Cloughie: Walking on Water

Cloughie: Walking on Water
by Brian Clough (with John Sadler)
2002 (updated 2003) • Headline Book Publishing
374 pages / 0747265682 (paperback)

The personality type of Brian Howard Clough is nowadays an extinct species in the higher levels of English football. As much an outspoken critic as a brilliant manager, Clough touched plenty of nerves when he took the English game and the people in it to task. Virtually no one - from players to members of the Football Association to television reporters - was safe from a dressing-down if he felt need for improvement or correction in the sport he loved.

When Clough died in 2004 at the age of 69, he represented a lost era of cantankerous football managing that would be greeted by fines and bans in today's mood of extreme political correctness. He also left behind one of the greatest managerial legacies in history by guiding two smaller clubs to English titles and the tournaments of Europe, something that has been made almost impossible by the sport's prevailing economics.

Born to a large working class family in 1935, Brian Clough climbed each individual step of the football ladder and felt entitled to his bristly disposition as a manager. He began his playing career with local clubs such as Billingham Synthonia and appeared in the Middlesbrough youth program during the early 1950s, earning little or no pay. After playing for an RAF team during National Service, he scored 251 goals from 274 league matches for Middlesbrough and Sunderland in a striker career that was prematurely ended by a knee injury. The English national team seemed to need Clough's goal-scoring prowess, but he was never in fashion with the FA, even as a player: he earned just two first-team caps under Sir Walter Winterbottom, a statistic that irritated him throughout his life.

Clough, with his former teammate and long-time associate Peter Taylor, became manager of the bottom-level Hartlepools United in 1965. It made him the youngest in the Football League at age 30 and one of the most attention-grabbing with his outspokenness. He eventually went with Taylor to Derby County, bringing the East Midlands club out of the Second Division and onto the First Division championship in 1972. Nottingham Forest also lived through its most successful period with Clough in the dugout, winning the First Division title and back-to-back European Cups in 1979 and 1980. Yet in a second international blow, his achievements were not enough to get him the managing job of England when he was a candidate.

Clough's life was cut short after fighting alcoholism and receiving a liver transplant in 2003. Fortunately for the sport, he left behind several pieces of autobiography, including a volume that was first published in 2002 and later updated. Cloughie: Walking on Water is exactly what you'd expect from him: intensely opinionated, often witty, often heated, and always leaving us with something to think about. The 374-page book, co-authored by Sun newspaper columnist John Sadler, sheds light on Clough's background while devoting plenty of space to his views on where football has gone and continues to go.

The autobiography, released by Headline Book Publishing in London, is an unusual but entertaining mix of confessional, memoir, treatise, and critical essay. The book's updated version in 2003 opens with a two-chapter account of his drink issues and the liver transplant he received in Newcastle. These 35 pages are a sort of catharsis for the issues that Clough struggled with privately and had become a public issue in the last years of his life. It's after this section that we get down to his prior years and many opinions shaped while in the Football League and non-league venues.

Cloughie is a pleasant surprise in avoiding the usual pitfalls of co-written autobiography. Many books of this type are poorly organized to the extent of muddling its story and co-authors often fail to develop the text in their subject's voice. John Sadler's working of the autobiography indeed switches too often between past and present for my liking, but it is still arranged well enough to maintain the flow of thought and keep things moving. Sadler also does superbly in bringing Clough's manner of speech to the page; his aggressive yet songlike diction pops up all over, feeling as if the late manager is speaking directly to us.

Looking back, Clough's opinions on the modern game are often completely accurate. He was well onto, for example, the unhealthy relationship between football and television that has made the sport a pawn of networks and reduced its appeal by being shown all week long. He also stated the obvious in warning that football's salary structure is overextending itself and would knock the economic framework into a spiral that leaves clubs either bankrupt or in the hands of foreign-born billionaires who may not have the game's best interests at heart.

On the other hand, we are treated to views that now look well off-base, such as his belief that Sir Alex Ferguson should have gone through with retirement from Manchester United after first announcing plans in 2002 (imagine if he hadn't). Clough, who was more complex than met the eye, also exposes his inner conflicts without intending. This is particularly clear in the falling-out with Peter Taylor after his friend returned to Derby County alone and 'stole' Scottish winger John Robertson from Nottingham Forest. In these types of situations, Clough tries to downplay his anger while the issues keep arising in the book and are clearly eating at him.

These unproven opinions and inconsistent trains of thought are part of the human element that makes Brian Clough one of us. Clough was nowhere near saintliness and we can accept his managerial brilliance, flaws and all. Cloughie, for the most part, is a fitting last testament to a winner of 594 matches, two First Division titles, two European Cups, four League Cups, and a European Super Cup; this besides countless animated interviews about one of his favorite subjects - himself - and his distribution of slaps to fans who invaded the pitch during games.

