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"Ulin, David L., author"
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Sidewalking : coming to terms with Los Angeles
\"Sidewalking is an impressionistic take on Los Angeles in its current moment, which is a flashpoint of great transition, as the city verticalizes and densifies. It is also a meditation on the history, natural and human, of a place that often is derided as having no sense of its own past. What does it mean to live in, and think about Los Angeles at the level of its streets? Growing out of a series of walks, Sidewalking peels back the myths, the layers, to look at the city as it really is\"--Provided by publisher.
Book
Sidewalking
In Sidewalking, David L. Ulin offers a compelling inquiry into the evolving landscape of Los Angeles. Part personal narrative, part investigation of the city as both idea and environment, Sidewalking is many things: a discussion of Los Angeles as urban space, a history of the city's built environment, a meditation on the author's relationship to the city, and a rumination on the art of urban walking. Exploring Los Angeles through the soles of his feet, Ulin gets at the experience of its street life, drawing from urban theory, pop culture, and literature. For readers interested in the culture of Los Angeles, this book offers a pointed look beneath the surface in order to see, and engage with, the city on its own terms.
eBook
Joan Didion, the 1960s & 70s
\"Joan Didion's influence on postwar American letters is undeniable. Whether writing fiction, memoir, or trailblazing journalism, her gifts for narrative and dialogue, and her intimate but detached authorial persona, have won her legions of readers and admirers. Now Library of America launches its multi-volume edition of Didion's collected writings, prepared in consultation with the author, that brings together her fiction and nonfiction for the first time. Collected in this first volume are Didion's five iconic books from the 1960s and 1970s: Run River, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Play It As It Lays, A Book of Common Prayer, and The White Album. Whether writing about countercultural San Francisco, the Las Vegas wedding industry, Lucille Miller, Charles Manson, or the shopping mall, Didion achieves a wonderful negative sublimity without condemning her subjects or condescending to her readers. Chiefly about California, these books display Didion's genius for finding exactly the right language and tone to capture America's broken twilight landscape at a moment of headlong conflict and change.\" -- $c Provided by publisher.
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The great poet-king
These are key, if essentially unanswerable, questions. Unfortunately, as \"The Life of David\" progresses, [Robert Pinsky] never moves beyond a kind of conversational crit-speak to get at the narrative within. It's not that the book is inaccessible; Pinsky's prose is penetrating and intelligent, full of insight into David as both icon and human being. (As is to be expected - Pinsky was a recent U.S. Poet Laureate - he's especially good on the Psalms and songs.) For all that, however, his tone remains distant, that of an interpreter rather than a teller of the tale. Partly, this has to do with Pinsky's reliance on the present tense, which keeps us from experiencing the depth of David's presence, but, still more, it is his unwillingness to let the story speak for itself. As a result, what we are left with is less a life than a life refracted, a reflection marked by \"levels of perspective and reservation, where is and is not occupy the same space.\"
Newspaper Article
A 50-year case of writers block
[Henry Roth]'s strange silence, and stranger re-emergence, are unique in American culture, not least because they place him in two generations at once. \"Imagine D.W. Griffith, the inventor of American narrative cinema,\" writes [Steven G. Kellman] in \"Redemption: The Life of Henry Roth,\" \"abjuring his rough magic shortly after 'Birth of a Nation' and then, on the verge of ninety and extinction, reemerging to create four extraordinary films to send out the century. Roth is a cohort of Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon as well as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf.\" For Roth, though, this was less a matter of dislocation than of continuation. That's a central theme of \"Redemption,\" which seeks to reconcile \"the misanthrope slaughtering waterfowl in rural Maine with the gregarious young Village radical who mingled with many of the era's most influential intellectuals and artists ... [and] these with the arthritic old man in Albuquerque who yearned for death while conjuring up his life.\" Much like [David Schearl], [Ira Stigman] is portrayed as an only child - until, that is, the middle of \"A Diving Rock on the Hudson,\" the second volume of the cycle, when Roth (or Stigman) reveals that he's been holding out on us, that he has a sister after all. It's a stunning turn, and it opens up the narrative, as it clearly opened up Roth. \"If Roth, whose fictional inspiration was almost always his own life, were to continue beyond 'Call It Sleep,'\" Kellman writes, \"he would have to take his protagonist through adolescence. And if he were to be true to his experience, he would be obliged to confront his own shameful behavior with his sister and his cousin. Roth was not prepared to do that until -in his eighties and embracing his own extinction - most of the people who could be hurt by his shocking revelations were gone, and wounding himself might bring redemption. As early as 1979, he had begun typing out raw drafts of what would evolve into 'Mercy,' but the writing acquired momentum only after Ira Stigman's sister suddenly materialized.\"
