California Literary Review

“Unlike journalism,” Mr. Hamill tells me, “fiction is about people one at a time.” And he seems determined to give readers a sample of every generation of New Yorkers since before the Revolution. [WSJ]

The ‘extraordiary’ diaries of an obscure Glasgow clerk who lived through the First World War and the Depression are set to become one of the publishing hits of the year. Tommy’s War contains the idiosyncratic musings of Thomas Cairns Livingstone, an otherwise unexceptional working class family man who set up home in the city’s Govanhill in 1913. Spanning some 20 years, Livingstone wrote his journal in a flowing copperplate, including passages in French and Latin, and illustrating it with quirky drawings. [Guardian]

In “Love and Consequences,” a critically acclaimed memoir published last week, Margaret B. Jones wrote about her life as a half-white, half-Native American girl growing up in South-Central Los Angeles as a foster child who went on to live a gang-banger’s violent life, wielding guns and running drugs for the Bloods. The problem is that none of it is true. [NYT]

Against this cynicism, however, stands the fact that the greatest statesmen — the ones who occupy the most cherished places in our historical memory — are the ones who were great writers. President Lincoln and Prime Minister Churchill, to take the most familiar examples, occupy a higher plane than the average president or prime minister, partly because of the events they participated in, but also because of the way they interpreted those events in their speeches and writings. Politics and language, they proved, do not have to be sullen strangers — or sworn enemies, as they are in the realm of propaganda that George Orwell wrote about. On the contrary, reading Lincoln’s second inaugural or Churchill’s 1940 speeches, it becomes clear that the political and the literary converge at the highest levels. [NY Sun]