Archive for the ‘Books’ Category

The struggle continues.

Saturday, September 10th, 2022

For those of you who are people of the gun, and especially those interested in holsters:

My fellow book collecting friend in the Association just tipped me off to the fact that there’s a second edition of Holstory. I wrote about the fist edition here: according to the website, the second edition adds three new chapters.

I really enjoyed the first edition (which I read cover to cover as soon as I could after that post), and have no qualms about recommending that you order the second edition if you didn’t order the first. I’ve already ordered my personal copy. (And no, I do not get any kickbacks or free books from the authors: I just happen to think this is a swell book.)

Personal indulgence (possibly noteworthy for others).

Thursday, September 8th, 2022

I’ve been listening to the Hornady Podcast.

They cover a wide variety of topics. They’ve talked about various hunting opportunities (including Africa). They do interviews with prominent individuals in the industry like Jerry Miculek. (And, on a side note, I really enjoyed their interview with Kristy Titus. Not in the “oooh, a girl in the gun industry”, or the “I want to marry this woman” sense, but: here’s a person who seems to have their head screwed on straight, knows what they know and what they don’t know, and is actively working to fill in the gaps on what they don’t know. I find that admirable. I hadn’t heard of Ms. Titus before this: now I’m a fan.)

And they’ve done several podcasts on interior (what happens to the bullet inside the gun) and exterior (what happens to the bullet in flight) ballistics. Those podcasts are really deep dives into the way things work. If you’re a gun person with a techy bent at all, I encourage you to listen.

Episode 35 is a listener Q&A session. If you listen to the first few minutes of it, you might hear a name you recognize. You can listen to the whole thing if you’d like (I’d encourage that) but the “relevant” (for some value of “relevant”) part comes early.

A couple of quick points:

  • Remember this post? Yeah, this is what I was talking about. Preston from Hornady had told me they were doing a Q&A at some point, and asked if he could use my questions on the show. Of course I said yes.
  • There’s a bit more to the questions I asked than what made it on to the show. What’s on the show is a very good summary of one of the questions I asked. Preston and I had a long conversation about both of my questions. I’m not kidding: Preston actually called me on the phone and we talked through this stuff. I can’t tell you how impressed I am with their support for some random murder hobo. (I don’t think anybody at Hornady even knows I blog.)
  • They didn’t really go into my second question on this podcast, but that’s okay. They did kind of briefly touch on it, and, from what they said, they plan a much deeper dive into that question in some future podcast. Which is awesome.
  • Never read the YouTube comments. Seriously. I know I’m taking this personal-like, but Preston and the rest of the gang was so nice to me, I can’t imagine how people could treat them like crap in the YouTube comments. I guess a lot of people have trouble remembering there are real people behind the screen.

And, actually, some other things are coming together. My project for the Smith and Wesson Collector’s Association came to fruition and is active now. I’ve even received some nice feedback. (You can’t access it unless you’re a member. Which you should be if you’re interested in Smith and Wessons.)

The government finally mailed my tax refund. I haven’t gotten official word yet, but I’ve gotten “unofficial” word on my corporate bonus and pay for the next two quarters (at least) and been reassured there won’t be any layoffs on my team.

And I’ve been talking to a fellow collector, and there’s some more hoplobibilophilia coming soon-ish.

In the meantime, as we often say, look for the smiling face of Archduke Franz Ferdinand on every bottle!

Obit watch: September 7, 2022.

Wednesday, September 7th, 2022

Peter Straub, noted writer.

Mr. Straub was both a master of his genre and an anxious occupant of it. Novels like “Julia” (1975) and “Ghost Story” (1979) helped revivify a once-creaking field, even though he insisted that his work transcended categorization and that he wrote how he wanted, only to watch readers and critics pigeonhole him as a horror novelist.
Not that he could complain about what critics and readers thought. Starting with “Julia,” his third novel, about a woman who is haunted by a spirit that may or may not be her dead daughter, Mr. Straub won praise from reviewers and topped best seller charts with a type of story that had previously been sidelined as sub-literary.
“He was a unique writer in a lot of ways,” Mr. King said in a phone interview on Monday. “He was not only a literary writer with a poetic sensibility, but he was readable. And that was a fantastic thing. He was a modern writer, who was the equal of say, Philip Roth, though he wrote about fantastic things.”

