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duparker's review against another edition
3.0
2.5 Stars. I always forget that I like the idea of James Ellroy books. I like the noir style and plot of the book. The twist and turn and creative inclusion of Jack Kennedy, was a good one. That said, it was not enjoyable for the most part. It really was a struggle
nikita_barsukov's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
Perfectly produced audiobook. Sound effects, full cast, sound quality - perfect, full stop.
Perfect hard-boiled noir, and a pseudo-history. Doom and gloom throught, everyone is weird in its own way. And what an atmospheric text!
Perfect hard-boiled noir, and a pseudo-history. Doom and gloom throught, everyone is weird in its own way. And what an atmospheric text!
Content Warnings
Graphic: Sexual content, Torture, Violence, Racial slurs, and Murder
Moderate: Alcohol, Dementia, Antisemitism, and Cursing
mackgordon's review
informative
mysterious
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.75
bwky85's review
5.0
Character development was amazing. Weak characters become strong ones and vice versa. Great dialogue and use of historical figures. Would recommend to anyone.
tittypete's review
5.0
Man, there’s three guys who are entwined with a bunch of shit. Creepy Howard Hughes who hates the Kennedys, Jimmy Hoffa and his mob buddies Sam Giancana and Johnny Roselli, other mob guys like Santo Trafficante and Carlos Marcello who are running heroin, cuban expats who hate Castro. A bunch of shit. These three guys do a bunch of dirty shit around all this shit. People get their asses kicked, dudes get their heads blown off, there are homosexual sorta gangsters that do homophobic comedy routines about Jack and Bobby at Knights of Columbus smokers. This book has it all. Everyone dies pretty much. It’s rad. Pete Bondurant and Kemper Boyd are great characters.
dantastic's review
4.0
The fates of three men, Ward Littell, Kemper Boyd, and Pete Bondurant, are forever entwined in the era of mobsters, Fidel Castro, and the Kennedys.
Yeah, that's not much of a teaser but there's no quick way to sum this one up.
American Tabloid takes key figures of the late 1950s and early 1960s and pisses all over them. Ellroy is back to the trinity of sin structure that worked so well in The Big Nowhere and LA Confidential. His three leads, Ward Littell, Kemper Boyd, and Pete Bondurant, rise and fall as they influence key historical events.
Politics makes strange bedfellows and Kemper Boyd is in bed with most of them. At various points of the book, he's linked with the FBI, CIA, the Kennedies, and probably other groups I can't remember at this moment. He's a wheeling-dealing son of a bitch. He was easily the most compelling of the three leads. Ward Littell started off as kind of a weakling and wound up being the biggest bad ass of the three. He also lost the most before winding up on top. Pete Bondurant struck me as the most pragmatic for most of the book and I'm hoping he'll be back for the sequel.
Ellroy doesn't pull any punches in this. The clipped sentence structure is in full effect, so much so that it's a little overwhelming at times. I still dug it. He also isn't afraid to cast aside the myth of the Kennedys being great men. JFK and RFK both come off as tools. J. Edgar Hoover is almost the Dudley Smith of the piece, a master strategist who never really takes the fall.
It was great how Littell, Boyd, and Bondurant were interwoven into the sagas of Jimmy Hoffa, Howard Hughes, and the Kennedys, linking all of them together into a tapestry of lies, drugs, and death. American Tabloid is just as bleak as the LA Quartet in its own way. While Ellroy's Hollywood is a cesspool, his political world is even worse, a shit and vomit-flecked abattoir where everyone is in bed with everyone else and no one can be trusted. By the end, I didn't think any of the three leads would survive to the second book.
American Tabloid was a dark and exhausting read. By the time I was done, I felt like Kemper Boyd had done a number on me with brass knuckles. 4.5 out of 5 stars.
Yeah, that's not much of a teaser but there's no quick way to sum this one up.
American Tabloid takes key figures of the late 1950s and early 1960s and pisses all over them. Ellroy is back to the trinity of sin structure that worked so well in The Big Nowhere and LA Confidential. His three leads, Ward Littell, Kemper Boyd, and Pete Bondurant, rise and fall as they influence key historical events.
Politics makes strange bedfellows and Kemper Boyd is in bed with most of them. At various points of the book, he's linked with the FBI, CIA, the Kennedies, and probably other groups I can't remember at this moment. He's a wheeling-dealing son of a bitch. He was easily the most compelling of the three leads. Ward Littell started off as kind of a weakling and wound up being the biggest bad ass of the three. He also lost the most before winding up on top. Pete Bondurant struck me as the most pragmatic for most of the book and I'm hoping he'll be back for the sequel.
