Reader’s Diary

Herman Wouk

This is the first of two Wouk novels about Israel. Together they make up a multi-generation, multi-family saga. “The Hope” starts in 1948 and ends with a stirring account of the Six Day War (1967). Wouk has written a nice fat book full of interesting, believable characters. While there is plenty of action, Wouk holds the reader’s interest by focusing on his characters’ development over time and their relationships.

The book has no Arab characters. Arabs only appear as politicians giving speeches and as faceless enemies. This is a book about Israel and only Israel; moreover it’s a book about an Israel that has no non-Jewish inhabitants. The US is portrayed as a very reluctant ally. I don’t know enough about the history of US-Israel relations to know if that is accurate, but I do know that Wouk’s 2 paragraph dismissal of Israel’s attack on the USS Liberty as an accident is extremely questionable if not downright dishonest.

Political issues aside, it’s a good story and I’ve already started on the sequel.

Larry McMurtry

These 12 essays are not so much about the West as about the literature of the West. McMurtry writes about authors from Lewis and Clark to Patricia Nelson Limerick. The essays are interesting, but not absorbing. The originally appeared as magazine articles, and some suffer from being too short for McMurtry to stretch his literary wings. For example, his piece on Western pulp writers is reminiscent of “Fennimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” but ends just as he gets up a nice head of steam.

Leon Uris

Gideon Zadok is an American Jewish writer in Israel during the 1956 war. He goes into action with a paratroop unit. This is a promising start, but the novel spends very little time in 1956. It hops back and forth in time, eventually working its way through Zadok’s family tree all the way back to the Russian ghettos. The confused chronology isn’t too hard to deal with, but the random narrators hurt, rather than help the story. Worst of all, virtually nobody in the book is at all likable. When they’re not cheating on their spouses, they’re probably beating them; between times they mistreat their children.

This is supposed to be a “semiautobioraphical” novel. If so, and assuming Zadok represents Uris, I pity the author’s family.

Bernard Cornwell

“The Archer’s Tale” is the first of a new Cornwell series set in the Hundred Years War. Its hero is a young English longbowman in the army of Edward III who is charged by his dying father with the task of recovering St. George’s lance. The book is typical Cornwell, which is to say that it’s very much like the Richard Sharpe series, and not, unfortunately, as deep as his “Warlord Chronicles”. A medieval Sharpe is no bad thing, but the similarities between the two series’ protagonists (low born, smarter than the average soldier, a Bond-like way with women, etc.) mean that there are few surprises here for the reader. What is surprising is that Cornwell, who wrote so convincingly of the Dark Ages in his Arthurian series, is not quite convincing in his portrayal of the 14th Century. He gets the setting right - his portrayal of warfare in the period is especially good - but his characters are more modern than medieval. This is a good book, but Cornwell has shown that he’s capable of more.