The Caine Mutiny in top 10 second year in row

The number two best seller for 1952 was a holdover from the 1951  list: The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk.  You can read my review in the archives from my reviews in 2011.

Silver Chalice empty of plausibility

Communion

I don’t like religious fiction much. Novels such as  The Silver Chalice are the reason why.

Thomas B. Costain’s  implausible tale has only minimal connection to the Bible and only slightly greater connection to psychological reality.

The richest man in Antioch adopts the fictional hero, Basil. When his foster father dies, the father’s younger brother contests the legality of Basil’s adoption and succeeds in having him disinherited and sold into slavery.

Joseph of Aramethia purchases Basil. Joseph wants to have a decorative frame made for the cup used by Christ and his disciples at the Last Supper. Basil is to make it.

Basil’s frame for the cup is to be a picture of the participants at the Last Supper. Researching his subjects, he travels the Bible lands, meeting the disciples, Paul, and even Emperor Nero.

Old Joseph has a wicked son in league with the Jewish leaders and a beautiful young Christian granddaughter. Basil antagonizes the son and captivates the granddaughter.

Before the book ends, Basil has won the fair Deborra, regained his inheritance, and become a Christian—and I have been alternately bored and nauseated.

This is a good book to let alone.

The Silver Chalice

Thomas B. Costain

Doubleday, 1952

553 pages

1952 Bestseller #1

My Grade: C-

Photo credit:  Communion 1 uploaded by 7205283929

© 2012 Linda Gorton Aragoni

1952 Bestseller List

Next on the schedule for 2012 is a set of reviews of the bestselling novels of 1952.  I’ll bet that at least half of them are novels you’ve heard of, even if you haven’t read them.

Here, with dates you can expect to read the reviews, is the list:

1. The Silver Chalice by Thomas B. Costain [Feb. 19,2012]
2. The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk (second year on the bestseller list)
3. East of Eden by John Steinbeck [Feb. 26, 2012]
4. My Cousin Rachel by Daphne du Maurier [Feb. 29, 2012]
5. Steamboat Gothic by Frances Parkinson Keyes [Mar. 4, 2012]
6. Giant by Edna Ferber [Mar. 7, 2012]
7. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway [Mar. 11, 2012]
8. The Gown of Glory by Agnes Sligh Turnbull [Mar. 14, 2012]
9. The Saracen Blade by Frank Yerby [Mar. 18, 2012]
10. The Houses in Between by Howard Spring [Mar. 21, 2012]

© 2012 Linda Gorton Aragoni

My picks of 1962′s doomsday novels

Impending doom seems to be the theme of the 1962 best-selling novels. My favorites are each by a pair of writers.

Fail Safe and Seven Days in May are thrillers in every sense of the word. Both are marked by taut prose and tightly constructed plots. Eugene Burdick and  Harvey Wheeler’s Fail Safe, though, conveys a continuing sense of menace that makes it my top pick of ’62.  No one reading Fail Safe today could deny the US still is vulnerable to failures in its too-big-to-fail systems.

Seven Days in May is a political thriller about a conspiracy to overthrow the President. While there are striking similarities between the book’s events and contemporary news,  Fletcher Knevel and Charles W. Bailey’s White House has a very low-key, Eisenhower era feel that doesn’t create the sense of continuing menace Fail Safe does.

Allen Drury’s A Shade of Difference is my  third-place  pick. The politicians who fill its pages are aware of being part of history. They see the significance of events they are helping to shape. The complex plot  that makes the book intriguing also make it easy to forget what happens in the novel.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh deserves an honorable mention. The quiet prose of her Dearly Beloved fares badly by contrast to the high voltage thrillers.  When read among quieter books, however, Lindbergh’s novel gently creates room for thoughtful reflection on the status and future of the institution of marriage.

©2012 Linda Gorton Aragoni

What are your top picks from 1962?

I’ve been telling you what I think of the 1962 bestselling novels.  Now I’d like to hear which ones you like.  Select your top three choices from the 1962 bestselling novels.

Laughs overlay nostalgia in The Reivers

Antique Car

The Reivers is a zany tale of a none-too-innocent rural Mississippi childhood related by Lucius Priest to his grandson.

