1991: Scarlett by Alexandra Ripley

The Author:

Alexandra Ripley (1934-2004) was born in Charleston, South Carolina, as Alexandra Braid.  She describes her upbringing as that of a Southern belle, who, nonetheless, left the south to attend Vassar college, where she received her B.A. for studying Russian in 1955.  In 1958, she married Leonard Ripley, who she divorced in 1963.  Her first novel, Who's That Lady in the President's Bed? was published in 1972.  In 1981, she published her second novel, a work of historical fiction titled Charleston.  That year, she also married university professor John Graham, with whom she had two daughters.  She published three more historical fiction novels in the 1980s: On Leaving Charleston (1984), The Time Returns (1985), and New Orleans Legacy (1987).  The Mitchell estate tapped Ripley to write Scarlett, the sequel to the classic Gone with the Wind, which was published amid great publicity and controversy in 1991. 

After the publication of Scarlett, Ripley wrote two more novels: From Fields of Gold (1994) and A Love Divine (1996).  She died of natural causes at her home in Richmond, Virginia.

The Book:

Length: 823 pages
Subject/Genre: Gone with the Wind characters/historical fiction

Scarlett takes place soon after the ending of Gone with the Wind.  It opens at Melanie's funeral, where Scarlett finally comes to terms with her past infatuation with Ashley Wilkes and, in preventing Ashley from throwing himself into Melanie's grave, commits a major faux pas, further solidifying her status as a social outcast among Atlanta's elite.  She goes back to Tara for a bit, only to find Mammy dying.  Rhett shows up to see Mammy before she dies, then leaves, telling Scarlett that he'll help maintain the illusion of their marriage, but he doesn't want to see her again.  Scarlett, however, is determined to get him back.  This leads to the rest of the novel, detailing Scarlett's descent in Atlanta's social life, and from there to Rhett's family home in Charleston.  She gets knocked up by Rhett before he leaves again.  Scarlett then goes to live with her father's relatives in Ireland, which is on the verge of its own civil war.  Here she gives birth to a daughter and sets up a new home.

I usually try to avoid giving away the endings in the summaries, but it's important in this case.  Whereas in Gone with the Wind, Rhett and Scarlett's daughter dies, causing Rhett to flee, in Scarlett, they team up to save their second daughter, and then profess their love to each other. Ripley has, essentially, rewritten the close of the first novel, to give it a Hollywood happy ending.  This approach is evident throughout the novel.  Scarlett has become a whiny socialite who thrives on the attention of others.  While she was never a really generous person, in Gone with the Wind, Scarlett's self-centeredness is offset by personal boldness, by determination and ambition, and by the dire necessity of her circumstances, much like Sabra Cravat in Edna Ferber's Cimarron.  Here, all she really cares about is getting her man back.  She's become petulant, with everyone else's success or misfortune considered only in terms of how they affect Scarlett.  Mammy's death hurts Scarlett  most because, as she repeats incessantly, this is when she really needs Mammy's support.  She has no problem associating with nouveau-riche con-men scamming Southerners, until they start scamming "her type of people."   Scarlett has become a typical historical romance heroine, pining for her distant lover.  The word 'simpering' comes up a lot in reviews of this novel.

Basically, Scarlett is Gone with the Wind if Gone with the Wind were content with being a potboiler.  Although, it's not entirely fair to blame Ripley, who has herself admitted to taking the job for the money, arguing that after this, she'd be able to write whatever she wanted.

The fact is, Margaret Mitchell had been vocally against a sequel while alive.  So had her husband, who managed the rights after Mitchell's death in 1949, and her brother after that.  But soon enough, the estate was in the hands of more distant relatives.  An attempt at a film sequel in the mid 1970s got tangled in legal problems and never came to fruition.  Over a decade later, the publication rights to Scarlett were sold at auction, with Warner Bros. paying nearly $5 million. The sequel was the subject of considerable advertising, and the controversy merely fueled public interest upon release, leading a mediocre historical fiction novel by a little-known author to be an international bestseller.

Because the cash-grab that is Scarlett wasn't enough, a miniseries debuted in 1994, starring Joanne Whalley and Timothy Dalton as Scarlett and Rhett.

Of course, if one sequel is successful, why not try for another?  In 2007, Donald McCaig's Rhett Butler's People was released.  The novel tells of events before, during, and after Gone with the Wind from Rhett's perspective.  Oh, and McCaig doesn't consider Ripley's novel to be canonical, so he contradicts it whenever possible (which, to be fair, isn't necessarily a bad thing in terms of the quality of the novel, although what it says about the Mitchell estate is less than flattering).     

All in all, I can't recommend this book to anyone.  As I've said before, I like to look at the goodreads reviews from readers with an opposite opinion to my own.  Most of the positive reviews fall into the 'wanting closure/a happy ending' category.  If you loved Gone with the Wind, but hated the fact that everything wasn't tied up with a neat bow, if you can't sleep at night because Scarlett didn't get the man of her dreams, if the very idea that a story can live on past the final page gives you migraines, then read Scarlett.  Otherwise, save yourself the time, money, and disdain.

Bestsellers of 1991:

1. Scarlett by Alexandra Ripley

2. The Sum of All Fears by Tom Clancy

3. Needful Things by Stephen King

4. No Greater Love by Danielle Steel

5. Heartbeat by Danielle Steel

6. The Doomsday Conspiracy by Sidney Sheldon

7. The Firm by John Grisham

8. Night Over Water by Ken Follett

9. Remember by Barbara Taylor Bradford

10. Loves Music, Loves to Dance by Mary Higgins Clark

Also Published in 1991:

Possession by A. S. Byatt

Mao II by Don DeLillo

American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis

Outlander by Diana Gabaldon

Sex by Madonna

Sources:

"Alexandra Ripley." Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2004. Literature Resource 
     Center. Web.

