Hampton Sides is an acclaimed bestselling author and a National Magazine Award nominated journalist. He won the PEN USA Award for nonfiction and the 2002 Discover Award from Barnes and Noble for Ghost Soldiers, a historical narrative following the rescue of WWII Bataan Death March survivors that was later adapted into the Miramax feature film The Great Raid. His next book, Blood and Thunder, was adapted into an episode of the Public Broadcasting Service’s American Experience series. Hellhound On His Trail, is a taut and thrilling account of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the 65-day manhunt for […]
BOOKS: Fey Accompli
NEW YORK TIMES: “Bossypants” isn’t a memoir. It’s a spiky blend of humor, introspection, critical thinking and Nora Ephron-isms for a new generation. But it chronologically follows Ms. Fey through an awkward girlhood spent in Upper Darby, Pa., teenage years with a coterie of gay friends and a fish-out-of-water stint at the University of Virginia. “What 19-year-old Virginia boy doesn’t want a wide-hipped, sarcastic Greek girl with short hair that’s permed on top?” asks Ms. Fey, who calls herself Greek when she isn’t calling herself German. “What’s that you say? None of them want that? You are correct. So I […]
BOOKS: The Art Of Being An A**hole
BY REBECCA GOODACRE You know there’s that guy that always, always seems to get his way? And no one even minds. Or the guy that gets to sleep with women yet manages to avoid all the whiney crap that usually goes along with it? Or the colleague who never really seems to do all that much work but always scores promotions? Or the relative that somehow manages to avoid all those irritating family duties? How do they do it?Well, it’s because those people are assholes. But don’t worry, you can be one too with a little help from Chris Illuminati […]
BOOKS: Q&A With Dan Dunn, Playboy’s The Imbiber
BY LAURA WESTERMAN Hunter S. Thompson once said “there is no honest way to explain [the Edge] because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.” For Playboy “Imbiber” columnist Dan Dunn, these words are both a cautionary warning and an irresistible dare. He’ll be in town on Thursday to promote his new book Living Loaded: Tales of Sex, Salvation, and the Pursuit of the Never-Ending Happy Hour, a heady cocktail of booze expertise and sexual misadventure. His tales of drunken hook-ups, barroom brawls in Ireland, all-day benders and Bible-driven mosh pits […]
WWMTD: What Would Mark Twain Do?
PUBLISHER’S WEEKLY: Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a classic by most any measure—T.S. Eliot called it a masterpiece, and Ernest Hemingway pronounced it the source of “all modern American literature.” Yet, for decades, it has been disappearing from grade school curricula across the country, relegated to optional reading lists, or banned outright, appearing again and again on lists of the nation’s most challenged books, and all for its repeated use of a single, singularly offensive word: “nigger.” Twain himself defined a “classic” as “a book which people praise and don’t read.” Rather than see Twain’s most important work […]
REWIND 2010: The Year In Phawker Interviews
Talk is cheap on the Internet, but at Phawker it’s totally free, baby — at least for you, dear reader. Trolling through the vast and dusty Phawker archives, we have dug up fat sack of conversations worth re-visiting: the always prickish-but-worth-it Will Oldham on authenticity, Americana and his testicles; the inimitable Black Francis susses out Doolittle for us; graphic artiste extraordinaire Charles Burns on the darkness within; author Hampton Sides discusses the banality of Martin Luther King assassin James Earle Ray’s evil; Dave Bielanko discusses Marah’s last chance power try; folk/rock legend Richard Thompson discusses Fairport Convention and reuniting with […]
WORTH REPEATING: A Christmas Carol
BY CHARLES DICKENS Chapter 1 – Marley’s Ghost Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it. And Scrooge’s name was good upon ‘Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.Mind! I don’t mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece […]
THE COLONEL REMEMBERS: Me & Keef
BY COLONEL TOM SHEEHY The year 2010 will go down as a very industrious year for The Rolling Stones. Even though there was no world wide tour, or a new album, the lads were very active in this recent past. For example, they released a newly remastered version of Exile On Main Street which included previously unreleased tracks, all of which were issued in support of the debut of Stones in Exile, a documentary of the making of the album they recorded in Keith’s basement in France, at a time when the band pulled up roots from the United Kingdom […]
BOOKS: Salman Rushdie At The Free Library
[Illustration via ARISTOTLE’S LACKEY] BY CAROLINE SCHMIDT Salman Rushdie’s personal life has been the focus of media attention ever since the publication of The Satanic Verses lead Iran’s Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini to issue a fatwah that called for the author’s execution in 1989 forcing the author into hiding for more than a decade. Starting with 1975’s Grimus, he has published more than a dozen novels, received numerous literary prizes, including the prestigious Man Booker Prize for 1981’s Midnight’s Children, and been knighted by Queen Elizabeth. He is more infamously known for his four marriages — to striking women with names […]
BOOKS: Keef’s Life Sentences
NEW YORK TIMES: “Life” has already attracted undue attention for a schoolyard-sounding anatomical swipe at Mr. Jagger. But this is a book that pulls no punches, and most of its disses are more serious than that. “Cold-blooded” and “vicious” are only two of the more printable words he uses to describe Brian Jones. Allen Ginsberg was an “old gasbag.” Mick Taylor, the former Rolling Stone, “didn’t do anything” after he left the band, and Donald Cammell, the film director (“Performance,” starring Mr. Jagger and Anita Pallenberg, Mr. Richards’s longtime lover and partner in crime), couldn’t commit suicide quickly enough to […]
NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR Comedian Mike Birbiglia was on tour in Washington state when he had a dream that a guided missile was heading toward his hotel room. In his dream — and in real life — Birbiglia decided to jump out the window of his hotel room. He was staying on the second floor. Birbiglia survived, receiving 33 stitches for gashes in his legs. When he returned home to New York, he was sent to a sleep physician for overnight observation. “They put the electrodes all over my body and observed my sleep and I was diagnosed with REM behavior disorder, […]
BOOKS: Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story
[Illustration by ALEX FINE] BY PAUL MAHER JR. The dystopian satire of Gary Shteyngart’s splendid affecting novel Super Sad True Love Story is anchored deep into the neuroses of an America that no longer is able to distinguish its objectives from its agendas. The novel’s landscape is less the chaotic sensory overload of Blade Runner than it is the bleak rain-soaked miasma of Taxi Driver, a Gotham sprawl seen from within a tortoise shell. The novel’s protagonist, Lenny Abramov, is no Travis Bickle however. Likening him to Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man is a more accurate comparison. Like the Dostoyevsky, Shteyngart richly […]
New York Times Reviews Will Bunch’s Backlash
NEW YORK TIMES: By far the most compelling, if not terribly original, arguments in “The Backlash” concern the current media environment, which has amplified the loudest and most partisan voices, and helped spread fact-free theories about President Obama’s not being born in the United States or wanting to take away people’s guns. Mr. Bunch invokes Neil Postman — who argued in his seminal 1985 book, “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” that the entertainment values promoted by television are subverting public discourse — to explore the phenomenon of Mr. Beck and his shameless emotional appeals to his audience’s deepest fears about change […]