Cloughie is readily available to readers in the UK and can be found in decent quantities for US 'soccer' fans via the Internet. While looking quite thick, the book is a fast-moving paperback with 24 pages of photographs from each stage of Clough's working and personal life. If anyone is serious about learning football history, Cloughie is absolutely essential.

Twenty Poems of Anna Akhmatova

Twenty Poems of Anna Akhmatova
translated by Jane Kenyon (with Vera Sandomirsky Dunham)
1985 • Nineties Press & Ally Press
53 pages / 0915408309 (paperback)

It was something of a miracle - or perhaps only a result of the arbitrary - that Anna Akhmatova survived condemnation for 'polluting' the minds of Russians with her poetry. Akhmatova, despite being one of the very first artists torn up by the USSR cultural wing, somehow avoided a prison sentence and execution to live until age 76, a witness to ongoing hardships but increasingly famous.

Though she did not live to fully experience it, Akhmatova is now recognized worldwide for lyric poetry that she struggled to make public. Her fame is in spite of blacklisting by the Central Committee of the Communist Party for a thirty-year stretch and the humiliation of Andrei Zhdanov's 'nun and harlot' essay that smeared her as a human being in 1946. Her work easily ranks in esteem with a group of female poets that includes Sappho, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and her contemporary Marina Tsvetayeva.

American poet Jane Kenyon's translations of Akhmatova were popular in literary circles for several years. Though Akhmatova's reputation was secure long before the translations were published as a book in 1985, the English-speaking world was still trying to absorb her legacy and wasn't yet receiving the total picture from her home country. Her famous war tribute Requiem, in fact, had still not been printed in its entirety by the Soviet publishing houses and other controversial pieces were limited to circulation in samizdat. In supplying twenty translations of Akhmatova's poems with their original texts and a helpful introductory essay, Kenyon gave English readers a new doorway to the poetess's work.

Twenty Poems of Anna Akhmatova selects from the few books she published early in her career and the various poems written in later decades. Kenyon, who is respected for poetry of a similar concision, has focused on Akhmatova's shorter lyrics, which are known for their vivid imagery and sharp glimpses into the interior world of the narrator. At first, Kenyon seems an ideal match for Akhmatova in the translation game, since their styles complement one another and their presence as women helps to channel ideas.

Kenyon collaborated with literary scholar Vera Sandomirsky Dunham of Columbia University and put forth a valiant effort in bringing Akhmatova's poetry to the West. But Kenyon's work, for its good intentions, stifled the delicate and often ecstatic music that Akhmatova conveys in Russian. Kenyon's rendering of her verse seems toned down and far too relaxed to convince us that Akhmatova's words have gone unadulterated.

There has always existed a tall barrier in converting Russian ideas to English, a problem that Kenyon acknowledges in her introduction. English does not offer as many idea-encompassing words as Russian and severely limits the possibilities in maintaining Akhmatova's form. Kenyon tries to overcome this by changing Akhmatova's nuanced meter and rhyme to free verse with the hope of preserving image. At times, she is compelled to reorganize ideas or shift text in order to maintain flow and prevent further distortion.

Those with at least working knowledge of Russian may be stunned that Akhmatova's scansion and rhyme - both essential to her poetry - have been mostly dropped. One of her exceptional poems from the collection Plantain, for example, uses highly melodic and alternating couplets; the first stanza alone rhymes ponedelnik (Monday) with bezdelnik (good-for-nothing) and miglyeh (darkness) with zemlyeh (earth). Kenyon, who no doubt had great challenges when translating this, creates a very dignified stanza that gives something of Akhmatova's original but is still below the Russian poetess's standards:

Twenty-first. Night. Monday.
Silhouette of the capitol in darkness.
Some good-for-nothing -- who knows why --
made up the tale that love exists on earth.

Kenyon does have moderate success in poems such as 'Evening hours at the desk' and 'Tale of the Black Ring,' a poem which took Ahkmatova years to complete, but too much of Akhmatova has been lost in dropping her musicality.

As independent pieces of writing, Kenyon's translations are above-average in quality and nothing particularly great. Akhmatova's work catches aflame only at moments as her words are separated by two considerably different languages, two largely different societies, and two vastly different eras. This volume begs the question: is poetry of this sensitivity, this vividness, translatable into English at all or should we all break out some Russian textbooks and learn the language?

Kenyon's Twenty Poems must be respected for its ambition and role in bringing Akhmatova to more of the English-speaking world, but other translators such as Stanley Kunitz, Judith Hemschemeyer, and Roberta Reeder serve as good comparisons for the paths that Russian to English translation can take. Kenyon's selection, co-published by Robert Bly's Nineties Press and Ally Press in Minnesota, is still frequently discussed and can be found in libraries or for purchase on the Web. The translations are also included in Kenyon's posthumous collection A Hundred White Daffodils, published by Graywolf Press in 2000.

