John A. Farrell's Blog: The Nixon Blog
December 15, 2014
Bradlee v. Nixon
Here's a link to my Politico Magazine piece on Ben Bradlee and Richard Nixon.
ahttp://www.politico.com/magazine/stor...
ahttp://www.politico.com/magazine/stor...
May 8, 2014
Was Dick Nixon the great Gatsby?
Watched The Great Gatsby on demand the other night, and something clicked. A few days later I wrote this for Politico magazine. Enjoy.
http://www.politico.com/magazine/stor...
http://www.politico.com/magazine/stor...
March 28, 2014
Why Didn't Nixon Burn the Tapes?
I'm spending the morning listening to a tape of the great (albeit not Nixon) biographer Fawn Brodie (Thomas Jefferson, Joseph Smith) interviewing Nixon's cousin, the equally famous novelist Jessamyn West (Friendly Persuasion), about his life in 1976.
Two grande dames: tough broads who wrote their way to literary fame in a male-dominated world, taking on and facing down their churches, families and communities along the way, eyeing each other over tea, circling warily, and inevitably succumbing to the irresistible mystery.
"There is a great play, a kind of MacBeth in his life," says West about her cousin.
When writing about "scoundrels" in fiction, the writer becomes the character, says West, and "once you become the evil man, you understand. You understand the pressures. And then you begin to forgive him....You forgive yourself."
The challenge of biography is different, she tells Brodie. "The purpose is for you to tell the story so truly that if he should be forgiven the reader will do the forgiving and if he doesn't merit it the reader will not be able to forgive."
Brodie and her husband were both stricken with fatal cancer as she worked on the book. She never really "got" Nixon. (As, interestingly, she confesses to West, she never got Joseph Smith.) Her book shows the effect, in tone and style, of illness and despair.
Brodie, though, has an interesting insight about one of the most famous Nixon mysteries: Why didn't he burn the tapes?
The key, she tells West, is that he felt the need to expose himself - "to let people know the worst as well as the best" - as a response to the guilt he felt, which was the legacy of his Quaker upbringing and his saintly mother's influence.
I'll go along with that, part of the way. There were a lot of practical political and financial reasons that he had to preserve the tapes too.
If Brodie is right and he did want to reveal himself, I'm more inclined to think that it was an act of vulnerability, not guilt: "See? See who I am? See what you've made me? Love me."
Oliver Stonish, I know, but there you are.
Two grande dames: tough broads who wrote their way to literary fame in a male-dominated world, taking on and facing down their churches, families and communities along the way, eyeing each other over tea, circling warily, and inevitably succumbing to the irresistible mystery.
"There is a great play, a kind of MacBeth in his life," says West about her cousin.
When writing about "scoundrels" in fiction, the writer becomes the character, says West, and "once you become the evil man, you understand. You understand the pressures. And then you begin to forgive him....You forgive yourself."
The challenge of biography is different, she tells Brodie. "The purpose is for you to tell the story so truly that if he should be forgiven the reader will do the forgiving and if he doesn't merit it the reader will not be able to forgive."
Brodie and her husband were both stricken with fatal cancer as she worked on the book. She never really "got" Nixon. (As, interestingly, she confesses to West, she never got Joseph Smith.) Her book shows the effect, in tone and style, of illness and despair.
Brodie, though, has an interesting insight about one of the most famous Nixon mysteries: Why didn't he burn the tapes?
The key, she tells West, is that he felt the need to expose himself - "to let people know the worst as well as the best" - as a response to the guilt he felt, which was the legacy of his Quaker upbringing and his saintly mother's influence.
I'll go along with that, part of the way. There were a lot of practical political and financial reasons that he had to preserve the tapes too.
If Brodie is right and he did want to reveal himself, I'm more inclined to think that it was an act of vulnerability, not guilt: "See? See who I am? See what you've made me? Love me."
Oliver Stonish, I know, but there you are.
February 13, 2014
The State of the Union Curse
I enjoyed tracking down Dick Goodwin, and writing this piece about the one great response speech - Ed Muskie's election eve response to President Nixon - to come along since Daniel Webster.
http://www.politico.com/magazine/stor...
http://www.politico.com/magazine/stor...
Lyndon Barack Johnson
My most recent piece for Politico Magazine, on the Johnson method and its applicability today.
http://www.politico.com/magazine/stor...
