The Martian Chronicles (1950) By Ray Bradbury

It’s not like I missed the cultural influence of Ray Bradbury, I was, after all, raised on Flash Gordon and The Day the Earth Stood Still, eventually graduating to Star Trek and, dare I admit, all theories pertaining to a certain event that may or may not have occurred in Roswell, New Mexico -- in your deepest soul, you know it did.  Yet, it was only a few weeks ago that I first read Bradbury’s classic The Martian Chronicles.

The Chronicles is a collection of short stories describing the colonization of the Planet Mars by Earthlings.  The stories first appeared in print individually during the heyday of magazine publishing in the 1940s.  They were compiled into book form in 1950.

Think about that date for a moment.  Here is an author who was writing about not just space exploration, but interplanetary travel and settlement -- years before Sputnik, years before communications satellites, a quarter century before Neil Armstrong set foot on the relatively nearby lunar surface, and a half century before NASA’s “Curiosity” began roving around the red planet.  Bradbury was colonizing Mars and running tourist junkets between it at Earth!

The book is immensely thought-provoking, providing some early discussion on the arrogance of interacting with beings from another world from an assumed position of superiority. It preceded by years the publication of Rachel Carson’s environmental epic Silent Spring, not to mention the public debate about global warming, and offered commentary on how we were/are destroying Planet Earth.  Its anti-war commentary remains frighteningly on target.

But the book is also fun, nowhere more so than in the tale of the first successful landing on Mars, as foreseen in a Martian woman’s dream.  She tells her husband that in her dream a man from another world -- who she is clearly enthralled by -- will arrive via rocket ship the next night in a nearby meadow.  As the next night falls and the first Earthling lands his rocket ship on Mars and disembarks, he is immediately shot dead by the jealous husband.

It takes several attempts before Earthlings are finally able to successful establish an outpost on Mars, beginning the colonization process whereby they work to remake the planet in Earth’s image.

To my surprise, Bradbury also incorporates some rather biting social commentary into his book by capitalizing on the time period it was written in, the years immediately after World War II when the American military was still officially segregated, and the Jim Crow-era was still uncontested in the South.  I don’t know if my favorite author, James Baldwin, was a Bradbury fan, but I believe I can safely surmise he would have applauded the chapter titled June 2003, Way In the Middle of the Air.  It tells the story of how overnight the entire African American population of a small Southern town packed up without notice to begin their interplanetary Great Migration to Mars.

At only 182 pages, this book is a fast read.  My advice though is to savor it, reading no more than a couple of chapters a night, and then read it again.  I already have.

Leopold & Loeb: The Crime of the Century (1975) By Hal Higdon

The competition from Chicago alone includes many legendary crimes: John Wayne Gacy, the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre & the entire Capone-era, Silas Jayne, the Spilotro brothers, and Richard Speck; yet only the Leopold & Loeb murder earned the moniker of The Crime of the Century.  Although the crime took place 88 years ago, its major details are still well known.  Hal Higdon’s book on the crime, trial and aftermath fills in the less current details in a manner that leaves one rapidly turning to the next page, as though it were a “who done it” on a best seller list. 

The book recaps the true story of a pre-meditated murder, with a victim picked at random.  The victim, Bobby Franks, and his murderers Nathan Loeb and Richard Leopold Jr., were all college students living in Chicago’s Kenwood neighborhood, then the address of the city’s elite.  What was their motive?  It is thought to have been curiosity, thrill, and a belief that their intellectual superiority entitled them to test out if they could commit the perfect crime.

If you are a resident of Chicago, the names and places are completely familiar. The book reads much like Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City in its connection to the city’s geography and social structure.  An equally frightening comparison would be Gene O’Shea’s nonfiction book Unbridled Rage: A True Story of Organized Crime, Corruption, and Murder in Chicago detailing the murder of three boys who disappeared on their way to a movie in the Loop in 1955, but expanding well beyond that incident.

The book Leopold & Loeb plays out on so many levels that it is difficult to structure.  First of course, is the crime story itself.  How these two young men planned this murder down to minute detail, and yet in retrospect, seemed to want to get caught.  In fact, in those days, long before the Miranda decision, they confessed to nearly everything, even aiding police in locating missing evidence, seemingly pleased with their efforts, though disappointed they made an error.

