Terry Alford's 'Fortune's Fool'

What can we learn from reading about the villains of history?

Terry Alford offers an extraordinarily entertaining and well-researched account of the life of Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth in his book "Fortune's Fool," which took a quarter-century to research and write.

The biography presents a plethora of reasons for Booth's crime:

Despite growing up in Maryland, Booth identified with the culture of the South, where actors enjoyed a much higher social status than in the North. He internalized the "death-to-tyrants" motif embodied by many of the Shakespearean martyrs he depicted onstage. He was a racist who despised abolitionists and was "particularly unsettled" by the prospect of blacks achieving citizenship. He was an alcoholic who occasionally showed signs of mental illness. And he was an attention-seeker who had an unhealthy obsession with fame.

Even taken together, these explanations don't feel quite satisfactory in explaining an act of terror that robbed our nation of its greatest leader, that ended all hopes for reconciliation between North and South, plunging our nation into a century of continued racial strife.

Despite Alford's commendable efforts, Booth remains a mystery.

The best paragraph (p. 175):

Free of the stage, he could now atone. Did he do so from a simple sense of duty? Or was it more complex - a sort of self-conscious performance with himself as star? These opposing viewpoints will be endlessly debated. One thing will not. John Wilkes Booth had reached a turning point. He would stop playing history. From now on he would make it.

Larry McMurtry's 'The Last Picture Show'

In his 2012 book "The Righteous Mind," social psychologist Jonathan Haidt writes that within every human brain is "a full-time public relations firm."

I was reminded of this quote when reading Larry McMurtry's 1966 novel "The Last Picture Show," which was his third novel and which was written--amazingly--when he was just in his late twenties.

The novel offers moving psychological portraits of the residents of Thalia, Texas, focusing on the sexual awakening of several high school seniors.

The book is uproariously funny, occasionally disturbing, and always on point in its portrayals of lovesick high schoolers plotting to gain advantage over one another in the social (and sexual) pecking order.

The novel is at its best when it demonstrates the stark divide between the characters' outward actions and their inner motivations -- the public-relations firm at work.

This is best exemplified by Jacy, the most sought-after girl in school who juggles relationships with three boys -- and is determined, if nothing else, to be noticed.

"Courting with Duane when all the kids on the school bus could watch gave Jacy a real thrill, and made her feel a little like a movie star," McMurtry writes, explaining that Jacy rejects all of Duane's attempts to move their "courting" to a spot on the bus less visible than the back seat directly under a light. "She could bring beauty and passion into the poor kids' lives."

Here's my selection for the best (two) paragraphs (p. 40-41), which paint such a vivid picture of what happens when boys and basketballs are left alone together in an unsupervised gym:

All but two or three of the boys ignored the ten-lap command and began shooting whatever kind of shots came into their heads. The only one who actually ran all ten laps was Bobby Logan, the most conscientious athlete in school. Bobby liked to stay in shape and always trained hard; he was smart, too, but he was such a nice kid that nobody held it against him. He was the coach's special favorite.

When the coach came back he had Joe Bob at his heels. By that time all the boys were throwing three-quarter peg shots, like Ozark Ike in the comics. Balls were bouncing everywhere. Once in a game Sonny had seen an Indian boy from Durant, Oklahoma actually make a three-quarter court peg shot in the last five seconds of play. It didn't really win the game for Durant, because they were already leading Thalia by about sixty-five points, but it impressed Sonny, and he resolved to start trying a few himself.