Ripley, Alexandra. Scarlett: the sequel to Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind. New York:
     Warner Books, 1991. Print.

1990: The Plains of Passage by Jean Auel

The Author:

Jean Auel (1936-    ) was born in Chicago as Jean Untinen .  In 1954, she married Ray Auel (pronounced 'owl'), with whom she had five children.  She attended the Portland State University (Oregon), and in 1976 received her M.B.A. from the University of Portland.  From the sixties through the seventies, she worked as a clerk in a tech company and later as a technical writer, before publishing her first novel, The Clan of the Cave Bear (1980), the first book of the six part Earth's Children series and a commercial success.  The second book of the series, The Valley of Horses (1982) sold well, ending up sixth on that year's annual bestseller list, and the third and fourth books take the #1 spot in their respective years.  The fifth book in the series, The Shelters of Stone (2002), appeared seventh on the annual bestseller list, and the series was finished in 2011 with the publication of The Land of Painted Caves.

The Book:

1st Edition Cover

Length: 760 pages
Subject/Genre: Prehistoric Society/Historical fiction.

The Plains of Passage is the fourth book in the Earth's Children series, following 1985's bestseller The Mammoth Hunters.  For a recap on the events of the first three books, refer to my review of The Mammoth Hunters.

The novel begins with Ayla and Jondalar, as well as the horses Whinney and Racer and the Wolf named Wolf, continuing on the long journey towards Jondalar's tribe, the Zelandonii.  The novel is largely just a sequence of loosely related events that occur to and around the characters during their travels, and these events mostly serve as excuses for Auel to talk about whatever she finds interesting, regardless of whether it is necessary to any other aspect of the story.  In fact, Auel's desire to inform supersedes all other aspects of the novel, from character to plot to tone to pacing.  This leads to another incredibly frustrating aspect of the novel, which is that most of what happens is characters explaining/talking/wondering about something around them.  And if they don't know, there's a good chance Auel will spend a few pages narrating the answer.  Whether it's the uses of particular shrubs or the mating habits of woolly mammoths, you're going to learn a lot about it, even at the expense of the novel as a coherent whole.  

The fact is, this was an incredibly frustrating read.  Much of the book could be summarized as such: The cavemen talked about the horses.  The cavemen talked about the wolf.  The cavemen talked about the other cavemen.  The cavemen talked about the other cavemen vis-à-vis the horses.  The cavemen looked at the river.  The cavemen talked about the river.  The cavemen talked about the river and the horses and the wolf.  The cavemen crossed the river.  The cavemen talked about the dirt.  The cavemen thought about the plants.  The cavemen thought about the plants vis-à-vis the wolf.  Etc. etc. etc.  

Add to this a fundamental paradox to the entire novel.  Auel's desire to demonstrate the typical world of prehistoric man depends on following a character who is entirely atypical of that time.  I pointed out in my previous review that Ayla has single-handedly made major medical discoveries, as well as being personally responsible for the domestication of animals.  This trend continues, as she here successfully develops the techniques of dog training.  Between Ayla and Jondalar, techniques and discoveries that occurred piecemeal over hundreds and thousands of years are condensed into less than a decade.  I don't plan on reading the fifth and sixth book, but it wouldn't surprise me if they ended up personally inventing the wheel, agriculture, and alphabet.    

All this is really a shame, because Auel clearly knows a heck of a lot about her area of expertise.  If she had written a non-fiction account of life in that time and region, it could have been quite good.  But instead we get a novel that is simply tedious.  I'm not a huge fan of the rule "show, don't tell," but I believe you need to do one or the other, not both, which Auel does consistently.  She shows us something then explains it, and vice-versa.    

Unless you are completely enrapt by the series up to this point, I can't really recommend it.

Bestsellers of 1990:

1. The Plains of Passage by Jean Auel

2. Four Past Midnight by Stephen King

3. The Burden of Proof by Scott Turow

4. Memories of Midnight by Sidney Sheldon

5. Message from Nam by Danielle Steel

6. The Bourne Ultimatum by Robert Ludlum

7. The Stand by Stephen King

8. Lady Boss by Jackie Collins

9. The Witching Hour by Anne Rice

10. September by Rosemunde Pilcher

Also Published in 1990:

Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton

L.A. Confidential by James Ellroy

The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

Sources:

Auel, Jean. The Plains of Passage. New York: Crown Publishers, 1990. Print.

"Jean M. Auel." Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2012. Literature Resource 
     Center. Web. 

1985: The Mammoth Hunters by Jean Auel

The Author:

Jean Auel (1936-    ) was born Jean Untinen and was born in Chicago.  In 1954, she married Ray Auel (pronounced 'owl'), with whom she had five children.  She attended the Portland State University (Oregon), and in 1976 received her M.B.A. from the University of Portland.  From the sixties through the seventies, she worked as a clerk in a tech company and later as a technical writer, before publishing her first novel, The Clan of the Cave Bear (1980), the first book of the six part Earth's Children series and a commercial success.  The second book of the series, The Valley of Horses (1982) sold well, ending up sixth on that year's annual bestseller list, and the third and fourth books take the #1 spot in their respective years.  The fifth book in the series, The Shelters of Stone (2002), appeared seventh on the annual bestseller list, and the series was finished in 2011 with the publication of The Land of Painted Caves.

