On Tyranny

A small, timely volume by Timothy Snyder which reminds readers that we are no wiser than the Romans, or Italians in 1922, or Germans in 1933, or Czechs in 1946, and that the descent of free societies into totalitarianism is quite normal.

A Man Called Ove

The popularity of the film of this novel is easy to understand: The story is appealing in a Frank Capra kind of way. But the novel offers few surprises and shallow sentimentality.

The Hemingway/Dos Passos Wars

This two-act play by Ben Pleasants, published in 1997, dramatizes the rupture of a friendship over the death of Dos Passos's Spanish friend, Jose Robles, at the hands of the Left. Dos Passos sought truth; Hemingway, results.

One Man's Initiation — 1917

John Dos Passos's first novel, published in 1920, recounts the horrors and absurdities of the Great War as witnessed by an ambulance driver. The author saw the things he fictionalized, setting the template for a career that would produce the great American novel, U.S.A. A brief review from the Bookman in 1922 of the American edition of One Man's Initiation says it well: "The literary workmanship is remarkably skillful as war is forced to parade in nakedness — robbed of its chauvanistic, romance-embroidered clothing."

The Ambulance Drivers

This account by James McGrath Morris of the friendship between Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos, and its acrimonious end in Spain in 1937, explores the literary, political, and personal elements of the relationship in a swift-moving chronological narrative. Dos Passos was more wronged against, and the better human being, but Hemingway scores in his admonition to his friend against polemic literature. Looking back on Hemingway's early work and comparing it to Dos Passos's, it's not hard to see why the latter was on top with the critics in this rivalry, even if he occasionally had to borrow money from his far more financially successful friend to make ends meet.