The Little Sister

The Little Sister
by Raymond Chandler
1988 • Vintage Books
250 pages / 039475767X (paperback)

For an author whose novels have been faithfully and successfully adapted by Hollywood, Raymond Chandler...well...hated Hollywood.

Already an established crime novelist, Chandler entered the film industry as a screenwriter to work with Billy Wilder on the 1944 drama Double Indemnity, which earned both men an Oscar nomination. By the time Chandler's stay in Hollywood ended, he published a widely-read article in the Atlantic that decried producers' 'exploitation' of scribes and had a permanent falling out with Alfred Hitchcock over Strangers on a Train.

The Little Sister, published in 1949, is an anti-Hollywood novel fueled by Chandler's dealings with the studio system. Little surprise that it was only adapted for television during his lifetime and not touched by the film industry until Paul Bogart directed an updated version, Marlowe with James Garner, in 1969. Chandler could not have made new friends in Tinseltown with this angry, aggressive novel that shows Philip Marlowe at his most bitter and the author at some of his truly best.

Six years had passed since Chandler released his previous Marlowe novel, The Lady in the Lake, in 1943. The Little Sister is his first novel set in the post-war era, which seems to have increased his - and consequently Marlowe's - irritation towards the United States as a military and economic superpower. Now 38, Marlowe laments the disappearance of 'old' Los Angeles when economic growth and urban sprawl changed the city's atmosphere and the attitudes of its people. Neither is his job getting any easier, by the way, and his assignment in The Little Sister is his most bizarre yet.

The story is centered on Orfamay Quest, a petite, childlike woman from Kansas who is trying to locate her brother, the employee of a California engineering company. Marlowe is immediately sucked into Chandler's plot maze, stumbling upon two murders just after they happen. He even runs afoul of the police, who place him under threat of arrest for suppressing evidence. Connections from the Los Angeles underworld lead him to an emerging Hollywood actress and the crude individuals she's surrounded by, who prove a wild experience in themselves.

The Little Sister, though with plenty of Marlowe humor, is a novel that will leave you feeling grim and a tad debauched. None of the characters Marlowe deals with are the least likeable and each person has a certain repulsive quality, coming across as a deadbeat, slut, or junkie. Even Marlowe falls into transgression when he crosses paths with good-looking and manipulative women, which creates more than enough problems for him when crime-solving.

Chandler's novel has a certain rawness that is not common to his other work and it's all the better for it. I found it far better made than The Lady in the Lake, which only shows traces of what makes Chandler a great author. The Little Sister has rounder characters and an airtight plot whose ending, while over the top, brings everything neatly to a close and left me completely satisfied. Though Marlowe does not visit unusual locations as in the previous novel, Chandler places the action in Los Angeles and Bay City (really Santa Monica) with eye-catching detail. You could almost smell the air freshener of expensive Hollywood suites and the mildew and stale booze of a run-down boarding house.

Though Chandler's novel was not a great success in bookstores and never adapted to film in his lifetime, The Little Sister now enjoys critical praise. It's perhaps not as stellar as The Big Sleep, Farewell, My Lovely, or The Long Goodbye, but it belongs at least on the next-to-highest tier of his output. While he could have spent more time depicting Hollywood and his wonderfully fluid writing (as usual) is sometimes too loose to the point of being long-winded or stilted, The Little Sister is still one of the best-written crime novels in English. Anyone with a stomach for shady people, seedy locations, and a touch of blood should be impressed by what Chandler pulls off.

Black Lizard, the crime label of Vintage Books, has done an exceptional job in rereleasing Chandler's novels, but there seems to be an unusual number of typos that were not fixed up before the 1988 edition of The Little Sister went to press. The 250-page volume is in Black Lizard's sleek format with Deco fonts and trim. Unfortunately, there were several instances where a word was misspelled and at least two cases where a word was omitted. Since Vintage has been exceptionally accurate in the other Marlowe novels, these mistakes jump off the page. This was hopefully corrected in later printings that are up to Vintage's established standard.

Sonnets from the Portuguese and Other Poems

Sonnets from the Portuguese and Other Poems
by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
1992 • Dover Publications
55 pages / ISBN 0486270521 (paperback)

Long before there was a writer named Carol Ann Duffy, Elizabeth Barrett Browning was a prime candidate for Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom. Equally famous for her relationship with Robert Browning as for her work, Barrett Browning was taken seriously in a field that would remain dominated by men until the 20th century. She was mentioned on terms equal with contemporaries like her husband and William Wordsworth and was considered for Wordsworth's position as laureate before Tennyson was selected. The United Kingdom would wait another 160 years before a woman finally received the title.

In fairness, Elizabeth Browning was never in particularly good health as an adult and would die of an unidentified illness just eleven years after Tennyson's appointment. This makes her accomplishments as a poet all the more remarkable, as she dealt with physical complications, conflicts with her father, and personal tragedies to create a body of work that is still widely read today. Though propped to a degree by recent feminist critics who value the message of her poems more than the actual craft behind them, Browning's work is invigorated by a bright emotionalism, respect for the poetic conventions of her age, and a wide social awareness.