The Book:

1st Edition Cover

Length: 645 pages
Subject/Genre: Prehistoric Society/Historical Fiction

The Mammoth Hunters is the third novel in the Earth's Children series, so you're dutifully warned of spoilers for the first two books.  The story takes place in prehistoric Europe, during the last ice age.  In the first book, Ayla, a young cro-magnon child, is orphaned and later adopted by a tribe of Neanderthals who refer to themselves as the clan.  Ayla deals with fundamental differences between herself and the Neanderthals.  The Neanderthals cannot communicate vocally and have access to racial memory, that is to say, the collective memory of the Neanderthal peoples.  Ayla is trained as a medicine woman but, due to the actions of a Neanderthal man who hates her, is exiled from the tribe.   In the second novel, Ayla sets up home in a cave, where she befriends and trains a cave lion cub and a horse.  Meanwhile, an eighteen year-old cro-magnon man, Jondalar, and his brother set out from their camp for a years-long journey.  The two men visit numerous societies.  Ayla's cave lion, when grown, leaves her and later ends up attacking Jondalar and his brother, injuring the former and killing the latter.  Ayla saves Jondalar and nurses him back to health, and for the first time is introduced to Cro-Magnon society. The two fall in love.    

In The Mammoth Hunters, Ayla, Jondalar, and Ayla's horse and it's foal, start the trek back to Jondalar's tribe.  Jondalar has explained to Ayla that there is a prevalent belief among the cro-magnons that the Neanderthals are no more than animals, incapable of complex thought, ritual, etc.  Dealing with anti-Neanderthal sentiment is common occurrence throughout the novel.   The two come across a camp of the Mamutoi, a jovial tribe of hunters.  Over the course of the novel, Ayla learns about Cro-Magnon society, continues to develop animal domestication and tools, and has her relationship with Jondalar put to the test.  This book largely focuses on Ayla's growing independence and understanding.  

That said, there are a couple things that really bother me, the first is the Forrest Gump approach to history, where one unassuming individual is responsible for multiple major innovations.  Ayla develops animal domestication, the sling, the harness, the travois, among other technologies and techniques.  All this is made more problematic by certain incongruities.  Contrary to the beliefs of everyone she meets, Ayla believes that sex leads to childbirth.  Yet, when she refers to the heart as a 'thing that pumps blood,' everyone knows what she means, despite the fact that even the early Greek physicians didn't know that.  Auel's desire to explore and explain early societies often supercedes what would make sense for her characters to do.    

The Mammoth Hunters seems to be equal parts domestic drama and infotainment.  

I like to look at the goodreads reviews to get contradictory opinions and to see if any impressions I get are common among those who read the book, and why the book is so popular.  Among the most positive reviews, the historical backing is what gets mentioned the most, and the steamy love triangle comes second. A common criticism that I wholeheartedly concur with is that Auel repeats herself far too much.  

In regards to the steamy love triangle mentioned in the above paragraph:  Auel's novels have been noted for their very frank and erotic sex scenes.  However, it comes across as something I'd expect to find in a harlequin romance novel as opposed to something like an Aimee Bender story. (And no, I'm not complaining that it's not written like a sex scene by Aimee Bender (or Toni Morrison, or Bret Easton Ellis, or Zora Neale Hurston, etc.), but rather trying to illustrate by comparison that a sex scene in a novel shouldn't suddenly change tone and be written in a gushy, wish-fulfillment, candlelight-and-mood-music kind of way.)    

Unless you're a huge fan of historical fiction and are interested in prehistoric societies, you probably shouldn't take on the Earth's Children series.

Bestsellers of 1985:

1. The Mammoth Hunters by Jean Auel

2. Texas by James Michener

3. Lake Wobegon Days by Garrison Keillor

4. If Tomorrow Comes by Sidney Sheldon

5. Skeleton Crew by Stephen King

6. Secrets by Danielle Steel

7. Contact by Carl Sagan

8. Lucky by Jackie Collins

9. Family Album by Danielle Steel

10. The Class by Erich Segal

Also Published in 1985:

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card

White Noise by Don DeLillo

Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis

Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a  Hat by Oliver Sacks

Gálapagos by Kurt Vonnegut

Sources:

Auel, Jane. The Mammoth Hunters. New York: Crown Publishers, 1985. Print.

"Jean M. Auel." Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2012. Literature Resource 
     Center. Web. 

1981: Noble House by James Clavell

The Author:

James Clavell (1921-1994) was born Charles Edmund Dumaresq Clavell.  Clavell was born in Australia, the son of a British Navy officer.  In 1940, Clavell joined the Royal Artillery and fought in the Pacific theatre of World War Two.  He was captured by Japanese forces in Malaysia, and taken to Changi prison in Singapore where he was held for over three years. The Changi POW camp was notorious for its inhumane treatment of prisoners.  Of the 150,000 people interred, only 10,000 survived.  He left military service in 1946 and attended the University of Birmingham for two years.  He married April Stride in 1951, with whom he had two children.  In 1953, Clavell moved to the United States (he became a naturalized citizen in 1963).  

In the U.S., Clavell began a career in screenwriting.  He wrote the screenplay for the sci-fi classic The Fly (1958), co-wrote The Great Escape (1963) and wrote and directed the Sidney Poitier film To Sir, with Love (1967).

