More book reviews
May 27, 2012
Jean Craighead George dies at 92; children's author
After children's author Jean Craighead George revealed that she wanted to write a book about a girl who talks with wolves, legendary book editor Ursula Nordstrom reportedly asked one question — will it be accurate? — and most certainly knew the answer.
May 27, 2012
Review: Edward O. Wilson tackles 'The Social Conquest of Earth'
The Social Conquest of Earth
May 27, 2012
'The Other America' takes the veil off American poverty
Michael Harrington's "The Other America: Poverty in the United States" had been in print for about 20 years when I first read it in the early 1980s. I was a young journalist then, and I had found a musty paperback edition in a basement-level used bookstore around the corner from my apartment near the heart of Jamestown, N.Y., where my entry-level newspaper wages were so low that, after rent and student loan payments, I couldn't afford a car.
May 27, 2012
Richard Ford finds his place in 'Canada'
It's tempting to call Richard Ford a writer of place. Beginning with his first novel, 1976's "A Piece of My Heart," the 68-year-old author has tended toward the border among landscape, language and character, using setting to help drive his narratives. Think of Frank Bascombe, who in "The Sportswriter," "Independence Day" and "The Lay of the Land" drifts across the bland surfaces of New Jersey, seeking not stimulation but a stasis similar to that of the suburbs where he resides. Or the people of Ford's Montana books, "Rock Springs" and "Wildlife": etched by the stark environment in which they find themselves, staring down the elements of their lives.
May 27, 2012
Poem: Stanley Plumly's 'Cancer'
In recent years, poet Stanley Plumly gave readers "Posthumous Keats," a gorgeous, award-winning prose meditation on the great English Romantic poet's life and death. With "Orphan Hours: Poems" (W.W. Norton: $25.95), the Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, ruminates again on the topic of mortality, though this time the subject is much closer to home. Surely there's a struggle ahead for anyone with a serious illness, but in the poem "Cancer," he offers a respite from the horror by addressing the disease from a startling, cosmic perspective.
8:55 PM PDT, May 20, 2012
A totally Californian poet laureate
Wearing jeans, green sneakers, a hipster straw bowler and a Buddhist symbol around his neck, the new poet laureate of California opened his weekly poetry workshop at UC Riverside with stretching and breathing exercises.
11:36 AM PDT, May 25, 2012
Reviews: 'The Perfume Lover,' 'Scent of Triumph' tell heady tales
This story has been corrected. See note at bottom for details.
May 19, 2012
A bet on books' continuing pop-hop
Like a bad love affair, they kept it a secret from their families as long as they could. Because in 2012, who can admit the thing they want more than anything in the world is to open a bookstore?
May 19, 2012
Review: 'Calico Joe' by John Grisham hits for average
John Grisham is to literature what Cheerios are to a rushed breakfast, something you buy in bulk and consume without too much thought. Honestly, I'm relieved when a new Grisham book doesn't weigh more than I do.
May 20, 2012
Review: 'The Man Who Changed the Way We Eat' by Thomas McNamee
The Man Who Changed the Way We Eat
May 17, 2012
Book review: 'Second Person Singular' by Sayed Kashua
Early in the novel, "Second Person Singular," a main character known throughout the book as "the lawyer" reads a note in his wife's handwriting. "I waited for you, but you didn't come," the note says. "I hope everything's all right. I wanted to thank you for last night. It was wonderful. Call me tomorrow?"
May 12, 2012
Book review: Peter Beinart's 'The Crisis of Zionism' sounds call
Nearly all the considerable attention generated by Peter Beinart's "The Crisis of Zionism" has focused on its final 81/2 pages. There, warning that the "hour is late," he calls for liberal supporters of Israeli democracy to engage in "direct action" against Israeli occupation of the territories occupied after the June 1967 war. To save Israel from what he sees as the corrosive effects of settlement in the West Bank, he says, American Jews should boycott products made in the settlements and push the U.S. government to ban tax-deductible gifts to charities that fund settlers.
