David Crumm > Recent Status Updates

I'm impressed that Christian Wiman recommended this book. I just listened to the interview with Christian yesterday on NPR, about the resilient power of connecting with others and with faith in the midst of crisis and trauma. There's a lot of wisdom in the call to reach out and not try to go it alone.

This book title may sound somber, but I'm in my late 60s and there are a few legacy things that I want my grandchildren to know someday. I am eager to be an early reader of this book because it lays out such a friendly and elegant way to pass along a few of those hopes and wishes.

I just read C.W. Goodyear's "Prologue" and I'm looking forward to this book. Goodyear is a young writer who has decided to focus on history and biography. This is his first major book and Simon & Schuster is an impressive place to start his publishing career. The book has 100 pages of notes at the back, so Goodyear clearly wants to demonstrate the authenticity of his research. What impresses me is his engaging style.

Chapter 1 of this cozy mystery opens with "So, this is our new island hot spot, I hear." Through the front door of Books & Brew walks one of the island's long-standing "characters." He meets the island's newest full-time resident who has just opened this welcoming bookstore that serves coffee and tea along with an array of books for sale or trade. That's the core appeal of a cozy mystery: a new community to explore.

I'm impressed in the opening section of this book by how many people around the world were transfixed by two different still photographs of Lon Cheney in this film, "London after Midnight," when they appeared in coffee-table-format books in the early 1970s. I was one of them, but there are opening pieces in this book by two other folks whose lives took a turn when they saw those riveting photos of the "vampire."

This biography is quite uneven as well as fascinating. Roberts devotes little more than a paragraph to the WWII landings in North Africa, which were crucial for Churchill. But he details much more about how Churchill used awareness of the Katyn massacre of Poles by Soviet troops as a bargaining chip and also about how the British gave their nuclear researchers over to the U.S. effort at Los Alamos.

Because Andrew Roberts has dug so deeply into Churchill's life and has so much space in this massive volume, I'm discovering truths about Churchill's war-time tightrope that I had not appreciated before this book. In the section I just finished, Roberts reports on efforts to vote "no confidence" in Churchill well into the war, efforts that Churchill deftly evaded partly by the pacing news he shared with the world.

The things you learn when you read the papers! I'm reading this Library of America volume of civil rights reporting slowly because I'm stopped dead in my tracks time and again. I just read a report on refusing to move to the back of a bus by Bayard Rustin for Fellowship, a newspaper of the Fellowship of Reconciliation. Turns out, my father joined the Fellowship in that era because of writings he read in Fellowship.

This collection differs from Library of America's 2-volume sets Reporting World War II and Reporting Vietnam. Those volumes lean toward best-selling newspapers and magazines, making the point that all Americans had front-row seats to such reporting. This collection draws more on alternative media. Case in point: an absolutely gripping report by Tolly Broady about the Kafkaesque process of registering to vote in 1941.

The opening pages of this 2-volume set acknowledge that major national civil rights efforts were unfolding as early as 1941, before the U.S. declared itself in World War II after the December 1941 Pearl Harbor bombings. The first two pieces are fascinating windows into Black organizations already making nationwide appeals. This was seven years before Truman's Executive Order 9981 integrating the U.S. armed forces.

One thing that impresses me about Negroni's book is that she's not simply using her considerable authority as a specialist in this field to "nail" bad people in the airline industry or in government oversight panels. She truly understands and values their work and she describes in the book how their committed focus can also lead to blind spots. This is a really helpful book for anyone who cares about this industry.

Fascinating book! In addition to exploring the "knowns" and "unknowns" of recent air disasters, Negroni reaches back to explore Amelia Earhart's disappearance as well as a couple of others in that early era, and she looks at Dag Hammarskjold's tragic crash in 1961. I like her perspective. She's not claiming she knows The Answers to these tragedies, but like a good researcher and journalist she tells us what is known.

Not for the faint of heart! This book was recommended to me by a Goodreads friend and by a family member who works on airplane safety as The Book to read about crash investigations. Of course, that means Negroni explains all sorts of things that can go wrong in a flight. Even the opening pages leave me in awe of all those professionals who help to keep planes flying safely.