“My inclination is to do what’s right,” Johnson explained to Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. “I’d hate like hell, though, to be such a statesman that I didn’t get elected.”
http://www.politico.com/magazine/stor...
“My inclination is to do what’s right,” Johnson explained to Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. “I’d hate like hell, though, to be such a statesman that I didn’t get elected.”
January 11, 2014
Dick Nixon, Chris Christie
Politico managed to wring a bit more bout Nixon from me.
http://www.politico.com/magazine/stor...
Hope you like it.
http://www.politico.com/magazine/stor...
Hope you like it.
December 27, 2013
Free e-book of Tip O'Neill biography
I confess I don't totally understand why, but I am giving away e-book copies of Tip O'Neill and the Democratic Century all day today, Dec. 27. Enjoy!
http://www.amazon.com/Tip-ONeill-Demo...
http://www.amazon.com/Tip-ONeill-Demo...
December 20, 2013
Tip O'Neill Biography On Sale
Nobody beats Crazy Al! I'm putting the Kindle version of my biography of Tip O'Neill on sale for just $2.99 until Christmas!
http://www.amazon.com/Tip-ONeill-Demo...
http://www.amazon.com/Tip-ONeill-Demo...
November 4, 2013
"Bleeding Edge" Review
Here is my review for Pynchon's new novel, "Bleeding Edge," in the Washington Independent Review of Books. It was published in October.
Here is the link, which includes some funny links:
http://www.washingtonindependentrevie...
And here is the review in text form:
At the apex of the Global War on Terror, an aide to President George W. Bush used words as cold as icicles to signal his perfidious attitude toward the footings of democracy.
The dupes in the “reality-based community” cling to a myth that the study of “discernible” facts can yield collaborative solutions, he said. But “that’s not the way the world works anymore.”
“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality,” the unidentified adviser said. “While you’re studying that reality…we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
Well, as George Will might put it. There’s a gauntlet at the feet, a glove-smack to the puss of all freedom-loving bards, libertarians, whistle-blowers, hacker heroes and — yes, still kicking, raging and relevant — a Great American Novelist like Thomas Pynchon, who assails that sort of imperious conceit in Bleeding Edge, his new novel.
No matter that, deep down in his beatnik prankster paranoiac soul, Pynchon may believe it’s all a lost cause; that mankind’s organizing institutions — economies, nation-states, corporations, war machines — inevitably beat down or subsume the individual, and that empires can indeed amend the real. In Bleeding Edge he saddles Rocinante, and if his lance is not so sharp, nor his back so strong at the age of 76, few windmills emerge unscathed.
The story plays out in New York City, in the seminal year of 2001. Here are the Snowdens of yesteryear, a motley gang of program-writing geeks, online gamesters, nerds and cyberpunks — some barely graduated from Pokémon and pajamas — rambling about town, confronting realities like Wall Street investment banks, the Patriot and the Espionage acts, and the vapid (Defending Our Nation. Securing the Future) big brothering of the NSA. The intoxicating rush of the dot-com boom has gone bust, and its refugees watch in dismay as the Internet — and its liberating potential — is bent to the aims of corporate-military capitalists, who may (or may not) be exploiting — maybe instigating? — an “endless Orwellian war” for their own villainous purposes, the Global War on Terror.
“We’re being played … and the game is fixed, and it won’t end until the Internet – the real one, the dream, the promise – is destroyed,” says one Eric Outfield, geek. Unless, “could be there’s enough good hackers around interested in fighting back. Outlaws who’ll work for free, show no mercy for anybody who tries to use the Net for evil purposes.”
“Anybody” would be the villainous Gabriel Ice, the filthy-rich owner of hashslingerz, a dot-com firm with vague and shady ties to certain federal security agencies and a Middle East hawala, headquartered in Dubai, run by Islamic (or are they?) jihadists.
Pynchon’s braveheart is Maxine Tarnow, a defrocked fraud investigator “gone rogue.” The lovely Maxi (a Rachel Weisz lookalike, Pynchon tells us, but I’d cast my homegirl Tina Fey for the movie) totes a Beretta in her purse and spends her days getting pizza for her boys Ziggy and Otis, tailing and nailing embezzlers, crooning karaoke with the dot com-clowns, bedeviling the evil Ice and taking advantage of the occasional odd stiffy. Down such mean streets a gal must go.
