Fenwick vs. Felicity
Students earn scholarships
Minster vs. Southeastern
Book Nook provides readers with insights into the world of books. Vick Mickunas takes you into the center of the publishing world with the latest book buzz, book reviews, and exclusive chats with authors..Home > Blogs > Book Nook > Archives > 2008 > May
May 2008
Book Insanity America
Dateline Los Angeles - Book Expo America grinds on to the inevitable conclusion. Attendance is down as many in the east coast book biz stayed home this year.
Los Angeles is an incredible, unreal scene for your innocent correspondent. Last night I finagled an invite to Larry King’s party for Ted Turner in Beverly Hills. I will give you all the juicy details in a future post. Suffice it to say that it was decadent and bizarre. A grand time was had by all.
I left the party at 3am (Ohio time) and my inner clock was going haywire. Several of the party goers continued on to another party. I did not have the stamina. The next party was at the musician Prince’s house. He performed for an hour from 1 to 2am west coast time.
And so it goes at BEA. Lots of books and lots of looks at the glitterati of SoCal.
(more later)
Vick Mickunas
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booked in Los Angeles
Greetings from sunny Los Angeles. The mob of book lovers surged into Book Expo America this morning. I was swept along with them.
I have already visited the big publishing house booths: Random House, Harper Collins, Penguin, FSG, Norton,etc. Now I’m looking at the smaller houses. Not as mobbed as the east coast shows always are. Times are tough in publishing. Lots of people did not attend this year.
Hot parties are on the horizon if I can snag an invite. Tonight Larry King is throwing a party for Ted Turner at his house in the hills. Tomorrow night the LA crimewriters will converge for a party for Michael Connelly. I might make that one….
And so it goes at BEA…more later.
Vick Mickunas
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Book Orgy America
OK, it isn’t really called that. It is actually called Book EXPO America but this annual convention of publishing people does have some aspects that are way over the top. A book lover (like myself) might even describe it as orgiastic if being engulfed with zillions of books turns you on. It turns me on. What more can I say? It starts Friday.
I’ll be there and I’ll be reporting on it. If past experience is any indication of what to expect I’m thinking I’ll see some amazing things. Past Book Expo memories include the following:
A guy walking around with a toilet paper dispenser attached to his head. He was dressed as a toilet. He even had a toilet lid. I’m guessing that he was promoting his own self-published book about….I’m not sure-I tried to keep my distance.
There will be people dressed up as various things. It’s like the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade with a book theme-big balloons-costumed promoters of this and that-freebies-swag-everybody is trying to get your attention. It’s like the Iowa State Fair sans corn dogs or the Minnesota State Fair without the fried cheese curds.
At a certain time on Saturday afternoon one sees the kegs and magnums of champagne being rolled out on the floor. I’m not sure what they are celebrating? The publishing industry seems to be circling the drain. FLUSH!
Then there are the parties. The ones with authors are my favorites. Trying to guess the identities of distinguished looking people who refuse to wear name tags. There are so many author events-meet ‘n greets- book rollouts, etc. It is a literary extravaganza!!
So I’m crossing my fingers that I can pass through airline inferno intact and land on the other side. Book Expo America is in Los Angeles this year.
I can’t wait.
Vick Mickunas
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the burning Bush
The former inner circle is melting down. Scott McClellan, the former White House press spokesman has a new book coming out next week that takes the Bush administration to task. Here’s a link to the story at the New York Times.
Here is the view from down under in The Australian newspaper:
President George Bush used propaganda to invade Iraq: former aide
Geoff Elliott, Washington correspondent | May 29, 2008
“One of George W.Bush’s most loyal former aides, Scott McClellan, has launched a blistering attack on the US President, saying his former boss relied on “propaganda” to sell the Iraq war and that the administration has “veered terribly off course”.
In his new book, Mr McClellan - a former White House press spokesman and aide dating back to Mr Bush’s days as Texas governor - said the President was not “open and forthright on Iraq” and had not served the US well as a wartime leader.
“I still like and admire President Bush,” Mr McClellan writes in What Happened - Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception.
“But he and his advisers confused the propaganda campaign with the high level of candour and honesty so fundamentally needed to build and then sustain public support during a time of war.
“History appears poised to confirm what most Americans today have decided - that the decision to invade Iraq was a serious strategic blunder.
“No one, including me, can know with absolute certainty how the war will be viewed decades from now when we can more fully understand its impact.
“What I do know is that war should only be waged when necessary, and the Iraq war was not necessary.”
Mr Bush was terribly ill-served by his senior advisers, especially those at the top in national security, he says in a swipe at US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, a close Bush confidante who served as national security adviser in his first term.
While Mr McClellan describes Mr Bush as “sincere” and “authentic”, his attack has stunned Bush administration insiders, and probably the President, who tries to instil intense loyalty in his staff.
This is the most openly critical book of the Bush years from someone who was so close to him in the White House.
At one point, Mr McClellan discusses rumours that Mr Bush used cocaine in his younger days - a charge that dogged him on the presidential campaign trail for the 2000 election.
Despite public denials, Mr McClellan says Mr Bush told him privately he “could not remember” if he used the drug.
“I remember thinking to myself, how can that be?” Mr McClellan writes. “How can someone simply not remember whether or not they used an illegal substance like cocaine?
“It didn’t make a lot of sense.”
Mr Bush, he said, “isn’t the kind of person to flat-out lie”.
“So I think he meant what he said in that conversation about cocaine. It’s the first time when I felt I was witnessing Bush convincing himself to believe something that probably was not true, and that, deep down, he knew was not true,” he writes. “His reason for doing so is fairly obvious - political convenience.”
This “penchant for self-deception” would have devastating consequences for US foreign policy, he writes, saying Mr Bush was too “stubborn to change and grow” in the White House.
When Mr McClellan finally resigned in April 2006 after three years as press secretary, Mr Bush said: “One of these days, he and I are going to be rocking on chairs in Texas, talking about the good old days.”
That appears less likely now. His book is in stark contrast to his years as a spokesman, when he was admired by Mr Bush for his willingness to obfuscate from the White House podium, so much so he was dubbed the “Unanswer Man” by The Washington Post.
But at age 40, Mr McClellan is now playing a text-book Washington game. By spilling some beans on the administration as it winds down, he is looking to sell some books while distancing himself from his former employer, whose popularity at home continues to sag. Only about one in five Americans now approve of Mr Bush’s performance.
The 341-page book also offers a scathing analysis of the President’s response to Hurricane Katrina, which wiped out large parts of New Orleans in August 2005. Mr McClennan says the White House “spent most of the first week in a state of denial”.
One of the worst images of the crisis for the President was a photo of Mr Bush surveying New Orleans from the window of Air Force One as he flew over the city.
Mr McClellan puts the blame for that disastrous piece of political imagery squarely at the feet of Karl Rove, the former White House aide to Mr Bush whom the president once dubbed the architect of his political success.
McClellan writes that he and presidential counsellor Dan Bartlett had opposed the idea of the photograph and thought it had been shelved, but “Karl was convinced we needed to do it - and the President agreed”.
“One of the worst disasters in our nation’s history became one of the biggest disasters in Bush’s presidency,” he writes. “Katrina and the botched federal response to it would largely come to define Bush’s second term.
“And the perception of this catastrophe was made worse by previous decisions President Bush made, including, first and foremost, the failure to be open and forthright on Iraq and rushing to war with inadequate planning and preparation for its aftermath.”
The long-time Bush loyalist says Mr Rove and Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the vice-president’s chief of staff, had “at best misled” him about their role in organising the disclosure of the identity of former CIA agent Valerie Plame.
In an infamous briefing on the leaking of Ms Plame’s name - which she has alleged was a payback because her husband Joe Wilson, a former diplomat, had been castigating the Bush administration over Iraq - Mr McClellan publicly claimed no one in the White House was involved in leaking her name.
But at Mr Libby’s trial for perjury relating to the affair, testimony indicated both Mr Rove and Mr Libby had talked to reporters about Ms Plame. “I allowed myself to be deceived into unknowingly passing along a falsehood,” Mr McClellan writes. “It would ultimately prove fatal to my ability to serve the President effectively. I didn’t learn that what I’d said was untrue until the media began to figure it out almost two years later.”
Some parties were not amused acording to this report from the Washington Post blog THE TRAIL:
Rove, White House Dispute McClellan Book Tales
Updated 10:44 a.m.
By Michael D. Shear and Michael Abramowitz
“Reaction has begun to the new tell-all book by former White House spokesman Scott McClellan.
Karl Rove, the subject of many of McClellan’s charges, said on Fox’s Hannity & Colmes last night that he disputes those charges and said McClellan sounded like a liberal blogger.
