John Paul Jones

Subtitled "A Sailor's Biography," this work by Samuel Eliot Morison paints the father of the US Navy as a complex, proud, enormously skilled tactician whose bravery and determination helped to secure the survival of the emerging American republic. (This despite the fact that the embryonic Navy had little role in the Revolution.) Born in Scotland and drawn to the sea at an early age, Jones led audacious attacks against the British coast, defeated a superior and faster ship in the Battle of Flamborough Head, and ended up working for Catherine II in the Black Sea fighting against the Turks. Morison's naval background skews the tale at times into the minutiae of sailing mechanics, but he also has plenty to say about Jones's love affairs, his relations with Ben Franklin (a friend) and assorted enemies, and his somewhat poignant end. Reading about an actual hero, warts and all, becomes an act of self-preservation in times of national collapse. And remember Jones's cry: I have not yet begun to fight!

Bloody Sam

Marshall Fine's biography of Sam Peckinpah is loaded — perhaps overstuffed is a better description — with anecdotes about the filmmaker's battles with producers, his alcoholism and drug abuse, and his several marriages. The author's interviews with people close to Peckinpah create a vivid picture of the man, but the book has less to say about the director's technical and storytelling talents.

God's Stepchildren

This 1924 novel about racial divisions in South Africa over roughly 100 years, from 1820 to 1920, is perceptive and affecting. Some of the language and ideas are outdated and offensive, but if you look to the heart of the book, that is, the people and their relationships, dreams, fears and beliefs, you will find a rich, multigenerational tale. Sarah Gertrude Millin's style is no-nonsense and drills down quickly to the essence of the issue: what is the meaning of identity for a multiracial person? 

Operation Shylock

Philip Roth the writer becomes Philip Roth the character in this novel, bedeviled by an impersonator in Israel. It is a dizzying and exhilarating trip in which, to the author's great credit, both cockamamie ideas and their refutations are equally convincing.

The Revenge of the Analog

Subtitled "Real Things and Why They Matter," David Sax's book argues for the superiority of physical, analog artifacts over their digital counterparts in several areas: for example, Moleskine notebooks, vinyl records, classroom teaching, and print newspapers. It is a necessary argument and, when dovetailed with a book like Tom Hodgkinson's How to be Idle, could form a useful philosophy of turning one's back on the digital world.

Zero Zero Zero

Roberto Saviano caught my attention with Gomorrah, an account of how Naples was fouled by drugs, crime, and pollution, and here he widens his lens to explain international cocaine trafficking. Widens, and helpfully focuses: for example, with microscopic detail on the ways in which drug gangs disguise and ship their product. His form of using traditional explanatory journalism woven with a personal narrative takes some getting used to, but ultimately it succeeds.

The Noise of Time

This Julian Barnes novel about the life of Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich hits, forgive me, all the right notes. It presents biographical information, the political background, and a credible account of the composer's inner thoughts all in a compact, three-movement "sonata" package. The scenes describing a performance of Lady Macbeth of the Mtensk District, its rejection by Stalin, and the mortal fear this caused in Shostakovich are particularly effective.

Adjustment Day

The themes in this Chuck Palahniuk novel are intriguing enough: another American revolution, a new nation segregated by race (or sexuality), a misunderstood guru. But the execution has a dashed-off quality that never succeeds in lifting the characters or the concept off the page. A novel that is not believable cannot be called a success, no matter how entertaining the special effects.

Idle Passion: Chess and the Dance of Death

Alexander Cockburn puts chess on the psychiatrist's couch with mixed results. The stories of the lives of some unusual chess champions (Alekhine and Morphy) and other figures like Stefan Zwieg will be of general interest. Plumbing the depths of Freudian theory in relation to chess, less so.

The Only Story

Julian Barnes's novel reminded me of On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan. Both are about young affairs that sour and a man who settles into a humdrum life. Barnes falls into the trap that just about every novelist falls into -- including especially English ones like McEwan and Graham Greene -- in treating love as a noun, a freestanding wondrous entity that someone "falls into"; instead, it should be seen as a verb, something that is done, worked at, the art of placing another person above oneself. If  a novelist could read Erich Fromm's The Art of Loving and base characters on its truths, that might be a great book.