Air travel was fairly new in 1959; many still lacked the nerve or the money to go up in a plane. What better way to promote round-the-world adventure than in the company of the man who invented James Bond?
This may be the idea behind this pleasant curiosity and footnote in the career of Ian Fleming, as envisioned first by the editors of the Sunday Times and, years later, the publisher of the Bond thrillers. The title hastens to assure you some really exciting places await you inside.
Do they?
The more I read Shakespeare’s history plays, the more I feel I am watching a debate between the author and another Renaissance legend, Niccolò Machiavelli, over what constitutes effective leadership.
Is it better to be loved or feared? Is religion a useful prop, or something more meaningful and lasting? Is there such a thing as being too ruthless, or can one only err on the side of mercy?
Time and again, Machiavelli clearly states one thing; Shakespeare gently suggests quite another. Take Shakespeare’s King John.
When it comes to DNA analysis, Robert A. Caro was way ahead of the field in 1982 when he identified a specific human genome for ruthlessness and dubbed it “the Bunton strain.”
A line of legendarily cold and selfish Texans, the Bunton family left a mark on their lineal descendent Lyndon Baines Johnson. Along with the unforgivingly harsh environment of the Lone Star State’s Hill Country, the Bunton strain formed LBJ in Caro’s telling to become one of the nastiest SOBs ever to win his nation’s highest office.
Life is a subjective, scattershot experience lived in the moment. How can a fiction writer present this on the page?
Most don’t, understanding reading is enough of a challenge without subjecting their audience to real-time fog of war. Others, most famously James Joyce, employ a method known as “stream of consciousness,” of an endlessly percolating series of wildly disparate thought bubbles.
Then there’s James Ellroy, who seems to craft his plots with butcher paper and Post-It notes, and shoves that into his typewriter wholesale for readers to dope out. Life comes at you fast and hard; so does Ellroy. At least that’s how White Jazz goes down.