During a screenwriters strike, Clavell began working on his first novel, King Rat, a fictionalized version of his experiences in Changi.  The novel was published in 1962.  This was the first of what would later be named the Asian Saga, a series of six books that make up the majority of Clavell's oeuvre. The second book in the series, Tai-Pan (1966) placed eighth on that year's annual bestseller list.  The third, Shogun (1975), placed ninth.  Noble House is the only one to take the top spot.  The fifth, Whirlwind (1986), placed third and the last, Gai-Jin (1993) did not appear on the list at all.  Clavell passed away in 1994 due to complications from cancer while in Switzerland.



The Book:

Length: 1370 pages
Subject/Genre: Hong Kong/Business Thriller

Excluding a prologue, Noble House takes place over the course of ten days, from August 18th, 1963 through August 27th.  The main plot of the novel is the ongoing battle between the two major trading companies in Hong Kong, Struan's, now led by the novel's protagonist, Ian Dunross, and their rival Rothwell-Gornt, led by Quillian Gornt.  Both sides play dirty, complex games as they try to outdo each other and at the same time win the alliance of Par-Con industries, and American company looking to become international.  While all this is going on, easily over a dozen subplots occur, covering everything from opium smuggling, romantic troubles, and Soviet conspiracies.  

In Noble House, Clavell tries to capture the economic free-for-all of Hong Kong in the 1960s, as well as to explain the psyche of its residents.  The depiction of Hong Kong natives and their ideology is interesting.  It would be easy to just write it off a stereotypical, but at the same time it may be an accurate representation of the view an outsider would have in Hong Kong society, a society with a very different set of cultural norms than ours.    

Politically, the novel is very focused on economics, and takes a 'red under every bed' approach.  In the context of the beginning of the 1980s, and the economic policies of Reagan and Thatcher, this may reflect the views of Western audiences of the time.  Ian Dunross is the individualist hero who succeeds in business by virtue of his own cunning and bravery which, within the context of the novel, I think it may be a little disingenuous, considering how often he is saved by luck or circumstances beyond his control.  

As a business thriller, for lack of a better term, Noble House is an engrossing but slow read.  Clavell has a habit of delivering important information in an offhand manner, often as one sentence in the middle of a long paragraph, that can easily be missed if you tend to skim.

Shogun remains the most famous and best-reviewed of the Asian Saga (it had a TV miniseries/movie in 1980 and one currently in pre-production).  King Rat and Tai-Pan were given film adaptations in 1965 and 1986 respectively. In 1988, Noble House was adapted as a four part miniseries starring Pierce Brosnan.

Noble House is a mixture of business, espionage, and legal thrillers, with a lot of subplots.  The genealogy of the characters would be more at home as a Lord of the Rings appendix.  But if you like your entertainment thick and complex, Noble House is for you.


Bestselling novels of 1981:
1. Noble House by James Clavell
2. The Hotel New Hampshire by John Irving
3. Cujo by Stephen King
4. An Indecent Obsession by Colleen McCullough
5. Gorky Park by Martin Cruz Smith
6. Masquerade by Kit Williams
7. Goodbye, Janette by Harold Robbins
8. The Third Deadly Sin by Lawrence Sinders
9. The Glitter Dome by Joseph Wambaugh
10. No Time for Tears by Cynthia Freeman

Also published in 1981:

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver
ronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Red Dragon by Thomas Harris
Tar Baby by Toni Morrison
The War of the End of the World by Mario Vargas Llosa

Sources:

Clavell, James. Noble House. 1981. New York: Dell, 1981. Print.

"James (duMaresq) Clavell." Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2003. Literature 
    Resource Center. Web.

1980: The Covenant by James Michener

The Author:

James Michener (1907-1997) was adopted by a Quaker from Doylestown, Pennsylvania.  He attended Swarthmore college for English and psychology, graduating with honors in 1929.  After a couple years spent abroad, Michener returned to Pennsylvania to teach high school English.  In 1935, he married his first wife, Patti Koon, then earned his Masters and taught briefly at Harvard before becoming an editor for Macmillan Publishers.   

Michener served in the South Pacific during WWII.  His experiences there provided the basis for his first novel, Tales of the South Pacific (1947), which won the Pulitzer for fiction in 1948 and was adapted by Rodgers and Hammerstein for the stage, under the title South Pacific.  In 1948, Michener divorced Koon and married Vange Nord.  Michener appeared in the top 10 annual bestsellers list twice in the 1950s, and fifteen times over the course of his life, taking the top spot four times.  In 1955, he divorced Nord and married Mari Sabusawa.  In 1977, Michener recieved the Presidential Medal of Freedom.   He died of kidney failure in 1997.     

The Book:    

Length: 1238 Pages

Subject/Genre: South Africa/Historical Fiction

The Covenant is the last Michener book on my list, and I honestly don't plan to read any others.  I went into more detail on my problems with Michener's approach to history in my review of Centennial, and it holds true to The Covenant as well.  The Covenant focuses on the history of South Africa, as usual focusing on a few ethnically/religiously/politically different dynasties, each meant to illustrate a particular point of view in an ongoing struggle, in this case the English imperialists, the Dutch/Huguenot immigrants, and the native Africans.  The novel focuses primarily on the late 15th century up to 1979.    

Part of the problem with Michener's style (from my perspective), is that he never seems to know which details are important and which aren't, leading to constant info dumps of relatively little, if any, use.  As a contemporary NY Times review notes: "His personal covenant is not with God, but with the encyclopedia. If, 15,000 years ago, in the African bush, the San used poison arrows, he will describe those arrows and name the source of the poison."  Michener gives us broad strokes for the people and the thought processes of the times, while going into great detail on what type of plates they ate off or how exactly they wore particular items of clothing.  This devotion to minutiae would be better served when constructing characters.  While the broad strokes are fine for providing a layman's history to an audience new to the subject matter, the sheer volume of the books (in terms of word count and epochs described) makes me question the necessity of the reduction.     

