Unabashedly Bookish

I can tell you exactly where I was at 5:04 p.m. October 17, 1989, when the Loma Prieta earthquake unleashed the equivalent of thousands of hydrogen bombs' worth of energy in 15 seconds. This is sort of the Northern Californian equivalent of asking people where they were when JFK got shot. Read more...

At what level of factual saturation does the fictitiousness of the "researched" novel start becoming irrelevant? I started asking myself this midway through Richard Price's Clockers, and I'd be very surprised to hear anyone come up with a definitive answer. If someone hadn't told you this particular story wasn't real, you probably would never know. Read more...

The Scandal of Reform takes us through a history of New York City politics, from the founding of the nation to 2003, and the ride is thoroughly entertaining. All of us probably learned something of Tammany Hall, Boss Tweed and New York-style patronage in our giant, terrible high school textbooks, but such cursory detail really doesn't do it justice. Barry clearly has fun relating these stories, as well he should. Tammany is fantastically corrupt and so unabashedly crooked that it's like reading about a cartoon. Read more...

In each of Simon's books and adapted series, the city of Baltimore itself stands out as the most fundamental character. It is the city that acts like a modern avatar of the ancient Greek gods and fates. It's not character, or one tough cop who won't take no for an answer or one God-fearing addict with two hands yanking on his bootstraps but rather the forces of economics, zoning, education, town councils, police blotters and public health that occupy the pantheon of our lives and are indifferently regnant over our circumstances. Read more...

Nathaniel Frank's Unfriendly Fire avoids one of the biggest pitfalls of non-fiction. It's informative and entertaining, and at no point does the pursuit of one undermine the other. However, it does run up against one potential pitfall that some readers might not get past: part of what makes it so fascinating is what can make it so frustrating. Read more...

Sports are great — heck, they're wonderful. But they're wonderful because they don't really matter: they're games. It's everything that comes between you and the sport that's a giant pain in the neck. Preening sportswriters? Tedious. Screeching on-air personalities? Unbearable. Marketed player personalities designed to sell books or a brand? Insufferable. Morality plays and equivalencies drawn to dire real-life issues? Completely missing the boat. Read more...

What he did was neither republican nor democratic, could be done conservatively or liberally or both — possibly with someone named Tory and, if done unsafely, in a way that eventually produces labor. But what it was, was basically human. Read more...

Despite calls for women's rights and a scaling back of the moral police during the campaign, the stridently reformist Moussavi didn't seem to come out of his shell until the end of it. His timing was perfect. His outrage increased pace just before the culminating outrage of a suspect election. Thus Moussavi and millions of angry voters find themselves joined fittingly in anger but with a strange diversity of aims. Read more...

The so-called "liberal media" is terrified of being called, well, just that. Stories that exist in the open to anyone with a search engine go unreported by major outlets because running with a story critical of the far right, "unprovoked," smacks of liberals going witch-hunting. Thus the sort of mordant comedy found in today's headline on MSNBC like this one: "Domestic Hate Groups on the Rise." Anyone paying attention knew that already. Hatred's gone mainstream for a while; it's just that MSNBC can now report it. Read more...

Like any other major federal nomination, Barack Obama's recommending Sonia Sotomayer for Associate Justice of the Supreme Court has sent ordinary citizens, bloggers and (sometimes painfully transparently) mainstream media personalities into last-minute study sessions to figure out what all this means. Even such an august body as the Supreme Court can still be a muddle for a lot of people. That's because it's by far the most secretive federal body, not counting whomever it is who administrates Area 51 and that wolfman body they keep frozen 500 feet under the national archives. Read more...