Daily Loaf

Unless you’re a police officer, you can only imagine what it’s like having a partner.

WAMBAUGH

We see it portrayed in books and films, and I gather it’s something like a marriage. So when you’re starting out together – when you get assigned a new partner – it’s sort of like an arranged marriage. There’s a sniffing period, a getting-to-know-you time, and then finally, there’s a bond formed.

Or not. Sometimes it doesn’t work out.

And that’s one of the reasons we love crime fiction . . . detective novels  . . . police procedurals. By any name, they always smell as sweet. We’ve been in love with these books since Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote Crime and Punishment. These books are not just about bad guys and good guys. They’re also about people and relationships and how human beings learn to love each other, or hate each other.

This is particularly good time for those of us who love these books. Go to your favorite local bookstore and these two will be on the front table, inviting you to read them:

• Hollywood Moon (Little, Brown, $26.99) by Joseph Wambaugh
• Nine Dragons (Little, Brown, $27.99) by Michael Connelly.

Wambaugh did much to invent the modern version of this kind of novel and Connelly is one of the form’s greatest practitioners, a worthy inheritor of the traditions and grace of  Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.

Considering the terrible cold we’ve suffered lately, I advise you to cuddle up with these books. (Trust me. I’m a doctor.)

CONNELLY

Let’s talk about Wambaugh first. Hollywood Moon is the third installment in his series on Hollywood Station, but the first two are not required reading before picking up the latest book. Though the books share the same cast of characters – including surfer cops Flotsam and Jetsam and frustrated actor Hollywood Nate – it doesn’t matter in what order they  are read.

These novels all have a narrative arc, but the stories are told as a series of vignettes, glimpses into the alternating monotony and frenzy that is police life. During the sniffing period, two new partners sit side by side and tell each other their resumes. One turns to her partner and says, “I love your stories.”

And that’s how we feel about Wambaugh. He is so comfortable with the form that his books appear to be effortless, the supreme compliment for a writer. He makes it look easy, which means it was anything but. Wambaugh’s been publishing great crime fiction for 40 years now and seems to be peaking – in my view, at least – with the Hollywood series. And that’s something, considering he wrote The Choirboys and The Blue Knight. (Wambaugh is also gifted with non-fiction. Check out The Onion Field sometime.)

We could also say that Connelly is at some kind of peak, but we seem to say that with every new book. Like Wambaugh, he explores the mean streets of LA, where he worked for a decade as a police reporter for the Los Angeles Times. (Connelly is a Floridian, however, and had the good sense to come back home a decade ago. He lives in the Tampa Bay area.) Read the rest of this entry »

Unless you’re a police officer, you can only imagine what it’s like having a partner.

WAMBAUGH

We see it portrayed in books and films, and I gather it’s something like a marriage. So when you’re starting out together – when you get assigned a new partner – it’s sort of like an arranged marriage. There’s a sniffing period, a getting-to-know-you time, and then finally, there’s a bond formed.

Or not. Sometimes it doesn’t work out.

And that’s one of the reasons we love crime fiction . . . detective novels  . . . police procedurals. By any name, they always smell as sweet. We’ve been in love with these books since Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote Crime and Punishment. These books are not just about bad guys and good guys. They’re also about people and relationships and how human beings learn to love each other, or hate each other.

This is particularly good time for those of us who love these books. Go to your favorite local bookstore and these two will be on the front table, inviting you to read them:

• Hollywood Moon (Little, Brown, $26.99) by Joseph Wambaugh
• Nine Dragons (Little, Brown, $27.99) by Michael Connelly.

Wambaugh did much to invent the modern version of this kind of novel and Connelly is one of the form’s greatest practitioners, a worthy inheritor of the traditions and grace of  Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.

Considering the terrible cold we’ve suffered lately, I advise you to cuddle up with these books. (Trust me. I’m a doctor.)

CONNELLY

Let’s talk about Wambaugh first. Hollywood Moon is the third installment in his series on Hollywood Station, but the first two are not required reading before picking up the latest book. Though the books share the same cast of characters – including surfer cops Flotsam and Jetsam and frustrated actor Hollywood Nate – it doesn’t matter in what order they  are read.

These novels all have a narrative arc, but the stories are told as a series of vignettes, glimpses into the alternating monotony and frenzy that is police life. During the sniffing period, two new partners sit side by side and tell each other their resumes. One turns to her partner and says, “I love your stories.”

And that’s how we feel about Wambaugh. He is so comfortable with the form that his books appear to be effortless, the supreme compliment for a writer. He makes it look easy, which means it was anything but. Wambaugh’s been publishing great crime fiction for 40 years now and seems to be peaking – in my view, at least – with the Hollywood series. And that’s something, considering he wrote The Choirboys and The Blue Knight. (Wambaugh is also gifted with non-fiction. Check out The Onion Field sometime.)

We could also say that Connelly is at some kind of peak, but we seem to say that with every new book. Like Wambaugh, he explores the mean streets of LA, where he worked for a decade as a police reporter for the Los Angeles Times. (Connelly is a Floridian, however, and had the good sense to come back home a decade ago. He lives in the Tampa Bay area.) Read the rest of this entry »

‘Tis the season for many things, and I bet one of them is over-eating.

If you’re going to be a glutton, do it right – and get some food for thought while you’re at it.  Feast on some great food books.

Some are cookbooks and some are books about food. Stay tuned to the end of this column and you will get a recipe for a dish that will change the world as we know it. It is my holiday gift to you.

As a teacher, I get all kinds of excuses. My favorite one was “I couldn’t make it to class because a transmission fell on my head.” And it was true.

I thought I’d have to use the classic dog-ate-my-review-copy excuse when my pooch wolfed down most of the UPS parcel containing Love Soup (W.W. Norton, $22.95) by Anna Thomas.

ANNA THOMAS WITH ALANIS MORISSETTE

In vegetarian cookbook circles, Anna Thomas is the Shakespeare of the form.  Even Alanis Morissette, who once played God in a movie, hangs with Thomas. Here’s an online cooking experience courtesy of the Huffington Post.