May 9, 2012
Appreciation: Maurice Sendak helped children's imaginations run wild
When my son Noah was little — no more than 2 years old — his favorite book was"Where the Wild Things Are"by Maurice Sendak, who died on Tuesday at age 83. We used to read it and reread it, every night before bed.
May 5, 2012
'Conversations at the American Film Institute With the Great Moviemakers' info
Conversations at the American Film Institute With the Great Moviemakers:
May 13, 2012
Review: Albright's 'Prague Winter' mixes the personal, historical
"Prague Winter: A Personal Story of Remembrance and War, 1937-1948"
May 7, 2012
Book review: 'The Hunt for KSM' is a true thriller
The tale told by former Los Angeles Times reporters Terry McDermott and Josh Meyer in "The Hunt for KSM," the story of the pursuit, capture and interrogation of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, mastermind of9/11, at times so resembles something straight out of "24" or the Bourne movies that the authors have to keep reminding the reader that this is for real. On the one hand, "The Hunt for KSM" is a flat-out thriller. On the other, it lays out aspects of our factual contemporary world that are far more ambiguous, internecine and dangerous than anything Hollywood dare contemplate.
May 13, 2012
Preserving the true spirit of New Orleans
In the days and weeks after Hurricane Katrina made landfall and the dark waters rose in late summer 2005, it didn't take long for people outside New Orleans to begin inquiring — not just about the safety of loved ones or the state of the infrastructure but something larger — as distinct as it was amorphous.
May 13, 2012
Not Just for Kids: Inside every prince, a bumbling idiot
The Hero's Guide to Saving Your Kingdom
May 7, 2012
'The Hunt for KSM: Inside the Pursuit and Takedown of the Real 9/11 Mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed' info
The Hunt for KSM: Inside the Pursuit and Takedown of the Real 9/11 Mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed
May 6, 2012
Book review: 'The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson' by Robert Caro
The Passage of Power
May 6, 2012
'The Coat' by Dana Gioia
Much of Dana Gioia's poetry might be set in the contemporary world, but a host of ancient, mythic references echo in the speakers' voices and the scenes they present to readers. In "Pity The Beautiful: Poems" (Graywolf: 75 pp., $15 paper), a new collection by the former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts (and now a professor of poetry at the University of Southern California), Gioia sounds an elegiac note as he considers lost loved ones, growing older and the daily frustrations that cause us to yearn for something more transcendent. The poem "The Coat" evokes a memory that the speaker pursues — even though he knows he will never find a suitable answer to his questions.
April 30, 2012
Book review: Frank Deford goes deep, as usual
A bio on NPR's website of its commentator Frank Deford notes that the magazine GQ christened him, quite simply, "the world's greatest sportswriter." (Is he?) A story on ESPN's companion website, Grantland, referred to Deford as "a writer who had achieved legendary status by the age of 50." (Did he?)
April 28, 2012
Book review: 'The Lifeboat' isn't just a tale of survival
The most remarkable achievement within Charlotte Rogan's debut novel, "The Lifeboat," is how neatly it exceeds, and defies, expectations.
April 29, 2012
For Alain Mabanckou, breakthrough translates well
In a UCLA classroom one day not long ago, Alain Mabanckou was teaching a course in post-colonial African fiction, which he instructs in his French mother tongue, one of several languages he speaks.
April 26, 2012
Review: 'Detroit: A Biography' by Scott Martelle sees ruin, hope
Detroit: A Biography
April 25, 2012
Review: Carole King reveals the story behind 'A Natural Woman'
My favorite scene in Carole King's long-awaited "A Natural Woman" comes near the beginning — appropriately, since the teen hitmaker was the epitome of an early starter. The high school student born Carol Klein had just signed a recording contract with ABC-Paramount. She was attending her first session as a guest when her host Don Costa, the conductor of the session's orchestra, had to leave the room. King had never held a baton nor read a score before, but she stepped to the podium and, at age 15, proceeded to lead the room of professional musicians.