In her “dowsing” for the truth, Maxi gets assists from Lester Traipse, a Web entrepreneur who supplies the requisite corpse for the party, and Reg Despard, a video auteur with a DVD that may or may not show that the government had foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks. Helping, too, are March Kelleher, an old lefty agitator; assorted code monkeys and “cyberflaneurs; third-wave feminists and Russian hoods; and — in his own twisted way — Nick Windust, a federal agent who began his career as an “entry-level wise ass” but has long since crossed from American Boy to the dark side of the force, and knows far too much ever to hope for graceful retirement.
“Whoever `they’ are, she needs to believe they are far worse than anything Windust became later on, working for them,” Maxi decides. “They found his careless gift of boy’s cruelty and developed it, deployed and used it, by tiny increments, till one day he was a professional sadist with a GS-1800-series job and no regrets.”
This is the year 2001. Do not think that, when Maxi’s ex-husband Horst rents an office on “the hundred-and-something floor of the World Trade Center,” and takes their boys to lunch at Windows on the World, that you won’t feel the ice pick brush your C-4 disk.
“Seems kind of flimsy up here” to Ziggy. “Nah …built like a battleship.”
That lunch takes place on Page 95, and from then the foreshadowing, the sense of sadness, drifts like the smudge of Ground Zero through what follows. We slip from “Hellzapoppin’” to “Slaughterhouse Five.” And if you think it all ends happy, as they say on TV, you haven’t been paying attention.
“That was the moment, Maxi. Not when ‘everything changed.’ When everything was revealed. No grand Zen illumination, but a rush of blackness and death. Showing us exactly what we’ve become, what we’ve been all the time.”
“And what we’ve always been is…?”
“Is living on borrowed time. Getting away cheap. Never caring about who’s paying for it, who’s starving somewhere else all jammed together so we can have cheap food, a house, a yard in the burbs … planetwide, more every day, the payback keeps gathering.
And meantime the only help we get from the media is boo hoo the innocent dead. Boo fucking hoo. You know what? All the dead are innocent. There’s no uninnocent dead.”
Pynchon has more going here than skewering history’s actors. Prepare to be surprised, and affected, by for whom the bell tolls. He is a literary artist of subtlety and grace — amid bedlam, doggerel and puns. (At one point, Maxi goes undercover as a pole dancer at a strip club called Joie de Beavre.) Not unlike, say, Harpo and the boys, Pynchon seasons the japes with sweet-bitter melodies — of lost boys and vanishing innocence; of the love of loved and loving women; of the daze of sensation, the addictions of distractions; the perils of manhood and the hopelessness of time.
The novel ends as it begins, in spring.
“They ascend to the street, where once again, overnight, all together, pear trees have exploded into bloom…The brightness in the street is from flowers on trees whose shadows are texturing the sidewalks. It’s their moment, the year’s great pivot, it’ll last for a few days, then all collect in the gutters. …
The boys have been waiting for her…folded in just this precarious light, ready to step out into their peaceable city, still safe from the spiders and bots that one day soon will be coming for it. …
‘Give me a second, I’ll be right with you.’
‘It’s all right, Mom. We’re good.’
‘I know you are, Zig, that’s the trouble.’
But she waits in the doorway as they go on down the hall. Neither looks back. She can watch them into the elevator at least.”
Bleeding Edge falls in line somewhere behind V. and Vineland in the Pynchon canon, two more or less reality-based novels with which it shares a passing resemblance. It’s no giddy skyrocket like Gravity’s Rainbow, nor as rich as any of these three masterworks. Read it to laugh, and maybe to mourn. Know it, though, as a kind of coda.
There once was a time, here in my land and your land, when artists accepted an obligation — when foulmouthed comedians, subversive directors, raging rock poets and, yes, great profane novelists took on the challenge of chastening history’s actors, and persuading America to redeem its promise. Or at least trying. Most of Pynchon’s running mates — Vonnegut, Heller, Kesey and the rest — are gone. The audacity of others has been stilled by age, muted in the academy, or rendered speechless by the Crisis. Afloat on “the soft and the dirge-like main,” Pynchon almost alone has escaped to tell us.
Here is the link, which includes some funny links:
http://www.washingtonindependentrevie...
And here is the review in text form:
At the apex of the Global War on Terror, an aide to President George W. Bush used words as cold as icicles to signal his perfidious attitude toward the footings of democracy.
