1968 was a fascinating and turbulent year in America, rocked by assassinations, protests, and riots. Baseball, though frequently cited as a respite from the violence and fear, was also in the midst of a sea-change and was not so far removed from the outside world. The 1968 World Series was at the precipice of all these changes. It was the last so-called “true” World Series, where the two teams earned their way into the series by winning their league’s pennant. The next year divisional playoffs […]
The Front Page of Absurdity
David Mamet is best know as the playwright behind such award-winning plays as Glengarry Glen Ross, Speed-the-plow, and American Buffalo. Chicago is his fourth novel but his first in eighteen years. The winding plot follows newspaper reporter Mike Hodge as he attempts to solve a string of gang-related murders in the titular town during the 1920s. With help from his fellow reporter Clem Parlow, a black female madam named Peekaboo, and a host of colorful characters on both sides of the law, Hodge attempts to […]
A Stunning Debut From Down Under
Only Killers and Thieves by Paul Howarth What if Cormac McCarthy was Australian and wrote accessible prose? The result might be quite a bit like Paul Howarth’s debut novel. Set largely in the Australian cattlelands of the 1880s, Only Killers and Thieves is a book about good and evil, innocence and experience, white and black, and the near impossibility of maintaining your ideals in a corrupted world. Tommy McBride is the younger son of a cattle rancher. Drought has rendered the family ranch nearly free […]
What a Bastard
Grizzled ex-cop P.I. Lew Archer is called in to the principal’s office when a boarding school student runs away after less than a week in class. But this is no ordinary school. It’s something of a school for wayward boys, and the runaway in question had just apparently stolen his neighbor’s car and wrecked it. Archer sinks his teeth into the case when no one will give him a straight answer, not even the boy’s distraught parents. Ignoring orders to cease his investigation, Archer stumbles […]