Sonnets from the Portuguese and Other Poems is a Dover Publications overview of Barrett Browning's shorter work, choosing verse from the different turns of her life in 51 pages. Edited by Stanley Appelbaum as part of the Dover Thrift Editions series, Browning is featured in a thoughtful volume that maps romantic, spiritual, and social concerns beginning with The Seraphim and Other Poems, her first mature collection published in 1838. We are given a variety of Browning's poems in chronological order, finishing with her Last Poems collection of 1862.

Browning's poetry, combining periods of reflection with fast responses to events of the day, offers the best and worst of early Victorian writing. She was very much an artist of her time, creating intense verse that touches upon public and private life. Sonnets from the Portuguese is probably her best-known verse in short form, a cycle of 44 sonnets reflecting her turbulent love affair with Robert. The cycle makes up a focal point for this book and shows Elizabeth at her truly best. These sonnets, besides their moving sincerity, offer constantly-changing imagery and a wealth of poetic resource.

Other poems, such as those dedicated to her spaniel Flush ('To Flush, My Dog'), the Greek god Pan ('A Musical Instrument'), and French author George Sand, show Browning's ability to widen the Victorian framework of strict meter and rhyme, much of it using iambic pentameter. Her respect for poets like Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, Wordsworth, and Coleridge (not to mention Dante and the Greeks) is also readily apparent.

Browning, like many of her generation, wrote verse in the heat of a moment. A deep feeling of social responsibility led her to write on current events with varying results. Topical poetry can be tied to emotional extremes of the given subject and make for bad poetry years later. While 'The Forced Recruit' is a powerful scene drawn from the Italians' fight against Austria in 1859, critics often shake their heads at 'The Cry of the Children' (on child labor) and 'A Curse for a Nation' (regarding slavery), which are too caught up in their political message to be overly concerned with art. The book includes these lesser-quality poems to capture the extent of Browning's social activism, though they are far from her better efforts.

At the height of her talents, Browning is a poet who still delights readers and cannot be ignored if someone has respect for good writing. Much of her poetry was well ahead of itself, some fifty years before the women's movement took any significant shape. This Dover collection is a low-priced introduction ($2.00 cover price) whose author continues to fascinate.

The volume is useful for newcomers to Browning's poetry or those looking for a quick brush-up. All of the poems offered are complete and Dover did not fall into the trap of excerpting from larger works that cannot be appreciated without their full text. Unfortunately, there are no introductions or footnotes for the poems; any references to social or personal situations not made clear in the verse will require a separate lookup. But plenty of poems, including Sonnets from the Portuguese, are based in common feelings and require no lookup at all.

The Basics of Winning Bridge

The Basics of Winning Bridge
by Montgomery Coe
1989 (reprinted 1993) • Cardoza Publishing
64 pages / ISBN 094068537X (paperback)

An estimated 200 million people worldwide participate in the game of contract bridge, which shows that diligence hasn't left us yet. More than a century in its evolution, bridge is an immensely challenging game that requires memorization and recall, cooperation with others, and the ability to plan ahead. In its fully appreciated form, it can be a source of peaceful competition and entertainment at little or no monetary cost.

Bridge may have even more enthusiasts if not for the daunting rules and techniques that pose as a barrier. Making oneself into a fully functioning player - let alone a good one - requires study and practice that many in this era of short attention spans will find taxing. This is worsened by teachers of the game who swamp newcomers with too much information at once instead of easing them in gradually.

One way to hold the interest of newcomers is by keeping things simple, at least when explaining the rules and fundamentals. The Las Vegas-based Cardoza Publishing seems to have understood this when releasing Montgomery Coe's The Basics of Winning Bridge as part of its widely-circulated titles list. The Basics of Winning Bridge is something of a blue-collar approach to this complex game, offering an extremely basic primer in just 61 pages.

This pocket-sized book outlines the basics of contract bridge for those who are completely new to the game. Covering bridge in short chapters with limited examples, Coe first describes setup, basics of bidding, and scoring. The book goes on to explain player evaluation of a bridge hand, opening bids, responses, and identification of game and slam situations. Other skills such as preempts, overcalls, doubles, and the playing out of hands are briefly discussed.

The aim of Coe's book is apparent when first pulling it from a shelf: it is a tutorial that will help you to get started. It uses simple language and doesn't concern itself with strategy, which will be up to the reader as he continues on his bridge journey. For anyone looking to slip his feet into the waters of bridge, this Cardoza title fulfills its limited purpose.

Its most glaring problem lies, however, in a lack of advice on how to continue. The Basics of Winning Bridge wraps up with some naïve instructions: we're told to 'study this book and practice,' as if this wafer-thin item will be enough for us to become the next world champion. Surely, Coe and the staff at Cardoza didn't believe this when their title went to print.

