I didn’t know much about New York Review Books’ “NYRB Classics” line when I was invited last year to contribute an introduction to Elaine Dundy’s “The Dud Avocado.” Since then, though, I’ve looked through the NYRB Classics catalogue with close attention and increasing wonder. Whoever picks the titles for this spectacularly eclectic series of stylish-looking reprints of insufficiently remembered books of the past (many but by no means all of which are novels) deserves some sort of prize for good taste. Among the worthy books resurrected in recent years by NYRB Classics are Colette’s “The Pure and the Impure,” Ivy Compton-Burnett’s “Manservant and Maidservant,” Kenneth Fearing’s “The Big Clock,” Vasily Grossman’s “Life and Fate,” L.P. Hartley’s “The Go-Between,” Murray Kempton’s “Part of Our Time,” J.F. Powers’ “Morte d’Urban,” Jean Renoir’s “Renoir, My Father,” A.J.A. Symons’ “The Quest for Corvo,” Italo Svevo’s “As a Man Grows Older,” Lionel Trilling’s “The Middle of the Journey,” Aleksander Wat’s “My Century,” Glenway Wescott’s “The Pilgrim Hawk,” and a whole batch of alarmingly dark romans durs by Georges Simenon, all of which are eminently worthy of revival. Has there ever been so quirkily adventurous a paperback reissue line? Not in my memory.

I recently started chewing through a boxful of books from NYRB Classics, and the volume on top, Angus Wilson’s “Anglo-Saxon Attitudes” (360 pp., $14.95), happened to be an old favorite that I hadn’t reread since my ancient, much-thumbed paperback edition disintegrated a few years ago. Originally published in 1956, “Anglo-Saxon Attitudes” was a deliberate attempt to write a novel in the style of Dickens and Trollope whose subject matter was unambiguously contemporary. It tells the tale of Gerald Middleton, a wealthy, washed-up historian who at the age of sixty upends his comfortable but unsatisfying life by investigating a Piltdown Man-like archaeological fraud for which the great friend of his schooldays turns out to have been responsible. “Anglo-Saxon Attitudes” is at once deeply felt, brilliantly witty and morally serious to the highest degree, a combination of traits rarely to be found in a single novel.

Of special interest is the cold eye that Angus Wilson casts on humanism in all its mid-century varieties. Neither conservative nor (so far as I know) religious, Wilson was nonetheless acutely aware of the inadequacies of the secular creed to which most of his fellow liberals adhered, and skewered them with the sharpest of sticks. A case in point is his acid portrayal of Frank Rammage, an amateur social worker whose desire to help his fellow men turns out to be rooted in exceedingly strange motivations:

The mention of rent put Frank on his mettle. “That’s all right, dear,” he said; “you pay when you can.”

Each time that he spoke this familiar phrase, and sometimes it was as often as twenty times in a week, he felt overcome by the sadness of the situation. It was seldom, he knew, that any good would come of his sympathy, but it was the hopelessness, the endless hopelessness of the lives with which he had surrounded himself, that awoke his compassion. Frank Rammage’s attitude could hardly be called sentimental, for it went farther than mere feeling-he regarded the dishonest and depraved as almost sacred. As usual, however, the little scene had satisfied the mixture of bullying and masochism that lay on the surface of his strange, Dostoyevskian philanthropy. He felt quite jolly.

Having revisited “Anglo-Saxon Attitudes” with the utmost pleasure, it occurs to me that Wilson’s first novel, “Hemlock and After,” which was greatly admired by both Evelyn Waugh and Edmund Wilson, is very much the sort of book that would suit the folks at NYRB Classics. I’d suggest it myself, but somehow I suspect that they’ve already thought of it.

Film, we’re told, is a serious art form, but it certainly hasn’t produced much of a serious literature, least of all when it comes to books about movie stars. Most Hollywood biographies, for instance, are ill-written compilations of gossip, while “filmographies” (to use the ugly but inevitable neologism) tend to be the work of fawning, obsessively compulsive fans. So it is a treat to report that Robert Nott’s The Films of Randolph Scott (McFarland & Company, 235 pp., $39.95 paper) is as discriminating as it is thorough, a worthy tribute to an insufficiently remembered actor whose best work is much deserving of revival.

As a young man Scott made movies of all kinds, but after 1947 he specialized exclusively in the Western, a once-beloved genre that has all but died out in recent years. His on-screen demeanor, as I wrote in a 2002 essay collected in A Terry Teachout Reader, was distinctive to the highest possible degree:

He always played the same character, a lanky, dryly amusing cowboy with a Virginian accent who spoke only when spoken to and shot only when shot at, and you could take it for granted that he’d do the right thing in any given situation. If he’d been younger and prettier, he would have been too good to be true, but Scott was no dresser’s dummy: he had a thin-lipped mouth and a hawk-like profile, and wasn’t afraid to act his age on screen. Nobody in Hollywood, not even John Wayne, looked more believable in a Stetson.

Most of Scott’s later movies were variously satisfying but predictable B- to B-plus Westerns in which he stuck closely to the heroic stereotype that made him popular. In the final years of his screen career, though, he made a number of films, most of them directed by Budd Boetticher, that were tougher in tone and austere to the point of stoicism. Boetticher’s “Seven Men from Now,” “Ride Lonesome,” and “Comanche Station” are all masterly variations on the same no-nonsense theme, terse moral tales of a vengeful drifter who seeks to right a wrong, and Scott’s disillusioned, flint-faced presence is a large part of what makes them so memorable.