On my library shelf, next to Richard J. Evans' trilogy about the Third Reich that he published 2003-2008 is this volume that he published in 2015. It's a collection made up partly of articles he has written about very specific topics (like Hitler's mental health and another on German concentration camps in Africa) and also some new material. It's absolutely fascinating so far! Evans is such a compelling historian!

As a journalist myself, I really appreciate the breadth these Library of America advisors achieved in these two volumes. Among those advisors was Milton J. Bates, who wrote "The Wars We Took to Vietnam" and Lawrence Lichty, whose research work on media I've respected and the late great Marilyn B. Young. Those are just the names I recognize from past reading. Terrific job in achieving real breadth here.

This section switches state side for some Hunter S. Thompson from his Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72. While I'm not a fan of Thompson, he did write quite a striking overview of the Vietnam veterans who were active in marching and speaking about ending the war. I had forgotten that Ron Kovic winds up with a memorable cameo in this Thompson book.

Biographer Andrew Roberts did a remarkable job of digging through Churchill's archives as well as declassified documents relating to Churchill. One fascinating detail in this section of his book is that Britain actually was ahead of the U.S. in 1941 in proposing the development of a nuclear weapon. When Pearl Harbor was bombed, Churchill and FDR agreed that the U.S. had better resources to continue with the idea.

I noted that there was "tragedy all around" in this war and now I'm reading some of the reporting about the devastation in the war's final years. In An Loc in 1972 "there are six buildings left in the town ... there were 30,000 civilians in An Loc two months ago. Now there are 3,000," wrote Rudolph Rauch for TIME. The litany of destruction goes on and on and still the generals claimed we were winning something.

What a fascinating reading experience! One of my favorite movies is the 1932 Grand Hotel from MGM. Recently, I saw someone on Goodreads enjoying the original novel, so I thought I would do the same thing. What I discovered is that I can't help "seeing" the cast of the film as I read. I just finished the dramatic "cat burglar" sequence in which the Baron scales the outside of the hotel. I saw John Barrymore as I read.

I'm now in the middle of the volume 2 of Library of America's "Reporting Vietnam." In Volume 1, I was struck by how clear the early reporting was about the impossibility of "winning" such a war. Now in Volume 2, I'm reading long passages of reporting about what a devastated and dysfunctional culture and economy existed in "our" South Vietnam in the early 1970s. There's enough tragedy to go around for all involved.

Jon Sweeney is both a talented journalist and "a spiritual pilgrim" himself. I have known and admired Jon for many years, since we first were introduced through our mutual friend (the late) Phyllis Tickle. Since then, I've read and have tried to lift up for other readers Jon's ongoing string of books. Occasionally, we've had a chance to do an interview for a magazine story. That's the case with this refreshing book.

If you're a film lover, and a silent film fan in particular, you'll feel like you're diving into a wonderland of silent film culture in this big scrapbook-and-history of the famous "lost" Lon Cheney classic "London after Midnight." I'm just savoring it, page by page, so likely won't finish it for a while!

I am enjoying the new Bluray set of Werner Herzog's films—and I saw a Goodreads friend reading "Hero Found." I've always been intrigued by Herzog's documentary "Little Dieter Needs to Fly" and, as I began connecting these dots, I realized that Herzog later made a feature film about Dieter, "Rescue Dawn," which is not included in the new Bluray set. Now, I'm going to see both Herzog films and read this biography.

I've been fascinated by "Lulu" and the many kaleidoscopic representations of Lulu since I first saw Pabst's Pandora Box with Louise Brooks in 1973 at a University of Michigan film cooperative. However, I never dug back into Frank Wedekind's background. I'm reading an inexpensive paperback now of this little collection edited for the Tulane Drama Review in the 1960s. I appreciate all the context in this little volume.

As a journalist, writer and editor, I'm pleased that Roberts looks closely at Churchill's writing and public speaking throughout his life, from the popular histories he published to pay the bills at home to his WWII-era speeches and radio broadcasts. Churchill understood the power of words. As the war began, for example, he changed the name of the Local Defense Volunteers to the Home Guard. Great branding.

I'm enjoying this biography because I'm intrigued by that era in American popular culture, since I remember a lot of it from my young years. I'm still not convinced that the world needed an in-depth biography of Don Rickles, but it's a pleasure to read the book to nostalgically remember that era and many of the celebrities who show up at Rickles' shows to be insulted by him.