April 21, 2012
'Art of Fielding's' Chad Harbach learns art of dealing with a hit
NEW YORK—There are author success stories. There's winning the lottery. And then there's Chad Harbach.
April 20, 2012
Are you there, readers? It's Judy Blume
When "Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing" first came out, publisher Dutton did not send Judy Blume around the country to talk about it. "There were no book tours!" she says. "I don't think they sent children's book writers on tour."
April 22, 2012
An opening set by 'The Lake'
A professor in the English Department at USC, David St. John employs natural landscapes in his new collection "The Auroras: New Poems" (Harper: 96 pp., $24.99) to explore psychological nuances, colorings and especially our limitations. The collection's opening poem, "The Lake," for example, brims with desire that is powerful, and yet, as St. John suggests, we are often incapable of fully appreciating or understanding what's before us.
April 20, 2012
Judy Blume at the Festival of Books
Event: Judy Blume in conversation with Times television critic Mary McNamara
April 22, 2012
David St. John at the Festival of Books
Event: David St. John reads from "The Auroras: New Poems"
April 22, 2012
To live and write in L.A.
I can still remember the first time I saw Los Angeles. It was December 1980, I was 9 years old, and the view came from the back seat of my older brother Lee's brown Chevette as we climbed up the Grapevine. My two sisters and I were crammed into the car along with all of Lee's earthly possessions — well, most of them, anyway, since the butterfly chair he had tied to the roof flew off somewhere near Kettleman City — which amounted to stacks of paperback books, three typewriters, every issue of Starlog that had been published to date and whatever pots and pans our mother could do without. In short, the essentials any college student would need for his first apartment, along with three younger siblings to help with the packing and schlepping.
April 22, 2012
Robert Crais at the Festival of Books
Event: Robert Crais in conversation with Times Film Critic Kenneth Turan
April 22, 2012
Los Angeles has plenty of history, if you look for it
Growing up in Philadelphia, I could hardly avoid history. Virtually every semester in grammar school, we would be packed on to buses to visit all the approved historical stops: the Liberty Bell, Ben Franklin's grave, Betsy Ross' house, then lunch and back to improper fractions.
April 22, 2012
Introducing Los Angeles to itself
To write about this city is in some essential way to create it. Not in cement and steel, but in the imagination of its citizens, as well as in the minds of people who will never come here but who nevertheless carry an image of it in their heads. An image that is, in its way, as important as the concrete place where people live and sleep and look for places to park.
April 22, 2012
Los Angeles, a writer's challenge and glory
The Los Angeles Times determined we have 114 separate and distinct neighborhoods here in Los Angeles. The city has posted several hundred blue signs naming far more. L.A. is a mash-up of uncountable, diverse neighborhoods spread over 465 square miles; hard and soft, painted in colors from concrete gray and security bar black to putting lawn green and jacaranda snowfall purple; beautiful, mysterious, dangerous, welcoming neighborhoods, soundtracked by the music of more languages than you or I or even the Los Angeles Times can count.
April 22, 2012
Critic's Notebook: Literature of 1992 L.A. riots is fragmented
One of my favorite pieces of writing to emerge from the 1992 Los Angeles riots is a poem by a writer named Nicole Sampogna, called "Another L.A." In it, the poet traces the odd dislocation of living on the Westside while so much of the city burns. "They send us home early, again," she begins, "supposedly for curfew sake, / but I know it's to beat the traffic." And then: "over there the smoke rises, / horns blare, streets scream, / shoot, loot, / bash windows, bash heads, / lights out / knocked out / by a black & white with a baton. / but, here / will the pizza man deliver after sunset?"
April 22, 2012
Jesmyn Ward ('Salvage the Bones') writes of Mississippi
Jesmyn Ward was struggling. Despite two master's degrees and five years of work experience, her job situation was difficult: She commuted an hour each way to a low-paying college teaching job. In her writing career, things were even worse. She sent out stories and got back rejection letters. Her agent tried and failed, and tried and failed again, to sell her book. "I almost gave up," Ward says. In the spring of 2008, she thought, "Maybe I should stop this. Maybe I should just quit and do something that would give me a steady, higher paycheck, like nursing."
