Short Takes
Memories From a Sinking Ship
By Barry Gifford
Seven Stories, 270 pp., $21.95
"Memories From a Sinking Ship" calls itself a novel, though that isn't entirely accurate. Like beads on a chain, the miniature fictions that make up the book are tiny, self-contained narratives, more or less chronologically arranged, some told in the first person, some in the third, variable in detail but consistent in shape and color.
Based on author Barry Gifford's hard-knocks childhood, they feature a wary and observant youngster named Roy growing up hither and yon in 1950s America. Roy's mother, divorced from his father, a flashy small-time hoodlum, is an aging party girl whose love life has never lived up to the promise of her beauty. The moments Roy cherishes -- as we do, reading about them -- are the long car trips he takes with her back and forth between Key West, Fla., and Chicago, both of which they intermittently call home, since this is the only time he has her undivided attention. As they sit side by side, eating up the miles, talking earnestly about dreams, about geography, about the meaning of life, a warm golden sun breaks through the moody overcast of Gifford's expertly crafted fiction.
Machiavelli: Philosopher of Power
By Ross King
Atlas/HarperCollins, 245 pp., $21.95
While "Machiavellian" has become a common epithet, Niccolò Machiavelli himself remains an indistinct figure, a situation Ross King aims to rectify by casting a vivid light on the controversial political philosopher.
Unpublished in his lifetime, "The Prince," now considered Machiavelli's dark masterpiece, is synonymous with the ruthless will to power. (Bertrand Russell called it a "handbook for gangsters.") The work is, of course, more complicated than that, as was Machiavelli's own relationship with power. The son of a respectable but hardly eminent family, by the age of 30 he was a councilor of the Republic of Florence, frequently sent on diplomatic missions. Eventually he fell afoul of the ruling Borgia clan and was brutally imprisoned in 1513, then exiled to the countryside, where, a Renaissance man indeed, he occupied himself with writing -- his satirical comedies were much admired -- two-timing his long-suffering wife, and scheming to get back into the Borgias' good graces.
A writer whose disciples range from Napoleon and Hitler to America's Founding Fathers, he was clearly a thinker of some complexity. Although the author's data-heavy style can make it difficult to see the forest for the tress, King ("Brunelleschi's Dome") knows the period inside out and works overtime to bring this intriguing figure to life, leaving Machiavelli's intellectual property largely for others to unpack.
Ten Points
By Bill Strickland
Hyperion, 256 pp., $23.95
Like David going forth to challenge Goliath, Bill Strickland, an amateur cyclist, decided to take on the big guys -- Olympic hopefuls and wiry veterans of international glamour events -- by competing in a season's worth of cycling races near his home in Pennsylvania. He was determined not just to compete ("throwing myself under the wheels of a pack of world-class cyclists," he calls it) but to win points awarded for being among the top finishers.
Strickland knows how to pump up the most sedentary reader's blood pressure with his visceral descriptions of churning through the pack at high speed, a hair's-breadth from the aggressive elbows and slashing machines of the competition. More than an adrenaline-charged athlete's narrative, however, "Ten Points" is the memoir of a psyche in jeopardy, a soul in pain. Strickland races to mend a damaged marriage, to reassure his precocious little daughter that wishes come true. But he also races to outrun the nightmare of a toxic upbringing and the fear of turning out like his father, a vicious sadist bent on proving his manhood in the worst possible ways.
Strickland first took up cycling because of a family history of cardiac trouble. In metaphorical terms, at least, there is absolutely nothing wrong with this man's heart.
Amanda Heller is a critic and editor who lives in Newton. 
