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By Vick Mickunas
| Thursday, May 15, 2008, 09:04 PM
Robert Crais has a new Elvis Cole novel coming out in July. I’m reading it now. I saw Crais last year in New York. It was strange to see him there. He is such an LA kind of guy.
I’m headed to Book Expo in LA at the end of the month. I hope to see Crais in his natural element. CHASING DARKNESS (Simon&Schuster) is the new novel. Crais has been chasing darkness for a while now.
I have interviewed him at least a dozen times. I’ll never forget one conversation we had. Crais always sets his novels in that urban sprawl of Los Angeles. He told me that he likes to drive around the area scouting locations, looking for those perfect spots. He knows one when he sees it. He told me, “what a perfect place to hide a body!”
Ya gotta love him. I love his books. Nobody does crime fiction better.
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confessions of a galley slave
By Vick Mickunas
| Wednesday, May 14, 2008, 09:16 PM
WHEN YOU ARE ENGULFED IN FLAMES by David Sedaris will be out in June. I’m listening to the audiobook version recorded by Sedaris and I have to admit that in this case the audio version is superior to the book.
It is all about his voice. He is so whiney. So wimpy. So hilarious. I can’t talk about it because the book isn’t out yet but I can say that it is hysterically funny.
Put it on your list. June 3 is the pub. date.
Vick Mickunas
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audiobook extra
By Vick Mickunas
| Tuesday, May 13, 2008, 01:34 PM
Nuala O’Faolain has died.
I remember the day I met Nuala. The Irish writer was on book tour for her memoir, ARE YOU SOMEBODY?
She came to Yellow Springs to spend an hour on my radio program. That memoir is one of the most powerful books I have ever read. She bares her heart and her soul, it is magical.
As I gazed into her beautiful eyes I sensed such a spark. She was so very alive. There was also a deep sadness.
As she prepared to leave the studio I noticed that a man had come into the lobby and that he was waiting to talk to her. I said: Nuala, there’s a man out there waiting for you. Without turning, or looking his way, she continued to face me and said: “Oh, is he terribly, terribly old?”
I cannot believe that that spark has been extinguished.
Here is a tribute from the Belfast Telegraph:
How Nuala told the truth right to the end
Published: Tuesday 13, May 2008 - 14:13
Nuala O’Faolain, writer and broadcaster, died last Friday, and although she didn’t know it, she once almost caused a friend of mine to fail his Final degree examination. She was a young lecturer at University College, Dublin, at the time, and invigilating the examination in question.
As she moved up and down the hall and past his desk, my friend’s thoughts, despite his best efforts, kept turning to the presence of this good-looking, sensual woman.
Not something you want to happen when the occasion calls for close attention to the causes of the First World War.
She was indeed attractive, right up to her death at the age of 68.
Not just physically but in her personality and character, too. In Are You Somebody? the memoir that made her famous, she wrote about herself and her family. Nothing was ducked or avoided.
Her parents’ unhappy marriage, her mother’s alcoholism, her own sexual encounters as a teenager and as a young woman in Dublin during the Sixties.
She wasn’t boasting about her experience but she wasn’t apologising for it either.
She simply wrote about it, wondering at the pain and pleasure of things then.
Writing about family and adolescence and early adulthood is a common activity among Irish writers — I’ve done it myself. What made O’Faolain’s book absorbing and an international bestseller was its honesty. How could she reveal these things about herself and others?
O’Faolain said she wrote it to make sense of her life to that point, never thinking that it would be of interest to others or find its way into print. But it was, and it did, selling hundreds of thousands of copies.
She was a TV producer with the BBC and RTE, and a columnist for the Irish Times and, at the time of her death, for the Sunday Tribune, for whom she was providing coverage of the US presidential primaries.
When she was diagnosed as having terminal cancer, she returned to Ireland and contacted RTE. Then just four weeks ago she did an interview with her friend, the RTE radio presenter Marian Finucane.
