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BOOK REVIEW

‘Letters of Note’
Compiled by Shaun Usher
Reviewed by Fred H. Olin, MD

“Letters of Note” has more than 125 authors, including Win-
ston Churchill, Kurt Vonnegut … and his son, Beethoven,
Queen Elizabeth II, Mary Stuart (Mary Queen of Scots,) the
widow of Eung-Tae Lee, Iggy Pop and many others. While
you’ve undoubtedly heard of many of them, there are quite a
few who were unknown even in their own times and places.

Now, this isn’t a book one sits down and reads cover to cover.
It’s big, but not coffee table big, and it’s a bit too heavy to hold
up and read in bed. It’s a beautiful book: The dust cover looks
good, and the layout, typography and reproductions of many
of the letters are superlative. Even the introduction is like a let-
ter. Everyone I know who has started with it seems to have had
pretty much this experience: seeing it sitting there, picking it
up, opening it at random, and being stuck for a while. Each
of the letters has a short introduction from the editor, Shaun
Usher, that explains its provenance. The publisher has consid-
erately included an attached ribbon to use as a bookmark, but
for me the random-access method was part of its charm.

LOVE, DEATH, HUMOR
There is no obvious organization to the book, but there are several themes that I became aware of: love and death being two of the

most engaging, and they often appear in the same letter. The 16th century Korean widow of Eung-Tae Lee, whom I mentioned above,
wrote to her dead husband: The letter was found on his chest when his tomb was discovered a few years ago. She was pregnant when
he died, and she bemoans her fate and that of her unborn child. Katherine Hepburn’s letter to Spencer Tracy was written 18 years after
his death. There is Virginia Woolf ’s suicide note, expressing her love for her husband, and a letter to the family of a victim of the Pan-
Am airliner that crashed in Lockerbie, Scotland, from the people who found his body on their farm. At least a few caused my vision to
cloud up … age, you know.

Lest you think it’s all gloom and doom, there’s a letter from Groucho Marx to Woody Allen, and Queen Elizabeth’s handwritten
letter to President Eisenhower includes her own recipe for “Drop Scones.” Three girls from Montana wrote to Ike as well, begging him
not to have Elvis Presley’s sideburns cut off when he was inducted into the Army or they “…will just die!” After the Soviets launched
Sputnik, a 12-year-old Australian boy wrote to “A Top Scientist…” at the Australian rocket range with a drawing of a rocket ship, a few
labels and the instruction that they should “…put in the details.”

The “compiler” of this collection must have put in hundreds, if not thousands, of hours researching letters from all over the world,
in all kinds of collections. How else could he have located a clay tablet with incised cuneiform letters, dating from the 14th century
BCE, that is from Ayyab, the king of the city of Atartu, to Amenhotep IV, the Egyptian pharaoh? Or how could he have known of the
existence of Mary Stuart’s letter to her dead husband’s brother, written just six hours before she was executed at the behest of Queen
Elizabeth I?

Here’s my ultimate recommendation: This is being written just before Thanksgiving, and I’m strongly considering buying copies of
this entrancing book as Christmas gifts for friends and members of my family. It doesn’t get any stronger than that.

Fred H. Olin, MD, is a semi-retired orthopaedic surgeon and chair of the BCMS Communications/Publications Committee.
He used to write letters, but his fountain pen broke and email came along. Pity.

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