The Best Books I Read in 2016

Miles Gone By: A Literary Autobiography, by William F. Buckley, Jr., 2004.

The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War, by Andrew Roberts, 2011.

The Fire Next Time, by James Baldwin, 1963.

Survival in Auschwitz, by Primo Levi, originally published in 1947, first English translation published in 1958.

Wilson, by A. Scott Berg, 2013.

King of the Night: The Life of Johnny Carson, by Laurence Leamer, 1989.

Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, by Tom Wolfe, 1970.

The Right Stuff, by Tom Wolfe, 1979.

The Bonfire of the Vanities, by Tom Wolfe, 1987.

I read 33 books in 2016, most of which I reviewed on this blog. Here are my favorites that I read this year. The links will take you to the full reviews of these books.

Miles Gone By: A Literary Autobiography, by William F. Buckley, Jr. 2004. WFB makes the list for a second year in a row. Miles Gone By isn’t a strict autobiography; rather, it’s a collection of autobiographical writings from throughout Buckley’s long career. Miles Gone By is really about the man behind the politics, and partisans of either stripe can enjoy Buckley’s wit, joie de vivre, impressive vocabulary, and generous spirit, all of which are on full display. It’s a marvelous read, and time spent in the company of the witty, passionate, intelligent Buckley is always time well spent.  

The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War, by Andrew Roberts, 2011. Roberts also makes the list for a second year in a row, for his superb overview of World War II. Roberts brings the conflict to life, and he’s an equally good writer on military or political matters. His chapter on the Holocaust is superb and haunting. Roberts is also very strong on the Eastern front, and convincingly makes the argument that it was Russia who bled the Nazis dry. The Storm of War captures the global scope and sweep of World War II while still reminding us of the stark tragedies that each one of the 50 million deaths in that conflict represents.

The Fire Next Time, by James Baldwin, 1963. Baldwin’s searing look at race in America is still relevant today, more than fifty years after it was written.

Survival in Auschwitz, by Primo Levi, 1947. For anyone wanting to understand more about the Holocaust, Levi’s eloquent memoir is a superb place to start. Levi was a prisoner in Auschwitz for more than a year, and in Auschwitz, he saw mankind at its worst. Levi summed up the entire experience of the Holocaust with this anecdote:

“Driven by thirst, I eyed a fine icicle outside the window, within hand’s reach. I opened the window and broke off the icicle but at once a large, heavy guard prowling outside brutally snatched it away from me. ‘Warum?’ I asked him in my poor German. ‘Hier ist kein warum’ (there is no why here), he replied, pushing me inside with a shove.” (p.29)

Wilson, by A. Scott Berg, 2013. An excellent cradle to grave biography of our 28^th President. Berg paints a vivid picture of one of our most accomplished presidents. Wilson’s writings are quoted from liberally, so the reader gets a vivid sense of his personality. 

King of the Night: The Life of Johnny Carson, by Laurence Leamer, 1989. A slight change of pace from the books listed above. This summer I attempted to learn all that I could about the enigmatic Johnny Carson. While Carson’s off-camera life was sometimes quite messy, (he was married four times) on screen he was the personification of cool, and he always seemed to have the perfect quip at hand. Leamer’s diligently researched biography is a superb portrait of the Tonight Show host.

Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, by Tom Wolfe, 1970. My new favorite author, Tom Wolfe, makes the list again, this time for three different books! Radical Chic describes a party that Leonard Bernstein threw for the Black Panthers at his thirteen-room, two-story, penthouse duplex. Wolfe’s writing is as sharp as a knife throughout the essay: “God, what a flood of taboo thoughts runs through one’s head at these Radical Chic events…But it’s delicious. It is as if one’s nerve endings were on red alert to the most intimate nuances of status.” Wolfe is always on red alert to the most intimate nuances of status! That’s his calling card! This is right up his alley! 

The Right Stuff, by Tom Wolfe, 1979. Wolfe’s chronicle of the early U.S. space program is an engaging look at the Mercury 7 astronauts. Along the way, Wolfe explores the mythic “right stuff” that test pilots and astronauts must have to remain cool under pressure. The sections where Wolfe re-creates the astronaut’s Mercury flights are superb. One of the main figures in the book is the late John Glenn, who was the most media friendly of the Mercury 7, and was also a strict moralizer who sometimes clashed with the other astronauts. 