Robert Nott, an arts and entertainment writer for the Santa Fe New Mexican, is a Western-loving film buff who has gone to the not-inconsiderable trouble of watching and writing about every surviving film that Randolph Scott made, not a few of which, he freely admits, weren’t worth the trouble: “You can be a fan of Scott’s and yet not be a fan of all of his movies. . . . For diehard Western film fans, part of the challenge of focusing on Randolph Scott’s film canon is sitting through the melodramatic misfires and embarrassing epics he made outside of the sagebrush genre.” Yet he somehow manages to write interestingly and amusingly about even the least of Scott’s efforts, and when the film under consideration is a good one, he always rises to the occasion. No matter how much you think you know about Randolph Scott’s oeuvre, Nott’s unpretentious synopses, which incorporate both original interview material and pointed excerpts from contemporary newspaper and magazine reviews, will point you in the direction of unfamiliar films that are worth watching (I can’t wait to get a look at “Carson City” after reading about it in The Films of Randolph Scott) and enhance your appreciation of the ones you’ve already seen.

It’s currently being whispered in film-buff circles that all of the Westerns Scott made with Budd Boetticher in the 50’s have been transferred to DVD and will be released as a boxed set this fall. I’ll believe that when I see it, but should these wonderful films finally be made available on home video, I strongly suggest that you acquire a copy of The Films of Randolph Scott to go along with them.

Earlier this year I wrote admiringly in this space about “Dirty Money,” the latest thriller from Richard Stark, the pseudonym that comic crime novelist Donald E. Westlake adopts when writing about Parker, a professional burglar with a heart of flint who will do anything to anybody in order to get what he wants:

I wouldn’t care to speculate about what it is in Westlake’s psyche that makes him so good at writing about Parker, much less what it is that makes me like the Parker novels so much. Suffice it to say that Stark/Westlake is the cleanest of all noir novelists, a styleless stylist who gets to the point with stupendous economy, hustling you down the path of plot so briskly that you have to read his books a second time to appreciate the elegance and sober wit with which they are written.

Back then I pointed out that most of the twenty-four Parker novels are out of print–the earlier ones were published as paperback originals that are now hard to find–and that certain titles in the series, “Butcher’s Moon” foremost among them, fetch alarmingly stiff prices on the used-book market. So I’m delighted to advise readers in need of tough-minded vacation fare that the University of Chicago Press has decided to publish a uniform edition of the first 17 Parker novels, and that the first three volumes are now available.

“The Hunter” (208 pp., $14 paper), “The Man with the Getaway Face” (224 pp., $14 paper) and “The Outfit” (224 pp., $14 paper) can and should be read in sequence as a trilogy–I would have published them in an omnibus volume–rather than separately. In these hard, laconic novels, published in 1962 and 1963, we first make the acquaintance of Parker, who has broken out of a California jail and made his way to New York City to settle a score with a woman who sold him out and left him for dead. We never learn much more about his personal history than that, nor should we, for Parker is a man devoid of introspection who lives exclusively in the present moment, never looking back and thinking ahead only far enough to plan his next crime. He is, I suppose, a sociopath, if you go in for labels like that, and it is the frightening charm of the novels in which he figures that you quickly find yourself cheering him on in his relentless quest to redistribute the wealth of America into his own bottomless pockets by any means necessary, up to and very much including murder.

The early Parker novels are somewhat coarser in literary tone than the ones that came later, but they are still of a piece with the rest of the series. Once you start reading them, my guess is that you’ll find it impossible to stop, for Stark/Westlake is a virtuoso craftsman who knows how to seize and hold the reader’s attention. Each Parker novel, for instance, opens in medias res with a sentence that begins with the word “when”:

When a fresh-faced guy in a Chevy offered him a lift, Parker told him to go to hell.

When the bandages came off, Parker looked in the mirror at a stranger.

When the woman screamed, Parker awoke and rolled off the bed.

How can you quit there?

“The Hunter,” “The Man with the Getaway Face” and “The Outfit” are handsomely designed, tightly bound trade-paperback volumes that have been freshly set from new type rather than reprinted from older editions. All of this strongly suggests that the University of Chicago Press is in it for the long haul, which is a good thing, since the uniform Parker is a multi-year project whose subsequent installments are to be published at unspecified intervals. Be patient.

• So far as I know, no one has ever written a novel about an opera librettist (though I can recommend a witty and knowing novel about the backstage world of opera, Brown Meggs’ “Aria”). But two of my other professions, that of drama critic and biographer, have been the subject of comic novels that are both exceptionally readable—albeit in different ways.

The eponymous anti-hero of Wilfrid Sheed’s “Max Jamison,” published in 1970, is a notoriously crotchety drama critic for a weekly newsmagazine who awakes one day to find himself smack dab in the middle of an excruciating midlife crisis with spiritual overtones: “Closing the Times was the end of his religious observance for the day. He wished real religion wasn’t quite so damn impossible. There was a need for it that the Times didn’t really fill.” Comprehensively unhappy with every aspect of his life, Max resolves to brighten up his pitch-dark point of view by taking up with a much younger woman, a decision that leads with staggering promptness to frighteningly funny grief.