The dupes in the “reality-based community” cling to a myth that the study of “discernible” facts can yield collaborative solutions, he said. But “that’s not the way the world works anymore.”
“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality,” the unidentified adviser said. “While you’re studying that reality…we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
Well, as George Will might put it. There’s a gauntlet at the feet, a glove-smack to the puss of all freedom-loving bards, libertarians, whistle-blowers, hacker heroes and — yes, still kicking, raging and relevant — a Great American Novelist like Thomas Pynchon, who assails that sort of imperious conceit in Bleeding Edge, his new novel.
No matter that, deep down in his beatnik prankster paranoiac soul, Pynchon may believe it’s all a lost cause; that mankind’s organizing institutions — economies, nation-states, corporations, war machines — inevitably beat down or subsume the individual, and that empires can indeed amend the real. In Bleeding Edge he saddles Rocinante, and if his lance is not so sharp, nor his back so strong at the age of 76, few windmills emerge unscathed.
The story plays out in New York City, in the seminal year of 2001. Here are the Snowdens of yesteryear, a motley gang of program-writing geeks, online gamesters, nerds and cyberpunks — some barely graduated from Pokémon and pajamas — rambling about town, confronting realities like Wall Street investment banks, the Patriot and the Espionage acts, and the vapid (Defending Our Nation. Securing the Future) big brothering of the NSA. The intoxicating rush of the dot-com boom has gone bust, and its refugees watch in dismay as the Internet — and its liberating potential — is bent to the aims of corporate-military capitalists, who may (or may not) be exploiting — maybe instigating? — an “endless Orwellian war” for their own villainous purposes, the Global War on Terror.
“We’re being played … and the game is fixed, and it won’t end until the Internet – the real one, the dream, the promise – is destroyed,” says one Eric Outfield, geek. Unless, “could be there’s enough good hackers around interested in fighting back. Outlaws who’ll work for free, show no mercy for anybody who tries to use the Net for evil purposes.”
“Anybody” would be the villainous Gabriel Ice, the filthy-rich owner of hashslingerz, a dot-com firm with vague and shady ties to certain federal security agencies and a Middle East hawala, headquartered in Dubai, run by Islamic (or are they?) jihadists.
Pynchon’s braveheart is Maxine Tarnow, a defrocked fraud investigator “gone rogue.” The lovely Maxi (a Rachel Weisz lookalike, Pynchon tells us, but I’d cast my homegirl Tina Fey for the movie) totes a Beretta in her purse and spends her days getting pizza for her boys Ziggy and Otis, tailing and nailing embezzlers, crooning karaoke with the dot com-clowns, bedeviling the evil Ice and taking advantage of the occasional odd stiffy. Down such mean streets a gal must go.
In her “dowsing” for the truth, Maxi gets assists from Lester Traipse, a Web entrepreneur who supplies the requisite corpse for the party, and Reg Despard, a video auteur with a DVD that may or may not show that the government had foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks. Helping, too, are March Kelleher, an old lefty agitator; assorted code monkeys and “cyberflaneurs; third-wave feminists and Russian hoods; and — in his own twisted way — Nick Windust, a federal agent who began his career as an “entry-level wise ass” but has long since crossed from American Boy to the dark side of the force, and knows far too much ever to hope for graceful retirement.
“Whoever `they’ are, she needs to believe they are far worse than anything Windust became later on, working for them,” Maxi decides. “They found his careless gift of boy’s cruelty and developed it, deployed and used it, by tiny increments, till one day he was a professional sadist with a GS-1800-series job and no regrets.”
This is the year 2001. Do not think that, when Maxi’s ex-husband Horst rents an office on “the hundred-and-something floor of the World Trade Center,” and takes their boys to lunch at Windows on the World, that you won’t feel the ice pick brush your C-4 disk.
“Seems kind of flimsy up here” to Ziggy. “Nah …built like a battleship.”
That lunch takes place on Page 95, and from then the foreshadowing, the sense of sadness, drifts like the smudge of Ground Zero through what follows. We slip from “Hellzapoppin’” to “Slaughterhouse Five.” And if you think it all ends happy, as they say on TV, you haven’t been paying attention.
“That was the moment, Maxi. Not when ‘everything changed.’ When everything was revealed. No grand Zen illumination, but a rush of blackness and death. Showing us exactly what we’ve become, what we’ve been all the time.”
“And what we’ve always been is…?”