But as an animal-flesh-eating swine, I didn’t see myself as the ideal person to review the book, since I’m not part of the target audience. So I gave the gnawed-up copy to my friend Angela, a vegetarian whose commitment is beyond reproach. The publisher kindly provided me with a non-chewed copy and I passed that on to Angela as well, so she could work on the recipes she missed because the dog ate them.

I have nothing but praise to report from the Bill’s Book Blog test kitchen. Angela is a tough, discriminating audience, but she thinks Love Soup is one of the best cookbooks she’s used. Angela is a gourmet and an engineer, so you know her endorsement means a lot. Weight Watchers Inc. has also given Love Soup its seal of approval.

As Dear Ol’ Mom used to say, “If you can read, you can cook.” Even those of you who are intuitive little-of-this-little-of-that cooks might enjoy trying something new.

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We live in a very weird world. If you’re in front of me in line at Publix and I commit the offense of talking to you (“Hey, that wheat germ looks right tasty”), you’re likely to call the cops.

But if I go online and friend you on Facebook, you’ll tell me all about yourself – what movies you like, what turns you on, what music is on your iPod. I  can learn your e-mail name (“GatorBootyGal”) and, if I’m lucky, see pictures of you puking your guts out  during some ill-advised bar crawl.

It’s strange not only what we share but how compulsive we have become about sharing. And it goes beyond sharing. In person, we can be private, almost secretive. Behind one of these keyboards, we’re eager to tell you our most intimate secrets.

Maybe this is driven by loneliness. Maybe it’s the modern way we’ve come to deal with lives of quiet desperation. Part of it might have to do with the delirious pursuit of fame. People want to become famous not by actually doing anything noteworthy. They just want to be famous, as if fame is a birthright.

This has been much on my mind lately because of The Peep Diaries (City Lights Books, $17.95) by Hal Niedzviecki (above). This book has preoccupied me since it came out in the summer and I’m wondering if it might end up being one of those prescient, influential books like David Reisman’s The Lonely Crowd.

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Every now and then in class, I mention “the library” and look out to see rows of blank faces. Time to explain myself again.

“It’s like the Internet, only it’s printed out,” I tell my students. “It’s this big building across campus . . . surely you’ve seen it? Has a million or so books?”

Blank stares again. “Books! You know, sort of like a blog that’s been printed out?”

There are a couple of Florida writers, longtime bloggers, whose work has now been preserved the old fashioned way: in books. It’s probably not much different than the old days when writers serialized their work in popular magazines like the Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s.

But for a semi-old fashioned guy like me, it’s so much handier – and more handsome – to tote around books, rather than carrying a laptop. Because this is the kind of writing you want to read aloud to friends and a book is a lot easier than saying, “Hey, hang on. As soon as I open my laptop and link to the network and type in the URL, I got some really funny shit for you.”

In this case, the really funny shit comes from two Florida writers, both in their early 40s, with connections to the Bay Area – Lance Carbuncle from Tampa and Patrick Hughes (at left, in his younger days) from Gainesville by way of (long ago) Tarpon Springs.

Let’s start with Hughes, because his wonderful book, Diary of Indignities (MPress Books, $14.95) has been out for some time.

It’s basically his life story, from his blog, Bad News Hughes. He’s since put that blog into hibernation and now maintains The Domesticated Shithead. The change reflects Hughes’s life, so his Diary is sort of like Pat Hughes: The Early Years. Indeed, from the cover —  a disturbing photobooth portrait of Hughes at 8 (an estimate) — we see the whole catastrophe of his life laid bare.

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Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to nominate the University Press of Florida for the state’s highest public service award.

After all, the publisher has brought Carl Hiaasen’s two collections of newspaper columns  back into print in handsome trade paperbacks. Check out Kick Ass and Paradise Screwed (both University Press of Florida, $24.95 apiece).

Hiaasen has always said that if he isn’t pissing people off, he isn’t doing his job.

Will somebody please give this man a raise?

There’s something in these books to offend just about everybody – particularly morally challenged shitheels ass-raping Florida’s environment and destroying the fragile beauty of this magnificent and wacky state.

And if you don’t fall into that category, Hiaasen will probably still make you pretty mad. He might get you so angry you’ll get out of your chair and do something to stop the ecological and ethical erosion of the Sunshine State.

Lots of people know Hiaasen the novelist.  His marvelous satirical books – Tourist Season, Strip Tease, Nature Girl and Lucky You among them – have sold truckloads of copies. He’s become a monster in young-adult fiction, with Hoot, Flush and Scat. And he is the Patron Saint of Golfers-Gone-To-Seed in his latest nonfiction best-seller, The Downhill Lie.

But a lot of his loyal fans don’t realize that despite his success, Hiaasen keeps his day job as a Miami Herald columnist. This probably saves him a lot of trouble. He doesn’t have to go looking for weirdness to put into his novels; all he has to do is page through the local section of his newspaper.

So he holds onto the newspaper job as a sort of reality check – or, since this is Miami, a surreality check.

These are books for Florida. Unlike his novels,these might not travel well. Hiaasen takes the “local columnist” thing seriously, and these pieces are specific to his beloved and vulnerable home state.

They are also well reported. Again, fans of his novels might not realize it, but Hiaasen was part of the Herald’s investigative team before he became a columnist in 1985. Unlike a lot of snoremonger columnists  — who read the work of real reporters, then ruminate and deign to tell us what it all means — Hiaasen still does his legwork. He doesn’t sit on his can and comment on things he’s only read about. This guy never stopped reporting.

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James Stewart once said that the reason we love the movies is that “they give us little, tiny pieces of time that we never forget.”

Too true, Mr. Stewart.

I see Sam Shepard, burned and damaged, walking out of the desert at the end of The Right Stuff. I remember The Quiet Man, with John Wayne telling Maureen O’Hara how a man can’t forget the sight of “a girl coming through the fields with the sun on her hair.” And there’s even Mr. Stewart himself, as a certain Mr. Smith, vowing to his dying breath to fight for the lost causes before collapsing on the floor of the Senate.