Part of what makes “Max Jamison” so readable is that Sheed is very, very shrewd about the New York literary racket. Needless to say, much has changed since 1970—among other things, the weekly newsmagazines no longer cover Broadway other than sporadically—but the big picture remains all too recognizable four decades later. Max himself is a most interesting figure, a semi-lapsed intellectual who used to write for the little magazines and now pontificates in the mass media (“He had sensed that in educated America, humor was the number 1 language, for criticism, passion, even cooking: and he set about learning it with grim intelligence”). Harold Ross was undoubtedly right as a rule when he said that “nobody gives a damn about a writer and his problems except another writer,” but “Max Jamison” is an exception, a portrait of a miserable writer that is at once sharp-edged and sympathetic.

• If it’s brainy slapstick you seek, I commend your attention to Mark Dunn’s “Ibid,” published in 2004. The conceit of the book is that Dunn himself has written a biography of one Jonathan Blashette, a turn-of-the-century circus freak (he was born with three legs) who invented underarm deodorant for men and later became a noted philanthropist. Then Dunn’s publisher accidentally destroys the typescript of his book—except for the footnotes. Hence “Ibid,” which consists of 253 pages of source notes for a biography that no longer exists. Some are gnomically short, others absurdly long, and all are written in a style best described as deadpan silliness:

17. She was trampled in the Wilmington nylon riot of 1940. Barbara Sadler, Nylon Riots: An Exhaustive History, Volume 3 (Chicago: Sartorial Press, 1953), 255-57. Hiram Diles’ wife, Cassia, recovered within a couple of weeks. Her sister Magda required surgery and two years of intensive psychological counseling.

Such inside foolery is not for everyone, but “Ibid” made me laugh out loud several times in a crowded airport departure lounge, which is a pretty high batting average for a comic novel.

‘Tis the season to see Shakespeare, especially in America, where summer Shakespeare festivals are as thick as fireflies on a hot night. I gallop from one festival to another in my capacity as drama critic of The Wall Street Journal, and my calendar is so crowded that I occasionally have to write my reviews in hotel rooms and departure lounges instead of in my book-lined Manhattan office. My knowledge of the Bard is considerable but not infinite, so I’ve been keeping an eye out for a reasonably compact one-volume Shakespearean reference book that I can slip in my carry-on bag and consult as needed on the road. This season I’m giving The Rough Guide to Shakespeare (Rough Guides/Penguin, 532 pp., $23.99 paper) a tryout, and so far it’s passed every test.

The Rough Guide series of reference books, which runs the gamut from jazz to gangster movies, offers its readers attractively designed handbooks packed with useful information and written in a no-nonsense style. I’ve read several Rough Guides and found most of them to be pretty much as advertised (though the travel volumes are written from a British point of view, which can be a problem when you’re relying on them for information about destinations in America).

The Shakespeare volume, written by Andrew Dickson, is exemplary of the series’ virtues. The style is transparent and accessible, the perspective that of an unusually well-informed journalist who has gone to considerable trouble to mug up his subject. Each play is covered in a chapter consisting of a crisp synopsis, an interpretative essay, a brief stage history, and an annotated list of film and TV versions, audio recordings, published editions and critical studies. Newspaper-style “sidebars” are sprinkled throughout the book-the chapter on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for instance, contains a concise introduction to Ovid-and separate chapters are devoted to the sonnets and longer poems. The last section contains a potted biography of Shakespeare, a discussion of the Elizabethan stage, a short glossary, an annotated bibliography and a list of Shakespearean Web sites.

What I like most about The Rough Guide to Shakespeare is that its author grinds no axes of any kind. His purpose, so far as I can tell, is to offer a straight-down-the-center summary of the best current thinking about Shakespeare, and his native good sense shines through on every page. Whenever he recommends books, they’re the right ones (Samuel Schoenbaum’s William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life and Park Honan’s 1998 biography head the list).

Above all, Dickson understands that Shakespeare’s plays are plays first and foremost, and while he is aware of and interested in what scholars have had to say about them, his main interest is in how they work on stage:

Sublime though it may be, “Antony and Cleopatra” is well-nigh unstageable-and seems frequently at risk of falling apart. Despite a mere handful of main roles (and no crowd scenes), there are around forty characters in the play, with some 220 entrances and exits, many involving significant groups of people. The stage empties over forty times (scenes are not marked in the only surviving text) and as the action builds, everything gets progressively faster. Even in the fluid, rapid-fire theatre of Shakespeare’s time the effect must have been dazzling, even disconcerting-a constant procession of people across the stage; cross-cutting, filmic scenes that finish practically as they’ve begun.

I know an alarmingly large number of otherwise well-educated people who find Shakespeare intimidating, usually because they were unfortunate enough to have seen tiresome productions of his plays in their youth and never got over the experience. To them–and to anyone else who wants to brush up his Shakespeare–I strongly recommend The Rough Guide to Shakespeare.

