Alex Rodriguez stopped being interesting to me about the time he went from the Seattle Mariners—where he played with Junior Griffey—to Texas, where he was handed 200 million dollars to play baseball. Come to think of it, major-league baseball became much less interesting to me at about
(Photo by Robert Birnbaum) One of the dependable touchstones of publishing is that every few years that rickety engine will cough out a book by maestro George Pelecanos (and a few others). Funnily enough, Pelecanos, author of 17 novels and editor of a super crime story collection (The Best American
While I am not a big fan of Oprah Winfrey, I don’t hold it against any writer that Oprah (who is not a tasteless dummy) may have brought them the immense commercial benefits that seem to accrue from her majestic anointment(s). Apparently, Jane Hamilton (A Map of the
Despite something approximating my best efforts, many venues for book information continue to propagate the silly notion that there is such a thing as summer reading. This is such a widespread contagion—most in evidence by the locust-like droning of lists purporting to contain summer books—that if there
As a young American, I was never enamored of the so-called horse operas that populated the airwaves in the ‘50s and ‘60s: Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, The Cisco Kid, Gunsmoke, Rawhide, The Rifleman, Bonanza, (Maverick and Have Gun—Will Travel excepted). What these stories had in common was the
English writer Philip Kerr, who has authored 19 novels (including some children’s books) and found himself on Granta’s second “Best of Young British Novelists” list in 1993 (along with Louis de Bernières, A.L. Kennedy, Will Self, and Kazuo Ishiguro), may be most well known for what has
Photographer Philippe Halsman snapped some of the planet’s most famous faces—Albert Einstein, Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Bob Hope, and countless others—and his portraits adorned more than 100 Life covers, when the magazine was a weekly publication and a real media force.
I haven’t read T. Jefferson Parker’s books for a while, though when I spoke with him in the mid-’90s I was favorably impressed with his writing. Along with Michael Connelly, Thomas Perry, Don Winslow, and Robert Ferrigno, Parker is one of a handful of crime writers who
There is much anecdotal evidence to support the view that despite America’s vast riches (yes, even now) we are still in thrall to a lifeboat mentality. On the other hand, the nongovernmental response to disasters such as Katrina, the tsunami, and numerous earthquakes are a sign, as Mark Twain
Our man in Boston talks with novelist Joseph O'Connor about writing historical fiction, the role of the Irish in the American Civil War, and the trouble of trilogies.