In it she described in detail the diagnosis of her illness and her feelings in the face of approaching death.
I have never heard an interview as moving or as frightening. O’Faolain is not the first sufferer from cancer to discuss her disease, but the way in which she laid out her loneliness and fear for all to hear was, paradoxically, immensely courageous. She felt alone, she said.
She felt in despair, not just because she was terminally ill, but because that knowledge had almost immediately drained life of its sweetness — ‘soured life’, as she put it.
The things that had given her pleasure, like reading, meant nothing any more.
Her voice breaking, she spoke of the sense of loss in leaving her beloved New York apartment, of the sense of futility that all the information her brain had absorbed and processed over time, all the things big and small that she knew, would cease to exist with her death.
Nor could she find consolation in religion.
She had no faith in God or an afterlife. Those who had faith, she wished well: their hope was theirs, her despair was her own.
After the interview, RTE was deluged with messages from people, thanking her for her frankness and unique response to her illness. At the weekend, Marian Finucane said the great wave of response brought her consolation.
Why am I writing about this woman?
Well, she was a newspaper columnist and years ago, she said that in choosing a topic to write about each week, she sometimes had to resist the temptation to write about a big headline issue and listen instead to her head and heart and what was preoccupying them.
Since I heard on Saturday that she had died, she has filled my head and heart. I never met the woman, but when someone writes the way she did, you feel you know them intimately.
Her honesty put most of the rest of us in the media to shame. Whatever the issue, public or personal, Nuala O’Faolain faced it and wrote the truth as she saw it. Not the comfortable truth or the fashionable truth or the truth that fitted in with the thinking of those around her.
Even though she had a strong, mature intellect, her honesty had a child-like quality, delivered always without affectation or gloss. It showed first in Are You Somebody? peeling back the truth about her early years, and it showed a month ago, in the truth of that final radio interview.
Bookends, as she said herself, framing her life at the start and the finish.
My friend found himself thrilled and unsettled by the power of her presence all those years ago. Countless others since have been thrilled and unsettled by the power of her words. In her death, our world has lost a dangerous truth-teller.
Ar dheis Dé go raibh a h-anam — may she rest in peace.
Continue reading "remembering Nuala O’Faolain"...
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we remember
By Vick Mickunas
| Tuesday, May 13, 2008, 12:30 AM
Do you remember James Frey? He was shamed last year when his “memoir,” A MILLION LITTLE PIECES, was exposed as a fiction pretending to be true. Oprah Winfrey had picked the book for her Oprah’s Book Club. When she found out that Frey had made a lot of it up she was not happy. She told him so on her program as he grimaced and took his medicine.
Frey is back. He is calling his new book, BRIGHT SHINY MORNING, a novel. According to this early review in the New York Times, it is a very good book:
click here
Continue reading "the rebirth of James Frey"...
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booms and busts
By Vick Mickunas
| Sunday, May 11, 2008, 05:16 PM
“Audition — A Memoir,” by Barbara Walters (Knopf, 609 pages, $30)
Barbara Walters is a television legend. Her image has been beaming into American living rooms for 44 years and counting. Over the course of her long career she has shattered one glass ceiling after another.
She tells her story in “Audition — A Memoir.”
Her dad made and lost several fortunes, first as a vaudeville promoter, then as the operator of glitzy nightclubs in Boston, New York and Miami. Financial problems and his habitual absenteeism were hard on the family.
Walters had a tough time growing up. She says that “looking back now, I realize that I was never young.”
Her childhood was muted by the strains in her family.
“Audition” traces the steps that led her to the fledgling medium of television. She got her big break on “Today” on NBC when they offered her a 13-week contract. They hired her because “she’ll work cheap.” She stayed for 13 years. “Today” gave her the boost that made her a force in broadcasting, and by the time she left the program she was the first woman co-host of a network news show.
