This novel reminds a bit of Damascus by Richard Beard since they both tell the events of a single day with some play between real time and imagined time. But unlike Beard's novel which rockets back and forth between past and present reimagined and possible meetings between two specific characters, Mallon uses multiple characters who eventually all cross paths in one climactic moment as Scott Carpenter is being rescued from the ocean after his successful orbit of the Earth in Aurora 7. There are interesting and bizarre historical coincidences peppered throughout the novel like the Civil War reconnaissance balloon Intrepid that flew in May 1862, 100 years before a Navy ship similarly named that recovered Carpenter. I mostly enjoyed how Mallon used the actual transcript of Carpenter's communication with NASA technicians as a framework for the storyline the takes place on Earth. This novel is thoroughly imaginative and filled with a love of humanity, the need for adventure and, most importantly, a respect for the bonds between parent and child. I read this to see if I would truly like Mallon after reading reviews of Two Moons. Now I'm set for his latest and I expect it to be just as good, if not better.

What a great book! Aurora 7 follows a young boy as he skips school on the day of Scott Carpenter's Mercury flight, wanders into New York City (where everyone is watching the flight on a giant Grand Central Station monitor), and has a fateful, miraculous meeting with his dad. Somehow, Carpenter's almost getting lost in space (he nearly didn't make it down) and the boy's fate get intertwinned. A soulful, gentle book.

This is a great collection of American treasured landmarks and items. It serves as both a historical review and a great presentation piece.

This was given to me as a present. I had never heard of the book before, and indeed, when I told people about it, I always got strange looks. But the 52 capsules of people's lives--not all of them well-known but they're people you should know about--are fascinating. Some personal favorites are the guy who invented the U.S. zip code and the founder of an AIDS group in a small town.

An enjoyable collection of obituaries written my Robert McG. Thomas Jr. These short (2-3 page) obituaries will make you smile and wonder what would be written about yourself. Some of the people you will recognize, most you will not, but you'll gain an understanding and appreciation for their time on this planet.

Recommended

When this book was first recommended to me by a friend, I must admit I was a little put off. A book of obituaries? Now there's a fun read! Although I know there are "die-hard" obit enthusiasts out there, I certainly don't count myself among them. All of this is leading to the further admission that I ordered the book with some trepidation. I needn't have worried. This book is an absolute joy. To say that it is well-written would be an understatement of Homeric proportions as Mr. Thomas had a subtle way with words that hints at Twain (I know! I know! They're "just" obituaries, but this gentleman could turn a phrase with the best of them!). Far from being ghoulish or depressing, these 52 McGs are fascinating celebrations of everyday extraordinary lives. Most importantly, each humorous account is filled with such warmth and respect that you don't get the feeling you're snickering at some poor dead guy "behind his back". 52 McGs falls into the category of "little discoveries that you can't wait to share with other people." Heartily recommended as an addition to your library or as a gift to anyone that enjoys highly skilled writing.

As a diarist, I enjoyed this book very much. It has a large amount of information about many, many diarists, and different genres of diaries. The author effectively conveys his enthusiasm for the topic, and it made me want to read many of the diaries in the book. (I found out that we only read the boring part of Pepys diary in high school English, and that there are all sorts of racy parts!)

As interesting as this book is, there was a little too much breadth at times and not enough depth. So many diarists were discussed in each chapter that I felt I would have to take notes to remember the ones I was interested in. Also, the transitions between diaries are rather awkward; I think this book would have been better in an encyclopedic rather than narrative format.

I think that this book is an excellent reference for anyone interested in the history of diaries.

I read this book over thirteen years ago, and I was hooked on diaries ever since. After reading in Mallon's book about some of the most interesting diarists, I found other diaries to read-one about a man's search for an institution for his retarded son, one by a woman facing major surgery and hospitalization (Walking Through the Fire), and a few others. He also inspired me to start my own diary, which I kept for over twelve years, seldom missing a day. This last year or so, I have fallen off but still add to my diary now and then. This is an activity I was hardly aware of, but when diary keeping is presented in such an interesting way, one sees it in a whole new way. I think of it as "the word made flesh." Mr. Mallon's book has added more to my life than practically any other I have ever read.

