Valparaiso

The first half of this novel by Nicolas Freeling, author of the Van der Valk detective series, is a study of character and place (a sailor and the Porquerolles). The second half is a caper that unravels a la Kubrik's The Killing. Together, lubricated with Freeling's world-weary style, they fit nicely.

Eisenhower 1956

This account by David Nichols of Eisenhower's handling of the Suez crisis in 1956 too often reads like a timeline on steroids, with lists of attendees at innumerable meetings. But the effort to get through that underbrush is worth it for Nichols's detailed telling of how the president handled health crises (heart attack, abdominal surgery), a re-election campaign, the British-French-Israeli attack on Egypt, and the Soviet invasion of Hungary. Eisenhower emerges as a principled but pragmatic leader. The least interventionist president of modern times, he went to the United Nations to try to secure a cease-fire in the Suez war, and when that effort was thwarted in the Security Council by a veto of the aggressor nations (and World War II allies), Ike went to the General Assembly instead. It is almost quaint to read about a president who puts peace above all, but as Nichols points out there was a nuclear anvil hanging over the nation's head, and Ike thought the only way to win World War III was to avoid it. It is saddening to read an account of such an admirable leader in the midst of such a disheartening presidential campaign 60 years later. 

The Flemish House

This Maigret story lacks the kind of revelatory excavation of human nature that others in the series provide. The detective is out of his element, among foreigners, which makes him, and eventually the reader, irritable.

Dispatches

Michael Herr's Vietnam book is best when the writer isn't infatuated with his own writing style, particularly the gripping section on Khe Sanh and in his accounts of other correspondents like Sean Flynn, son of the film actor.

Dewey Defeats Truman

This is another old-fashioned and satisfying historical novel by Thomas Mallon, set in 1948 in Owosso, Michigan, during the presidential campaign between Thomas Dewey and Harry Truman. Mallon's skill is to make himself invisible as a writer, using an agreeable prose style that puts characterizations and plot to the fore. His modesty and craftsmanship are qualities too often missing in contemporary American literature.

Amherst

This William Nicholson novel, based around an affair between Emily Dickinson's brother and the woman who would become the poet's champion, alternates between that narrative and an account of a young Englishwoman visiting Amherst to research a potential screenplay on the affair. Like many novels by fine English writers (Graham Greene's The End of the Affair comes to mind) and countless bad films, Amherst displays an almost infantile conception of romantic love. There is a quote, deep in the novel, that tentatively moves toward a more mature understanding ("We think there's someone out there who can make us happy, someone who'll make us complete, but that's not how it works."), but the person quoted follows the thought to a nihilistic conclusion. Nicholson is better that the overheated romance novel dialogue that he's put into this book.