…

Though he was hardly as prolific as Mr. King, Mr. Straub continued to write best-selling books, not all of which involved horror. His “Blue Rose” trilogy — “Koko” (1988), “Mystery” (1990) and “The Throat” (1993) — revolve around the hunt for a serial killer. Though there is nothing supernatural about them, each book won a Bram Stoker Award from the Horror Writers Association, three of seven Stoker prizes that Mr. Straub accumulated.

Dr. Ronald Glasser. He was another one of those folks I had not heard of before, but he wrote a highly acclaimed book, 365 Days.

Dr. Glasser was opposed to the war when he was drafted in August 1968.
He was assigned to a hospital in Zama, Japan — one of four frenetic Army hospitals in Japan that every month were receiving 6,000 to 8,000 injured troops airlifted from the battlefields of Vietnam during their 365-day tours of duty.
Dr. Glasser was originally assigned as a pediatrician to treat the families of military dependents in Japan. But, he wrote, “I soon realized that the troopers they were pulling off those medevac choppers were only children themselves.”
“365 Days,” published in 1971, was a finalist for the National Book Award. The playwright David Mamet hailed it in The Wall Street Journal as “the best book to come out of Vietnam, and yet the author wasn’t stationed there.”
Dr. Glasser explained in “365 Days” that he had never intended to become a writer, but that he felt compelled to record what he had seen and heard at the hospital. He dedicated the book to Stephen Crane, the author of the novel “The Red Badge of Courage,” which vividly described the bloody battlegrounds of the Civil War.
“I did not start writing for months, and even then it was only to tell what I was seeing and being told, maybe to give something to these kids that was all theirs without doctrine or polemics, something that they could use to explain what they might not be able to explain themselves,” Dr. Glasser wrote.
“As for me,” he continued, “my wish is not that I had never been in the Army, but that this book could never have been written.”

…

Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, who was a national security adviser in the Trump administration and is now a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, characterized Dr. Glasser in an email as “one of the most humane men I have ever met” and said that what distinguished him was “his description of war and the experiences of those who fight, sacrifice and suffer” and “his empathy for those he treated and to whom he listened” — including his fellow doctors and nurses.

…

The book was banned from some public libraries because it liberally quoted the soldiers’ use of profanity. Dr. Glasser was unapologetic.
“The truth as I saw it was that common language failed,” he testified in a court case contesting the ban. “It didn’t express their anguish. It wasn’t enough.”

CleCon!

Tuesday, September 6th, 2022

That’s Cleveland content, for my peeps in Ohio.

Daniel Stashower (The Beautiful Cigar Girl) has a new book out: American Demon: Eliot Ness and the Hunt for America’s Jack the Ripper, about the Cleveland Torso Murders.

He also has a good piece up at CrimeReads tied to the book and his family history in Cleveland. I had no idea he was a good Cleveland boy.

I’m probably going to wait to buy this one, but that has nothing to do with Mr. Stashower, and more to do with the fact that I’ve read a fair amount about Eliot Ness and the hunt for the torso murderer. That includes a good write-up in Bill James’s Popular Crime and (I think) the original version of In the Wake of the Butcher: Cleveland’s Torso Murders.

On the lighter side, Field of Schemes has a good piece up on the quest for a new Browns stadium:

You have time and resources to call a ton of people and interview them for a story about the local sports team’s potential $1 billion-plus stadium ask, and to talk to at least one of them for 25 minutes according to the story, and you choose to call: Three former city officials, one of whom has also worked for the Browns; three broadcasters who work for the Browns or a fellow Cleveland sports team; two real estate brokers; and two restaurateurs.

As I’ve said before, FoS runs a little left for my taste, but the one thing we agree on is opposition to giving money to sports teams.