“Is living on borrowed time. Getting away cheap. Never caring about who’s paying for it, who’s starving somewhere else all jammed together so we can have cheap food, a house, a yard in the burbs … planetwide, more every day, the payback keeps gathering.
And meantime the only help we get from the media is boo hoo the innocent dead. Boo fucking hoo. You know what? All the dead are innocent. There’s no uninnocent dead.”
Pynchon has more going here than skewering history’s actors. Prepare to be surprised, and affected, by for whom the bell tolls. He is a literary artist of subtlety and grace — amid bedlam, doggerel and puns. (At one point, Maxi goes undercover as a pole dancer at a strip club called Joie de Beavre.) Not unlike, say, Harpo and the boys, Pynchon seasons the japes with sweet-bitter melodies — of lost boys and vanishing innocence; of the love of loved and loving women; of the daze of sensation, the addictions of distractions; the perils of manhood and the hopelessness of time.
The novel ends as it begins, in spring.
“They ascend to the street, where once again, overnight, all together, pear trees have exploded into bloom…The brightness in the street is from flowers on trees whose shadows are texturing the sidewalks. It’s their moment, the year’s great pivot, it’ll last for a few days, then all collect in the gutters. …
The boys have been waiting for her…folded in just this precarious light, ready to step out into their peaceable city, still safe from the spiders and bots that one day soon will be coming for it. …
‘Give me a second, I’ll be right with you.’
‘It’s all right, Mom. We’re good.’
‘I know you are, Zig, that’s the trouble.’
But she waits in the doorway as they go on down the hall. Neither looks back. She can watch them into the elevator at least.”
Bleeding Edge falls in line somewhere behind V. and Vineland in the Pynchon canon, two more or less reality-based novels with which it shares a passing resemblance. It’s no giddy skyrocket like Gravity’s Rainbow, nor as rich as any of these three masterworks. Read it to laugh, and maybe to mourn. Know it, though, as a kind of coda.
There once was a time, here in my land and your land, when artists accepted an obligation — when foulmouthed comedians, subversive directors, raging rock poets and, yes, great profane novelists took on the challenge of chastening history’s actors, and persuading America to redeem its promise. Or at least trying. Most of Pynchon’s running mates — Vonnegut, Heller, Kesey and the rest — are gone. The audacity of others has been stilled by age, muted in the academy, or rendered speechless by the Crisis. Afloat on “the soft and the dirge-like main,” Pynchon almost alone has escaped to tell us.
September 20, 2013
I'm gonna kiss the Sunset pig
So over on another social media site, I asked for suggestions from various pals and gals about the best books on California, and especially southern California, to inform me as I write about Nixon.
I told them I had read a lot of Chandler and Didion, and ordered up some Kevin Starr and Carey McWilliams from the LOC, but what else was out there that I might be missing?
Obviously, this was something folks feel pretty passionate about. I got swamped with recommendations, from some pretty excellent writers themselves.
Here they are:
Gary Delsohn: for some political context, lou canon's Reagan bios, ethan rarick's pat brown bio is good. kevin starr is a gasbag but he does cover the basics.
Postsuburban California: The Transformation of Orange County since World War II
The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream
Water and Power: The Conflict over Los Angeles Water Supply in the Owens Valley
Charles Pierce: Greg Mitchell's book on Upton Sinclair's campaign is a good one, Jack. Mike Davis, too, although he may be too recent for your purposes.
Michael Doyle: Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner is the essential book about Western water and water politics, crucial in SoCal, and Privileged Son, the bio of Otis Chandler, is central to understanding role of LA Times in the creation of Nixon.
John Aloysius Farrell: "The American as conqueror is unwilling to appear in public as a pure aggressor....The American wants to persuade not only the world, but himself, that he is doing God service in a peaceable spirit, even when he violently takes what he has determined to get." - Josiah Royce, "California - A Study of American Character."
Lisa Friedman: One of my all-time favorite Didion lines is about San Bernardino - she called it 'a place where it's hard to buy a book, but easy to dial a devotion.' Glad you've got her covered. I'd also recommend Oil! by Upton Sinclair -- kind of muckraky, of course...See More
Larry Harnisch: That is a short question with a long answer. I may be able to get a blog post out of it. I'm not a fan of the Starr series.