“First of all, this doesn’t sound like Scott. It really doesn’t,” Rove said. “Not the Scott McClellan I’ve known for a long time. Second of all, it sounds like somebody else. It sounds like a left-wing blogger. Second of all, you’re right. If he had these moral qualms, he should have spoken up about them.”
Rove said that he did not recall McClellan being in many of the meetings on subjects that he criticized. He said McClellan’s comment in the book that he was surprised to see Rove and Lewis “Scooter” Libby talking together is evidence of his absence from major meetings.
“Well, look, it goes to show how out of the loop he was, that he didn’t think we spent much time together,” Rove said. “I mean, over the course of the seven years or six years that we worked together, Scooter and I spent a lot of time first on the campaign and then when we were at the White House we were on several committees together.”
The White House sloughed off the book this morning as the work of a disgruntled former staffer.
“Scott, we now know, is disgruntled about his experience at the White House,” White House press secretary Dana Perino said in a statement for reporters traveling with Bush in Colorado today. “For those of us who fully supported him, before, during and after he was press secretary, we are puzzled. It is sad — this is not the Scott we knew.”
She added: “The book, as reported by the press, has been described to the president. I do not expect a comment from him on it — he has more pressing matters than to spend time commenting on books by former staffers.”
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remembering Detective Inspector John Rebus
We have spent the past 20 years together and now it is time to say goodbye. Well, not quite yet, but soon.
Ian Rankin’s wonderful creation, Detective Inspector John Rebus is closing in on age 60; mandatory retirement age for the Scottish Police. As Rankin’s final Rebus book begins our beloved Inspector is 10 days away from retirement. It is late fall in Edinburgh and Rebus still has some work to do, some loose ends to tie up.
EXIT MUSIC (Little, Brown) has a well chosen cover. It depicts a glass of that Rebus favorite, alcohol. The title is also significant. Music has always been a key element in these books.
The last time I spoke to Ian Rankin (last year) he assured me that Rebus would be retiring for sure. I asked him if he planned to kill off his memorable character. He assured me that Rebus will live on and if it suits Rankin that Rebus might reappear in some future novel. Rebus may be retiring but Rankin certainly is not.
This final book in the series will be published in the US on September 17. I got an advance copy today in the mail. I can’t wait to read it on the plane tomorrow….
Vick Mickunas
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ascending the Peak with James Lee Burke
James Lee Burke will publish his latest novel in the Dave Robicheaux series, SWAN PEAK (Simon and Schuster) on July 8. I have awaited each new Burke offering with great anticipation for many years now. He just keeps getting better with every book.
This latest book finds Dave and his sidekick Cletus far from their Louisiana environs. Burke, who summers in Montana, has set this story in western Montana where an insidious crime syndicate is doing a dastardly business.
Burke is once again at his peak. Dave continues to battle his demons. Clete keeps getting himself into horrible messes. Burke has his usual cast of villains, miscreants, and sympathetic victims. The real tour de force in this novel is Burke’s creation of a rather nasty character who somehow attains a measure of redemption. We start out hating him but by the end he is a hero.
A great summer read!
Vick Mickunas
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a holiday meditation
Long holiday weekends provide some languid moments to reflect upon the state of things. It is a gorgeous Sunday. The cats are strewn across the lawn. Goldfinches frolic along the hedgerows. Brother toad found a wet spot where the sump pump delivers a cool shower.
In Yellow Springs the grills are getting fired up. Cold drinks are being prepared. The tourists stroll, gawking. Is that Dave?
For those who could use a jump start on your holiday reflections there is a lovely new coffee table sized book that is certain to get you to thinking about life as you know it. AMERICA AT HOME - A Close-Up Look at How We Live (Running Press) is a gorgeous merging of fine photos and prose that explicates this America we experience.
Somewhere little girls are blowing bubbles. Enjoy some quiet moments of reflection on this Memorial Weekend.
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cubicle life
Millions of Americans work in office cubicles. During difficult economic times some cubicle occupants fear for their livelihoods. Corporate downsizing creates a host of empty cubicles.
Ed Park knows the feeling. He was the editor of the Village Voice Literary Supplement when he became concerned about his future there. The new owners of the newspaper fired Park in 2006. Suddenly, he had lots of spare time. He used it to write his first novel, “Personal Days.”
The story takes place in an office building in Manhattan. A group of office workers are working for a nameless company. It is never made clear what it is exactly that this company does. Whatever it is, there are big changes on the horizon. Cubicles are being vacated as workers are being sacked.
Fans of the television program “The Office” will recognize the set-up. It doesn’t matter what these office workers are supposed to be doing. We are more interested in their interactions and their growing paranoia as the axe continues to fall upon their co-workers.
The boss is a fellow named Russell. Behind his back almost everybody calls him “The Sprout.” There are about half a dozen workers who hang out together. They are concerned because their company has been bought by a shadowy organization that they refer to as “the Californians.”
These employees try to figure out if there are any patterns to these job cuts. They have noticed that people are being fired who have first names that begin with the same letter. One woman is terminated after being exiled to an abandoned floor, a place they call “Siberia.”
A new employee seemingly appears out of nowhere. He has an English accent and nobody can figure out what he does. Is he in management? His name is Grime and his behavior is quite mysterious.
Meanwhile, the soap opera plays out in the workplace. There are flirtations and fascinations. One character obsessively Googles himself. He has an unusual name and it annoys him to think that his namesakes “are having more fun, leading more interesting lives, than he is.”
“Personal Days” is spot on in depicting the mundane comedy of cubicle life, the computer crashes, the office intrigues, battles over where to go for lunch, the puzzle of who owns that rotting banana in the refrigerator.
The book is written in three parts. By the time readers reach the final section the story has morphed into a run-on sentence in the form of an e-mail being written inside a stalled elevator by a character who has figured out what is really going on.
Park has penned a brooding farce that glistens with a sinister frivolity.
Vick Mickunas
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books to read before you die…
There was quite an interesting review Friday in the New York Times. Here is how the review begins:
Volumes to Go Before You Die
By WILLIAM GRIMES
“An odd book fell into my hands recently, a doorstopper with the irresistible title “1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die.” That sounds like a challenge, with a subtle insult embedded in the premise. It suggests that you, the supposedly educated reader, might have read half the list at best. Like one of those carnival strength-testers, it dares you to find out whether your reading powers rate as He-Man or Limp Wrist.
The book is British. Of course. The British love literary lists and the fights they provoke, so much so that they divide candidates for the Man Booker Prize into shortlist books and longlist books. In this instance Peter Boxall, who teaches English at Sussex University, asked 105 critics, editors and academics — mostly obscure — to submit lists of great novels, from which he assembled his supposedly mandatory reading list of one thousand and one. Quintessence, the British publishers, later decided that “books” worked better than “novels” in the title.
Even without Milton or Shakespeare, Professor Boxall has come up with a lot of books. Assume, for the sake of argument, that a reasonably well-educated person will have read a third of them. (My own score, tallied after I made this estimate, was 303.) That leaves 698 titles. An ambitious reader might finish off one a month without disrupting a personal reading program already in place. That means he or she would cross the finish line in the year 2063. At that point, upon reaching the last page of title No. 1,001, “Never Let Me Go” by Kazuo Ishiguro, death might come as a relief.
Two potent factors make “1001 Books” (published in the United States in 2006 by Universe; $34.95) compelling: guilt and time. It plays on every serious reader’s lingering sense of inadequacy. Page after page reveals a writer or a novel unread, and therefore a demerit on the great report card of one’s cultural life. Then there’s that bullying title, with its ominous allusion to the final day when, for all of us, the last page is turned.”
Naturally, you want to read the list don’t you? One wonders how many titles you can check off, how will you score? It is almost like some kind of twisted literary IQ test.
Here is the list: click here.
Well, how did you do? How many have you read? What did you think of the list?
As I scanned over it I was starting to worry that my all-time favorite book had failed to make the list. What a relief it was to find it near the end. There it is at #995, Gargantua and Pantagruel by Françoise Rabelais.
Did your favorite book make the list??
Vick Mickunas
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much ado about Stephenie Meyer
Every day I check out the top selling books on Amazon.com. At the moment there are three books in the top ten on Amazon by Stephenie Meyer. Her new book, BREAKING DAWN, is set for an August release. It is already at #5 on the Amazon sales chart. Two other books by Meyer are in the Amazon top ten. Wow! I guess I had better check her stuff out?
I haven’t read her books. Does anybody have any thoughts? Have you read her stuff? What do you find appealing about her writing??
Vick Mickunas
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the Bill Bryson brand
Bill Bryson struck gold with his hilarious account of hiking the Appalachian Trail, A WALK IN THE WOODS. Bryson, a native of Des Moines who resides in his adopted nation of England can publish just about anything these days and be assured of another best-seller. His publishers value the Bryson brand.