(For the record, my Cleveland relatives who are sports fans informed me that they have given up on the Browns this year, as they are completely disgusted with their handling of the Watson debacle. I think this also means I can make jokes about the Browns without feeling guilty.)

This is stretching the definition of “Cleveland content” a little bit: Cedar Point is about an hour from Cleveland, but that’s close enough that a good number of Clevelanders go there. Anyway, Cedar Point is shutting down the Top Thrill Dragster coaster.

The Top Thrill Dragster gained fame for reaching speeds of 120 mph in just 3.8 seconds…
At the time it opened in 2003, it was the tallest and fastest roller coaster in the world. But it was later eclipsed by the Kingda Ka ride at Six Flags Great Adventure in New Jersey.

The coaster had been closed since last August, after a woman was badly injured. Top Thrill Dragster entry on Wikipedia.

Obit watch: September 2, 2022.

Friday, September 2nd, 2022

Earnie Shavers, boxer.

Fighting during boxing’s — and particularly the heavyweight division’s — golden era in the 1970s, Shavers recorded a 74-14-1 record throughout his career, with 68 of those wins coming via KO.

…

Lauded by his opponents for his overwhelming power, Shavers fought in two heavyweight title fights, suffering defeats in each. In 1977, he lost to Muhammad Ali for the WBA and WBC belts at Madison Square Garden via unanimous decision, but earned the GOAT’s praise after the bout.
“Earnie hit me so hard, it shook my kinfolk in Africa,” Ali said after the fight.

I am seeing reports that Frank Drake, noted astronomer (famous for the Drake Equation) has died, but I don’t have a reliable source to link to.

Barbara Ehrenreich, author. (Nickel and Dimed.)

Continuing adventures in hoplobibliophilia.

Sunday, August 28th, 2022

I think I’ve brought this up before, but, since the recent unpleasantness, pickings have been sort of slim at Half-Price Books. Sometimes I’ll stumble across something, but it doesn’t seem like they’re getting as much good stuff as they used to.

Today was one of those stumble across days. We happened to be in the neighborhood dealing with the Mongolian fire drill that is Dan’s on a Saturday morning for breakfast, so I thought I’d duck in for a few minutes. And I walked out with a haul. Including not one, but two original Samworth books. (Technically, one is a reprint, but it is an original Samworth book.)

(more…)

Obit watch: August 26, 2022.

Friday, August 26th, 2022

Joe E. Tata, actor.

Credits other than “Beverly Hills, 90210” include “Monster Squad”, the 1966 “Batman” series, “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea”, “The Outer Limits”, “Mission: Impossible”, and “Lost in Space”.

He also did a fair number of cop/PI/procedural shows, including “O’Hara, U.S. Treasury”, “The F.B.I.”, “Cannon”, “Quincy M.E.”, eight episodes of “The Rockford Files”…

…and “Mannix”. (“A World Without Sundays”, season 7, episode 8. “A Problem of Innocence”, season 6, episode 23. “What Happened to Sunday?”, season 4, episode 15.)

E. Bryant Crutchfield, inventor of the Trapper Keeper.

By way of Mike the Musicologist: a nice tribute to Richard Taruskin from Alex Ross. (Link goes to archive.is because I’m not sure how long that will stay available for non-subscribers.)

By way of The Mysterious Bookshop: Michael Malone, novelist and TV writer. He won a Daytime Emmy for “One Life to Live”, and an Edgar Award in 1997 (Best Short Story for “Red Clay”, in the anthology Murder for Love).

Obit watch: August 24, 2022.

Wednesday, August 24th, 2022

Len Dawson, one of the greats. NYT.

Known as “Lenny the Cool” for his composure and guile on the field, Dawson was the Chiefs’ starter for 14 seasons, including their appearances in Super Bowl I and Super Bowl IV.

…

Dawson, a strapping 6-footer with wavy hair and a killer smile, began working as a sports anchor for KMBC-TV (Ch. 9) during his playing days in 1966, not stepping down until 2009. He also served as an NFL color commentator for NBC Sports for six years; was co-host for HBO’s “Inside the NFL” for 24 years; and was the Chiefs’ radio analyst from 1984 to 2017.

…

In 1987, Dawson was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio, just 20 miles from his childhood home of Alliance, Ohio. Dawson, inducted into the Chiefs Hall of Fame in 1979, also was selected 1972 NFL Man of the Year, an award that honors a player’s contributions both on the field and in the community.
Dawson’s work as a broadcaster was recognized in 2012, when he received the Pete Rozelle Radio-Television Award from the Pro Football Hall of Fame, 25 years after he was enshrined as a player. Dawson, Frank Gifford, Dan Dierdorf and John Madden are the only members of the Pro Football Hall of Fame who also received the Rozelle Award, which recognizes “longtime exceptional contributions to radio and television in professional football.”

…

In his 19-year professional career, Dawson completed 2,136 passes in 3,741 attempts for 28,711 yards, 239 touchdowns and 183 interceptions. His 183 games played for the Chiefs ranks third among non-kickers to only Will Shields’ 224 and Tony Gonzalez’ 190. And Dawson completed more passes (2,115) for more yards (28,507) and more touchdowns (237) than any quarterback in Chiefs history.

…

More important to Dawson was the contribution he and the Chiefs played in Kansas City, a town searching for its major-league identity.
“The games themselves don’t mean that much,” he said. “You tend to forget the details. But our success was important to Kansas City. I like to think our football team played a part in changing the minds of people about Kansas City. That is the most significant thing to me.”

Tim Page, Vietnam war photographer. (Alt link.)

A freelancer and a free spirit whose Vietnam pictures appeared in publications around the world during the 1960s, he was seriously wounded four times, most severely when a piece of shrapnel took a chunk out of his brain and sent him into months of recovery and rehabilitation.
Mr. Page was one of the most vivid personalities among a corps of Vietnam photographers whose images helped shape the course of the war — and was a model for the crazed, stoned photographer played by Dennis Hopper in “Apocalypse Now.”
Michael Herr, in his 1977 book “Dispatches,” called him the most extravagant of the “wigged-out crazies” in Vietnam, who “liked to augment his field gear with freak paraphernalia, scarves and beads.”

…

He published a dozen books, including two memoirs, and most notably “Requiem” a collection of pictures by photographers on all sides who had been killed in the various Indochina wars.
Issued in 1997 and co-authored by his fellow photographer Horst Faas, it was a memorial that he considered one of his most important contributions. The collection was put on permanent display in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

Requiem: By the Photographers Who Died in Vietnam and Indochina (affiliate link to used copies on Amazon). I’ve mentioned it before, but I think this is a great book.

His closest encounter with death came in April 1969 when he stepped out of a helicopter to help offload wounded soldiers and was hit with shrapnel when a soldier near him stepped on a mine.
He was pronounced dead at a military hospital, then was revived, then died and was revived again, finally recovering enough to be transferred to the United States, where he endured months of rehabilitation and therapy before picking up his cameras and heading back to work.
During this time, in an event that consumed much of his later life, two fellow photographers headed on motorcycles down an empty road in Cambodia in search of Khmer Rouge guerrillas and never returned.
Over the following decades, Mr. Page made repeated forays into the Cambodian countryside in a futile search for the remains of the two men, Sean Flynn and Dana Stone.

This goes unmentioned in the obit, and isn’t strictly relevant, but I find it an interesting historical footnote: Sean Flynn was Errol Flynn’s son (by his first wife, Lili Damita). To the best of my knowledge, Mr. Flynn and Mr. Stone have never been found: “In 1984, Flynn’s mother had him declared dead in absentia.”

Personal indulgence: Doris Emily Bedford Gerlat. She was the mother of my beloved and indulgent Uncle Allan (who is married to my beloved and indulgent Aunt Cheryl: the two of them are responsible for the Major Award among other things).

Obit watch: August 22, 2022.