Hell, yeah, I love the movies. As tiresome as many of the summer blockbusters have become with their noise and explosions and marketing ploys, we can still be mesmerized by great storytelling and brilliant acting. Explosions? We don’t need no stinking explosions.

It’s only afterward when we discover we were living in a golden age. Looking back at the 1970s now and seeing myself in a darkened theater, I know that I witnessed Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese achieving their cinematic adulthood. I remember first seeing Robert DeNiro in Bang the Drum Slowly, and thinking, “Where in the hell did they find this dumb cracker to play the doomed ballplayer?” And then I learned that DeNiro wasn’t from the Georgia woods, but was instead a great actor.

When I think back on those movies I loved in the 1970s, a lot of them featured actor Warren Oates and were directed by Hal Ashby. Neither name rolls off legions of lips today. Maybe both of them were too self-destructive to achieve mass fame. Both died young.

Two excellent new books bring the artists back and recreate that era of film. Check out Warren Oates: A Wild Life (University Press of Kentucky, $34.95) by Susan Compo and Being Hal Ashby (University Press of Kentucky, $37.50) by Nick Dawson. In another age, these excellent biographies would be brought to you by a major American publisher, but in the roulette wheel of this economy, we have an excellent university press filling our need (and it is a need, if you love the movies) for books such as these. Both are part of Kentucky’s “screen classics” series.

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Maybe I’m just a geezer who never got it with graphic novels.

I grew up on comic books and loved them, from the DC super heroes, to the uber-cool Marvel mutants, to the great works of literature presented by Classics Illustrated comics.

But I was  well removed from my comic- buying years when graphic novels began appearing. I figured they were just very good comics – well drawn, cooler angles, slick paper.

Art Spiegelman’s Maus changed my view of these books. That look at the Holocaust shocked a lot of people when it was published – you’re turning that atrocity into a comic book … featuring a mouse?  But Maus worked and earned respectability for the genre.

Now a great work of 20^th Century fiction has been re-imagined as a graphic novel.

Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (Hill and Wang, hardcover, $30; paperback, $16.95) takes that classic about a book-burning culture maintained by thought police and presents it anew, with the sharp visual style of artist Tim Hamilton.

Of course, Bradbury would embrace this. This forward-thinking gent has even written a new introduction to the book. His classics – The Martian Chronicles, Dandelion Wine, The Illustrated Man and the essential Stories of Ray Bradbury – loom large in my life. I remember my older brother reading me Something Wicked This Way Comes from the top bunk, and I began a lifelong love for Bradbury’s work. I’ve particularly admired Fahrenheit 451, with its tortured protagonist Montag. He’s a fireman, but in the future, firemen start fires — to burn books and kill free speech. (The title notes the temperature at which paper catches fire and burns.)

Bradbury hasn’t gotten the respect he deserves as an American grand master. Unfortunately, noodle-headed mainstream critics long ago marginalized his work as science fiction when it’s actually great fiction that sometimes deals with science, technology and speculation. Read the rest of this entry »

And now for something a little different. File this under “library, treasures of the.”

Whenever I’m blue, I get a book down from the shelf, turn to page 78 and begin to laugh.

It’s The Great American Baseball Card Flipping, Trading and Bubble Gum Book (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973), edited by Brendan C. Boyd and Fred C. Harris.

It’s one of those books available by special order. You can also find a used copy online for $85 or so. It’s worth every penny. You can also find it at the library, which is a pretty cool place. It’s like the Internet, only with stuff printed out.

On page 78, the authors simply list their favorite nicknames of ballplayers. I’ve never needed more than five bites of the first column before I begin to feel better.

I present this selection of names as a public service to all humanity. If only the United Nations General Assembly would join me in my mission to bring peace to the world . . . .

If this was read aloud before that body, in all the languages of earth, we could achieve a just and lasting peace.

It’s hard to fight when you’re laughing.

(I use the Rocky Bridges card as an illustration. The nickname ‘Rocky’ isn’t nearly as funny as his real name — Everett. But Boyd and Harris write an essay on every baseball card in their book and the essay on Bridges is probably the funniest.)

Unfortunately, the tradition of baseball nicknames seems to have been lost. Since Boyd and Harris compiled this list three decades ago, there haven’t been too many colorful additions. Chris Berman does his part on ESPN. There was a player on the University of Florida baseball team some years back named Dave Majeski. I tried to get one of my sportswriter friends to work Purple Mountains Majeski into his story one day. He did, but it didn’t catch on.

The baseball nickname is the entymological equivalent of the dodo. So appreciate these names while you can.

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In the latest edition of ArtsSpeak, CL’s arts and culture podcast, Daily Loaf book blogger William McKeen interviews Adrian Colesberry (right), standup comic and former biomedical engineer, on his very funny new book, How to Make Love to Adrian Colesberry. Turns out the first rule of How to Interview Adrian Colesberry is: try not to mention the name “Adrian Colesberry.” But Bill — University of Florida journalism prof and author of Outlaw Journalist, which Greg Palast calls the Great Red Shark of Hunter S. Thompson biographies — still gets great info from Mr. Colesberry, including the reactions to the book from the women in his life — his current wife said it made her both angry and horny — and the chapter that should make Adrian’s momma proudest, “Adrian and your asshole.”

After the jump, listen to the podcast and view Colesberry’s must-see YouTube promos. Read the rest of this entry »

Tom Wolfe started with a simple question:

What do you do after you walk on the moon?

How do you top that?

After romping around on the lunar surface, you can imagine the empty feeling that comes upon you even when you do something exciting. Going to Wal-Mart on a Saturday morning loses its thrill. After all, you’ve been on the moon.

Wolfe called it “post-orbital remorse,” the condition that affected the astronauts who walked on the moon.

How many of us know for certain that our lives have peaked?