While Centennial was the only one of the four Michener novels I read that got a television adaptation, The Covenant has a legacy of its own.  It is the center of what may be very legitimate plagiarism claims by Michener's researcher, Errol Uys.  Michener's biographer, Stephen May (Michener: A Writer's Journey) takes Uys's side.  It seems that Uys wrote numerous pages-long sections of The Covenant, but was refused any credit for it.

Controversy aside, The Covenant is pretty standard Michener fare.  It is structurally and stylistically similar to his other novels, just about South Africa this time.  

Bestselling novels of 1980:

1. The Covenant by James Michener

2. The Bourne Identity by Robert Ludlum

3. Rage of Angels by Sidney Sheldon

4. Princess Daisy by Judith Krantz

5. Firestarter by Stephen King

6. The Key to Rebecca by Ken Follett

7. Random Winds by Belva Plain   

8. The Devil's Alternative by Frederick Forsyth

9. The Fifth Horseman by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre

10. The Spike by Arnaud de Borchgrave and Robert Moss

Also Published in 1980:     

Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess

The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

Sources:

Leonard, John. "The Covenant." The New York Times 30 June 1981.

Michener, James. The Covenant.1980. New York: Fawcett Crest, 1984. Print.

1978: Chesapeake by James Michener

The Author: 

This is the third book by James Michener (1907-1997) to appear on my list.  He has four different books on the list, a total matched only by Stephen King and surpassed only by John Grisham.  As such, I hope you'll forgive me for copy/pasting most of the author bio from my review of The Source and Centennial.

James Michener (1907-1997) was adopted by a Quaker from Doylestown, Pennsylvania.  He attended Swarthmore college for English and psychology, graduating with honors in 1929.  After a couple years spent abroad, Michener returned to Pennsylvania to teach high school English.  In 1935, he married his first wife, Patti Koon, then earned his Masters and taught briefly at Harvard before becoming an editor for Macmillan Publishers.   

Michener served in the South Pacific during WWII.  His experiences there provided the basis for his first novel, Tales of the South Pacific (1947), which won the Pulitzer for fiction in 1948 and was adapted by Rodgers and Hammerstein for the stage, under the title South Pacific.  In 1948, Michener divorced Koon and married Vange Nord.  Michener appeared in the top 10 annual bestsellers list twice in the 1950s, and fifteen times over the course of his life, taking the top spot four times.  In 1955, he divorced Nord and married Mari Sabusawa.  In 1977, Michener recieved the Presidential Medal of Freedom.   He died of kidney failure in 1997.     

The Book:

Length: 865 Pages

Subject/Genre: Chesapeake Bay Region/Historical Fiction

Chesapeake is, as the name suggests, a history of the Chesapeake Bay region.  The novel begins in 1583, focused on Native American inter-tribal relationships and history, followed by the arrival of Europeans and the foundation of Jamestown and the Chesapeake Bay Colony, the slave trade, the Civil War and Reconstruction, up through to the 1970s.       

As opposed to Michener's other works, Chesapeake is very focused.  Where as The Source covered several thousands of years of history and Centennial  spent a hundred pages explaining early earth geology and detailing the lives of prehistoric river mammals, Chesapeake's focus wavers less, leading to a whole that is more cohesive than the others I've previously reviewed.  Chesapeake's focuses on the usual suspects of American historical fiction, religion, race, class, and discrimination, e.g. the Quaker, pro-abolition family set at odds with the wealthy slave-owning family.

Michener's modus operandi seems to be a wide-scope of an area's history, leading up to current social or political situations.  The Source leads to violence in the Middle East, Centennial to the modern Midwest, Chesapeake to the the modern South and Civil Rights movements, and The Covenant to apartheid era South Africa.  Michener attempts to draw a step by step diagram of how things got the way they are.  Such a diagram is going to be, at best, oversimplified. While his aim is admirable, compressing four hundred years of history into a single novel (even a long one) is going to require things to be painted in very broad strokes. Michener realizes this (as demonstrated by the notes at the chapter ends in Centennial), but the novel form is not greatly suited for this type of endeavor.  Michener tries to explain history from the perspective of those living it, and not just the heads of state or generals, but from the perspective of the average man.  However, the men and women in his novels are by no means average.  They must embody some particular archetype: the slave owner or the abolitionist.  Too much, the social forces of the time are embodied too literally, and everything seems teleological, as if it had to happen this way, a view that is true only in retrospect.  

I don't mean to imply that Michener is factually incorrect, or that he plays fast and loose with the facts.  Michener's novels are, if nothing else, well-researched.  Rather, it's his approach to history as a series of inevitabilities, a habit of viewing past events and decisions through the lens of their long-term results.  

That said, if you like long historical fiction, Chesapeake is for you.

Bestselling Novels of 1978:

1. Chesapeake by James Michener

2. War and Remembrance  by Herman Wouk

3. Fools Die by Mario Puzo

4. Bloodline by Sidney Sheldon

5. Scruples by Judith Krantz

6. Evergreen by Belva Plain

7. Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah by Richard Bach

8. The Holcroft Covenant by Robert Ludlum

9. Second Generation by Howard Fast

10. Eye of the Needle by Ken Follett

Also Published in 1978:

The Stories of John Cheever by John Cheever

The World According to Garp by John Irving

The Stand by Stephen King

Requiem for a Dream by Hubert Selby, Jr. 