Broadway Books has just re-issued a book that Bryson wrote in 1991 for the British market. Bryson’s Dictionary for Writers and Editors is exactly that, a dictionary but it is a compendium of words chosen by Bill Bryson and thus it is funny. Actually, I thought Bryson was funnier BEFORE he became famous so this is vintage Bryson in my book.
I have always read dictionaries for my own personal amusement. This one is ideal. As you read along through his definitions you’ll find patterns and lots of chuckles among his definitions. The Bryson brand has gone global.
It is a lovely resource because it is useful AND funny. Imagine that?
Vick Mickunas
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talk’em KNOCKEMSTIFF
Donald Ray Pollock has made one of the most auspicious literary debuts of the year. Pollock’s short story collection, KNOCKEMSTIFF (Doubleday) is set in the southern Ohio holler where Pollock grew up, the quaint community of Knockemstiff.
Pollock’s stories are brutally frank, indescribably dark, and strangely uplifting. They are a lot like the writer himself; honest, unassuming, charming.
I spoke to Don recently. Our conversation aired on WYSO Public Radio in Yellow Springs. If you missed it you can still listen by clicking here.
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book cover of the week
Are You There, Vodka? It’s Me, Chelsea by Chelsea Handler wins my vote for best book cover of the week. The book is doing very well. I like the title. I hear that the book is hilarious. Has anybody read it??
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the daze of wine and roses…
“The Battle for Wine and Love or How I Saved the World from Parkerization” by Alice Feiring, Harcourt, 271 pages, $23.
“The Billionaire’s Vinegar — the Mystery of the World’s Most Expensive Bottle of Wine” by Benjamin Wallace, Crown, 319 pages, $25.
Wine consumption in the United States continues to rise as more Americans discover the pleasures of this ancient beverage. Our domestic wine industry can produce wines that compare favorably with some of the best vintages from France and Italy.
Two new books focus on different aspects of the passions that have aroused wine lovers. “The Battle for Wine and Love or How I Saved the World from Parkerization” by Alice Feiring recounts how the author fell in love with wines and describes her quest to track the source for her first memorable tasting experience.
Feiring’s journey to becoming a wine writer began when she tasted a 1968 Italian Barolo made by a producer named Scanavino. Years later, she decided to find that man. She went to Italy and sought to meet him to tell him how much his wine had changed her life.
She writes in a witty, confessional style about her adventures driving through the wine regions of France and Italy in pursuit of wines made according to the old traditions. Feiring is on a mission here. She is convinced that winemakers are so influenced by the opinions of Robert Parker, the world’s leading wine critic, that they are doing all sorts of unnatural things to their wines to try to snare high ratings from Parker.
She brings passion to her struggle to overcome his powerful influence. Parker’s opinions have actually impacted the way many wines are being made. She wants to tell him: “Please do not continue to contribute to the dumbing down of the wine world.”
In 1985 in New York, an auction record was set for the world’s most expensive bottle of wine. It is a record that still stands. Benjamin Wallace tells the fascinating story behind this high-priced vintage in “The Billionaire’s Vinegar — the Mystery of the World’s Most Expensive Bottle of Wine.”
That bottle of wine was reputed to have belonged to Thomas Jefferson. A cache of extremely rare 200-year-old wines was found hidden away in Paris. The bottles bore Jefferson’s initials. Jefferson was the first great American wine expert.
Hardy Rodenstock, a German wine merchant, found those “Jefferson” wines. He ran a thriving business selling rare French wines to affluent wine collectors around the world. He had an amazing knack for locating highly desired vintages in the strangest places. Michael Broadbent, the respected British wine expert, was the auctioneer who sold that pricey bottle. He vouched for its authenticity.
Those were precious drops of collector wine. One wine merchant, Bill Sokolin, broke a bottle supposedly worth half a million. His wife understood how he felt, “she accidentally broke an 1874 Lafite. She and Bill had literally lapped it up off the floor.”
And such a lucrative business, “Wine was among the easiest collectibles to fake.” Were the Jefferson bottles real or just a lovely swindle? We might never know.
“The Billionaire’s Vinegar” reads like some bizarre detective story. Wallace unearths the reality behind a thriving counterfeit wine business that continues to dupe unwitting wine lovers.
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the amazing Knockemstiff
Donald Ray Pollock spent 3 decades working at the paper mill in Chillicothe. But he always wanted to be a writer. Now he is.
Pollock’s story is inspiring. So is his debut collection of short stories. He named the book KNOCKEMSTIFF. That is the name of the place where the author grew up.
I interviewed Pollock about this amazing book and his exciting new career. Listen tomorrow (Sunday-May 18) at 10:30 am on WYSO, 91.3fm to hear our conversation.
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“Beam me up, Scotty!”
Star Trek fans are in for a real treat. William Shatner, the actor who portrayed Captain James T. Kirk of the U.S.S. Starship Enterprise in the original Star Trek TV show just published his autobiography, UP TILL NOW.
This is another case where the audiobook is more amusing than the actual book because Shatner reads it. Can you believe this guy has been acting since the 1950’s? And he is still a star! Amazing.
This is his story. I’ll confess that I loved the original Star Trek series and Shatner’s recollections of the program that beamed him to stardom are the high points for this listener.
Of course then there was TJ Hooker and his more recent success on Boston Legal. He really is almost a parody of himself. Have you ever heard the record album, THE TRANSFORMED MAN, that he recorded back in the 1968? Now that is a collector’s item.
Vick Mickunas
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Chasing Darkness
Robert Crais has a new Elvis Cole novel coming out in July. I’m reading it now. I saw Crais last year in New York. It was strange to see him there. He is such an LA kind of guy.
I’m headed to Book Expo in LA at the end of the month. I hope to see Crais in his natural element. CHASING DARKNESS (Simon&Schuster) is the new novel. Crais has been chasing darkness for a while now.
I have interviewed him at least a dozen times. I’ll never forget one conversation we had. Crais always sets his novels in that urban sprawl of Los Angeles. He told me that he likes to drive around the area scouting locations, looking for those perfect spots. He knows one when he sees it. He told me, “what a perfect place to hide a body!”
Ya gotta love him. I love his books. Nobody does crime fiction better.
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sometimes the audiobook is better
WHEN YOU ARE ENGULFED IN FLAMES by David Sedaris will be out in June. I’m listening to the audiobook version recorded by Sedaris and I have to admit that in this case the audio version is superior to the book.
It is all about his voice. He is so whiney. So wimpy. So hilarious. I can’t talk about it because the book isn’t out yet but I can say that it is hysterically funny.
Put it on your list. June 3 is the pub. date.
Vick Mickunas
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remembering Nuala O’Faolain
Nuala O’Faolain has died.
I remember the day I met Nuala. The Irish writer was on book tour for her memoir, ARE YOU SOMEBODY?
She came to Yellow Springs to spend an hour on my radio program. That memoir is one of the most powerful books I have ever read. She bares her heart and her soul, it is magical.
As I gazed into her beautiful eyes I sensed such a spark. She was so very alive. There was also a deep sadness.
As she prepared to leave the studio I noticed that a man had come into the lobby and that he was waiting to talk to her. I said: Nuala, there’s a man out there waiting for you. Without turning, or looking his way, she continued to face me and said: “Oh, is he terribly, terribly old?”
I cannot believe that that spark has been extinguished.
Here is a tribute from the Belfast Telegraph:
How Nuala told the truth right to the end
Published: Tuesday 13, May 2008 - 14:13
Nuala O’Faolain, writer and broadcaster, died last Friday, and although she didn’t know it, she once almost caused a friend of mine to fail his Final degree examination. She was a young lecturer at University College, Dublin, at the time, and invigilating the examination in question.
As she moved up and down the hall and past his desk, my friend’s thoughts, despite his best efforts, kept turning to the presence of this good-looking, sensual woman.
Not something you want to happen when the occasion calls for close attention to the causes of the First World War.
She was indeed attractive, right up to her death at the age of 68.
Not just physically but in her personality and character, too. In Are You Somebody? the memoir that made her famous, she wrote about herself and her family. Nothing was ducked or avoided.
Her parents’ unhappy marriage, her mother’s alcoholism, her own sexual encounters as a teenager and as a young woman in Dublin during the Sixties.
She wasn’t boasting about her experience but she wasn’t apologising for it either.
She simply wrote about it, wondering at the pain and pleasure of things then.
Writing about family and adolescence and early adulthood is a common activity among Irish writers — I’ve done it myself. What made O’Faolain’s book absorbing and an international bestseller was its honesty. How could she reveal these things about herself and others?
