PICKING ON ME
Jim Agnew, monitor of the literary world, made The Coup `Pick of the Day’ on October 9th. Thanks, Jim. That’s always going to be our special day.
FOUR STARS OVER COLORADO
My mother-in-law, Marie Jackson of Commerce City, Colorado, is one of the world’s friendliest women. Recently, she was in her local library, and, overcome by an irresistible urge to boost her son-in-law, she told the librarian that I had recently published The Coup. Right away, the librarian looked up the book in some super-exclusive data …
TALKING WWII WITH RICK ATKINSON
Here is an interview I did with Rick Atkinson, which first appeared on playboy.com: Rick Atkinson is one of my favorite writers. Twice a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist with The Washington Post, Atkinson is also the author of several books on military subjects, including The Long Gray Line, a narrative account of the West Point class …
THE JUXTAPOSITION OF SLAP AND SLITHER–YEAH!
Posting on the website grassrootsandgranite.com, (a New Hampshire website devoted “to all things political”) the perceptive commentator Rebecca Lavoie (of course I would think her perceptive, but you’ll see the objective accuracy of my opinion in coming days when you read her My Turn column in Newsweek, which has nothing to do with me) compliments …
FRONT PAGE NEWS
Rob Marchant has labeled me “a well-versed observer of the dark arts practiced in the corridors of power’’ who possesses “an interest in the scheming, ambitious, grandiose side of American life.’’ Rob, flattery will get you everywhere. In a complimentary profile on front page story in Sunday’s Journal News—the big Gannett paper in Westchester County, …
FLY AMERICAN!
Thanks to The American Way, the in-flight magazine of my new favorite airline American Airlines, for a very enthusiastic review of The Coup. I encourage everyone to board a plane–perhaps to go to Cleveland, to root on the Yanks–to show their appreciation for American’s discerning support for the literary arts.
SOPHISTICATED, VICIOUS, AND PLEASANT ENOUGH
On the website thecheckplease (which I am reliably informed is based “as of now” in Illinois, Vermont, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Maryland, New York, and California), the satirist E.F. Watley has written a very complimentary piece about me and The Coup, which he calls my “most ambitious effort to date, a more sophisticated and viciously imagined world …
CHEERED BY CHEEVER
Praise is always welcome, but that’s especially true when it comes from someone who really knows what he is talking about. That’s why I’m especially pleased to have received admiring acknowledgments from Ben Cheever, himself a writer of critically acclaimed fiction and non-fiction (his latest book, Strides: Running Through History With An Unlikely Athlete, was …
HAIR AT 40
On a clammy, sweet Central Park Saturday evening, the New York Shakespeare Festival celebrated the 40th anniversary of he musical Hair with the first of a three performance revival. Many in the crowd that was well-mixed between genuine youths and paunchier, grayer veterans youths who were in their salad days when Hair was in its …
ESTEEMED IN THE PHILIPPINES
There are a lot of unexpected pleasures that come from publishing a book, chief among them the realization that you’re reaching people far far away. One such person is Philip Cu-Unjieng, the book (and apparently hair-styling) critic of the Philippine Star, out of Manila. After describing the excellent cut he received from RJ Decena at …