Bill Zehme and The Late Night Talk Show Gods

By Alex Belth Esquire Classic 2016 Bill Zehme got to know David Letterman and Jay Leno when he profiled them in the early ’80s as their careers all took off. A decade later, Zehme was a feature writer for Esquire, perfectly positioned to go inside and get the scoop...

Seeing Catch-22 Twice

By Ron Rosenbaum Slate August 2, 2011 Now, my father wasn’t a big reader and rarely wrote letters, much less to authors. But when I went through a phase in high school of constantly carrying Catch-22 around and quoting from it and writing things like, “There was only...

The Stacks Chat: Levi Stahl

By Alex Belth Bronx Banter October 14, 2014 Donald E. Westlake (1933-2008) was one of our most prolific and entertaining writers. Now, we’ve got this posthumous treat: The Getaway Car: A Donald Westlake Nonfiction Miscellany, published by the University of Chicago...

Yogi

By Alex Belth SI.com September 23, 2015 Yogi. It’s hard not to smile when you hear his name. You might think of his goofy mug, with the crooked smile that looked as if it had been ripped from the funny pages. Then there’s the oddly-shaped wrestler’s body—squat torso,...

Against Normalization: The Lesson of the “Munich Post”

By Ron Rosenbaum LARB February 5, 2017 TRUMP/HITLER?   [This article was first published just weeks after Donald Trump’s inauguration.]    The Trump-Hitler comparison. Is there any comparison? Between the way the campaigns of Donald Trump and Adolf...

Hitler Continued

By Ron Rosenbaum LARB June 10, 2014 RON ROSENBAUM’S 1998 book, Explaining Hitler, is a critique of “Hitler studies,” the term coined by Don DeLillo, and it remains for me a key experience in my life-long reading about the Third Reich. In the book Rosenbaum assessed...

Freeing “Pale Fire” from Pale Fire

By Ron Rosenbaum Slate July 23, 2010 You know the line: “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.” It’s Pacino, complaining about the mob in Godfather III (or maybe about the Hollywood culture that got him to do the much-derided second sequel). Here I’m...

The Human Nature

By Marguerite Del Giudice American Fiction: Volume 13 October 28, 2014 When I lived on Loveland, I used to let that stupid fat thing next door put all her garbage and ashes on the side of my house. Rachel. For one thing they had coal heat and I had oil, and she would...

The Novel of the Century

By Ron Rosenbaum The New York Observer December 6, 1999 O.K., I’ll play. You know, the Century-Slash-Millennium List Game. I admit I was reluctant to get into the whole Man -of-the-Century, Movie-of-the-Millennium enterprise. But a couple of things changed my mind:...

To The Beat

By Will Blythe The New York Times July 8, 2010 If you’re like me, you tend to regard plot summaries as a necessary boredom at best. They’re the flyover country between a reviewer’s landing strips of judgment, revealing almost nothing about the way a book actually...

Raising Kane

By Alex Belth The Stacks Reader December 17, 2019 Last year, Harlem, 1958, a beautiful book celebrating the 60th anniversary of the most famous picture in jazz history was published. It remains a perfect gift for the jazz lover or the pop culture history buff in your...

Have Pen, Will Travel

By Alex Belth The Stacks Reader December 12, 2019 Thanks to Josh Lieberman, check out this trove of goodies from Holiday magazine. Tasty.   “In Defense of Brooklyn” by Murray Goodwin (November, 1946): Feltman’s is not the only Brooklyn restaurant of repute....