April 17, 2012
Edward Humes' work is rubbish
Edward Humes is a man of eclectic storytelling tastes. A former journalist awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1989 for a series of stories he wrote for the Orange County Register on the military establishment in Southern California, Humes has written 11 nonfiction books on subjects including how the GI Bill transformed the American Dream, Southern justice and the Dixie Mafia, and the juvenile justice system in Los Angeles County. His latest book, "Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair With Trash" (Avery: 278 pp., $27) covers a subject that most of us take for granted: the world of garbage. We caught up with Humes and asked him about his writing process and the dirty business of trash.
April 16, 2012
Cheryl Strayed at the Festival of Books
April 16, 2012
'Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Coast Trail' info
Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Coast Trail
April 19, 2012
Getting a read on the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books
What do Sugar Ray Leonard, Judy Blume, Betty White, T.C. Boyle, Rodney King, Joseph Wambaugh and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar have in common? They're just a few of the high-profile personalities appearing this weekend at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books.
April 18, 2012
To Gustavo Arellano, Mexican food is a big melting pot
It was a humble Cal-Mex combo plate that first brought enlightenment to Gustavo Arellano.
April 17, 2012
Edward Humes at the Festival of Books
Panel: "Disposable Nation: Trash and Consequences"
April 13, 2012
Lawsuit against Apple: Writers wary of action by Dept. of Justice
When the Department of Justice and state officials announced their lawsuits against Apple and five major publishers Wednesday, it sent a ripple of anxiety through the talent at the industry's heart.
April 15, 2012
David Treuer at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books
What: Nonfiction: The Art of Immersion
April 19, 2012
Festival of Books info
April 15, 2012
The Writing Life: David Treuer mines his family's 'Rez Life'
David Treuer never planned on writing nonfiction. "I was happy working on my novels," the fiction writer and USC professor says over the phone from Ann Arbor, where he is visiting the University of Michigan to talk about his new book, "Rez Life: An Indian's Journey Through Reservation Life" (Grove: 330 pp., $26). "But after the Red Lake shooting in 2005" — in which a 16-year-old named Jeffrey James Weise went on a shooting spree at a school on Minnesota's Red Lake Reservation — "I became upset and frustrated with the coverage. I had worked at that school. My father had taught there. The news was telling the same old story, that our lives, as Indians, are tragic. But there was more to reservation life, and more to that shooting. When [Grove Press publisher] Morgan Entrekin asked if I could write a book about these issues, I thought: How hard could it be?"
April 15, 2012
An Appreciation: Adrienne Rich
It was a freezing night in March 1978 — and the small, determined woman climbing next to me up the icy incline to the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for women leaned on a cane. I wanted to take her arm, but because she was famously fiercely independent, I hesitated. Later, I thought that I was right to hold back: Adrienne Rich was that kind of standard-bearer, accustomed to her own "climb," accustomed to a righteous loneliness in her ascent.
April 15, 2012
Not Just For Kids: 'The Extraordinary Education of Nicholas Benedict' by Trenton Lee Stewart
The Extraordinary Education of Nicholas Benedict
April 15, 2012
T.C. Boyle archives go to Ransom Center at UT Austin
The Tea Fire was raging across the hills of Montecito, and T.C. Boyle was worried. He was worried about the safety of his home, as anyone near the flames would be, and that concern was amplified by the fact that the nearly century-old house was designed by no less than Frank Lloyd Wright. And then there were the papers: the highly combustible manuscripts, research, notes and bound volumes that constitute Boyle's life's work. Everything that had gone into writing two dozen books and 150 stories was stashed in Boyle's basement. If the wind shifted, it would all be lost.
