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May 04
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April 29
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Jesse
gave  to:
The Cutie (Hard Case Crime #53)
by
Donald E. Westlake
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my rating:
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read in March, 2009
Jesse said:
"Decent. Not as goofily subversive as primo Westlake. Sort of a game, if I read it right: how to write a mystery novel, with what is essentially a detective hero, except entirely on the wrong side of the law. Of course he pulls it off, but not in such...more
Decent. Not as goofily subversive as primo Westlake. Sort of a game, if I read it right: how to write a mystery novel, with what is essentially a detective hero, except entirely on the wrong side of the law. Of course he pulls it off, but not in such a way that it's exciting or life-changing. Fun, quick, and forgettable.(less)
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Jesse
gave to:
House Dick (Hard Case Crime #54)
by
E. Howard Hunt
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my rating:
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read in April, 2009
Jesse said:
"Howard Hunt could write! I mean, really write: he won at least one literary fellowship early in his career. Which also confirms that whole vision I've had of the early CIA as this oddball nest of literati and American Studies profs. This has a bunch ...more
Howard Hunt could write! I mean, really write: he won at least one literary fellowship early in his career. Which also confirms that whole vision I've had of the early CIA as this oddball nest of literati and American Studies profs. This has a bunch of gritty details about being a house detective in a DC hotel. No clue if they're real, but they SOUND good. Plus, oddly, a lot of law-and-order and respect-the-police pleading: cheaply ironic, given his later escapades. Did kind of make me want to read others of his novels, though; and is there a biography? What an odd, fascinating man.(less)
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Jesse
gave to:
Soul of a People: The WPA Writers' Project Uncovers Depression America (Hardcover)
by
David A. Taylor
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my rating:
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read in April, 2009
Jesse said:
"Odd--sort of the companion to a documentary, it tells the stories behind the stories of some of the WPA state guides. Sort of. Sometimes it just kind of retails some anecdotes and stops, as in California. Sometimes it's thematic. Sometimes not. Somet...more
Odd--sort of the companion to a documentary, it tells the stories behind the stories of some of the WPA state guides. Sort of. Sometimes it just kind of retails some anecdotes and stops, as in California. Sometimes it's thematic. Sometimes not. Sometimes, as in Louisiana, where it details a pattern of censorship and surveillance, or Florida, where it discusses workers kept on plantations in near-medieval slavery, it's powerful and distressing. He finds an early Jim Thompson piece about the death of a hobo and makes a good case for its influence on Thompson's later work. (Maybe the most interesting part are the glimpses of plains-state literary culture. Being a writer with ambitions in Omaha in 1935 cannot have been fun.) But it's not really a cohesive guide to the project, to the ways it was produced (there are occasional quasi-populist references to how Washington interfered that don't add up to much), or to how it worked as a whole. Still, since I will read more or less anything about the 30s, I lapped it up anyway.(less)
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April 13
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April 06
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November 17, 2008
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November 12, 2008
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October 16, 2008
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Jesse
gave  to:
Savage Peace: Hope and Fear in America, 1919 (Hardcover)
by
Ann Hagedorn
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my rating:
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read in October, 2008
Jesse said:
"Amazing how little I knew about 1919, somehow--even after the Lehane book, and Dos Passos, and William Leuchtenberg, and everything. Big surprise here, I suppose, is the spying (followed at a close second by all the lynchings): Hagedorn reveals how c...more
Amazing how little I knew about 1919, somehow--even after the Lehane book, and Dos Passos, and William Leuchtenberg, and everything. Big surprise here, I suppose, is the spying (followed at a close second by all the lynchings): Hagedorn reveals how closely and obsessively the federal government was allied with, and even led by, private spy types, and by military intelligence, which went right on spying in some areas even when told not to. (And on people like CJ Walker as well as WEB DuBois and various lefties. The major assigned to "colored" issues, black himself, ended up concluding that Bolshevism had little to do with unrest, and that white prejudice accounted for the vast majority of problems.)
Secret hero: William Monroe Trotter, who got himself off to Paris to agitate for equal rights, got ignored by Wilson (one of history's great what-ifs: no Vietnam War, maybe, better Civil-Rights progress, less lynching...Should be a lefty alt-history novel, instead of all these warmongering History-Book-Club tomes where the Confederacy gets guns or whatever. Other one: Carl Sandburg, whose journalism from WWI Europe and in Chicago's black belt I now want to read.(less)
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