The Bonfire of the Vanities, by Tom Wolfe, 1987. Wolfe’s first novel, Bonfire was a massive study of New York City, specifically the justice system, the one part where different strata of society interacted. Wolfe captures the zeitgeist of the 1980’s in all its money-lusting glory with the character of Sherman McCoy, a wealthy bond trader. It’s a marvelous book, nearly 700 pages long, with 2,343 exclamation points.

Book Review: The Right Stuff, by Tom Wolfe (1979)

Original dust jacket cover of The Right Stuff, by Tom Wolfe, 1979.

Tom Wolfe, photographed by Annie Leibovitz in 1980. His look seems to be saying, "Yes, I am the Tom Wolfe!"

The Mercury 7 astronauts, 1960.

Tom Wolfe, writing in his classic book The Right Stuff about the Mercury 7 astronauts, the first American men in space, gets directly to the heart of what made these men tick. Most of the Mercury 7 astronauts were military test pilots, and being a military test pilot is about the hardest damned thing there is. It is the apex of singular macho pride. Those pilots are pushing the envelope of those planes every single day! And they are doing it by themselves! Sure, there's a whole crowd of support people on the ground, but up there, in the wild blue yonder, you are it! There's just you, and your judgement, your daring, your reflexes, your instincts, your STUFF, responsible for that plane. And if you have the right stuff, you'll bring that plane back safely. If you don’t have the right stuff, well, there’s a 23% chance you’ll die in an accident.

What exactly is “the right stuff”? Wolfe never gives the reader a brief definition, but it’s a combination of several things, all adding up to a cool unflappability in the face of possible death. 

Wolfe writes of “the right stuff,” “Perhaps because it could not be talked about, the subject began to take on superstitious and even mystical outlines. A man either had it or he didn’t! There was no such thing as having most of it. Moreover, it could blow at any seam.” (p.21)

There were numerous pitfalls along the way for anyone who wanted to make a career out of being a military pilot. Early in the book, Wolfe describes how the status of pilots was assessed in terms of the right stuff:

“Nor was there a test to show whether or not a pilot had this righteous quality. There was, instead, a seemingly infinite series of tests. A career in flying was like climbing one of those ancient Babylonian pyramids made up of a dizzy progression of steps and ledges, a ziggurat, a pyramid extraordinarily high and steep; and the idea was to prove at every foot of the way up that pyramid that you were one of the elected and anointed ones who had the right stuff and could move higher and higher and even-ultimately, God willing, one day-that you might be able to join that special few at the very top, that elite who had the capacity to bring tears to men’s eyes, the very Brotherhood of the Right Stuff itself.” (P.17-8) 

Wolfe returns to the image of the ziggurat numerous times throughout the book, and it’s a perfect metaphor that lingers with the reader. 

The Right Stuff introduces us to the world of American test pilots after World War II, and to one of the most colorful characters in the book, Chuck Yeager, perhaps the ne plus ultra of the right stuff. Yeager was cool and laconic, and never seemed to feel the pressure of his job, even during his successful attempt to break the sound barrier in 1947 in the Bell X-1. 

Wolfe vividly describes the California desert around Muroc Field, now known as Edwards Air Force Base, where much of the testing of the 1940’s and 1950’s happened. Wolfe writes of the landscape: “Other than sagebrush the only vegetation was Joshua trees, twisted freaks of the plant world that looked like a cross between cactus and Japanese bonsai. They had a dark petrified green color and horribly crippled branches. At dusk the Joshua trees stood out in silhouette on the fossil wasteland like some arthritic nightmare.” (p.36)

Yeager basically disappears from the book once the Mercury 7 astronauts were chosen, and The Right Stuff focuses on the sometimes complicated relationship the seven men had with each other. One of my favorite parts in the whole book was Wolfe’s description of astronauts Gus Grissom and Deke Slayton:

“As soon as Gus arrived at the Cape, he would put on clothes that were Low Rent even by Cocoa Beach standards. Gus and Deke both wore these outfits. You could see them tooling around the Strip in Cocoa Beach in their Ban-Lon shirts and baggy pants. The atmosphere was casual at Cocoa Beach, but Gus and Deke knew how to squeeze casual until it screamed for mercy. They reminded you, in a way, of those fellows whom everyone growing up in America had seen at one time or another, those fellows from the neighborhood who wear sport shirts designed in weird blooms and streaks of tubercular blue and runny-egg yellow hanging out over pants the color of a fifteen-cent cigar, with balloon seats and pleats and narrow cuffs that stop three or four inches above the ground, the better to reveal their olive-green GI socks and black bulb-toed bluchers, as they head off to the Republic Auto Parts store for a set of shock-absorber pads so they can prop up the 1953 Hudson Hornet on some cinderblocks and spend Saturday and Sunday underneath it beefing up the suspension.” (P.132-3) 

I love that description. It’s so wonderfully vivid. You can see Gus and Deke very clearly in your mind. It’s passages like this that make Tom Wolfe such a great writer. It’s a passage that you would never read in a more “scholarly” book about the Mercury space program, but because it’s a more unorthodox way of writing, and more similar to a description that you would read in a novel, Wolfe gets you closer to the truth of what Gus and Deke were probably like. 

The long sections of the book where Wolfe re-creates the astronaut's flights are amazing. It gets as close as we can to being inside their heads during those moments. And it seems to prove that picking astronauts from test pilots was the right thing to do, despite the quibbles of some climbing the ziggurat who squawked that the astronauts weren’t even really pilots because they weren’t in full control of the capsule! They were just passengers, there to enjoy the view! Sure some of the Mercury flights were relatively easy, but some were not-Gordon Cooper's flight especially. You needed someone who knew how to handle that pressure and make the right decisions in real time. Someone who had, yes, the right stuff!

John Glenn is one of the most vivid figures in the book, as he quickly became the chief media spokesperson for the Mercury 7 astronauts. Glenn was always amiable, and while some of the other astronauts looked askance at his goody two-shoes attitude, Tom Wolfe rather enjoyed Glenn. Wolfe said of Glenn in a 1981 interview: “It’s very rare to see a man in our day-outside the Church-who is a moral zealot and who doesn’t hide the fact; who constantly announces what he believes in and the moral standards he expects people to follow. To me that’s much rarer and more colorful than the Joe Namath-rake figure who is much more standard these days.” (Conversations with Tom Wolfe, p.164)

After Glenn’s successful flight in 1962, in which he became the first American to orbit the earth, President John F. Kennedy’s father, old Joe Kennedy himself, broke down in tears when he met Glenn. Wolfe wrote, “That was what the sight of John Glenn did to Americans at that time. It primed them for the tears. And those tears ran like a river all over America. It was an extraordinary thing, being the sort of mortal who brought tears to other men’s eyes.” (p.282) 

From a historical perspective, more than thirty five years after The Right Stuff was published, Wolfe was right to focus a lot of attention on Glenn, as he became the biggest hero from the early space program. Thanks to Glenn’s four terms in the United States Senate, along with his return to space in 1998, his celebrity among the average American far outstrips that of Alan Shepard, who beat out Glenn for the honor of commanding the first Mercury flight in 1961. 

The Right Stuff was an instant hit among both critics and the public. In the same 1981 interview quoted above, Wolfe was asked about the feedback he got from the astronauts about the book. Wolfe replied, “I’ve had varied reactions. Some of them really seemed to like it, or at least to have said that it’s accurate, which means more to me than whether or not they really liked it. Alan Shepard, I know, doesn’t like it because every time he’s asked he says, ‘I haven’t read it and I’m not going to.’” (Conversations with Tom Wolfe, p.164)

Wolfe admitted that The Right Stuff was a difficult book to write, and it had a long gestation period. Wolfe had first gotten intrigued by the astronauts at the very end of the Apollo program, as he wrote about Apollo 17, the last mission to the moon in December of 1972, for Rolling Stone magazine. Wolfe quickly knew the material could be expanded to a book, as he said in a 1973 interview with Publishers Weekly, “the title will probably be The Right Stuff,” and “The reigning fantasy is that it will be ready by fall.” (Conversations with Tom Wolfe, p.31) That obviously didn’t happen, as Wolfe admitted in 1979, “I would do almost anything at times to avoid working on it…which may be the reason I published three other books during that period.” (Conversations with Tom Wolfe, p.107)