April 15, 2012
Daniel Boorstin got it right in 'The Image'
Long before there were "real" housewives on television, actor-politicians and even potential celebrity politicians like Donald Trump, theme restaurants, virtual online vacations and Kim Kardashian, who makes her living by being Kim Kardashian, there was "The Image," historian Daniel Boorstin's prescient examination of a nation in transition, which celebrates the 50th anniversary of its publication this year. When "The Image" first appeared, one critic predicted that it would join William Whyte's "The Organization Man" and John Kenneth Galbraith's "The Affluent Society" as one of those seminal books that not only capture the zeitgeist but change the American mind-set. He was right.
April 15, 2012
Carol Muske-Dukes at the Festival of Books
Panel: California Literature: The Big Picture
5:15 PM PDT, April 10, 2012
Adam Mansbach writes 'Seriously, Just Go to Sleep' for the kids
A year ago, Adam Mansbach was an award-winning novelist and aspiring screenwriter wrapping up a two-year teaching job at Rutgers University. That was before his off-color picture book, "Go the F— to Sleep," became an international phenomenon, catapulting the sleep-deprived father of one to the tops of bestseller lists and into the eye of a parenting maelstrom.
April 9, 2012
Charles Duhigg at the Festival of Books
Panel: Who Says? Habits, Fear and Why We Think the Way We Do
April 15, 2012
T.C. Boyle at the Festival of Books
Event: T.C. Boyle reads from his work with an introduction by Ralph Lewin
April 9, 2012
Book review: 'The Power of Habit' by Charles Duhigg
When Paul O'Neill took over the floundering Aluminum Co. of America in October 1987, he shocked attendees at an introductory news conference by proclaiming that his focus would not be on expanding sales or improving profitability. Rather, he said, his emphasis would be on improving employee safety. Investors at the conference thought he was crazy and rushed from the room to tell their clients to sell Alcoa stock immediately. "It was literally the worst piece of advice I gave in my entire career," one later said.
April 8, 2012
Book review: 'Suddenly, a Knock On the Door' by Etgar Keret
Suddenly, a Knock On the Door
April 9, 2012
'The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business' info
The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business
April 10, 2012
Review: 'Dodgers From Coast to Coast' doesn't get whole picture
At the outset, let it be noted that this book is for the faithful, those who bleed blue, who stay at the game until the last out (whatever the inning) and who don't think the day is complete at home until Uncle Vinny signs off with a cheery "good-night everybody."
April 8, 2012
Book review: 'The Selected Letters of Charles Dickens'
The Selected Letters of Charles Dickens
April 8, 2012
Figment fires up teens' literary aspirations
NEW YORK — It started with a story for a magazine. In 2008, during a trip to Japan, New Yorker staff writer Dana Goodyear decided to write about cellphone novels, a phenomenon — involving young women writing largely for young women, posting fiction from their phones to media-sharing websites — that was then shaking up Japanese publishing.
March 25, 2012
Michael Hiltzik: Book review: 'The Idea Factory' by Jon Gertner
For generations of industry research executives, AT&T's Bell Telephone Laboratories served as an inspiration: a warren of youthful scientists and engineers assigned to go where their intellects took them, not especially concerned about serving the corporate bottom line, picking up cartloads of Nobel Prizes along the way. Bell Labs was the model for, among others, Xerox Corp.'s legendary Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC, which spun out the personal computer, Windows-style displays, Ethernet and many other advances that delivered their bounty more to society at large than to the parent company.
March 24, 2012
Book review: 'The Stranger Within Sarah Stein'
Young adult novelists are increasingly tackling darker subjects: kidnappings, drugs, rape. But few have delved into so many dark subjects as novelist Thane Rosenbaum, who ventures into YA territory with his latest, "The Stranger Within Sarah Stein," a novel revolving around divorce, Sept. 11, homelessness and the Holocaust.
December 18, 2011
Book review: 'Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest' by Wade Davis
On June 6, 1924, two men set out from a camp set at 23,000 feet on Mt. Everest. They were George Mallory, who, at 37, was already one of the world's most accomplished climbers, and Andrew "Sandy" Irvine, a 22-year-old Oxford graduate with little climbing experience. They walked out of the camp, vanished into the mists that surrounded the peak, and were never seen again until Mallory's frozen body was found in 1999.