The look at the astronauts started as a Rolling Stone series Wolfe wrote in 1973. When he began digging deeper into the story for the book-length version, he got so involved that he had to cut off his manuscript before it became unwieldy. When it came out in 1979, The Right Stuff (Picador, $16) told the story of the space program from the test-pilot days of the pioneers in the late 1940s, up through the end of the Mercury program, in 1963. The story of the third generation of astronauts, those who were part of the Apollo program, remains tucked away in his archive of magazine articles.
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It was Sept. 12, 2001, and New York – along with the rest of the world – was still numb with shock from the terrorist attacks of the day before.

America’s royal acting couple was at a hushed Manhattan restaurant. Life as we knew it had changed. Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward ate quietly, until Newman set down his knife and fork, dabbed his mouth with a napkin and stood. Without introduction or explanation, he began singing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Within a few moments, the other diners stood and sang along with the National Anthem. At the end of the song, Newman bowed, sat and returned to eating dinner with the woman he loved so dearly.

Something about that little story, which appears in Shawn Levy’s new biography, Paul Newman: A Life (Harmony, $29.99), perfectly sums up the late actor. He was a pure product of America, renowned as a philanthropist and citizen as much as for his screen presence. And no matter what he did, we always seemed to trust his judgment and follow him.

If you liked Paul Newman – and really, who didn’t? – then you will love Levy’s biography. Don’t come here looking for dirt. It’s not an obsequious, fan-worshipping biography, but Levy obviously likes the man.

That’s no crime. Reading a biography written by someone who loathes the subject is no fun.

Even though Levy never had an interview with the Blue-Eyed One, we still get a rich and full portrait of the guy.

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You’re probably wondering what Hunter S. Thompson has to say about Sarah Palin. Maybe you’re curious about his thoughts on the first months of Barack Obama’s presidency. Could be you want to know his predictions for the upcoming professional football season.

We can’t know what he would think, of course. And don’t for a moment presume that you would know his opinion, say, of President Obama. Thompson was many things and most of them were unpredictable. He was a brilliant man, a gifted writer and an artful, challenging conversationalist. Largely self-educated, he would see historical and literary parallels in nearly every avenue of discourse and for him writing / art / conversation was a parry-parry-thrust sort of game.

As much as his army of readers misses him, imagine being a close friend and missing him. When there is a Great Historical Moment – the Obama Inauguration, for example, or the death of Michael Jackson – the friends all prepare for the illumination and insight of their old buddy, for a moment forgetting that he is gone.

So, unless there is a Mojo Wire in the Great Beyond, we cannot know what Hunter S. Thompson thinks about Palin, Obama or Jackson. And it reminds us how much we miss that voice of his, the twisted and insightful literary voice he brought to the world. He left behind a lot of writing and over the next decade or so, it will be carefully published by the family’s literary trust. The first major posthumous work, The Mutineer – his third volume of collected letters, edited by Douglas Brinkley – will appear in October.

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LEARNING TO FLY: Maybe it doesn’t happen for everyone. But for those who love books, it’s not hard to remember that moment when they fell in love with reading.

Maybe it happened early on, with Dr. Seuss. Maybe it came later, during the early pangs of adolescence, with Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.

For me, it happened when I first laid hands upon The Wind in the Willows. What a strange and wonderful world Kenneth Grahame described in his 1908 novel for children. This tale of a mole, a river rat, a badger and the officious Mr. Toad was the first major step in my lifelong reading habit. Not sure where that first copy came from: It was the 50th anniversary Scribners edition, illustrated by Ernest H. Shepard, and it came out when I was three. It was probably my older brother’s copy.

At school, I plunged into reading – Robb White’s The Lion’s Paw , a whole series of biographical books aimed at the elementary school set – but Wind in the Willows was sort of a secret. None of my other friends had read it. Maybe, I figured, it was an English thing. I’d spent my first few Wonder Years in England. Later, when I read that the book was one of John Lennon’s childhood inspirations, I felt some kind of vindication.

None of my friends here in the States had read Wind in the Willows, though they were conversant in Poohspeak. A.A. Milne’s Winnie-The-Pooh came two decades after Grahame’s book, but both books were illustrated by the same artist, Shepard, who did the Wind in the Willows I knew best.

Now, just after its 100th anniversary, Wind in the Willows is back, in the deluxe treatment. That classic Scribners edition I grew up with is still available (from Atheneum Books), but W.W. Norton, the publisher that produces the “Annotated” series of books, has turned its reverent and superb attention to this classic of children’s literaure. (Norton has produced several books in the “annotated” series. Click here for more.)

The Annotated Wind in the Willows (W.W. Norton, $39.95) fascinates and entertains on so many levels.

First of all, there’s the great story of the adventures of Mole and Rat and how they band together with Badger to assist Mr. Toad in his battle against evil. There’s also a moment of revelation about the mystic powers of language. The chapter titled “Pipers at the Gates of Dawn” struck me in ways I didn’t begin to understand as a child. Yet it took me to another level and I realized language could guide you into a dream state. (It also might have inspired my first hallucinations, but that’s another story.)
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FATHER ALONG: Nobody knows how to be a parent. When people enter adulthood and see the rest of life yawning ahead, they look at this parenthood thing and cringe. How the fuck am I supposed to do that? A young friend once said he thought he might not be a good parent because wasn’t very good with his dog. I didn’t say anything, but I thought, “Dude – trust me. It’s different.”

I’m a father of seven and I’m still trying to figure out this shit. No. 7 is just as perplexing as No. 1. What worked for No. 2 doesn’t faze No. 5 at all.

But one thing I’m pretty sure about: You only begin to understand the profound depth of love when you become a parent. At least, it was that way for me.

And it seems like it was that way for Michael Lewis too, based on Home Game (W.W. Norton, $23.95). Lewis sees himself as a Yuppie curmudgeon and was dragged kicking and screaming by his wife – former MTVer Tabitha Soren – into life as a daddy. Once he joined the club, there was anger, resentment and self-pity. But then he seemed to get it.

That ideal family of television situation comedies does not exist. Families are complex organisms and parenthood ain’t pretty. The best we can do is try and certainly it’s a parent’s duty to protect children and let them be children as long as they can.

