Archive for the 'books' Category
Backtracking
I started on my reading project awhile before this blog & I read quite a few books from 1946 and 1947 that I didn’t write any quick reviews for. At this point I just want to call attention to some of my favorites that weren’t covered. My favorite U.S. books of 1946 Eugene O’Neill- The [...]
Read More..>>Les Baxter- Music Out of the Moon
33 RPM vinyl LPs hit the market in 1948. They would eventually conceptually revolutionize the making of music, allowing for longer presentations of material (from around 25 to 50 minutes) than 78 or 45 RPM singles or EPs. In the early days of the LP, the format was used maximally by Classical Music labels–which were [...]
Read More..>>The Asphalt Jungle by W.R. Burnett
Originally published in 1949. A heist novel masquerading as a social novel–this book opens with chapters on police corruption, police/media relations, and the honorable work that cops do while responding to the never-ending reports of domestic violence and petty theft. It then takes a sudden turn to focus exclusively on an assortment of not-quite-low lives [...]
Read More..>>The Man With the Golden Arm by Nelson Algren
As though he was sending hints to Hollywood casting agents while writing, Nelson Algren peppered The Man With the Golden Arm with references to Frank Sinatra. In the late 1940s, while this book was being written, Sinatra was still seen as a light weight, though tremendously popular, crooner. In the next decade his work would [...]
Read More..>>The Young Lions by Irwin Shaw
Published in 1948. Another of the late 1940s wave of WWII books by first time novelists, and this is a big one. It’s often paired with Norman Mailer’s slightly shorter debut The Naked & the Dead, but it lacks the sensationalism or made-up curse words, though not the ambition. The novel begins before the war [...]
Read More..>>The Hucksters by Frederic Wakeman
Originally published in 1946. The Hucksters was amongst the top ten bestselling novels of 1946, and its success initiated a mini-trend of fiction about advertising (Madison Avenue no doubt employed any number of aspiring novelists who saw their chance to upload their bosses’ quirks into the public consciousness). In fact, a year later when Herman [...]
Read More..>>Henry Kuttner- Two Novels
Fury, published 1947 The Time-Axis, published 1948 Like much pulp science fiction of the 1940s, the novels and stories of Henry Kuttner and his wife C.L. Moore were written at high speed. Some top genre writers of the era used to boast that they never revised their work. This often makes for some dated and [...]
Read More..>>Ape & Essence by Aldous Huxley
Originally published in 1948. Huxley opens this philosophical novel with two Hollywood studio execs talking shop and digging through some slush pile scripts that have fallen off a garbage truck. One of these scripts is “Ape & Essence” by a Mr. William Tallis–who, we soon learn when the execs try to track him down, has [...]
Read More..>>John Franklin Bardin Omnibus Part One
John Franklin Bardin Omnibus Part One I knew little of John Franklin Bardin when I found this 1976 omnibus at a Mystery bookshop. I had only seen his 1948 novel Devil Take the Blue-Tail Fly (included here) on several lists of the best mystery novels of the 20th century. The cashier told me that Bardin’s [...]
Read More..>>The Fifteen Weeks, by Joseph M. Jones
The Fifteen Weeks (February 21-June 5, 1947), by Joseph M. Jones Published in 1955 A behind-the-scenes account of the Truman’s decision to take up the mantle of world leadership from the crumbling British Empire in the face of Stalin’s moves to turn Greece, Turkey and Iran into Soviet satellites, and how the main administration players, [...]
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