I finally got around to reading a yellowed Penquin edition of A Book of One's Own and am pleased to see that Hungry Mind is keeping this alive and available for everyone else who has yet to enjoy it. Essentially, it is a pageant of diarists and their words, with Mallon standing to the side, offering an often witty, always insightful commentary. It is a literate, sensitive dialogue. As a sometime diarist, I fought for awhile with his notion that everyone writes with an audience in mind, that our most private writings are not unselfconscious, that we intend to be found out. But I did not go reading this to locate my own opinions. It is delightful, and with the bibliography neatly situated in the back, it reads silkily, without the interruption of footnotes.

Thomas Mallon is smart, has common sense, and demands that you sit up and pay attention to him. He is a fast talker, too. These pieces appeared in monthly popular magazines, where likely he was the resident curmudgeon/ intellectual - albeit with a deadline. As he explains, he spent enough time in academia, "stuffing myself like a Christmas goose (Dickens) from the groaning board of books on the prescribed reading list" to earn a doctorate in twentieth-century British literature and teach for awhile (at Vassar) before moving "up" and out, into a job as a writer and mainstream critic.

Mallon loves language's usefulness - sometimes as weaponry - and revels in his ability to use it well. There are lots of smart bits, arcana and literary and cultural trivia. He does his research, and then lays it all out for the reader. He loves proper nouns, too. Sometimes there are as many as twenty on a page. I actually wished for an index to somehow gather, at book's end, the many people, places, book titles, and other index-worthy things in this collection. He sometimes goes for the jugular. (Dos Passos' "unpunctuated Joycean singsong") He can be mean and lacking in the sort of tact that (for example) an undergraduate might require - in order to ever write again. It's not appealing, for example, when he savages David Guterson -not only his first novel, but his wholly extraliterary views on a variety of other things. Mallon can turn a phrase, but sometimes it would have been better not to.

In other places this long-knives approach is just what you want. Regarding Mencken's reprehensible political views, during the 1930's, Mallon writes, "These are less the genteel barbarities of another age that the eternal chant of the crazy who's just boarded the subway car." On the other hand, when Mallon approves, he says so. ("In 'The Ice Age' Margaret Drabble surveys England like a sociologist in a helicopter, a sort of digital George Eliot.")

In these pieces he is brainy, unforgiving, and approves, unfortunately, of comparatively few things. Good reading, but in measured doses.

Thomas Mallon is a former academic who got out because he could not abide how theory was choking literature. He became a distinguished novelist and critic, and this is first collection of essays on fiction, fact, and the relationship between them. He takes what might be called the Tom Wolfe side of the argument; that is, fiction is much better when it is about *something* besides the author's delicate inner feelings. Mallon is a witty, highly readable writer who is something of a rarity among New York-based critics--he's not automatically close-minded about politics. He praises Ward Just's Washington D.C. novels. He celebrates Tom Wolfe's "A Man in Full." H.L. Mencken is found amusing but ultimately too self-aborbed, bitter, and anti-Semitic. Garry Wills is scorned for his simplistic political correctness about John Wayne. Don DeLillo's "Underworld" is called a masterpiece. Robert Stone's "Damascus Gate" is a "big, good book." There is a great consideration of works set in New Orleans, "The Big Uneasy." He celebrates Gore Vidal ("when the writing is this good, who cares about politics?"--my own feelings exactly.) He writes an appreciative piece about readers who write him letters (hope he feels the same way after the deluge of correspondence it is sure to get him.) There's a brilliant evaluation of Edmund Morris' "Dutch", which acknowledges the folly of that author's fictionalizations while acclaiming his basic insights on Ronald Reagan; it's the most balanced judgement I've read about that flawed but important book. He concludes with several fine essays about historical fiction : why write it, why read it, what is the author's duty to the facts. Perhaps his most perceptive cooments are about Norman Mailer's "Oswald's Tale." Mailer writes that we are reluctant to accept Lee Harvey Oswald as the assassin of JFK because of the existential absurdity of such a insignificant figure being responsible for such earth-shattering consequences. Mallon falls back on the concept of religious faith: the concept of the "absurd", he writes is problematic because "it's a small, secular notion. Who knows what greater, untragic mystery may lie behind it, one explaining why the enormities happening here for no apparent reason may, in a place so distant it's hardly our affair, mean something after all?" A splendid collection.