Newspaper Article
The looking-glass revolution, Christopher Sorrentino fuses fact and fiction in his kaleidoscopic reimagining of the Patty Hearst story
Even now, the story is so strange that it seems to operate out of a dreamscape, like a fable or fairy tale. That's a notion [Christopher Sorrentino] explores in his second novel, \"Trance,\" which re-imagines the [Patty Hearst] saga - or at least the part of it that began on May 17, 1974, when the LAPD laid siege to a house in South Los Angeles and killed six members of the SLA, after which the heiress turned radical and spent the next 15 months on the lam. Sorrentino's not being coy, for \"Trance\" is anything but a documentary, although it does integrate a lot of so-called \"objective\" truth. At the same time, he pushes his narrative into a middle territory by fictionalizing many of his characters, even as he frames others pretty much as they were in life. Hearst, for instance, is recast as Alice Daniels Galton - another Alice through the looking glass, in a surreal and violent Wonderland. SLA members Bill and Emily Harris become Drew and Diane Shepard, while Kathy Soliah is Susan Rorvik, a waitress turned revolutionary turned fugitive. In many ways, that's the key statement in \"Trance,\" a defining sensibility, if you will. It embodies not just the characters, but the era and, by extension, the culture itself. If the novel has a flaw, it's that it is too long; at 516 pages, \"Trance\" can be slow going at times, especially in Sorrentino's extended account of Guy Mock, a character based on Jack Scott, the former Oberlin College athletic director who helped ferry Hearst and the Harrises East to a farmhouse in Pennsylvania, where they spent the summer of 1974 hiding. Yet even here there's a method to the madness, as \"Trance\" cycles back and forth between the SLA members - claustrophobic and paranoid, drilling endlessly with BB guns to keep sharp as urban guerrillas - and the machinations of the outside world.
Newspaper Article
Recommended reading, HUNTER'S BOUNTY
For the past few months, ever since Hunter S. Thompson killed himself, I've been rereading \"Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72\" (Warner, $7.99), his account of the 1972 presidential campaign. This has turned out to be a revelatory experience, not least because it brings back just how vivid the author's work once was. Long before his death, Thompson fell prey to self-parody; he didn't write a book worth reading after 1979's \"The Great Shark Hunt.\" His early efforts, though, remain nuanced, passionate and committed, and \"Campaign Trail\" is his masterpiece, a scabrous, bloodthirsty journey through the dark heart of American politics.
Newspaper Article
Americas remarkable year
Still, if \"1776\" might have benefited from a broader swath of experience - pulling back from the war on occasion to portray the mood of the citizenry, the effect of the conflict, its influence on civic life - in the end, that's something of a quibbling point. What [David McCullough] has done here, after all, is to take not just a piece of history but a well-traveled piece of history and render it anew. \"The year 1776,\" he writes, \"celebrated as the birth year of the nation and for the signing of the Declaration of Independence, was for those who carried the fight for independence forward a year of all-too-few victories, of sustained suffering, disease, hunger, desertion, cowardice, disillusionment, defeat, terrible discouragement and fear.\" But it was also, as this book makes clear, a time of \"phenomenal courage and bedrock devotion to country,\" in which an array of remarkable individuals, from [George Washington] to [John Greenwood], took a gamble on the future and won. If \"1776\" has any flaw, it's that McCullough focuses too narrowly on military history. The book comes billed as the story of two Georges (Washington and England's King George III), but that's not really accurate; the king makes only a few cameo appearances, although in typical fashion, McCullough offers up a nuanced portrait, treating him with unexpected depth and sympathy. The same is true of other influential figures, such as [Thomas Paine], who barely rates a mention, and the members of the Continental Congress, whose deliberations occur at a distance, in the background of the battlefield.