One of the things I learned in the course of writing Rhythm Man, my forthcoming biography of Louis Armstrong, is that surprisingly few full-length books about jazz can be read with both profit and pleasure. Serious jazz scholarship is itself a fairly recent phenomenon, and most of the scholars who write about jazz are better at amassing and interpreting facts than in setting them down on paper stylishly. From the beginning, my goal in writing Rhythm Man was to produce a biography of Armstrong comparable in size, scope and literary quality to a “definitive” literary biography like, say, W. Jackson Bate’s Samuel Johnson. No such book exists, though Bix: Man and Legend, the 1974 biography of Bix Beiderbecke by Richard M. Sudhalter and Philip R. Evans, comes close. As for the rest, the bibliography of Rhythm Man lists nearly two hundred books, the vast majority of which are about jazz in whole or part. These are the five I most enjoyed reading:

Gunther Schuller, Early Jazz: Its Roots and Musical Development (1968). The first fully scholarly study of jazz to see print, and one of the best, though later scholarship has superseded some of Schuller’s findings. The insightful chapter on Louis Armstrong’s early development is still invaluable, but Schuller, a high modernist, never managed to come to terms with Armstrong’s musical populism, a defect of sensibility that mars The Swing Era, his 1989 sequel to Early Jazz.

Otis Ferguson, The Otis Ferguson Reader (1952, reprinted in 1997 as In the Spirit of Jazz). Ferguson, who wrote about jazz and movies for The New Republic in the 30’s, was the first journalistic jazz critic to produce a good-sized body of work that remains readable today. Not only has his Chandleresque tough-guy style kept much of its old-fashioned period charm, but time has proved his musical judgment to be consistently sound.

Max Harrison, Charles Fox and Eric Thacker, The Essential Jazz Records, Vol. 1: Ragtime to Swing (1984). A hard-headed, exceptionally well-written survey of major jazz recordings from the beginning to bebop. Harrison, the best of the three contributors, was one of the finest jazz critics of the 20th century, sometimes a bit cranky but impeccably knowledgeable. I drew on his contributions to this volume time and again in writing Rhythm Man.

Ross Firestone, Swing, Swing, Swing: The Life and Times of Benny Goodman (1993). Not a scholarly biography in the ordinary sense of the word–Firestone inexplicably omitted source notes–but thorough, vividly written, and meticulous in every other way. Goodman was a famously difficult personality, and Firestone portrays him with skill and sympathy. I can think of no full-length jazz biography that I’ve read with greater pleasure.

Richard M. Sudhalter, Lost Chords: White Musicians and Their Contribution to Jazz, 1915-1945 (1999). Hugely controversial when it was first published, Lost Chords has since come to be accepted by most (though not all) scholars as a landmark contribution to the literature of jazz. Sudhalter’s critical discussions of the music of such key figures as Red Norvo, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, Miff Mole, Pee Wee Russell, Artie Shaw and Jack Teagarden are unfailingly penetrating.

All of these books are still in print except for Lost Chords (which is easy to find) and The Otis Ferguson Reader (which isn’t, alas).

Television can make you famous, but it can’t keep you famous. Once the red light goes off, the half-life of the small-screen star is likely to be dismayingly short indeed. A mere quarter-century ago, Harry Reasoner was a famous man, but now he is almost entirely forgotten, though he was one of the brightest people ever to anchor an evening newscast and-when he took the trouble to knock out his own scripts-a stylish writer.

It was Reasoner’s practice to end his TV newscasts with a brief, pithy commentary on some aspect of the day’s events. Usually his “end pieces” were dryly witty, but not always. When Ernie Kovacs died in a car crash in 1962, Reasoner wrapped up “The CBS Evening News” with these poignant words:

All prayer books ask for protection from sudden death. It is nice to think we will have a warning, time to think things out and go in bed, in honor and in love. Somebody dies in an unprepared hurry and you are touched with a dozen quick and recent memories: the sweetness of last evening, the uselessness of a mean word or an undone promise. It could be you, with all those untidy memories of recent days never to be straightened out. There’s a shiver in the sunlight, touching the warmth of life that you’ve been reminded you hold only for a moment.

It’s been a long time since anybody said anything remotely like that on a nightly newscast, which may help to explain why fewer and fewer people bother to watch TV news these days.

A handful of Reasoner’s end pieces made it into Before the Colors Fade, his slight but graceful 1983 memoir, and a few more are to be found in Douglass K. Daniel’s Harry Reasoner: A Life in the News (University of Texas, 270 pp., $29.95), a book that has the distinction of being, so far as I know, the first non-gossipy primary-source biography of a TV newsman other than Edward R. Murrow ever to make it into print. Frankly, I’m surprised that anybody bothered to write such a book about Reasoner, who died in 1991 and is now remembered, if at all, for having been one of the original co-anchors of “60 Minutes,” along with a better-known gent by the name of Mike Wallace. For all his not-inconsiderable gifts, Reasoner’s celebrity was almost entirely a function of the fact that he appeared on TV, and once the appearances came to an end, so did the celebrity. Such is the inevitable fate of all who chooses to earn their livings by talking into a TV camera.

If you’re old enough to recall Harry Reasoner and curious about what he was like off camera, A Life in the News will tell you everything you want to know, along with a fair amount that you’ll be sorry to learn. Reasoner, it turns out, was a lazy, somewhat aimless man who drifted into electronic journalism for lack of anything better to do. His bosses at CBS discovered that his penny-plain Midwestern accent and straightforward, slightly amused demeanor were hugely appealing to viewers, and Reasoner soon became, after Walter Cronkite, the best-loved figure in TV news. He was so popular that he didn’t have to work very hard for a living: all he had to do was show up and read what was written for him, and over the years he grew increasingly willing to let other people ghost-write his scripts. It was, to be sure, a common enough practice-Peggy Noonan got her start writing Dan Rather’s radio commentaries-but I was sorely disappointed to learn that Reasoner was one of the many talking heads of TV news who ended up being little more than just that.

