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Feb 21, 2011

brian rated it:

barreling down the 101 in a '63 impala, psychojazz squawking outta busted speakers, sucking hard at a bottle of beam, poppin' dexies every few miles, truckstop whore's got your cock in her mouth, spots and stars and sunbursts all over the sky, the road, the windshield, and yer mainlining speedballing ramrodding straight through american history -- "everything looks different" "then maybe it is" -- and this is it in all its nastiness and it just ain't ever gonna stop. beam dri More...

13 comments like (24 people liked it)

Mar 27, 2010

Kemper rated it:

“I paid a dear and savage price to live History.”

And that’s the message of the Underworld USA trilogy (American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand and Blood’s A Rover) summed up in one sentence. Here at the end, it’s all about remorse, radicals, revolution, rebellion, revenge and redemption. (To borrow some Ellroy-style alliteration.)

The book begins with a brief flashback to an armored car heist in 1964 that might have been planned by The Joker considering the body count an More...

5 comments like (9 people liked it)

Nov 29, 2009

Mike rated it:

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here

3 comments like (5 people liked it)

Oct 16, 2011

Jim rated it:

This trilogy seriously goes downhill after the excellent "American Tabloid." Not only does the writing style become increasingly more inscrutable (especially in the second book, "The Cold Six Thousand") but the characters become less well-defined and difficult to care about, and the historical stakes they're dealing with get far lower.

Whereas the first book deals largely with the JFK assassination and the lead-up to it (feeding into conspiracy theories and makin More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Feb 04, 2011

Morgan rated it:

Attention un James Ellroy dans la place. J'ai commencé ce livre le dimanche 11 avril 2010. Je suis en vacances à l'Ile d'Oleron et ai du temps pour dévorer l'objet.
Lecture exigeante comme d'habitude requise par cet Ellroy. Au bout de 50 pages (sur plus de 800) je me retrouve à faire un MindMap avec les 20 personnages principaux (du moment) ce n'est que le début.
Actuellement au alentour de la page 250, je me sens plus à l'aise avec les liens entre les différents groupe et ne confond More...

1 comment like (1 person liked it)

Jul 27, 2011

Dave rated it:

A worth conclusion to the trilogy that starts out with American Tabloid and continues through The Cold Six Thousand. Blood's a Rover is written in that same staccato style which can be very hard to read, but once you get into the rhythm of it becomes impossible to put down. James Ellroy is a freak, there is no denying that, and he's really injected himself into this book much more so than in the proceeding novels.

The characters are complex, confused, torn apart and dark. The obsessions that More...

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Nov 14, 2010

Stephen rated it:

Fairly disappointing Ellroy. Still an exhilirating ride, but the pay-off was very unsatisfying. This is the conclusion to his American Tabloid trilogy. The first part was based around the assassination of JFK, and the second around those of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King. Ellroy, justifiably, decided not to cover the Watergate scandal in the third volume, but that left no comparable historic events to anchor this book, making it feel a far less significant work. This sadly drags down th More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jun 27, 2010

Shawn rated it:

I listened to the audio version of "Blood's A Rover" based on a Stephen King EW review in which he essentially called in the best audiobook ever. I guess I'd have to disagree.

Weighing in at over 24 hours it is a very long audio (no surprise, as it is a 640 page book) and I found it very hard to get interested. Eventually, I did become interested in the story, but never to the point I'd say I really liked it. Ellroy plays fast and loose with history, which I suppose is pa More...

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May 22, 2010

Pat rated it:

I honestly don't think I would have had the gumption to finish this story if I had read it. Not that it's long....I can do a lot of pages in a day if the stars are aligned properly. The complexity of the characters and the plot are not ones that you can just speed read over and that's about all I seem to have time for. I set about the audio version vis-à-vis a recommendation I read by Stephen King and on his praise of the narrator Craig Wasson. It is a true tour de force. All of his characteriza More...

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Feb 01, 2010

Scott rated it:

By the same author as LA Confidential, I was looking for something to read over vacation. The plot description was horribly convoluted, which made me mildly intrigued. At its heart, Blood's a Rover is the story of people who are largely controlled and manipulated by the forces around them but who seek to find some way to "do the right thing." Using J. Edgar Hoover as the evil force of hatred and bigotry that pulls the puppet strings on various shady characters, these wildly unpredic More...

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Nov 02, 2009

Brayden rated it:

I loved Ellroy's American Tabloid, I got really tired of The Cold Six Thousand, and I felt something in between enjoyment and weariness while reading this third part of the American Underground trilogy. The writing again was lean and mean and aggressive. No surprises there. The male characters were basically thugs caught up in a conspiratorial scheme to discredit leftist activists and black nationalists. The attitudes of the male protagonists roamed somewhere between extreme ambition and passive More...