O’Faolain said she wrote it to make sense of her life to that point, never thinking that it would be of interest to others or find its way into print. But it was, and it did, selling hundreds of thousands of copies.
She was a TV producer with the BBC and RTE, and a columnist for the Irish Times and, at the time of her death, for the Sunday Tribune, for whom she was providing coverage of the US presidential primaries.
When she was diagnosed as having terminal cancer, she returned to Ireland and contacted RTE. Then just four weeks ago she did an interview with her friend, the RTE radio presenter Marian Finucane.
In it she described in detail the diagnosis of her illness and her feelings in the face of approaching death.
I have never heard an interview as moving or as frightening. O’Faolain is not the first sufferer from cancer to discuss her disease, but the way in which she laid out her loneliness and fear for all to hear was, paradoxically, immensely courageous. She felt alone, she said.
She felt in despair, not just because she was terminally ill, but because that knowledge had almost immediately drained life of its sweetness — ‘soured life’, as she put it.
The things that had given her pleasure, like reading, meant nothing any more.
Her voice breaking, she spoke of the sense of loss in leaving her beloved New York apartment, of the sense of futility that all the information her brain had absorbed and processed over time, all the things big and small that she knew, would cease to exist with her death.
Nor could she find consolation in religion.
She had no faith in God or an afterlife. Those who had faith, she wished well: their hope was theirs, her despair was her own.
After the interview, RTE was deluged with messages from people, thanking her for her frankness and unique response to her illness. At the weekend, Marian Finucane said the great wave of response brought her consolation.
Why am I writing about this woman?
Well, she was a newspaper columnist and years ago, she said that in choosing a topic to write about each week, she sometimes had to resist the temptation to write about a big headline issue and listen instead to her head and heart and what was preoccupying them.
Since I heard on Saturday that she had died, she has filled my head and heart. I never met the woman, but when someone writes the way she did, you feel you know them intimately.
Her honesty put most of the rest of us in the media to shame. Whatever the issue, public or personal, Nuala O’Faolain faced it and wrote the truth as she saw it. Not the comfortable truth or the fashionable truth or the truth that fitted in with the thinking of those around her.
Even though she had a strong, mature intellect, her honesty had a child-like quality, delivered always without affectation or gloss. It showed first in Are You Somebody? peeling back the truth about her early years, and it showed a month ago, in the truth of that final radio interview.
Bookends, as she said herself, framing her life at the start and the finish.
My friend found himself thrilled and unsettled by the power of her presence all those years ago. Countless others since have been thrilled and unsettled by the power of her words. In her death, our world has lost a dangerous truth-teller.
Ar dheis Dé go raibh a h-anam — may she rest in peace.
I spoke to Nuala on other occasions, for her novel, and when she published her second memoir. She came out to see me again.
After we signed off on WYSO somebody took our photo. She got into her escort’s car and as they drove off she turned and looked back at me. She waved. I never saw her again.
I must find that photo.
Vick Mickunas
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the rebirth of James Frey
Do you remember James Frey? He was shamed last year when his “memoir,” A MILLION LITTLE PIECES, was exposed as a fiction pretending to be true. Oprah Winfrey had picked the book for her Oprah’s Book Club. When she found out that Frey had made a lot of it up she was not happy. She told him so on her program as he grimaced and took his medicine.
Frey is back. He is calling his new book, BRIGHT SHINY MORNING, a novel. According to this early review in the New York Times, it is a very good book:
Little Pieces of Los Angeles, Done His Way
By JANET MASLIN
BRIGHT SHINY MORNING
By James Frey
501 pp. Harper. $26.95.
“He wrote a book but it was bad, liar bad, faker bad, it got him in trouble. A million little pieces. It was the name of the book. It was also how hard he got hit. He had to sit there on the couch. Everybody saw. The television celebrity book club woman got mad, she let him have it. He had to sit there on the couch. He squirmed, he cringed. Everybody watched, everybody blamed him. Then it was over. Then he was gone.
He waited. They forgot about him. He tried again.
In the 1930s Los Angeles is the film capital of the world. F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of “The Great Gatsby,” comes to live there. He tries to write movies. He fails. He writes a Hollywood novel, “The Last Tycoon.” He says there are no second acts in American lives. He turns out to be wrong.
The million little pieces guy was called James Frey. He got a second act. He got another chance. Look what he did with it. He stepped up to the plate and hit one out of the park. No more lying, no more melodrama, still run-on sentences still funny punctuation but so what. He became a furiously good storyteller this time.
He wrote a big book. He wrote about a city. Los Angeles. He made up a lot of characters, high low rich poor lucky not, every kind, the book threw them together. It was random but smart. Every now and then he would pause the story, switch to the present tense and throw in an urban fact.
Like this: The Los Angeles area has a museum devoted to the banana.
James Frey loved Jack Kerouac and Charles Bukowski and maybe even John Fante but he didn’t sound like them, he didn’t sound beat or cool. He sounded hopeful. He sounded unguarded, tender. He quit posturing. He stopped romanticizing squalor. He found new energy. He sounded more like Carl Sandburg in love hate thrall with great maddening Chicago than like the usual tough gritty moody chronicler of California’s broken dreams.
He wrote about people who were drawn to Los Angeles and who they were, why they came, what they wanted, whether they got it, if they didn’t get that, then what they got instead. He looked into their hearts. But he didn’t get sloppy, not maudlin. He just made up characters and wrote as if he cared about them desperately. Bright Shiny Morning. A new chance, real or illusory, that’s what they all wanted. Bright Shiny Morning. So he made that the name of the book.
His publisher called it a dazzling tour de force. (Look, somebody had to, if only to create a comeback drama.) But that wasn’t so far off the mark. Even if his publisher maybe could have asked more questions about what the banana museum had to do with anything.
Still, even the stray facts had their artistry. They helped turn this book into the captivating urban kaleidoscope that, most recently, Charles Bock’s “Beautiful Children” was supposed to be. Bright Shiny Morning was mobile and alert to layout, tempo, different voices, how words looked on the page. Different visual styles suited different characters. Some got long litanies of brisk, sharp dialogue. Others got dense, descriptive prose.
Even the one-sentence page had its use here.
The language got sleek and arch when the book described two superstars, Amberton and Casey. A man and a woman, married to each other, best friends both gay no secrets. Everything perfect, supposed to look that way. Prop children. Money houses cars personal assistants nannies yoga teacher everything perfect. Wearing vicuña. Eating ahi tuna. Still Amberton wanted more, got a crush on an ex-football player. All this captured with elegance, with wit. Movie stars. Not so original, so what? So what if the book always made poor people humble decent better than rich spoiled profligate ones?
So there were Maddie and Dylan, young and in love, eking out a living and traveling on a moped, he eventually got a job as a caddy she as a clerk. The book loved them. There was Old Man Joe, homeless guy, living in a bathroom in Venice, Calif., somehow stronger more decent more heroic than the star who plays movie heroes.
And Esperanza, Mexican-American, working as a maid for an old white lady so mean she threw her morning cup of coffee if Esperanza didn’t make it right. But the old lady turned out to have a son. He liked Esperanza, liked treating her like a human being. Maybe he liked needling his mother even better.
There were easy ways a cynical, sentimental crybaby like the million little pieces guy could have told Esperanza’s part of the story. Crisis, violence, redemption, whatever: that’s what he knew about. That’s what he wrote about. That’s what he passed off as nonfiction. That’s why he sounded as if he’d seen too many lousy movies.
So the Bright Shiny Morning guy did it differently. He let the little vignette play out against a big, gaudy, dangerous Southern California backdrop, full of drug-dealing gang-bangers, full of schemers, phonies, rich with a history of robber barons, all of it listed here, all of it stacking the deck against any generosity of spirit. The son steals the maid’s virtue? Been there, read that. They plot against the old lady? Been there too. This novelist wanted something else for Esperanza: he wanted to honor her, fall in love with her, do it with startling sincerity. He wanted to save her.
And it worked.
That’s how James Frey saved himself.”
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Baba Wawa
“Audition — A Memoir,” by Barbara Walters (Knopf, 609 pages, $30)
Barbara Walters is a television legend. Her image has been beaming into American living rooms for 44 years and counting. Over the course of her long career she has shattered one glass ceiling after another.
She tells her story in “Audition — A Memoir.”
Her dad made and lost several fortunes, first as a vaudeville promoter, then as the operator of glitzy nightclubs in Boston, New York and Miami. Financial problems and his habitual absenteeism were hard on the family.
Walters had a tough time growing up. She says that “looking back now, I realize that I was never young.”
Her childhood was muted by the strains in her family.