1976: Trinity by Leon Uris

The Author:

Leon Uris (1924-2003) appears one other time on the annual best-seller list, for 1959's Exodus.    Leon Uris (1924-2003) was born in Baltimore, Maryland.  His parents were Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe.  Uris never finished high school, opting to drop out and enlist in the Marine Corps during his senior year.  He served in combat in Guadalcanal.  After the war, Uris moved to San Francisco with his wife, also a former Marine.  While there, he worked for a local newspaper.  In 1953, his first novel, Battle Cry, was published to huge popular success.  From there he was given a job in the story department of Warner Brothers Studios.

      In 1955, he released his second novel, The Angry Hills and, in 1956, penned the screenplay for Gunfight at the O.K. Corral.  In 1958, he published Exodus, which became a runaway success, becoming the first of two annual bestsellers on this list and earning him a considerable fan following. In 1961, Uris released Mila 18.  Trinity was published in 1976, and was inspired by a trip Uris and his third wife took to photograph modern Ireland.  Uris kept writing until his death in 2003.  He was married three times over the course of his life and had five children.  He died of renal failure.

The Book:

1st edition cover

Length: 817 pages

Subject/Genre: Irish history/historical fiction

Trinity primarily follows Conor Larkin, a poor Irish Catholic living in mid-to-late 19th century Ireland.  Much of the beginning of the novel is spent detailing the wretched conditions the Irish were forced to live in at the hands of the British, the local culture of small town Irishmen, and the history of attempted rebellion against the British.  Conor's story is the typical hero's journey of the historical fiction of an oppressed people.  Through personal strength and courage, Conor rises to fight the British rule as a leader of men.    

Published in 1976, and detailing a time period over a hundred years past, Trinity was still topical when it was written.  The period between the late 1960s and 1998 in Northern Ireland is referred to as The Troubles.  Violent attacks and acts of retribution were frequent between Irish Republican Army (IRA) splinter groups and British occupation forces, and between different splinter groups as well. The basis of the groups' attacks was the continued occupation of Northern Ireland by the British and a desire for Irish self-rule.  The conflict was a major subject in the news for decades.  The violence hit it's height in the 1970s, around the time Trinity was written and published.  

The novel puts the modern conflict in its historical context, as part of the Irish's centuries long attempt at overthrowing their colonizers.  When researching Uris, claims that he was merely a propagandist pop up frequently, mainly pointing to the one-sided good vs. evil, freedom vs. tyranny approach to the stories.  While I agree that Trinity is certainly one-sided, I don't think it would be propaganda inasmuch as it is an attempt to merely demonstrate the opposite side's view.  Trinity is also a product of the time it was written in, and functions as an attempt to explain and understand the perspective and history of the bad guys (i.e. IRA sects).

As far as the book itself goes, I feel Uris, like Michener and Hailey, gets too bogged down in detail.  Uris tries to function almost as a documentarian of 19th century Ireland, and the balance between providing mountains of information and storytelling is difficult to maintain for extended periods of time, leading to a narrative that moves in spurts.     

That said, if you are the type of person who likes your historical fiction long, winding, and full of detail, you'll probably like Trinity.  If you like Trinity, Uris wrote a sequel to it 1995, titled Redemption.

Bestsellers of 1976:

1. Trinity by Leon Uris

2. Sleeping Murder by Agatha Christie

3. Dolores by Jacqueline Susann

4. Storm Warning by Jack Higgins

5. The Deep by Peter Benchley

6. 1876 by Gore Vidal

7. Slapstick or Lonesome No More! by Kurt Vonnegut

8. The Lovely Lady by Harold Robbins

9. Touch Not the Cat by Mary Stewart

10. A Stranger in the Mirror by Sidney Sheldon

Also published in 1976:

Will You Please Be Quiet, Please by Raymond Carver

Ordinary People by Judith Guest

Roots: The Saga of an American Family by Alex Haley

Sources:

"Leon Uris." Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2007. Literature Resource Center. 
     Web.

Uris, Leon. Trinity. 1976. New York: Bantam, 1977. Print.

1975: Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow

The Author:

Edgar Lawrence Doctorow (1931-      ) was born in the Bronx.  He later studied philosophy at Kenyon College and briefly attended Columbia University for graduate studies in English drama before being drafted into the military, where he served from 1953-1955.  While overseas, he met and married Helen Setzer.  Upon returning the the U.S., he worked as a manuscript reader for Columbia Pictures, then as an editor for the New American Library from 1959-64.  In 1960, he published his first novel, a western titled Welcome to Hard Times.  In 1964, Doctorow became the editor-in-chief of Dial Press and in 1966 published his second novel, this time sci-fi, called Big as Life.  It wasn't until 1971 that Doctorow wrote his first historical fiction novel, The Book of Daniel, about the Rosenberg trial.  The book was a critical success and was a finalist for the National Book Award.  In 1975, Doctorow published Ragtime, his most popular book, which also won the National Book Critics Circle Award.   Since then, Doctorow has published eight novels, three short story collections, and two books of essays.  is most recent novel, Andrew's Brain, was published earlier this year.

The Book:

Length: 334 pages
Genre/Subject: Historical fiction/Early 20th Century New York

Ragtime takes place over the course of the opening decade and a half of the twentieth century.  It focuses on three main fictional groups, the unnamed upper middle class white family living the American dream (named simply Father, Mother, and Mother's Younger Brother), a poor Jewish immigrant (Tateh) and his daughter, and a black musician from Harlem named Coalhouse Walker.  But what's remarkable about Ragtime is the extent to which real historical personages appear in the story, most notably socialite Evelyn Nesbit, anarchist Emma Goldman, magician Harry Houdini, and industrialist J. P. Morgan.  This puts aside the brief appearances by everyone from Archduke Franz Ferdinand to Henry Ford to Theodore Dreiser.  At one point, Freud and Jung take a boat through the Tunnel of Love on Coney Island.

