The Prize is a dynamite thriller

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 [...]

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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.  

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1962 political thriller is no seven days’ wonder

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 [...]

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Cold War thriller packs contemporary message

During a military exercise, American bombers armed with nuclear weapons streak off past the fail-safe point, headed for Moscow. Watching blips on the air command’s radar screen blink are a congressman and a manufacturer whose equipment went into the complex system intended to make the nuclear deployment program accident-proof. All hope fervently that the radar [...]

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Happy 150th birthday to Edith Wharton

January 24 will be the 150th birthday of New York City author Edith Wharton. Pat Ryan has written a retrospective for the New York Times mingling historical perspective on Wharton’s work with insights into the  American fascination with British aristocracy as evidenced in the popularity of the  mini-series “Downton Abbey” currently in its second season [...]

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Franny and Zooey in top 10 second year in row

The number five best seller for 1962 was a holdover from the 1961 list: Franny and Zooey by J. D. Salinger.  You can read my review in the archives from my reviews in 2011.

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Insiders’ peek into the book business

Youngblood Hawke is Herman Wouk’s contribution to the shelf of novels by novelists about novelists. The novel has the usual plot complications readers expect as the rube with the typewriter is taken on, taken in, and taken over by shysters. The story opens with Arthur Youngblood Hawke’s sale of his first novel to Prince House. [...]

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Thriller built on race relations and foreign policy

Allen Drury followed up his blockbuster novel Advise and Consent with A Shade of Difference, which builds on events and characters from that novel. In the mid-twentieth century, “Terrible Terry,”a Western-educated leader of a British possession, is seeking UN help in getting immediate independent status for his African country.  Terry has the support of the [...]

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Dearly Beloved Ponders: Does Marriage Still Matter?

Anne Morrow Lindbergh described Dearly Beloved as reflections in a fictional frame. The frame is a June wedding in a private New England home attended by family and close friends. The occasion triggers the circle around the bride and groom to ponder the meaning of marriage in modern society. Dearly Beloved is short enough to [...]

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Ship of Fools is vehicle for unpleasant truths

Ship of Fools is not a pleasant story, but Katherine Anne Porter’s rendition of the ship of the world voyaging to certain disaster makes compelling reading. A German ship, the Vera, leaves Veracruz, Mexico, for Bremerhaven, Germany Aug. 22, 1931. Most of the first class passengers are ex-patriots returning home. They are joined by a [...]

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