High school kids Jude and Teddy spend their time in their small Vermont town hanging out, stealing and getting high. On New Year’s Eve 1987, the pair pass out in the snow after a night of drugs, drink and parties. Teddy never wakes up.
Ten Thousand Saints
Eleanor HendersonEcco Press 2011, Hardcover, 388 pages, £17.24
Shortly before his death Teddy [...]
In many ways the back-story of this book is more interesting than the book itself. Memoirs of a Master Forger was not written by William Heaney but by Graham Joyce, the author of a string of fantasy novels over the last 20 years. When it was released, in 2008, the author’s true identity was not [...]
Well, I finished The Man Without Qualities, which is more than its author managed to do. Robert Musil died in 1942, aged 61, a mere 21 years after he began writing this mammoth book. The published edition runs to more than 650,000 words and it’s thought that the finished work would have been twice as [...]
Ron Jaworski was an NFL quarterback for more than 15 years. He spent the bulk of his career with the Philadelphia Eagles and took them to their first Super Bowl. These days he is an analyst on Monday Night Football.
The Games That Changed the Game
Ron JaworskiESPN Books 2011, Paperback, 312 pages, £10.22
In this book, Jaworski looks at [...]
This is one of those books that feels like a good, long magazine article that has been expanded beyond the range of the material. Other examples include The Long Tail, Freakonomics and anything by Malcolm Gladwell. Indeed, Gladwell is probably the apotheosis of the form: his books feel like over-extended articles; his articles feel like [...]
The only Le Carre books I had read, before this one, were his classics from the 60s and 70s: The Spy Who Came In From The Cold and the Smiley Trilogy. This is a more recent work, which deals with the espionage world as it today, with the Cold War a distant memory and terrorism [...]
Originally planned for release next year, Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs was brought forward after the Apple founder and former CEO died in October. Isaacson interviewed Jobs more than 40 times in the last years of his life and spoke to Jobs’s friends, former colleagues and to key figures at Apple. This kind of [...]
“Hey Foss,” the prosecutor said, taking Clark by the arm, “of course it changes. Don’t take it so hard. Some of us die, the rest of us get older, new guys come along, old guys disappear. It changes everyday.”
The Friends of Eddie Coyle
George V. HigginsPicador USA 2010, Paperback, 192 pages, £8.99
The Friends of Eddie Coyle is another [...]
This is considered a classic of hardboiled crime fiction. It’s also the only book that I’ve continued to search for after I bought a copy. That’s because it took me a long time to realise that The Hunter and Point Blank, two much-recommended crime novels, were in fact the same book. There are also three [...]
I don’t re-read books very often, as regular visitors to this site will know, but this is my second reading of Take Your Eye Off the Ball this year. Strictly speaking, it’s somewhere between a re-reading and a new book, since this Playbook Edition updates the original with more than 50 pages of new material.
Take [...]