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Oct 11, 2009

Jack rated it:

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here

0 comments like

Oct 05, 2009

Tim rated it:

The concluding volume of Ellroy's "Underground USA" trilogy is nothing less than an alternative history of the United States from the years 1968-1972. In Ellroy's novel, the conspiracy theorists were right - JFK, RFK and MLK were all assassinated through the machinations of an uneasy coalition of rogue CIA/FBI, mafia and patsies. Big plans are still afoot: J. Edgar Hoover, obsessed with black militants, orders his "pet thug" agent Dwight Holly to design a counter-intelligence More...

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Oct 03, 2009

Tony rated it:

Ellroy, James. BLOOD’S A ROVER. (2009). **. I’m a big fan of Ellroy, or at least I used to be. This novel, the third in his latest trilogy began with “American Tabloid,” and was followed by “The Cold Six Thousand.” It is a relatively stand-alone book, though some of the characters from the previous two show up again. It is written in his familiar – of late – staccato form, much like an old Walter Winchell broadcast. In fact, reading the book is like sitting through a six-hour Winchell ma More...

1 comment like (3 people liked it)

Oct 03, 2009

Hood rated it:

Hard Print

http://theleadmiamibeach.com/2009/100209...

Three the Hard Way

James Ellroy Chats about Underworld USA

By John Hood

Dig. Mau Mau militants knocking off ghetto liquor stores. An unhinged J. Edgar Hoover heaving heavy over Archie Bell & the Drells. An FBI cut-out cutting everybody else outta the rad action. A holed-up Howard Hughes buying up Vegas and scarfing down nuclear-strength narco-cocktails. MLK shot dead. RFK ditto. Sirhan Si More...

0 comments like (4 people liked it)

Sep 09, 2009

Plebar rated it:

Just read the 10 questions for Ellroy interview here on goodreads and it clarified some of my ambiguity about Rover, particularly the Joan character. In a note from Ellroy on the back of the ARC, he describes her as "my greatest female character: the Red Goddess Joan". But listen to JE in the interview: (paraphrasing here) "Women are everything, I'm a total romantic, they're why I get up in the morning". This is why he can't write convincing women characters, and why I'm les More...

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Aug 05, 2009

Erik rated it:

Two things:

First: Ellroy is a great American novelist. This trilogy is one of the towering feats of American literature since WWII. He is not merely a crime novelist, though he has incredibly used the genre as a vehicle to become a great American novelist. This trilogy says as much about America in our day as any single novel in the last fifty years. His craft is unsurpassed. He is a ventriloquist on par with Faulkner. When Sonny Liston is speaking, you never doubt that it's Sonny Li More...

36 comments like (15 people liked it)

Jul 12, 2011

Matt rated it:

The third and final book in Ellroy's "Underworld USA" trilogy, and perhaps the best. By now, readers now what to except: brutal violence, sublimely profane dialogue, terse, pulsating prose, insanely complex plots, and dozens of interconnected characters all fighting against, or being swept along, the ceaseless waves of History. What's different about this installment is that Ellroy examines the psychological toll that years of bloodshed and atrocity have taken on these characters. T More...

0 comments like

Mar 10, 2011

Laura rated it:

Best part of this book? The fabulous poem snippet from which the book got its title, by A.E.Housman: "Clay lies still, but blood's a rover; Breath's a ware that will not keep. Up, lad: when the journey's over There'll be time enough to sleep." The book is stream of consciousness whack-a doodle craziness where the world must be another universe, where good is bad and the protagonist appears to be a sweaty patricidal young man who wastes his Mormon father who would have wasted him fir More...

1 comment like

Sep 06, 2009

Greg rated it:

There might be some spoilers. I will make sure that they pop up later in the review. Don't hit more if you don't want to see them.

The hump sucked up fear and hate wholesale. He was a stone shit magnet.

After 1600 plus pages in the past three weeks, slumming in the netherworld of Ellroy's vision of American history my brain has fried itself on staccato prose, excessive violence and a belief that we are all rotten to the core. I feel complicit. I want a sap. A few th More...

4 comments like (7 people liked it)

Dec 26, 2011

Perry rated it:

Not read an Ellroy novel for ages, having read most of his other books in a rush a few years back. Blood's A Rover is a carbon copy of the previous two books in this Underworld USA trilogy, but the absence has helped me to "re-situate" (in Ellroy's parlance) myself to his extraordinary, staccato, verb-less style.

