Undiminished by Decadence
I grew up in the 1960s and ’70s and I’m happy to report that, for the most part, television and mainstream cinema today are orders of magnitude better than they were in my salad days.
Get Ready for the Return of the Abortion Novel
The abortion novels that proliferated in the late 1960s were filled with characters who are forced by carelessness and circumstance to make the most agonizing of personal choices.
The Western Reinvented. Again.
It has been 30 years since a Western last won the Best Picture Oscar at the Academy Awards. That was in 1992 and the film was Unforgiven, directed by Clint Eastwood, who also starred in it alongside Morgan Freeman, Gene Hackman, and Richard Harris. On Sunday, Jane Campion’s The
Heading Into the Atom Age—Pat Frank’s Perpetually Relevant Novels
NOTE: The following essay contains spoilers. British journalist Ed West recently published an excellent essay entitled “Children of Men Is Really Happening,” in which he tied together the shrinking fertility rate wreaking demographic havoc across the globe and the Russian invasion of the Ukraine, which is also wreaking havoc across
Authentic Immediacy—A Tribute to the Political Fiction of Frederick Forsyth
When the Berlin Wall fell and the USSR collapsed, one might have assumed that Cold War fiction would become irrelevant. That hasn’t turned out to be the case with Frederick Forsyth’s work. Consider, for instance, this passage from his 1979 novel, The Devil’s Alternative: The Union of
Dominick Dunne, Writer of Wrongs
The success of the HBO TV series Succession and the recent feature film House of Gucci are proof that the wretched excesses of the fabulously wealthy never lose their audience appeal. Nobody knew that better than the late novelist and journalist Dominick Dunne. He spent the last 30 years of
How D.B. Cooper and the Golden Age of Air Piracy Changed Aviation Fiction
Frank Sinatra's “Come Fly With Me” was the best-selling album in the United States for five weeks in 1958, but the irony of its popularity (or, perhaps, the source of its aspirational appeal) is that practically none of us could take up the offer to "glide, starry-eyed" on an aircraft
High White Notes: The Rise and Fall of Gonzo Journalism—A Review
A review of High White Notes: The Rise and Fall of Gonzo Journalism by David S. Wills. Beatdom Books, 555 pages. (November 2021) I. In High White Notes, his riveting new biography of Hunter S. Thompson, journalist David S. Wills describes Thompson as America’s first rock star reporter and
