman.