Daily book reviews in the Times
October 17, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
'Boulevard' by Stephen Jay Schwartz
LAPD Det. Hayden Glass, the fractured protagonist at the center of Stephen Jay Schwartz's ambitious first thriller, "Boulevard," leads a double life. As a member of downtown's Robbery-Homicide division, he's "the elite of the elite." But as an intermittently recovering sex addict, he often engages in unseemly behavior more expected from the seamy characters he hunts for a living. Well aware of the fault line splitting his psyche, Glass at his best likes to think, "I'm more cop than addict." But at his worst, he seems to be hurtling into some bottomless abyss.
October 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
'Strange Things Happen' by Stewart Copeland
The rock singer Sting may be a man of furtive cool, mystical tantric talents and exotic, globe-spanning tastes, but it was his affable drummer who could always boast the more intriguing back story.
October 12, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
'Nine Dragons' by Michael Connelly
If you're planning on buying "Nine Dragons," Michael Connelly's latest Harry Bosch novel, be careful where you read it.
October 10, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
'The Magician's Elephant' by Kate DiCamillo
Newbery Medal winner Kate DiCamillo has made a specialty of chronicling animal protagonists who overcome unfortunate circumstances to become better versions of themselves.
October 9, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
'Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife' by Francine Prose
Last week, a video went up on YouTube that shows the only motion picture images ever taken of Anne Frank. It's just a quick glimpse, a few seconds of film.
October 8, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
'Wolf Hall: A Novel' by Hilary Mantel
These days, Thomas Cromwell is probably best known through James Frain's portrayal of him in the popular Showtime series "The Tudors": a brooding, black-clad figure in a popped collar who engineers Henry VIII's marriages and dissolves the monasteries before his career ends in one of the series' most horrifically unforgettable scenes.
October 5, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
'A Change in Altitude' by Anita Shreve
Acute mountain sickness affects people at high altitudes. Symptoms include dizziness, confusion and fatigue. In her 15th novel, "A Change in Altitude," Anita Shreve writes about it knowledgeably. Perhaps she was suffering from it as she wrote, because this novel is a mess.
October 2, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
'A Bomb in Every Issue' by Peter Richardson
Live fast, die young, leave a good-looking corpse. That's the stuff of myth, but Ramparts pulled it off.
September 25, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
'The National Parks: America's Best Idea' by Dayton Duncan and Ken Burns
Ours is a house divided -- not by red and blue states but by something more essential: our relationship to what's wild. Should we leave it alone? Cherish it and make sure it lasts? Or continue to wall it up, fence it off and take shiny things from it so we can all get rich?
September 24, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
'Dexter by Design' by Jeff Lindsay
It has been nearly impossible for anyone traveling L.A. streets or reading this newspaper to avoid seeing ads for this Sunday's season premiere of Showtime's "Dexter." Many of the ads show Michael C. Hall, the actor who plays Dexter Morgan, sporting his trademark demonic grin while holding a cherubic baby. Both baby and serial killer are spattered with red liquid, the "joke" being that it isn't clear whether the liquid is juice or blood.
September 21, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
'Bicycle Diaries' by David Byrne
If you've lived in New York some time during the last three decades, you might have seen David Byrne on his bike -- long legs pedaling, bright eyes watching. The erstwhile Talking Head, sometime filmmaker, Brian Eno collaborator and perspicacious blogger has been using two-wheelers as his main mode of transport since the early '80s -- way before green lifestyles were trendy. In part, "Bicycle Diaries" is a tract advocating less dependency on fossil fuels and urging readers to get off their butts. But mostly, these pages offer a travelogue from a keen cultural observer.
September 18, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
'Nothing Was the Same' by Kay Redfield Jamison
In the prologue to "Nothing Was the Same," Kay Redfield Jamison writes, "It has been said that grief is a kind of madness. I disagree. There is a sanity to grief, in its just proportion of emotion to cause, that madness does not have."
August 22, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
'The Last Ember' by Daniel Levin
An endearing aspect of "The Da Vinci Code" phenomenon has been the creation of a new kind of action man. The boffin-as-hero, exemplified by Robert Langdon, marks a change from the traditional male adventurers of page and screen: the gun-toting muscleman, the caped superhero, the suave secret agent lethally accessorized with an exploding fountain pen. Guns and gadgets now have to make room for middle-aged professors more familiar with biblical symbolism than how to deal with ominously ticking briefcases or what to wear for cocktails in South American embassies. These eggheads may not be destined for glory as articulated dolls or interactive video games, but their ability to foil evil cults by drawing on a knowledge of dead languages and ancient statuary has undeniably captured readers' imaginations.
September 11, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
'Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman' by Jon Krakauer
Pat Tillman, unlikely football hero and unlikelier warrior, went to Afghanistan and got accidentally wasted by the men in his own Ranger platoon. It happens. Among the many shadows Jon Krakauer illuminates in his compelling and dispiriting book, "Where Men Win Glory," is the commonness of fratricide in high-tech warfare. Thus the military's bleak poetry of misadventure: FUBAR, SNAFU, Charlie-Fox.
September 7, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
Relic hunt: Dai Sijie's 'Once on a Moonless Night'
People confront art in two ways. Some crave context: the who, the how, the why, the when. They need to make sense of the object before them, to place it, to know what is known about it. For others the encounter is purely personal, perhaps even mystical, and explanation can only taint it.
September 8, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
'The Confessions of Edward Day: A Novel' by Valerie Martin
A man walks down a pier on the Jersey shore alone at night, leans on a decrepit railing and falls through into the black waves below. Just as his strength gives out, he feels a pair of arms around him -- a rescue. He owes his life to another man. This strange debt -- analyzed, negotiated, shirked -- is the molten center of Valerie Martin's subtle but intense seventh novel, "The Confessions of Edward Day."
September 5, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
'Geektastic: Stories from the Nerd Herd'
Nerds. Dorks. Any fanboy or girl will do. If you like cosplay, RPGs and BSG, or wish Klingon was a language option in high school, "Geektastic" is for you. And if you have no idea what any of the aforementioned even means (cheat sheet: costume role play, role-playing games, "Battlestar Galactica"; if you aren't familiar with Klingon, there is no hope), feel free to stop reading now because "Geektastic" isn't for regular book readers. It's a short story collection for those young adults (and young adults at heart) who spend most of their time staring at screens and living in fantasyland -- sci-fi fans who'll debate the merits of "Star Trek" versus "Star Wars" for hours on end and gamers who can pull themselves away from their computers long enough to read a fictional account of their lifestyles.
September 4, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
'Silver Lake' by Peter Gadol
An "act of violence" occurs in the middle of the night. This is how the plot point on which Peter Gadol balances his beautifully written, suspenseful new novel "Silver Lake" is described on the back cover of the book. While it might be possible to write about "Silver Lake" without being more specific, it wouldn't do the novel justice, so I'll dispense with the two-step.
September 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
'Essays' by Wallace Shawn
Artists are in the business of simultaneously de-familiarizing and re-familiarizing us with the world around us. "Habit is a great deadener," Samuel Beckett explained, and art lends us a new pair of spectacles with which to view reality anew.
August 27, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
'I'm Dying Up Here: Heartbreak and High Times in Stand-up Comedy's Golden Era' by William Knoedelseder
They came from New York, the Midwest, the Southern states, a great exodus of young comics traveling west in search of a few minutes with Johnny Carson. That's all it took to begin the migration: In 1972, "The Tonight Show" moved from New York to Burbank, and stand-up comedy's center of gravity went with it.
August 31, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
'Hell' by Robert Olen Butler
If you must have a shtick, make it a good one. Robert Olen Butler is familiar with this dictum: His collection "Tabloid Dreams" was based on supermarket tabloids; the stories in "Had a Good Time" were drawn from vintage postcards; "Severance" was composed of 240-word pieces about the dying thoughts of the decapitated; and last year's "Intercourse" imagined the inner monologues of 50 famous couples as they had sex.
August 29, 2009
THE SATURDAY READ
'Starting Point' gives a rare glimpse of acclaimed animator Hayao Miyazaki
The only foreign director to win the Academy Award for best animated feature, Hayao Miyazaki, 68, is the most admired and influential filmmaker working in animation today. His latest film, "Ponyo," opened earlier this month in America in 927 theaters -- a record for a Japanese animated feature. ("Ponyo" was the No. 1 box office hit in Japan in 2008, earning more than 14.9 billion yen -- more than $155 million -- to become the eighth-highest-grossing film in Japanese history.)
August 28, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
'The Children's Day' by Michiel Heyns
Sex and politics on the playground. Yes, another coming-of-age story.
August 25, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
'The Locust and the Bird: My Mother's Story' by Hanan al-Shaykh
When we read about the Arabic world today, we see it most often through the prism of headlines, which wash out complexity as bright light washes color from a photograph. On those rare occasions, then, when a vital novel about the lives of Arabic families is published in English, we may not know what to do with it -- and leave it lying on the shelf.
August 24, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
'The Puzzle King: A Novel' by Betsy Carter
The kernel of Betsy Carter's third novel, "The Puzzle King," is a powerful bit of family lore that takes up no more than a paragraph of her 2002 memoir, "Nothing to Fall Back On": the story of the time, in 1936, that her mother's German-born American aunt, Flora, traveled back to her native country to get dozens of her relatives out. The gift she brought for the American consul was a copy of that year's hottest book in the States, "Gone With the Wind." The gift she brought for her family, Jews trapped in Hitler's Germany, stripped of their rights under the Nuremberg Laws, was her signature on the required affidavits of support, promising to provide for them in America if they should fail to make it on their own.
August 21, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
'To Heaven by Water' gets the British scene just right
Justin Cartwright was born in South Africa in 1945, came to study at Oxford in the mid-1960s and has lived in England ever since. Like his previous novels, "To Heaven by Water" showcases his uncanny ability to get the British scene just right, combining the perspective of a onetime outsider with the innate knowledge of one thoroughly at home.
August 20, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
'Born Round: The Secret History of a Full-Time Eater' by Frank Bruni
It's a good thing Frank Bruni is such a talented writer, or "Born Round: The Secret History of a Full-Time Eater" would be a lot tougher to digest. The outgoing restaurant reviewer for the New York Times writes frankly about gargantuan binges and drastic weight-loss strategies in this alternately rollicking and sobering memoir. A book of comic excesses and culinary appreciation, it ends on a cautiously optimistic note: Bruni mostly has his eating under control, but doesn't take it for granted.
August 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
'Vanilla Ride' by Joe Lansdale
Like gold standard writers Elmore Leonard and the late Donald Westlake, Joe R. Lansdale is one of the more versatile writers in America. Over a span of 30 years, he's written well over a dozen mystery, suspense, western and sci-fi novels and short stories with detours into graphic novels and horror. The notice from critics has been impressive -- garnering Lansdale praise for prose "as tasty as a well-cured piece of beef jerky" (the Houston Chronicle) and awards as varied as multiple Bram Stokers for horror fiction and an Edgar for the moody, stand-alone mystery "The Bottoms."
July 27, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
'The Girl Who Played With Fire' by Stieg Larsson
Already, a nimbus of legend surrounds the story: In late 2004, Swedish journalist Stieg Larsson delivered to his publisher three finished manuscripts -- the opening salvos in a rumored 10-part suspense narrative. Like a latter-day Sjöwall-Wahlöö, the husband-and-wife detective novelists whose Martin Beck decology (1965-75) engaged Olof Palme-era political unrest, Larsson sought to explore and explode the moral deficits, irresponsible government and extremist movements that characterize postmillennial Europe. And, he admitted, he wanted to ensure a plush retirement.
July 25, 2009
THE SATURDAY READ
'Rain Gods' by James Lee Burke
After getting the lay of the literary land in James Lee Burke's new Texas-based crime novel, I was reminded of a friend mentioning -- with film-buff certainty -- that Howard Hawks' classic western "Red River" was in fact an uncredited reworking of the sea adventure "Mutiny on the Bounty." In spite of certain plot similarities, I was not then, nor am I now, at all convinced.
July 24, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
'Short Girls' by Bich Minh Nguyen
"This is a country of tall people," Dinh Luong frequently reminds his daughters, Van and Linny, the protagonists of Bich Minh Nguyen's first novel, "Short Girls," which follows her acclaimed memoir, "Stealing Buddha's Dinner." For the Luong family, height is a metaphor for the limitations of their Vietnamese heritage, recorded for posterity on the wall of their suburban Michigan home: Dinh, 5 feet 3; Van, 5- 1/8 ; Mrs. Luong, 4-11 1/2 ; Linny, 4-11.
July 18, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
'Get Real,' by Donald E. Westlake
Before Janet Evanovich brought us Stephanie Plum, Don Westlake was the Grand Master of Criminal Laughs with his hilarious novels about professional thief John Dortmunder. "Get Real" is the 14th Dortmunder novel and proves again that Westlake is the King of Clever.
July 13, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
'Ravens' by George Dawes Green
George Dawes Green has made an irregular habit of analyzing how extreme circumstances affect the most ordinary of people. His deserved Edgar-winning debut, "The Caveman's Valentine" (1994), traveled down mystery fiction's trope-filled streets with a paranoid schizophrenic as tour guide. "The Juror" (1995) was a slick account of how a young woman's jury turn took a descent into stalker territory, but Green's knack for wringing maximum disturbance out of a nerve-jangling story line elevated the bestselling novel (and subsequent movie) above similar fare. Even his 14-year hiatus between books, often spent working on storytelling extravaganzas under the Moth rubric, seems appropriate -- especially as the end result is a high-wire act of risk and dreams in constant threat of being snatched away.
July 7, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
'Promised Virgins: A Novel of Jihad' by Jeffrey Fleishman
Foreign correspondent Jay Morgan isn't yet 40, but he is burned out by war. He lost his wife, a combat photographer, to a bullet in Beirut. By the late 1990s, he is in Kosovo, where Serb paramilitaries are skirmishing with Albanian-ethnic rebels. When the atrocity level gets too high -- and Jay is able to predict which atrocities will make Page One and which won't disturb the American public's slumber -- NATO will intervene with bombs and cruise missiles. Until then, he has risks to run, stories to file.
July 2, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
'Duchess of Death' by Richard Hack
Agatha Christie, history's bestselling novelist, always had a special relationship with Christmas. When she was a child, it was the occasion of happy memories before and after the turn of the 20th century. Once she became a prolific and popular author, the holiday was a marketing hook for her English publisher, who for decades urged customers to give "a Christie for Christmas."
June 25, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
'Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music' by Greg Milner
And in the beginning, there was no recorded sound. For millennia, music lovers had to play songs for each other in order to hear their favorite music. Because of this, perhaps -- as Greg Milner points out in his exhaustive, technically precise and fascinating survey "Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music" -- the primary objective of the earliest sound recording was verisimilitude.
June 22, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
'The Favorites' by Mary Yukari Waters
True fluency in two cultures is a privilege -- and a burden -- granted to few. Mary Yukari Waters is one of these. Her Irish American father met and married her mother in Kyoto, Japan, where Waters spent her early years. At age 9, she moved with her parents to California, where she still lives, while remaining close to her Kyoto relatives. Strikingly Caucasian-looking to the Japanese, more Japanese at heart than Americans suspect, Waters is unusually able to explain them to each other.
June 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
'Bottom of the Ninth: Branch Rickey, Casey Stengel, and the Daring Scheme to Save Baseball From Itself'
It was Bill Veeck, a true maverick among the sport's moguls, who once declared that "[B]aseball must be a great game, because the owners haven't been able to kill it." Serious fans know they've given it a pretty good try over the years, with a considerable late assist from the steroidal heroes who wear the uniforms. They all get away with it because we fans don't want to know how baseball's sausage is made. We watch the game not just for the aesthetic pleasures of a mighty clout or a well-turned double play, but because it offers a time and space apart from our headaches and aggravations.
