When he finally stopped writing he was so severely over-stimulated he was unable to keep his body still. His arms flailed about and he paced so much on de Beauvoir’s carpet that he wore a hole in it. He was a speed freak. Speed renders the tongue hyperactive, even when one is not talking, and at one point he wore all the skin off the top of his. A nightly, near overdose of sleeping tablets […]
True-crime aficionados are going to eat up Trials of the Century: A Decade-by-Decade Look at Ten of America’s Most Sensational Crimes by Mark J. Phillips and Aryn Z. Phillips (Prometheus). But they won’t be the only ones. As the introduction tells us: Americans are addicted to violent crime. Not to committing it, particularly, notwithstanding a history of nineteenth-century gunslingers, twentieth-century gangsters, and the wide prevalence of handguns, which outnumber citizens. Rather, Americans love to talk […]
Winston Churchill was an iconic leader. But most of us imagine him as he was best known: a seasoned leader deep into his life and at the height of his powers. Here Simon Read (The Case That Foiled Fabian, Dark City, War of Words) looks closely at a much earlier Churchill: the young man military man and reporter between 1895 and 1900. In Winston Churchill Reporting: Adventures of a Young War Correspondent (Da Capo) we […]
The beaver has an image problem. All bucktooth goofiness, not worthy of noble national animals like America’s soaring eagle or China’s ferocious but cute panda. But, Frances Backhouse contends in Once They Were Hats (ECW) there is much more to the beaver than a tail that appears to have been flattened by a tractor tire: The truth is, the humble and much-aligned beaver is actually the Mighty Beaver, arguable North America’s most influential animal, aside […]
A memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life by John le Carré, will be published in September 2016 simultaneously in Canada, the US and the UK by Penguin Random House. An audiobook version, read by the author, will be released at the same time. “Out of the secret world I once knew,” le Carré writes in The Pigeon Tunnel, “I have tried to make a theatre for the larger worlds we inhabit. First comes the […]
Alice in Chains: The Untold Story (Thomas Dunne Books) is not a book that could have been published a couple of decades ago. Aside from the obvious — events unfolding — the truth was simply too new and raw for anyone to talk about. Born in the shadow of Seattle grunge-era superstars Nirvana, Soundgarden and Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains’ path to stardom was littered with drugs and mishaps, including the death of charismatic lead […]
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