Not an acquaintance or a fair-weather companion, but a real friend, someone who truly knows and loves you, someone who will give you a book that you can’t help but love.
Happily, that’s happened to me twice this holiday season. The first book came from my old friend Rick Lewis. Barry Levinson — yeah, screen writer and director of “The Perfect Storm,” “Avalon,” “Diner” — has written a novel.
“Sixty-Six” (Hollywood Books. 271 pages. $24) is about life in Baltimore during the troubled, transitioning mid-’60s. And since I grew up outside that sad city during those days, this novel sure enough strikes home.
Last winter I was driving through Baltimore, passed the row houses with their marble steps and the city’s wintry parks with their leafless sycamores and frozen fountains, when I happened upon three young men working on an automobile.
All of them were wearing blue stocking caps and pea jackets and they were stomping their feet on the asphalt to keep warm. Little clouds of vapor drifted from their mouths as they talked and examined a fuel pump they had taken off the engine. Had I awaked from a long sleep to discover these guys working on the car, I would have known exactly where I was — Baltimore.
That’s the way this book works for me — which isn’t to say it’s perfect by any means. At times the narrative is anecdotal and subliminally preachy. But the novel captures a time and place with great authenticity.
Bobby Shine narrates as his friends Neil, Ben, Turko, and Eggy struggle through pratfalls of coming of age, a too often handled theme in our literature. There are drugs and broken marriages and Vietnam and civil rights — all the usual stuff you’d expect from a boomer period piece.
What’s not here, however, are strongly evolved characters. When I finished the novel, I felt as if I were hanging out with my high school friends — another bunch of palookas who remain unrealized in memory — talking the usual trash.
Still, “Sixty-Six” is a warm and readable novel, and Rick was generous to pass it on to me. It cheered me up to read it.
My buddy Danny Infantino knows I dig nautical themes, and he passed along David Cordingly’s “The Billy Ruffian: The Bellerophone and the Downfall of Napoleon” (Bloomsbury. 355 pages including notes and index. $25.95).
Billy Ruffian is a sailors’ corruption of “Belleropone,” the name of a 74-gun British ship-of-the-line that fought in the three greatest sea battles of the Napoleonic era — the Glorious First of June, the Battle of the Nile, and Trafalgar.
Cordingly’s beautifully written account follows the ship from its conception to its sad end — struck from the naval list, dismasted and disarmed to serve out her days as a decaying prison ship.
What will keep readers enthralled are the battle descriptions. Serving under Nelson, the Ruffian took on the French flagship L’Orient and blasted her out of the water despite the fact that the French ship carried 120 heavier guns. L’Orient caught fire and her magazines exploded, producing one the best remembered detonation in naval history.
The Billy Ruffian’s proudest moment came after the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, when Napoleon was cornered in La Rochelle and surrendered to the captain of the ship that had thumped the French fleet at every outing.
Cordingly uses personal correspondence, ships’ logs, and all available documentation to pull together this fascinating naval history. It’s darn difficult to put down. In fact, this book deserved a second reading — and maybe a third. Thanks Danny.
Happy holidays to all of you.
Stephen Smith is a professor of English at Sandhills Community College. He can be reached at travisses@hotmail.com.