Yet another level involves the time period, 1924, the mid-point of Prohibition, the ascendancy of the Capone reign of terror in Chicago.  Yet the endless front page coverage that summer wasn’t about Al Capone, Bugsy Malone or blatant police corruption, it was about two egg-heads, one even an ornithologist, who committed just one of the 177 murders registered in the city in the first six months of the year. 

It was the period of Chicago history immortalized in The Front Page by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, when six daily newspapers fought for circulation by trying to out scoop and out sensationalize each other.  The story was ready made: two kids from good families, prominent in the business community, students at one of the most prestigious universities in the world, both with genius IQ’s, and rumored to be “perverts,” an emphasis considered more damaging than the murder.  And it was a story with the never completely answered question: why?

And then there was the trial, with the combatants being a States’ Attorney whose political career could be made, or broken, by the case; versus Clarence Darrow, arguably the most famous attorney in American history, and himself a Chicago resident.  The murder case was almost incidental to the two legal questions fought over: the moral underpinning of the death penalty; and the claim of mental illness as a mitigating factor in criminal responsibility.

And then there was the post-trial story, which extended to the summer of 1974.

Summer reading does not get more engrossing than this.

Death Is A Lonely Business (1985) By Ray Bradbury

A month ago Ray Bradbury died just shy of his 92nd birthday.  All I knew about him was that he was an incredibly successful writer in the “future fiction” genre.   His first big commercial success was with The Martian Chronicles, published back in 1950.  I’m not really sure why, but I don’t recall having read any of his works, though I did see the movie version of Fahrenheit 451.  

In a case of good timing, a friend sent me Bradbury’s book Death is a Lonely Business a few weeks ago.  It is set in Venice, California, circa 1949, as the menagerie that was the Venice Pier is being torn down in an early version of re-gentrification.  All of the book's characters are part of the world being left behind, be they academics, former opera divas from Chicago or silent film stars -- yes, there is a variation of Norma Desmond!

The main character is a struggling young writer living in the Venice fog.   One night the writer comes across a body that has somehow become entangled in an abandoned circus lion’s cage, submerged at high tide.  The rest of the book involves the writer’s quest to investigate this incident, and convince the local detective that it’s part of a pattern of serial killings.  An important subplot is convincing this same detective to complete his own unfinished book.

While the plot construction of Death is a Lonely Business might be a tad convoluted, it’s easy to pick out the reasons for Bradbury’s success as a writer.  I dog-eared about a dozen pages that condensed into a few sentences what could easily be stand-alone novels, my favorite tells of a dream.

"I was a writer in a small, green town in northern Illinois, and seated in a barber chair like Cal’s chair in his empty shop.  Then someone rushed in with a telegram that announced I had just made a movie sale for one hundred thousand dollars!

In the chair, yelling with happiness, waving the telegram, I saw the faces of all the men and boys, and the barber, turn to glaciers, turn to perma-frost, and when they did pretend at smiles of congratulations their teeth were icicles.  Suddenly I was the outsider.  The wind from their mouths blew cold on me.  I had changed forever.  I could not be forgiven."

From Wikipedia, I learned that the “green town in northern Illinois” alludes to Waukegan (just north of Chicago) where Bradbury was born.   Although this was not my plan, my decision to read this book was influenced by Bradbury’s death – which seems appropriate because it is a murder mystery dedicated to the memory of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, two of the masters of that genre.  

The Mother (1934) By Pearl Buck

China has been “discovered” by the West many times, dating from the Travels of Marco Polo in the late 13^th century, to Richard Nixon in 1972.  Yet despite occasional waves of interest, native Chinese have largely remained an unknown to most westerners, though the history of Chinese immigrants in the U.S. is fairly well documented.

A few years ago I read the emotionally jarring Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang, and was surprised at how ignorant I was on this subject.  I asked my mother, who was in her teens at the time, how much of this story hit the American press.  Her answer was none that she could recall explaining that part of the world did not exist to most people [Americans] until Pearl Harbor.  