Doctorow raises all the standard but relevant social issues.  Nesbit and Goldman discuss gender, while Coalhouse and Mother's Younger Brother consider race, and Tateh ponders class in American society.  Yet despite the prevalence of these themes in American literature, Doctorow makes them seem fresh, at least in presentation.  One of the most memorable scenes in the novel takes place between Ford and Morgan, sitting down to discuss reincarnation and the idea of Great Men.  Such a meeting almost certainly never happened, and is just one instance of the mixing of the historical and fictional.  However, Doctorow has said:

     "I'm under the illusion that all of my inventions are quite true. For instance, in Ragtime, I'm
     satisfied that everything I made up about Morgan and Ford is true, whether it happened or not.
     Perhaps truer because it didn't happen."    

I think Ragtime is the first postmodern novel on the list.  While novels like Elmer Gantry or Valley of the Dolls can be seen as Roman á clef's, Doctorow makes a concerted effort to make reality and fiction indistinguishable, to draw a line between truth and fact.  It wasn't merely Doctorow that was making massive changes to historical fiction and the fact/truth divide, rather we can see Ragtime as a more accessible example of what was going on.  On the one hand, you had the continued rise of New Journalism.  Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72 was called "the least factual, but most accurate account" of the election.  Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow pushes the border between psychological and  magical realism, all in the historical context of World War II.  Ragtime only slightly precedes Robert Coover's The Public Burning, a novel about the Rosenberg trial narrated by Richard Nixon.  While Modernism is usually tied to disillusionment, postmodernism could (in my opinion) be tied to hysteria, that is to say, disillusionment to the point of humor or madness. Note that this is not a negative judgment.

Ragtime was adapted to the screen in 1981.

The film starred James Cagney but had a strangely eclectic cast, with an uncredited appearance by Jack Nicholson, a role filled by The Naked and the Dead author Norman Mailer, and before-they-were-famous performances by Jeff Daniels and Samuel L. Jackson.
In 1998, Ragtime was adapted to the stage.  The musical was nominated for thirteen Tony awards, and won four, losing Best Musical to The Lion King.

Unlike many books so far on the list, Ragtime has maintained much of its popularity.  It was placed at #86 on Modern Library's list of the 100 best books of the 20th century, as well as TIME's 100 best novels since 1923.

Ragtime is definitely worth reading if you like historical fiction, or even if you're just lukewarm on the genre.  It doesn't tread much new ground with on social issues, but it comes at them from a new angle.




Bestselling novels of 1975:

1. Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow
2. The Moneychangers by Arthur Hailey
3. Curtain by Agatha Christie
4. Looking for Mr. Goodbar by Judith Rossner
5. The Choirboys by Joseph Wambaugh
6. The Eagle Has Landed by Jack Higgins
7. The Greek Treasure by Irving Stone
8. The Great Train Robbery by Michael Crichton
9. Shōgun by James Clavell
10. Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow

Also Published in 1975:
The Book of Sand by Jorge Luis Borges
J R by William Gaddis

Sources:

Doctorow, E. L. Ragtime. 1975. New York: Fawcett Crest, 1990. Print.

Mchugh, Frank K. "Doctorow, E.L. (1931- )." Benet's Reader's Encyclopedia of American 
     Literature. George B. Perkins, Barbara Perkins, and Phillip Leininger. Vol. 1. New York: 
     HarperCollins, 1991. 266. Literature Resource Center. Web.

1974: Centennial by James Michener

The Author:

James Michener (1907-1997) has already appeared on this blog for 1965's The Source.  Michere was adopted by a Quaker from Doylestown, Pennsylvania.  He later attended Swarthmore college, studying English and Psychology, graduating with honors in 1929.  After spending a couple abroad, Michener returned to Pennsylvania to teach high school English.  In 1935, he married his first wife, Patti Koon, then earned his Masters and taught briefly at Harvard before becoming an editor for Macmillan Publishers.   

Michener served in the South Pacific during WWII.  His experiences there provided the basis for his first novel, Tales of the South Pacific (1947), which won the Pulitzer for fiction in 1948 and was adapted by Rodgers and Hammerstein for the stage, under the title South Pacific.  In 1948, Michener divorced Koon and married Vange Nord.  Michener appeared in the top 10 annual bestsellers list fifteen times between 1951 and 1992, taking the top spot four times.  In 1955, he divorced Nord and married Mari Sabusawa.  In 1977, Michener received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.   He died of kidney failure in 1997. 

The Book:

Length: 1086 pages

Genre/Subject: Historical Fiction/The American Midwest

Centennial is about the eponymous fictional small town in Colorado.  The first part tells us the framing device: a major magazine is doing a piece on the typical American small town, and they've asked a historian to do his own investigation for the purposes of fact checking.  As such, each chapter ends with a note to the editors, clearing up any possibly incorrect or speculative historical elements of the preceding chapter.  In true Michener fashion, this story of a small town doesn't start with the town's naming in 1876, or the history of the Native Americans living in the area before that, or even with the dinosaurs that roamed the Earth millions of years ago.  Michener starts the story of Centennial, Colorado with the formation of the Earth's crust.     

