BOOKS THREAD

Sorry if I missed it in my search, but has anyone put up a review of Sally Jenkins' The Real All-Americans yet? (The book, not just the excerpt that ran in SI. Found that thread.)

Roger Goodell raved about it in this week's MMQB; guess that's a pretty good recommendation. Just added it to my Amazon.com cart.

 

To those who recommended that I look into Cormac McCarthy beyond "The Road", I thank you. Am currently reading "No Country for Old Men" and loving the hell out of it.

This thread is one of the things I love most about this site.

 

I just read that too. I enjoyed it, but had the same concerns as I did about Pressfield -- whether the rest of the series would get repetitive.

 

I'm not sure whether I'll read any further, either. I may go ahead and pick up the next book and leave it in my stack in case the mood strikes.

 

I have the following books reserved at the B&N in my 'hood:

Too Far From Home, by some guy named Jones.

Ladies And Gentlemen, The Bronx Is Burning.

Murder, Inc.: The Story of the Syndicate.

 

Just polished off the last 100-plus pages of Mark Kriegel's "Pistol: The Life of Pete Maravich." I'll now watch Maravich mixes on YouTube when I should be sleeping. Good book about that covers three generations of Maraviches.

P.S. Kriegel really makes John Brady look like quite the ass at the end. I find Brady less offensive than many sportswriters, but I'm not surprised at what I read.

 

Just finished Tim Weiner's "A Legacy Of Ashes," the history of how incredibly screwed up, dysfunctional, and worse, the CIA has been almost since its founding. Fascinating thing about the book: there isn't one anonymous quote in it. It's all on-the-record stuff and document work. Great, great reporting, and something for everyone on both sides of the aisles. For example, Boom's gonna LOVE the stuff about JFK and RFK. It's also important to read it before they launch this new TV series, The Company, in which they apparently try to rehabilitate old James Jesus Angleton, who was completely mad.

 

Looks like interesting book. I read some reviews and found a funny passage from book :

"To compare some of the agency's antics revealed in this book to the Keystone Kops is to do violence to the memory of Mack Sennett, who created the slapstick comedies. My personal favorite is an episode in Guatemala in 1994, when the CIA chief of station confronted the American ambassador, Marilyn McAfee, with intelligence, as she recalled, that "I was having an affair with my secretary, whose name was Carol Murphy." The CIA's friends in the Guatemalan military had bugged McAfee's bedroom, Weiner reports, and "recorded her cooing endearments to Murphy. They spread the word that the ambassador was a lesbian." The CIA's "Murphy memo" was widely distributed in Washington. There was only one problem: the ambassador was married, not gay and not sleeping with her secretary. " 'Murphy' was the name of her two-year-old black standard poodle. The bug in her bedroom had recorded her petting her dog."

 

True story, Boom, and one of the only ones in the book that's really funny.
And you are going love the Kennedy chapters, lad. Oh-ho, yes, you are.

 

My new favorite paragraph and sig:

It was time to recognize, Brenda decided gloomily, that when you had Gary around, there were questions for which you would not get answers. The snow kept coming down. Out on the roads, the universe would be just one big white field.

From page 48 of "The Executioner's Song" by Norman Mailer. God, this book is mammoth in just about every sense.

 

This has been my favorite paragraph for a while:

" I ride over my beautiful ranch. Between my legs is a beautiful horse. The air is wine. The grapes on a score of rolling hills are red with autumn flame. Across Sonoma Mountain, wisps of sea fog are stealing. The afternoon sun smolders in the drowsy sky. I have everything to make me glad I am alive..."

 

Read "The Crossing" next. Then "Blood Meridian."