Madison Taylor

“Letters: Kurt Vonnegut” Edited by Dan Wakefield; Delacorte Press; 436 pages.

 Fiction only hides so much.

It is the curse, or blessing, of an author that bits and pieces of a life are revealed in every book or short story. Remnants can be stitched together like a patchwork quilt over time to present something of a disjointed portrait of the person behind the words.

But it’s far from complete.

Collected personal writing, though, fills in those gaping holes. Correspondence between an author and family friends, editors, contemporaries and institutions open windows into the emotional turmoil, relationships, frustrations and agitations that can either deprive or drive an author’s spirit. It’s autobiography, yet not. It’s a diary, but not really. It is many parts piled into a loosely configured whole.

“Letters: Kurt Vonnegut” is illustrative. This new collection of personal letters from the late novelist Kurt Vonnegut Jr. is a sometimes startling, often hilarious and sometimes sad examination of an artist over more than five decades of his life. The term artist applies, because almost certainly Vonnegut, an Indiana native who lived most of his adult years in Massachusetts and New York, viewed himself that way — though he would be loathe to make such a bold admission himself.

It leaks through, though, in hundreds of letters he wrote over the years to a variety of people, including more than a few schools or communities bent on banning his sometimes controversial books over the years. He scolds such transgressors with pithy and piercing observations and a tutorial about the First Amendment and American experience from the perspective of a World War II veteran and POW survivor who believes he fought in one of the only justified wars in history.

Far from the stereotypical tortured artist, Vonnegut’s letters largely reveal a writer frustrated by his lack of early success largely because he fully expected it to happen.

Indeed, the duality of an artist at work is the alternating sense of pending failure followed by moments of ego-driven assurance. In one letter to an editor, Vonnegut might castigate himself for his writing struggles on a particular day and in the next proclaim the book of a contemporary far less memorable or remarkable than one of his own.

Such moments are why an author’s correspondences are so critical in an overall assessment by scholars and fans. Dan Wakefield, an Indiana native who attended Vonnegut’s old high school, is perhaps the perfect person for the job. An author of both fiction and non-fiction, Wakefield first met Vonnegut in 1963 before Vonnegut gained wide fame for an impressive list of novels, including “Slaughterhouse-Five,” “Breakfast of Champions,” “Cat’s Cradle” and “Mother Night.” Many are considered classic American literature. Most and other works are taught on college campuses. Wakefield was a friend of Vonnegut and his family until the author’s death in 2007 at age 82.

Vonnegut’s fiction is of singular importance because it encompasses the gamut of American culture from World War II to the millennium. Vonnegut boldly, satirically and often whimsically, challenged readers and popular convention by tackling the most significant, subjects of his time: War, politics, communism, unions, political labeling, Watergate, corruption, religion, fanaticism and corporate America. He considered himself a freethinker and bid others to do the same.

Vonnegut eschewed email and computer technology — surprising for someone who so often wrote of the future and was at times classified incorrectly as a science fiction writer. In fact, he writes of what he called “genreism” and considered it the racism of the literary world. His letters were mainly written on a manual typewriter and as a member of the Greatest Generation, he was a loyal correspondent to friends and colleagues. The result is an open window into Vonnegut’s world. What’s revealed, then, isn’t always neat and tidy.

Some of his personal turmoils are heartbreaking. Readers can detect the growing distance between Vonnegut and his first wife, a relationship that ends in a divorce that impacted their three children in a variety of ways.  His family correspondences are always heartfelt. He deals with the divorce from his first wife in frank but loving language as he tries to mend fences or explain his actions to his children and the three additinal kids the couple also raised. It had to be a difficult personal period, but readers only get a one-way glimpse. He often responds to letters that aren’t available for publication. His second marriage ends in a loveless deadlock between two people who won’t divorce or leave each other. Still, Vonnegut continued to be a productive writer and painter over the last 20 yaers of his life

 Such insights are valuable for those wishing to assess the life an author, much more than the view of a third-party biographer who is often drawing conclusions. Indeed, if anything will be lost to future generations it will be such physical correspondence. Generations have kept letters, but is email collected in the same way?

