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.

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.

Photo of The White House by Edgar0587

© 2012 Linda Gorton Aragoni

Nuclear Warning

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 reports are wrong.

Russians watching their radar screens are also convinced the problem is in the display: nothing has prepared them for an attack or an American accident.

The President calls Krushchev.

To prevent an unprovoked attack on Moscow, the President first tries to shoot down the US planes. When that does not work, he seizes the only option available to avert World War III.

With that material to work from and their taut prose, Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler could not help turning out a thriller.

Fail-Safe, however, is not just a few hours’ entertainment. It’s a reminder that in any complex, untested system, the occurrence of several statistically improbable errors can bring the whole system crashing down. Perhaps if that lesson had been learned from this novel, the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico might not have come as such as shock to the American public.

Illustration Nuclear Warning 2 by Flaivoloka

© 2012 Linda Gorton Aragoni

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 on PBS.

Check out the accompanying slide show for marvelous photos of people and places of Wharton’s era.

I reviewed  Wharton’s famous 1921 bestselling novel, The Age of Innocence, here last year.

Linda Gorton Aragoni

"It's Academic" would have suited Franny & Zooey

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.

Thomas Wolfe House in Asheville, North Carolina

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. The novel is promising rather than good.

Art figures he needs to write about seven books before he’ll know his craft. He aims to be first a successful author, then a rich one, living off his investments while he writes great books.

Art invests the income from his books in enterprises from hog futures and commercial real estate to self-publishing. His financial successes and failures are spectacular, but they are never what’s important to him. His world is the pad of lined yellow paper that he fills hour after hour.

Like most other novels about novelists, Youngblood Hawke contrasts the mercenary publishing world with the world of the art. But Wouk’s cast of colorful characters makes clear that the profit motive operates throughout society: even artists have to eat.

And the most tenacious of the followers after fortune may be somebody’s mother.

[Herman Wouk based Youngblood Hawke  on the life of Thomas Wolfe.  The photo above shows the boarding house owned and operated by Wolfe's mother where Wolfe lived until he went to college.]

© 2012 Linda Gorton Aragoni

Wallace at University of Alabama

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 Communist countries as well as the non-aligned and anti-American nations. More important, Terry has the support of the liberal segment of Americans always ready to denounce their nation.

When Terry dramatically escorts a black girl to integrate a white Southern school, he unleashes a violent clash of races and political opponents.

An experienced political reporter, Drury writes with an insider’s knowledge and a propagandist’s aim.

However, he’s also a capable story teller, who never forgets that readers come for the story. His omniscient character descriptions are borne out by the words and actions of those characters.

The most startling aspect of A Shade of Difference is how contemporary the story feels. Representative Cullee Hamilton, caught in the conflict between the races and his own political ambitions is a fictional sixties Barack Obama.

Whatever your political leanings, you will find intrigue and entertainment in the pages of this political thriller.

© 2012 Linda Gorton Aragoni

Wedding ceremony photo by Katman1972

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 read in an evening, but best read a chapter or two at a time. The characters’ interior monologues are designed to trigger similar monologues by readers.

Lindbergh suggests that two people going through very similar circumstances can react very differently because of the attitude and experiences they bring to it.

The bridesmaid and best man look forward to marriage, but with quite different ideas of what a happy marriage would be.

The maiden aunt wonders considers whether she missed anything by not marrying.

The married men and women wonder if their marriages could be happier. One woman chooses divorce, another chooses to remain married. One man ministers to a dying wife because of love, another has affairs to escape the routine of life with a woman who bores him.

After letting readers stand in the shoes of her characters, Lindbergh leaves them to decide for themselves whether marriage still matters.

© 2012 Linda Gorton Aragoni

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 sprinkling of students going to study in Europe, tourists, Catholic priests, and an aging Spanish Contessa who has been deported from Cuba for political reasons.

In steerage are 876 Spanish agricultural workers being deported from Cuba because the sugar industry in which they worked has failed.

Despite the number of characters, Porter makes them distinctive individuals. Each elicits , if not sympathy, at least a measure of understanding.

Being confined in a small ship for 27 days brings out the cruelty and bigotry of individuals. National and religious biases are magnified. All leave the ship with relief at finally being home in a familiar, comfortable place.

Readers see what the voyagers do not: home will not be better. Europe will soon be torn apart by cruelty and bigotry on a colossal scale, yet World War II will change nothing. People will remain blind to any interests but their own.

