BOOKS THREAD

Desk 88 by Sherrod Brown about several U.S. Senators who all used his desk in the Capitol over the years.

Very Profiles in Courage vibes and it is a quick read. The senators range from well-known candidates for president (RFK, McGovern) the mostly forgotten (T.F. Green, Glen Taylor, Herbert Lehman) and some in between (Hugo Black, Al Gore Sr.)

 

Went to a fun discussion last night between David Remnick and Kelefa Sanneh at the New York Public Library, where the two discussed Remnick's new book Holding the Note, his collection of profiles of various musicians. I think I read most of the stories when they originally ran but still looking forward to reading them again in the book. Cohen, Buddy Guy, Dylan, McCartney, Franklin. The event was really fun, Sanneh was really good at leading the discussion and of course Remnick knows how to get the audience to eat out of the palm of his hand.

 

Finally got around to this and also found it enjoyable.

The book revealed a name I'd never heard of before: Angelo Lano, an FBI agent who was a source for Woodstein. He's apparently the one who got crossed-up on Bernstein's convoluted instructions confirming Hugh Sloan had given up Haldeman's name to the grand jury as the fifth person to control the CREEP fund. Also the fellow Woodstein then confronted in the immediate aftermath of the confusion. IIRC, he's also the dude Bernstein (Hoffman) is walking with on the sidewalk in ATPM the film.

Respect the fact Graff acknowledged the importance of reporting by people other than Woodstein:
1. The great Jack Nelson and his colleagues at the LA Times for getting the first-person account of the break-in from Al Baldwin.
2. Walter Rugaber's work for the NY Times; Sy Hersh, as well.
3. TIME Magazine.

For those of us that have read the numerous books previously written, a lot of the information will come back to you including from a personal favorite: Without Fear or Favor by Harrison Salisbury. Maybe it's nitpicking, but Graff could have done a better job of attribution of Salisbury's book and others in the narrative but he does so in the endnotes.

Anyway, with attribution to Flip, Joe Bob says check it out.

 

Lot of Jeff Guinn fans on this thread, including me. Finally got a copy of his Bonnie and Clyde book "Go Down Together." Excellent as always. The Barrow gang often robbed National Guard Armories....why weren't they better "guard"ed?

 

It’s largely centered on the architectural breakthroughs of different generations of malls, but I loved this look at the birth, heyday, death and possible future of the shopping mall.

 

"Charlatan" by Pope Brock, published in 2008. A wild, true tale about 1920s quack doctor John Brinkley, a dangerously unqualified surgeon who conned people into thinking he could cure impotence with....transplanted goat testicles (called glands in the press back then).

Brinkley pedaled worthless medicines and botched many surgeries, but thanks to being an early radio pioneer as advertiser and show host, he became extremely famous.

He also almost became governor of Kansas as a write-in candidate!

 

I just read Jaws for the first time.
The movie is one of my all-time favorites that I watch every chance I get, and I've read other books by Benchley (The Island and The Deep), but I've never gotten around to reading Jaws.
I always knew there were major differences, but that doesn't begin to cover it.
None of the characters in the novel are likable. There are major plot elements in the novel that were happily cut out by Spielberg.
If you are a fan of the film, you know already that Robert Shaw made Quint, and there has never been a more true statement. The Indianapolis soliloquy was Shaw at his drunken finest. In the movie, there was motive behind Quint's madness. In the book, he was just a bastard who liked to torture and kill ocean life.

 

Don Winslow's new one, City of Angels, book two in the trilogy that began with City on Fire, is outstanding.

 

Isn't there a whole weird "Mrs. Brody wants to fuck Hooper" subplot in the book as well? I think I read it in my teens after seeing the movie, so that was quite the surprise for me. (Also, my parents randomly had the novelization of Jaws 2. I don't know why, since they didn't have the original novel, or even the movie on VHS.)

 

Not wants to, did for a whole day while it was raining and the Chief was at work.

 

I seem to remember this too, after also reading "Jaws" when I was a teenager.

The next time I watched the movie I looked for any hint of that plot, and the closest they get is when Mrs. Brody and Hooper out-snob the police chief at dinner. But Spielberg doesn't go any further than that.

 

Lou Cannon's "President Reagan: the Role of a Lifetime." A mammoth (almost 9oo pages) tome that is often sympathetic....but also manages to be incredibly damning.

Reagan is seen as unbelievably passive and often ignorant and lacking in initiative. His aides constantly worried about how to protect the presidency...from Reagan himself. They feared the idiotic ramblings his right-wing associates would feed him as he was always influenced most by the last person who visited with him.

Without a script in front of him, Cannon shows, Reagan was utterly helpless. When he rarely went off script, he'd say stupid, crazy shit....and then deny he ever said it.

He lacked close friendships of any kind, showed zero loyalty to any of his subordinates, and was utterly under the thumb of a weird and vindictive FLOTUS who dictated his calendar according to an astrologist (!).