March 19, 2012
'House of Stone' by Anthony Shadid
A yearning for home, wherever that may be, is one of many themes that the late New York Times journalist Anthony Shadid so deftly touches on in "House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East."
March 5, 2012
Book review: 'American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History' by Chris Kyle, Scott McEwen and Jim DeFelice
This is the season of celebrity for the Navy SEALs.
March 18, 2012
Book Review: 'Tinderbox' by Craig Timberg and Daniel Halperin
Tinderbox: How the West Sparked the AIDS Epidemic and the How the World Can Finally Overcome It
March 4, 2012
Review: 'Extra Virginity' exposes the world of olive oil
Extra Virginity The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil
10:25 AM PST, March 1, 2012
'The Wolf Gift' review: Anne Rice teases, but payoff is slight
How's your back feeling? Sore?
March 4, 2012
Book review: 'Half-Blood Blues' by Esi Edugyan
Not unlike its counterpart rock 'n' roll, memorable jazz novels occupy a pretty slim shelf at the local bookstore. Though the music has been gracefully spun into fiction by Roddy Doyle, Michael Ondaatje and — most distinctively — Rafi Zabor in the surreal, ursine-centric "The Bear Comes Home," it's a fringe topic for the most part.
January 17, 2012
Book review: 'The Real Romney' adds fuller picture of candidate
Let's face it, Mitt Romney seems more than a little opaque. On the one hand he's über-rich, incredibly smart and nakedly ambitious; on the other he seems somehow robotic, shut-down and so happy to embrace the pragmatic option that the core of his character remains elusive. There's a sense of a man who will eagerly deny even his own best achievements if doing so will help him seize the brass ring. Is he inauthentic or merely trying to find that area known as the common ground?
January 4, 2012
Critic's Notebook: Grantland takes on the bigger world of sports
When it comes to sportswriting, I tend to subscribe to George Plimpton's small-ball theory: The smaller the ball, the better the writing about the sport. This has a lot to do with my own biases (I'm a baseball fan, not much interest in basketball or football), but it also seems borne out by the literature. And yet, if Bill Simmons is right, the whole notion of a ball theory (small or large) might turn out to be moot.
January 18, 2012
'Breakdown' review: V.I. Warshawski on the case again
One of the many pleasures of Sara Paretsky's V.I. Warshawski novels is that the sharp-tongued, short-tempered detective often seems to be following clues that lead not just to the heart of whatever mystery is at hand, but also into the red-hot center of the zeitgeist itself.
February 26, 2012
'The Fry Chronicles' review: Stephen Fry autobiography
"The Fry Chronicles -- An Autobiography"
January 1, 2012
James M. Cain's 'Paradise' is prescient
Here's the striking thing about James M. Cain's essay "Paradise," originally published in the American Mercury in March 1933: Even then, before many of the prevailing tropes about Los Angeles had yet to assert themselves, we were already looking at the place through a mythic filter, one Cain sets out to undermine. You can see it in that fantastic opening sequence, with its intention to wash out all the preconceptions that have emerged from "Sunkist ads, newsreels, movie magazines, railroad folders, and so on." You can see it in the deftly rendered metaphor by which Cain reframes Southern California as a kind of watercolor, because it "blurs here and there, and lacks a very clear outline."
February 8, 2012
Dishing on late celebs' cooking
Frank Decaro, the author of "The Dead Celebrity Cookbook," is contemplating a bite of Greer Garson's capirotada.
December 24, 2011
'Shockaholic' review: Carrie Fisher's tales electrify
Carrie Fisher has done an excellent job of reinventing herself as ... Carrie Fisher, evolving from ingenue actress and geek pinup to salty, tell-it-like-it-is writer and humorist. And as Just Carrie Fisher she has a lot to say, mostly about her odd but compelling life, and enough to add a Part 2 to her memoirs.