If you are interested in bridge, you're probably aware that becoming a successful player requires work, albeit very rewarding work. After reading a basic title such as this one, it would be in your interest to keep reading, find a class, and download a computer program that allows you to learn hands-on. If you would like to start thinking and speaking on bridge terms in the meantime, this cheaply-priced Cardoza title is not a terrible first step.

I have seen the Cardoza gaming series at many bookstores in addition to the Internet. The Basics of Winning Bridge is printed in softcover and retailed at $4.95. While not highly recommended, 'The Basics of Winning Bridge' is affordable, simplified, and finished in no time. Cardoza Publishing also prints Basics of Winning books on other forms of gaming, including blackjack, poker, craps, keno, chess, and backgammon.

The Man with the Golden Gun

The Man with the Golden Gun
by Ian Fleming
1965 • New American Library
183 pages / ISBN 1906772142 (hardcover)

Bond is sent to a mental institution and we don't read a page about what happens. There's a sign that things have gone wrong...

The Man with the Golden Gun was an incomplete and wholly unfortunate way for Ian Fleming to go out. The last novel he worked on before dying in August 1964, Gun only exists in a first draft and it was far from the vibrant tales that were his usual product. Fleming usually wrote a second version with reworkings of the material to improve balance and detail, making his thrillers amongst the greatest in popular literature.

All that exists of Gun is a kind of skeletal novel that Fleming, who was unhappy with the results, would have fleshed out in prior years. Publication of the existing novel was never a certainty; while the manuscript was generally approved by his copy editor William Plomer, publisher Jonathan Cape had reservations and asked critic Kingsley Amis to examine it. Fleming's semi-complete novel was released on April Fool's Day, 1965, to unfavorable but respectful reviews. A loosely-based film version with Roger Moore and Christopher Lee was also screened in 1974, but The Man with the Golden Gun has kept an uneasy relationship with the Bond faithful.

Where to start with a book that never really had its chance to succeed? For one thing, The Man with the Golden Gun is not a completely bad novel; though it is pallid compared to Fleming's other work, it has small traces of the energy and dark humor that made his Bond character a great success. The overall problem is that Gun reads exactly like what it is: a novel that was never truly finished. Only 180 to 190 pages depending on its edition (Thunderball, for comparison, runs about 270 pages), Gun feels rushed, underdeveloped, and lacking in the typical Fleming spark.

Gun picks up from Fleming's prior novel, You Only Live Twice, in which Bond rubs elbows with Japanese intelligence while on a diplomatic mission and sets out to kill Ernst Stavro Blofeld. Bond disappeared in action and was assumed dead by the British government. After nearly a year, Bond emerges at the MI6 offices in London and is found to have been brainwashed by the Soviet Union. M. narrowly escapes an assassination attempt and, knowing of Bond's past value, commits him to a mental facility to be 'switched back.'

As mentioned, the de-brainwashing period is not covered by Fleming at all. Time jumps forward between chapters and Bond is suddenly on a redemptive mission to Jamaica, where he must kill Francisco Scaramanga, a gun for hire who has murdered hundreds in Jamaica and Cuba alone. Scaramanga is a lower-grade villain - a gold pistol-wielding Catalan who struts around in modified Western gear. He is known for an accurate shot, thought to have major sexual prowess, and enjoys seeing people eaten by crocodiles.

Bond flies to Jamaica, Fleming's home island in real life, and finds Scaramanga dealing with shady investors on a hotel. This novel is swamped in chance occurrences: Bond happens to meet up with his secretary Mary Goodnight, who has been transferred to the Jamaican branch of MI6; Bond happens to find a real estate auction listed in a Kingston newspaper, eventually meeting Scaramanga at the property; and Bond happens to be employed by Scaramanga as a bodyguard to watch over the deadbeats he's conducting business with. The business meetings, which Bond overhears, contain a lot of dull shop talk and the gangsters' aims are a muddled combination of organized crime and Cold War tactics. There are plans to sabotage the Jamaican sugar and metal industries, introduce gambling to the island, traffic marijuana, and increase dealings between the Mob and Communist intelligence.

Probably the biggest letdowns of this novel are its villains. Compared to Dr. No and Blofeld, Scaramanga is just a deranged gunslinger from the backwoods. He is annoying rather than frightening and doesn't seem to pose any realistic threat to Bond. The group of hoodlums who surround him, complete with sleazy dispositions and tropical shirts, are dummies from a pistol range we're waiting for Bond to punch holes through. The Man with the Golden Gun might've been saved by an effective villain or two, but Fleming completely fails in this respect.

