Archive for The Book Bum - page 13

Guinn, Jeff. Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson, Simon and Schuster, New York, 2013 (495pp.$27.50) He was a disagreeable child who lied about everything and blamed others for his misdeeds. Without a father and scrawny to a pitiable degree, Little Charlie compensated by…

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Drury, Bob and Clavin, Tom, The Heart of Everything That Is: The Untold Story of Red Cloud, An American Legend, Simon and Schuster, New York, 2013 (414pp.$30) Among the Bad Face Brule band of Sioux living in the western Nebraska panhandle was a brave called…

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Strohm, Peter. Chaucer’s Tale: 1386 and the Road to Canterbury, Viking Penguin Group, New York, 2014 (283pp.28.95) Geoffrey Chaucer, who died obscurely in 1400, achieved, rather quickly, a posthumous renown in the decade after his death—so quickly as to astonish the literary world of the…

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Beachy, Robert. Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity. Alfred A. Knopf,  New York, 2014 (305pp.$27.95) Modern identity politics begins with the struggle of subjugated peoples against European colonialism, a mid-twentieth century movement that commenced with plantation slavery and progressed through apartheid and on to…

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Carr, Nicholas. The Glass Cage, W.W. Norton Co., New York, 2014 (261pp.$26.95) On May 31, 2009 an Air France Airbus A330 departed Rio de Janeiro, headed for Paris. Helmed by two experienced French pilots, there were 228 crew and passengers on board. Running into a…

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Gardner, Mark Lee, Shot All to Hell: Jesse James, The Northfield Raid, and the  Wild West’s Greatest Escape, William Morrow (Harper Collins), New York,  2013 (309 pp. $27.99) Mark Lee Gardner is an independent historian and the author of a splendid life of Billy the…

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Krist, Gary. Empire of Sin: A Story of Sex, Jazz, Murder and the Battle for Modern New Orleans, Crown Publishers, New York, 2014 (414pp.$26). New Orleans was always a polyglot city in which prosperous Anglo-American planters and merchants built entire neighborhoods of capacious mansions in…

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Isenberg, Andrew, Wyatt Earp: A Vigilante Life, Hill and Wang Farrar, Strauss, New York 2013 (296 pp. $30) Like the Lincolns half a generation before them, the Earps migrated from the semi-feudal upper South of Kentucky, crossed the Ohio River, and settled in rapidly commercializing…

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Theroux, Paul. Mr. Bones: Twenty Stories, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, New York, 2014, (359pp.$27) “Art is swindle,” counseled the German refugee teacher and painter Josef Albers, whose book “Interaction of Color” has become a classic, though in practice at Black Mountain and later at Yale, Albers…

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Day, Barry (ed.), The World of Raymond Chandler: In His Own Words, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2014 (250pp.$30) Much (if not over-much) has been written about Raymond Chandler, the famous creator of Philip Marlow and patriarch of the American noir detective story.   An only-child…

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