Douglass K. Daniel tells Reasoner’s story plainly and without frills, making no effort to posthumously inflate him into something other than what he was, acknowledging his talent but also making room for the devastating summing-up of George Herman, one of his colleagues at CBS: “He was extraordinarily lazy. Harry was one of the best news readers in the business and, I thought, an excellent writer. But he didn’t have the nose for news and the drive and the inquisitiveness and whatever else it takes to be a good reporter, I don’t think.” All of which strikes me as a not-unjust epitaph for network TV news itself, which even in its glory days was never much more than a headline service and is now fast approaching its well-deserved demise.

As for Reasoner, he died a few weeks after retiring from CBS, perhaps from disappointment as much as anything else. He had been a hard drinker who in middle age turned into a full-fledged alcoholic, no doubt because he found his well-paid professional life to be more than a little bit unsatisfactory. His fate reminds me of the equally bleak tale of the decline and fall of Robert Benchley, a wonderfully witty essayist and drama critic who spent his last years playing himself in Hollywood movies and drinking to devastating excess, no longer capable of writing anything more than bits and pieces of dialogue. Like Benchley, Harry Reasoner must have known better than to believe that a talented writer who lets others do his work for him is anything other than a fraud. After such knowledge, the grave looks good.

The rise of the Internet has transformed the way in which I use the reference books that I keep within arm’s reach of my desk. I own, for instance, the two-volume New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, but I can’t remember the last time I opened it. When I want to look up a word, I use an online dictionary. By the same token, my Bible and Complete Works of Shakespeare have long since been relegated to the living-room bookshelves, not because they’re any less valuable under the aspect of postmodernity but because the texts of these oft-consulted books have been made available in searchable online versions that make it possible for me to hunt down half-remembered passages with the greatest of ease.

I still keep Fowler’s Modern English Usage on my desk, though mostly for sentimental reasons, and a half-dozen more books are shelved where I can get at them without rising from my chair. They are Dostoevsky’s Demons, a Modern Library edition of Montaigne’s essays and four ancient hardbound Viking Portables: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Joseph Conrad, Henry James and Johnson and Boswell. (Once you reach middle age, Boswell’s Life of Johnson is better read in an abridged version.) Again, though, these books are more talismans than tools, and I keep them nearby as a gesture, much as Whittaker Chambers kept copies of Demons, Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France and Franz Kafka’s Parables and Paradoxes in the top drawer of his desk at Time. My real “reference library” is my MacBook, with which I can consult anything from the 24,000 public-domain texts that Project Gutenberg has made available in electronic “editions” to a searchable version of the complete run of Time, starting in 1923 and extending forward to this week’s issue.

The only two reference books on my desk that I still consult with fair regularity are David Thomson’s New Biographical Dictionary of Film and H.L. Mencken’s New Dictionary of Quotations on Historical Principles from Ancient and Modern Sources, both of which are more idiosyncratic than their titles suggest. Thomson’s book is a fat collection of essayettes about major figures in film, all written with a strongly personal slant from which a true lexicographer would gallop at full speed. Here, for instance, is Thomson on Humphrey Bogart:

He made few wholly satisfactory films-High Sierra, To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep, In a Lonely Place-and failed in a variety of parts outside the narrow range he saw fit for himself. But within that range he had the impact of Garbo or James Dean. Like them, he was a great Romantic. It is harder to see him as such because of the efforts he made to appear anti-Romantic. The implications of his work-as a comment on self-dramatization-are rather more daunting and disturbing than he ever realized.

Mencken’s New Dictionary is a similarly deft piece of literary prestidigitation, a 1,347-page commonplace book disguised as a sober-looking dictionary of quotations, though you don’t have to peruse it much more than casually to realize that the quotations Mencken painstakingly assembled and organized by topic were intended to reflect his own dark skepticism about mankind. One reviewer, Morton Dauwen Zabel, saw at once what Mencken had been up to when the book was published in 1942: “The impression soon becomes inescapable that what Mencken has produced as a ‘Dictionary of Quotations’ is really a transcendend ‘Prejudices: Seventh Series,’ a ‘Notes on Humanity,’ or more expressly ‘Mencken’s Philosophical Dictionary, Written by Others.’”

Now that it’s possible to search the archives of Time on line, I looked up that magazine’s original review of the New Dictionary the other day, and was not disappointed:

The reader may thus trace from start to semi-finish a concentrated history of thumbnail memoranda on such subjects as God, boredom, marriage, work, Government, lawyers, shoals of others. He may learn the Golden Rule not only from the New Testament but from Confucius, Isocrates, Tobit, the Mahabharata, Hillel Ha-Babli; such shy self-revelations as the U.S. proverb: “Do others or they will do you,” or Bernard Shaw’s “Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.” The reader can observe that, whereas there is much respectful talk about law itself, human experience with lawyers has been bilious. He can get every sort of opinion of work, from Hippocrates’ sound advice “Never work when hungry” to the African proverb: “Work only tires a woman, but it ruins a man.”