What Vonnegut’s letters do lack is much personal observation about the writing process itself. Readers looking for insight into why Vonnegut illustrated “Breakfast of Champions” or how he developed the religion, Bokonism in “Cat’s Cradle” will be disappointed. “Slaughterhouse-Five” gets the most treatment in this way, and still there isn’t much of it.

And there is little of consequence in terms of correspondence between Vonnegut and those he influenced or rivaled. He speaks in passing of Norman Mailer, the post-World War II novelist who, like Vonnegut, wrote his most significant work (“The Naked and the Dead”) about his experiences in World War II but there is nothing in writing that passes between them. John Irving, who was a student of Vonnegut’s in the famed Iowa University writers program and later a neighbor, is mentioned favorably, but nothing remarkable is exposed.

Still, “Letters” provides an honest look at Vonnegut’s life with strengths and weaknesses there for all to see. And perhaps most importantly, readers are given a chance to enjoy his words in ways they were never able to before.

Hi-ho.

“They Eat Puppies Don’t They?”; Christopher Buckley; Twelve, Hachette Book Group, 2012; 334 pages

Only Christopher Buckley could create an organization calling itself the Institute for Continuing Conflict and not make it seem like some throwaway one-liner suitable for the 140-characters or less social media crowd.

No Buckley, the author of 14 books, including some of the finest, most creative and gut-busting American satire written in recent times, always has larger issues at hand and no shortage of ready targets. Government, politics, the media and culture are unwitting accomplices for Buckley who uses those devices with a deft comedic hand to take down any number of society’s cornerstone institutions or beliefs. Indeed, every word Buckley writes seems to move toward two larger goals: Provoking laughter and no small amount of thinking.

It’s a formula Buckley used to carve up lobbyists, media shills, special interest groups, medicine and tobacco companies in the 1994 novel that gained him widespread public attention, “Thank you for Smoking.” Since then, the former speechwriter for President George H.W. Bush and the son of the late conservative commentator, writer and icon William F. Buckley has taken on everything from the State Department to UFOs.

His latest is the prov0catively titled “They Eat Puppies Don’t They?”. It follows in the grand tradition of previous Buckley satires but most especially “Thank you for Smoking.” Once more Buckley takes aim at soulless lobbyists and the corporations or organizations that keep them in business. Along the way, though, the scattershots ricochet through the military industrial complex, Congress, TV pundits, equestrians, the Dalai Lama, China, communism, foreign policy, marital infidelity, spies, presidential advisers and Civil War re-enactors.

It’s an interesting and rich stew that is perhaps in a larger sense is also a lampoon of lifestyles from northern Virginia to southern Maryland.

“They Eat Puppies Don’t They?” is centered upon the world of Walter “Bird” McIntyre, a public relations adviser and lobbyist who specializes in helping defense contractors navigate through the congressional political minefield. But the Alabama-based company now paying his salary wants McIntyre to take on a more secretive and larger assignment — one that will ensure Washington politicians won’t soon decide to trim the defense budget.

McIntyre’s new duties put him in the path of a curvy conservative pundit and war-monger who makes a living appearing on cable news shows like “Hardball.” Together they scheme to keep America’s combat fires burning by a not-so-subtle campaign to resurrect public sentiment against an old national enemy.

Meanwhile McIntyre, perhaps the worst unpublished spy novelist of all time — encounters trouble at home from his high society spouse, who has her heart set on being a member of a U.S. equestrian team, no matter the cost.

Buckley spins an engaging and rollicking tale that features petty infighting among Chinese leaders, bumbling back-channel negotiating; a sinister plot to sway public opinion on two continents and presidents in two nations who are perhaps more on the ball than their critics would like to believe.

Or are they?