Monday, August 22nd, 2022

Virginia Patton, actress. She had a short career: most notably, she was apparently the last surviving adult member of the “It’s A Wonderful Life” cast. (Karolyn Grimes, who played “Zuzu”, is still alive, as is Jimmy Hawkins, who played “Tommy”.)

Josephine Tewson. She did a lot of British TV, some of which made it to PBS here. Most notably to my people, she was “Elizabeth”, the neighbor of “Hyacinth Bucket” in “Keeping Up Appearances”.

By way of Lawrence: Alexi Panshin, SF author.

Tom Weiskopf, noted golfer.

Obit watch: August 19, 2022.

Friday, August 19th, 2022

Norah Vincent, author.

Her first book, Self-Made Man: One Woman’s Year Disguised as a Man (affiliate link) was about the 18 months she spent passing as a man.

But the book was no joke. It was a nuanced and thoughtful work. It drew comparisons to “Black Like Me,” the white journalist John Howard Griffin’s 1961 book about his experiences passing as a Black man in the segregated Deep South. David Kamp, writing in The New York Times Book Review, called Ms. Vincent’s book “rich and audacious.”

Her second book, Voluntary Madness: Lost and Found in the Mental Healthcare System (affiliate link) was about the time she spent in various mental hospitals after suffering a breakdown during her time posing as a man.

…While in treatment, she said, she thought to herself: “Jesus, what a freak show. All I have to do is take notes and I’m Balzac.”
What transpired was less tidy than “Self Made Man,” however. As she toured mental institutions — a Bellevue-like urban one, a high-end facility in the Midwest and finally a New Age clinic — Ms. Vincent found herself increasingly mired in depression and juggling a cocktail of medications. The book’s conclusion did not endear her to reviewers, as she exhorted those in extremis like her to move on and “put your boots on.”

She also wrote Adeline: A Novel of Virginia Woolf (affiliate link). During the process of writing the book, she tried to kill herself.

Ms. Vincent was a lesbian. She was not transgender, or gender fluid. She was, however, interested in gender and identity. As a freelance contributor to The Los Angeles Times, The Village Voice and The Advocate, she had written essays on those topics that inflamed some readers.
She was a libertarian. She tilted at postmodernism and multiculturalism. She argued for the rights of fetuses and against identity politics, which she saw as infantilizing and irresponsible. She did not believe that transsexuals were members of the opposite sex after they had surgery and had taken hormones, a position that led one writer to label her a bigot. She was a contrarian, and proud of it.

She sounds like someone who would have been interesting to meet. She was 53: according to the obit, she died at a medically assisted suicide clinic in Switzerland.

Obit watch: August 16, 2022.

Tuesday, August 16th, 2022

Nicholas Evans, author. (The Horse Whisperer)

Michiko Kakutani, writing in The New York Times, called it “a sappy romance novel, gussied up with some sentimental claptrap about the emotional life of animals and lots of Walleresque hooey about men and women.”
“About the only thing missing,” she added, “is a picture of Fabio on the cover.”

In spite of that, it was a huge hit, as you know, Bob. Also, I have to give mad props to the guy for being a survivor: he had melanoma while writing the book. And then, in 2008…

He and his second wife, Charlotte Gordon Cumming, a singer-songwriter, were staying with her brother, Alastair Gordon Cumming, and his wife, Lady Louisa, in the Scottish Highlands. They had picked and enjoyed a meal of wild mushrooms, which turned out to be poisonous. All four became sick, and their kidneys soon failed. Mr. Evans, Ms. Gordon Cumming and her brother required years of dialysis — and new kidneys. Mr. Evans’s daughter Lauren donated one of hers. Ms. Gordon Cumming was offered the kidney of her son’s best friend’s mother, and Mr. Cumming’s came from a patient who had died. Mr. Evans became a patron of a kidney donation charity. Ms. Gordon Cumming made a documentary film about her experience.

…

His reviews grew more positive with every book. Nonetheless, he tended to avoid reading them.

Pete Carril, basketball coach at Princeton. He never won a championship, but his teams played well.