Would that Mencken’s New Dictionary were still in print, but used copies are easy to find and worth acquiring. Rarely does a week go by that I don’t have occasion to consult it, always with profit and often with amusement.

Is it possible to write interestingly about uninteresting art? Of course–good critics do it every day–but the real trick is to write interestingly about a style of art that the reader dislikes. A case in point is Erin Hogan’s “Spiral Jetta: A Road Trip through the Land Art of the American West” (University of Chicago, $20), which I read in a single delighted sitting despite the fact that I don’t share its author’s taste for large-scale minimalist art. Part of the reason why I liked “Spiral Jetta” so much is that Hogan, the director of public affairs at the Art Institute of Chicago, writes with the infectious gusto of the true believer. To hear minimalism described as “ambitious, beautiful, rigorous, geometric, engaged with questions of form rather than personality, aiming at the eternal without irony” is to wonder–briefly–whether there might possibly be more to Philip Glass than meets the ear. (Answer: no, no, a thousand times no.) But what makes “Spiral Jetta” so readable is not so much the art that is its nominal subject as the quirky, engaging personality of the woman writing about it.

“Spiral Jetta” is the story of an aesthetic pilgrimage taken for reasons having little to do with art. Hogan is a longtime city dweller who, by her own rueful admission, dislikes being alone: “I take comfort in being surrounded by a constant clamor of voices–of strangers, of friends–and el trains and car horns and music from passing cars and the rhythms of the boys drumming on overturned buckets on the sidewalk.” So she hopped in her Volkswagen Jetta, drove west and spent three weeks visiting such giant-sized landmark earthworks of monumental minimalism as Robert Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty” and Walter De Maria’s “Lightning Field,” not merely to see them for the first time but in the hope of “testing and challenging myself, breaking out of my nine-to-five routine and trying to find something in myself beyond the ability to answer e-mails, attend meeting, and meet friends for cocktails.”

As it happens, Hogan was disappointed by most (if not all) of the works of land art that she saw, and she tells of her dissatisfaction with charming candor. The trip itself, however, proved to be far more satisfying, if not infrequently frightening, and when it was over Hogan realized that she was the better for having plunged heedlessly into the wild:

While I certainly hadn’t managed to free myself of anxiety–getting lost, cougars, mechanical failures–I had come to enjoy the liberating feeling of solitude that had so far eluded me….The life of a drifter–minus the poor hygiene–was beginning to appeal to me. However, as an astrologer once told me, “You are not that kind of person.” He is right, but at least I had become the kind of person who could fully enjoy a trip like this.

In case you’re wondering what Erin Hogan’s neurotic dislike of spending time alone has do with art criticism, she offers this thought-provoking reply:

People visit the Museum of Modern Art to learn about modern art, not about themselves. But would more people come if they thought some sense of personal transformation were at stake? I set out on my trip wanting to learn about art, but I was realizing that the most significant thing I learned out in the west was via art, not about it. Does that make “Lightning Field” more or less valuable than analytical cubism?

No matter how self-evident you think the answer may be, it’s still a good question–and “Spiral Jetta” is a very good book.

Anyone familiar with the war-related films made by the U.S. government during World War II–all of which are in the public domain and can be seen from time to time on TCM and the Documentary Channel–knows that the best of them are priceless cultural time capsules. In recent weeks I’ve watched “Resisting Enemy Interrogation,” “With the Marines at Tarawa,” the first part of Frank Capra’s “Why We Fight” and John Huston’s “The Battle of San Pietro” and “Let There Be Light.” I found them all to be both immensely interesting and (if this is the right way to put it) hugely entertaining. Thus I made a special point of requesting a review copy of Instructions for American Servicemen in France During World War II (University of Chicago, 72 pp., $12), a hard-bound facsimile edition of the pocket guide that was distributed to every American soldier in England just prior to D-Day. It is, like the training films those soldiers watched, a powerfully evocative souvenir of an America that no longer exists save in the deeply etched memories of the gray-headed men who long ago risked their lives to save the West.

A Pocket Guide to France (to call the book by its original title) is a concise, clearly written manual that crackles with no-nonsense idealism from the first page onward:

You are about to play a personal part in pushing the Germans out of France. Whatever part you take–rifleman, hospital orderly, mechanic, pilot, clerk, gunner, truck driver–you will be an essential factor in a great effort . . . The Allies are going to open up conquered France, re-establish the old Allied liberties and destroy the Nazi regime everywhere. Hitler asked for it.

Note the utter straightforwardness of that introduction. No moral relativism, no postmodern irony, no doubts of any kind whatsoever: World War II was worth fighting, period.

No less bracing is the Pocket Guide’s equally unequivocal assertion that “the French have what might be called a national character. . . . To them property represents the result of work. To destroy property means to belittle work.” Contemporary readers will doubtless smile at such simplifications, but I was struck by how deftly the anonymous author sketched the bourgeois virtues of prewar France:

If you are billeted with a French family, you will be in a more personal relation than if you were in barracks or a hotel. Remember that the man of the house may be a prisoner of the Nazis, along with a million and one half others like him. Treat the women in the house the way you want the women of your family treated by other men while you’re away….A whole French family would spend less on pleasure in a month than you would over a week-end. The French reputation for gayety was principally built on the civilized French way of doing things; by the French people’s good taste; by their interest in quality, not quantity; and by the lively energy of their minds. The French are intelligent, have mostly had a sensible education, without frills, are industrious, shrewd and frugal.

