In baseball lingo, Sam Shepard is at least a four-tool talent—writer, playwright, screenwriter (Paris, Texas), and actor. As an actor Shepard has made valuable contributions to some memorable films (Days of Heaven, The Right Stuff), and he has written over 40 plays (The God of Hell,Buried Child)
In military and diplomatic circles small wars are operations undertaken under executive authority within certain parameters. In the case of my insights and perambulations for this day, Small Wars (Harper Collins) is the title of British writer/screenwriter Sadie Jones’s (The Outcast) second novel set (mostly) in a British
Don Lattin (Jesus Freaks), who for years covered religion for San Francisco newspapers, has a new book: The Harvard Psychedelic Club: How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith, and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered in a New Age for America (Harper Collins). The title pretty much tells you
Writer, poet, and University of Houston mentor Nick Flynn received well-deserved attention and commendations for the first installment of his memoirs, Another Bullshit Night In Suck City, which chronicled a childhood filled with his mother’s suicide and his father’s incarceration and an adulthood where he meets his
Miami has certainly had a fair share of superlative chroniclers—Joan Didion’s Miami, David Rieff’s Going to Miami: Tourists, Exiles, and Refugees in the New America, among others—while Miami Beach has been celebrated mostly by crime story writers—Carl Hiaasen, Elmore Leonard and Charles Wiliford, and TV
It makes sense that all those pointy-headed intellectuals (a quick search of the Internet and my claim will be confirmed) would flock around George Scialabba and his new anthology of essays and reviews, What Are Intellectuals Good For? (Pressed Wafer Press). If that smallish chorus doesn’t congratulate each
Thomas Jefferson Parker has done well in the crime-story world, having written 16 well-received novels. The last two (LA Outlaws, The Renegades) featured LA Sheriff’s Department deputy Charlie Hood and the legend of a 19th-century Mexican outlaw Joaquin Murrieta, aka El Famoso. His newest opus, Iron
In the United States, My Lai may still be remembered as the one recognized massacre of the Vietnam war. And the El Mozote (see Mark Danner) carnage may be recalled by a few Americans who were aggrieved by U.S. involvement in Central America in the Reagan years. Now comes
Thomas Mallon (Fellow Travelers) is a delightful writer. In conversation he displays a puckish sensibility, and on the page, ample good humor. With seven novels under his belt (one of my favorites is Henry and Clara, the story of the couple occupying the same opera box as Abraham Lincoln the
In their eye-opening new book Slow Death by Rubber Duck: The Secret Danger of Everyday Things (Counterpoint), Canadian environmental activists Rick Smith and Bruce Lourie quote from Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring: “For the first time in the history of the world every human being is now subjected to