Larry Harnisch: Last year, I interviewed the Los Angeles Public Library's map librarian, Glen Creason. Here's his book list: http://bit.ly/VIB3Gc
Reading Los Angeles: Glen Creason
ladailymirror.com
Bill Walker: Everything by James Ellroy, esp. The Black Dahlia. Also, Privileged Son: Otis Chandler and the Rise and Fall of the LA Times Dynasty, by Dennis McDougal.
Larry Harnisch The "secret handshake" among California historians is whether they are onto Kevin Starr. His series of books is like Will and Ariel Durant's "Story of Civilization": Often displayed and rarely read.
John Aloysius Farrell: Found this one. Price seems like a steal.
Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology (The Library of America) www.loa.org
Larry Harnisch: Yeah you can pick that up pretty cheaply. Of course, it's just an anthology. You might be better off reading an entire book by John Fante or James M. Cain, for example, rather than a snippet.
Larry Harnisch: "Los Angeles: Biography of a City" by John and LaRee Caughey is a similar book, with snippets of original documents in chronological order. Anything by Robert Cleland or Glenn Dumke is supposed to be good, although it's outside my research period so I'm not conversant with their works. The Remi Nadeau books are, again, supposed to be good but likewise outside my research period.
Larry Harnisch: Most of Bancroft's books are available on Google books if you want to plow through them.
Larry Harnisch: Christoper Hawthorne of the L.A. Times did a yearlong project on "Reading L.A." http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/...
Reading L.A.: Introducing a yearlong project [Updated]
latimesblogs.latimes.com
Mark Kram Jr.: Try Didion's husband. John Gregory Dunne, particularly a collection of his early non-fiction "Quintana & Friends." In it there is an interesting essay called Momento Delano, which he revisits Cesar Chavez. (He also wrote a book on the same subject called"Delano" but I have not read it.) Dunne had an excellent feel for California during that period
Larry Harnisch: Get the DVDs of "Shotgun Freeway" and "Los Angeles Plays Itself." http://www.kingpix.com/films/shotgun/
Shotgun Freeway
www.kingpix.com
Larry Harnisch: "Los Angeles Plays Itself" on YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SNc41...
Los Angeles Plays Itself - Part 01 / 12
NOTE: The full movie is now online in one piece: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=...
Thomas Coakley: Steve Lopez and Dana Parsons
Marshall T. Spriggs: "Cadillac Desert" by Marc Reisner for the development politics that made Southern Cal what it is.
Tod O'Connor: How about anything on the Life and Career of Hiriam Johnson. here is one source. The only successful progressive leader". The Independent. Nov 16, 1914. Retrieved July 24, 2012. The effect of His Progressive Party movement is still being felt today in politics and government throughout the state of California.
Peter Dougherty: True Confessions, by John Gregory Dunne
Phyllis Orrick: Also the Natural History of California (I think--that's not it). will look for it but you need to have geology etc in there. Carey McW is terrific as is Cadillac desert. Also good is a libertarian crank (now with Hoover) memoir of his famil raisin farm in centrl valley
Larry Harnisch: Possibly John McPhee's "Assembling California."
Judy Pasternak: "West of the West"--Mark Arax. And I totally second Oil! Great book. "Where We Are Now: Notes from Los Angeles," by D.J. Waldie.
Peter Dougherty: Historian Michael Saler has written some great essays on California published in the TLS
8 hours ago · Like
David Clary: Mike Davis' "City of Quartz" on Los Angeles is a fascinating, provocative read. (I just finished Darrow and loved it, by the way!)
I told them I had read a lot of Chandler and Didion, and ordered up some Kevin Starr and Carey McWilliams from the LOC, but what else was out there that I might be missing?
Obviously, this was something folks feel pretty passionate about. I got swamped with recommendations, from some pretty excellent writers themselves.
Here they are:
Gary Delsohn: for some political context, lou canon's Reagan bios, ethan rarick's pat brown bio is good. kevin starr is a gasbag but he does cover the basics.
Postsuburban California: The Transformation of Orange County since World War II
The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream
Water and Power: The Conflict over Los Angeles Water Supply in the Owens Valley
Charles Pierce: Greg Mitchell's book on Upton Sinclair's campaign is a good one, Jack. Mike Davis, too, although he may be too recent for your purposes.
Michael Doyle: Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner is the essential book about Western water and water politics, crucial in SoCal, and Privileged Son, the bio of Otis Chandler, is central to understanding role of LA Times in the creation of Nixon.
