Rusty Redburn, the narrator who directs the traffic of this exciting and busy book, never expects, when she goes to Hollywood in the early 1940s, that she will end up as a spy for Columbia Pictures. Harry Cohn, President of Columbia, wants to keep tabs on every aspect of the life of “Rita Hayworth” (Margarita Carmen Cansino), his shy and most mistrustful star. As author Jerome Charyn traces the real life of this glamorous film star, he is able to convey the male dominated film business and its demeaning of its female stars. Two of Rita’s five marriages – to Orson Welles (1943 – 1947) and to Prince Aly Khan (1949 – 1953) – are keys to understanding Rita Hayworth, and author Jerome Charyn presents them with sympathy for Rita and a broad knowledge of Hollywood, Rita’s films, the men with whom she starred in films, her lovers, and the film world milieu of the mid-1940s and 1950s. Rita Hayworth had roles in twenty-four films between 1940, when she was twenty-two, and 1958, when she had her fortieth birthday. Her two last appearances were in 1971, on the Carol Burnett Show and Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In.
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“In the early morning hours of March 18, 1990, two thieves gained entry to the Gardner Museum and stole 13 works of art by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Manet, Degas, and other artists. The works including Rembrandt’s Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee, his only known seascape, and Vermeer’s The Concert, are worth more than $500 million. The Gardner heist remains [to this day] the biggest unsolved art theft in history.” Though more than thirty years have passed since this crime, no one has forgotten it. As recently as the winter of 2022, new clues were being assessed, and hopes of finding the missing artworks have not waned. Written by the staff of the Gardner Museum, and others highly familiar with the robbery, the emphasis is on the artworks themselves, with photographs of the missing artworks as the focus. The museum is offering a reward of $10 million for information leading to the discovery of the stolen works.
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May God Forgive, Alan Parks’s fifth novel in his Tartan noir series featuring Glasgow detective Harry McCoy, has three grisly deaths for McCoy to look into in the first fifty pages, and twenty characters are also involved. McCoy who has just been released from a month’s stay in hospital for a bleeding ulcer, caused by his drinking, smoking, and hard living. As he investigates these and other crimes going forward, the characters increase, the complex involvements of various gangs create issues, and McCoy spends more time investigating on his own than he does as a representative of the police. Making the novel more personal, father-son relationships become an issue, including for McCoy. The action ultimately features a character list of about 40 characters, competing criminal gangs, and some vivid details of violence, torture, mutilation, and maiming, making this novel a stomach-churning experience in which characters driven by their own senses of “justice” have more sway on all levels than the local police.
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Posted in 08-2022 Reviews, Experimental, Historical, Humor, Satire, Absurdity, Literary, Psychological study, Social and Political Issues, Uruguay on May 8th, 2022
This unusual novel focusing on a talking frog and his help for a tormented man allows author Carolina De Robertis to explore philosophical ideas of governance and individual responsibility. Here author Carolina De Robertis describes the difficult inner world of a member of Uruguay’s Marxist Tupamaros during his fourteen year imprisonment in a hole deep underground during the 1970s and 1980s. This is a man who has been wounded six times during various escape attempts from confinement, who fears for his own mental health during his torture and imprisonment, but who is ultimately elected Uruguay’s President from 2010 – 2015. Author Carolina de Robertis’s intense and involving story, based loosely on the traumatic life and career of the real President, José Mujica, during that period, focuses on the man’s involvement in the political changes in the early twenty-first century. Though it is filled with the horrors of revolutionary warfare and its personal effects on the participants, the resulting fictionalized biography is often very funny, filled with ironies.
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Following the narrative pattern of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, author Jillian Cantor focuses primarily on three young women, all of whom appear in the Gatsby book. Three “Gatsby women,” all originally from Louisville, Kentucky, are the main focus here: Daisy, who becomes the wife of the almost impossibly wealthy Tom Buchanan; Jordan Baker, Daisy’s close friend, a golfer who is on the tour though accused in a major scandal; and Catherine McCoy, a lesser developed character who attends women’s suffrage meetings and who is the sister of Myrtle Wilson, a married woman who is profiting from her role as the secret lover of Tom Buchanan. Their stories rotate throughout, often overlap, and provide the structure of the novel. At the same time, a new character, Detective Frank Charles from New York, appears at key points in 1922, after the death of Jay Gatsby, as he investigates that death, the characters associated with Gatsby, and the clues that have developed, including the discovery of a diamond hair pin at the murder scene. While Beautiful Little Fools is certainly not a feminist tract, it does illustrate how different the outcomes might have been in Fitzgerald’s Gatsby if the position of women, their own expectations, the expectations of them by others, and the culture in which they lived had been significantly different.
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