The Pursuit of Love

Admittedly, I was drawn to The Pursuit of Love because of the author - I was curious about Nancy Mitford's work, given that I'd read much of her, and a book about her (and her sisters), but nothing by her. Happily, the book lived up to my hopes, and it's a delightful, period "classic" in the same vein as Evelyn Waugh or Irène Némirovsky.

As Amazon notes, "The Pursuit of Love is a classic comedy about growing up and falling in love among the privileged and eccentric." In that sense, the Mitfords are just one in a long line of English aristocrats run amok (the Mountbattens and Carnarvons being others of the same "species"), whose dysfunction makes for entertaining reading, particularly from this distance. Mitford was widely known to have drawn liberally from her own family's quirks in creating her characters, particularly Uncle Matthew, the blustering patriarch; contemporaries mourned the passing of both the real man and the fictional one when David Bertram Ogilvy Freeman-Mitford, 2nd Baron Redesdale died in 1958.

The protagonist of The Pursuit of Love is Linda, the most beautiful and wayward daughter, who has been denied a traditional upbringing, never been to school, and falls for a succession of wildly inappropriate men (at least by her family's standards): first a pompous City man, then a deep red Communist, and finally a French duke whose reputation precedes him.

Still, this is a light, fun read, and I was happy to learn upon its conclusion that this is the first of three novels Mitford wrote with this set of characters. I've already added the others to my reading list.

Five stars. 

Summer of '49

The cover says this is "the story of a magnificent season - and the battle royal between Joe DiMaggio's Yankees and Ted Williams's Red Sox for the heart of a nation." Halberstam captures much more than a baseball season between the covers, though. He captures an entire zeitgeist and draws the reader back to the age of players who had fought in an actual war. He also brings to life each of the players, so that they are not merely the athletes of the era, but varied and interesting human beings. This is perhaps best illustrated when Halberstam relays the anecdote of the notoriously intelligent and well-spoken Dom DiMaggio, little brother of Joe, shouting at an umpire, "I have never witnessed such incompetence in all my life!"

Unlike Halberstam's The Fifties, Summer of '49 is brisk and lively. There can be no doubt that his passion fueled this work. In that way, it is similar to The Boys of Summer, the major events of which took place just three or four years after the Yankees and Red Sox battled it out. I am not a particular fan of baseball (I'd barely seen more than two games before meeting my husband in college), but I've now read several books that track the progression of baseball from the very early days (Saint Louis, 1883) to the height of the Ruth-Gehrig mania (New York, 1927), to the post-war evolution of the game from radio and day games to television and night games. Summer of '49 just might be the best of them, though.

Five stars.