Scott Eyman, Mark Harris, Donna Tartt (continued), The Mets

Since the war had started he [John Ford] had watched with increasing contempt as John Wayne had made and broken one vague commitment after another to join up.
Mark Harris, Five Came Back. A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War (The Penguin Press, 2014).

This is the kind of detail missing from John Wayne: The Life and Legend by Scott Eyman (Simon and Schuster, 2014).  Eyman's book is a beautifully detailed biography of Wayne that breaks no new ground, while Harris's book is a fascinating study of five directors (Ford, John Huston, George Stevens, Frank Capra, William Wyler) and how the war changed their lives and affected America's perceptions of WW II. Ford and Huston continued their careers with great films while Capra retreated into his muddled politics, where populism shaded into Fascism, and produced only one more interesting film (It's a Wonderful Life, which continues to be misunderstood as some kind of happy Christmas story while actually being a brilliant and bitter critique of small-town America) and William Wyler and George Stevens never truly recovered from the horrors they saw.  Harris's book intelligently integrates the stories of all these men and their struggles during the war to produce vivid documentaries (with often unacknowledged re-enactments) that they could live with in spite of the racism and dubious propaganda involved.

The July issue of Vanity Fair has an interesting piece about the critical reception for Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch, which initially received positive reviews but was panned by The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books.  To me it was an enjoyable novel, with great strengths and some weaknesses, but it's just another book.  Loren Stein, the editor of The Paris Review, is concerned that people who only read a couple of books a year will read this instead of something else!  This is similar to some of the arguments about what high school and college students should read, with the assumption being that after they graduate they will never read another book, an assumption that has some truth to it. Ideally people should read many different books for many different purposes and make their own judgments.  Even Dickens was not universally admired in his day and not all of today's critics are that crazy about him. There is no critic of books, movies or art today who is a totally reliable guide, many of them (and this is especially true of Tartt's critics) falling for the fallacy of "realism."

The dreariness of this year's New York Mets is less dreary than it might be because of their radio voices.  Howie Rose and Josh Lewin continue (on WOR, 710) to be intelligent, thoughtful and perceptive.  Gary Cohen is a decent TV announcer but his colleagues Keith Hernandez and Ron Darling tend to relate everything to their own careers.  The radio voices of the Yankees John ("t-t-t-h-h-e-e Yankees win") Sterling and Suzyn ("that's right, John") Waldman detract from the game, and the bombastic Michael Kay makes the TV broadcasts equally hard to take.