Schooled in football in Baltimore during the era of the peerless Unitas, I am properly reverential towards the special attributes of the great quarterbacks. And yet, over the years, it has been defensive players that I have found especially exciting–Rick Volk and Bobby Boyd, Mike Curtis, Jack Lambert and Jack Ham, Ronnie Lott, and the …
Here’s a little item that appeared earlier today on The Huffington Post: “In April 2005, police swarmed the U.S. Capitol to confront an erratic Australian man, carrying two suitcases, who they feared was a suicide bomber. After blowing up one of the bags, officers realized he was harmless. The police never noticed the two nervous …
Sometimes good things happen to good people. For a couple of years in the early nineties it was my good luck to work at Spy magazine and to sit in a cubicle located between cubicles occupied by two wonderful people, Joanne Gruber to the east, and Jim Collins to the west. Jim–funny, smart, unflinchingly decent, …
Had a lovely time today talking to Matthew Weiner, the Executive Producer of Mad Men, the most excellent AMC series. I was talking to Weiner for USA Weekend about The Apartment, the Billy Wilder classic now in a Collectors’ Edition DVD. Weiner was so smart and articulate about the film, and very generous with his …
I was thrilled to receive a note from my old friend from college Ron Hull, who had seen The Coup mentioned in LaSalle’s alumni notes. Ron, as it turns out, is Senior Counsel at Underberg & Kessler, a law firm in Rochester NY, where he specializes environmental law. In 2007, Ron was named by Law …
I received a wonderful and totally unexpected Christmas present the other day when I got this note from a writer in Los Angeles named Chris Farnsworth. “Mr. Malanowski,” he begins. “I don’t usually write the authors of books to tell them how much I enjoyed their works — I’m a writer also, and I’m usually …
Dana Milbank, a correspondent for The Washington Post, has just published Homo Politicus, a smart and very funny tour d’horizon of Washington and the people there who run our government. In the book, Milbank adopts the guise of an anthropologist to examine their culture and behavior, a very clever and revealing way to think afresh …
David Weinstein of Carle Place, Long Island, has written a largely favorable review of The Coup on epinions.com. An apparently unstoppable reading machine, this review is but one of 167 commentaries that he has posted, critiques that have earned him the trust of 69 members of the community (although it’s not clear whether one review …
Among the contributors to The Concord Monitor of New Hampshire who last week were asked to name their favorite books of the year was my friend Rebecca Lavoie, who nominated The Coup. “In an age in which satire seems almost superfluous,” writes Rebecca, “The Coup manages the near-impossible, delivering a satisfying and indulgent fictional spin …
Brian Sorgatz is a freelance writer from Sacramento. Since he maintains a website called Reflections on Playboy (because, he says, he “flatters myself to think that Kendra Wilkinson might call this blog intellectual pimping”), his work is well-known in these precincts–Brian pays my colleagues and me the tremendous compliment of paying close attention to what …