It seems clear from the novel's development that Fleming was a very ill man who would never finish the story. The way Gun lackadaisically moves through its scenes and hobbles to a climax makes tension impossible to build. We are rushed from England to Jamaica and remain there for the length of this novel, almost as if Fleming didn't have the strength to leave his home island again. Most characters are underdeveloped and we don't see into 007's mind often enough.

The hot backdrop gives Fleming a license for sexual innuendos on much cruder and more frequent levels than usual. Some of them are lewd to the point of tastelessness (a cabaret scene comes to mind) and I can't imagine a younger Fleming leaving them in after revisions. Speaking of frequency, there is plenty of repetition to go around in this novel, as the writing has an unusual number of repeated words and turns of phrase. Fleming also continues his habit of making sentences a bit too long to swallow at first reading, which is more forgivable in a better-written story.

The best sections of this novel, believe it or not, feature Bond and Mary Goodnight. Goodnight, who was transferred to the Jamaican wing of MI6 after Bond's assumed death, catches up with her ex-supervisor and is shown to have more than a professional admiration for him. She is only in tight corners of the plot, but their relationship is portrayed in Gun with an unusual amount of sensitivity. The scenes featuring Bond against Scaramanga and the Mob are so underachieving that Goodnight actually has a moment to shine.

Thankfully, the twentieth century's most prolific espionage writer has left behind many superior novels for us to enjoy. The Man with the Golden Gun might have been better off published as a tribute edition - perhaps even a facsimile of the original manuscript - instead of being pushed off as a legitimate entry to the Bond series. It's unlikely this novel will ever have a better reputation and the goofy film version, maligned by many fans, will not help its cause.

The Man with the Golden Gun will remain on bookshelves as a curiosity piece for Bond fans. Other readers will probably be drawn to the novel after seeing its film, but you are best advised to read Fleming's well-written novels - Dr. No, Thunderball, Goldfinger, and On Her Majesty's Secret Service amongst them. The Bond series has been recently marketed by Penguin Books in a handsome edition. The printing I've bought is a used 1965 hardcover by the New American Library. Its dust jacket is missing, which is kind of fitting for a novel that doesn't compare to its predecessors.

Wisdom of the Buddha: The Unabridged Dhammapada

Wisdom of the Buddha: The Unabridged Dhammapada
translated and edited by F. Max Müller
2000 • Dover Publications
64 pages / ISBN 0486411206 (paperback)

Just as Moses is thought to have found divine revelation on Mount Sinai and Jesus supposedly gained his fortitude in the Judean desert, Siddhartha Gautama discovered truth after intense meditation under a tree. Siddhartha, born perhaps in the 560s BC, was the son of a tribal lord in Nepal who provided him with any comforts he wanted and shielded him from pain and adversity. Separated from the family's populous throughout his youth, the prince began to travel through their land by the age of 30 and witnessed the effects of misery and sickness.

Moved by the sufferings of mankind, Siddhartha left his palaces to become a mendicant, or wanderer who survives through alms. He spent years with Hindu scholars and went through a period of self-mortification before attaining enlightenment after nearly 50 days under a Bodhi tree in the Indian region of Bihar. Siddhartha then became Shakyamuni Buddha, or 'the Awakened One,' and organized a travelling ministry that grew to over 1,000 disciples.

The Dhammapada (Pali for 'path to virtue') is one of mankind's oldest existing spiritual texts. It is the result of Buddhist scholars who collected Shakyamuni Buddha's numerous teachings as a minister and social philosopher. The principles advanced in the Dhammapada remain a treasure-trove to practicing Buddhists, those of other faiths, and non-religious persons alike, largely because of its all-encompassing ideals and simple, clear-minded views of human existence.

Dover Publications, who continues to impress with its Thrift Editions of classic literature, offers a strong translation of the Dhammapada in Wisdom of the Buddha: The Unabridged Dhammapada. In this softcover edition, Dover reprints from a frequently-referenced collection of religious writings, Sacred Books of the East, published by The Colonial Press in 1900. Sacred Books of the East is a 50-volume collection of translations that is still regarded as a landmark of Victorian scholarship.

The Dhammapada's translation is supplied by F. (for Friedrich) Max Müller, a German philologist who helped to found Indian studies and comparative religion in academia during the mid to late 1800s. Müller was an established scholar in eastern languages and became an authority on Indian culture after relocating to England, where he reviewed Sanskrit texts held by the British East India Company.

Müller's translation is a steady, well-phrased rendering that honors Buddhism's intensely meditative states, frequent irony, and endless poetics. The Dhammapada is itself made up of 26 brief chapters with titles that illustrate the simple elements of Buddhist thought, such as 'Evil,' 'Happiness,' 'Anger,' and 'The Way.' Most chapters last for one to 1 ½ pages, each offering its philosophy in long lines that are self-contained forms of verse. A reader may find himself taking a breath before each line of the Dhammapada, since each reads like an incantation.