“Audition” traces the steps that led her to the fledgling medium of television. She got her big break on “Today” on NBC when they offered her a 13-week contract. They hired her because “she’ll work cheap.” She stayed for 13 years. “Today” gave her the boost that made her a force in broadcasting, and by the time she left the program she was the first woman co-host of a network news show.
Walters interviewed almost every famous politician and movie star. “Audition” enumerates the amazing circumstances that surrounded some of these interviews. She snagged, for example, a five-hour interview with the Cuban dictator Fidel Castro at the site of the Bay of Pigs invasion. The next day he picked her up in a jeep and took her through the mountains of Cuba for six hours. “He drove with one hand, waving his cigar with the other.”
She interviewed Yasser Arafat when he was considered the leading Palestinian terrorist. Walters wasn’t intimidated. But the interview that meant the most to her was the one she had with the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat.
Walters’ anecdotes about her guests are marvelous. Mamie Eisenhower told her that the success of her 50 years of marriage to president Dwight Eisenhower was due to the fact that “we have absolutely nothing in common.” Barbra Streisand was such a control freak that Walters never again allowed a guest to dictate conditions for an interview.
When Gilda Radner began doing a characterization of Walters for “Saturday Night Live,” Walters was devastated. She didn’t appreciate the humor of it until she found out that her daughter thought it was hilarious. One of the highlights of the audiobook version of “Audition” is when Walters does her own imitation of Gilda imitating her as “Baba Wawa” from “SNL.”
Walters doesn’t hold back. She describes her love affairs and divorces. Her career has made her personal life a challenge. Relationships have suffered. Her daughter became involved with drugs. Walters admits her failures. “I’m sick of telling you how guilty I feel.”
This is a courageous book.
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Nixonland
Richard Nixon was my favorite president. There were so many aspects of him that I cherish; the way he sweated under the televison lights, the five o’clock shadow, his statement that “I AM NOT A CROOK!”. I could go and on. But I won’t.
Nixon has been the subject of many books. I’m not the only one fascinated by Tricky Dick - I’m excited about reading a new book called NIXONLAND (Scribner) by Rick Perlstein. George Will reviewed it this week for the New York Times:
Bring Us Apart
By GEORGE F. WILL
NIXONLAND
The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America.
By Rick Perlstein.
Illustrated. 881 pp. Scribner. $37.50.
“Rick Perlstein’s sprawling, rollicking book arrives hard on the heels of a contest of empathy-exhibitionism in which the two Democratic presidential candidates competed to see who could more ardently adore churchgoing, gun-owning, not-at-all-bitter working-class Pennsylvanians. Perlstein’s readers will learn why this happened. He shrewdly quotes a commentator’s assessment of Richard Nixon’s 1952 Checkers speech with its maudlin reference to his wife’s “Republican cloth coat”: “Dick Nixon has suddenly placed the burden of old-style Republican aloofness on the Democrats.”
In Perlstein’s mental universe, Nixon is a bit like God — not, Lord knows, because of Nixon’s perfect goodness and infinite mercy, but because Nixon is the explanation for everything. Or at least for the rise of the right and the decline of almost everything else. This is a subject Perlstein, a talented man of the left, has addressed before.
In 2001, he published the best book yet on the social ferments that produced Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential candidacy. Subtle and conscientious, “Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus” demonstrated Perlstein’s omnivorous appetite for telling tidbits from the news media, like this one: When Goldwater was campaigning in the 1964 New Hampshire primary, The New York Times ran a photograph with the snide caption “Barry Goldwater, aspirant for the Republican presidential nomination, with the widow of Senator Styles Bridges in East Concord. She holds dog.” Oh, the other person must be the conservative presidential candidate.
In November 1964, surveying the debris of Goldwater’s loss of 44 states, the Times columnist James Reston said Goldwater “has wrecked his party for a long time to come.” The archetypal public intellectual of the day, the Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter, who thought the conservative movement was the manifestation of a psychological disorder, said Goldwater’s candidacy provided conservatives “a kind of vocational therapy, without which they might have to be committed.” Surely “the end of ideology” — as Daniel Bell’s 1960 book was titled — was at hand. As the winner of the 1960 presidential election had assured the country, the liberal consensus was so broad and deep that America’s remaining problems were “technical” and “administrative.”
“These,” said President Lyndon Johnson when lighting the national Christmas tree in December 1964, “are the most hopeful times since Christ was born in Bethlehem.” In his State of the Union address a few weeks later, he said, “We have achieved a unity of interest among our people that is unmatched in the history of freedom.” The nation was, however, stepping high, wide and plentiful along the lip of a volcano. The first eruption occurred seven months later in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts. And in 1968, Republicans began winning seven of the next 10 presidential elections. Perlstein thinks he knows why. Whereas in 1960 22,000 people donated to John Kennedy’s campaign and 44,000 to Richard Nixon’s, in 1964 Goldwater had more than a million contributors. A mass movement was gestating, undetected by complacent celebrators of liberalism’s hegemony.
Now comes the second installment of Perlstein’s meditation on that era’s and, he thinks, our current discontents. “Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America” completes his inquest into the death of the “cult of ‘American consensus’” and the birth of “American cacophony.” Perlstein’s chronicle, which begins with the Watts riot of August 1965, is itself riotous: even at its calmest, his pell-mell narrative calls to mind a Pieter Bruegel painting of tumultuous peasants; at its most fervid, it resembles one of Hieronymus Bosch’s nightmares.
Do we need another waist-deep wallow in the 1960s, ensconcing us cheek by jowl with Frank Rizzo and Eldridge Cleaver, Sam Yorty and Mark Rudd, Lester Maddox and Herbert Marcuse and other long-forgotten bit players in a period drama? Do we need to be reminded of that era’s gaseous juvenophilia, like Time magazine’s celebration of Americans 25 or younger as 1967’s “Man of the Year”: “This is not just a new generation, but a new kind of generation. … In the omphalocentric process of self-construction and discovery,” today’s youth “stalks love like a wary hunter, but has no time or target — not even the mellowing Communists — for hate.”
Well, this retrospective wallow does increase the public stock of harmless pleasure, as when Perlstein revisits the 1972 Democratic convention that nominated George McGovern and heard 80 nominations for vice president, including Mao Zedong and Archie Bunker. But Perlstein’s high-energy — sometimes too energetic — romp of a book also serves, inadvertently, a serious need: it corrects the cultural hypochondria to which many Americans, including Perlstein, are prone.
Because the baby boomers’ self-absorption is so ample, there already has been no shortage of brooding about those years. We do, however, benefit from the brooding by Perlstein, who is not a boomer, for two reasons. First, he has a novelist’s, or perhaps an anthropologist’s, eye for illuminating details, as in his jaw-dropping reconstruction of the Newark riots of July 1967. Second, his thorough excavation of the cultural detritus of that decade refutes his thesis, which is that now, as then, Americans are at daggers drawn.
Nixon, who became vice president at age 40, was well described as “an old man’s idea of a young man.” He was, Perlstein says, one of only two boys in his elementary school photograph wearing a necktie. Politics is mostly talk, much of it small talk with strangers, and Nixon was painfully — to himself and others — awkward at it. His temperament always invited, and has received, abundant analysis. Perlstein’s Rosetta stone for deciphering Nixon’s dark personality is a distinction he acknowledges borrowing from Chris Matthews’s 1996 book “Kennedy and Nixon: The Rivalry That Shaped Postwar America.” Arriving at Whittier College, Nixon, “a serial collector of resentments,” found that the clique of cool students was called Franklins, so he helped organize the Orthogonians for people such as himself — strivers who would try to ascend by grit rather than grace.
Perlstein repeatedly explains Nixon’s or other people’s behavior as arising from an Orthogonian resentment of Franklins, including establishment figures as different as Alger Hiss and Nelson Rockefeller. Nixon “co-opted the liberals’ populism, channeling it into a white middle-class rage at the sophisticates, the well-born, the ‘best circles.’” By stressing the importance of Nixon’s character in shaping events, and the centrality of resentments in shaping Nixon’s character, Perlstein treads a dead-end path blazed by Hofstadter, who seemed not to understand that condescension is not an argument. Postulating a link between “status anxiety” and a “paranoid style” in American politics — especially conservative politics — Hofstadter dismissed the conservative movement’s positions as mere attitudes that did not merit refutation. Perlstein, too, gives these ideas short shrift.
As the pollster Samuel Lubell had already noted before the 1952 election, “the inner dynamics of the Roosevelt coalition have shifted from those of getting to those of keeping.” Perlstein keenly sees that some liberals “developed a distaste” for the social elements they had championed, now that those elements were “less reliably downtrodden” and less content to be passively led by liberal elites.