John Aloysius Farrell: "The American as conqueror is unwilling to appear in public as a pure aggressor....The American wants to persuade not only the world, but himself, that he is doing God service in a peaceable spirit, even when he violently takes what he has determined to get." - Josiah Royce, "California - A Study of American Character."
Lisa Friedman: One of my all-time favorite Didion lines is about San Bernardino - she called it 'a place where it's hard to buy a book, but easy to dial a devotion.' Glad you've got her covered. I'd also recommend Oil! by Upton Sinclair -- kind of muckraky, of course...See More
Larry Harnisch: That is a short question with a long answer. I may be able to get a blog post out of it. I'm not a fan of the Starr series.
Larry Harnisch: Last year, I interviewed the Los Angeles Public Library's map librarian, Glen Creason. Here's his book list: http://bit.ly/VIB3Gc
Reading Los Angeles: Glen Creason
ladailymirror.com
Bill Walker: Everything by James Ellroy, esp. The Black Dahlia. Also, Privileged Son: Otis Chandler and the Rise and Fall of the LA Times Dynasty, by Dennis McDougal.
Larry Harnisch The "secret handshake" among California historians is whether they are onto Kevin Starr. His series of books is like Will and Ariel Durant's "Story of Civilization": Often displayed and rarely read.
John Aloysius Farrell: Found this one. Price seems like a steal.
Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology (The Library of America) www.loa.org
Larry Harnisch: Yeah you can pick that up pretty cheaply. Of course, it's just an anthology. You might be better off reading an entire book by John Fante or James M. Cain, for example, rather than a snippet.
Larry Harnisch: "Los Angeles: Biography of a City" by John and LaRee Caughey is a similar book, with snippets of original documents in chronological order. Anything by Robert Cleland or Glenn Dumke is supposed to be good, although it's outside my research period so I'm not conversant with their works. The Remi Nadeau books are, again, supposed to be good but likewise outside my research period.
Larry Harnisch: Most of Bancroft's books are available on Google books if you want to plow through them.
Larry Harnisch: Christoper Hawthorne of the L.A. Times did a yearlong project on "Reading L.A." http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/...
Reading L.A.: Introducing a yearlong project [Updated]
latimesblogs.latimes.com
Mark Kram Jr.: Try Didion's husband. John Gregory Dunne, particularly a collection of his early non-fiction "Quintana & Friends." In it there is an interesting essay called Momento Delano, which he revisits Cesar Chavez. (He also wrote a book on the same subject called"Delano" but I have not read it.) Dunne had an excellent feel for California during that period
Larry Harnisch: Get the DVDs of "Shotgun Freeway" and "Los Angeles Plays Itself." http://www.kingpix.com/films/shotgun/
Shotgun Freeway
www.kingpix.com
Larry Harnisch: "Los Angeles Plays Itself" on YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SNc41...
Los Angeles Plays Itself - Part 01 / 12
NOTE: The full movie is now online in one piece: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=...
Thomas Coakley: Steve Lopez and Dana Parsons
Marshall T. Spriggs: "Cadillac Desert" by Marc Reisner for the development politics that made Southern Cal what it is.
Tod O'Connor: How about anything on the Life and Career of Hiriam Johnson. here is one source. The only successful progressive leader". The Independent. Nov 16, 1914. Retrieved July 24, 2012. The effect of His Progressive Party movement is still being felt today in politics and government throughout the state of California.
Peter Dougherty: True Confessions, by John Gregory Dunne
Phyllis Orrick: Also the Natural History of California (I think--that's not it). will look for it but you need to have geology etc in there. Carey McW is terrific as is Cadillac desert. Also good is a libertarian crank (now with Hoover) memoir of his famil raisin farm in centrl valley
Larry Harnisch: Possibly John McPhee's "Assembling California."
Judy Pasternak: "West of the West"--Mark Arax. And I totally second Oil! Great book. "Where We Are Now: Notes from Los Angeles," by D.J. Waldie.
Peter Dougherty: Historian Michael Saler has written some great essays on California published in the TLS
8 hours ago · Like
David Clary: Mike Davis' "City of Quartz" on Los Angeles is a fascinating, provocative read. (I just finished Darrow and loved it, by the way!)
The Nixon Blog
Thoughts on a work in progress, by a biographer writing about Richard M. Nixon
- John A. Farrell's profile
- 162 followers
