#FridayReads–Lee Child’s “Bad Luck & Trouble” & Gerard Helferich’s “Theodore Roosevelt & the Assassin”

/0 Comments/in , /by

#FridayReads, July 12–Bad Luck and Trouble is a deceptively simple thriller that I found compelling throughout. Only the second Jack Reacher novel I’ve read, I’m finding these books are real easy to get hooked on. Reacher is a very interesting character, a drifter and loner, he’s an unconventional investigator–actually more of a crusader for justice and decency than a typical problem solver, a real knight errant, as many of the best protagonists are in suspense fiction.

width=200

Just picking up a galley of a fall title, Theodore Roosevelt and the Assassin: Madness, Vengeance, and the Campaign of 1912, that was sent to me by my friend, and long time Carroll & Graf colleague, Keith Wallman, who is now Senior Editor at Lyons Press. He’s been signing up great narrative nonfiction there, and this book on the failed attempt on Teddy Roosevelt’s life, in the midst of a presidential campaign, is a too-little known historical drama. Author Helferich is himself a former publishing executive who worked at Doubleday, S&S, and Wiley before becoming an author. I’m just getting started on this one, but I already like how it begins–with a map showing the separate but intertwining travels of candidate Roosevelt and his maniacal pursuer, a Manhattan saloonkeeper named John Flammang Schrank, over the summer of 1912, when Schrank stalked the man he crazily believed was going to leave the USA open to foreign invaders.

 

Read more

Appreciating Russell Hoban with his Daughter Phoebe and other Writers

/2 Comments/in , /by

Turtle DiaryLast Monday night Kyle and I went to McNally Jackson Books in lower Manhattan to celebrate New York Review of Books Classics‘ reissue of Russell Hoban’s Turtle Diary. I wrote about Hoban and the book soon after he died in December 2011, and mentioned then that the novel–my favorite among his many great books–was slated for reissue. The new edition has an introduction by novelist Ed Park, who was joined at the bookstore in discussion by novelist John Wray, translator and editor Damion Searls; and Phoebe Hoban, journalist, biographer of painters Basquiat and Alice Neel, and daughter of the novelist. Each panelist read from Hoban’s work–Park and Wray offering selections from Turtle Diary; Searls from Hoban’s children’s book classic, Bread and Jam for Frances; and Phoebe from an essay collection of her father that I believe was titled True North, and from eulogies read at his memorial in 2012. She made an interesting point about the many transitions her father experienced in his life and career. With his first wife Lillian, Phoebe’s mother, he moved his whole family from New York City to London; he evolved from writing children’s books exclusively to writing adult novels and kids’ books; and he evolved from being one of a cadre of Jewish-American novelists in a generation that included Malamud, Bellow, and Roth, to living amid a wholly new literary milieu in London.

Below are pictures from the discussion at McNally Jackson. If you enjoy Hoban’s work, I suggest you read my memorial post from January 2012.

Read more