No doubt there were plenty of “ugly Americans” then, just as there are today, but any soldier who read A Pocket Guide to France and took it to heart would have come away with a realistic respect for the country he was fighting to liberate.

To be sure, one inevitably wonders in retrospect just how realistic it was. The Pocket Guide, as it happens, has strikingly little to say about the French collabos. That was the way we did things in World War II: allies were allies, enemies enemies. Perhaps it was naïve of us to think that way, but a world in which naïveté is no longer possible is one in which it is not very pleasant to live. Small wonder that Americans of my generation (I was born in 1956) continue to idealize the generation that brought us into the world. Our parents, after all, were capable of writing books like “A Pocket Guide to France”–and acting on them.

The novels of John P. Marquand are no closer to a revival than when I last wrote about them in COMMENTARY in 1987. To be sure, Marquand’s melancholy, satire-flecked studies of middle- and upper-middle-class American life were immeasurably popular in the 40’s and 50’s, but they are largely forgotten today, save for The Late George Apley, which won their author a Pulitzer Prize long, long ago. The Library of America shows no signs of taking an interest in Marquand’s oeuvre, and virtually all of his books have gone out of print. Fortunately, they sold so well when they were new that they’re easy to find on the used-book market, and I commend seven of them--Apley, H.M. Pulham, Esquire, Wickford Point, So Little Time, Point of No Return, Sincerely, Willis Wayde and Women and Thomas Harrow–to the attention of anyone in need of high-quality vacation reading.

It happens that I just got back from a visit to the small Missouri town where I grew up. A copy of Point of No Return, Marquand’s best novel, can still be found on the bookshelves of my mother’s house, and so I decided to read it again for the first time in a number of years. Once more I found myself caught up in the tale of Charles Gray, a small-town Massachusetts boy turned Manhattan banker who takes stock of his life to date and finds it inexplicably unsatisfying. I was so impressed that I looked up what I’d written about the book in “Justice to John P. Marquand,” my COMMENTARY essay, and found that I hadn’t changed my mind one bit:

Viewed from a technical standpoint, Point of No Return is quite impeccable. The satirical scenes are for the first time in Marquand’s work wholly integrated into the overall texture of the novel. The framing action has the economy of a short story, while the long central flashback is handled with cinematic fluidity. Moreover, Point of No Return is one of the few genuinely convincing treatments of the business world to appear in [American] fiction. Anyone who has traveled the long road that leads from a small-town childhood to an urban career will immediately appreciate the sympathetic accuracy with which Marquand has portrayed Charles Gray’s transformation into a polished banker.

That last sentence goes to the heart of the matter. When I first read Point of No Return, I was stuck by the precision with which it conveys what it feels like to partake of an experience that was and is central to American life. The Great Gatsby, to my mind the great American novel, tells a similar story more artfully, but also with a heightening touch of melodramatic lyricism that is necessarily less true to life. Not so the plainer-spoken Marquand. Writing in 1949, he suggested with uncanny exactitude much of what I felt when I came to New York as a young man some three decades later.

I especially like the scene in which Charles Gray arrives at Grand Central Station in 1930, having put his troubled past behind him to come looking for a job:

Outside the station, the streetcars and the traffic were already running in a steady stream under the ramp at Pershing Square. The shops on Forty-Second Street, the drugstores, the optical stores and haberdasheries, were already opening for the day. When he reached Fifth Avenue the lions in front of the Public Library looked white and cold and those old buses with the seats on top were moving in lines on the Avenue, but New York was sleepy still. New York had the appearance of having been up very late, and everyone on the streets had a patient, complaining look of having been routed too early out of bed. As he walked up the Avenue the city seemed to him as impersonal as it always did later and he loved that impersonality. Now that he had left his bag at the parcel room there was nothing to tie him. The tides of the city moved past him and he was part of the tide. His own problems and his own personality merged with it.

Point of No Return is by no means a great novel, nor was Marquand a great novelist, but I do think it says something about the American experience that few other writers have succeeded in putting on paper. It deserves to be remembered–and read.

• Thomas Quasthoff’s dark, velvety bass-baritone voice and penetrating intelligence have helped to make him the most talked-about interpreter of German art song since Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau was in his unforgettable prime. So have his deformities. Born in 1959, Quasthoff was one of the ten thousand European children whose pregnant mothers unknowingly took thalidomide, a drug that causes severe birth defects. As a result, he is four feet tall and has no arms, a disability that prevented him from pursuing an academic degree in music in Germany, where conservatory students, even singers, were then required to play the piano. But it didn’t stop him from studying law, taking private voice lessons, winning a major music competition, signing a recording contract by Deutsche Grammophon, and becoming world-famous.