Newspaper Article
Detective work, Sherlock Holmes returns to solve a few more cases. But are the horrors of the 20th century too much for the aging logician?
Of all the characters in English literature, none has had as independent an existence as Sherlock Holmes. Originally introduced in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's 1887 novel, \"A Study in Scarlet,\" Holmes went on to animate three more full-length works and 56 short stories - now known by devotees as the Canon, or the Sacred Writings - before his creator's death in 1930. Even during Conan Doyle's lifetime, Holmes sparked an array of parodies, adaptations and pastiches (a term connoting \"a serious attempt to produce a story in the style of the original author,\" according to Holmes scholar Leslie S. Klinger), but over the past 75 years, such efforts have become ubiquitous. In his \"New Annotated Sherlock Holmes,\" Klinger cites upwards of 2,000 imitative works, from the films of Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, whose portrayals of Holmes and Dr. Watson still influence how we see the characters, to Nicholas Meyer's \"The Seven Per-Cent Solution,\" the 1974 pastiche that brought Holmes back to vivid life. One hundred and 18 years after the first Holmes story, the detective continues to inspire additional adventures and interpretations, most recently in three new novels: [Caleb Carr]'s \"The Italian Secretary,\" [Michael Chabon]'s \"The Final Solution\" and [Mitch Cullin]'s \"A Slight Trick of the Mind.\" If the notion of Holmes as a quasi-spiritualist seems to contradict tradition, it also highlights the challenges of taking on so well-known a character. Still, there's something invigorating about such reinterpretations, as Chabon's \"The Final Solution\" and Cullin's \"A Slight Trick of the Mind\" illustrate. Of the two, Cullin's book is by far the more ambitious; in comparison, \"The Final Solution\" reads like a knock-off, superficial and with the merest of mysteries at its heart. But what's surprising is how much the novels share. Both imagine Holmes as an old man (89 in \"The Final Solution,\" 93 in \"A Slight Trick of the Mind\"), retired to Sussex, where he occupies himself with beekeeping and the diminishments of age. Both juxtapose him with young boys, as if to suggest that a heart does beat beneath his methodical exterior, that he is, in fact, a human being. Both address the idea that, even for so rational a figure, a time comes when, as Chabon writes, \"it was the insoluble problems - the false leads and the cold cases - that reflected the true nature of things.\"
Newspaper Article
The American Rome
In many ways, [Jonathan Mahler] is describing the city as it came to be configured, albeit in a nascent form. [Ed Koch] would be mayor for 12 years, a period defined by private sector excess. \"New York's future,\" Mahler notes, \"belonged not to labor bosses, political power brokers, or social visionaries but to entrepreneurs; between 1977 and 1985, the private sector created more jobs in the city than in the '50s and '60s combined.\" At the same time, New York underwent a striking renaissance, losing its image as a \"ruined and broken city\" to re-emerge as the American Rome. \"Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning\" is a stirring portrait of that process as seen in \"the yellowing image of what New York had been and the still blurry image of what it was becoming.\" Jonathan Mahler uses [Howard Cosell]'s remark as the title of his first book, \"Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning: 1977, Baseball, Politics and the Battle for the Soul of a City\" - and what a fitting title it is. A contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, Mahler sees 1977 as a crucible, a turning point in the city's life. On almost every level, he suggests, New York was changing, shedding traditions such as \"the generous municipal salaries and pensions; the subsidized public transportation; the rent-controlled apartments; the free higher education\" that had long symbolized its \"civic liberalism.\"
Newspaper Article