That is indeed the genius in Buckley’s satire. He writes of a world seemingly run amok but in which all things seem to work out in the end — for the moment anyway.

The Wind through the Keyhole; by Stephen King; Scribner, 2012; 307 pages.

“The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.” With that simple line, Stephen King launched a small spare novel called “The Gunslinger.” Originally published as a magazine serial, it was  equal parts fantasy and Sergio Leone spaghetti western.

Only later did it become a genre-bending publishing phenomenon for a writer who has broken nearly every literary rule in becoming arguably the most popular American author of the past century. Unlike other novelists, King doesn’t simply write the occasional book in hopes of creating a bestseller. He manufactures them in clumps. Along the way he has set new boundaries for the book-buying marketplace and defied the skepticism of those who believe horror fiction — or its writers — shouldn’t be taken seriously.

Nowhere is this truer than in the string of books King calls the “Dark Tower “series. Starting with “The Gunslinger” in 1982, King began to paw at the idea of multiple worlds churning simultaneously with occasional intersecting portals. It’s a concept that not only drives that series but dozens of his other works as well. It’s instructive to note that beyond the seven books in what can now be called the original Dark Tower series, King lists 14 other novels or short story collections as Dark Tower-related.

Most, though, thought the series about an oddly familiar world that has “moved on” ended in 2004 with a flurry and something of an unsatisfying thud. The final three books in the Dark Tower series were published in a dizzying two-year period. There was a six-year lull between Book Four: “Wizard and Glass” and Book Five: “Wolves of the Calla” during which King was seriously injured (and nearly killed) when struck by a car while walking. It’s logical to assume that, facing his own mortality, King rushed to ensure the series he considered to be his epic creation was completed.

Not so fast.

In 2009 King announced there would be a new chapter in the Dark Tower series — “The Wind through the Keyhole” — a story that takes place somewhere between Books 4 and 5 but has no real impact to speak of on the already published ending. It’s a tale King assures his audience in the book’s preface that can stand alone for those unfamiliar with the exploits of Roland Deschain, the last gunslinger and his quest to reach the Dark Tower.

While that assertion is open to debate, there’s little doubt that King finds himself on solid ground in Roland’s very odd world, a place where monsters still exist, magic remains a scary yet lifesaving force and rules of polite society — that vague time centuries ago when formidable technology obviously existed — no longer apply. It’s a place of legend, fantasy, eastern philosophies, horror and science fiction. It’s a world of Tolkien and of Arthurian legend. In many ways it’s a kaleidoscopic patchwork quilt of memes and tall tales that are alternately inspiring, engaging or just plain silly.

“The Wind through the Keyhole” picks up Roland and his party — people of another more modern and recognizable America drawn into Roland’s world in earlier installments of the series to aid the gunslinger on his quest. But the story quickly detours into a tale from Roland’s past — always rich territory.

That’s the good news.

The Dark Tower series is usually at its best when King delves into Roland’s past and the often violent and murky events that placed him on this path. “The Wind through the Keyhole” delivers two stories — essentially a story within a story within a story. One is about a dangerous assignment Roland undertakes as a young gunslinger to seek and slay a shape-shifting murderer. The other is a tale people from Roland’s world spread about a boy who must rise to meet unspeakable challenges under the harshest circumstances.

Yes even the cautionary fables in Roland’s world are larger and more hazardous. Indeed, that’s true of nearly everything else as well. Storms aren’t merely weather events that quickly pass through — they eradicate entire species. Old machines aren’t simply landfill fodder — they’re laced with dark, sinister  forces.

The strength of “The Wind through the Keyhole” is that it most resembles “The Gunslinger,” that straight-forward first book penned before the series became like a tangled web of intersecting plots buried under the vast weight of Dark Tower mythology.

King has indicated he intends to revisit the series. He wants to make additions and perhaps delete some of the more laughable portions. Not often in literary history have authors had the ability or clout to do so. If King does take on this chore — a personal quest as it were — one or two additions like this one wouldn’t be a bad idea.

