Pierre Berton, War of 1812 **** 1/2

"Being a compendium of the bestselling The Invasion of Canada and Flames Across the Border," this book describes the War of 1812 from a Canadian point of view. (Pierre Berton is a popular Canadian author and historian.) We invaded Canada, don't you know?

Berton is an excellent storyteller who can interleave the big-picture strategy with vivid narrative detail. He uses only primary sources in his quest to "tell not only what happened but also what it was like;... to picture the war from the viewpoints of private soldiers and civilians as well as from those of generals and politicians."   The book includes plenty of excellent maps too. The battles start to seem repetitive in the later stages of the war, as the combatants took and retook the same ground. As Berton says, "In all this [fighting at Fort Erie] there is a weary sense of deja vu."

The fact that I knew next to nothing about the war helped maintain the suspense about the outcome of battles. The occasional reference to the war Britain was fighting in Europe at the time reminded me that the action here was happening at the same time as the action in War and Peace; and one of the incidents sparking the war happened on a ship (Leopard) formerly commanded by the fictional Jack Aubrey. These cross-references were fun to notice.

Entertaining and informative. A perfect choice from browsing in Toronto bookstores.

Richard Ford, Canada ***

The new novel from Richard Ford is quite different from the Bascombe trilogy, one of my all-time favorites. It's far more plot driven (as opposed to character driven), and takes place in the West rather than the suburban Northeast. The main theme of the book is how remarkable, life-changing events happen right in among the mundane events of everyday living, and can themselves be rather mundane.

I really enjoyed the first half of the book, Part I, during which the narrator's mismatched but ordinary-seeming parents -- a former Army officer and a somewhat bohemian Jew -- get arrested for robbing a bank. The details of life for a 15-year-old boy in Great Falls, Montana in 1960 are vivid, and his confusion about how to square the parents he knew with the fact that they robbed a bank seems genuine. He remains a bit of a cipher as a character, but his observations are interesting.

The second half of the book was less successful. Our narrator is taken to a small town in Saskatchewan and put under the care of a mysterious hotel owner. The descriptions of the place remain solid, but I found the narrative and characters less interesting than in the first half.

Christopher Hayes, Twilight of the Elites ** 1/2

This book, whose subtitle is America After Meritocracy, purports to show that our current crisis of public confidence results from the failure of meritocracy. Meritocratic thinking is fundamental to the American creed, but the disasters of the past decade -- the financial crisis, the war in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, and so on -- demonstrate the bankruptcy of the approach.

That's what the author says the book is about, but he doesn't question the fundamental correctness of a meritocracy. He points out how difficult it is to assess merit in real life situations and illustrates the problems that come from the single-minded pursuit of limited goals, but his suggested solutions are the traditional liberal ones: progressive taxation, class solidarity, and government regulation.

Hayes' prose gets a bit overheated when he describes the crises, so that it's easy to lose track of his point. Ultimately, he attributes our lack of trust in social institutions to two factors: the unprecedented inequality in modern America and the inherently different interests of the elite and the rest of us. The role of meritocracy in  his analysis is that its individualistic bias sanctions the inequality and that people welcomed into the elite naturally take on the interests of the elite class. It seems to me that these issues arise regardless of the method used to choose the governing class, so that it's not a strike against meritocracy.

Zachary Mason, The Lost Books of the Odyssey **

I really like the idea of a book consisting of "alternative episodes, fragments, and revisions" of Homer's Odyssey, apocrypha if you will. But I was disappointed with Mason's execution of the idea.

First of all, the stories all have a modern feel to them with their meta-textual tricks and character psychology. At best they are contemporary understandings of the original, not alternative versions of the story. Mason also travels freely beyond the Odyssey, with some stories relating to the Illiad, the Agamemmon stories, and even Greek myths more generally. Finally, and most damaging, the stories just weren't that interesting. They reminded me of the book Sum: Forty Tales from the afterlives: very short vignettes, intriguing subject matter, only intermittently enjoyable.

Norman Rush, Mortals *****

Mortals tells the story of Ray Finch, a Milton scholar teaching at a secondary school in Botswana. His secondary job as a contract CIA agent puts him in touch with African politics, and his uxorious relationship with his possibly unfaithful wife Iris has him obsessing about love and marriage.

The things I love about this book are the things that many people would hate about it:

• The hero is an insecure, self-involved academic who overthinks and filters his experiences through a gauze of literary references.
• His mind keeps returning to his suspicions about his wife even during the life-threatening action in the second half of the book.

These two aspects of Ray's personality can make him an unpleasant character to be around, and they make the story move slowly even when bullets are flying. But the quality of the writing and Rush's psychological insights kept me engrossed and feeling painful empathy with Ray. (I've admitted before that I tend to like obsessed and overly analytical narrators.)

Probably my favorite section of the book comes when the political and intimate story lines collide. Ray has been taken prisoner by a band of mercenaries. After he has been tortured for several days, his captors toss another prisoner into his cell: the man he suspects his wife of sleeping with. Despite the urgency of their situation, Ray feels that he has to confront the man and get him to admit to the adultery. But he can't manage to come right out and ask; he spends pages trying a variety of circumlocutions while the other man tries to focus on the situation at hand. As a reader you want them to get on with the story, but I felt the building suspense as Ray circled ever closer to getting his answer.

R.J. Smith, The One: The Life and Music of James Brown ** 1/2

I was slightly disappointed with this biography of the Godfather of Soul. It touches on the many facets of James Brown -- music, dancing, bandleader, cultural icon, womanizer -- but it failed to make him into a solid three-dimensional character. I often felt like I was reading a collection of anecdotes about Brown, or the fleshed-out notes for a biography, rather than a "definitive" biography.

Smith gives especially short shrift to Brown's relationships with women. Several times we learn that Brown gets married, but his wives disappear from the story soon afterword. The same comment applies to many of his band members; they never develop the personalities they surely had.

Donald Ray Pollock, The Devil All the Time ***

The Devil All the Time has almost everything it needs to be a cracking good read: strange backwoods characters who show flashes of unexpected humanity, a plot riddled with violence and religion, and fine writing that straddles the line between hard-boiled and picturesque. (I also really like the physical feel of the Anchor Books paperback -- its heft, its font size, and so on.) However, the pieces don't fit together into anything bigger. The characters are well drawn but never develop; the narrative resolves without any build-up of complications or thematic resonance. The story kept me engaged throughout, but I kept hoping for something more.