Once World War II was over, China again mostly disappeared to the American public (with the cinematic exception of The World of Suzy Wong, starring William Holden and Nancy Kwan), hidden behind the “bamboo curtain” drawn closed by Chinese leaders, and by a door slammed shut by American politicians; one of whom, Richard Nixon, made a career out of China-baiting. Ironic then that he is credited with reopening the door 25 years later.

In the years before World War II however, before the civil war was won by Mao Tse Tung resulting in the creation of a two-China policy in the West, there was a flickering of interest in the Chinese people.  That interest was almost single-handedly the result of author Pearl Buck, the daughter of Presbyterian missionaries from West Virginia, who spent most of her childhood and early adult life in China. Ages ago, I think when I was in high school, I read Buck’s novel The Good Earth, which won her a Pulitzer Prize in 1932.  Subsequently she won the Nobel Prize in Literature in recognition of her books set in China.

Recently I revisited Buck, reading her 1934 novel The Mother.  The story tells the story of a peasant woman whose husband has abandoned her, leaving her with the responsibility for not only their 3 children, but also her aging mother-in-law.   Her struggle to survive in a culture where women are decidedly second class citizens, and peasants are no more than feudal serfs, is gripping, and surprisingly universal, even to a westerner. This is feminist literature at its creation.  It is also a primer on the day to day challenges faced by the masses in China which set the stage for the rise of Communism.  The Mother’s second son would become an early Communist insurgent, though politics is something she herself never understood, or even questioned.

In her works Pearl Buck mastered these human stories of the peasantry, making it all the more ironic that she was later banned re-entry to the country, branded as a tool of West.  To her credit, even though she was disavowed by the new power structure in China; her personal philanthropy clearly never abandoned a concern for their people.

The Circus in Winter (2004) By Cathy Day

I enjoy reading, yet routinely I’m ready for a book to end long before I get to the final page; but with The Circus in Winter, I would have been perfectly content for it to go on for another 300 pages.  That may be the strongest recommendation I’ve ever given a book.  A none-too-small part of that gush is the book’s relevance to my childhood -- settle down, I wasn’t a circus kid.

It’s an odd book; a collection of related short stories about people in the quasi-fictional town of Lima, Indiana.  I say “quasi” because Cathy Day, the book’s author, grew up in Peru, Indiana, where history has it a now long defunct circus spent its winter months.  This geography and the town folk are something I’m rather familiar with, being a native of northern Indiana. I particularly relate to the underlying subplot shared by all of the characters: the “comfort” of living in a small Midwestern town, versus the “get me outta here” dynamic. I knew this dilemma personally – one foot in then-small town Portage, the other foot in “the Chicago metropolitan area.” In my case, Chicago won out, though most of my large family remains in Indiana.

The book begins with a short biography of Wallace Porter, one of the "leading citizens" of Lima. On his annual business trip to New York he falls in love and marries.  His new wife however is rapidly stifled by life in a small town. In chapter 2, after it becomes clear she does not have long to live, he decides to buy a circus so that they can travel endlessly ... her dream.  She dies that day.  Afterwards, he keeps the circus, and it becomes his family. Just as it became his family, it also became a part of the fabric of the town.

There are chapters in this book that are just priceless, such as the Gypsies at the KOA camp.  But I’ll let you learn this on your own.  A note of caution: this is not a children’s book.

I found out about this book because it was referenced in the course material for a seminar on Sherwood Anderson (Winesburg, Ohio) at Chicago’s renowned Newberry Library. The materials placed her in Anderson's genre.  Fair enough, though she has a style that stands on its own quite sufficiently.  Further inquiry lead me to discover that a recent class of the Theater Department at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana (a.k.a. Middletown) turned the book into Circus in Winter, The Musical. I truly would have loved to have seen that!

The World in the Evening (1954) By Christopher Isherwood

I am somewhat at a loss to describe The World in the Evening by Christopher Isherwood.   The word “vast” comes to mind, though that seems vague and somewhat misleading.  By “vast” I don’t mean lengthy or inaccessible, or even epic, it is none of these.  I mean it is vast in the range of life experiences that are explored.

