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. 

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.