BOOKS THREAD

Just finished Julian Sher and William Marsden's Angels of Death, about the global reach of the crime committed by the Hell's Angels and other biker gangs. Some of the material is, well, shocking really. It's amazing that the Hell's Angels have been able to maintain this legendary good 'ol boy image they have.

 

I'm about 200 pages in and have found it very fascinating. I'm not necessarily interested in that age, well not as much as when I was a kid, but it has been a very easy read.

 

I'm currently reading The Great Deluge, Douglas Brinkley's book about Hurricane Katrina. Not exactly light reading but man is it a fucking eye opener.

 

Not hardly.

I love Brinkley's work, but I can't bring myself to read that, knowing I'll get a visceral reaction similar to the one I got two chapters into Krakauer's "Under the Banner of Heaven."

A reaction of sickness and disgust mixed with the urge to break something.

Meanwhile, I've finally gotten to Doris Kearns Goodwin's "Team of Rivals," which has been on my list forever.

 

I'm about 150 pages in and I don't know how many times I've read a passage, shaken my head and thought "What the fuck was going on here?"

 

Team of Rivals deserves all of the praise that it gets. It is right up there with Caro's LBJ series, IMO.

 

Just finished Outlaw Journalist: The Life And Times Of Hunter S. Thompson, by William McKeen. This must be the definitive book on The Good Doctor. Written by University of Fla. journalism prof McKeen, it goes beyond the other bios. McKeen interviewed Thompson's childhood friends wives, girlfriends, editors, publishers, old Air Force acquaintances, waitresses ,bartenders, Thompson's buddies and others. The result is a must read for anyone interested in the wierdest wordsmith of them all. Just released Monday and don't know if it's available at Amazon or other online booksellers. Got mine from the publisher, W. W. Norton & Co.

 

Thanks for the heads up, I hadn't heard about this one. How does it compare to Gonzo (which I just finished) the oral bio put together by Jann Wenner? He talked to a lot of those people too.

 

Huggy, McKeen's book vs. Wenner's is like comparing a Bugatti to a VW Bug.

 

I'm reading Billy Joel: The Life and Times of an Angry Young Man by Hank Bordowitz.

Billy's been a fave for 30+ years. The information is interesting. But Hank Bordowitz can't write.

You'd think if you were supposedly a music writer and you were writing a biography of a singer/songwriter and you thought it would be clever to give every chapter the name of a lyric from said singer/songwriter, you could at least be buggered to get the lyric correct.

But that's only part of the problem. The guy's just not a good writer.

 

Just finished David Halberstam's collection, "Everything they had." I love his writing, but you realize quickly that all of his newspaper work followed one consistent theme — it was all better in my day. That's great, and god love him for it, but reading the same stories in different works side-by-side got a little cumbersome.

I am now reading S.L. Price's "Far Afield." I am about 100 pages in, and really enjoying it.