Lewis has the usual neuroses and then some. The majority of parents probably fall in love with their child at first sight (if they haven’t already loved the idea of the child in utero).

In Lewis’s case, the first baby arrived and . . . nothing. Or, at least, next to nothing. He doesn’t feel the overwhelming wallop of emotion he’s been told to expect.

So Home Game is sort of a running diary of growing into love. No one will accuse Lewis of being overly sentimental, but he does achieve a cumulative, deep resonance of love in this book.

There’s a holiday coming up on June 21 that honors fathers. This might be a great gift for the old man. If he isn’t much of a reader, it’s cool; Home Game clocks in at just under 200 pages, and it has pictures. Oh – and did we mention that Michael Lewis is a brilliant writer? He’ll get pop over the hump.

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Sure, it happens at the movies all the time. Somebody jumps out of the darkness with a knife and we all shudder. A whole film genre has been based on such scares. But when was the last time that happened to you while reading a book?

For me, that happened just last week, at the halfway point of The Scarecrow (Little, Brown, $27.99) by Michael Connelly. Even though you know something is up, the moment that makes you jump and do your Good-God! James Brown impression hits you with the same shock and fear that grips the novel’s hero, Jack McEvoy.

Moments like that make you appreciate what a great novelist Connelly has become. His books will still be read 75 years from now in the same way that college students are required to read Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain. Connelly leaves most of his contemporaries in the dust.

The Scarecrow doesn’t feature Connelly’s main attraction, L.A. Detective Harry Bosch, but instead focuses on newspaper reporter McEvoy, the central character in Connelly’s The Poet and a supporting character in a couple of other Connelly books.

This story grows from the freak show that is the modern newspaper business. McEvoy is a dedicated and talented veteran journalist, so he is laid off from the Los Angeles Times and forced to train his young-sprout replacement, a naïve and ambitious rookie from the University of Florida. Connelly vents a lot about what’s happened to the newspaper business — he was an LA Times star for several years before becoming a novelist — but uses that heartbreak to open the door to yet another thrilling narrative. It’s a great tale about a cast-aside reporter on the trail of a bad-ass computer-whiz serial killer. That the book also shows evidence of the immorality of big-time journalism is an added bonus.

It’s a thrilling, masterful book and it reminds us of why we love to read: we love to get caught in the web by a brilliant storyteller. Connelly lives in the area and he has a few shoutouts to Florida homies that make the book even more fun.

It seems that it was just 20 minutes ago that Connelly published his last novel, The Brass Verdict, and he’s got another one — Nine Dragons, the latest Harry Bosch novel — coming out in October. Janet Maslin of the New York Times is always a tough review, but she praised The Scarecrow, then said at the end of her review that Connelly was too prolific, that he needed to slow down. But Dude — as long as the books are this good, please … please keep them coming.

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Time to get caught up. As the T-shirt reminds us, “So many books, so little time.” Let’s hit the road.

AMERICA THROUGH THE WINDSHIELD: We’re all about road trips here at Creative Loafing and so imagine this: The dude who pulls up next to you at the Tastee Freeze parks a little too close. You glance at him when he gets out of the car and I’ll be damned if it isn’t the former president of the United States.

Don’t worry. W isn’t behind the wheel. This is the absolutely true story about a much-more-wonderful time when the president could move out of the White House and on to the highways.

Harry Truman’s Excellent Adventure (Chicago Review Press, $24.95) by Matthew Algeo is the thoroughly charming story of how the former president and first lady drove across country in 1953. It was for fun, not publicity. At first, you might think this book is science fiction, since the guy playing the president of the United States is so bullshit-free. But this is an all-true story.

Algeo pulls together the narrative of the trip and retraces the route in his own car. It’s part road-trip meditation and a wonderful morsel of American history. We learn all kinds of things, including that Truman was a shitty driver. He paid off the other drivers in his prolific fender benders, mostly to keep Bess Truman from chewing his ass.

Back then, ex-presidents didn’t have Secret Service protection or even a pension plan. It was, as I say, a different world. This wonderful book allows us the opportunity to get a glimpse of that America.

Read the rest of this entry »

This state inspires so much great prose, it’s amazing we can keep up.

Here’s a half dozen great new Florida books you need to get your mitts on.

THEY PUT UP A PARKING LOT: From some of the same folks who brought you a Pulitzer Prize comes Paving Paradise (University Press of Florida, $27).  Craig Pittman and Matthew Waite tell a complex and on-its-face unsexy story about water in Florida.  But it works, drawing readers into its difficult subject by resorting to the dirtiest trick in the journalist’s bag of tricks: great storytelling.

Pittman and Waite use several people – some heroic, some shady – to examine the political shell game that makes white equal black and no equal yes. They tell the story through the eyes of politicians, developers, bait-shop owners and a league of people who mourn what’s happened to this state.

Based on their award-winning series for the St. Petersburg Times, Paving Paradise is the perfect way to give a longer shelf life to a vital work of journalism. Pittman and Waite are a couple of the best journalists practicing the craft in the country today. 

It makes us wonder if there will be a place for journalism like this in a few years. If newspapers still exist, will they give over this much space to an in-depth report. Will book publishers then give reporters the space to expand on their work?

This isn’t a story that works well on Twitter.

Read the rest of this entry »

LED ZEPPELIN: John Bonham, Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones

Here’s the book-review equivalent of the lightning round. Short takes on a lot of great new books.

Any Led Zeppelin fan who’s ever seen The Song Remains the Same remembers the story of the theft of the band’s $203,000 stash o’ cash from their hotel. In Black Dogs (Three Rivers Press, $13.95), author Jason Buhrmester imagines what might have happened. In this case, he sees the main culprit as a semi-deranged Black Sabbath fan working as a backstage caterer at Madison Square.  Lots of great, sharp dialogue – kind of like an updated His Girl Friday script – and insider rock geek stuff make this book indispensible.