The masses bought television sets and enjoyed what they watched. But Newton Minow, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (and formerly Adlai Stevenson’s administrative assistant) declared television a “vast wasteland,” thereby implicitly scolding viewers who enjoyed it. When New York was becoming a lawless dystopia, with crime, drugs and homelessness spoiling public spaces, August Heckscher, the patrician commissioner of parks under Mayor John Lindsay, sniffily declared that people clamoring for law and order were “scared by the abundance of life.”
A Newsweek cover story on Louise Day Hicks, who led opposition to forced busing of school children in Boston, described her supporters as “a comic-strip gallery of tipplers and brawlers and their tinseled overdressed dolls … the men queued up to give Louise their best, unscrewing cigar butts from their chins to buss her noisily on the cheek, or pumping her arm as if it were a jack handle under a truck.”
Perlstein deftly deploys such judgments to illustrate what the resentful resented. Unfortunately, he seems to catch the ’60s disease of rhetorical excess. He says George Romney was a “glamour boy,” Secretary of State Dean Rusk was “maniacal,” Lyndon Johnson’s 1955 heart attack was a “psychosomatic illness,” Mayor Richard Daley’s supporters were “cigar-chompers.” Senator Paul Douglas, the Illinois Democrat, was a giant of postwar liberalism, but when he said residential segregation resulted in part from “consciousness of kind,” he was, Perlstein writes, “aping Daley.”
Perlstein says “it was hard to keep count” of how many times Nixon ran for president. Not really. When Perlstein writes that during a 1966 civil rights debate “congressmen North and South behaved as if Washington, D.C., were about to cart schoolchildren off in tumbrels,” he becomes a cartoonist. Perhaps his deep immersion in the desensitizing coarseness of the 1960s is to blame for his occasionally snarky tone, as when, referring to the death of three astronauts in a fire on the Cape Canaveral launching pad, he says they “roasted to death.” Senator Abe Ribicoff’s speech nominating George McGovern in 1968 was “windbaggery.” A Black Panther shot by police “was turned into a block of Swiss cheese.” When “the old Wall Street crew” could not get into Nixon’s suite at the 1968 convention, were they really “reduced to spittle-flecked rage”? Calling South Vietnam’s army “a joke” is not historical analysis, it is an unworthy dismissal of men who fought and died for more than a decade. +
Reaching for easy irony by jumbling together events large and small, Perlstein piles up jejune incongruities, like: “The month of March came in like a lamb with Frank Sinatra sweeping the Grammy awards and went out like a lion with Jimi Hendrix in the hospital after burning himself while immolating his guitar.” As Truman Capote said of Jack Kerouac’s fiction, that is not writing, that is typing.
Having cast the Nixon story as a psychodrama, Perlstein has no need to engage the ideas that were crucial to conservatism’s remarkably idea-driven ascendancy, ideas like the perils of identity politics and the justice of market allocations of wealth and opportunity. Instead, Perlstein dwells on motives, which he usually presents as crass or worse. As a result, the book often reads as though turbulent waters from the wilder shores of cable television have sloshed onto the printed page.
For example, Perlstein writes about some military policemen in 1969 wondering why they were on 24-hour alert at an airbase in New Jersey: “A team of soldiers stood guard around two B-52s. Their pilots sat in the ready room carrying guns. An M.P. madly scanned the newspaper in vain for some international crisis. He knew what it meant when B-52 co-pilots started carrying sidearms. It was for one co-pilot to shoot the other if he was too chicken to follow orders and drop the big one.”
Well. Leaving aside the adolescent language (“chicken,” “the big one”), perhaps there really was a madly scanning M.P., but an Air Force historian laughed when asked about the idea that crews carried guns aimed, so to speak, at one another.
Perlstein says that before the Kent State violence, “citizens were thrilled to see the tanks and jeeps rumbling through town.” There were no tanks there. What he calls “the heavily Dixified eastern corner” of Tennessee was actually the least Southern, most pro-Union portion of the state. He says that at the Rolling Stones’ 1969 rock concert at Altamont, Calif., “Hells Angels beat hippies to death with pool cues.” The bikers did fatally stab one person and hit others with pool cues but killed no one with cues. In his victory speech following the 1968 election, President-elect Nixon mentioned seeing, at a whistle-stop in Deshler, Ohio, a girl carrying a sign reading “Bring Us Together.” Perlstein says: “A reporter tracked the girl down and learned her placard actually bore the rather more divisive words ‘L.B.J. Taught Us Vote Republican.’” So Nixon lied? No. The New York Times later reported that as the girl drew near the event she lost her sign that said “L.B.J. convinced us — vote Republican,” but by the time she reached Nixon’s train she had picked off the ground another that read: “Bring Us Together Again.”
Perlstein considers it significant that before the 1972 election, in which Nixon carried 49 states, James Reston wrote that “barely over one in four adult Americans will have voted for the winner in 1972. … The consequences of that kind of a minority presidency are hard to foretell.” Actually, such “minority” presidents are not unusual. In 1980, when Ronald Reagan carried 44 states and defeated President Jimmy Carter 489-49 in electoral votes, Reagan won the votes of 26.9 percent of American adults. The winners of the 1996, 2000 and 2004 elections received 24 percent, 24.1 percent and 28.2 percent, respectively.
The cumulative effect of carelessness, solecisms and rhetorical fireworks is to make Perlstein seem eager to portray the years and people about whom he is writing as even wilder and nastier than they were. Which is especially unfortunate because he has a gift for penetrating judgments, for example, that Ronald Reagan was elected governor of California because he provided “a political outlet for the outrages that, until he came along to articulate them, hadn’t seemed like voting issues at all.”
Perlstein’s thesis is that America became Nixonland because of “the rise of two American identities” in the 1960s — actually between 1964, when Johnson won 61.1 percent of the vote, and 1968, when the combined votes for Nixon and George Wallace were 56.9 percent. Perlstein says Nixon’s legacy is the “notion that there are two kinds of Americans.” On one side of the barricades are “values voters” and other conservatives who are infuriated by the disdain of amoral elites conservatives consider (in the brilliantly ironic phrase that Perlstein appropriated from Kevin Phillips) a “toryhood of change” determined to supervise their lives. On the other side are Hofstadterian liberals who feel threatened by these nincompoops who have been made paranoid by their status anxieties.
“How did Nixonland end?” Perlstein asks in the book’s last line. “It has not ended yet.” But almost every page of Perlstein’s book illustrates the sharp contrast rather than a continuity with America today. It almost seems as though Perlstein, who was born in 1969, is reluctant to let go of the excitement he has experienced secondhand through the archives he has ransacked to such riveting effect.
“We Americans,” he says, “are not killing or trying to kill one another anymore for reasons of ideology, or at least for now. Remember this: This war has ratcheted down considerably. But it still simmers on.”
Not really. America has long since gone off the boil. The nation portrayed in Perlstein’s compulsively readable chronicle, the America of Spiro Agnew inciting “positive polarization” and the New Left laboring to “heighten the contradictions,” is long gone.
So exquisitely sensitive are Americans today, they worked themselves into a lather of disapproval when Hillary Clinton said that Lyndon Johnson as well as Martin Luther King was important in enacting civil rights legislation. There has not been a white male secretary of state for 11 years. Today a woman and an African-American are competing relatively civilly for the right to run for president against the center-right — more center than right — senator who occupies the seat once held by Goldwater. Whoever wins will not be president of Nixonland.”
George F. Will is a syndicated columnist.
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it never ends
Charles Manson scared us to death 40 years ago. Apparently, that wasn’t the end of the story. This just in from the New York Times:
Ranch to Be Searched for Manson Victims
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER
LOS ANGELES — “For those who spend a great deal of time mulling the intricacies and unanswered questions of real-life crimes, a remote area in Death Valley has always been fertile ground.
For years there was speculation that unaccounted-for victims of Charles Manson and his followers were buried at Barker Ranch, where Mr. Manson was captured, and the local authorities say they are going to put the matter to rest at last.
Citing soil testing suggestive of the possible presence of human remains at the ranch, the Inyo County Sheriff’s Office will begin digging for graves later this month.
The area around Barker Ranch, in the southwest area of Death Valley National Park in the Panamint Mountains, will be closed to the public for four days while the digging goes on.
The search was prompted by the findings of a forensic technology team that descended on the ranch in March, armed with special instruments that detect human decomposition, a cadaver-seeking dog and a group of researchers that included the sister of the actress Sharon Tate, who was among seven people murdered by members of the Manson cult.
The sheriff’s office said that the response of dogs and subsequent soil research were inconclusive, and that digging was needed to make conclusive findings.
“I believe the only way to determine once and for all whether there are bodies buried at Barker Ranch from the time of the Manson family,” said Sheriff Bill Lutze in a news release, “is to proceed with limited excavation in a few areas.”