Seeing that this book had not yet garnered any reviews, I thought I would put in a word for Mallon's engrossing and fast-paced study of what is (to my mind anyway) a fascinating topic. In light of recent revelations about the work of Kearns Goodwin and Ambrose, it makes for a timely and lively read. In his opening thumbnail sketch of the history of plagiarism, Mallon shows how major literary figures such as Laurence Sterne, Coleridge and de Quincey infused their works with ample unattributed borrowings. (Sterne, for instance, stole heavily from Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy -- even going so far as to plagiarize a passage about plagiarism -- and plagiarized his own love letters to his wife in letters he sent to his mistress years later.) The real gems here, though, are Mallon's discussion of modern scandals. Mallon writes about the novel "Wild Oats" by Jacob Epstein, a late '70s lit wonder boy with all the connections, who fell from grace when his plagiarisms of Martin Amis's "Rachel Papers" were revealed. (Reading Epstein's novel, the passages stolen from Amis seem to Mallon like "plateaus on otherwise flat land," roughly.) And in the cleverly titled chapter "Quiet Goes the Don," about former Texas Tech history professor Jamie Sokolow, Mallon shows how reluctant the academic establishment, down to the AAUP and American Historical Association, was to take action against an obvious and known plagiarist. (Sokolow, after he was coaxed out of Texas Tech, ended up evaluating historical research for the NEH in Washington.)

This book fascinatingly plumbs the psychology of the plagiarist, for example his seeming desire to get caught. (Epstein's novel features students who buy essays from term-paper companies, and a child who is punished for plagiarizing Winnie the Pooh.) An afterword on the internet is interesting but too brief, and the postmodernist challenge to authorship is dealt with too lightly and dismissively for my tastes; however, I would heartily recommend this book to anyone interested in the subject. For further reading, I would suggest a memoir by Neal Bowers, a victim of plagiarism, called "Words for the Taking." Also Anne Fadiman's essay in Ex Libris (from which I have "stolen" my title, heh heh). Of course, she had her own sources.

Sinclair Lewis's "Main Street" deals honestly with the negative aspects of small town life. In the book, Carol Kennicott, a big city girl marries Dr. Kennicott, and they move to the small town of Gopher Prarie. Carol is an idealist, but her efforts to reform the town are met with ignorance. The citizens of Gopher Prarie are convinced that they lead a utopian life, and that poverty and ugliness does not exist in their town. Carol is subjected to gossip, greed, and dullness in her journey through Gopher Prarie. I think this book is an accurate description of many small towns, but it deals too negatively with small towns. I have visited many times Lewis's hometown of Sauk Centre, after which Gopher Prarie was modeled, and found none of the drab buildings and narrow minded people that Lewis described. Howver, this novel is a classic example of how our own ignorance prevents us from seeing our true surrondings. This book is a real eye opener.

Main Street is a classic story demonstrating the fascinating mentality of Midwestern America. It is best personified in the great character study of the beleaguered Carol Kennicott, who left the big city and dreams of culture to exist in mediocrity and banality in the small town of Gopher Prairie, Minnesota. The reader is taken along her tumultuous life in this small town with her husband and family. At times the book is slow and can seem depressing. As a student from the Northeast who moved to the Midwest for college, it genuinely helped me gain a greater understanding as to why people act as they do in the Midwest. While Lewis wrote this book in 1930, his lessons are still applicable today in understanding human social interaction.

