false 9 13 11 true 5948367 read 0 true 3966419 currently-reading 2 true 3966418 to-read http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/44713546 Kim's review of Charlie
by Ben Hecht

From the book:

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"Yes I murdered my wife," Wanderer told Captain Norton, "because I hated married life...I think the thought of becoming a father must have driven me mad."

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Apparently your great-grand uncle became great pals with Hecht and MacArthur once he was on death row and played rummy with them in his cell every night. He owed them $10 when he was hanged. ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/44713546 to: Charlie (Hardcover) by Ben Hecht
"The Front Page" and "His Girl Friday" are two of my favorite movies and probably always will be. Even before I knew anything about Ben Hecht and Charlie MacArthur, I knew that the guys who wrote that script had to have been reporters. The hard-drinking, charming characters and the supremely cynical attitudes are still instantly recognizable to anyone whose ever worked in a half-decent newsroom.

Despite the romance, the plot of "The Front Page" always struck a cartoonish note with me until I read this book. But if Hecht is to believed (and I want more than anything to believe) the real-life capers he and MacArthur got up to in Chicago in the 1920s made the storylines of their fictions seem pedestrian. They bust into jails to find safe-breakers to save a girl trapped in a railway safe, concoct elaborate schemes to revive hanged corpses and wittily dodge arrest after all-night sing-a-long sessions at the piano in a Mexican whorehouse. They party with the round table in New York, with royalty in Europe and move to Hollywood, where they con Sam Goldwyn out of $10,000, then spend it in a fortnight on booze and room service. They make World War II seem like an amusing romp fought in-between drunken Parisian brawls with Hemingway.

Debauchery notwithstanding, the love story between MacArthur and his wife, Helen Hayes, is life-affirming and wonderful, as are the mushy letters he wrote her.

Unintentionally and by sheer power of unspoken contrast, this book exposes the average young American modern journalist as the humorless, college-trained, ethics-and-Watergate obsessed corporate drones s/he is. Hecht and MacArthur were first-rate reporters and writers. But their true power came from their sense of style and poetic, tragic sense of life, not some pompous sense of self-righteousness.

This book is long out of print, but I found a used copy in the basement at Myopic and it's worth hunting down, if you're the sort of person who'd like to actually swing from a chandelier, or to read about people who might do that. ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/45322959 The Best American Crime Reporting 2008 by Jonathan Kellerman
bookshelves: to-read
]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/45322936 A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You: Stories (Paperback) by Amy Bloom
bookshelves: to-read
]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/40182269 to: The Yiddish Policemen's Union (Hardcover) by Michael Chabon
I heard Chabon talking about the real-life history behind this (apparently the U.S. government seriously considered making Alaska a Jewish homeland after World War II) on the radio and thought he sounded awesome. I was a little disappointed to later discover that this is a bestseller that everyone knows about already.

Anyway, it's every bit as good as everyone says. It drops off a bit as the plot unravels towards the end, but I feel that way about most detective books. Like all the best Phillip/Henry Roth/Saul Bellow etc., it made me wish I was Jewish. It's almost as unappealing an advert for Alaska as you-know-who, however.
]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/41227361 to: Shaking a Leg: Collected Journalism and Writings (Paperback) by Angela Carter
Angela Carter thinks everything looks like a penis. Or a vagina, or maybe, occasionally, a tit. Partly this is because she seems to spend half her time traveling to Japanese penis festivals, but mostly it's because, you know, she's one of those feminists who think everything looks like a penis.

At my right-on university, you were expected to agree with her about everything, but not, bizarrely, to have actually read anything she wrote. It was presented as dogma, rather than thought, which is a shame since she turns out to be far more open-minded and witty than her acolytes.

I saw someone else had described this book in a one-word review as "sharp," which is right, absolutely. I'd say she's whip-smart, except that is the kind of loaded compliment she'd write an 10,000 word essay about, invoking De Sade and proving that I'm a male chauvinist pig. All right, I'm a male chauvinist pig.

This book made me very nostalgic for Britain. ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/40182217 to: Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets (Paperback) by David Simon
I loved The Wire as much as the next guy, but though this book is awesome, it's a bit of a let down after that.

As a piece of journalism, it's incredible. There aren't many reporters who could get this kind of access to a bunch of miserable homicide cops (Simon seems to have spent every waking moment with them for a year), but there's even fewer, who, having bonded with the detectives, could burn so many of them so badly in print. There's a lot of potentially career-ending stuff in there, and I'd love to know what happened to all these guys after the book came out. That said, the man-love Simon has for the cops is obvious.

As great a reporter as Simon is, and though his prose is serviceable, this book is way too long at more than 600 pages. His hackery comes out in a few chapters where similes and metaphors get reused, and some of the framing conceits get gimmicky as the book drags on.

It's also impossible to read the book, if you've seen The Wire, without confusing the real-life detectives in the book with the made-up ones in the show. Not Simon's fault, but still irritating. ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/40182432 to: Interview With History (Paperback) by Oriana Fallaci
Oriana Fallaci is a goddess. I can't believe any of the men interviewed by her in this book agreed to do it for any other reason than they wanted to marry her. Then she made them all reveal themselves as evil, or stupid, or both. The Kissinger interview is awesome, as is the Ali Bhutto one. But they're all awesome, with the possible exception of some old Italian socialist who put me to sleep near the end of the book.

It's easy to see why the women (Golda Meir, Indira Ghandi) agreed to be interviewed. Fallaci loves all the women. All right. She can do what she wants as far as I'm concerned. ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/40179364 to: A User's Guide to the Millennium: Essays and Reviews (Paperback) by J.G. Ballard
Ballard is a randy old goat who writes elegantly and thinks future civilizations will remember us by our motorway flyovers. He doesn't say this in an irritating "satirical" Bill Bryson/David Brooks way, he actually thinks it, and he's utterly convincing.

It's amazing, when I look at the shit that passes for commentary in the British press 99% of the time, that most of the essays in this book originally appeared in newspapers. The stuff on classic Hollywood and Sci-Fi is great. And although, by the time most of the essays were published, he was already a balding, middle-aged man, he's never embarrassed, or embarrassing, when he writes about sex, which he does all the time, because he's a randy old goat who loves motorways and airports and cars.

I called him up once at his Shepperton home (his number's in the phone book) when I worked at his local rag. He answered the phone and I asked him for an interview. He paused for a long time and then said, in a very polite voice, "I think I shall have to decline." Which is a pretty classy, funny way of saying "no," I think. ]]>