Summer Readings in the Penny Press!

Just as the last embers are flickering out on the latest Open Letters Monthly Summer Reading feature, The Weekly Standard has trundled out one of its own, and in addition to items one suspects were selected for non-literary reasons (right-wing screed-histories and the like), there were some gems:

Christoph Irmscher, who is himself the author of a really good recent book (Louis Agassiz: Creator of American Science), turns in a spirited and very enjoyable review of Alexander Wilson: The Scot Who Founded American Ornithology by Edward Burtt and William Davis – a review full of wonderful lines like:

If Wilson’s texts are stellar, his plates have their own, quieter beauty. The birds he drew and then, often, hand-colored seem to delight in their difference from humans.

There’s also an intelligent, perceptive review of Rick Atkinson’s magnificent The Guns at Last Light by Nelson Lankford, although something of The Weekly Standard‘s mildly lax editorial standards glares through in the fact that no editor at the magazine saw fit to delete Lankford’s bizarre, monstrous characterization of WWII as “Europe’s second bloody 20th-century civil war.”

Those lax editorial standards crop up again in the issue’s best piece, a look at that most unlikely of sub-genres, Christian hardboiled crime fiction. The piece is by Jon Breen, and it’s on balance very good, but we can take it as a given that, for instance, OLM‘s shark-tank editorial process would have caught this repetition: “But Bertrand may be the finest of the lot” followed shortly after by “While the three novels are of nearly equal merit, Nothing to Hide (2012) may be the best of the lot.” (A more attentive editor might also have questioned Edwin Yoder’s assertion that the first line of Pride and Prejudice “may be the most famous open sentence in novelistic history,” since A Tale of Two Cities will always win that contest).

Fortunately, there’s almost never a need to worry about editorial laxness over at the mighty TLS, which this time around, among its usual bounty, features a very solid review by Bruce Boucher of Daniel Savoy’s Venice from the Water:

In the most creative part of his book, Savoy suggests that the waterways of the lagoon both defined and enhanced the manner in which Venice presented itself to natives and visitors alike. Early navigational maps established sightlines to bell towers like the Campanile of San Marco, which could be seen several kilometres away and served as lighthouses as well as markers along a ceremonial route.

Savoy’s book is one of those curious items that seem to improve in the memory long after the reading, so the added attention from the TLS is encouraging. Only one more brutal month of official summer remains to flatten and charbroil Boston (with the only source of relief coming from repeated viewings of Disney’s “Teen Beach Movie”), but Summer Readings at least form seasonal highlights – and the majesty of the TLS is evergreen.