Over Time: My Life as a Sportswriter; by Frank Deford; Atlantic Monthly Press, 2012; 351 pages.

Reading the work of Frank Deford has always been about cold shivers — those jaw-dropping moments of insight or poetry of language so surprising, delightful or meaningful that reactions transcend thought into a physical tingle.

Deford is on the short list of the nation’s most notable sports magazine writers and is almost certainly among the best of his generation across all categories. To call him merely a sportswriter, his area of specialty for the lion’s share of his remarkable career, does him a serious injustice. It’s true that much of his work involves sports-related subjects — appropriate for a writer who was among those who turned Sports Illustrated from a money-losing venture focused on general activities into an iconic literary chronicle of competitions and competitors. But Deford has always managed to tell a larger human story about his myriad subjects from the delightful (Arthur Ashe), the difficult (Bobby Knight) and the ridiculous (Jimmy Connors).

He is equal parts wordsmith and psychologist; craftsman and historian; observer and interviewer. And always, in a way, a participant.

So why would his memoir be any different?

Thankfully, it’s not. Deford, the author of 17 books, including 10 works of fiction, crafts the latest about perhaps his most difficult subject to date — himself. Oddly — and again, thankfully — he does not choose the usual route for his memoir, “Over Time: My Life as a Sportswriter.” There is no “I was born in the house that my father built” intro here. Deford takes a piecemeal — almost scrapbook — approach to telling the story of his sports writing career. Along the way, he adds a dab or two about his Baltimore upbringing to move the story full circle. He just takes a different route in getting there.

It’s a welcome technique. Too often memoirs become bogged down in inconsequential childhood tales or amateur analysis of family members or third parties. Here Deford begins his story at Princeton University where he’s trying to determine what will be the next phase of his life. It’s a great first snippet in a book laced with them. Each chapter is a short anecdotal bite from Deford’s life. It follows no chronological pattern. Deford has essentially created a patchwork quilt of his sports writing life with words.

Nothing is covered in excruciating detail and again, that’s a plus. The nuggets Deford does provide are insightful and significant. He doesn’t dwell, for example, upon the death of his daughter Alexandra to cystic fibrosis — a story he wrote about poignantly in the book “Alex: The Life of a Child.” But he does recall a meaningful episode with the famous and now deceased oddsmaker and TV football analyst Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder, who lost two children to the same disease.

This focus on relationships, however brief, keeps the narrative lively and entertaining. As one of the first writers to cover professional basketball extensively, Deford met and spent time with many of the luminaries of that time from Elgin Baylor to Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain. The stories of how the NBA moved from barnstorming league to cult status to global phenomenon unfolds through Deford’s eyes and via his interactions with those directly involved.

Because he spent much of his career at Sports Illustrated, Deford covers a lot of territory there, sharing memories of legendary editor Andre Laguerre and how the magazine built an audience when there basically was none. He stays away from kiss and tell stories about other writers. Only Dan Jenkins (the best at being a writer for Sports Illustrated) and Mark Kram get more than a casual mention.

To his credit, Deford does not shy away from editorial missteps either. A chapter is devoted to The National, a daily newspaper launched in 1990 devoted solely to the coverage of sports. Deford was the first and only editor of The National, an ambitious publication never before produced in America. He lured the best writers from across the nation to join his staff. But it closed after a little more than a year with $150 million in losses. High costs and delivery issues doomed it.

For journalists in particular this business of memoir-writing is a tricky path. Too often reporters and editors use this forum to hold forth on the idea that journalism isn’t what it used to be in the grand old days or bemoan the changing habits of younger writers or readers. Deford deftly avoids this trap. While his story is also a history of reporting (he pays much respect to forbearers like Grantland Rice and Ring Lardner), Deford chooses not to dwell on what he doesn’t like about the current state of the business. He makes it clear that certainly how news or sports is presented has evolved over time but chooses not to lambaste those differences, merely point them out. ESPN, after all, is too easy a mark for a writer of Deford’s ability.

