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Since this morning, I’ve been trying to think of an appropriate comment about the death of Maurice Sendak. My younger brother Robert, eleven years younger than me, was the perfect age for Sendak. I got to read to him Where the Wild Things Are and In The Night Kitchen, a great gift of [...]  On C-Span, talking about his new book, Robert Caro just asked, “Am I going on too long here?” Once Lyndon Johnson became president, a remarkable historical resource became available: His recording of all his phone calls at the White House and at his ranch. This allows Robert Caro to describe with an extraordinary vividness events from early December of 1963 on. One remarkable example of Johnson hardball had to do with his [...] Update: I forgot to add this detail: Square Books in Oxford has signed copies of Caro’s book, Passage to Power. It is often odd to read a review while one is in the middle of reading the book under review, and Garry Wills’s review of Robert Caro’s new installment in his never-ending biography of [...] I enjoyed Chris’s reading, sponsored by Vox last night. There can not possibly be a more appropriate post than this one. If you weren’t there, you’ll not know why until his next novel is published, but you’ll at least experience the lessons of Dave Batholomew and “The Monkey Speaks His Mind.” Tonight, there’s “An Evening With Chris Offut” sponsored by Vox Magazine, at the PowerHouse in Oxford at 7:00 PM. My prior experience at Chris’s readings suggest a splendid time is virtually guaranteed. I’ll be there. Robert Caro’s account (New Yorker subscription required) of the day Kennedy was shot, from Lyndon Johnson’s perspective, is an amazing and vivid piece of writing. It’s a moment-by-moment account, and both carries the reader along with great intensity and describes the crisis lived through by people in the presidential entourage that day. It’s in the April [...] Immanuel Velikovsky was a writer most famous for the book Worlds in Collision, in which he theorized that ancient myths and the Bible described actual natural disasters provoked when Mars and Venus left their orbits and passed near Earth. He was a neighbor and friend of the physicist Freeman Dyson, and asked Dyson for [...] There’s an obituary in the Times for folklorist Tristam Coffin that’s worth reading. One opinion he held I’m discounting as a folklorist instance of the principle “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” He apparently wrote that Daisy Buchannon of The Great Gatsby was “a Jazz Age incarnation of [...] Luc Sante, reviewing the second collection of William S. Burroughs’s letters, quotes a letter to Truman Capote, “prompted by his distaste for “In Cold Blood” and for the fact that Capote did nothing to save his subjects from capital punishment”: You have betrayed and sold out the talent that was granted you by this department. [...] |
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