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57

#FridayReads, Nov. 23–“The Double Game” and “Gotham”

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This week, more of a #FridayRe-Reads than a #FridayReads

#FridayReads, Nov. 23–The Double Game, Dan Fesperman’s brilliant riff on the spy novel genre, and Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 by Edwin Burrows and Mike Wallace.  It may be the distractions of the holiday week–I’ve just been re-reading a couple of favorites. Last summer I blogged about Fesperman’s novel, and found it so irresistible I’ve picked it up again. The author ingeniously embeds plot points and clues in his story from books by giants of the genre–Le Carre, Ambler, Greene, Buchan, Childers, and others–actual volumes that are in the personal library of the novel’s narrator. It’s a true tour de force, and so good I find myself challenged to say something truly intelligent about it. It was published last August, and I’ve been a bit disappointed to see that it seems to have been published without the notice it deserves.

Gotham, published by Oxford University Press in 1999, is a rare book written by scholars in that it is as readable as any novel or potboiler. Although the narrative proceeds chronologically from the establishment of New Amsterdam through the incorporation of the five boroughs in to one great city, there are tremendous set pieces in it–on the electrification of the metropolis; the Draft Riots; the rise of a national publishing scene from Manhattan, and many others. A second volume, bringing the history of the city up to the present, is due to be published at some future point. Meantime, I relish this initial volume, so good on so many aspects of New York City history. Before publication it was praised by the late Edward Robb Ellis, about whom I blogged on the latest anniversary of his birthday. I published four books by Ellis, including his worthy predecessor to Gotham, The Epic of New York City. Eddie blurbed Burrows’ and Wallace’s book, saying, “Gotham is a masterpiece. It is the best history of New York ever written. It will be read a century from now.”

This week I’ve also read and savored writer Nick Paumgarten’s thorough examination of the Grateful Dead’s library of in-concert live recordings that’s running in the current New Yorker. I actually disagree with some of his dismissive conclusions about the Dead’s music, but am appreciative of the effort he went to in listening to these many hours of music, as well as visiting with the archivists and band members such as Phil Lesh.

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#FridayReads, Oct. 26, Kathleen Sharp’s ‘Blood Medicine’ & Richard Ford’s ‘The Sportswriter’

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#FridayReads, Oct. 26, Kathleen Sharp‘s Blood Medicine: Blowing the Whistle on One of the Deadliest Prescription Drugs Ever, a riveting narrative that is a kind of Civil Action covering the corrupt world of prescription drug marketing and dangerous off-label uses of these often untested medicines.  I edited and published Sharp’s 2003 book, Mr. & Mrs. Hollywood: Edie and Lew Wasserman and their Entertainment Empire, and am excited to see that her career’s continuing in really intriguing directions.

 

Also reading Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter, his 1986 novel that is the first book in his Frank Bascombe trilogy, followed by Independence Day (1996) and Lay of the Land (2006), As ever, as I discovered when I read his latest novel, Canada, Ford crafts gorgeous sentences and tells moving stories.

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#FridayReads, Oct. 12–“The New New Deal” & “The Night Strangers”

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#FridayReads, Oct. 12–The New New Deal: The Hidden Story of Change in the Obama Era, Michael Grunwald’s deeply reported revelatory account of how the 2009 Recovery Act put the brakes on the financial collapse, prevented a depression, and jump-started President Obama’s agenda for change by distributing hundreds of billions of dollars of stimulus to create whole new parts of our economy such as green energy and electronic medical record-keeping. Grunwald makes clear that the conventional wisdom around the oft-maligned bill is in many instances just plain wrong. For instance, the extent of fraud and corruption was minuscule, “about 0.001%.” He also details in new ways the fact that congressional Repubs–in the period after the election and before the inauguration–resolved on “a strategy of uniform resistance to the president’s agenda, so that Obama would be unable to keep his post-partisan promises.” Joe Biden tells Grunwald that he was told, “For the next two years, we [Repubs] can’t let you succeed in anything. That’s our ticket to coming back.” So much for the false Romney-Ryan claim that the president has been insufficiently bipartisan.

Also, finished The Night Strangers, the first novel of Chris Bohjalian’s that I’ve read. I’ve posted about it in #FridayReads twice before, as it took me a little while to get going in this contemporary haunted house story set in my old college town of Franconia, NH. But I found it totally engrossing once I got over the initial hump. Interesting characters, especially the evil and diabolical ones, and excellent use of structure in the novel to build suspense. It also had a satisfyingly creepy “Village of the Damned”-type denouement, where it’s clear that the evil, far from being extinguished, is actually free to carry on. I’m sure I’ll read more of Bohjalian’s work.

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#FridayReads, Oct. 5–“I’m Your Man,” New Leonard Cohen bio & “The Night Strangers”

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#FridayReads, Oct. 5–I’m Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen by Sylvie Simmons, a well-written, richly textured bio of the 78-year old world class troubadour, just published this week. Still reading and savoring Chris Bohjalian’s quietly beautiful haunted house novel, The Night Strangers, set in New Hampshire’s North Country, near where I went to school at Franconia College.

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#FridayReads, Sept. 28–Chris Bohjalian’s,”The Night Stranger” & Neil Young’s “Waging Heavy Peace”

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#FridayReads, Sept. 28–The Night Stranger, Chris Bohjalian’s unusual haunted house novel, set in a town much like Franconia, New Hampshire, where I went to college. What does it mean that the number of passengers who died in a crashed airliner–thirty-nine–is the same as the number of bolts in a mysterious basement door? Though about mortality and  hidden things, the novel is told with an oddly calm narration that is all the more unsettling for it.

Also, just picking up Waging Heavy Peace, Neil Young’s long look back on nearly seven decades of living and music-making, a rock memoir written in a calm tone of voice and in a pensive and thoughtful frame of mind. With Neil so much a part of my life and musical DNA, I’d really been looking forward to this book, especially after hearing him in conversation with Patti Smith at BEA last June, and now that’s in my hands, I couldn’t be happier to be reading it, with the voice of Neil coming through on every page.

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#FridayReads, Sept. 21–“500 Days” and “Night Strangers”

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#FridayReads, Sept. 21–500 Days: Secrets and Lies in the Terror Wars by Kurt Eichenwald, a carefully researched and meticulously documented narrative history, encompassing much new information about the events of September 11, 2001, going well beyond what has been known before in many areas. Eichenwald made news when on September 10, he published a NY Times Op-Ed, The Deafness Before the Storm, detailing with unprecedented specificity the degree to which the Bush Administration failed to heed numerous warnings from intelligence officials about signs of an imminent attack, a column drawn from this book. This is all personal to me, since I was a lower Manhattan office worker on the day of 9/11, and have recently written, Remembering 9/11/01–Running Through a Dust Cloud in Lower Manhattan, about my own experiences that day, but even if it weren’t I would want to be reading 500 Days, the sort of book that people eager to understand the early days of the 21st century will be reading 100 years from now.

The fiction I’m just picking up, a kind of counterbalance, is Chris Bohjalian’s Night Strangers, a New England haunted house novel. The author comes from the North Country, near where I went to college in Franconia, NH. I’ve been hearing about Bohjalian for years, and am excited to finally read him.