The Iowa Baseball Confederacy

• A 2000 inning long baseball game.....check.
  
• Time travel......check.
  
• Native American mythology.....check.
  
• A slightly odd church that lives life 12 hours offset from the rest of the world....check.
  
• Finding the love of your life. Again. Or previously....check
  
• Learning that getting what you’ve always wanted doesn’t necessarily solve your problems....priceless?
  

This is just a fantastic book. I finished it last night and I’m ready to re-read it starting today. W.P. Kinsella, who wrote “Shoeless Joe,” which was the basis for the movie Field of Dreams, gives us another fantastical story of magic, love, and life wrapped around the mythology of baseball, and once again set in a Midwestern corn field.

I am uncomfortable with the way Richard Condon is largely remembered.

Richard Condon is my favorite writer right now. I just put down a fourth book by him (An Infinity of Mirrors) and started a fifth (Winter Kills) and I am convinced - was convinced after The Manchurian Candidate, Prizzi's Honor and Arigato - that I want to read every word this man ever wrote.

So my iniative into "the Condon Cult" is well underway. And I'm actually a little thrilled to be in on the conspiracy, to be a fan of a writer with a "cult following" - you always hear about these things but rarely see or remember them - one whose books are largely out of print but are remembered by dusty dealers in used book stores.

But as a new convert, a zealot perhaps, I have to say I'm uncomfortable with the way Condon is largely remembered and portrayed.

He seems to be remembered mostly for The Manchurian Candidate - a fine book, to be sure, but one that blurs in the memory of most with the movie (admittedly, a good movie).

If he is remembered after that it is for Prizzi's Honor - again with a movie, a movie I have no intention of ever seeing because I want its characters firmly in my mind the way they are, not as John Huston, no matter how much I admire that filmmaker, presented them.

Beyond that Condon seems to be remembered as a writer that's difficult to categorize but one that mostly produced thrillers with political and satirical elements. The adjectives typically attached to him are "paranoid" and sometimes "frenetic." His sometimes long, cataloguing sentences are often described. Sadly, there is also a cloud of plagiarism hanging over him in one notable instance.

Granted, I am only four and a quarter books into his 20-some piece body of work, but I am uncomfortable with that general portrait of this man, who I think is a master of prose, who creates amazing characters with exceptional clarity, writes beautifully about men and women, plots and paces marvellously, and puts the most astoundingly perfect dialogue into the mouths of his characters.

In short, I feel Condon is being remembered as gimmicky, like Hunter S. Thompson or Thomas Pynchon, when he is an absolute master of writing, an artist that elevated the novel of entertainment to artistic summits. He is a jewel worthy of his following - a following that seems to be dying out.

Here are a series of disappointing interviews with Condon and Don Swaim (I'm not sure who that is). In them, they discuss the places Condon lived, food, the fact he composed on the then-new word processor - anything but the fucking quality of his writing and the treasures that are his books. I want to shake my computer and scream. Were I to have a couple hours with Condon I would ask him how he came up with certain ideas, how he brought to life certain characters, how he tunes his characters' dialogue, and what kind of sophisticated, worldly man is able to dream up such assassins, reprobates, perverts, Nazis, gamblers, murderes, officers, gentlemen, heroes, schemers. I would ask him his opinions on the world, I would ask him of his own substance.

I would ask him who the writers are that inspire him and upon which he models his own work - in short, I would not be asking him whether there were any good fucking restaurants in Dallas.

Richard Condon is my favorite writer right now and I will carry his torch held high til he is better illuminated in my small corners of the world.

The Plot to Kill Jackie Robinson

I picked this up at a used bookstore and it's the best $3 I've spent in a long time. It's film noir, on paper, as the author really captures the feel of the times in this hardboiled crime fiction set in NYC in the months leading up to opening day, 1947, with Jackie Robinson playing first base for the Brooklyn Dodgers. It's a good story that moves along quickly, and would make one hell of a good movie. ESPN, are you listening?

Under the Dome

1070 pages, yet it felt like a quick read. How does Stephen King do that? I read it in about a week. The basic plot - an invisible force field cuts a small New England town off from the world. Imagine living in a snow globe. How would you react? How would other react? At one point about half-way through the book I almost quit. It was so dark, and so depressing, the evil in men’s hearts so domineering, that I really didn’t want to read any more about it. Luckily, that is the point where good starts to make its presence known. This is not scary in the Salem’s Lot or Pet Cemetery sense. It’s scary because King has nailed human nature in this book, and it isn’t pretty.