Philipp Meyer’s American Rust (Speigel & Grau, $24.95) has been getting a lot of buzz and justifiably so. Much of the buzz comes in the form of this-is-a-serious-LITERARY novel, but don’t let that scare you off. Read the rest of this entry »

Of all the great lost arts of America, perhaps it’s time to praise the short story.

People still write them and magazines and literary journals still publish them.  But we must have hit some sort of a peak – a harmonic convergence, perhaps – in the middle of the last century. In a long tradition that included Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ring Lardner and Ernest Hemingway, came two great mid-20th Century masters whose private lives have just been put on display.

Flannery O’Connor is the subject of Brad Gooch’s Flannery (Little, Brown, $30) and John Cheever gets the epic treatment in Cheever by Blake Bailey (Knopf, $35).

O’Connor (at right) and Cheever are among the greatest storytellers in our history. Happens that they are both favorites of mine. When I was a young swain, working on a magazine, my managing editor introduced me to O’Connor’s work. My mentor was no slouch himself – a gifted author of short stories, winner of the prestigious O. Henry Award – and so I gorged on his advice, swallowing whole O’Connor’sComplete Stories (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $17).

Her stories, often called Southern Grotesque, formed whole worlds. Lesser writers might try to fashion a novel from the material O’Connor used for mere paragraphs. Each story offered new, dark insight to the soul of a Southern eccentric. Odd and twisted, her stories are unforgettable.

“A Good Man is Hard to Find” was about a family car trip derailed by an escaped killer. “Good Country People” featured a charlatan who steals an introverted woman’s wooden leg. “The Lame Shall Enter First” used a familiar O’Connor them,  the well-intentioned helping the less-fortunate, and struck a resounding chord in a symphony of human nature. Read the rest of this entry »

Spring is here and mysteries are in bloom.

There’s something about this time of year that seems to bring out the pollen and also the best in our great mystery writers.

Michael Connelly, who just delivered The Brass Verdict last fall (and sent it rocketing up the best-seller list) is giving us The Scarecrow (Little Brown, $27.99) in a couple of weeks. Jack McEvoy, the hero of The Poet, one of Connelly’s classics, is back and this time he’s laid off. In a truly ripped-from-the-headlines move, the great reporter is a victim of Los Angeles Times downsizing. We’ll talk more about The Scarecrow as we get closer to publication date, but early returns are in and Connelly has scored another winner. (In a move designed mostly to make the rest of humanity feel like a bunch of slackers, Connelly will have his next Harry Bosch mystery out this fall. Pardon me, Dude, but three books in a year . . . . Are you trying to make the rest of us feel like slugs?)

Author TIM GREEN

A couple of other Florida mystery writers are bringing out novels as well: Tom Corcoran’s photographer-sleuth Alex Rutledge returns in Hawk Channel Chase (Ketch and Yawl, $24.95). See my Creative Loafing profile of Corcoran for more details. And Randy Wayne White is in top form — and that’s saying a lot — in Dead Silence (Putnam, $25.95), his latest Doc Ford mystery. Watch Creative Loafing for a career retrospective of White in a couple of weeks.

But let’s stop and praise a couple of other great mystery writers now.

Being a mystery novelist is Tim Green’s third life — at least. After an NFL career (defensive end for the Atlanta Falcons) and service as an attorney, Green became a writer. As an author, he’s written a non-fiction book about adoption and professional football and also published a series of children’s books.

And he’s a heck of a mystery writer. His new book, Above the Law (Grand Central, $24.99), is one of those fast-paced novels written with the urgency of a Twitter post. Like James M. Cain or Robert B. Parker, Green writes as if he’s being charged by the word. He sets a fast pace, then picks up the tempo a bit.

In short, you’ll rip through this book. Read the rest of this entry »

It might be fun to watch some of these big-time rock critics take each other on in a creamed-corn wrestling match. Some of them have such bile and bitterness that it might be nice to see them exorcise their anger in a tub of gooey vegetable product.

And what makes them so angry? Why, each other, of course.

British rock critic / historian Clinton Heylin has always been amusing because of the jabs he takes at other rock writers in his books. Mention Heylin’s name in the presence of Springsteen’s Boswell, Dave Marsh, for example, and Marsh is likely to go apoplectic. (All unfair, I might add. Marsh remains one of the best and most literate of all rock writers. But Heylin left him out of his huge anthology of rock writing, The Penguin Book of Rock and Roll Writing. That’s like leaving one of the apostles out of the Bible.)

So Heylin takes some of his usual shots at that huge subset of rock writers called Bob Dylan Experts in his new book, Revolution in the Air (Chicago Review Press, $29.95). Slamming other rock writers is just part of the territory for Heylin.

Heylin is no stranger to Dylanology. He wrote Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades in 1991, an oral history biography that has been once revised. He also meticulously went through Columbia Records’ archives to produce Bob Dylan: The Recording Sessions, an indispensible book covering Dylan’s studio work from 1960 to 1994.

Read the rest of this entry »

Here you are, suddenly single.  Your long-time girlfriend finally tires of your insatiable need to alphabetize. Your wife walks out after years of you cheating on her with the Tampa Bay Bucs. Maybe you got tired of slipping on the panties she leaves lying on the bedroom floor.

Whatever the cause, it’s daunting to be single after years of sedentary monogamy. When it’s time to date again, to jump back on that pony, you’ll soon discover that the rules of the game have changed.

Most books about re-enlisting in the dating corps seem to be addressed to women, but Judith Sills’ Getting Naked Again (Springboard, $24.99) has adaptable wisdom for us all.

She uses that central theme – nudity, both physical and psychological – as the entry point for her book.  Maybe you have small children, which makes dating again an emotional minefield about the suddenly insecure little ones. Maybe your kids are teen-agers and now you’re trying to do what you’re telling them not to do. When your kids reach a certain age and see you struggle in relationships, it’s an odd about-face when they start giving their parents dating advice. And there’s always the satisfaction that comes with knowing that your dating life kicks the ass of your kid’s dating life. Read the rest of this entry »

When I was growing up, the motto on the editorial page of my hometown paper was that famous quote of Voltaire’s: “I disagree with what you say but will defend to the death your right to say it.”

