Reader’s Diary

Aaron J. Klein

After watching Spielberg’s excellent “Munich“, I was curious as to how much of the story, “inspired by real events”, was true. The answer - which doesn’t detract from the movie - is, according to Aaron Klein, “not much”.

Klein’s “Striking Back” is not one of those non-fiction books that reads like a novel. However, it does seem to be based on extensive research on the 1972 terrorist attack on the Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics and on the Israeli assassination campaign that followed.

Despite the fact that the campaign didn’t succeed in killing the high-level planners, or even the surviving participants, it did apparently succeed in sowing fear in the hearts of Palestinian terrorists and materially affected their ability to strike at Israeli targets. Klein emphasizes that the targets were sometimes loosely connected (and, in the infamous Lillehammer killing, not at all connected) with the terrorists but he also claims that the killings were conducted with an eye to the safety of non-combatants and Israeli agents. He also points out that it was generally “human intelligence” (HUMINT) that allowed Israel’s security forces to go after its enemies. It’s a shame that the Bush administration hasn’t taken a similar measured, considered, proportionate, and effective approach to the “war on terror” following 9/11.

(Klein commented on “Munich” in “Slate”.)

Sinclair Lewis, Anthony Di Renzo (Editor)

This anthology contains 15 Lewis short stories that were originally published between 1915 and 1921. Their common setting is the white collar workplace. The surprising thing is that most of them, period slang and antique business practices aside, aren’t dated. Oak desks and stenographers may have been replaced by cubicles and computers, but people haven’t changed in the last 90 years. Readers may recognize their bosses and co-workers in these pages; more uncomfortably, they may recognize themselves.

The best stories in the collection are the title piece, which is the story of an office malcontent blind to his own faults, and “A Story With a Happy Ending”, a tale of the fall and redemption of a self-deluding businessman who becomes complacent about this job.

Editor Di Renzo’s introduction set the stories in the context of Lewis’ career and describes Lewis’ experience in and attitudes towards the world of business.

Eugene B. Bergmann

Most people, if they know of Jean Shepherd at all, would describe him as the author and narrator of the beloved 1983 movie “A Christmas Story“. But Shepherd was much more than that, more than a short story writer and more than a “Car and Driver” or “Village Voice” columnist: he was a radio genius.

For 22 years Shepherd had a talk radio show on New York’s WOR. His brand of talk radio wasn’t call-in radio: he was a monologist. For about five years he did three and a half hours a night, five nights a week, for the rest of his tenure at the station he did 45-minute shows. Altogether he did over 5000 shows. Shepherd called his listeners the “Night People” and many of them looked on him as a mentor, a friend who talked directly to them, one-to-one.

Shepherd didn’t use a script. He’d show up at the studio with a few clippings and talk. Listening to him is like listening to the Grateful Dead. They both started with a theme, went off into wild riffs of elaboration and digression and returned at the precise proper moment to the theme, ending on the mark. Shepherd was a story-teller who told stories of his childhood, talked about life, berated “slob culture”, battled “creeping meatballism” and read poetry. His combination of cutting wit and warm affection for his subjects is reminiscent of Sinclair Lewis. He used nostalgia, but his work wasn’t nostalgic: he was no Garrison Keillor.

In “Excelsior, You Fathead!”, Bergmann does a tremendous job of analyzing Shepherd’s prodigious output, his style, and the roots of his material. Though it does contain biographical details, it isn’t primarily a biography. Call it a critical appreciation. Bergmann is critical of Shepherd the man while admiring Shepherd the artist. Shepherd wasn’t always the warm person his listeners assumed him to be. He was difficult to deal with and it’s hard to disentangle the true stories from the fictional ones. Bergmann doesn’t avoid the dark side of Shepherd’s character, but he doesn’t ever lose sight of Shepherd the artist.

(Shepherd’s work is preserved and celebrated on the web at Jim Sardur’s site, “Flick Lives“, and the Jean Shepherd Archive.)

Warren H. Carroll

This is a solid treatment of Church history from Constantine to the end of the First Crusade, told from the perspective of a faithful Catholic. Carroll covers a lot of ground, and there are times when the heresies and popes fly by so quickly that the reader has a hard time keeping track of them. Unfortunately, this volume doesn’t have quite the narrative flare and epic sweep of the first one in the series, but it’s a good book for anyone wanting to learn more about the history of the Catholic Church.

(See “Triumph” for a more concise history of the Church.)

John Le Carré

Ted Mundy, protagonist of John Le Carré’s latest novel, is adrift in a sea of identities. It takes Le Carré about 150 pages to explain Mundy, from his childhood as the son of a drunken British officer in Pakistan to his years as a radical in the Berlin of the 60s. Finally, he gets to the spy stuff, but it’s worth the wait. Mundy’s “absolute friend” is Sasha, an East German of confused loyalties. The two meet during Mundy’s radical years, meet again as agents on opposite sides of the Cold War, and, finally, in present-day Bavaria.

Sasha reenters Mundy’s life after a long absence to with an invitation to join an international school being set up by a mysterious benefactor. Since this is a Le Carré novel, nothing is what it seems. When you think you know what’s going on, you don’t, and the ending comes as a tragic surprise.

Is this as good as the novels from Le Carré’s “classic period”? No: Mundy and his world are not as interesting or vivid as Smiley and the claustrophobic world of “the Circus”. Nevertheless “Absolute Friends” is a good, serious, well-written novel relevant to the post-Cold War era.

Tom Gabbay

Who was planning to kill President Kennedy in 1963, in Berlin? That plot is the heart of “Berlin Conspiracy”, in which ex-CIA agent Jack Teller is brought out of retirement by a message from beyond the Iron Curtain. As the intricate but somewhat obvious plot unfolds, Teller has to confront his past as well as the assassins. The book is a mix of “Day of the Jackal” and hard-boiled detective story; it’s not a would-be “Spy Who Came in From the Cold”.