Sheriff Lutze was unavailable Friday to give further details.
The ranch house is where Mr. Manson and his followers were captured after a two-night killing spree in August 1969.
Mr. Manson, who was convicted with four others on multiple counts of murder and other charges, is serving a life sentence at Corcoran State Prison in California.’
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pants on fire
Roger Clemens was walking down the street the other day and smoke was coming out of his trousers. They called the fire department. They couldn’t put out the fire.
It seems that Roger, or is that ROIDger? has a wee truth problem. The former star pitcher for the New York Yankees claims that he never took steroids or human growth hormone. He had no problem tossing his wife Debbie under the bus though. He said it was his wife who took the HGH. Uh huh. Sure, Roger.
Now he has tossed his wife under the bus again. Repeatedly. Apparently ROIDger has not been a very faithful husband. Is he deceitful or merely, dumber than a box of rocks??
Even Roger Clemens’ apology for flaws… is flawed
By Ian O’Connor / The Record (Hackensack N.J.)
“Roger Clemens never has been big on public acts of contrition. He would rather surrender a grand slam to Mike Piazza in Game 7 of a Subway Series than apologize for crashing a fastball against the slugger’s skull.
So it came as no surprise that his stab at expressing sorrow over unnamed misdeeds was as lame as his excuse for throwing Piazza’s shattered bat at the Met (“I thought it was the ball”) a few months after beaning him eight seasons back.
“Like everyone,” Clemens said through a spokesman, “I have flaws.”
Clemens can’t confirm that he’s got flaws, not without reminding the world that you have flaws, too.
He wasn’t apologizing for using steroids and human growth hormone as Rocket fuel, even though a mountain of evidence swears he did just that. In the wake of reports that Clemens carried on extramarital affairs during his playing days (at this point, wouldn’t it be news if a star athlete didn’t carry on extramarital affairs during his playing days?), the greatest pitcher of his day decided it was time to say he is sorry for who knows what.
“Even though these articles contain many false accusations and mistakes,” Clemens said, “I need to say that I have made mistakes in my personal life for which I am sorry.”
Again, Clemens can’t announce that he’s screwed up royally without reminding others that they’ve screwed up royally, too.
“I have apologized to my family,” he continued, “and apologize to my fans. … I have sometimes made choices which have not been right.”
Roger Clemens hasn’t made a single right choice since his former trainer, Brian McNamee, fingered him as a juicer in the Mitchell Report. Back when Clemens was talking in the Yankee clubhouse, struggling to give coherent answers to the simplest news media questions, it appeared he wasn’t the smartest guy who ever picked up a rosin bag.
Now that suspicion has been confirmed in neon lights.
By pursuing a hearing before Congress, and by pursuing a defamation suit against McNamee, Clemens has done more damage to his personal life and professional legacy than the Mitchell Report ever could’ve done on its own.
He talked his way into a federal perjury investigation and, just maybe, into prison. He also sued his way into an examination of his own character that inspired Daily News reports of marital vows left looking like Piazza’s Subway Series bat.
Clemens apparently admitted to cheating on his wife. That would be the same wife, Debbie, whom he acknowledged as an HGH user while denying he even knew how to spell HGH.
“I believe my personal life has nothing to do with the accusations of steroid and HGH use,” Clemens said through his spokesman in a statement first published in the Houston Chronicle. “I have already made clear that I did not use them.”
Testimony from McNamee and Andy Pettitte says Clemens did indeed use performance-enhancing drugs. If McNamee and Pettitte told the truth under oath, and it sure looks like they did, Clemens lied again while apologizing for sins he didn’t name.
His reputation is beyond saving now, even if he didn’t start a sexual relationship with Mindy McCready, country singer-to-be, when she was 15. Nothing good can emerge from the balance of this case, nothing except (hopefully) the death of hero worship as we know it.
Clemens. Barry Bonds. Mark McGwire. Marion Jones. Lionized athletes too often end up exposed as false gods, a trend that spans decades of misplaced adulation on the ballfields.
It’s better to avoid getting too close to your heroes; their warts are generally bigger than their biceps. A friend of mine, Mark Dymond, came to know Mickey Mantle after his playing career - his limo company shepherded Mantle around town. The Mick confessed to Dymond that he was too hung over during some at-bats to even see the fastballs and curves thrown his way.
At a fantasy camp in Florida, Dymond was once walking with Mantle toward an elevator when a boy about 11 years old approached.
“Mr. Mantle, can I have your autograph?” the kid asked.
“(Bleep) off,” the great Mantle responded.
Yankees’ officials will tell you that Clemens didn’t treat fans and minions that way when the cameras were turned off. They will tell you about the small acts of decency behind clubhouse doors, the steak dinners he bought for the low-level staffers, the people who weren’t in any position to help him.
Nobody said Clemens is evil, just that he’s dumb. If Clemens isn’t dumb, he sure does a Hall of Fame impression of someone who is.
Rocket is also the flagbearer of a culture of jock entitlement. He’s had his launching pad kissed for so long, he assumed he could do whatever he pleased and then throw high and tight heat at anyone who dared to call him on it.
“I realize that many people want me to simply confess and apologize for the conduct that I have been accused of,” Clemens said in his statement, “but I cannot confess to, nor apologize for, things I did not do.”
So this act of contrition was a little short on, well, contrition. Roger the Dodger isn’t as sorry about the reported infidelity and drug use as he is about the fact he has to answer to the reported infidelity and drug use.
Clemens and megastars like him aren’t used to answering to anyone about anything. But the Rocket can’t glare his way out of this jam. The walls of his entitled culture are crumbling, exposing his outsized imperfections for all the flawed masses to see.”
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the newest number one book
AUDITION, the new memoir by Barbara Walters came out this week. Published by Knopf, AUDITION instantly vaulted into the #1 spot at Amazon.com with a perfectly timed push from Oprah Winfrey. Walters appeared on Oprah’s program and they talked about that big skeleton in Barbara’s closet, her affair with a US Senator.
Walters, the queen of network television, reflected on her 44 years in the business. She also shares some amazing aspects of her private life in this book. Read my review this Sunday in the Dayton Daily News.
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Hillary is toast
I have said it before. I’ll say it again: Hillary Clinton is toast. Barack Obama has won the North Carolina Democratic primary. It is time for Senator Clinton to gracefully withdraw from the race.
The New York Times, today, makes it sound rather hopeless, right? She just loaned her campaign another 6 million dollars….
“Clinton advisers acknowledged that the results of the primaries were far less than they had hoped, and said they were likely to face new pleas even from some of their own supporters for her to quit the race. They said they expected fund-raising to become even harder; one adviser said the campaign was essentially broke, and several others refused to say whether Mrs. Clinton had lent the campaign money from her personal account to keep it afloat.”
Hillary, read the handwriting on the wall. Listen to the music.
Give up already. We admire stubborn and obstinate but if it costs your own party the election in November you will start looking a lot like a spoiler - a Ralph Nader. Your quixotic campaign needs to end. Now. Let’s mend the fences. Pick up the pieces. Make nice. It’s over, Hillary. You ran a good campaign but it simply wasn’t enough.
Former Senator George McGovern who knows a bit about hopeless causes (he was obliterated by Dick Nixon in the 1972 presidential election) was backing Clinton. Now he wants her to drop out.
What do you think? Should she stay or should she go??
Vick Mickunas
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rocky times in the book biz
For the last 15 years I have followed the book business closely. Book sales are in decline and that comes as no shock since reading books is a pastime that is also in decline.
Audiobooks are one of the only bright spots in publishing these days. As a book lover I am concerned about the situation. As a book reviewer I try to encourage people to read more books. There are so many good books to read, you could never begin to read even a fraction of the wonderful books that exist in the world.
A report in the New York Times provides another indication of the troubles in the publishing industry. Random House, a major publisher, is in turmoil. Here’s the story:
Random House Chief to Step Down, Executives Say
By MARK LANDLER
FRANKFURT - “Peter W. Olson, the chief executive of Random House and one of the most powerful figures in American book publishing, will step down in the next few weeks, according to two executives at Bertelsmann, the German media conglomerate that owns the division.
Mr. Olson, who has run Random House, the world’s largest consumer publisher, since 1998, has come under mounting pressure in recent months as Bertelsmann’s financial results have been damaged by lower profits at Random House and steep losses in its American book clubs, which he also oversees.
Bertelsmann’s recently-appointed chief executive, Hartmut Ostrowski, has lost patience with the performance of this American outpost and wants to install his own person, said these executives, who spoke on condition of anonymity because it involved internal personnel issues.