At age 11, Lucius and two pals who work at the family’s freight business borrow his grandfather’s automobile and drive up to Memphis from Jefferson, Mississippi, no mean feat in 1905.

While Boon and Lucius eat supper at a brothel where Boon’s girl friend works, Ned trades the car for a horse. Ned plans to race the horse, bet heavily, collect a pile, and get the car back when the horse wins.

Unfortunately, the horse hates to run unless there’s another horse ahead of him.

Ned has to enlist Boon and Lucius to help.

William Faulkner’s narrator tells the story in a wheezy, cracker barrel manner, letting readers deduce what actually happened—if that is possible.  The yarn may be only a few facts embroidered by an old man’s fancy, the characters might be just enhanced wisps of Lucius’ memory.

The charm of the story is believing there was once a time when people who cared about one another might have had exciting adventures together and never come to any harm.

The Reivers: A Reminiscence

William Faulkner

Random House, 1962

305 pages

1962 Bestseller #10

My grade: B

 © 2012 Linda Gorton Aragoni

Photo credit: Black Antique car uploaded by Still

Agony prolonged for second year

Portrait of Michelangelo

Although it dropped out of first place,  The Agony and the Ecstasy by Irving Stone made the bestseller list for the second time in 1962. You can read my review in the archives from 2011.

© 2012 Linda Gorton Aragoni

The Prize is a dynamite thriller

Stockholm by Night

In The Prize, Irving Wallace knits threads about Cold War political intrigue, Nazi atrocities, gutter press journalism, and the Nobel Prize awards into a complex yarn that ends with no loose ends.

The main character is the year’s literature recipient, Andrew Craig, an American novelist who traded his pencil for a bottle after his wife died in a car crash with him at the wheel. In Stockholm, Andrew falls for a girl brought up by her uncle, the physics honoree, after her parents perished at the hands of the Nazis. Andrew discovers Emily has some war stories of her own.

Other Nobel winners who figure in the story are a French husband-wife research team and an American doctor with a chip on his shoulder big enough to require psychiatric removal.

The secondary characters are presented with broad strokes; the main characters are only slightly more individuals. But Wallace uses the history of the Nobel Prize to tie all the disparate threads together, making the implausible plot seem as inevitable as the annual awards themselves.

The ending seems a bit too pat and romantic; however, it’s hard to see how a novel about the world’s most illustrious award could be anything but romantic.

The Prize

Irving Wallace

Simon and Schuster, 1962

768 pages

1962 Bestseller #8

My grade: B+

Photo of Stockholm by Night uploaded by Wyrls

© 2012 Linda Gorton Aragoni

Great Penformances joins Oneida Dispatch blog roll

Great Penformances reviews are now available to visitors at The Oneida Daily Dispatch website.

I look forward to hearing from of the Dispatch and of vintage novels who live in upstate New York’s Madison County and Southern Oneida County.

Thanks to editor Kurt Wanfried for adding Great Penformances reviews to his blog offerings.

 

1962 political thriller is no seven days’ wonder

The White House

Seven Days in May is a thriller by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II, a pair of newspaper reporters whose knowledge of the mid-twentieth century Washington political realities infuse every page.

One May Sunday, Marine Colonel Martin J. Casey uncovers what he thinks could be a plot by his boss, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. James Scott to overthrow the President. Putting his job on the line, Casey discloses his suspicions to the President.

President Lyman takes some convincing, but as evidence mounts, he decides to act. He will act secretly, with help from just a few trusted men and his long-time secretary.

The characters are drawn in broad outline, recognizable as types rather than individuals.

Knebel and Bailey’s strong point is plot. Fifty years after first publication, the story sounds even more plausible than it did against the landscape of the 1960s. If anything, the fictional President’s observation that a frustrated electorate, feeling unable to influence events has “seriously started looking for a superman” rings more true today than it did in 1962.

As to the rest of the setting—a President the people are not quite sure of, high unemployment, economic insecurity, apprehension over potential foreign attacks—sounds like the morning news to me.

Seven Days in May

Fletcher Knebel & Charles W. Bailey II

Harper & Row, 1962

341 pages

My grade: B+

1962 Bestseller #7

Photo of The White House by Edgar0587

© 2012 Linda Gorton Aragoni