Why John Cheever, one of America’s finest short-story writers, is not as widely read today as he should be is perplexing. Are his stories too well rooted in a postwar America of growing affluence and suburban angst? To read him today is to encounter a world so precisely described, and emotion so finely calibrated, that it is the equivalent of sipping a gin martini, bracing and yet capable of warmth. Susan Cheever, herself a meticulous writer and the author of a previous memoir about her father, who died in 1982, has done a wonderful job linking his work to the events and influences around him. All the Men Wore Hats not only deepens our understanding of Cheever’s works but of Cheever himself and the daughter who ended up like him: a sympathetic yet critical observer of human frailty.
The siege of Leningrad, which lasted 900 days as Hitler’s army encircled the city and tried to kill and starve its 1.5 million residents, is a well-told tale, but rarely has it been recounted and brought so vividly to life as Sinclair McKay does here. McKay not only reminds us of the horrors and the bravery that were both so much in abundance then, but places those brutal years in the context of the city’s magical and dark history; St. Petersburg was founded by Peter the Great and centuries later became the birthplace of Vladimir Putin, who lost his own older brother to starvation during the siege and later became deputy mayor of the city that did so much to shape him. It may have been called Leningrad from 1924 to 1991, but St. Petersburg has always remained a symbol of what Peter the Great envisioned and what Putin believes in: Russia as a great power.
For writers, there is both special pleasure and deep dread in reading about plagiarism. One can deride those too lazy to write their own stuff and too doltish to pass off someone else’s work as their own. But what writer is also a tad bit concerned that some wonderful sentence they read a long time ago might pop up in their own work, only to be caught out by a computer program designed to uncover word theft? Roger Kreuz offers hundreds of examples of plagiarism, noting correctly that the term itself is problematic since it seems to cover everything from flawed footnotes by scholars to the outright stealing of melodies by songwriters (or “sampling,” as some would have it). Many of the stories will make you chuckle, such as the one about the Boston welder who, in 1949, tried to sell a poem by William Wordsworth to Good Housekeeping.
As Kreuz points out, social media has weaponized plagiarism for political purposes, but that purpose has been around for centuries. See: when Galileo unfairly accused another astronomer of taking credit for first sighting the moons of Jupiter in 1610. (Those were the days!) Strikingly Similar is that rare book: entertaining, comprehensive, and relevant. Don’t sleep on it! (Full credit to Henry VIII, who first suggested sleeping on a decision before it evolved into modern slang with a different meaning.)
Jim Kelly is the Books Editor at AIR MAIl. He can be reached at jkelly@airmail.news