If there is any flaw in the translation, it is due to the fact that English was not Müller's first language. This may explain an occasional contradiction between points in the text and a sometimes loose usage of vocabulary. Buddhism is also known for its double entendres and the Pali-based ideas may not readily convert to English, leaving the reader to figure things out for himself. Siddhartha would likely have approved of this demand, as Buddhism calls for a particular drive in attaining Nirvana.

The Dhammapada remains a motivating and highly influential text around the world, whether its readers are in need of pure spirituality or not. While inspiring Buddhist practitioners, New Age devotees, and those of other persuasions, Siddhartha's teachings have been of great interest to the western intelligentsia. Hermann Hesse's novel Siddhartha, for instance, helped him to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946. In his poem 'Finding the Space in the Heart,' poet Gary Snyder remarks 'O, ah! The / awareness of emptiness / brings forth a heart of compassion!'

Wisdom of the Buddha, Dover's 64-page, softcover release of the Dhammapada, is widely available on the Internet and at bookstores carrying the Dover Thrift Editions label. The book retails for $2.50, which is a pretty low fee for improving one's karma.

My Country and the World

My Country and the World
by Andrei D. Sakharov, translated by Guy V. Daniels
1975 • Vintage Books
109 pages / ISBN 0394720679 (paperback)

It is easy to forget those who were heavily involved in political landscapes of old. As our concerns shift from Eastern Europe to the Middle East and Far East, memories of our standoff with the USSR have faded or, at least, blurred.

With twenty years now dividing us from the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991, average people have largely forgotten the efforts of Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov, a physicist who took part in the development of nuclear weapons during the 1940s and 50s. Sakharov, a product of Moscow State University who died in 1989, was a leading force in both diplomatic change and reform within his own country. His writings and political activism toed a very fine line when critics of the Soviet regime were regularly imprisoned or deported.

Political frontiers have built up and dissolved since the mid-1970s, so observers can easily lose sight of the courage behind Sakharov's outspokenness. My Country and the World, first published in 1975, may read like a simple moral tract nowadays; but the essay was in stark contradiction to Soviet policy when it first appeared. The essay was critical of both Soviet life and foreign diplomatic relations, positions that could be fatal for those who voiced them. Sakharov fought on, however, by offering correctives toward disarmament, improved understanding between countries, and greater social freedoms for all involved.

Vintage Books' original run of My Country and the World is a very readable translation by Guy V. Daniels, a French and Russian scholar known for works of other dissidents and the plays of Vladimir Mayakovsky. The five-section, 109-page book offers Sakharov's comprehensive views on the state of Soviet and international affairs at its time of publication.

Most impressive is the first section, an open critique of Soviet society. Here, Sakharov examines how the USSR's heavy-handed economics and lack of basic freedoms such as international travel and non-conformism have stilted enormous Soviet potentials. He is especially critical of the USSR's grossly mismanaged labor system, the Soviet justice system, and its harsh treatment of political prisoners. Other issues include the formation of a nomenklatura, a sort of 'inner party' that holds wealth and privilege in Soviet life, and the discrimination of various ethnic groups such as Germans and those in the Soviet republics.

The four remaining parts are international in approach. Section two discusses our human right to leave and reenter one's country at will. Section three is an account of disarmament issues, reflecting Sakharov's own experience in the Third Idea project. Sakharov goes on to defend the original aims of U.S. intervention in Vietnam through his section on Indochina and the Middle East before finishing out with criticism of Western intellectuals and journalists who hold naive (and, Sakharov concludes, politically dangerous) views on life in the Bloc nations.

On the surface, My Country and the World is an idealistic tract that may now seem high-flown and preachy. When considering the state of affairs at its time of publication, however, Sakharov's essay was a courageous pearl of wisdom and it cost him dearly. Sakharov, who faced pressure from the Soviet authorities since becoming an activist in the 1950s, managed to avoid disappearing into prison or facing banishment from his country. Still, the relationship with his country became increasingly strained. When selected for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975, he was not allowed to visit Oslo (his wife attended in his place). After protesting the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Sakharov was banished to Gorky, a city off-limits to foreigners, in 1980. He could not return to Moscow until 1986.

Though topical, My Country and the World gives an interesting retrospective on political situations of the 1970s and Cold War tensions. Copies of the Vintage Books softcover from 1975 have circulated widely and are available on the Internet (including Amazon), in used book stores, and in libraries.

Post Office

Post Office
by Charles Bukowski
1971 (reprinted 2009) • Virgin Books
176 pages / ISBN 9780753518168 (paperback)

The United States Postal Service offers a list of well-known individuals who have worked for the agency at some point in their lives. You will find Charles Bukowski amongst the distinguished names, having given his energy to the U.S. mails for some 15 years.

While it is highly possible that the USPS public relations staff have read Bukowski's work, I tend to doubt they've ever read Post Office, the first novel of his famous (and infamous) literary career. The vitriolic novel, first published by Black Sparrow Press in 1971, has kept its reputation as a landmark of Dirty Realism and an effective putdown of American workplaces, bureaucracies, and social institutions.

