BOOKS THREAD

Sounds interesting enough for me to read it. Yes, his bio of Plant was excellent.
I’m half way through “All or Nothing: the story of Steve Marriott” which is compendium of interviews of everyone involved in the life of the frontman of Small Faces and Humble Pie. Many interviews with Marriott, too.
Rough scene in the down and dirty English rock biz of the early days, the Krays were always there to ‘help’. Always liked the rawness of his musicianship, he played many instruments, and Humble Pies version of “Hallelujah, I Love Her So”( the Ray Charles classic) is well done on Rockin The Fillmore, albeit a bit sloppy. He and bassist Ronnie Lane wrote “Tin Soldier”, which charted for the Small Faces and was made into a cover hit by Streetheart in the 70s. Great tune and almost an exact copy. He was considered for Brian Jones’ spot with the Stones but the dope is Mick didn’t want another front man in the band. Marriott has a crunchy style that would have meshed with Keith but thank heaven Mick Taylor got the job. The world is a better place with MT having played with the RS.
Marriott liked to joke it took 2 guys, Rod Stewart and Ron Wood, to replace him in the new Faces band. As per usual drugs and booze blew everything in his universe into outer space. There’s always enough in these types of bios to satisfy me.

 

Reading “Dreams From My Father”. I’d watch that Obama guy, he’s going be going places.

 

He should run for office.

 

"Inside Money: Brown Brothers Harriman and the American Way of Power" by Zachary Karabell. He's a great writer and much of it was interesting (Prescott Bush and Averell Harriman are main characters), but he spent way too much time on the origins of the firm rather than the history of the firm itself, which dates back to the 1930s.

 

Just finished "Don't Skip Out on Me" by Willy Vlautin. Reminded me a little of Plainsong and the other Kent Haruf books. Last few chapters felt slightly out of step, but an easy read.

After crashing and burning on Ellroy's latest quartet, I've started in on his Lloyd Hopkins trilogy. A few chapters in, it reminds me of how good he can be.

 

I’m knocking out Tolstoy this summer, one of my blind spots as a reader. Started with “Anna Karenina.” Levin’s day working in the field is now among my favorite scenes in literature. On to “War and Peace.”

 

In the early 90's I went through my Russian lit phase; Crime and Punishment, War and Peace, Anna Karenina and Brothers Karamazov. Very rewarding. First was Anna Karenina and biggest hurdle was realizing that each character had 4 or so names. Frustrating, then extremely rewarding. What I realized is that the West didn't give Russians enough credit for how hard life is/was for Russians (well I did come of age during the Cold War.)

 

I just read his USFL book. The research makes it, and I learned a lot about the league that was just in my periphery at the time.

 

Finally getting to "Reconstruction" by Eric Foner. All this talk about Critical Race Theory and Juneteenth, it says a lot that I barely remember the post-Civil War period being mentioned in school. Seems we went from the Civil War to World War I, with a couple of mumbles about the rise of industry between the two.

 

I had a little key I wrote on a bookmark to identify each character for the first 60-80 pages until I recognized them better. It definitely was disorienting.

 

Just finished reading Gloves Off by Lowell Cohn. As an East Coast denizen, I was not familiar with his work or his genre - - but after reading the book, I think I was deprived of many interesting and enlightening reads.

This is an easy read; if you have a 3-day weekend with bad weather, you can get through this book easily and still have the luxury of stopping to think about many of the characters that Cohn describes here. He has lots of nice things to say about Bill Walsh, Steve Young, Frank Robinson and even Barry Bonds but less than wonderful things to say about some other folks such as Al Davis.

Highly recommended...