Columnists at their best

For newspaper columnists, their greatest challenge is their deadline. Whether their column runs daily, weekly or something in between, they still have to come up with an idea, something they can write the required number of inches about and that people will want to read about, and get it into shape by the time the clock ticks down to zero. That pressure can be terribly difficult to bear day after day, week after week, year after year.

Yet most of the columns collected in Deadline Artists: Scandals, Tragedies and Triumphs (2012), probably seemed to write themselves. Mostly they tell about significant events and important people, natural subjects for columnists. The writers just had to give form to the ideas as as they came.

And so we find H.L. Mencken writing about the Scopes-Monkey trial, Damon Runyan on the trial of Al Capone, Jack London describing the San Francisco earthquake, Ellen Goodman on the murder of John Lennon, Shirley Povich telling about Don Larson's perfect game, Grantland Rice writing on the Dempsey-Willard fight and so on. Some of the columns are great because they describe great events. Others were made great by great writing.

In this latter category I would place Nora Ephron's New York Times piece about being an intern in the Kennedy White House and NOT getting propositioned by the president. Lorena A. Hickok wrote a wonderful column for the Minneapolis Tribune in 1923 about most of the population of a small Iowa town staying up all night just to watch President Harding's funeral train speeding through. Jim Murray wrote a superb tribute to ball player Jim Gilliam. Regina Brett wrote an unusually fine column for the Cleveland Plain Dealer about recovering from cancer. The book includes several columns by Mike Royko of the Chicago Sun-times, and each one is outstanding.

Editors John Avlon, Jesse Angelo and Errol Louis made excellent choices for this, the second of their "Deadline Artists" books. My only complaint is with how a few of the columns are categorized. Were the victory of Dwight Eisenhower in 1952, the defeat of Tammany Hall in 1961 and the persistent failure of the Chicago Cubs really tragedies? I can see placing William Laurence's column about the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki among the triumphs, but a postwar piece by Homer Bigart describing the terrible Hiroshima after effects seems more like a tragedy to me.

A political thriller

Jess Walter's 2005 novel Citizen Vince won an Edgar Award for best crime novel of the year. I don't know of any award for best political novel of the year, but if there were, Citizen Vince might have won that, too.

Vince Camden's real name is Marty Hagan. He's an ex-con who was convicted of his first felony in his teens and has never been eligible to vote in his life. Yet he's now living in Spokane under a new identity in the witness protection program, and with the new identity, his felonies are erased and a card arrives in the mail making him a registered voter. Never mind that Marty, now, Vince, continues to work the old credit card scam he did back in New York. He just hasn't been caught yet.

But Vince learns Ray Sticks, a notorious mob hit man, is looking for him. Assuming the New York mob has found him and is trying to settle old scores, Vince returns to New York to try to buy his life back. The mobster takes his money but tells Vince the actual price is to kill Ray Sticks, who also turns out to be in the witness protection program.

All this takes place in late October and early November in 1980, when Ronald Reagan is challenging Jimmy Carter for the presidency. Vince may be battling for his life, but he's also, for the first time in his life, fascinated by the upcoming election. In a key scene, with Vince and Beth, his prostitute girlfriend, in grave danger, he manages to talk Sticks him into letting him vote.

The novel has a bit of the grit and the unpredictability of an Elmore Leonard story, yet Citizen Vince also reads like a literary novel. Jess Walter could have won an award for that, as well.

Saved for something better

In the early pages of Destiny of the Republic, Candice Millard describes two dramatic events, one a deadly steamship collision in Long Island Sound and the other a young man working on a canal boat who falls overboard after everyone else has gone to sleep. That young man is James A. Garfield, whose flailing arms find a rope, to which he clings and uses to climb back onto the boat. Later he discovers the rope was never actually tied to anything on the boat. He wrote later, "I did not believe that God had paid any attention to me on my own account but I thought He had saved me for my mother and for something greater and better than canaling." In 1880, Garfield was elected president of the United States.

