#fridayreads – Page 7 – The Great Gray Bridge

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

October 26, 2012/0 Comments/in Books & Writing /by Philip Turner

#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.

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

October 12, 2012/2 Comments/in Books & Writing, Personal History, Family, Friends, Education, Travels /by Philip Turner

#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.

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

October 5, 2012/0 Comments/in Books & Writing /by Philip Turner

#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.

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

September 28, 2012/0 Comments/in Books & Writing, Music, Bands & Radio /by Philip Turner

#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.

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

September 21, 2012/0 Comments/in Books & Writing, Urban Life & New York City /by Philip Turner

#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.

#FridayReads, Sept. 14–“Rust Belt Chic” & “The Scarlet Ruse”

September 15, 2012/0 Comments/in Books & Writing, Music, Bands & Radio, Philip Turner's Books & Writing /by Philip Turner

My belated #FridayReads is for the new book, Rust Belt Chic: A Cleveland Anthology, edited by Richey Piiparinen and Anne Trubek, to which I’ve contributed “Remembering Mr. Stress, Live at the Euclid Tavern,” an essay on the bluesman I followed devotedly for the many years I lived in Cleveland. I just got my own copy of the book yesterday and have begun reading my way through the more than 50 other entries in it, with pieces on legendary rock n’ roll scribe Jane Scott, poet hart Crane, graphic novelist Harvey Pekar, urban decay and renewal, and many other topics. It’s a thrill to be in this book with so many other terrific writers.

Before Rust Belt Chic‘s arrival in the mail yesterday I was reading one of John D. MacDoanld’s gripping Travis McGee novel’s The Scarlet Ruse, which I’m continuing to enjoy this weekend. If you too enjoy MacDonald’s work, please note I’ve blogged about his novels a number of times, and I learned this week there’s a Facebook group page in his honor, which I invite you to check out and consider joining. It’s always fun to have such great nonfiction and fiction on the boil.

#FridayReads, August 31–“Wilderness” by Lance Weller + Matt Taibbi

August 31, 2012/0 Comments/in Books & Writing, Publishing & Bookselling /by Philip Turner

#FridayReads, August 31–“Wilderness” by Lance Weller. This is a novel occurring post-Civil War, though set not in the south like Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain or The Sands of Pride by my own author William R. Trotter. Instead, this is set in 1899, more than thirty years after the end of the war, with a protagonist, Abel Truman, who is scratching out an existence for himself in the Pacific Northwest, on the edge of the western-facing ocean. Coming from Bloomsbury in September, I am reading and really enjoying an advance reading copy (ARC) I got at Book Expo America (BEA), back at the beginning of the summer.

Also reading Matt Taibbi’s investigative article in Rolling Stone, “Greed and Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital,” full of revelations on how Mitt Romney manipulated Federal regulators in to allowing Bain & Company (as distinct from Bain Capital) to reclaim money that ought to have been returned to the Treasury.

#FridayReads, Aug. 24–Keith Thomson’s “Once a Spy”

August 24, 2012/0 Comments/in Books & Writing /by Philip Turner

#FridayReads, Aug. 24–Keith Thomson’s Once a Spy, an entertaining wise-cracking urban crime novel blended with an espionage yarn. Narrator Charlie Clark–an NYC cab driver and regular denizen of Aqueduct Racetrack–discovers that his father Drummond is suffering with Alzheimer’s disease. What Charlie doesn’t know, at least until the story begins unfolding, is that Drummond, who ran an appliance store, operated the store as a CIA cover; in fact, he spent decades working undercover for the agency. Thing is, even with Drummond’s diminished memory, he still possesses a trove of secrets that agency bigwigs fear could end up in the wrong hands. It’s an intriguing premise, one I’ve never encountered before.

Also reading The Woman in 606, a long piece of narrative journalism recommended in the Longreads email this week. Seattle reporter Christopher Frizzelle tells this story that Longreads describes as “An inquiry into a neighbor’s suicide [that] leads a man to discover links between heavy marijuana use and psychosis among people who suffer from mental illnesses.”

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