Eric Ambler Moves Us Even Closer to Evil

My consumption of Eric Ambler novels continues with The Schirmer Inheritance, an excellent novel. Ambler's gifts seem to include detailed knowledge about various places in Europe and their tangled history. In Schirmer, he is covering some of the same ground as his classic Coffin for Dimitrios in that his protagonist, a stable, unextraordinary attorney, is attempting to unravel what happened to specific people during a time of upheaval and war. In this case he is on the trail of a German paratrooper that went missing in Greece during the last stages of World War II and may be the inheritor of a large American fortune. He is, but he's also the inheritor of something else - a bloodline of strength, mercenary ability and moral ambivalence.

I like many things about this. First, I love that Ambler is moving us closer to evil; he takes someone from an ordered world and immerses him in the chaotic. As with Dimitrios, his protagonist is attempting not so much to impose order on the lawless world of war and crime - for then this would be a more standard police novel - but simply to understand it, to describe it, to give it the option of revealing itself. This makes these novels as much about character as plot, about plumbing the depths of a human heart involved in political machinations and consequences - the stuff of first rate spy fiction.

Second, his protagonist, the attorney George Cary, I described as "not extraordinary." He's not, but he's also not a wimp or a patsy, nor simply a device to reveal his opposite. Cary is in fact a survivor of World War II like so many 1950s men, an aviator. But Ambler makes the analogy that while Cary has always experienced danger and destruction, it was from far away, from the safety - comparative safety - of a bomber. He clearly draws the distinction between one who flies, Cary, and one who jumps from an airplane into the thick of things, his prey, Franz. He holds these up to us as juxtapositions so that evil can be more clearly illuminated. My point is by making Cary as complex a character as Franz, Ambler sidesteps a silly convention.

Last, there's a major female character as well, Maria, George's interpreter, that hides all of her characteristics and at which the reader's brain picks like a loose tooth. She surprises in the end with troubling implications. The truth is, I'm not sure what to do with what Ambler's given me there - Maria succumbs to evil and despises herself for it; is it because her life has punished her and twisted her so that she can only worship strength? Her humanity is one of the concealed casualties of war and politics and again we should be grateful that Ambler shines his light on it, however grotesque. Didn't see that aspect of the ending coming and was sort of disgusted when it came. Regardless, more Ambler in my future.

Missed It By That Much

2nd Manassas is a somewhat overlooked battle in the American Civil War. That is a shame, because it provides a compelling drama in the brilliance of General Lee’s leadership, contrasted sharply with the utter incompetence of General Pope on the Union Side. This richly detailed account gets deep into the weeds of regimental level troop movements, but does so in a way that maintains a focus on the fact that these are real live people fighting and dying on the battlefield.

I never really understood 2nd Manassas prior to the book. It doesn’t have that one majestic battle that is associated with the more famous Civil War events. Instead, it is comprised of clashes set over several days. Lee just misses the chance to destroy the Union Army here. It is amazing how often the survival of either the Union or CSA armies in this war came down to a matter of just a few minutes. Both sides missed numerous chances to end this war years before the final surrender at Appomattox. A delay of less than 1 hour by Jackson on the final day may have cost Lee a chance to pin the Union Army in, and destroy it. Who knows what the US would be like today if that had happened.

Even though this campaign is a resounding victory for Lee, it is a victory at a steep cost. The losses and attrition resulting from the battle, and the march through Manassas to Maryland, would severely impact Lee’s ability to achieve victory at Antietam later in the fall.

Return to Bull Run: The Campaign and Battle of 2nd Manassas

The Forever War

A 1974 book about an inter-stellar war that goes on forever, with an enemy we don’t understand, fought by soldiers that were drafted, and led by officers that are idiots. Vietnam anybody? Anybody?

This parable of the follies of war is as relevant today as it was in 1974. By taking the never ending war to a ridiculous extreme and by applying the paradox of near light speed travel to the protagonist, we get a hero who lives through the entire 1000 year war, while only aging a few years himself. The difficulties of integrating back into a culture that has gone through several generations while you aged two years also lets Hadleman say something about shell-shocked Vets that volunteered to go back to 'Nam 2 or 3 times.

Tea Party sympathizers, if they can even get through an anti-war novel, will recoil in horror and how humanity solves its war problem. Everybody should read this book though, especially those that won’t get it.