As for that steamship collusion, also in 1880 involving the Stonington and the Narragansett, many people died or were seriously burned by the resulting fire. One who survived was a man named Charles Guiteau, who believed, writes Millard, "the tragedy was simply further proof that he was one of God's chosen few." He believed he was "chosen by God for a task of tremendous importance." Within a few months, Guiteau assassinated James A Garfield.

Guiteau was insane. Garfield may have been among the most intelligent men to hold the presidency. Have not most of us believed, rationally or not, we were among the chosen few? We can smoke and not get cancer, drive too fast and neither crash nor get stopped by troopers. We will, if not live forever, at least live longer than anyone else. Perhaps this is what enabled young men to charge the D-Day beaches. It may even be what encourages gamblers to bet against the odds.

Yet I cannot help wondering if each one of us is not meant for something better, if we are each not, in some way, special. Perhaps both Garfield and Guiteau really were saved for a reason, and perhaps assassination was not that reason.

Garfield's slow death

Four American presidents have died at the hands of assassins, but all the books seem to be written about just two of them, Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy.  Scores of books have been written about these tragic events, and more continue to be published each year. But when is the last time you've seen a book about the assassination of William F. McKinley?

Thanks to Candice Millard, one of our very best writers to focus on American history for a general audience, we have the 2011 book Destiny of the Republic about the murder of James Garfield. Her book is so good, perhaps we won't need 50 or 100 more books on the same subject.

Charles Guiteau, thoroughly mad, pulled the trigger and ultimately died for his crime, yet it was Garfeld's doctors, not Guiteau, who actually killed the president, Millard writes. The bullet wound was serious enough for that day (1881), but it was hardly fatal. It had missed all vital organs, and Garfield could have survived and lived a long life if the bullet had simply been ignored. Plenty of Civil War veterans were walking around with similar bullets in similar places in their bodies. But this was the president of the United States, and the doctors determined the bullet must come out. Cleaning their hands and instruments before poking around in his body was never a priority, however.

In 1881, the existence of bacteria remained a controversial idea in the medical world. A man with the unlikely name of Dr. Doctor Bliss appointed himself head of the medical team and, over a period of several weeks repeatedly assaulted Garfield's body, creating a bacteria-filled cavity to where he believed the bullet must surely rest. Later an autopsy found the bullet on the other side of Garfield's body. The infection killed the president.

The inventor Alexander Graham Bell plays a key role in Millard's story. Bell worked long hours to perfect his induction balance machine capable of finding a bullet in a body. Despite technical problems, the device would have worked, but Dr. Bliss would allow Bell to test only the side of Garfield's body where he was convinced the bullet was located, not the side where it actually was.

The president's slow death accomplished something other than inspiring Bell's invention. It united the  country more than anything that had happened since the Civil War. North and South, blacks and whites ... everyone loved James Garfield.

The long dying also gave Chester Arthur, Garfield's vice president, time to mature to the point he was ready for the presidency when it finally fell to him. As vice president, Arthur had been Roscoe Conkling's man, not Garfield's. Conkling favored the spoils system, handing out government jobs on the basis of connections rather than merit. Arthur had never gotten a job on the basis of merit in his life and doubted his ability to do just about anything, let alone the presidency. Millard tells how he rose to the task, thanks to advice from a woman he didn't even know.

Like Millard's previous book, The River of Doubt, about Theodore Roosevelt's nearly-fatal South American adventure, Destiny of the Republic makes compulsive reading. More books have been written about the Lincoln and Kennedy assassinations, but few of those books have been the equal of this one.

Real men, ugly jackets and chain bookstores

Gabrielle Zevin's The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry, a novel about lives built around books and reading, contains several lines worth a comment.

Her mother likes to say that novels have ruined Amelia for real men.

I once wrote a newspaper column, somewhat controversial, in which I suggested romantic novels serve a function for women similar to that which soft core porn or even the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue serves for men. They provide an idealized version of the opposite sex. In real life, women are rarely as beautiful as SI and Playboy models and men are rarely as dashing or heroic as the men in fiction. Amelia's mother may be on to something.

