2012 Challenge Completed! Battle of the Prizes, American Version

Having finished and reviewed my second National Book Award winner, I have now completed the 2012 Battle of the Prizes, American Version.

This challenge pits winners of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction against the winners of the National Book Award. Participants can read one Pulitzer winner, one National winner, and one double dipper, or read two of each.  The challenge runs through January 2013, so there is still time to sign up!

My Pulitzer choices:

•  A Bell for Adano by John Hersey (reviewed here)
• Tinkers by Paul Harding (reviewed here)   

My National choices:

• Mr. Sammler's Planet by Saul Bellow (reviewed here)
• The Spectator Bird by Wallace Stegner (reviewed here)

I am still trying to decide whether to host again in 2013, but assuming I do, I already have a list of possible books from my TBR shelves:

Pulitzer possibilities include:

• The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon
• One of Ours by Willa Cather
• Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry 

National possibilities include:

• The News from Paraguay by Lily Tuck
• Victory Over Japan by Ellen Gilchrist
• Them by Joyce Carol Oates
• Morte d'Urban by J.F. Powers

For details about the challenge or to sign up, please visit the challenge page, here, or click the page tab in the bar at the top of the blog. 

Book Beginnings: Public Trust

Please join me every Friday to share the first sentence (or so) of the book you are reading, along with your initial thoughts about the sentence, impressions of the book, or anything else the opener inspires. Please remember to include the title of the book and the author's name.

TWITTER: If you are on Twitter, please tweet a link to your post using the has tag #BookBeginnings. My Twitter handle is @GilionDumas.

MR. LINKY: Please leave a link to your post below. If you don't have a blog, but want to participate, please leave a comment with your Book Beginning.



MY BOOK BEGINNING

 "Please, promise me they won't let it burn," the woman said."  

-- Public Trust by J. M. Mitchell.  This is mystery with a National Park story-line.  Of course, if it starts off with a forest fire, it is immediately captivating. 

Thanks go to book publicist Mary Bisbee-Beek for my copy.

Review: Witness

 


Whittaker Chambers was an American communist and Soviet spy who broke with the Communist Party in 1938 and later denounced the other members of his underground cell to the House Un-American Activities Committee and a New York grand jury. His testimony eventually lead to the 1950 perjury conviction of Alger Hiss and launched a decades-long battle between the Left and Right over which man was the real villain. The controversy seems to have petered out, at least in the mainstream, since both the US Russia released formerly-classified Cold War records identifying Hiss as a Soviet agent.

In 1952, Chambers published Witness, his autobiography and apologia. Starting with his childhood, Chambers explains his attraction to communism, his involvement in the communist movement in America – first in the open party as an organizer and writer for the Daily Worker, later in the underground – how his growing Christian faith lead to his break from the party, and how his Quaker principles lead to his testimony against his former fellow-travelers.

Chambers spent ten years as a writer and editor for Time Magazine, so he knew how to wield a pen. His story is organized, his arguments persuasive, and his writing is moving, sometimes even beautiful. The drawback is that Chambers took his serious subject seriously – there is not a glimmer of humor in the whole 800 pages. Still, it is an amazing story and much of it reads like a spy thriller, well, an egg-heady spy thriller. 

Witness isn't a quick or easy read, but as a first-hand account of a fascinating episode in American history, it is worth the effort. Christopher Caldwell summed it up well when describing the book:

Confession, history, potboiler -- by a man who writes like the literary giant we would know him as, had not Communism got him first.

OTHER REVIEWS

Cindy Simpson for American Thinker (2010)
Brothers Judd (2001)

If you would like your review of this book listed here, please leave a comment with a link and I will add it.

NOTES

Witness is on the National Review list of Top 100 Non-Fiction Books of the 20th Century.  It counts for several of my 2012 challenges: Chunkster, Tea & Books, Mt. TBR, Off the Shelf, TBR Pile, and Memorable Memoirs.

Review: Mr. Sammler's Planet

 

There's a reason why Mr. Sammler's Planet doesn't spring first to mind when making a list of favorite or best known Saul Bellow novels. People tend to mention The Adventures of Augie March, Herzog, Seize the Day, or Henderson the Rain King, but not Mr. Sammler's Planet, even though it won the National Book Award in 1971.

Mr. Sammler's Planet is not an easy novel, either to read or review. It has a typical Bellow plot, simple, funny, and shaggy, and a typical Bellow collection of wonderful, overblown characters. Here, Artur Sammler is an elderly, one-eyed Holocaust survivor and former minor member of London's Bloomsbury Set, living in Manhattan on the largesse of a nostalgic nephew, under the haphazard housekeeping care of a loony daughter and a couple of nieces, and attracting the attention of screwball hucksters, an Indian professor with theories of colonizing the moon, and a sharply dressed pickpocket with a peculiar method of intimidation.

But, also typical of Bellow's books, it is a novel of ideas – in this case dense and unrelenting ideas about the degradation of social mores, the philosophical underpinnings of human suffering, and the existence of God. That's a lot to get through in 285 pages.  And it is difficult to know how Sammler's ideas fit together or where they end up.  As the 1970 New York Times review noted:

There is something appealingly elegiac about Sammler. The book is not only his swan song, but civilization's as we once knew it. With his minutely articulated ideas as his only tools, Sammler is something like a watchmaker tinkering with the huge and faulty mechanism of modern life. And though he may not succeed in putting it back in working order, it is both moving and instructive to see him try.

Dedicated Bellow fans may end up adding Mr. Sammler's Planet to their personal list of Bellow's best, but newcomers may want to start with one of his more accessible books.

OTHER REVIEWS

Commentary Magazine (1970)
New York Times (1970)

If you would like your review of this book listed here, please leave a comment with a link and I will add it.

NOTES

Mr. Sammler's Planet counts as one of my National Book Award choices for the 2012 Battle of the Prizes, American Version.   With this one, I've now completed the challenge. Woo hoo!

It also counts for the Mt. TBR and Off the Shelf challenges, the TBR Pile challenge, and my "sky" choice for the What's in a Name challenge. 

Teaser Tuesday: Swan Peak

He was standing at the far end of the bar, knocking back shots from a bottle of Jack Daniel's, chasing it with a can of Bud. The customers who come back into the club were avoiding him, and so was the bartender.

-- Swan Peak by James Lee Burke. Sounds like Dave Robicheaux's buddy, Clete Purcell, is heading for trouble. Again.


Teaser Tuesdays is hosted by Should Be Reading, where you can find the official rules for this weekly event.