One of those other books was the essay collection Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine, published in 1976, which I reviewed here. A highlight of Mauve Gloves was the article “The Truest Sport: Jousting with Sam and Charlie,” about fighter pilots in Vietnam. Wolfe comes close to naming “the right stuff” in this passage: “Within the fraternity of men who did this sort of thing day in and day out-within the flying fraternity, that is-mankind appeared to be sheerly divided into those who have it and those who don’t-although just what it was…was never explained.” (Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine, p.45) 

Wolfe humorously discussed his problems finishing The Right Stuff in a 1981 interview with Joshua Gilder, published in Saturday Review: “I even got to the point where I wore clothes in which I couldn’t go out into the street. Such as khaki pants; you know, I think it’s demeaning. I can’t go out into the street in khaki pants or jeans.” Gilder then asks the natural follow up question: “You own a pair of jeans?” Wolfe answers, “I have one pair of ‘Double X’ Levis, which I bought in La Porte, Texas, in a place that I was told was an authentic Texas cowboy store, just before I started working on The Right Stuff. I’ve had them on, but I’ve never worn them below the third floor. So I put on a pair of khaki pants and a turtleneck sweater, a heavy sweater.” (Conversations with Tom Wolfe, p.161)

In another 1981 interview, which was not published until 1983, Wolfe discussed the structural challenges of The Right Stuff. “The book was extremely difficult to write. There was no central character, no protagonist…The problem of giving the book a narrative structure, some sort of drive and suspense, was quite tough.” (Conversations with Tom Wolfe, p.182) Wolfe is right about the book not having a central character. If Chuck Yeager had been chosen to be an astronaut, it would have been easy-he clearly would have been the central figure. As it is, Yeager looms large in the beginning of the book, and then disappears once the astronauts for the Mercury program are selected, at which point John Glenn becomes the central figure in the narrative. 

In that same interview, Wolfe was asked if he was pleased with the reception of the book. He said, “I felt that it was my best book. I very consciously tried to make the style fit the particular world I was writing about, mainly the world of military pilots. To have had a prose as wound up as the prose of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test would have been a stylistic mistake.” (Conversations with Tom Wolfe, p.181) 

Tom Wolfe devotees shouldn’t worry about the prose style being too laid back, there are still plenty of exclamation points, and some pet Wolfe phrases reappear throughout the book, as people are “packed in shank to flank,” (p.85) and the reader is told to “deny it, if you wish!” (p.303) However, no one in The Right Stuff is described as arteriosclerotic, which was a pet word of Wolfe’s in his first book, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. 

The Right Stuff feels like a perfect book for its time. Wolfe’s portrait of the Mercury 7 astronauts as genuine American heroes resonated just as America ended the bewildering decade of the 1970’s, in which she had seen her power and might slip, and moved into the more patriotic 1980’s, led by Ronald Reagan, who loved stories about American heroism. I wonder if Ronnie ever read The Right Stuff? Well, he probably saw the movie. 

Tom Wolfe is at his very best throughout The Right Stuff, and it’s one of the best books of his long career.

Book Review: The Pump House Gang, by Tom Wolfe (1968)

My rather tattered paperback copy of The Pump House Gang, by Tom Wolfe, 1968. Yes, that's the by now obligatory photo of my Tom Wolfe bookshelf. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

Tom Wolfe, photographed by Irving Penn, 1966, around the time he wrote most of the pieces in The Pump House Gang.

It started on the beach. That was where they first saw him. They weren’t quite sure which member of the group had spotted him first, but eventually they became aware of him. This guy just hanging out on the beach with a notebook. And what was he wearing? A suit? Dig, man, what kind of crazy trip was he on? And how old was he? He didn’t look that old, but he just seemed old, you know, like there was no way he would know who the Beach Boys were, or that he could possibly know anything about chopped and channeled woodies. What kind of a nutso getup was he wearing? I mean, fer Chrissake, who in the hell wears a suit to the beach, man? 