This is one of my issues with Michener, and it's largely a matter of personal taste.  After a brief introduction to the concept of the book, he spends over a hundred pages on geology and evolutionary biology.  Do we really need what is essentially a short story depicting the life of a particular buffalo living hundreds of thousands of years before its species had contact with humans?  On the one hand, horses, buffalo, beavers (and, yes, even the giant Diplodocus), and the unique landscape of the area are of great importance to the history of the area and the story itself, but is this too much? I'm a big fan of going on tangents, but you have the tangent before you have the thing it's tangential to.   

In my review of Hailey's Wheels, I compared Hailey, Michener, and Uris. During my research for that post, I came across a review from The New Republic which I think holds true to Michener as well.

     [His] most devoted readers, one senses, are the sort who don't read novels except those 

     certified as “informative” and “educational”; whose highest praise for the novels they really 

     cherish is that they are “very educational.”

While today we tend to think of historical fiction as factually dubious at best (thanks, Dan Brown), people like Michener treated the genre as a means to popularize history.  Being informative was at least as important as being entertaining, and the goal was to give you as complete an understanding of the subject as possible. Personally, I've always been of the opinion that if I want to read a book about history, I'd pick up a history book.  This isn't to say that novels can't be informative or have a significant non-fiction component (cf. In Cold Blood).  The problem is that an attempt to tell us everything can weigh the work down.  But once again, the historical meandering just isn't the kind of thing I like, and there's no accounting for taste.

Due to it's popularity, NBC made Centennial into a twelve-part miniseries in 1979, starring Raymond Burr and Barbara Carrera, as well as Andy Griffith and pre-James Bond Timothy Dalton. 

Like I've said, Michener goes to great lengths to be as historically accurate as possible.  If you like historical fiction and very long books, Michener would be a good fit.

Bestselling Novels of 1974:

1. Centennial by James Michener

2. Watership Down by Richard Adams

3. Jaws by Peter Benchley

4. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carré

5. Something Happened by Joseph Heller

6. The Dogs of War by Frederick Forsyth

7. The Pirate by Harold Robbins

8. I Heard the Owl Call My Name by Margaret Craven

9. The Seven-Per-Cent Solution by Nicholas Meyer

10. The Fan Club by Irving Wallace

Also Published in 1974:

The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum by Heinrich Böll

Enderby's End by Anthony Burgess

Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said by Philip K. Dick

Fear of Flying by Erica Jong

The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin

Sources:

Maloff, Saul. "Troubadour of Free Enterprise." The New Republic 165.17 (23 Oct. 1971): 21-22. 

     Rpt. in Literature Resource Center. Detroit: Gale, 2014. Literature Resource Center. Web.

Michener, James. Centennial. 1974. New York: Fawcett Crest, 1989.

1965: The Source by James Michener

The Author:

James Michener (1907-1997) was adopted by a Quaker from Doylestown, Pennsylvania.  He attended Swarthmore college for English and psychology, graduating with honors in 1929.  After a couple years spent abroad, Michener returned to Pennsylvania to teach high school English.  In 1935, he married his first wife, Patti Koon, then earned his Masters and taught briefly at Harvard before becoming an editor for Macmillan Publishers.  

Michener served in the South Pacific during WWII.  His experiences there provided the basis for his first novel, Tales of the South Pacific (1947), which won the Pulitzer for fiction in 1948 and was adapted by Rodgers and Hammerstein for the stage, under the title South Pacific.  In 1948, Michener divorced Koon and married Vange Nord.  Michener appeared in the top 10 annual bestsellers list twice in the 1950s, and fifteen times over the course of his life, taking the top spot four times.  In 1955, he divorced Nord and married Mari Sabusawa.  In 1977, Michener recieved the Presidential Medal of Freedom.   He died of kidney failure in 1997.

The Book:

Length: 909 pages
Subject/Genre: Israel/Historical Fiction

The Source starts with a crew of archaeologists arriving at a dig site in Israel.  This archaeological dig serves as the frame narrative for a story that spans about five thousand years, starting in the Stone Age and the move towards an agricultural society up through the creation of the modern nation of Israel.

Michener's writing reminds me a lot of Irving Stone's, but whereas Stone novelizes the biography of individuals, Michener writes the biography of regions.  He does have some of the same problems as Stone, most importantly the rather dry prose.  The Source is exhaustively researched, and at many times reads more like non-fiction or a history textbook than a novel.    

This is the second novel about Israel on my list (not counting the novels that take place at or around the time of the Jesus), the first being Uris's Exodus, which is also based on exhaustive research.  Israel is still a hot topic today.

The Source is one of only a handful of novels so far on my list to have not had a film adaptation.  In this case, it's not surprising.  The Source functions in many ways like a novel in stories, that is to say, a novel comprised of a number of connected short stories.  

The Source is pretty darn long, which seems to be typical of Michener's work.  I feel that part of this is due to the novel's function as a history book, where details and explanations that are not really necessary for the story, or even slow the story down, are included for a sense of historical completeness.  This can be interesting, if at times a bit annoying.  

Overall, if you are interested in religious history or historical fiction, The Source  is a good, if long, book for you.

Bestselling Novels of 1965:

1. The Source by James Michener
2. Up the Down Staircase by Bel Kaufman
3. Herzog by Saul Bellow
4. The Looking Glass War by John le Carré
5. The Green Berets by Robin Moore
6. Those Who Love by Irving Stone
7. The Man with the Golden Gun by Ian Fleming
8. Hotel by Arthur Hailey
9. The Ambassador by Morris West
10. Don't Stop the Carnival by Herman Wouk


Also Published in 1966:

Frank Herbert - Dune
Jerzy Kosinski - The Painted Bird

Sources:

Michener, James. The Source. New York: Random House, 1965. Print.