Advice for first time readers of Sinclair Lewis: Start with Main Street. I started with Babbitt, a worthy novel, but inferior to Main Street. They share a nimble, though often heavy handed touch of irony, and good characterization; and Mr. Lewis' trenchant social commantary is present in both.

We all know the story: Carol Kennicott (nee Milford), educated at tiny Blodgett College, wants action: She wants to travel and live in a big city where she can see plays and hobnob with intellectuals. She meets future husband Dr. Will Kennicott at a St. Paul dinner party; (Throughout the novel, her feelings toward Will oscillate between admiration for his efficient practice and good nature, and discomfort with his depthless character). Will coaxes Carol onto a train bound for the hamlet of Gopher Prairie, Minnesota. The bulk of the novel, which, considering the context, could be considered picaresque, consists of Carol's haphazard attempts to reform the obdurate, immobile mindsets of the citizens of her new home. Among the improvements Carol suggests are a library board composed of the well read men of the town, and a campaign to renew interest in reading (In a town where the great books are bypassed for the contemporary moralistic, optimistic, and religious authors), and a theater company containing one fine actor and a supporting cast of hams, who bungle through one play (the frivolous "Girl from Kankakee"; poor carol had Shaw or Sophocles in mind. Throughout the novel, Carol evinces a blinding fear of living as a stereotypic denizen of the American Main Street; her fears are intensified by the birth of her son another fetter that could prevent a night train escape from Gopher Prairie), and the loss of several friends (the most notable being Miles Bjornstam, a Swedish horse trader who leaves for Canada after his wife's death) Made desperate by the seeming ineffectuality of her reform efforts, and these fears of decline into a town matron, Carol runs off to Washington D.C. for a period, before returning half broken to Gopher Prairie, tractable while still picturing herself as a maverick.

A five star review does not preclude qualms over a piece of literature. Main Street is truly a marvelous book, but there are flaws. Irony peppered moderately in a story can lend life and humor; too much can overwhelm the reader with a sense that the author has no other crutch than easy, predictable amusement. Also, this being an episodic novel, there sometimes seems to be little tying the book together save for the overpowering contagion of yearning for excitement, reform, and freedom that leaves Carol and others in Gopher Prairie so disappointed. These should not be deterent enough to suggest you steer clear of Main Street, though. As with every marred but overall fantastic booke light breaks the dark for the reader willing to overlook flaws that, were he or she writing the novel, he or she couldn't have ironed out. As glorious a work of literature as it is an historical document, this is a delight for any serious or recreational reader.

"Dewey Defeats Truman" is my first reading of Thomas Mallon, and I unequivocally recommend this novel to anyone interested in American history in the immediate postwar era; or for that matter, to anyone simply interested in a good story of a time ostensibly more innocent than our own. At times some the characters display an inside-the-beltway sort of cynicism about politics that would only seem possible in today's climate, but I suppose that was the reality even back then! As with any historical fiction, liberties with facts have probably been taken for the sake of art, though presumably not at the risk of revisionism, I'm certain. Initially, I was somewhat troubled by what seemed too many gratuitous cultural references from the 1940¹s--I could have done without Jack Riley's fantasy about Peggy Lee while trysting with Louise Rutkowski in his office --but then again baby boomers & Gen X'ers have a hard time picturing Lee, the legendary recording star, as the sultry, sexy song stylist she indeed was--a big-band version of one of today's interchangeable pop goddesses--only someone with real talent! But as I continued, and warmed up to Mallon's narrative, these references became welcome additions to the text, giving added dimension and deeper insight to that bygone time. Whether or not Mallon's portrait of small-town 1948, particularly the uniqueness of Owosso, Michigan in that year, is wholly accurate, the characters for the most part are very real. Although I felt instinctively from the beginning that Anne Macmurray, given her upper-middle class East Coast background, would eventually have doubts about Jack (while denying her smitten, magnetic tug towards the caddish, privileged Peter Cox), their relationship was nonetheless believable, cemented together, however tenuously, by Anne's attraction to the earthier "other" , and her social conscience, which she could see as best served only by another Truman administration. At times Anne seems oddly contemporary in her in! dependence, but she is also tempered by the traditional social restrictions of her time (maybe typical of women in the period just after WWII??). Peripherally, I enjoyed Jane Herrick--the rather daffy grieving mother--tremendously, given over to statistical and mathematical eccenctricities following the death of her son in service to the country. And even Horace Sinclair, though drawn a little too predictably curmudgeonly for his age and purpose in the story, was a wonderful addition to the myriad cast of Owosso characters. The integration of history and personal relationships in "Dewey Defeats Truman" could have been an awkward stew if written by someone less gifted than Mallon, but it works beautifully in his hands, evolving chapter by chapter, coalescing page by page, until the reader has actually felt the excitement (an excitement Americans no longer seem to experience) of a Presidential race too close to call, at a time (before we had become so smugly superior!) when America truly was destined for--dare I say it?--greatness.

