Channelling Ike
“Nonfiction writers who succumb to the temptations of phantom scholarship are a burgeoning breed these days, although most stop short of fabricating interviews with Presidents. But Stephen Ambrose, who, at the time of his death, in 2002, was America’s most famous and popular historian, appears to have done just that. Before publishing a string of No. 1 best-sellers, including “Band of Brothers” and “D-Day,” Ambrose had made his name chronicling the life of Dwight D…..”
Wanted: A Kinder, Gentler Cop
“IN MACARTHUR PARK, AT THE edge of downtown Los Angeles, it’s 8:15 on a Friday night and a man is dying. Middle-aged, black, wearing white sneakers and a white T-shirt, he lies beneath a eucalyptus tree that stinks as though a hundred horses urinated against it. He has been shot in the arm and left eye. His right eye is open, and there’s very little blood.”
“Book review: ‘The Hunt for KSM’ is a true thriller”
“The tale told by former Los Angeles Times reporters Terry McDermott and Josh Meyer in “The Hunt for KSM,” the story of the pursuit, capture and interrogation of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, mastermind of 9/11, at times so resembles something straight out of “24” or the Bourne movies that the authors have to keep reminding the reader that this is for real.”
“Of Human Bondage”
“It was 1963, and I was seven years old, when I first dreamed of being James Bond. My parents had separated, and I was living with my father in a seaside resort of faded Edwardian splendor. Together we went to a double bill of Dr. No and From Russia with Love at the local Gaumont, an art-deco movie palace from the 1920s…”
“Book review: ‘The Real Romney’ adds fuller picture of candidate”
“Let’s face it, Mitt Romney seems more than a little opaque. On the one hand he’s über-rich, incredibly smart and nakedly ambitious; on the other he seems somehow robotic, shut-down and so happy to embrace the pragmatic option that the core of his character remains elusive. There’s a sense of a man who will eagerly deny even his own best achievements…”
“Book review: ‘Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest’ by Wade Davis”
On June 6, 1924, two men set out from a camp set at 23,000 feet on Mt. Everest. They were George Mallory, who, at 37, was already one of the world’s most accomplished climbers, and Andrew “Sandy” Irvine, a 22-year-old Oxford graduate with little climbing experience.
“Review: “The Pale King” by David Foster Wallace”
“The Pale King” is composed of parts of the “something long” on which 46-year-old David Foster Wallace was working before he hanged himself at his home in Claremont, Calif., on Sept. 12, 2008.Wallace – author of fictions such as “The Broom of the System,” “Girl With Curious Hair,” “Infinite Jest” and “Brief Interviews With Hideous Men,”…
“‘Steve Jobs’ review: Walter Isaacson’s biography mesmerizes”
He was an abandoned child who grew up with the unshakable belief that he was destined to be a prince. How arrogant and sensible of him.His personal hygiene was bad. He often wore no shoes and liked to stick his feet in the toilet. His food faddery was so extreme that he sometimes endangered his own health.
“Paperback Writers: Classic Patricia Highsmith”
Guilt was Patricia Highsmith’s great theme. In her books even the good know they’re not innocent, and they carry an apprehension that they too will be found out. “Night was falling quickly, with visible speed like a black sea creeping over the earth,” reflects Robert Forester at the beginning of “The Cry of the Owl”
“John le Carré’s ‘Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy’ reissued”
During the writing of an early draft of “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,” recalls John le Carré in an introduction to his classic spy novel, now reissued by Penguin Books along with a selection of his other works, he was banging his head against the wall. For a long time, he tried to make the story of a quest to ferret out a double…
“Paperback writers: Classic Le Carré”
First published in 1974, John le Carré’s “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” (Penguin: 400 pp., $16) deals with the quest to ferret out a double agent within the highest levels of the British secret service. The novel’s plot weaves together a backward-looking investigation, drawing in the testimony of witnesses, case files and detailed memories…
“A Life Runs Backward”
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” which forms the basis for the new David Fincher movie starring Brad Pitt, originally appeared in Collier’s on May 27, 1922 (earlier the story had been rejected by Metropolitan), and was then featured in Fitzgerald’s second story collection, “Tales of the Jazz Age.”
“Book review: ‘Celebrations of Curious Characters’ by Ricky Jay”
To say that Ricky Jay does card tricks is, as Mark Singer once noted in the New Yorker, somewhat akin to suggesting that “Sonny Rollins plays tenor saxophone.” Jay is one of the greatest sleight-of-hand artists ever to fool and wow an audience. A few years back, at a theater in Westwood…
“Paperback Writers: Sunlight and shadow in ‘Los Angeles in the 1930s’”
Created by FDR in 1935, in the depths of the Great Depression, the Federal Writers’ Project (a small part of the wider Works Progress Administration) was a make-work agency that gave jobs to about 6,500 writers, editors and researchers before closing shop in 1943. The government, in other words, used taxpayers’ money to pay small but welcome salaries to writers.
“Book review: ‘The Fifth Witness’ by Michael Connelly”
Michael Connelly’s richly entertaining new novel, “The Fifth Witness,” features defense attorney Mickey Haller, who operates out of the big armor-plated Lincoln he acquired from some lowlife in lieu of a fee and who seems, for the moment, to have replaced detective Harry Bosch as this immensely successful writer’s go-to narrative guy.
Paperback writers: Two survivor stories
Many memoirs, and some of the best, are survival stories, tales told by that supposedly fortunate person who emerged living but not unscarred from the carnage of natural disaster or personal tragedy. Survival comes with a price tag: Not only must the survivor move forward, but he or she must assess his or her position vis-à-vis what occurred.
“Book review: ‘While Mortals Sleep’ by Kurt Vonnegut”
It was in the 1950s that Kurt Vonnegut, then in his early 30s, quit his job as a publicity man for the research department of General Electric and committed himself to a freelance career. He soon published a first novel, ‘Player Piano’ (unsuccessful), and began cranking out short stories, scores of them, for the ‘slicks’…
“Book review: ‘My Father at 100: A Memoir’ by Ron Reagan”
“Hinckley had loaded his pistol with a type of exploding bullet charmingly marketed as a Devastator,” writes Ron Reagan, describing John Hinckley Jr.’s 1981 attempt to assassinate his father, President Ronald Reagan. “It was the sixth and final shot that first hit not Dad but the armor-plated side of the presidential limousine.
Paperback Writers: Between sea and sky
Bruce Chatwin, the brilliant English writer and stylish nomad, died from AIDS in late 1989. His memorial service, held in a Greek Orthodox Cathedral in London on the day that Ayatollah Khomeini handed a death sentence to Chatwin’s friend Salman Rushdie, was a legendary event, mobbed by fans, celebrities and hundreds of journalists.
Book review: ‘Letters,’ Saul Bellow, edited by Benjamin Taylor
Saul Bellow, being Saul Bellow, coined literary profit from emotional tumult. From personal pain came self-exploration and impish bons mots, poured into the heightened confessional of his fiction and also into the letters he fired off throughout his life. These bulletins from the biographical front, as it were, are now collected in a hefty, handsome volume…
“‘Titanic Thompson: The Man Who Bet on Everything’ by Kevin Cook”
Alvin Clarence Thomas, a.k.a. Titanic Thompson, was a gambler and golf hustler who died at age 82 on May 19, 1974, but whose outlaw career really flourished, as Kevin Cook records with breezy relish in his biography “Titanic Thompson: The Man Who Bet on Everything,” between 1920 and 1950. That period was a golden age in the history of the American confidence game.