Fantastic Metropolis

Pinnochio Finn, James Doone

Graduate student Doone’s serendipitous discovery of twenty-three letters between the writers better known to history as Carlo Collodi and Mark Twain proved to be not only a literary bombshell but the year’s most unexpected bestseller. Letter by letter, with copious annotations provided by Doone, an extraordinary story emerges, telling of how the two writers met in Europe in 1878 and became not only friends, but collaborators. Following the success of Tom Sawyer, Twain had embarked on The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, only to put the manuscript aside in frustration, unable to find the key to his great themes of freedom and slavery. He had come to Europe seeking both escape and inspiration. Collodi, meanwhile, was struggling with the modern fairy-tale that would become his chief literary legacy, beloved to generations of children, The Adventures of Pinnochio. What Doone demonstrates conclusively is that the character of Jim, as well as the important secondary figures of the King and the Duke (and others too numerous to list here) were in fact inspired by and derived from characters in Collodi’s tale: namely, Jiminy Cricket and the Fox and the Cat. Yet the influence was far from one-sided, with Twain’s sardonic vision of humanity lending Collodi’s work a mature depth, even a darkness, it had never before attained… and would never again equal.

My Secret Life with Ronald Reagan, J. G. Ballard

A shockingly frank, frequently hilarious, and, in the end, deeply moving record of the author’s long-time relationship with the former President of the United States.

Divided We Fall, Tom Clancy

Who but Clancy could have penned this fast and furious thriller in which the son of a former president steals a presidential election from the rightful victor thanks to the intervention of Supreme Court justices appointed by his father, then, along with his vice president and a consortium of oil company executives and religious conservatives, manipulates Islamic fanatics, secretly financed by said oil companies and religious conservatives, into committing an act of terrorism so heinous that the U.S. is able to launch a war to secure valuable rights for U.S. oil corporations to a pipeline across Afghanistan without a shred of protest on the home front, where, at the same time, a military state is slowly imposed over a grateful citizenry too scared or stupid to wave their freedoms goodbye? At its best, Clancy’s far-fetched fable is almost believable, and readers will doubtless say a prayer of thanks that we live in a strong and stable democracy rather than the hollow pretense of one depicted here.

Ms. Shakespeare, Camille Paglia

Drawing heavily on the sexual subtext of Hamlet, Paglia claims that it’s really Ophelia, and not the play’s eponymous hero, who feigns madness—and then is murdered for her troubles by her own brother, at her father’s order, to keep her from revealing the horrifying history of her sexual abuse at the hands of both. If Paglia had stopped there, her book would have been a major contribution to Shakespearean literary analysis… and indeed, her subsequent excesses should not detract from the originality and value of this theory. Unfortunately, however, like so many others, Paglia has been seduced by the siren song of alternative authorship for the Shakespearean canon. Her candidate: Anne Hathaway. Admittedly, ingenious arguments are advanced, but one expects no less of Paglia. But ingenuity does not equal proof, and in the end we are forced to conclude that Paglia has produced something closer to science fiction than serious scholarship.

Mao III, Don DeLillo

In this wacky farce, author DeLillo returns to the world of Islamic terrorists and white people a little too smart, and a little too rich, for their own—or anyone else’s—good. I laughed so hard I cried!