If you want a clear picture of Bukowski, you should forget a content soul in post office garb and imagine a pockmarked, middle-aged man sitting at his rusty typewriter with a cigarette, beer, and justifiable grudge against humanity. Born in Germany and brought to Los Angeles by parents who mentally crushed him, Bukowski was destined never to fit into regular society. His early years were marred by an abusive father, self-consciousness over his German accent, embarrassment from severe acne (he attended his high school prom with toilet paper covering his face), and an ever-growing hatred of the societal power structure.

Though published on occasion, most of Bukowski's early attempts at writing failed and he became a drifter after the Second World War. A dropout from Los Angeles City College, he worked at menial jobs, drank heavily, and lived in flophouses before 'settling' into employment with the postal network. He would experience two stints for the U.S. Postal Service - first as a carrier, then as a clerk - before receiving financial support from publisher John Martin that allowed him to write full-time.

Post Office was written after years of delivering and sorting letters, a career that paralleled Bukowski's life as a writer, boozer, horse player, and womanizer. In all four cases, Bukowski couldn't quite help himself and the social forces that engulfed him wouldn't allow it to stop. Written largely from first-hand experiences, Post Office gives an honest and mostly unflattering view of the Los Angeles working class that Bukowski knew intimately.

In a novel filled with sex, arguments at work, arguments at home, a robbery attempt, stampeding buffalo in Texas, and assorted bad behavior, Bukowski converts his own life into the form of Henry Chinaski, an unmarried L.A. native who doesn't buy into the steady grind of work and family. Thinking he is about to make easy money, Chinaski becomes a post office temp during the Christmas season and, afterwards, a 'substitute' carrier for all times of the year.

Post Office is divided into six chapters, each composed of short episodes that happen over a 17 or 18-year period. The plot can be loosely broken into three timeframes based upon Chinaski's employment: his first stint of three years as a letter carrier, two years in which he tries to earn his living at the betting windows of racetracks, and another 12 years as a clerk whose job is to route letters from the main stations at night. The episodes alternate between Chinaski's private life and his workplace experiences, both of which have erratic (and often funny) results.

Bukowski writes as a minimalist, keeping sentences brief and offering exterior details only to advance the story. While using casual language, his storytelling is very deliberate in approach. The novel makes no secret of what it's trying to accomplish in presenting a working man's story that members of his social stratum can relate to.

Post Office is at its most effective when taking us into the lives of people who staff the Post Office and other massive organizations. As Chinaski works long and grueling hours, we witness the bizarre operations of the USPS (called the Post Office Department until 1971), complete with half-cocked supervisors, clerks on the verge of a mental breakdown, and men who are due for retirement but limping across the finish line. The Post Office is depicted as a gargantuan system in which employees are judged by output and little else.

As one would expect, Bukowski's prose is just as rude, crude, and crass as his poetry. He holds no shame in describing his sexual experiences, uses dirty language, and pulls no punches in discussions of what's wrong with himself and others. The novel has a sarcastic tone that indicates Chinaski has faced mankind's stupidity one time too many. This aggressiveness, this sheer exasperation, lowers Bukowski to an average person's level - our level - and we tend to love him for it.

The novel is sardonic, but Bukowski was a human and the novel is not without humanity at key points. While despising his job, Chinaski is also a keen observer of his colleagues and has sympathy for the men and women who are going to pieces after cowering before their bosses for decades. He also must bear witness to the lonely death of Betty, a former lover whom he meets up with and finds in the last throes of alcoholism and rapid aging. A rare happy moment in his life comes from the arrival of a daughter through his later girlfriend Fay.

Post Office is a very quick read, lasting 160 pages. The plot actually becomes repetitive in the last few sections, probably since Bukowski was running out of material to keep things going. Luckily, he draws matters to a close without overextending them. And he ends the story in a typically Bukowskian way: with Chinaski going on a booze and sex spree after quitting his job.

Those who are easily offended will dislike everything about Bukowski: his subject matter, his style, and his real-life behavior. Novels of this type are an acquired taste, but those who are at all interested in the legacy of Dirty Realism and the American counterculture should not hesitate to read Post Office. The book has enjoyed repeated printings and been translated into several languages, so it will not be hard to find.

Editions currently available include a 2009 softcover printing by Virgin Books in the UK. The Virgin edition, at 176 total pages, offers a quirky introduction by writer Niall Griffiths. Griffiths, an author of such books as Runt and Ten Pound Pom, was himself an employee of the Royal Mail and draws connections between Bukowski's novel and his own experiences in the British postal trade. The book also has stylish, if drab, cover art and uses a large, easy-to-read typeface.

The USPS, meanwhile, should get a copy and find out who they're including on that list of theirs.