June 2, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
'Censoring an Iranian Love Story' by Shahriar Mandanipour
Censorship is an endlessly fascinating subject; a puzzle box, a Russian nesting doll in which the writer's truth is buried and often lost. Czeslaw Milosz's 1953 classic "The Captive Mind" revealed the insidious and creative ways that censorship enters and inhabits the mind of the artist. Shahriar Mandanipour, an Iranian film critic and the editor of a literary journal in Iran, was not allowed to publish fiction from 1992 to 1997. He came to the United States in 2006. "Censoring an Iranian Love Story" is his first book published in English. In this novel, a writer (also named Shahriar Mandanipour and the author's alter ego) tries to write the story of Sara and Dara, a young couple in love, and finds himself in a metaphorical burka. He is forced to change his story, characters and dialogue to comply with the restrictions of the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance in the person of a Dostoevskian character, Mr. Petrovich.
May 29, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
'The Red Squad' by E.M. Broner
Does history repeat itself, or would it be better described as a tape loop on which we play our solo? In "The Red Squad" by E.M. Broner, Anka Pappas receives an envelope of surveillance records of her antiwar activities during the Vietnam War. Suddenly we rewind to the late 1960s, but with the present day spliced in.
May 25, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
'The City & The City' by China Miéville
If Philip K. Dick and Raymond Chandler's love child were raised by Franz Kafka, the writing that emerged might resemble China Miéville's new novel, "The City & the City."
May 21, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
'Lowside of the Road: A Life of Tom Waits' by Barney Hoskyns
Self-mythologizing is as much a part of rock as the 15-minute guitar solo. Tom Waits knows the drill: He's been messing with our heads for a full generation. Like Bob Dylan, he has proven a canny master of disguise, creating an impenetrable wall to keep his life from a discerning public.
May 18, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
'Therapy' by Sebastian Fitzek
In Sebastian Fitzek's wildly implausible but mesmerizing mystery thriller, "Therapy," the fragmented chapters wheel and turn in unpredictable directions, the reader always plunging after a narrator who disappears around the corner.
May 13, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
'The Lonely Soldier' by Helen Benedict
The women who joined the military after 9/11 probably didn't know about the degrading marching cadences that had been chanted on various bases across America for decades:
April 18, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
'It Sucked and Then I Cried: How I Had a Baby, a Breakdown, and a Much Needed Margarita' by Heather B. Armstrong
Heather B. Armstrong is kinda like the Howard Stern of mommy bloggers. Visitors flock to her website dooce.com to see the former Mormon turn everyday life in Salt Lake City into an uproarious rant in which few topics are spared -- and no one is left unscathed.
May 11, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
'The Way Home' by George Pelecanos
There comes a point in a writer's career when reviewers start to look not just at the book on the "New Releases" table in the bookstore, but at the body of work as a whole. This sort of analysis usually happens when the number of potential books is dwarfed by the author's previous output; upon recent death, when literary-leaning obituarists struggle to mine some instant legacy; or years if not decades later, when those in the throes of rediscovery commit their ecstatic cries to page and pixel.
May 9, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
'Stone's Fall' by Iain Pears
In his internationally bestselling 1997 novel, intriguingly titled "An Instance of the Fingerpost," British author Iain Pears explored the murder of a 17th-century Oxford don via intricate plotting, ambitious structure, unreliable narrators and provocative ideas about Restoration-era politics and science.
May 4, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
'I Love a Man in Uniform' by Lily Burana
Lily Burana's "I Love a Man in Uniform: A Memoir of Love, War, and Other Battles" presents itself as a spicy romp through the ins and outs of military wifedom.
