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Fiction A witness to change THE LIGHTHORSEMEN: A Novel of Indian Territory By Jack Shakely 214 pp. Strider Nolan Reviewed by Bob Sanchez The Creek Indian Billy Mingo murders a man who he says really “needed killing.” The year is 1895, and the law catches up to him. Mingo surrenders to the Lighthorsemen, the Creek Nation’s law enforcement, and he admits his guilt. Creek judges sentence him to death, but according to custom they tell him to go home and be with his family for most of a year and “return on the first Saturday in August 1896 to be executed.” Mingo complies on the appointed day, and in the audience the journalist Edward Perryman watches the man’s death by firing squad. Perryman is deeply impressed by the murderer’s honor and bravery, and by the system of laws that command such respect even from a convicted criminal. Perryman decides to become part of this honorable Creek legal system, first by becoming a Lighthorseman and eventually a lawyer to protect his people. The execut...

Nonfiction Stoking our daydreams TEN MOVIES AT A TIME: A 350-Film Journey Through Hollywood and America 1930-1970 By John DiLeo 407 pp. Hansen Publishing Group Reviewed by Rebeca Schiller Back in the mid-1990s I lived with an economist who cursed his choice of careers. His dreamed of writing novels, but he had one problem: he wasn’t a natural-born storyteller. To find his muse, he decided to watch 100 films in one month. I went along with the idea, but mentioned we needed some viewing guidelines that covered genre, directors, country of origin and so on. Out of those 100 films, I watched 84 from the opening to the ending credits. That averaged out to three movies a day while he cheated and fast-forwarded the remaining 16 films. The outcome of that challenge? He’s still an economist, and I’m the writer. And that leads me to John DiLeo’s Ten Movies at a Time. DiLeo, the author of five other books on films, is a contributing book reviewer for the Washington Post , a weekly regular on...

--> Fiction Murder and sins of the flesh BABYLON BERLIN By Volkner Kutscher Translated from the German by Niall Sellar 423 pp. Picador Reviewed by Alan Goodman I like this book as much for the style of writing (even in translation, not an easy accomplishment) as for the development of the story and characters. This is a story that keeps you turning pages until you run out of pages, at which time you wonder how you’ll find another book that will keep you similarly engaged. Volkner Kutscher, the author, is a man who has apparently not bothered with the apocryphal shortest book in the world, “A History of German Humor.” Amidst the grimness of creating entertainment from the cruelest human activity one might imagine, Mr. Volkner manages to reveal a sense of humor – if not always for the characters themselves, then in a quite subtle manner for the march of human activity in general. Here is one such moment describing a pornography bust by the Berlin Vice Squad: The man was faintly r...

Nonfiction Tragedy, privation and death ISLAND OF THE BLUE FOXES: Disaster and Triumph on the World’s Greatest Scientific Expedition By Stephen R. Bown 346 pp. Da Capo Reviewed by David E. Hoekenga, M. D. Russian Tsar Peter the Great conceived the Great Northern Expedition that place from 1733 to 1743 and consumed amazing 18 percent of the total income of the entire Russian state.   Bown writes that the decade-long expedition spanned three continents, (and) in its geographic, cartographic and natural history accomplishments are on a par with (the combination of) James Cook’s famous voyages, the circumnavigations of Malaspina and Bougainville and Lewis and Clark’s cross-continental trek. Expedition leader and renowned Danish mariner Vitus Bering had offered a modest proposal that Empress Anna’s final instructions raised it to “grandiose proportions.”   Bering would lead “a huge troop of nearly three thousand scientists, secretaries, students, interpreters, artists, surveyors, n...