You know everything you need to know about a person from the answer to the question, What is your favorite book?

I don't really believe this, at least not literally. Certainly a person's reading can be revealing. I like looking at the bookshelves in people's homes for clues about them. Book choices reveal a lot, but they hardly tell the whole story.

"Finally, a nice-looking jacket is important. I don't want to spend any length of time with an ugly jacket."

When reading a book, especially a good book, I usually close it at intervals simply to admire the cover. I don't know why that is, but it seems to say something about the importance of cover designs, not just when buying a book but also when reading. We like holding beautiful objects in our hands.

From his of view, the only thing worse than a world with big chain bookstores was a world with NO big chain bookstores.

These are the thoughts of the owner of a small bookstore. I agree. Large bookstores may be crowded and impersonal, staffed by people who know little about books. Yet they get a lot of books into the hands of readers, many of whom may never set foot in a small, private bookstore.

A life made of stories

Perhaps our lives aren't really novels, as we might suppose. Perhaps they are short story collections. That suggestion comes through Gabrielle Zevin's popular novel published last year, The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry.

The title character runs a small bookshop on a small island in New England. Short story collections don't sell well in his store, as in most other bookshops, but he favors stories, so he stocks them anyway. Zevin cleverly uses famous short stories, like "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" and "The Tell-Tale Heart," as chapter titles, the theme of the stories relating somehow with what's going on in Fikry's life at the time.

The novel opens with Fikry at 39, recently widowed and in a foul mood. Amelia Loman, 31, a publisher's rep, chooses this day of all days to visit Fikry and try to get him to order some books from her company's new catalog. It does not go well.

Yet there are other stories in Fikry's life. A woman leaves her toddler in the bookshop, then commits suicide. Fikry, deciding that since he is good at gift-wrapping books he ought to be able handle diapers, elects to adopt the girl, called Maya. He owns a valuable first edition of a book by Edgar Allan Poe, which is stolen from his store. The island's police chief becomes a friend after these two incidents and also develops into one of Fikry's best customers. The bookseller eventually gets another chance with Amelia and this time makes a good impression, ultimately leading to marriage. Maya grows up and thinks of becoming a writer. Fikry develops a rare cancer likely to prove fatal.

Some of the stories in the life of A.J. Fikry may seem a bit manufactured or contrived. I seemed to enjoy the first half of the book more than the second half. Yet it is a hard book not to like, or even to love, especially if you love books as much as the characters in this novel love books.

No wordplay in 'Wordplay'

Amelia groans. "That is truly an awful wordplay."

Gabrielle Zevin, The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry

Amelia isn't reviewing Glenn Bassett's book Wordplay, but she could be. It is truly awful.

Amelia, in fact, makes reference to what we usually think of when we hear the word wordplay, a pun. They are eating at a restaurant with a Moby Dick theme when A.J. Fikry suggests "a whale of a sundae" for dessert. It is not entirely clear what Bassett, a retired social psychology professor, means by the term, but it isn't puns. At one point he writes, "Advertising is word play." Later he mentions word play in reference to economists.

He begins his book by talking about how important language is simply for being human and for interacting with other humans. "Without words, we remain beasts," he says. Then he goes on to discuss the importance of language in various contexts, such as politics, science and philosophy. By wordplay (or word play, he doesn't seem sure which) he apparently means the use of language in general.

So language is vital to human culture. Bassett writes a difficult book, albeit with mostly simple sentences, to make that rather obvious point.

Not that the author doesn't have some interesting things to say. I liked when he describes baseball as "nothing more than vigorous activity as long as there are no words to describe it." I appreciate the line, "The written word sits patiently until it is discovered and read." I was intrigued by his sentence, "Much of what is accepted as knowledge and wisdom is invented reality." Yes, he does provoke some thought along the way, but readers must dig hard to find such gems. I'm not sure they're worth the effort.