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. Kevin Mims 5 May 2022 · 26 min read
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 Kevin Mims 25 Mar 2022 · 9 min read
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 Kevin Mims 22 Mar 2022 · 11 min read
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 Kevin Mims 18 Feb 2022 · 13 min read
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 Kevin Mims 11 Dec 2021 · 14 min read
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& Kevin Mims 24 Nov 2021 · 33 min read
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 Kevin Mims 11 Nov 2021 · 25 min read
Bad News—A Review A review of Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy by Batya Ungar-Sargon. Encounter, 312 pages. (October 2021) In Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy, Batya Ungar-Sargon, the deputy opinion editor of Newsweek (where, full disclosure, she has published two of my essays), argues that elite left-wing Kevin Mims 25 Oct 2021 · 20 min read
In Praise of the Novelization—Pop Fiction's Least Reputable Genre This month brings us the release of Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. No, not the film. That came out in 2019. But now HarperCollins is publishing a novelization, written by Tarantino himself, and based on the earlier film. This particular type of fiction—the bastard offspring Kevin Mims 28 Jun 2021 · 20 min read
Remembering John Ball, the Writer Who Gave Us Virgil Tibbs Sidney Poitier, who retired from acting 20 years ago, turned in many unforgettable screen performances over a career that spanned the entire second half of the 20th century. But his best known is almost certainly his portrayal of police officer Virgil Tibbs, the protagonist of Norman Jewison’s 1967 film Kevin Mims 27 Apr 2021 · 20 min read
Before 'Groundhog Day': The Time-Loop Novel that Started It All On March 4th, the Ringer, a website that covers pop culture, featured an article entitled “We’re in a Time Loop of Time-Loop Movies.” Similar articles have appeared in many other pop-culture venues of late. Suddenly, time-loop stories seem to be everywhere. This month Hulu began streaming director Joe Carnahan’ Kevin Mims 18 Mar 2021 · 11 min read
Beating Up Boomer Reviews of A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America by Bruce Cannon Gibney, Hachette, 465 pages (March 2018) OK Boomer, Let’s Talk: How My Generation Got Left Behind by Jill Filipovic, Atria/One Signal, 336 pages (August 2020) Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom Kevin Mims 20 Jan 2021 · 16 min read
Ray Russell's Incubus: A Lost Gem from America's Twentieth Decade Hard as it might be to believe, the years that stretched from roughly 1967 through the bicentennial year of 1976 brought even more foment, outrage, unrest, and upheaval to America than the most recent decade has managed. The escalation of the Vietnam War, the student protests against that war, the Kevin Mims 13 Jan 2021 · 15 min read
Journalism's Ivory Towers In a recent essay entitled “The Resentment That Never Sleeps,” New York Times columnist Thomas B. Edsall explains how a lowering of social status among non-college-educated white Americans has increased that demographic’s anxiety and helped fuel the populism that made possible Donald Trump’s rise to the presidency. Reporters Kevin Mims 15 Dec 2020 · 10 min read
The Hustler and the Queen NOTE: This essay contains spoilers. The surprise success of the Netflix miniseries The Queen’s Gambit has brought me a great deal of delight—I’m a longtime fan of both the novel and its author, Walter Tevis. Just this summer, I wrote an essay about all the great American Kevin Mims 4 Dec 2020 · 14 min read