The triumph of “Over Time” is that it chronicles an era when sports reporting grew not only in quantity but quality and importance. Deford was and still is a leader in this field. “Over Time” tells readers why.

I actually read this some time ago but didn’t feel that any review I might write could do the book justice. I was a little daunted to say the least. One of the more impressive books I’ve read in a long time.  Here goes anyway.

The Art of Fielding; by Chad Harbach, 512 pages, Hachette Book Group, 2011.

For Henry Skrimshander, a chance to play Major League baseball is only a few slick plays from his grasp. It’s what the small college shortstop has worked tirelessly for, what he’s dreamed about. He’s raised catching the ground ball and firing to first base into an epic poem. And in the process lifted a moribund collegiate baseball program to heights no one could have imagined.

And then …

This is the story at the heart of Chad Harbach’s astonishing first novel, “The Art of Fielding.” But of course, it’s not really about just that. Baseball more than any other athletic endeavor inspires so much more from its writers. Harbach’s tale takes a circuitous and marvelously written route to finally land upon themes all share: Longing, desperation and finally, a sense of belonging. A need in every way, to reach home.

In the tradition of the finest baseball novelists like Thomas Harris (“The Southpaw” “Bang the Drum Slowly”) and W.P. Kinsella (“Shoeless Joe,” “The Iowa Baseball Confederacy”), Harbach uses the game  to mine more deeply into what makes us all human. And like the fiction of John Irving there is a sense of quirky detachment at play. It creates an otherworldly quality that sharply defines these charming characters into three-dimensional people struggling for purchase in a world where nothing seems to exactly fit — including the characters themselves.

Harbach, a Wisconsin native educated at Harvard and the University of Virginia, sets “The Art of Fielding” at fictional Westish College, a tiny school in “the baseball glove that is Wisconsin.” Nicknamed the Harpooners, the school’s claim to fame is that Herman Melville might have stopped there once. It has a decent academic reputation owing to well-respected college president Guert Affenlight —  but almost no history of success in athletics. That is, until Mike Schwartz arrives on campus.

It is Schwartz, the kid with a hardscrabble past in Chicago and bereft of family, who sees Skrimshander at an American Legion baseball tournament and becomes enchanted and then transfixed by the scrawny teen’s prowess with a glove at shortstop. He recruits him to Westish to join the team of baseballing Harpooners.

From there, Schwartz makes it his goal to train Henry into a player worthy of playing baseball at the highest level and at the same time guide the Harpooners to previously unattainable heights. It’s a fixation that becomes an almost unbearable emotional burden that finally takes a physical toll in an unexpected way on Skrimshander while wrecking the once solid psyche of Schwartz — team captain in both baseball and football and de facto big man on this tiny campus.

Harbach interweaves several intriguing story lines that thread seemlessly. Affenlight not only has to handle the return of his daughter after a failed marriage but also his own yearning that leads to a relationship that’s taboo on many levels. He becomes recklessly bromantically involved with a student, a path that’s fraught with deep and yawning pits.

The relationships between Schwartz and Skrimshander; Affenlgiht and the student become central features in a book alive with metaphors. In fact, Skrimshander keeps a tattered copy of a book written by his baseball hero, the great but fictional St. Louis Cardinals shortstop Aparicio Rodriguez. It offers insights about the job of an infielder such as “The shortstop is the source of stillness in the center of the defense. He projects this stillness and his teammates respond” The name of the fictional book? “The Art of Fielding,.”

Similarly great passages and insights emerge from nearly every page. Harbach writes with relentless eloquence and never allows the tale to become bogged down in dead-end plot lines. Delightful, thoughtful and profoundly sad surprises lurk within each chapter.

“The Art of Fielding” is an ambitious book about what some might think a trivial subject. But like the most noteworthy fiction generated around baseball its lofty goals have a way of catching readers by surprise. And unlike nearly all works of fiction it never disappoints.

