Happy bloated and Black Friday. Here are a few books I’ve read lately that are worth recommending, including a book about reading. Since huge numbers of books are sold during the Christmas season, one of these might be a welcome gift.
Michael Dirda is the longtime book critic for “The Washington Post.” He’s famous for both the breath of his interests and the enthusiasm with which he recommends his latest find. “An Open Book” is his memoir of growing up as the bookish son of a Lorain, Ohio steelworker. To his family he seemed like a member of an alien species. I have long enjoyed Dirda’s reviews, but I picked up this volume when I saw it was like a return to my own early years.
That’s because I am a year older than Dirda, grew up 27 miles from him, the son of a rust belt factory worker, and was just as sure as Dirda to be found with my nose in a book. I also studied literature at an Ohio liberal arts school and ended up newspapering, though in a far more provincial and less illustrious manner than Dirda.
Anyone who grew up in the 1950s and 60s would probably enjoy this nostalgic visit to a lost world of blue collar industrial America. Those for whom books are central to life will recognize themselves in this portrait of the reader as a young man whose horizons widen, and tastes develop by discovering vast new worlds between two covers.
They may also be amused to recall the cheapo classics available from the TAB book club and the notion that Will Durant’s “Story of Civilization” was the last word in historical knowledge. They will also have fun agreeing with Dirda’s youthful taste or picking fights with it. I heartily seconded his fondness for Rick Brant’s electronic adventures and those of Tom Swift Jr. and Ken Holt, but he lost me when he fell for Doc Savage and Tarzan.
“City of Fortune” by Roger Crowley concerns the heyday of Venice, roughly from 1100 to 1500, from the age of the Crusades to the High Renaissance. It tells the improbable tale of how a bunch of fishermen built a city on a boggy lagoon and turned it into an economic powerhouse through sea trade, linking the supply of goods from the East with the developing demand of an awakening Europe.
It is heroic how these traders brought cargos back from Alexandria, Constantinople and distant Black Sea ports, and how Northern European customers crossed the Alps to attend markets on the Rialto. But the book also serves as a cautionary tale. The once mighty La Serenissima on the Adriatic declined as the balance of power shifted in the Levant, and as the even more heroic voyages of the Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutch shifted the supply chain from the ancient Silk Road to open ocean. Almost overnight the business model of Venice was doomed, turning it from the center of the world into a backwater.
Crowley argues that the Venetians understood before anyone else not just supply and demand, but “the need for consumer choice, a stable currency, on-time delivery, rational laws and taxes.” And in the process, it “replaced the chivalrous Medieval knight with a new type of hero; the man of business.”
Readers will not miss the fact that the object lesson of Venice can also apply to our own hubris. Their commercial empire was subject to unpredictable change, “harbors and ports came and went, and the roots it put down on many foreign shores were not deep.” Perhaps we ourselves are like Venice, which “knew deep down that all the imperial razzamatazz of trumpets, ships and guns was only a mirage.”
David Thomson is always entertaining and thought provoking, in his film criticism, biographies and especially his indispensable reference work, “A Biographical Dictionary of Film.” It is as amusingly opinionated as Dr. Johnson’s dictionary. He argues, for example, that the most important film actor in history is Cary Grant, and makes a pretty persuasive case for it.
His most recent book is “Warner Bros: The Making of an American Studio,” and both the title with its bros, and the origin of the work reflect his puckish intellect. It is part of a Yale University Press series that offers brief biographies of important Jews, such as Einstein, Kafka and Freud. Immediately Thomson admits the brother that counted was Jack and that he is “maybe the biggest scumbag ever to get into a Jewish Lives series.” He hastens to add that in Warner’s Hollywood, this was not an entirely pejorative term. Rascals were admired.
The book itself does not dwell at length on the machinations by which the four sons of a Youngstown, Ohio cobbler turned themselves into movie moguls. He’s more interested in the movies the leader of the pack, Jack, made in the Golden Age of Hollywood, and in the characteristics they shared that made them immediately identifiable as Warner products.
Warner’s first made money with Rin Tin Tin, became a pioneer of the sound era with “The Jazz Singer,” but then, in the early Thirties as other studios opted for opulent café society escapism or singing and dancing, Warner’s began to specialize in the slum, the street, the gangster, and in hard-edged melodrama. Warner’s was noir long before noir.
Its stars embodied these leanings – Edward G. Robinson, Cagney, and Bogart in films like “Public Enemy,” “Little Caesar,” “High Sierra,” “White Heat,” “The Big Sleep.” And Warner’s women were also as tough as nails — Stanwyck sleeping her way to the top in “Baby Face,” Bette Davis in “Of Human Bondage,” “Marked Woman,” and “Dark Victory,” Joan Crawford evolving from unrepentant tramp to anguished wronged woman. And equally manic and transgression was the cartoon unit where Bugs was a kind of Cagney with a carrot.
Thomson is brilliant on all this, and how it reflected the scuffling brutality of Jack Warner whose actors regularly fled his tyranny. But he also had the guts to embrace an ash can view of the Great Depression, and a willingness to attack the Nazi regime when other studios worried about losing revenues from Germany.