The book follows the early adult life of Stephen Monk, from his postgraduate days through two early marriages.  To tell his story Isherwood merges two established literary genres: the Masterpiece Theater formula of the British gentry aimlessly wandering through Europe, and the formula of American youth “finding themselves” on "the" continent, after graduation, before returning to the States to begin their adult lives.

The first marriage is to a British author named Elizabeth, who dies of a heart ailment -- the title is taken from one of her books.  His second marriage is to Jane, an American party girl. The book begins as Stephen’s marriage to Jane is dissolving, and is primarily told through a series of flashbacks triggered by his reading of Elizabeth’s personal letters as he is convalescing from a serious accident.  

Readers of this book will fall for Stephen as they page through his life story.  He is a likeable, almost charismatic figure, though he is not a particularly admirable human being, which perhaps adds to his attraction. 

While The World in the Evening is a personal story, it plays out mainly in Europe over a momentous period of history – World War II is underway by the book’s end.  This backdrop is rarely the focal point of the story, but its presence grows as the book unfolds.

Isherwood is regarded as an early witness of the rise of Nazism, and notes it frequently in his writings set in the 1930s, including this book.  Yet, what has always left me questioning is whether he recognized the early beginnings of this decline into an abyss as it was occurring, as his books suggest, or if it was with a flawless 20-20 hindsight.  His books were, to my knowledge, written years later, after the full extent of the holocaust became widely known to the rest of the world.  I may have to add an Isherwood biography to my reading list to better address this question (though that’s no guarantee of an answer), and let me point out that the question does not pertain solely to Isherwood.

And finally, this would not be an Isherwood novel were it not to include some gay characters.  One seems particularly worthy of mention because he seems out of context.  Stephen’s doctor has a young lover named Bob, who like Stephen was raised a Quaker.  From a literary standpoint, Bob’s primary purpose in the book is to allow Isherwood to explore the subject of religious pacifism at the advent of a war against an unmistakable evil. But the interesting thing about how Bob is portrayed is that he is philosophically an unapologetic gay man, who clearly would have become a “militant” gay activist if he lived in the 1970s or later, yet the story takes place in the 1930’s and was written in 1952 when this topic was still very much “the love that dare not speak its name.”

Suddenly A Knock On The Door (Hebrew 2010; English Translation 2012) By Etgar Keret

I had the pleasure of seeing Etgar Keret in lecture about a year ago, and raved about it endlessly. He was back in town recently to kick off a book tour promoting his latest collection of short stories, giving a lecture at the Chicago Sinai Synagogue.  I unfortunately had a scheduling conflict, my loss. I however have now read the new book, my gain.

Etgar Keret is a much acclaimed Israeli author, currently teaching a creative writing course at the University of Illinois at Champaign.  This new book is his fourth collection of short stories to be translated into English.  His stories are irreverent and priceless.  The cover blurb on The Bus Driver Who Wanted to be God captures the essence of his work perfectly: “warped and wonderful short stories.”

The title story from Bus Driver is a completely “wonderful” fable, and the “warped” description fits The Son of the Head of the Mossad perfectly.  Totally off the charts however is Kneller’s Happy Campers.  It tells the tale of several characters that have “offed themselves” by committing suicide – but, instead of going to heaven or hell, they are assigned to a suburb of Tel Aviv.

The first collection I read was The Nimrod Flipout, which includes a marvelous little story called Eight Percent of Nothing.  The Girl on the Fridge opens with the one paragraph, mega attention-getting, short story titled Asthma Attack, and includes a totally sad but funny story titled A No Magician Birthday.

The new release, Suddenly, a Knock on the Door, includes another mythical place: Lieland.  It is a world where all of the characters that one has ever incorporated into one’s little white lies reside in their lied about state: i.e. I can’t come to work today because my grandmother fell and broke her hip.  And my favorite fable, which is too short to summarize: Guava.

Almost as warped as some of the stories are the covers of two of these books:  The Bus Driver features a smiling suicide; while Nimrod’s Flipout features an Elmer Fudd-like character in an orange rabbit suit.

All of the 133 stories in these four collections were originally published in Hebrew.  You can order one of these books, but you might as well save yourself the trouble and order all four ... because you will want all four.