Archive for The Book Bum - page 14

Ford, Richard. Let Me Be Frank With You, Ecco (Harper Collins), New York, 2014 (238pp.$27.99) The loathsome character Frank Bascombe continues to tunnel away at writer Richard Ford’s time and talent, both of them, writer and main character, now nearly hollow, each nearly filled to…

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Powers, Thomas. The Killing of Crazy Horse, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2011 (568pp.$30) The great Oglala Sioux warrior Crazy Horse, leader of the Hunkpatila band comprising some 150 lodges and perhaps 400 men, women and children—Thunder Dreamer, Carrier of the Shield, killer of Custer the…

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    Bagley, Will. South Pass: Gateway to a Continent, University of Oklahoma Press,Norman, Oklahoma (325pp.) The crest of South Pass is located in Fremont County, Wyoming, about ten miles southwest of South Pass City at 42.34.4 degrees north latitude and 108.88.6 degrees west longitude….

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  Bagley, Will. With Golden Visions Bright Before Them: Trails to the Mining West, 1849-1852, Volume 2, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 2013 (480pp. $45) That there was placer gold in California’s Sierra Nevada was secret to many. Californios had found it in San Feliciano…

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Bagley, Will. So Rugged and Mountainous, University of Oklahoma Press, 2011. Fifty years later, Catherine Sager Pringle recalled that her father was one of the “restless” ones who took his large family, including a pregnant wife, west along the Oregon Trail in 1844. A German…

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Lewisohn, Mark, The Beatles: All These Years, Volume I, Tune In, Crown Archetype (Random House), New York, 2013 (932pp. $40) Nowhere is it written in the long history of History that History unspools the carpet of happiness at our human feet. The history of History…

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  McMillian, John. Beatles vs. Stones, Simon and Schuster, New York 2014 (304pp. $26) Before they were the Beatles they were four teenage “scousers” from Liverpool who seemed unlikely to be remembered by anyone. Save for Ringo who lived in bone-crushing poverty and possessed a…

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  Amis, Martin. The Zone of Interest, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2014 (306pp.$26.95)  Mostly an ossuary, the lamentable twentieth century and its Nazi Holocaust remains on Martin Amis’ mind. And why wouldn’t it, given that there is no adequate response to Primo Levi’s question…

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Brady, Frank, Endgame:  Bobby Fisher’s Remarkable Rise and Fall (Crown Publishing Group, New York, 328pp, $25.99) In the end he was alone, dying of a kidney disease for which he refused treatment by Reykjavik’s medical specialists, mistrusting doctors on principle and suspecting their motives.  Years…

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Wade Davis is the current National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence.  But he’s much more than that!  Ethnologist, botanist, eco-traveler, master historian—and a writer whose prose glows, that’s Wade Davis.  Here’s a review of his masterwork of mountaineering, the human soul, and World War I. Davis, Wade.  Into…

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