December 4, 2011
Tablets: Downloadable classic books are in abundance
Let's say you're getting, or giving, a new tablet or an e-reader (iPad, Kobo, Nook or Kindle Fire) for the holidays. Here's an idea for what to do with it: Load it first with free books. Thanks to Project Gutenberg, as well as the cultural gift known as public domain, you can build a library, as I have, with a variety of classic literature, gratis: Daniel Defoe's "A Journal of the Plague Year," Benjamin Franklin's "Autobiography," Kate Chopin's "The Awakening." It's enough to make you believe in the free flow of ideas.
December 25, 2011
Critic's Notebook: Patti Smith's 'Woolgathering'
One thing I've always admired about Patti Smith is her refusal to be characterized. Rocker, poet, artist, mother: She seems to inhabit each of these roles almost effortlessly, moving among them as if the only difference was in our heads. And why not? For Smith, they all come out of the same impulse, a kind of ecstatic self-engagement, in which the line separating life and creativity, the mundane and the mystical, is an illusion, a border we create to bound ourselves. "Oh, God, I fell for you," she sings at the end of her 1979 song "Dancing Barefoot," and since the first time I ever played that record, I've heard this as a prayer, a benediction, as if it were God she had fallen for.
December 30, 2011
Book review: 'Westmoreland' by Lewis Sorley
Reading Lewis Sorley's scalding biography of Army Gen. William Westmoreland, "Westmoreland: The General Who Lost Vietnam," is like watching a slow-motion replay of an oncoming train wreck.
December 19, 2011
Book Review: 'Irresistible North' by Andrea di Robilant
It wasn't a fascination with the sea that caused two brothers to set sail for frozen waters in Andrea di Robilant's "Irresistible North: From Venice to Greenland on the Trail of the Zen Brothers."
December 22, 2011
Socially networked reading: Hey, take a look at this
Look ahead: The presents have been opened, wrapping thrown away, and for a few quiet hours you've been curled up reading the new Steve Jobs biography, a gift from your dad. You find a surprising detail and call to your significant other, "Honey, did you know ...?" but because he is busy making dinner, the idea fizzles away as you turn the page.
November 27, 2011
The Reading Life: 'Agatha Christie: An Autobiography'
Last summer, while browsing in a used bookstore in San Luis Obispo, I discovered something I thought no longer existed — an Agatha Christie novel I had not read. Anyone monitoring my vital signs would have thought I had discovered the next Gnostic gospel or a lost play of Shakespeare's. Clutching it tightly as if someone might snatch it from me, I quickly bought it. I promised myself I would take my time, savor the experience and read only a few pages at a time. Instead, I finished it the next day.
December 25, 2011
The Siren's Call: Island in the city
The novels of Richard Zimler shine compelling light on overlooked aspects of history — and along the way they provide plenty of myth and lore to delight any student of esoterica. "The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon" (2000), for instance, describes the mystical practices of 16th century kabbalists as it explores the plight of Jews in Inquisition-era Spain. Other novels of his, including "Guardian of the Dawn" and "Hunting Midnight," explore storylines that are like intriguing variations on what one finds in "Kabbalist." An occasional contributor to our pages in the past, Zimler also keeps his own Jewish heritage firmly focused in his stories.
December 4, 2011
A comparison of three e-readers: Kindle Fire, Nook and Vox
Holiday Books: E-readers
December 14, 2011
Book review: 'Holidays in Heck' by P.J. O'Rourke
P.J. O'Rourke has written so many books of humor that no one is quite sure how many. I have it on good authority that it's 15, but since I finished writing this sentence, he may have written yet another. That's how fast he is.
November 27, 2011
Book review: 'The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories' by Don DeLillo
It's impossible not to get a sense of déjà vu reading "The Angel Esmeralda," the first book of short stories in Don DeLillo's 40-year career. The themes here are echoes — of one another, yes, but even more, of the issues that have defined DeLillo's writing since his first novel, "Americana," came out in 1971.
Copyright © 2012, Los Angeles Times
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