Walters interviewed almost every famous politician and movie star. “Audition” enumerates the amazing circumstances that surrounded some of these interviews. She snagged, for example, a five-hour interview with the Cuban dictator Fidel Castro at the site of the Bay of Pigs invasion. The next day he picked her up in a jeep and took her through the mountains of Cuba for six hours. “He drove with one hand, waving his cigar with the other.”
She interviewed Yasser Arafat when he was considered the leading Palestinian terrorist. Walters wasn’t intimidated. But the interview that meant the most to her was the one she had with the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat.
Walters’ anecdotes about her guests are marvelous. Mamie Eisenhower told her that the success of her 50 years of marriage to president Dwight Eisenhower was due to the fact that “we have absolutely nothing in common.” Barbra Streisand was such a control freak that Walters never again allowed a guest to dictate conditions for an interview.
When Gilda Radner began doing a characterization of Walters for “Saturday Night Live,” Walters was devastated. She didn’t appreciate the humor of it until she found out that her daughter thought it was hilarious. One of the highlights of the audiobook version of “Audition” is when Walters does her own imitation of Gilda imitating her as “Baba Wawa” from “SNL.”
Walters doesn’t hold back. She describes her love affairs and divorces. Her career has made her personal life a challenge. Relationships have suffered. Her daughter became involved with drugs. Walters admits her failures. “I’m sick of telling you how guilty I feel.”
This is a courageous book.
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audiobook extra
By Vick Mickunas
| Saturday, May 10, 2008, 12:28 PM
Richard Nixon was my favorite president. There were so many aspects of him that I cherish; the way he sweated under the televison lights, the five o’clock shadow, his statement that “I AM NOT A CROOK!”. I could go and on. But I won’t.
Nixon has been the subject of many books. I’m not the only one fascinated by Tricky Dick - I’m excited about reading a new book called NIXONLAND (Scribner) by Rick Perlstein. George Will reviewed it this week for the New York Times:
Continue reading "Nixonland"...
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politicked
By Vick Mickunas
| Friday, May 9, 2008, 09:52 PM
Charles Manson scared us to death 40 years ago. Apparently, that wasn’t the end of the story. This just in from the New York Times:
Ranch to Be Searched for Manson Victims
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER
LOS ANGELES — “For those who spend a great deal of time mulling the intricacies and unanswered questions of real-life crimes, a remote area in Death Valley has always been fertile ground.
For years there was speculation that unaccounted-for victims of Charles Manson and his followers were buried at Barker Ranch, where Mr. Manson was captured, and the local authorities say they are going to put the matter to rest at last.
Citing soil testing suggestive of the possible presence of human remains at the ranch, the Inyo County Sheriff’s Office will begin digging for graves later this month.
The area around Barker Ranch, in the southwest area of Death Valley National Park in the Panamint Mountains, will be closed to the public for four days while the digging goes on.
The search was prompted by the findings of a forensic technology team that descended on the ranch in March, armed with special instruments that detect human decomposition, a cadaver-seeking dog and a group of researchers that included the sister of the actress Sharon Tate, who was among seven people murdered by members of the Manson cult.
The sheriff’s office said that the response of dogs and subsequent soil research were inconclusive, and that digging was needed to make conclusive findings.
“I believe the only way to determine once and for all whether there are bodies buried at Barker Ranch from the time of the Manson family,” said Sheriff Bill Lutze in a news release, “is to proceed with limited excavation in a few areas.”
Sheriff Lutze was unavailable Friday to give further details.
The ranch house is where Mr. Manson and his followers were captured after a two-night killing spree in August 1969.
Mr. Manson, who was convicted with four others on multiple counts of murder and other charges, is serving a life sentence at Corcoran State Prison in California.’
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Book Nook provides readers with insights into the world of books. Vick Mickunas takes you into the center of the publishing world with the latest book buzz, book reviews, and exclusive chats with authors..
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