Anyone out there today willing to go balls-to-the-wall for a dissenting point of view? Didn’t think so.

We’ve turned into a nation of shouters, whiners and complainers. When someone starts spouting a point of view that we don’t like, we start the no-nodding and the condescending smirking, and we don’t even let the spouter finish a sentence before we inform him he is a repulsive dumb ass.

So much for civil discourse or “free, robust and wide-open” debate. John Milton and John Locke would shit their philosophical pants if they cruised deep cable and saw Keith Olbermann off on one of his operatic rants, or if they happened on Bill Maher jumping down the throat of someone who dared to disagree with him. If they saw the jabbering heads exploding with rage and cross talk that turned hours of digitized signals into gibberish, they would run for the next available time machine.

So here comes Bernard Goldberg with A Slobbering Love Affair (Regnery, $25.95), which will never reach the audience that could most benefit from it. As with Bias, his earlier best-seller, Goldberg makes some strong points – and does so very entertainingly. But many will condemn the book without cracking the cover or even glancing at Goldberg’s arguments. Read the rest of this entry »

OK, let’s get that disclaimer stuff out of the way. I’m about to tell you about a book and you should know that I blurbed on the cover. No, I didn’t puke on it. That just means that I said nice stuff about it, in an effort to get you to buy the book.

I did it because it’s a good book and because the publisher asked me. But how often do I waste your time writing about a book I don’t like?  So I’d write about this book anyway.

“This book” is Jay Cowan’s memoir of life with Hunter S. Thompson. Cowan spent several years living in a cabin just across the driveway from the Gonzo King  at Owl Farm. He was caretaker, protégé and confidant. His book gives us a look at Thompson that few could ever offer. Only a few other people in the planet had a better look at Thompson: a couple of wives, some girlfriends and the Gonzo writer’s long-suffering assistant, Deborah Fuller. All of those other people who wrote about Thompson – they never had to live with the guy.

The only weak point of Cowan’s book is its title – Hunter S. Thompson: An Insider’s View of Deranged, Depraved and Drugged-Out Brilliance (The Lyons Press, $24.95). It gives the impression that it’s another book of Amazing Drug Tales with Hunter.

It’s not. It’s a journey inside the life of a writer who was not appreciated enough during his lifetime. Hunter Thompson wasn’t taken seriously by a lot of folks mostly because he made it look so easy. Cowan’s book is a trip behind the wall, a study of  the craft that went into Thompson’s writing. Cowan was there for a lot of the pain and struggle, too. Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s talk about some books that don’t look like books – at least not like the books they really are. These are stealth books.

Flip through The Stuff of Life (Hill and Wang, $14.95) and you think it’s a comic book.

It has comic-like drawing, none of the dark stuff that infuses graphic novels. But once you get into it, you see it’s a genius way to to teach science.

Maybe your school had budget cutbacks. Even back in the Seventies, we had those. My chemistry class was taught by a math teacher, because we couldn’t afford a chemistry guy. And in college, I was one of those students who attended only enough classes to pass the course. Another missed opportunity.

So those of us who are science-deficient for one reason or another need the comic book approach.

In The Stuff of Life, writer Mark Schultz and illustrators Zander Cannon and Kevin Cannon (amazingly, not related) take us through all of that stuff we should know … the stuff we wish we knew.

Back in high school, that was always the rap on science and math. “I’m never going to use this,” kids used to say.  That was before they made the great discovery that there’s tremendous pleasure in just knowing.

What Schultz cooked up to make this so interesting is an alien called Bloort 183. He’s been sent to Earth to research its genetic history and report back to the home planet. Read the rest of this entry »

Seems the older we get, the more we fuck up. We stop doing the stuff that got us here.

For one thing, we stop asking questions because we fear people will think we’re stupid or that we will come off as uncool. But the result is that we grow dumber because by not asking questions, we’ve atrophied as learners.

Same goes  with reading. Remember when you were a kid and you used to read at the table after dinner each night? OK, so maybe you didn’t do that. My son Jack, a well-read boy of 6, entertains us with a book a night aloud.

Once a year, we go off to a remote cabin in a state park, freed from the bonds of television and video games. All of us – husband, wife, four small spawn – amuse ourselves with murmuring radio and reading aloud. We’ve done a couple of Harry Potter books that way and those sorts of memories will never fade.

But in your everyday life – do you ever read aloud? Are you worried about that “uncool” stuff? You’ve got to get over that. The best part about aging is no longer giving a shit about trying to be cool.

I used to keep English Romantic Poets by Marius Bewley (Modern Library, out of print) in my bedside table. I’d occasionally serenade a guest with one of Wordsworth’s Lucy poems or even Leigh Hunt’s “Jenny Kissed Me” (I’m such a sentimental swine).

Read the rest of this entry »

As we ruminate further on the decline of newspaper journalism (Holy Smoke! The Detroit papers will be available only online five days of the week!), let’s celebrate something that makes newspapers so important to us – great columnists.

Florida is blessed with several of the best in the nation, and luckily the University Press of Florida has begun a program of preserving great newspaper columns as part of a series on Florida culture, edited by University of South Florida professors Gary Mormino and Raymond Arsenault. Mormino and Arsenault offer a master’s degree  in Florida Studies. Woo hoo!

Jeff Klinkenberg of the St. Petersburg Times is one of Florida’s greatest blessings and his latest collection, Pilgrim in the Land of Alligators (University Press of Florida, $24.95), is another entry in his “Real Florida” crusade against anything false and manufactured with the stench of a theme park attached.

Klinkenberg — that’s him wrestling an alligator at right — hits the road to find off-the-beaten trail people and places, examples of the old, weird and wonderful Florida.

Imagine this scene: You pull up at a desolate Florida Panhandle gas pump to fill up the guzzler. There’s a picture of that bad-ass cop on the pump, warning you that if you drive off without paying you are dogmeat. Then the real-life cop pictured on the gas pump pulls up next to you. What happens next, of course, is a great story.

