A Pair of Bests from This Year’s Edgar Awards A few weeks back the esteemable Edgar Awards announced the winners for 2012, which of course also included a list of the nominees. As always, the books cited had been published the previous year, but that doesn’t mean for a moment that any of the titles [...]
How The Wrecking Crew Changed the Way We Grooved Open any page of Kent Hartman’s hit-soaked history The Wrecking Crew [wreckingcrewbook.com] (Thomas Dunne/St. Martin’s $25.99) and you’ll find some kinda sound nugget: The Byrds’ David Crosby introducing The Beatles’ George Harrison to the sitar (which he then used on Rubber Soul’s “Norwegian Wood”) despite just [...]
And George V. Higgins Wrote ‘em Harder Than Anyone “This life’s hard, but it’s harder if you’re stupid.” So says an astute gun-runner in George V. Higgins’ kickass classic The Friends of Eddie Coyle, unequivocally one of the best crime stories of the 20th century. Close readers of Bound may recall me plugging [sunpost story] [...]
Stunning New Slabs of Gaga, Weiwei and Rauch If ever there was a more photographed (or photographical) figure than Lady Gaga, you sure couldn’t prove it by me (or her). Neither Mae West (to whom the Lady owes plenty) or Jayne Mansfield (who had Hearst at her disposal) or Madonna (whose triumphs pretty much ended [...]
Two Monumental Looks at Our Storied Past Miami Book Fair may be over, but books of course will endure, as will history, whether or not we’re doomed to repeat it. To ensure we swing with those who know (and know better) though, here’s the lowdown on two (relatively) recent historical offerings, each of which will [...]
In His Own Words The last thing you want to do is hire Tom Brokaw… The NBC newsman (The Today Show, 1976-81; NBC Nightly News, 1982-2004) – in town to promote his new book, The Time of Our Lives (Random House) – recounted for his audience at Miami-Dade College last Friday night how his career [...]
Putting Down the Most Wanted Man in the World As even those living under rocks now know, on May Day 2011, U.S. forces snuck into Pakistan and took out Osama Bin Laden, questionably the most wanted man in the world. It was an exemplary moment for America’s armed forces, as well as for America’s President, [...]
Maus Gets Meta The universe “is not an ethical place,” said Art Spiegleman to the LA Times’ David L. Ulin. But does that mean we must be ethical creatures? That’s some “conundrum,” and one he’s not willing to let be “the take-away” from his mighty Maus. The whole “God has a plan even if I [...]
James C. Clark Recounts the 1950 Pummelling of Claude Pepper From 1963 until he died in 1989, Claude Pepper represented Florida’s 18th Congressional District, which included Key Biscayne, Bal Harbour and Coral Gables, as well as all of Miami Beach. For the last decade of those 26 years, Pepper was so popular with his constituents [...]
Bound Deborah Reed Knows What Makes a Heart Grow Fonder Life’s funny. Not funny ha-ha, of course — but funny peculiar. What’s especially funny are the things that normally make up a life. Take love, for instance, which only a Mencken would consider to be laugh-out-loud. Love is something that pretty much everybody has spent [...]
Telling the Tall Tale Behind the Ballad of Tom Dooley On May Day, 1868, in the town of Statesville, North Carolina, a man named Tom Dula was hanged for murder. The victim, a slip of a woman named Laura Foster, had been stabbed to death and hastily buried on a ridge in nearby Wilkes County. [...]
To wade through Amazon’s 81 thousand-plus September 11 search results would in itself be a formidable task; to read even a fraction of those titles would probably take till the next 10-year mark. By that time there’d likely be another unwieldy score of written offerings and you’d have to start all over again. But it [...]
