Raymond Sokolov is the author of The Saucier’s Apprentice, the novel Native Intelligence, and a biography of A. J. Liebling, Wayward Reporter. His new book is Steal the Menu: A Memoir of Forty Years in Food.For the Wall Street Journal he named five top books for the Anglomaniac, including:
No More ParadesRead about another book on Sokolov's list.
by Ford Madox Ford (1925)
This is the second volume of the best war novel not by Tolstoy. Ford's whole great tetralogy "Parade's End" was recently compressed into a TV miniseries, which did a fine but ultimately inadequate job of re-creating the inner world of the decent, self-laceratingEdwardian Tory intellectual Christopher Tietjens, who is too good to be true but true anyway to his vile, evil, unfaithful, endlessly seductive wife, Sylvia. The marriage withers, as does his civil-service career. Tietjens soldiers on, literally, in the trenches and, figuratively, at country estates and in the upper reaches of British politics. But the real action, thanks to Ford's deft application of the then-hot technique of internal monologue, occurs in Tietjens's stoical mind. The committed reader will acquire the re-edited and (very usefully) annotated edition of 2011.
--Marshal Zeringue
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