Great, serendipitious things like that happen to Klinkenberg.

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There’s an old story about James Stewart, the late, great American actor. A fellow walked up to him once on a movie set and said, “You were in a picture once. You were in a room. You said a poem about fireflies.” The man paused. “That was good.”

And that little incident gave Stewart the opportunity to tell us why people love the movies: “What you’re doing is … you’re giving people little, tiny pieces of time that they never forget.”

We all have those pieces of time in our heads. And though we can keep everything preserved at home now on DVD and BluRay, it’s never really enough, is it? It’s nice to have something tangible – a book perhaps – to help us hold onto and appreciate those fleeting images on the screen.

There’s a new biography of Marlon Brando and a compendium of commentaries on a thousand films – with Brando as Don Vito Corleone on the cover – and both these fine books are feasts for film fans.

Somebody (Knopf, $26.95) is a splendid and highly readable biography by Stefan Kanfer. Thorough without the curse of being academic, Somebody (as in “I couldda been . . . “),gives us insight and anecdotes that will enrich your next trip through On the Waterfront, Last Tango in Paris or Apocalypse Now. Brando was a hugely talented actor whose style is still controversial, nearly 60 years after his film debut. We might start a fist-fight arguing if he was the best screen actor ever.

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BRAGG-ING WRITES: Rick Bragg (at right) is a great storyteller and I’ve always had faith that people will continue to want stories. Ever since we sat around campfires in the days of the hairy and unhygienic cavemen, we’ve always wanted stories.

I’ve always been a sucker for them (stories, not cavemen) – whether in newspapers, magazines or books. Bragg made his mark in newspapers, writes frequently for magazines and has published several best-selling books.

Still — these are scary times for storytellers and people who love to read.

Alarms started going off in the newspaper industry, but still I had faith. I told myself: The nature of the publication might change, but people will still want stories … won’t they? They will still care about other people … people unlike themselves … won’t they?

Even though the delivery system has changed for the young folks, I still hold on to my newspapers. I guess that makes me a weirdo.  I look at my friends leaving the Tribune and the Times and ponder a world crushed by information and the incredible shrinking product from which I prefer to get the news. I don’t think a laptop can compete with a newspaper for pure portability and information storage. What a great invention.

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TAKE US OUT TO THE BALL GAME: For those of you already weary of the holidays, here’s a bit of good news: only three months until pitchers and catchers report to spring training.

After this great Rays season, Tampa Bay is officially on the baseball radar. Sure, there are a lot of Red Sox, Phillies and Yankees fans around – I’m a Detroit Tigers man myself – but it will be fun to see what a whole season of Rays fandom will be like. Stay tuned. This could be the start of something big.

Of course, there’s the stadium thing. Tropicana Field has all the architectural charm of a Sam’s Club. But it’s not always about bricks, mortar and aluminum sheeting. It’s the history and memories that make a great ballpark, and a lot of other stadiums have a head start on the Trop. Some of them are about to start their second century.

But great baseball history isn’t enough to save a ballpark. My beloved Tiger Stadium fell to the bulldozer. Every year, there are whispers about the futures of Wrigley and Fenway.

Nothing is sacred in sports commerce. Yankee Stadium, the House that Ruth Built, is no more. A new Yankee Stadium will open next season and one of the great traditions of baseball will be gone.

For baseball lovers, but especially for Yankee fans, you must get Harvey Frommer’s Remembering Yankee Stadium (Stewart, Tabori and Chang, $45).

Read the rest of this entry »

HOLD THE PHONE!: We interrupt this regularly scheduled blog for this announcement of a book signing tonight.

We’ve been talking about Carlos Frias and his brilliant new book, Take Me With You (Atria, $24.95). Frias lives in South Florida and works for the Palm Beach Post. We figured he’d let us know about book signings or events in the Tampa Bay area.

He just called from the desolation known as Yeehaw Junction. He’s on his way to the Barnes and Noble at  11802 N. Dale Mabry. The reading starts at 7 p.m.

If you haven’t made plans yet, this might make for a good evening. I’ve heard Carlos read from the book and it’s incredibly moving.

My Palm Reader column this month in the print edition was devoted to Frias. You can read more of our interview in this week’s full version of the Book Blog.

And if you can’t make it tonight but live near I-4, Carlos will be at the Barnes and Noble, 2418 E. Colonial Drive, Orlando, on Tuesday.

William McKeen is chairman of the University of Florida’s Department of Journalism and author of several books, including the Hunter S. Thompson biography Outlaw Journalist.

William McKeen is chairman of the University of Florida’s Department of Journalism and author of several books, including the Hunter S. Thompson biography Outlaw Journalist.

THE BIG CHILLER: Too bad that giving-gifts-for-Halloween thing never caught on. It was my personal childhood crusade, merely another pathetic attempt to maximize booty for the Kid. It didn’t work on my pop and it didn’t work on society at large.

But if it had caught on, what fun it would be to try to creep each other out with gory gifts every Oct. 31. The more literary minded might use the occasion to share stories of horror and suspense.

Imagine how cool it would be to go door-to-door and pick up some scary lit. People would hand out Edgar Allan Poe and Stephen King the way grannies toss that worthless candy corn into trick-or-treat bags.

Read the rest of this entry »

William McKeen is chairman of the University of Florida’s Department of Journalism and author of several books, including the Hunter S. Thompson biography Outlaw Journalist.

COMING TO INKWOOD: Hunter Thompson used to say that every writer needed to serve time in a sports department. The drama of the games and the deadline demands brought out a writer’s best work, the Prince of Gonzo said.

Here’s a chance to test Dr. Thompson’s theory. Dave Boling comes to Inkwood Books at 2 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 18, to sign copies of his new novel, Guernica (Bloomsbury, $26). Set during the Spanish Civil War and based around the bombing of the Basque city of Guernica, the novel is Boling’s first published book. Read the rest of this entry »