BOOKS THREAD

On-screen reading is not satisfying for me. I am increasingly anxious for the library to reopen.

I polished off the borrowed stack, and have finished nearly everything in the bag of used books I usually pass along while traveling. I might have to poke around at my own shelves soon, including the many back copies of "Best American Sports Writing" I bought but never read beyond the indexes.

I recommend "My Mother's Kitchen" by Peter Gethers, whose family opened Ratner's on the Lower East Side and whose mom cooked with many famous chefs in the 1970s. I don't cook, so I was particularly amused by how he acerbically broke down famous recipes.

 

My problem with Stinnett's books is everyone is some sort of ex special forces Billy Badass. I like the others because the characters seem more like regular folks. Sometimes they win, sometimes, they get their butts handed to them, would rather talk their way into and out of situations than be Rambo.

As for the Ketchum books, yeah, the "adventures" are full-length. The "tales" are short stories that sort of take place between the main books and fill in gaps. I obviously like them because they are set in North Carolina ... a little farther north than my area, but still The Old North State. I have exchanged many emails with the author and am trying to get him to have the main character make a trip down to TI.

 

There aren't many bad Elmore Leonard books. His dialogue was golden.

 

I really enjoyed this, but I was/am a big fan of the subject, so that might color my opinion.

It's told like an oral history, with just a bit of narrative at the start of each chapter, which follows his life chronologically. And it's got multiple paragraphs from everyone you would expect -- Day Aykroyd, Bill Murray, Lorne Michaels and most of the SNL people, along with his manager, agent and lots of others. There's a bunch of photos, too, and they're not all clumped together in one section of the book. They're in the part of the book where they're relevant.

Belushi really wanted to be taken seriously as an actor, after the huge successes of Animal House and Blues Brothers, but the movies he made after that just weren't good, or he was in a role he shouldn't have played.

He was a brilliant guy, but just couldn't handle the fame. It sucks he died so young.

Joe Bob says definitely check it out.

 

Max Hastings's book, Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy: 1945-75 isn't light reading, literally or figuratively, but it is essential for those looking to understand the war, what caused it, what happened during it and its aftermath from both sides.

 

Just finished Erik Larsen's book, The Spendid and the Vile. It is the story of Winston Churchill's first year as Prime Minister - the time of the London Blitz and the fall of France. It is not just a history, it draws on the diaries of Churchill's daughter, Mary, and the diaries of several of his closest aides to give a picture of what was going on inside the War Cabinet at the time. It also includes diary entries from several Nazi officials such as Goebbels and Goering that are contemporaneous.

It is a history book that reads as a "page-turner". Highly recommended...

 

I borrowed this from a friend Friday evening and just finished it on Sunday evening. Really good look at how a Black woman has found/is finding her way in a world of whiteness. And it's an interesting story of why her parents named her Austin.

Joe Bob says definitely check this one out.

 

"Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich," Norman Ohler. Outstanding look at the junkies who ran Germany into the ground, going well beyond Hitler into how half the nation was on meth (including a future Nobel Prize for Literature winner writing home from the front begging his parents for pills) and the cocaine gum they were giving to teenagers piloting the minisubs the Nazia hoped desperately to blow up British docks with. Like the author's slightly less than credulous voice, too.

 

There's a lot of really interesting history of Las Vegas in here, but it all leads to Elvis' comeback performances at the International Hotel in 1969. Vegas helped re-invent Elvis, and Elvis helped re-invent Vegas.

I'm an Elvis fan from way back, but I still learned a lot from this. The most interesting tidbit: A year after Elvis died, his dad Vernon and Col. Tom Parker staged a tribute show to Elvis in Vegas, and that's pretty much what started the Elvis industry there. There's a mention of Big Elvis, "a four-hundred-pounder who sits in a chair while delivering Elvis songs." I Googled Big Elvis, and while may have been at 400 pounds at the time the book was being written -- it came out in 2019 -- at his heaviest, he weighed 960. Nine hundred and sixty pounds. That's nearly three of William "The Refrigerator" Perry.

Joe Bob says check it out.

 

I read that last month and enjoyed it as well. I've never been to Vegas, so it was cool to read about its glory days.

 

This is a terrific book. Obviously there are a load of Elvis books out there, some indispensable - Peter Guralnick's two-volume bio - most lousy. This one does a great job of examining a significant part of his career that is usually glossed over and tying it into the mega Vegas shows we see today.