Raoul Felder

New York divorce lawyer Raoul Lionel Felder is the author, most recently, of Bare-Knuckle Negotiation, published this month by John Wiley & Sons.

Manhattan ’45 by Jan Morris (Oxford, $18). Simply put, the best travel book written in modern times. It’s a snapshot of the Manhattan that returning World War II servicemen met, in June 1945, when it was the repository of the world’s brightest minds and wealthiest, most creative people—the embodiment of the lyrics in an old blues song: “You can save your money, save your railroad fare. When you leave New York, you ain’t goin’ nowhere.”

A Coffin for Dimitrios by Eric Ambler (Vintage, $12). Every first-class novelist of international intrigue—including John Le Carré and Alan Furst—is to some degree a literary offspring of Ambler. In this elegantly written mystery, a writer becomes obsessed with reconstructing the life of a villain named Dimitrios Makropoulos, whose body is found floating in the Bosporus.

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The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler (Vintage, $12). Dashiell Hammett created the genre of hard-boiled detective novels, but it was brought to perfection by Chandler. There is no point in describing the plot of this or other Chandler novels, since they take gratuitous, meandering paths. It is in the characters drawn, and the writing, that the attraction lies, and to dismiss Chandler’s novels as simply “detective stories” is a declaration of ignorance.

Moby Dick by Herman Melville (Bantam, $5). Probably the best novel ever written by an American. To describe it as being about a man and a whale is like saying Catholicism is about a rabbi and his speeches.

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Bantam, $7). Forget the psychologists, psychiatrists, and psychoanalysts: Dostoyevsky explores the mind, particularly the criminal mind, more acutely than any bunch of overpriced pretenders with fancy diplomas. Crime and Punishment is a sprawling story, but not in the sense of War and Peace; its landscape is the human mind and psyche.

A Farewell to Arms

Farewell

An Army at Dawn.