Literary Glimpse
All For a Few Perfect Waves
Defining the life of legendary surf icon Miklos “Miki” Dora can be as elusive as the man himself. The self-proclaimed “King of Malibu” has been compared to trailblazers such as Bob Dylan, Jack Kerouac, and Pablo Picasso for providing the archetype of the counterculture surfer. Yet he was also a convicted felon who rarely missed an opportunity to scam even his closest friends. All for a Few Perfect Waves meets this conflicted figure head on, as David Rensin provides a rare look at the famously guarded Dora through hundreds of interviews with those who knew him best. The result is a portrait of a life wedged between hyperbole and vulnerability. His beguiling personality charmed many, but few relationships and situations were ever deemed off-limits to a con. Happily, any judgments are left up to the reader, as Rensin’s engaging narrative seeks only to explore the inner workings of a man who truly lived life on his own terms.
From the writer who brought us “No Country for Old Men”…
STARK, Violence, in McCarthy’s postapocalyptic tour de force, has been visited worldwide in the form of a “long shear of light and then a series of low concussions” that leaves cities and forests burned, birds and fish dead and the earth shrouded in gray clouds of ash. In this landscape, an unnamed man and his young son journey down a road to get to the sea. (The man’s wife, who gave birth to the boy after calamity struck, has killed herself.) They carry blankets and scavenged food in a shopping cart, and the man is armed with a revolver loaded with his last two bullets. Beyond the ever-present possibility of starvation lies the threat of roving bands of cannibalistic thugs. The man assures the boy that the two of them are “good guys,” but from the way his father treats other stray survivors the boy sees that his father has turned into an amoral survivalist, tenuously attached to the morality of the past by his fierce love for his son. McCarthy establishes himself here as the closest thing in American literature to an Old Testament prophet, trolling the blackest registers of human emotion to create a haunting and grim novel about civilization’s slow death after the power goes out.
Rome 1960 Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Maraniss chronicles the triumphs, tragedies, and treacheries of “the Olympics that changed the world” with Rome 1960. The same Games that announced the greatness of icons like Cassius Clay, Wilma Rudolph, and Rafer Johnson, also exposed a growing unrest between East and West, black and white, and male and female. Even the host city of Rome, Maraniss recounts, was “infused with a golden hue…an illuminating that comes with a moment of historical transition, when one era is dying and another is being born.” With moving portraits of the Games’s remarkable personalities woven among tales of espionage and propaganda, Rome 1960 explores an Olympics unable to fight off the troubles of the modern world. Cold War sniping and issues of social inequalities were spilling into fields and stadiums, and the face of sport was rapidly changing. History buffs and sports fans alike will appreciate Maraniss’s quiet reporting, as he deftly removes himself from a storyline that is still relevant today. –Dave Callanan
Fahrenheit 451: Of the hundreds of stories Ray Bradbury has written, none are better known than Fahrenheit 451. Published in 1953 during the Cold War and McCarthy Eras, the novel reflects Bradbury’s concerns about censorship and conformity during a period when free expression of ideas could lead to social and economic ostracization. The book expands the concept of a short story that Bradbury wrote in 1947 under the title “Bright Phoenix,” which was published in a revised form in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1963. Galaxy published an expanded version of the premise under the title of “The Fireman” in 1951. Fahrenheit 451 is twice as long as “The Fireman.” Book burning and the memorization of texts for preservation are the central actions of all three versions of the story.
While viewed as a science fiction work, Fahrenheit 451 has led to mainstream critical acclaim for Bradbury’s ability as a prose stylist and as a writer of ideas. The novel is often compared to other dystopias—works which create societies where people lead dehumanized and often dangerous lives—such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984. Bradbury has been praised for the richness of his imagery in Fahrenheit 451. The thematic elements of the novel have gained it the reputation as a book of social criticism which focuses particularly on American consumerism and cultural decline.