The terms and exact timing of Mr. Olson’s departure were still under negotiation, these people said. Bertelsmann’s board is scheduled to meet in New York in two weeks; an announcement could come shortly after that. “It’s just a question of working out his deal,” one executive said.
It was not yet clear who will replace Mr. Olson, although these executives said it would not necessarily be a prominent figure from New York publishing, and maybe not even an American.
Mr. Ostrowski, 50, rose to the top of Bertelsmann as the head of its printing and services division, Arvato, and since taking the helm in January, he has placed emphasis on its nuts-and-bolts businesses.
When Mr. Ostrowski laid out his strategy for Bertelsmann shortly before taking office, Mr. Olson, who was ill at the time, was missing from a lineup of executives on the stage in Berlin. The illness, these people said, had left him distracted and unavailable for long stretches last year.
Mr. Olson, a tall, reserved man who speaks fluent Russian and German, has long cut an unusual figure in the publishing industry. The highest-ranking American in a German company, Mr. Olson is known equally for his voracious reading habits and for his zealous attention to the bottom line.
In 2003, he abruptly dismissed the president of the Random House Trade Group, Ann Godoff, saying in a news release that she ran the only unit “to consistently fall short of their profitability targets.” In an interview, he said it would have been disingenuous to attribute her exit to other reasons.
Now, Mr. Olson appears to have fallen victim to the same bottom-line calculus. Sales at Random House fell 5.6 percent in 2007, hurt by the eroding dollar and weak consumer spending. Operating profit declined 4.9 percent, though Random House maintained its impressive run of bestsellers, among them “Playing for Pizza,” by John Grisham, “On Chesil Beach” by Ian McEwan, “Giving,” by Bill Clinton, and “Women & Money,” by Suze Orman.
The book clubs, which Mr. Olson overseas as the head of Direct Group North America, are an even weaker spot.
Bertelsmann expanded aggressively in this business in 2005 by buying Columbia House, a membership group that distributes DVDs and music. In 2007, it bought the 50 percent it did not already own of Bookspan from Time Warner. But the clubs have fallen far short of sales expectations.
Last year, Bertelsmann wrote down 414 million euros ($637 million) on its investment in the clubs, causing its overall net income to plunge more than 80 percent to 405 million euros ($623 million).
Bertelsmann has put the clubs up for sale, retaining Morgan Stanley to advise on offers. Industry executives said they have drawn interest from Ripplewood Holdings, a private equity firm, and from a management-led group. Bertelsmann hopes to raise about 250 million euros ($385 million).”
Random House puts out some tremendous titles on their imprints like Knopf, Pantheon, Doubleday, Vintage, Anchor, and Random House. The turmoil at Random House is a symptom of an industry in transition.
I’m headed to Book Expo America at the end of May to take the pulse of the industry. I’ll be blogging books from Los Angeles. Stay tuned….
Vick Mickunas
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the story behind a New Age publishing empire
This long article appeared today in the New York Times Magazine. It is an amazing story about a woman who founded a New Age publishing empire.
Here is the intro:
By MARK OPPENHEIMER
“LOUISE HAY IS ONE OF THE BEST-SELLING AUTHORS IN HISTORY, and none of the women who have sold more — like J. K. Rowling, Danielle Steel and Barbara Cartland — owned a publishing empire. They did not change the spiritual landscape of America and several of its Western allies. They were not pregnant at 15 and they did not lack high-school diplomas. Finer writers they may have been (depending on your taste), and wealthier women, but it would be hard to argue that any was more interesting than Louise Hay.
In any event, none of them ever touched my arm so intimately.”
It makes you want to read the rest of the article, doesn’t it? OK, here is the whole thing: click here.
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a war story
“Peace,” by Richard Bausch, (Knopf, 171 pages, $23).
Dramatic tension is the lifeblood of the novel. Writers who can build it and artfully sustain it provide pleasure for their readers with nervous friction that thrills us.
Richard Bausch employs the ultimate tension-building device in “Peace,” his latest novel. It is the winter of 1944 and Cpl. Robert Marson is a member of a U.S. Army patrol in Italy. The tide has turned in World War II as “the Italians had quit, and the Germans were retreating, engaging in delaying actions, giving way slowly, skirmishing, seeking to make every inch of ground costly in time and in blood.”
Marson takes two men on a reconnaissance patrol to the top of a hill to see what the Germans are doing. They are being guided by an elderly Italian man who was driving a farm cart along the road. The hillside is heavily wooded, and freezing rain is pouring down. The troops are miserable as they struggle to climb it.
Night falls. The weather worsens, and the soldiers realize the hillside is a mountain. Their guide is acting suspiciously so they don’t trust him. Exhausted, the four men try to snatch a few hours sleep.
It starts snowing. Their trek up the mountainside becomes a ghastly ordeal in blizzard conditions. Joyner, a profane southerner, wants to turn back. The third G.I. is Asch, a Jew from Boston.
These men have been thrown together on this hazardous mission. Marson doesn’t care for Joyner. “They did not particularly like each other. There had been tension between them before. Joyner had a set of attitudes about Negroes, Jews and Catholics, and his assertions, along with the obscenity of his speech in general, had an unpleasant air of authority about them.”
As the men battle the elements and argue with one another, they remember what their lives were like before the war. Marson thinks about the wine they drank in Palermo before they went into combat. An Italian boy named Mario located some fine wines that had been hidden from the Germans.
“Marson had knowledge about wine because his father had taught him. The old man, Charles, also brewed his own beer, and in the summer of 1929, when Marson was 12, the workmen building houses in Piqua, Ohio, where the family then lived, would come to the door of the house and say to his mother, ‘Mrs. Marson, do you think we could have a little of Charles’s cold home brew?’ “
Marson’s thoughts drift back to his days as a baseball player. He thinks of his wife and wonders if he will see her again. They finally reach the top of the mountain and they discover that the Germans are nearby. Tension builds as the impending threat of violence becomes as smothering as the snowdrifts that threaten to engulf them.
A sniper can kill before you hear the shot. “Peace” has the sizzling impact of a sniper’s round. Bausch doesn’t waste words or bullets.
You won’t know what hit you.
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to be born again
It was a misty night, May 2, 1987. I had just finished my radio show and I was riding my bicycle home. It was a little bit after 10 o’clock on a spring night in Des Moines.
I never saw the car. After stopping at the stop sign on a quiet residential street I pedaled forward and that was it. I was hit by a Suburu. It ran the stop sign. The young man behind the wheel thought that he had killed me. It looked that bad.
My head smacked into his left fender. Made quite a dent. In his fender. And in my head.
My bicycle was crushed. I kept trying to get back astride what was left of it. Ride on, like everything was fine. It wasn’t.
I had been scalped. The top of my head was flipped forward in true horror show fashion. There was a wedding reception going on at the house on the corner. A young man in a garish pink tuxedo came out and sat on my chest to prevent me from trying to mount what was left of my bike.
I recognized him. He had been on my Little League team, the Senators - I hadn’t seen him since. I said, I know you! He said, WHO THE (expletive deleted) are YOU?!
I guess I didn’t look the same? The ambulance arrived and they took me to the hospital. I never lost consciousness. No skull fracture. The doctors said that if I had been wearing a helmet that the impact would have probably broken my neck. As it was, the soft tissue of my scalp took the impact and the scalping and my skull and brain (haha) remained intact.
At the hospital I swam in a mental loop. I was in a state of shock. Every few minutes I would ask someone what time is it?? When I spotted a doctor or a nurse I would inform them that I was certainly suffering from a subdural hematoma? Amazing, how the mind functions under duress?
Strange, what the mind did on that day when it was nearly lost - 21 years ago today. I lived. I was born again that day. Really.
I’m finally old enough to have a beer. I think that I shall.
Postscript: The plastic surgeon who did the repair on my scalp laceration explained to me during my aftercare that he was thrilled to have the opportunity to work on such a significant injury. He said he had seen a few of them but he had never been asked to repair one. I asked him why not? He said: “none of the people I have seen with such serious damage were still living.”
21 years later I’m still not good to go…..
Vick Mickunas
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Ron Paul wins it all
John McCain will be the Republican presidential nominee. The Democrats have whittled the field down to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.
Republican Congressman Ron Paul is still running against McCain, right? His quixotic libertarian quest for the highest office in the land is purely dramatic at this point. Still, Paul was the only Republican candidate who wants an immediate withdrawal from Iraq, decriminalization of marijuana, etc. Amazing.
I just checked the best sellers over at Amazon.com and was stunned to see that the new #1 book on Amazon is Ron Paul’s THE REVOLUTION-A Manifesto (Grand Central). Wow! That’s Barack Obama territory when you have the top seller on Amazon.
Clearly, Ron Paul has an audience. What do you know about him? What do you think of him?
Vick Mickunas
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