A fighting chance

By Jan Gardner  |  April 26, 2009

The Davis Cup match on July 20, 1937 was a contest of epic proportions. It was America against Germany, democracy against fascism. Millions around the world listened on the radio as Don Budge, a working-class player from Oakland, Calif., faced Gottfried von Cramm, an aristocrat under surveillance by the Gestapo. Von Cramm was a closeted homosexual who refused to join the Nazi Party or even defend Adolf Hitler. But winning the Davis Cup, he thought, just might save his life.

In "A Terrible Splendor" (Crown), Marshall Jon Fisher, who lives in the Berkshires, offers richly detailed portraits as the story moves from one nail-biting set to the next against a backdrop of improbably high personal and political stakes.

The Nazi threat is central to another new book, this one a novel by veteran Boston newspaperman Peter Lucas, whose reporting assignments have taken him to trouble spots all over the world. He has drawn on his trips to Albania, his parents' homeland, to write "Balkan Caesar" (Aberdeen Bay). It is a fictionalized account of a band of US soldiers - including an Albanian-speaking officer from Boston - who volunteer to join the battle against the Nazis in the rugged mountains of Albania.

In 1923, Edna St. Vincent Millay, a flamboyant denizen of Greenwich Village, became the first woman awarded the Pulitzer Prize in poetry. Two years later, Millay and her husband bought an old farmhouse they called Steepletop in Austerlitz, N.Y., on the Massachusetts border. She lived there until her death 25 years later. Millay had a writing cabin, lush gardens, and room to entertain fellow writers and friends.

Over the years, the house - containing her library and many possessions - fell into disrepair. The Edna St. Vincent Millay Society is spearheading the effort to restore Steepletop, a national historic landmark, and open it to the public. Linda and Phil Halpern, poetry lovers who own Brook Farm Inn in Lenox, are hosting a fund-raiser at 3 p.m. on May 16. Peter Bergman, the society's executive director, will read from Millay's work and talk about her life. Tickets are $20.

Anne Fadiman, whose collection of essays, "Ex Libris," touches on matters of book etiquette as well as the union of her library with her husband's, will give a free talk at 6 p.m. May 5 at the Boston Athenaeum. Fadiman's first book, "The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down," which examined the gulf between a Hmong family with an epileptic child and the American healthcare system, is now required reading at some schools.

Formerly editor of The American Scholar, Fadiman teaches at Yale, where she is the inaugural Francis Writer in Residence, the university's first endowed appointment in nonfiction writing. Reservations are required (617-720-7600).

"A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of '08 and the Descent into Depression," by Richard A. Posner (Harvard University)

"Echoes of a University Presidency: Selected Speeches," by J. Donald Monan (Linden Lane)

"Sag Harbor," by Colson Whitehead (Doubleday)

Pick of the week

Kathryn Fabiani of RJ Julia Booksellers in Madison, Conn., recommends "Genesis" by Bernard Beckett (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt): "In a futuristic society, the survivors of a devastating worldwide plague live on an isolated and heavily defended island. This short novel is a stunning and original combination of philosophy, history, suspense, and technology, with an ending that will take your breath away."

Jan Gardner can be reached at JanLGardner@yahoo.com.