And he asked them all of these really basic questions, it was obvious he had never been surfing. They had to explain everything to him, which they were only too happy to do. KA-SPLOSH, the surf came roaring in, and it almost gets him wet, and he’s got these white buck shoes on, if he gets those babies wet they are done for, but zoom! He moves back real fast, and doesn’t get a drop on him. Nothing seems to faze this guy, it’s like he’s off on his own out in some other time zone, neither hip nor square, just in his own bag with his own groovy happening going on. 

He has this soft voice, like he doesn’t want to draw too much attention to himself, despite the Beau Brummell wardrobe. He’s got this real high, cresting forehead, with this mass of hair swooping over from left to right. He pulls out this notebook, this great, hulking green notebook with the spirals at the top, and he starts firing questions, one after the other. He’s scribbling furiously, feverishly trying to get it all down on paper as they tell him the dope on their lives. 

In the Introduction to The Pump House Gang, Tom Wolfe’s second collection of articles, which was released on the same day in 1968 as Wolfe’s book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Wolfe described taking part in a symposium on “The Style of the Sixties.” The other panelists all seemed quite depressed about the state of the world. When it was Wolfe’s turn to speak, he said “What are you talking about? We’re in the middle of a…Happiness Explosion!” (p.9) The other panelists didn’t have the foggiest notion what Wolfe was talking about, but he was right! Sure, things might have seemed like they were going to hell back in the late 1960’s, but middle class Americans suddenly had the leisure time and money to be deliriously happy! All of the time! And, despite the stagnation in middle class earning power since then, we still have a lot of things that can distract us in 2016! iPhones! Computers! Kindles! Spotify! Netflix! We are doing less and less manual labor-which means more time to tune out the world around us and create our own versions of reality!

Wolfe’s real subject of The Pump House Gang is exploring different subcultures and how they define themselves. In “The Hair Boys,” he writes: “It is not that any of these groups is ever rich. It is just that there is so much money floating around that they can get their hands on enough of it to express themselves, and devote time to expressing themselves, to a degree nobody in their netherworld position could ever do before.” (p.103) 

There are 15 pieces in The Pump House Gang, and as usual in Wolfe’s collections, many topics are covered.

“The Pump House Gang” follows a group of teenage surfers in La Jolla, California. Wolfe describes how these kids have set up their own lifestyle of surfing and hanging out-they’re a prime example of the subcultures he examines throughout the book.

“The Mid-Atlantic Man” is a brilliant piece of reporting about a London advertising man who travels to New York City regularly on business and then finds himself stuck between being English and being American. It’s a piece of Wolfe’s writing that foreshadows what a great fiction writer he would become. It reads like fiction, since you’re inside this guy’s mind, but you know that it’s all true! This piece shows how in tune Wolfe is to differences and gradations in status. On page 40, we get a mention of Fabrilex, which is the name of a fictitious company that Wolfe has used in other books as well. It shows up at random times; look for it in The Bonfire of the Vanities. 

“King of the Status Dropouts” is a profile of Playboy magazine publisher Hugh Hefner. It’s fascinating stuff, as during this period of time Hefner was holed up in his Chicago mansion, running the Playboy brand and empire entirely from his house! He wasn’t out on the town partying with blonde starlets; he was staying in, dressed in his robe, smoking his pipe, drinking Pepsi-Cola after Pepsi-Cola, and embracing the Sexual Revolution that he had helped to create! One of my favorite anecdotes about Hugh Hefner, dating from this same time period, is about Hefner’s appearance on William F. Buckley’s television show Firing Line. In his excellent 1971 book Cruising Speed, Buckley related the story of how a friend of his was watching Hefner’s appearance on his show with some guests from France; however, when they tuned in, there was a problem with the sound, so they couldn’t hear what the men were saying. Based solely on their body posture, the French guests surmised that the slouching, grinning Buckley, with his arching eyebrows and darting tongue, must be the publisher of Playboy, and the erect, ramrod-straight Hefner must be the conservative Republican writer and host! In all seriousness, I think Hugh Hefner is quite a remarkable guy, and someone should really write a biography about him, as I think he’s one of the figures most responsible for the sexual revolution in America. 