May 5, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
'The Collector of Worlds: A Novel of Sir Richard Francis Burton' by Iliya Troyanov
Some men and women have such a profound and lasting effect on literature and popular culture that they make the rest of us look as though we've spent our lives chasing our tails. One such bigger-than-life individual was the English explorer, linguist, translator and diplomat Richard Francis Burton.
April 28, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
'Secret Son: A Novel' by Laila Lalami
Laila Lalami's new novel, "Secret Son," brings readers into the down-and-out sections of Casablanca, Morocco, to follow the travails of Youssef El Mekki, a young man trying to rise above the abject poverty into which he was born. Youssef knows certain things about himself: He knows his father, whom he doesn't remember, was a respected fourth-grade teacher who died while hanging lights for a religious feast, falling three floors and breaking his neck. He knows his mother is an orphan and thus the two of them must make their hardscrabble way together with no extended family to help.
April 24, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
'Not Becoming My Mother' by Ruth Reichl
Ruth Reichl is a commanding and daunting figure in American culture. Beginning in the 1970s, she played a key role in revolutionizing food and restaurant journalism, wielded make-or-break influence as a restaurant critic for the Los Angeles Times and later the New York Times, and continues to loom large as editor in chief of Gourmet magazine.
April 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
'Closing Time' by Joe Queenan
In "Closing Time," Joe Queenan's new memoir, the author was none too pleased with his high school girlfriend when she told him that "she had big plans for her life, and that none of them included me." She was on her way to study music at Catholic University (out of state, that is), while Joe would be only a few blocks from home, his "dream . . . to make a living by ridiculing people, and it didn't seem to matter all that much where I got my degree, as you couldn't major in satire or invective." Tongue-in-cheek maybe, but Queenan, the author of nine books, is best known today as a humorist and cultural critic, a contributor to publications that include the New York Times, GQ and Rolling Stone.
April 13, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
'Admission' by Jean Hanff Korelitz
Parents of students aspiring to elite universities may want to wait to read Jean Hanff Korelitz's novel "Admission," about a Princeton admissions officer in crisis. Korelitz's depiction will reinforce their fear that getting into an Ivy League school takes far more than being an excellent student -- curing cancer might do it, so long as some other 17-year-old doesn't do it first.
April 4, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
'The Glister' by John Burnside
A moral fable in the guise of a murder mystery, John Burnside's "The Glister" has an unusual protagonist: its own prose style. Burnside, a Scot, has published 11 collections of poetry as well as a memoir, "A Lie About My Father," and fiction, including the novel "The Devil's Footprints." Here, the language in which it's told is crucial to how we read this darkly beautiful meditation on death, guilt and redemption.
April 2, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
'I Can See Clearly Now' by Brendan Halpin
In the time it takes a character to roll a joint, you get the irony behind the title of "I Can See Clearly Now," Brendan Halpin's novel about young musicians working in a haze of hormones and pot smoke in New York.
March 30, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
'Gimmick!,' Volumes 1-6
In America, comic books have often presented a conservative political message. From the combat missions of World War II GIs to the vigilantism of "The Dark Knight," even anti-heroes have generally fought to preserve the established order. There have been exceptions, of course, but American readers will be surprised to find a powerful denunciation of the war in Iraq in the comedy-adventure manga series "Gimmick!" with its story by Youzaburou Kanari and art by Kuroko Yabuguchi.
March 26, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
'Warren Oates: A Wild Life' by Susan Compo
Many a great film director is tethered artistically to a trusted actor: John Ford had the Duke, Fellini had Mastroianni and Scorsese had De Niro.
March 23, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
'A Strange Eventful History: The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving, and Their Remarkable Families' by Michael Holroyd
When Michael Holroyd takes on a subject, you know his sweep will be wide. This is not to say that he forfeits depth -- far from it -- but rather that he puts things in the fullest possible context. His groundbreaking biography of Lytton Strachey more than 40 years ago not only established him as a first-rate practitioner of the art but also blew the lid off the Bloomsbury group with his revelations of their hitherto discreetly covered-up antics. Indeed, he is both forefather and godfather to the hundreds of works exploring the lives, loves and libidos of that fascinating crowd.