A few years ago Quasthoff wrote a German-language autobiography that has now been updated and translated into English as The Voice: A Memoir (Pantheon, 256 pp., $24.95). It is, not at all surprisingly, a remarkable book, and not merely because of the remarkable story its author has to tell. Quasthoff is bristlingly tough-minded and apparently devoid of self-pity. Here, for instance, is how he describes what he saw in the bathroom mirror on the morning that he made his 1998 New York Philharmonic review:

“Crippled arms and legs, no laughing matter.” That’s how a tabloid paper once put it, but I see the situation differently. Here is a four-foot three-inch concert singer without knee joints, arms, or upper thighs, with only four fingers on the right hand and three on the left. He has a receding hairline, a blond pig head, and a few too many pounds around his hips, and he is in a superb mood. All he needs now is a shave.

How can one fail to be impressed by a man capable of writing a paragraph like that?

But The Voice would be worth reading even if Quasthoff were merely a first-rate singer outfitted the normal quota of limbs, for he is also a witty, sharp-eyed observer of the passing scene who has strong opinions and no inhibitions about sharing them with his readers. Nor are his opinions in any way predictable. Unlike many European artists, for instance, Quasthoff appreciates the “fundamentally democratic casualness” of the American classical-music scene:

What strikes me first is the complete absence of that solemn, respectful murmur that has been flowing around German stages since the days of Goethe and Schiller. Instead one enjoys the relaxed atmosphere, the matter-of-fact attitude with which the Americans have-yes, I will put it this way-made use of their cultural temples….Personally, I view Homo Americanus’s habit of valuing the classical arts no higher than other forms of intelligent entertainment-whether film or basketball-as a true achievement of civilization. It does not harm the quality and professional appreciation of artists; rather, the opposite is true.

This openness to the cultural implications of the democratic experience undoubtedly arises from the fact that Quasthoff is a passionate fan of all kinds of American music. Not only is The Voice salted with passing references to such unlikely figures as Robert Johnson, the Golden Gate Quartet, Miles Davis and John Fogarty, but Quasthoff’s most recent album for DGG, Watch What Happens, is a collection of English-language pop standards plausibly sung in a jazz-inflected style. One of the funniest anecdotes in the book is the tale of how Quasthoff auditioned for his first voice teacher by singing “Mack the Knife” and “Ave Maria,” then tossing off an imitation of Louis Armstrong “complete with a swinging throat catarrh.” I would have paid to hear that.

• One good book deserves another, and I’m sorry to say that Daniel J. Levitin, the author of This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession, has not quite lived up to expectations the second time around.

This Is Your Brain on Music, which I reviewed in this space last year, is that rarity of rarities, a lively and informative book written in a clear, straightforward style by a specialist in a field notable for its technical complexity. It was and still is the best introductory discussion of the psychology of musical perception and cognition ever to see print. But Levitin, a musician and record producer turned neuroscientist, has since succumbed to the urge to simplify and theorize, and The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature (Dutton, 333 pp., $25.95), while full of good things, doesn’t add up to a persuasive whole.

Part of the problem-most of it, really-is that The World in Six Songs makes a promise that it fails to keep. “I have come to believe,” Levitin writes, “that there are basically six kinds of songs, six ways that we use music in our lives, six broad categories of music. . . . They are songs of friendship, joy, comfort, knowledge, religion, and love.” This sentence is breathtakingly broad in its implications, and the book appears at first glance to be organized in such a way as to prove the point, though no more than a moment’s thought will leave most readers suspecting that the world of music is rather more complicated than Levitin suggests. What about songs of sorrow? Or story-driven ballads whose subject matter is not romantic love? Into which of his six pigeonholes would Levitin stuff, say, Irving Berlin’s “Top Hat, White Tie and Tails,” the Beatles’ “Paperback Writer,” or Donald Fagen’s “Morph the Cat”? And his decision to disregard instrumental music is so cavalier as to require far more justification than he offers:

The evolution of mind and music is easiest to follow in music that involves lyrics, because the meaning of the musical expression is less debatable. . . . Because music wasn’t recorded until about a hundred years ago, nor even accurately notated until a few hundred years before that, the historic record of music is substantially lyrics. For these two reasons, music with lyrics will be the predominant focus of The World in Six Songs.

That near-exclusive focus, alas, negates much of the explanatory power of The World in Six Songs, for it is impossible to take seriously any account of “the impact music has had on the course of our social history” that completely ignores the culture-shaping power of abstract instrumental music.

Fortunately, a closer look at Levitin’s book reveals that its purpose is not nearly so sweeping as the title suggests. In fact, the real subject matter of The World in Six Songs turns out to be “the evolution of music and brains over tens of thousands of years and across the six inhabited continents.” According to Levitin, music is “a core element of our identity as a species, an activity that paved the way for more complex behaviors such as language, large-scale cooperative undertakings, and the passing down of important information from one generation to the next.” Thus his six categories of song turn out not to be all-encompassing, but merely to represent the principal ways in which music “influenced the eveolution of human emotion, reason, and spirit.”

That I’ll buy, necessarily conjectural though it is. What I still find hard to accept is the loose organization of The World in Six Songs, which is less a well-structured book than a bagful of factual goodies into which the reader reaches more or less blindly to see which one comes out next. To be sure, I learned a lot from The World in Six Songs, but Levitin’s style is so discursive, anecdote-driven and gratuitously autobiographical (at one point he interrupts the narrative for an eight-page account of the development of his pacifist views) that I found much of the book needlessly difficult to follow. If you read it with patience, you’ll come away knowing more than when you started, but I wouldn’t blame you for giving up well before the halfway point.