‘The Family Corleone’; by Ed Falco, based on a screenplay by Mario Puzo; Grand Central Publishing, 2012; 436 pages.

It would be almost impossible to understate the influence of Mario Puzo on generations of American readers, authors, filmgoers and filmmakers. His original novel “The Godfather,” published in 1969, sold more than 21 million copies and spent 67 weeks on the bestseller list before spawning two films that have transcended into the tapestry of American popular culture.

The memorable quotes morphed into catchphrases used for decades, speak to this at a shout. “I’ll make him an offer he don’t refuse”; “Leave the gun, take the canolis”: “It’s not personal, it’s strictly business”; and “Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes” are spoken in some form and in some way, almost every day. Cable TV almost could not exist without “The Godfather,” “The Godfather II” and the lamentable and sad “Godfather III” to play almost every weekend.

Perhaps no novel has had such a wide impact. Puzo’s book is a gangland “Gone with the Wind” only in this case Tara is a guarded compound in Long Island, N.Y. made impregnable to attack. Along the way it spawned some of the most colorful and unforgettable characters in literary and film history.

But perhaps most significantly, Puzo’s novel opened a previously locked door in American literature regarding violence and sex. This sprawling story of Italians and organized crime was blunt in its telling of a brutal world where family has multiple meanings, trust is at a premium and death is a way of life. What can be said about a code of conduct in which placing the decapitated head of a horse in a man’s bed just to change his mind is the cost of doing business?

Puzo’s saga of Vito Corleone — immigrant child chased out of Sicily under a threat of death who would one day be the top crime boss in America — is compelling and disturbing on too many levels to count. But perhaps most importantly is how it’s told in a fashion that justifies these nefarious activities as somehow honorable to protect a sense of family.

Indeed, it’s strictly business.

Along the way, “The Godfather” paved the way for dozens of imitators and essentially gave filmmakers Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese their careers.  Puzo, for his part, never really matched this brilliance again. He continued to write, from his own walled-off  mansion in Long Island (there’s irony and karma at work). He even cobbled together another screenplay in the Corleone story before his death in 1999.

That’s where Ed Falco comes in.

Falco, a professor at Virginia Tech, took on the job of turning Puzo’s screenplay into a novel that became the newly released, ”The Family Corleone.” It’s a prequel — something that seems to be cropping up more frequently in a modern world bereft of new ideas. This one looks at the Corleones in 1933 — as prohibition is about to end and every crime boss in America is seeking to stake out territory as a means of self-preservation in changing business times. Yes, these guys are CEOs, only they deploy men in fedoras packing choppers.

The question arises: Is there indeed more for Falco to tell in this well-worn family story?

“The Family Corleone” begins as the Depression is coming to an end. Crime boss Giuseppe Mariposa is on a mission to consolidate all the small gang operations under his growing empire. Freelancers like the fearsome Luca Brasi as well as a gang of Irish hoodlums, keep getting in the way. Vito Corleone with capos Peter Clemenza and Sal Tessio are meanwhile plotting a strategy to ensure the future  while also building that compound in Long Island.

Real family matters become a concern as Vito’s son Santino (Sonny) grows into manhood but eschews his father’s advice to take on legitimate work. Adopted son Tom Hagen is in law school while Fredo, Michael and Connie are mere babes.

Falco, who has written three novels and four collections of stories, has rich material to be sure. And he’s done a credible job manufacturing an engaging tale about a previously unexplored area of the Corleone mythology. He keeps the characters true to the original vision by Puzo. None utters a false note. The period detail and language are accurate — right down to a glossary of Italian terms placed at the novel’s end for quick reference. Just the material on Luca Brasi alone is entertaining and frightening. He was perhaps the most memorable character no one knew anything about from previous works.