This is the second novel by Thomas Mallon I have read (the other being HENRY AND CLARA), and in both books Mallon excels at finding the right detail to open up a character or a scene more fully for the reader. In a scene in a hospital waiting room, Anne Macmurray wishes to indicate to her fiance to leave so that she can comfort a teenage boy who she senses wants to cry but won't in the presence of the older man. Mallon writes that Anne attempts a telepathic sort of glance at her fiance, "like a test of the Emergency Broadcast System," and he does take the hint. The detail both evokes the period in which the book is set and also shows how Anne is slowly satisfying herself that she has made the right choice after all in her finace. The novel is filled with small moments like this, all of them well selected and all of them reminding us of the humanity of the characters. (If I had the book with me here at work, I could add another good example, but that is one I remember from savoring this book in January.

I am quite taken by this story. It is a rich, layered story of love and the turning points of many lives in the summer and fall of 1948. Mallon challenges us to think a little differently and a little more deeply about the choices we face, and shows that 'following one's heart' is not so clear and easy (or maybe even 'right'). While I am surprised by the negative reviews I found here, they are just another reminder that whether we love or dislike a book sometimes says as much about our tastes, mood, circumstance, expectations etc. as it does about the quality of what the author has created. (See the reviews for Annie Proulx's The Shipping News in Amazon). I think Mallon has progressed far from Aurora 7, (the other work of his I have read), a nice book but not nearly so affecting. I especially admire his respectful treatment of all these characters, which is tougher than leaning on cynicism, which seems more common. But in stepping from story to story in this collection of people of Owosso, the shifts in viewpoint sometimes tumble too abruptly. The book slowed a bit in the middle (though never to a 'slog' as two other readers found). Some of the sub-stories don't work as well for me (Horace Sinclair's dilemma, and the follow through on Tim Herrick), and I suppose he might have done more to further develop Peter Cox and his relationship with Anne M. But I still found this fresh, unique and a moving read.

This book was very little about astronomy and the actual history of the discovery of Phobos and Deimos, which is what I was interested in, and much more about the politics in postbellum (that is too a word; I looked it up) America.

I skimmed endless passages detailing the intricacies of the lives of men whose names I didn't know because, well, because they probably didn't have much to contribute to the pagent of history. Maybe I daydreamed through this part in history class, but shouldn't a good historical novel include an engaging introduction to the period, rather than a catalog of the doings of every bit player?

I was unable to sympathise with any of the main characters, who were all self-absorbed and self-pitying. Peripheral (and non-political) characters, like the Irish astrologer, the "Scientific Frenchman" correspondent, and Asaph Hall (the moons' discoverer) and his ambitious wife, were much more interesting to me.