March 21, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
'Forever Blue: The True Story of Walter O'Malley, Baseball's Most Controversial Owner, and the Dodgers of Brooklyn and Los Angeles' by Michael D'Antonio
To Brooklynites of a certain age, Dodgers owner Walter O'Malley was a money-grubbing weasel who ripped the soul from their community when he announced he was moving the team to L.A. in 1957. Many Angelenos, however, view O'Malley as a pioneering saint for bringing Major League Baseball to the West Coast, thus heralding the seismic shift of professional sports beyond the Mississippi, while a group of vocal critics believes that the stadium deal O'Malley struck with the city of Los Angeles destroyed the predominantly Mexican American neighborhood of Chavez Ravine.
March 20, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
'Stuffed: An Insider's Look at Who's (Really) Making America Fat' by Hank Cardello
In the fight against obesity, parents are shoving vending machines out of schools and state governments are falling over each other trying to legislate trans fats out of restaurants. Hank Cardello, a former food industry executive with Coca-Cola and General Mills, has his own solution, which he proposes in "Stuffed: An Insider's Look at Who's (Really) Making America Fat," written with Doug Garr: Serve up a tasty, profitable business scenario and let the industry take the forefront in shrinking America's growing waistlines. Cardello's ideas may not win over food purists, but his ideas derive from practical, real-world experiences.
March 19, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
'Me Cheeta: My Life in Hollywood' by Cheeta the Chimp
Rin Tin Tin and I are into what we call "extreme romping." Once a week, we head for the back country, where we leap crags and ford rivers -- just like in the movies, except there are no bad guys. Last week, before beginning our trip home, he mentioned that Cheeta the Chimp had just written "Me Cheeta: My Life in Hollywood" and asked if I'd read it.
March 16, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
'The Face on Your Plate: The Truth About Food,' by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson
Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson wants to help all meat eaters wake up from the dream of denial they are experiencing. He wants to prepare us for what he describes as a "transformative moment," when we look at the meat or animal product on our plate (fish, fowl, mammal, egg, milk, cheese) and acknowledge that it came from a living being, capable, he has no doubt, of suffering and happiness. Like children when they are first told that the drumstick is actually a leg, the tongue is really a tongue, the bacon was once a pig like Wilbur in "Charlotte's Web," Masson hopes, with all his heart, that we will say, "Eeeuwww, yuck."
March 14, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
'Security' by Stephen Amidon
"Security," the title of Stephen Amidon's sixth novel, means more than one thing. It refers to the company run by a character named Edward Inman, a company called Stoneleigh Sentinel, which installs high-tech alarm systems for wealthy residential clients. It also refers to that most basic human need, a sense of security, which in this novel proves an elusive commodity.
March 12, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
'Joseph P. Kennedy Presents' by Cari Beauchamp
In the introduction of Cari Beauchamp's crackling page-turner "Joseph P. Kennedy Presents: His Hollywood Years," this top-flight film historian declares that the father of JFK "saw everything and everyone, from Gloria Swanson to Adolf Hitler, through a lens of dollars and cents." Beauchamp demonstrates again and again that, apart from his abiding love and concern for his nine children (and perhaps a few others, including Marion Davies), the bottom line was everything.
March 10, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
'The Little Sleep' by Paul Tremblay
Paul Tremblay is either brave or crazy to call his first mystery "The Little Sleep."
March 7, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
'The Tourist,' by Olen Steinhauer
It was a pleasure to watch events unfold and Olen Steinhauer's skills evolve over the five-novel series he set in an unnamed Soviet bloc nation -- from the police procedural "The Bridge of Sighs" (2003), in which the idealistic cops of the First District Militia Station are introduced, through the adventures of the enigmatic state security officer Brano Sev, to "Victory Square" (2007), which reunites the older yet wiser colleagues in a masterful mix of police procedural and espionage novel that illuminates the human dimension of a crucial historical period without sacrificing a crackling good plot.
Copyright © 2009, The Los Angeles Times
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