His record at Princeton was 514-261, with 13 Ivy titles, 11 appearances in the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s championship tournament, two in the National Invitation Tournament (his team won in 1975) and only one losing season. Fourteen of his Princeton teams led the nation in defense. In 1997, he was elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass.
He emphasized a deliberate off-the-ball offense that kept players passing the ball and setting screens until a shooter was open or someone broke free to the basket in a patented backdoor play. The scores were low, and no matter how much opponents prepared, they were frustrated and often lost their poise.

…

Every year at his first practice session, Carril made the same speech to his players.
“I know about your academic load,” he said. “I know how tough it is to give up the time to play here, but let’s get one thing straight. In my book, there is no such thing as an Ivy League player. When you come out of that locker room and step across that white line, you are basketball players, period.”
But he also told his players:
“Princeton is a special place with some very special professors. It is something special to be taught by one of them. But you are not special just because you happen to go here.”

Obit watch: August 11, 2022.

Thursday, August 11th, 2022

Gary C. Schroen, CIA officer.

He was most famous for leading the first team of CIA people – probably the first team of Americans, period – into Afghanistan after 9/11.

Mr. Schroen selected seven men and gathered the weapons, outdoor gear and food they would need. The mission was code-named Jawbreaker. At least one representative from the military was supposed to join them, but the Pentagon pulled out of the mission at the last minute, declaring it too dangerous.
“There was no rescue force,” Bruce Riedel, a former C.I.A. case officer who worked frequently with Mr. Schroen, said in a phone interview. “If they got in trouble, there were no American troops to come rescue them.”
Before Mr. Schroen left for the mission, Mr. Black took him aside.
“I want to make it clear what your real job is,” Mr. Schroen recalled Mr. Black telling him. “Once the Taliban are broken, your job is to find bin Laden, kill him and bring his head back on dry ice.”

He also wrote a book, First In: An Insider’s Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan (affiliate link).

Darryl Hunt, bass player for the Pogues. I apologize for not inserting a musical interlude here, but I couldn’t find one that featured Mr. Hunt. If anybody has one, they are more than welcome to put a link in comments.

Obit watch: August 9, 2022.

Tuesday, August 9th, 2022

I’m thinking about no longer posting obits.

Recently, it seems like as soon as I post one obit watch, two or three or more people die. Clearly, correlation implies causality: my posting obits is making people die, therefore, if I stop posting, people will stop passing away. Right?

Well, it’s a theory, anyway.

David McCullough, historian and author. It is an odd thing: I enjoy history, but I mostly haven’t read any of McCullough’s work, and I don’t know why. (I say “mostly” because we did have some of those Reader’s Digest Condensed Books volumes around the house when I was very young, and one of them had The Johnstown Flood in it. I remember being fascinated, but more for the account of the actual flood itself than the human and engineering factors leading up to it. I should probably grab a copy of the real book somewhere and read it.)

Olivia Newton-John.

In 1970, she was asked to join a crudely manufactured group named Toomorrow, formed by the American producer Don Kirshner in an attempt to repeat his earlier success with the Monkees. Following his grand design, the group starred in a science-fiction film written for them and recorded its soundtrack. Both projects tanked.
“It was terrible, and I was terrible in it,” she later told The New York Times.

The name of the film is also “Toomorrow“, as best as I can tell. There’s a PAL DVD listed on Amazon as “currently unavailable”, but you can get the soundtrack on vinyl.

Lawrence emailed the obit for Lamont Dozier.

In collaboration with the brothers Brian and Eddie Holland, Mr. Dozier wrote songs for dozens of musical acts, but the trio worked most often with Martha and the Vandellas (“Heat Wave,” “Jimmy Mack”), the Four Tops (“Bernadette,” “I Can’t Help Myself”) and especially the Supremes (“You Can’t Hurry Love,” “Baby Love”). Between 1963 and 1972, the Holland-Dozier-Holland team was responsible for more than 80 singles that hit the Top 40 of the pop or R&B charts, including 15 songs that reached No. 1. “It was as if we were playing the lottery and winning every time,” Mr. Dozier wrote in his autobiography, “How Sweet It Is” (2019, written with Scott B. Bomar).