Many passages were clumsily written, telling rather than showing. And before each character comes down with malaria, the author made a point of describing the protentous mosquito bite--but ignores all the other bites that every character would have suffered in the course of the muggy summer.

My interest was in astronomy, not politics, so perhaps I shouldn't blame the author for expounding my favorite subject, but I'm a fairly well-rounded person, I think, and if the political stuff was better written, I might have enjoyed learning about it. However, it failed entirely to engage my interest.

This is a wonderful, charming little book. It's a romance with a small "r". It's not the great American novel and thank God it doesn't even try for that. The last thing we need more of is the bloated over-weight fudge we keep getting from Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer.

The characters are well-drawn and believable, unlike several of the characters in Mallon's previous novel, "Dewey Defeats Truman". You will care about them and you will understand why they do what they do. As always, Mallon's ability to evoke a time and place is unmatched. His aim is dead on. I'm no expert in Washington, D.C. in any century, but the depiction of the capital in 1877 worked for me and I didn't find any major anachronisms. The astronomical and astrological themes are skillfully woven into the story and provide a good deal of interest. Finally, anyone who truly has been in love will find that the story of Cynthia May and Hugh Allison will strike a resounding chord in your heart.

This is a rare kind of book. It combines a meticulous sense of historical reality with science and high romance between unlikely characters. It makes me want to seek out and read all of Mallon's work, and to keep and reread (soon!) this one.

An interesting and well-written historical novel. For most of its length it is rather unexciting, but this is made up for in the later chapters which give a vivid, harrowing picture of a doomed marriage slipping into violence and madness. The story of Henry Rathbone and Clara Harris is a sad, indeed tragic, one, and Mallon does a good job of tracing the seeds of destruction that overshadowed these two from their earliest days together. He also avoids many of the usual traps historical novelists fall into, such as long-winded explanations of vanished customs and dusty disertations on forgotten politics. Mallon moves things along smoothly, with a minimum of description, and nicely fleshes out the known facts about his primary characters with fictionalized details and motivations. If Clara is ultimately the more sympathetic of the two, it is perhaps because her predicament (a brilliant, but stubborn woman trapped in a marriage which she realizes has become a nightmare)is the more easily grasped. Henry Rathbone remains something of an enigma despite Mallon's careful work, just as his inaction (or delayed reaction) on that fatal night at Ford's theater remains an enigma to history. For a more exciting, but equally touching, non-fiction sketch of Henry and Clara, turn to Gene Smith's "American Gothic" about the theatrical Booth family, the assassination of Lincoln, and the repercussions for all those involved in that horrid event.

Mallon has woven an engrossing tale around figures and events from ninteenth century America. Like the best historical fiction, "Henry and Clara" operates on three levels: the personal, the interpersonal, and the historical. Thus, the reader is at once given insight into the emotional lives of the characters, the social rituals of the time, and insight into the historical events shaping the era.

Historical fiction may be the most difficult genre to write. While plotting and character are required for any good novel, historical novels also demand the right tone. This, to me, is where Henry and Clara breaks down. At times, characters become mouthpieces for speeches that seem political anachronisms. Other times characters speak in naive, sentimentalisms that read like a Hollywood vision of the era. In these cases, the reader is jarred by a tone that doesn't quite fit. In general, the author puts his own machinations too much in the foreground, wrecking the suspension of disbelief that historical fiction requires.

This is a great read for anyone interested in good literature, or history, especially for those who are civil war buffs. It is a wonderful period novel, giving the reader a good sense of the culture and society of the era. The characters are well developed and absorbing, paritcularly the intracicies and psychological complexities of Henry Rathbone and Clara Harris (guests of Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln at Ford's Theater on that fateful night.) I found the subject highly intriguing and fascinating, the examination of the impact of Lincoln's assination on Henry and Clara as individuals and as a couple. There are many historical facts in this novel, and it is fun to sort out fact from fantasy. The novel is a complete offering, providing a great narrative, depth, social and psychological study, and suspense as well. I found it very difficult to put this book down.