Dwight Holly and Wayne Tedrow Jnr are back from The Cold Six Thousand, joined here by wannabe spot-tailer and obsessional "peeper" Donald Crutchfield. The More...

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Aug 26, 2011

Tara rated it:

JAMES Ellroy's latest novel opens like a punch to the face, hard and unforgiving. An armoured car heist. Masked men. Cash. Emeralds. Silencers. Skull-cracking point-blank shots to the face. Gas bombs. Betrayal. Blowtorches.
In true Ellroy form, the punches don't stop.
Reading the self-proclaimed ``Demon dog of American crime fiction'' is an acquired taste, and once acquired, it can be addictive. His ``telegraphic'' prose style is relentlessly raw, staccato and at times eerily poetic:
More...

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Aug 08, 2010

Tom rated it:

I trudged manfully through Blood's A Rover by James Ellroy. The percussive rat-a-tat-tat of all the short sentences and the endless re-stating of all the threads of the story (Hoover was gay! The Mob and the FBI killed JFK!) are rather a grind, but the characters seem even less defined than in his previous books. And the language, the endless repetition of pejorative epithets, that grinds too.

In contrast to Raymond Chandler's premise that "down these mean streets a man must go More...

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Aug 11, 2010

F.R. rated it:

This series really does fall victim to the law of diminished returns. I’ve already noted how ‘The Cold Six Thousand’ is not as good as ‘American Tabloid’, but ‘Blood’s A Rover’ is a considerable dip from all that went before.

It was never going to be easy. ‘American Tabloid’ focused on the assassination of JFK, while ‘The Cold Six Thousand’ built up to the deaths of RFK and Martin Luther King. And although the years after that were tumultuous and eventful ones in America’s history, th More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Dec 02, 2009

Bookmarks Magazine rated it:

With Blood's a Rover, Ellroy completes his epic of revisionist history, and critics agreed that it is a worthy finale. Action-packed scenes, narrated in Ellroy's trademark staccato prose, hurl the reader along towards a shocking conclusion, but this is no conventional thriller. Ellroy dissects people and events familiar to history buffs and reinvents them within the sordid underbelly of the mid-20th century, interspersing the narrative with invented police statements, transcripts, and FBI report More...

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Jul 15, 2010

William rated it:

This one gets a three only because it doesn't live up to the first two installments of the UNDERWORLD USA trilogy (American Tabloid & Cold Six Thousand). This one takes us from immediately after RFK's assassination in '68 through Nixon's election and presidency. Ellroy didn't want to get into Watergate, so it ends with the death of J. Edgar Hoover. Some more escapades in the Caribbean, this time with the Boys targeting new casinos in the DR, and the right-wing paramilitary still making runs to C More...

0 comments like

Oct 23, 2009

Danaher rated it:

Huh... I just finished reading this book. I liked parts of it quite a bit and have always loved Ellroy's Style. Something just felt a bit off to me. I'm not exactly sure what it is. I felt like the three main characters lacked a bit of the heft of the earlier ones in this series. Ward, Kemper and Pete were all pretty interesting for me. I never really liked Wayne in 6000 and don't really have much feeling for him here either. Dwight's motivations feel a bit forced in this book. Crutch I guess be More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Oct 24, 2010

Patrick rated it:

This was good, not great. It is the final book in Ellroy's Underworld USA trilogy, a reinvention of American history during the 1960's where the FBI and the mafia work together to assassinate the Kennedys and Martin Luther King. This book takes place after Nixon's election, and chronicles the fall of J Edgar Hoover and his domestic spying policies. The novel is almost relentlessly dark, with the main characters (and most of the minor ones) being distinguished only by their varying degrees of More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Aug 24, 2010

Johnny rated it:

Wow. Seriously. Wow.

If you've got 26 hours to blow, put on your seatbelt and grab this audiobook. It got me from Portland to Los Angeles and back, driving.

If I had read the book, I would have probably given it four stars. The structure and story feels familiar, some of the same schtick as his previous two books, with slightly less of the depth of character. But Craig Wasson's read is masterful. It really bolsters the argument of the Audiobook as its own medium.
More...

1 comment like (1 person liked it)

Oct 28, 2009

Tripp rated it:

So I've finished Blood's A Rover and I am happy to say that my initial enthusiasm carried throughout the entire read. I was so sad to see it finish, which is rare for a crime novel. While I tend to think the best crime novels are the equal of the best litfic, there are those that disagree. Genre snobs should consider the book a literary work and note that while its story line is like that of a thriller, the depth of character, the singular use of language and syntax and the emotional depth of th More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

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