I asked Rockford to pick up a book for me from my to-read list. “Our Man in Havana” wasn’t in, and Rockford was in a hurry, so he grabbed the first Graham Greene title he recognized: “The Quiet American.”

It was a fortuitous thing. This is a great book. I saw the movie when it came out on DVD, so I already knew the story. But the writing was so good that I got caught up in it anyway, even to the point that I forgot to jot down my favorite phrases. I did catch a few:

… “Phuong,” I said — which means Phoenix, but nothing nowadays is fabulous and nothing rises from its ashes …

… I was a man without a vocation — one cannot seriously consider journalism a vocation …

The last line of the novel is stunning, but I’m not going to write it out here. You’ll have to read it for yourself.