…

Sometimes he would have an idea for a song’s feel: He wrote the Four Tops’ “Reach Out I’ll Be There” thinking about Bob Dylan’s phrasing on “Like a Rolling Stone.” Sometimes he concocted an attention-grabbing gimmick, like the staccato guitars at the beginning of the Supremes’ “You Keep Me Hangin’ On” that evoked a radio news bulletin.
And sometimes Mr. Dozier uttered a real-life sentence that worked in song, as he did one night when he was in a Detroit motel with a girlfriend and a different girlfriend started pounding on the door. He pleaded with the interloper, “Stop, in the name of love” — and then realized the potency of what he had said. The Holland-Dozier-Holland team quickly hammered the sentence into a three-minute single, the Supremes’ “Stop! In the Name of Love.”

Obit watch: August 6, 2022.

Saturday, August 6th, 2022

Today’s kind of a run-down of people who aren’t as famous as I usually cover, but whose obits I find interesting in one way or another.

Dee Hock. He’s generally credited with having built the consortium that became Visa into what it is today.

As chief executive, he oversaw the development of the first electronic authorization system and the first interbank electronic clearing and settlement system. Banks would issue the cards, not Visa, and they were mandated to add the magnetic stripe to their cards.

Melissa Bank. The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing was a big deal (I never read it). Her follow-up book seems to have been well regarded, but didn’t do as well, and she was working on a third book when she died at 61.

Mary Ellin Barrett. She was one of Irving Berlin’s daughters, and wrote a book about her father (Irving Berlin: A Daughter’s Memoir).

In it, Ms. Barrett offered a new portrait of her father: droll, self-effacing, with an unspoken perfectionism that would doom him to bitterness in old age but that for four decades of maturity pushed him to dazzling artistic achievements, along with attentiveness to his family.
That has become a definitive insider’s view of Irving Berlin. The Times critic Stephen Holden credited Ms. Barrett with the ability to balance affection for her father with awareness of his flaws, and he called her book a “touching, wise, gracefully written memoir.”

Albert Woodfox, who spent 42 years in solitary at Angola.

Mr. Woodfox was placed in solitary confinement in 1972 after being accused of murdering Brent Miller, a 23-year-old corrections officer. A tangled legal ordeal ensued, including two convictions, both overturned, and three indictments stretching over four decades.
The case struck most commentators as problematic. No forensic evidence linked Mr. Woodfox to the crime, so the authorities’ argument depended on witnesses, who over time were discredited or proved unreliable.

Sid Jacobson, comics writer.

Obit watch: July 31, 2022.

Sunday, July 31st, 2022

Burt Metcalfe. In addition to his producing credits on “M*A*S*H”, he did some acting. Credits include “The Twilight Zone” (“The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street”), “Perry Mason”, “The Bridges at Toko-Ri”, “The Outer Limits”, and the “12 O’Clock High” series. Producing credits also include “AfterMASH”.

Stuart Woods, another one of those big-shot thriller authors.

Mr. Woods, who was also a swashbuckling licensed private jet plane pilot and trans-Atlantic sailor with homes in New York, Maine and Florida, tacked into his career as a novelist somewhat haphazardly.

…

He later moved to Ireland, where he began to write his first novel. But he was soon diverted when he became enamored with sailing and began racing. In 1976, in a race from Plymouth, England, to Newport, R.I., that took him 45 days, he finished about in the middle of the field.
He then wrote a nonfiction account of the race, “Blue Water, Green Skipper,” and, after returning to Georgia, sold the American rights to W.W. Norton & Company. It also agreed to publish “Chiefs,” the thriller that Mr. Woods had begun eight years earlier.

He was another one of those guys whose books I saw all the time on the rack at the grocery store, but I’ve never actually read any of them. Chiefs sounds like it might be a good place to start…

Mary Alice, actress. She won a Tony for “Fences”, an Emmy for ““I’ll Fly Away”, and appeared in “The Matrix Revolutions” among other credits.