BOOKS THREAD

Really enjoyed this and he led me to some other true crime I hadn't read and really enjoyed, particularly "In Broad Daylight" by
Harry M. Maclean. Found a used copy on-line and enjoyed it so much, I mailed it off to Moddy when I was done!

 

Dear Friend of the F: Just finished re-reading (first time in decades) "The Simple Art of Murder," by Chandler. It's a collection of pulp short stories (no Philip Marlowe) plus the essay in detective fiction of the same name. Excellent.

 

Just finished Francisco Goldman's "Say Her Name". He calls it a novel but it's really a slightly fictionalized memoir of his young wife and her death in an accident in 2007. It is beautiful and sad and affirming all at the same time. It's the kind of book that makes me wish I was a writer just so I could tell you properly how affecting this book is.

 

I read this last year and was similarly affected. In many ways it reminded me of F.Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night.

 

His first novel - The Long Night of White Chickens - is also awesome. I go back and read it every few years.

 

It's still wonderful. In that genre, Chandler remains the King.

 

Mr G,

I have the Chandler collection (now 37 years in my possession) sitting on my desk at work. Look at it once a week.

I'm still a Ross Macdonald guy but Chandler, Hammett and R-Mac are the Holy Trinity.

YHS, etc

 

Read a bunch of books during recent trip to South Africa. One in particular I really enjoyed, which I found in one of the rare used bookstores in Cape Town, was Selling Hitler by Robert Harris (wrote Fatherland). Story of the Hitler Diaries, which I didn't really know a lot about until the book. It's a stunning story by itself - a loser forger convinces a reporter he has Hitler's diaries, reporter convinces paper's higher-ups, paper's higher-ups bully editors into running it, historians...ignored until publication. But Harris is a great writer and the story reads like a thriller. Great story of one of the great journalistic debacles ever.

 

I believe one of those duped was William Broyles Jr. who is a really successful Hollywood screenwriter.

 

Just finished game Change after reading the thread about the HBO movie. Riveting, fast-paced stuff, just great behind-the-scenes access. Makes you wonder why anyone would want to put themselves through the hell of a presidential run.

 

I read all of Theodore White's "Making of the President" books. The book in 1960 was somewhat unique because, to that point, there really hadn't been full-length books which tried to go inside the campaigns so close to the previous election.

I think a young person today probably might look at it as unimpressive, and there are problems with the book. The first is that if the election isn't exciting (1964 and 1972), the book isn't likely to be as interesting as in close elections (1960 and 1968).

The other thing is that political reporting evolved from the 1950s thru the 1970s. Reporters were willing to report more information, and with Watergate, more things were reported and there were a lot of books by the start of the 1976 campaign which made White's model obsolete.

 

Agreed, Gold. I am glad I read his work though, as way to look at the evolution of book-length political reporting. White was known as a hero-worshiper (oddly, he was enamored with both JFK and Nixon).

I never read his first book though because I have Arthur Schlesinger's "Thousand Days" in my collection and that covers the election pretty well.