BOOKS THREAD

I remember that story vividly. I can only imagine how the event would play out on social media if it happened in 2019.

 

I picked this up last year and am finally going to settle down and read it on my vacation.

 

Outstanding book I began on vacation last week: Steven Ross' "Hitler in Los Angeles: How Jews Foiled Nazi Plots Against Hollywood and America." I'd never heard of Leon Lewis, the Jewish lawyer and WWI veteran turned spymaster who's the focus of this tale, but the amount of Nazi and fascist activity in SoCal in the '30s he and his amateur spies exposed was mind-boggling (aided by the government's and law enforcement's relentless focus on communists and the lax LA port security that enabled stormtroopers to move into town every day). Plots to disarm National Guard installations, take over federal departments, murder movie stars...amazing.

 

I heard a very positive review for James Ellroy's new book, This Storm, yesterday. Do you know if his novel has this aspect of WWII LA in it?

 

Just started reading my first John Dos Passos book, 42nd Parallel. It’s beautiful.

 

The Old Man and The Boy ... It's old book, written the 50s by Robert Ruark.
If you had a grandfather or dad who taught how to hunt and fish, and provided general lessons in growing up, I highly recommend it.
It's a short, simple read.

 

On the recommendations of a few people here, I just read "Beartown" and "Us Against You," two books written in sequel by Fredrik Backman.

Both books were good, and got better as they went along. There was great character development and growth through the story(ies), and both were good reads that I wasn't going to leave unfinished. Story-wise, my only problem was that I kept reading Beantown every time I saw the word Beartown -- seriously, almost every time!

My only critique would be that both were a bit too unnecessarily long, taking too much time to get where they wanted to go. With each book, by the time I was done with it, I was glad, and ready for it to end.

 

Groucho was not a happy man, and he had no idea how to have a healthy relationship with a woman, whether it was his wives, daughters, girlfriends or co-workers. So as funny as the Marx Brothers films were (and are), this was not a funny book. I'm glad I read it. It was well-reported, though the author could have toned down the high-falutin language at time.

Joe Bob says check it out, but don't expect a Marx Brothers laugh-a-palooza.

 

Reading "The Club," which centers around a group of friends -- Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, David Garrick, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke and Sir Joshua Reynolds -- who met each Friday for years, to drink, eat, hold court, and who ended up being the leading figures in their respective disciplines in late 18th century England. Pretty damn fascinating how all these guys came into contact, fostered relationships and had varying degrees of success, fame and wealth. Johnson, for one, was basically indigent until the king gave him a yearly pension when he was quite old.

 

I hadn't heard of that one, CD, but sounds like a fun one to check out.

Reading and enjoying The Infernal Library by Daniel Kalder. Subtitle: On Dictators, the Books they wrote, and other catastrophes of Literacy. The books of Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Castro, etc. Quite entertaining and informative but also has this great line early on:

"I was struck by the fact that many dictators begin their careers as writers, which probably goes a long way toward explaining their megalomaniac conviction in the awesome significance of their own thoughts.... A deep study of dictators' works might enable me to map devastating wastelands of the spirit while also exploring the terrible things that happen when you put writers in charge."

 

Is this accurate? Were they writers or political theorists who wrote books espousing their beliefs? A big difference for the theory put forth in the last sentence of the quotation.