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I am in a book reading competition this year with my pal Erik Young (aka EPY), and I just finished reading one of the most enjoyable books thus far – What Makes Sammy Run?
The book is narrated with the thoughts of Al Manheim, a friend of the protagonist, Sammy Glick. Much like in Atlas Shrugged, which opens with the question, “Who is John Galt?”, Manheim is obsessed with the central question of the book, “What makes Sammy Run?” In other words, what drives Glick to constantly aim to climb the social and professional ladder?
There are several things that make this book incredibly enjoyable, but there are two standouts:
- Character development, in which you see so many of the characteristics of people you know or have worked with. Most deeply developed is the protagonist, Sammy Glick, whose rapid rise through Hollywood in the 1930s is tracked by the cost and quality of the shoes he wears, but there are at least a half dozen characters whose treatment by Schulberg is outstanding.
- Quality of the prose. This book felt like a highly-tuned sports car, handling tightly around the corners of language with every word placed like it belonged on the page forever. Schulberg is a master of the cadence and content of the Brooklyn/Newyorkese dialect, with metaphors and mannerisms that will keep you in wonderment (and stitches!) throughout the whole book.
At a small 300 pages and just under 100,000 words, this is a very quick and enjoyable read that you will want to own so that you can return to it for second and third helpings. Much like the time I re-read The Great Gatsby in my late 20s and recognized so many characters that I had missed on my first forced high school reading, this book will help you understand the world of people around you and their motivations, and give you a whole new vocabulary and mental framework to understand your “social graph”. A true portrait of the human species.
If you like stats, here is an update on where I am in the competition:
Books Finished/Total: 42/44
Total Pages: 14,191
Total Words: 5,024,532
Where art thou, EPY?
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