“The Put-Together Girl” chronicles the adventures of Carol Doda, an exotic dancer in San Francisco who was one of the first women in America to get breast implants. 

“The Noonday Underground” is another piece that Wolfe wrote in London, about teenagers who spend their lunch hours at dingy discotheques listening to mod rock and buying the latest Carnaby Street knockoffs. 

“The Mild Ones” is a very short piece about “work-a-daddy citizens” who are also into motorcycles.

“The Hair Boys” is about teenage car culture, and it revisits car customizer Ed Roth, one of the subjects of Wolfe’s first ground-breaking essay, “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby.” 

“What if He is Right?” profiles media theorist Marshall McLuhan, who had become an unlikely mid-1960’s celebrity. It’s an interesting piece, opening with Wolfe staring at, and becoming obsessed with, McLuhan’s clip-on necktie. 

“Bob and Spike” dives into the New York City art world of the mid-1960’s, as seen through the eyes of Robert and Ethel Scull, two of the most prominent collectors of that time. Ethel was the subject of Andy Warhol’s wonderful 1963 portrait, Ethel Scull 36 Times. There’s a marvelous description of a party that the Sculls gave at the Top o’ the Fair restaurant in Flushing, which was built for the 1964-5 World’s Fair. The restaurant is still there, now called “Terrace on the Park.” 

“Tom Wolfe’s New Book of Etiquette” is the funniest piece in the book. It features Wolfe’s views on cocktail parties, and the rapidly changing social mores of the 1960’s. Among other fascinating tidbits, you’ll learn that “Socially, New York today is highly redolent of London during the Regency period (roughly, 1800 to 1830).” (p.169) 

“The Life & Hard Times of a Teenage London Society Girl” is another piece from London where Wolfe does some great reporting and gets into the mind of, well, a teenage London society girl. 

“The Private Game” is yet another dispatch from London, this time about private gambling clubs that had proliferated after the legalization of gambling in England. 

“The Automated Hotel” is one of the few non-fiction pieces in which the focus is squarely on Tom Wolfe. Wolfe is the protagonist of this piece, and he has some very harsh words for the then newly opened New York Hilton Hotel, where he checked in while trying to avoid distractions and finish several magazine articles.

“The Shockkkkkk of Recognition” follows movie star Natalie Wood as she visits New York City in April of 1966 to tape an episode of What’s My Line? and to possibly buy some paintings. Wolfe gets to observe Wood at an art dealer where she looks at a variety of paintings. Had I been a dashing young New Journalist working for the New York World Journal Tribune in 1966, I would have gladly accepted this assignment! I also would have accepted the assignment, “watch Natalie Wood watch paint dry.” The day before Wood taped the episode of What’s My Line? she was in Boston at Harvard University accepting an award from the Harvard Lampoon for the “Worst Actress of the Year.” No one accepted sarcastic awards like that in person, but Wood confounded her critics by showing up. Of course, she stole the show, treating the event like she had won the Oscar. You can watch Natalie Wood’s appearance on What’s My Line? here. She’s very funny as she tries to stump the panel by adopting a Russian accent, and completely throwing panelist Arlene Francis for a loop when Francis asks her, “Are you something other than American?” Wood replies, “Well, in my mind.” 

“O Rotten Gotham-Sliding Down into the Behavioral Sink” explains the ideas of anthropologist Edward T. Hall, who theorized that life in New York City was getting worse because of overcrowding. It’s an interesting theory, and I wonder what Hall would have to say about overcrowding in cities now, fifty years later.

As noted above, The Pump House Gang was released on the same day in 1968 as The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. While The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test has gone on to assume classic status and is one of Wolfe’s most famous books, The Pump House Gang remains more obscure. It’s probably inevitable that collections of non-fiction articles are rarely ever the most famous works of authors, but despite the fact that it might not be well known today, The Pump House Gang, like its predecessor The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, was a very steady seller. The copy of The Pump House Gang that I own is the 13^th paperback printing, from November of 1980. The Pump House Gang went through four paperback printings in 1970 alone, so I’d say it was pretty successful for Tom Wolfe. It’s a fine example of his exhilarating writing style, and his sharp observations on contemporary culture.