There are a couple of odd and confusing plot turns that seem out of place on the Corleone timeline. One is perhaps essential to telling this section of the story but may mystify fans of the original novel and movies. For the most part, Falco deserves credit for filling in the few gaps in the original novel. Puzo didn’t leave many holes to fill in “The Godfather  but for fans of the book and films “The Family Corleone” takes care of many.

So is there more story to tell? Overall, yes. And for fans of the book and films “The Family Corleone” is probably a must read.

‘The Night Train’; by Clyde Edgerton; Little Brown; 211 pages; $23.99.

Think of the literary work of author Clyde Edgerton as a pone of cornbread. Each book he’s written represents a small slice of the North Carolina life he knows so well. Every butter-layered piece tells a small but filling tale ready for quick and delightful consumption.

It’s rich storytelling, which is perhaps why each piece is so small. The simply offered bites unveil a range of issues that readers can chew upon. Via Edgerton readers have explored piety vs. moral ambiguity; tradition vs.  prosperity; or the idea of absolute right balanced against unspeakable wrong. In Edgerton’s world, more than one idea is always in play.

The matters of race relations and hope are where Edgerton rests in his latest novel, “The Night Train,” a worthy follow to “The Bible Salesman,” “Lunch at the Piccadilly,” “Raney,” and perhaps his most well known book, “Walking Across Egypt.” Each entry in the Edgerton catalog tells the larger story of a southern — and North Carolina — way of life that no longer exists  in a world taken over by easy transportation, mass communications, chain retailers and fast food restaurants.

His tales are those of country folks who lead uncomplicated lives but who still manage to find themselves in complex moral situations. How they reason and emerge from it all provides the humor for which Edgerton is so well known.

But while Edgerton writes of a South irretrievably lost, it’s one Tar Heels still know well. It’s a South that is recalled with longing and regret; with love and guilt. It’s a time when people stayed close to home, watched TV together and ate from the garden, usually at the same time every day — but one complicated by church allegiances, Christian confusion and longtime albeit unexplainable biases.

That’s the fine line Edgerton, who now lives in Wilmington, always walks. It takes tremendous skill to do so without bombast, bluster or preachery. Edgerton, as always, refrains from all three. Instead, he conjures a slowly boiling story that will catch readers by surprise page after page.

“The Night Train” is set in fictional Starke, North Carolina. The year is 1963. Two teenagers — one black, one white — are just starting to understand how they fit into the world and what if anything, the future might hold. They understand the racial divide common in the early 1960s South, enforced by parents and friends. The rules and boundaries are clear.

Acceptance is another question.

As the rise in prominence of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King plays quietly in the background, music by James Brown and Thelonious Monk dominates the foreground.

Brown’s landmark “Live at the Apollo” album is the ironic heart of Edgerton’s coming-of-age story. The piano wizardry of Monk, a jazz legend, provides the soul. Taken together, these two iconic American artists create the notion of music as a unifying force and source of belief that better times are ahead. Brown, of South Carolina and Monk, of North Carolina, had to leave the rural South in order to find fame and acceptance at clubs and venues in New York and other metropolitan areas.

A recognizable but not stereotypical cast is constructed around the music. Edgerton doesn’t so much create vivid characters but instead offers familiar vessels that do the work of advancing the narrative. While no single figure in “The Night Train” is sharply drawn, southern readers will know every single one.

At 210 pages, “The Night Train” is a quick read but a wholly nourishing one. And more than a few readers might want to go back for seconds.

‘Those Guys have all the Fun: Inside the World of ESPN”; By Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller; Little-Brown; 2011; 748 pages; $27.99.

After almost 750 pages, “Those Guys have All the Fun: Inside the World of ESPN” doesn’t really conclude. It stops.

In most cases that would seem anticlimactic. Not so here. After all, ESPN at age 30 is only really getting started. From a tiny dream of less-than-visionary founders to create an all-sports station for a strictly Connecticut audience, a cultural phenomenon that mirrors America’s dependence on television, sports and entertainment emerged as the bona fide giant of a new world order created by cable TV. Indeed, it can be said that cable TV didn’t create ESPN. ESPN launched cable TV into something nearly all wanted in their homes.

