WINTHROP KNOWLTON

For September, our official reader devoured an eclectic mix of classic fiction, thrillers and political history.

DAILY: New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, New York Post
WEEKLY: Economist, New Yorker, New York, Bloomberg Business Week
BI-WEEKLY: Fortune, Forbes, Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, New York Review of Books
MONTHLY: Scientific American, Gloom, Doom, Boom Report, High-Tech Strategist

TITLE	AUTHOR	COMMENT
The Presidents Club	Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy	A terrific read. Two Time reporters tell the story of sitting presidents’ relationships with their living predecessors, starting with Truman and Hoover and ending with Obama and Clinton. Filled with surprises, some heartening and others sickening (the latter mostly involve Nixon and Carter). A wonderful book idea, flawlessly executed.
Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President	Candice Millard	Another winner, a riveting tale of President Garfield’s shooting and his subsequent “assassination” by the country’s greatest doctors, who take what would otherwise have been a harmless bullet wound and over a period of months convert it into a death sentence, producing for the poor (and brave) victim a prolonged and agonizing death. None of us has ever realized what a great man Garfield was and what a great president he might have become, let alone what a horrifying drama this tale of medical malpractice turned out to be. The insane shooter, who claimed that he was not the man who actually killed the president (must have had a good lawyer!) was nevertheless hanged.
The Portrait of a Lady	Henry James	Decided to read this before tackling Portrait of a Novel (see below). This novel, one of America’s three or four greatest, grows in fascination with each reading. The New York Edition should be chosen.
Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece	Michael Gorra	A fascinating analysis of how, why, where, and when James wrote and then revised the novel in question.
Moscow Rules	Gabriel Allon	Who else to turn to after Henry James? One of the better Gabriel Allon capers.
A Wanted Man	Lee Child	The first third of this Jack Reacher thriller is gripping but the book then collapses. Child seems to have forgotten the importance of a scary and powerful individual villain, settling instead for bloodless institutional foes. The six-foot-seven-inch Reacher is shortly to be portrayed in the movies by the midget Scientologist Tom Cruise. There’s a scary thought.

Click here for more Reading List articles.

Comments are closed