© 2012 Linda Gorton Aragoni

I’ve found 69 of those 70 novels either in print or in digital format at Project Gutenberg, the first producer of free ebooks. Among them are some famous titles, such as The Good Earth that was the number one top selling novel two years in a row, and famous authors, such as Hemingway and Faulkner.

You’ll be pleasantly surprised to find some great reading by authors you’ve never heard of as well as some novels that are, in my view, better than those for which the novelist is justly famous.

I haven’t found Three Loves by A. J. Cronin from the 1932 list. The Great Depression was hard on books: people wore rags instead of turning them into paper. Thus many books published between 1930 and World War II have crumbled into dust; some ’30s novels are more rare than novels of the 1800′s.

1962 Bestseller List

1. Ship of Fools by Katherine Anne Porter [Jan. 4, 2012]
2.  Dearly Beloved by Anne Morrow Lindberg [Jan. 8, 2012]
3.  A Shade of Difference by Allen Drury [Jan. 11, 2012]
4. Youngblood Hawk by Herman Wouk [Jan. 15, 2012]
5.  Franny and Zooey by J. D. Salinger  (second year on bestseller list)
6.  Fail Safe by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler [Jan. 22, 2012]
7. Seven Days in May by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II [Jan. 25, 2012]
8. The Prize by Irving Wallace [Jan. 29, 2012]
9. The Agony and the Ecstasy by Irving Stone (second year on the bestseller list)
10. The Reivers by William Faulkner [Feb. 5, 2012]

1952 Bestseller 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]

1942 Bestseller List

1.  The Song of Bernadette by Franz Werfel
2. The Moon is Down by John Steinbeck
3. Dragon Seed by Pearl S. Buck
4. And Now Tomorrow by Rachel Field
5. Drivin’ Woman by Elizabeth Pickett
6. Windswept by Mary Ellen Chase (second year on the bestseller list)
7. The Robe by Lloyd C. Douglas
8. The Sun Is My Undoing by Marguerite Steen (second year on the bestseller list)
9. King’s Row by Henry Bellamann
10. The Keys of the Kingdom by A. J. Cronin (second year on the bestseller list)

1932 Bestseller List

1. The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck (second year in first place)
2. The Fountain by Charles Morgan
3. Sons by Pearl S. Buck
4. Magnolia Street by Louis Golding
5. The Sheltered Life by Ellen Glasgow
6. Old Wine and New by Warwick Deeping
7. Mary’s Neck by Booth Tarkington
8. Magnificent Obsession by Lloyd C. Douglas
9. Inheritance by Phyllis Bentley
10. Three Loves by A. J. Cronin

1922 Bestseller List

1. If Winter Comes A.S. M. Hutchinson
2. The Sheik by Edith M. Hull (second year on the bestseller list)
3. Gentle Julia by Booth Tarkington
4. The Head of the House of Coombe by Frances Hodgson Burnett
5. The Breaking Point by Mary Roberts Rinehart
6.  Simon Called Peter by Robert Keable
7. This Freedom by A.S. M. Hutchinson
8. Maria Chapdelain by Louis Hemon
9. To the Last Man by Zane Grey
10. Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis (shared 10th place)
11. Helen of the Old House by Harold Bell Wright (shared 10th place)

1912 Bestseller List

1. The Harvester by Gene Stratton Porter (second year on the bestseller list)
2. The Street Called Straight by Basil King
3. Their Yesterdays by Harold Bell Wright
4. The Melting of Molly by Maria Thompson Daviess
5. A Hoosier Chronicle by Meredith Nicholson
6. The Winning of Barbara Worth by Harold Bell Wright (second year on the bestseller list)
7. The Just and the Unjust by Vaughan Kester
8. The Net by Rex Beach
9. Tante by Anne Douglas Sedgwick
10. Fran by J. Breckenridge Ellis

1902 Bestseller List

1. The Virginian by Owen Wister
2. Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch by Alice Hegan Rice
3. Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall by Charles Major
4. The Mississippi Bubble by Emerson Hough
5. Audrey by Mary Johnson
6. The Right of Way by Gilbert Packer
7. The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle
8. The Two Vanrevels by Booth Tarkington
9. The Blue Flower by Henry van Dyke
10. Sir Richard Calmady by Lucas Malet

Dust off your library card, load up that book reader you got for Christmas, and prepare to spent winter evenings insides with a good book.

© 2012 Linda Gorton Aragoni