The saga of ESPN and its rise from the unlikeliest of media outposts in Bristol, Conn. isn’t so much a story of the often startling fascination with sports in America — although that’s a huge chunk of it. In a larger sense, it’s an examination of the popular culture cultivated in a cablesphere that embraced a crew of snarky broadcasters who delivered information in ways rich — or in some cases poor — with commentary. Indeed, the way ESPN anchors and analysts interacted with the audience from the start is the forerunner of how cable news broadcasters engage viewers. Along the way it’s created a reactionary breed of information consumers, perhaps to the detriment forever of news production.

“Those Guys have All the Fun” refrains from such judgments, it merely tells what the authors call the story of ESPN, not the history. Still, there are facts aplenty as the book chronicles what the writers call the network’s climb to “global domination.” It’s a fascinating read and a compelling story that allows readers to frame their own opinions.

With 30 years of anecdotes from a colorful cast of characters, there is no shortage of rich territory to mine for writers Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller. The two collaborated on the equally engaging and lively look at entertainment, comedy and culture in “Live from New York: An Uncensored History of ‘Saturday Night Live.’” Shales, a Pulitzer Prize winner formerly of the Washington Post, is perhaps the top television critic in America. Miller, author of “Running in Place Inside the Senate” is nearly his equal in gleaning information from subjects who aren’t always the easiest to interview. Think bombastic and bullying former basketball coach Bob Knight, who is among the hundreds of ESPN’ers who agreed to sit and be questioned.

Shales and Miller use the oral history format put in place for their work about “Saturday Night Live” to also tell the story of ESPN. The narrative is driven largely — almost entirely — by quotes from nearly  anyone affiliated with the network from its rather timid beginning (Australian Rules Football, anyone?) to last year with its triumphant broadcast of the World Cup.

And at the start, absolutely no one thought it had a chance of succeeding, much less overtaking the big three major networks that dominated the sports broadcasting landscape for decades.

While the background players may not be names those who watch ESPN recognize, they comprise the core information about ESPN’s creation, its early stumbles and the exceptional successes with college basketball that helped turn the network into a sought after service rather than a passing joke on “The Tonight Show.” To be sure, ESPN’s rise to cable goliath was built upon gaining the rights to the NFL, Major League Baseball and the NBA, but those things were obtained through shrewd business maneuvering, a work ethic bordering on the insane and the phenomenal success of SportsCenter, a show that cost nearly nothing to produce but built the network’s early and very loyal audience. SportsCenter is the foundation upon which ESPN successfully constructed its future.

A litany of producers, directors and executives who made pivotal and sometimes controversial decisions are interwoven with the anchors and analysts most viewers more easily recognize. From George Grande and Chris Berman to Dan Patrick and Keith Olbermann to Stu Scott, Hannah Storm, Erin Andrews and Scott Van Pelt the book crackles with anecdotes about missteps; triumphs; creative differences; a work-hard, party-hard culture; and a rather troubling history of workplace issues related to mistreatment of women. For example, it wasn’t uncommon in the 1980s for the Playboy channel to be on in the newsroom.

Ultimately, ESPN grew because it learned from its mistakes — like launching a trendy and hip ESPN2 with Olbermann, its resident bad boy, wearing a leather jacket even Fonzie wouldn’t find cool during the first broadcast. The network now operates on a myriad of cable stations and on platforms that include print and online reporting. It’s most visible successes include the award-winning Sports Century series or the more recent 30 for 30 sports documentaries.

As it’s grown, ESPN has become a target for criticism — much of it justified. It was, after all, the network that brought America the horrid LeBron James program “The Decision” last summer, a show emblematic of the self-absorbed athlete the ESPN culture has created. It’s a highlight-driven and opinionated world where winning is all that truly matters.

In that way, “Those Guys have all the Fun: Inside the World of ESPN” is the story of modern America.