'The Death of a President'

Hey there, y'all.

Sorry it's been awhile since I've ducked in here. The last couple of weeks at work have been nuts. It's the busy season for us, too. One of several.

Not too much to report. We had a great Thanksgiving. Hope you did, too.

Saturday night I was feeling well enough to take a jaunt to Johnson City. I hadn't seen Robinella since our wedding and we were overdue for a short and sweet road trip.

So, we went to the Down Home and heard some tunes and detoxed from all the turkey and tryptophan.

I've been neglecting my reading since finishing Tom Brokaw's new book. Tonight after work and a later appointment, I ducked into the Fountain City Branch Library and borrowed William Manchester's "The Death of a President." I thought about it last week when that awful anniversary came and went. Hate to admit it, but I've yet to read it. (Can you believe this one-time best seller is out of print?!)

Manchester writes in a distinctive style that is both anachronistic and charming. I have to keep a dictionary nearby. But I love it. His two books on Churchill are must haves for any student of history and I enjoyed what I read of "American Caesar," Manchester's biography of Douglas MacArthur.

Jenn tells me that sometimes I get submerged in whatever historical anniversary we're bumping up against at the time. Maybe so. This year, I stumbled onto a YouTube series of the CBS broadcast day from Friday, Nov. 22, 1963, beginning with "As the World Turns," which was interrupted about 10 minutes after its 1:30 p.m. (Eastern) start time when Walter Cronkite read the first of the fateful wire dispatches from Dallas.

I watched about 30-some installments of it over the course of a week and finally decided to dig up a copy of Manchester's book. I'll let you know what I think when I'm through.

Here is a link to a 2009 Vanity Fair story that tells the stunning, tragic story behind the book's publication, which was fought by Jackie Kennedy for a time.

UT prof's new novel gets high marks

Not bad, is it, for a writer to be compared to Walker Percy and F. Scott Fitzgerald?

UT creative writing professor Michael Knight has been mentioned favorably in the same breath with those literary lights. Read his new novel, "The Typist," over the course of an evening. Calm. Concise. Cool.

The story is set in Tokyo during the American occupation of Japan after World War II. The main character is a kid from Alabama who is assigned to Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s staff as a typist.

Knight says the idea for the novel first came to him after reading a newspaper article about a football game that was played at Nagasaki a few years after an atomic bomb was dropped there in August 1945.

“But I couldn’t get in touch with the character, I didn’t understand what the story was supposed to be,” Knight says.

So, he put it away to work on short stories. While signing books in Gainesville, Fla., Knight met a man who told him he was a typist under MacArthur’s command in Japan following the war.

“And I realized it’s a much more personalized story,” Knight says, “which I hope is sort of a coming of age story.”

Knight says he read several biographies on MacArthur while researching the book and was delighted to discover that one of the general’s nicknames was “Bunny.” Big Mac makes guest appearances in the book as Knight has his main character become a babysitter for MacArthur’s son, Arthur.

Publishers Weekly says that “The Typist” is “not quite darkly comic, not quite ironic … driven by earnest, unaffected storytelling and the soft shocks it delivers render this a modest, entertaining story.”

I concur. It was a nice shift from Pat Conroy's pyrotechnics and it even made me want to dig out my copy of William Manchester's MacArthur bio "American Caesar" once I finish James Kaplan's fantastic new book on Frank Sinatra.

Knight won't knock your socks off, but he charms you with his cogent, quiet style and superb storytelling. It's great company for a cold winter's night by the fire.

“The Typist” is available from Amazon.com, other book outlets and through the Knox County Public Library. The New York Times review can be found here.