Dictator

Dictator concludes Robert Harris's compelling series of three novels centered around the life and career of Cicero. As orator, philosopher and politician, Cicero has much to teach readers 2,000 years later, but such wisdom is wasted on those who cannot or will not hear.

Doctorow: Collected Stories

In this final book by E.L. Doctorow, containing 15 stories, there is a not a single word out of place. Every sentence is finely wrought. It also shows the author's mastery of various styles and unfailingly gives that short story "click" on the final page that is like a catharsis.

Truth in Comedy

This manual on improvisation reads, at times, like a cult manifesto: There are certain things you must do, and others you must never do. But the information and instruction are presented convincingly. One tenet that seems counterintuitive at first but right on second thought is that agreement is funny. Another is that telling "jokes" is the surest way to doom a scene.

The God Boy

Ian Cross's 1957 novel might be compared to The Catcher in the Rye, but it is more sincere and affecting than that earlier work. Cross evokes place (New Zealand) and adolescence beautifully with small details, and succeeds, improbably, by having as his narrator a 13-year-old recounting three days in the life of his 11-year-old self. Religious mania, family dysfunction, sibling love, small-town life — it's all wrapped up in one package of nearly flawless prose.

The Theme Is Freedom

This 1950s collection of travel and political pieces by John Dos Passos allowed him to look back on his youthful enthusiasms with a more seasoned eye. The challenge with a book whose author has moved across the political spectrum is, basically, to be honest. Dos Passos thought Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent in 1927; it would ill-serve his credibility as a member of the right to throw overboard his meticulous and heartfelt defense of them then, and he doesn't. Whether sympathetic to the early Communists, the IWW or, later, more free market thinking, the thread that links all of these ideas is found in the book's title, but more specifically in a defense of the individual against giant organizations.

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.