Ellroy doesn't pull any punches in this. The clipped sentence structure is in full effect, so much so that it's a little overwhelming at times. I still dug it. He also isn't afraid to cast aside the myth of the Kennedys being great men. JFK and RFK both come off as tools. J. Edgar Hoover is almost the Dudley Smith of the piece, a master strategist who never really takes the fall.
It was great how Littell, Boyd, and Bondurant were interwoven into the sagas of Jimmy Hoffa, Howard Hughes, and the Kennedys, linking all of them together into a tapestry of lies, drugs, and death. American Tabloid is just as bleak as the LA Quartet in its own way. While Ellroy's Hollywood is a cesspool, his political world is even worse, a shit and vomit-flecked abattoir where everyone is in bed with everyone else and no one can be trusted. By the end, I didn't think any of the three leads would survive to the second book.
American Tabloid was a dark and exhausting read. By the time I was done, I felt like Kemper Boyd had done a number on me with brass knuckles. 4.5 out of 5 stars.
barts_books's review against another edition
5.0
A blistering epic that's both shocking and thoroughly entertaining. Ellroy takes the Kennedy legend and flips it on its head whilst portraying the late 50s mafia underworld, shakedown artists, hitman and the rich and immensely powerful of the era.
actuallycurtis's review
1.0
Reprehensible and inept.
The characters are almost entirely identical: They talk the same, they think the same, they all stumble through the plot in the same way: numb, cocksure, and without any discernible motivation for any of their actions. This book lacks even the cookie-cutter archetypes of a standard noir, which it so clearly wants to be. Instead, each character simply goes from crime to crime with no particular purpose. They are devoid of morals, but Ellroy has failed to give anything interesting to make up for that. They seem to care a little about money, but not particularly. Why do things happen? Who the fuck knows. Things happen, and the characters consistently pat themselves on the back for their actions, but it's all meaningless. Near the end of the book, there is a clumsy attempt at giving each of the main characters a motivation, but by that point it is so late, and so much has happened, that it no longer matters.
The plot is essentially a shaggy dog story. Alliances shift and twist, but not towards any particular goal. Characters frequently have to repeat to themselves and each other exactly what is happening, because the plot changes so often. Characters will instantly offer up indiscretions to people they have just met for the sole purpose of either re-explaining the current plot or to give another character some leverage, to force yet another shift in allegiances and power. Every plot point is cartoonish, an over-the-top attempt at shocking the reader via sex (typically homosexual sex) or violence. It quickly gets boring.
I'll give Ellroy the benefit of the doubt and assume that the narrator is not Ellroy, but simply a character whom we never meet. In that case, the narrator is a racist, homophobic, fumbling writer. Although he tries to write in a Chandler-esque hard-boiled noir style, with short, choppy sentences, he isn't an adept enough writer to pull it off. Sentences end up limp and vague, with ambiguous pronouns and misplaced modifiers littered throughout. The only reason this doesn't completely stall any forward momentum is that Ellroy tells, rather than shows. He describes little actual action, and instead has the characters tell and retell each other what has happened, or is happening.
However, even assuming the narrator is not Ellroy, there are two problems that fall purely in Ellroy's lap: the dialogue and the document inserts. Every character in this book speaks in the exact same way. The dialogue of Pete Bondurant, a gigantic French-Canadian tough, and the dialogue of Kemper Boyd, a highly educated FBI agent from Tennessee, are both interchangeable. Ellroy is obsessed with regional dialects (characters often remark on the accents or dialects of other characters), and yet Ellroy has a tin ear for human speech. The only time Ellroy changes any dialogue at all is for his Jewish characters, who throw in an absurd number of Yiddish terms into their conversations. Then, there are the document inserts: They read like more Ellroy, rather than any sort of official document.
This isn't a novel, it's a conspiracy theory, and as such it shares the problems of most conspiracy theories. It is sprawling, tying in every conceivable person in the area with no rhyme or reason. Any famous person from the late 50s and early 60s shows up here. Ellroy's favorite tactic is to name-drop a celebrity and then casually mention what sexual deviancy they were guilty of. Ellroy is obsessed with certain details, such as the makes and models of firearms, but knows nothing about the other elements, such as what happens when someone gets shot, or when a toaster is thrown into a sink, et cetera. The few action scenes in the book are therefore rushed through, with ludicrous all caps lines such as "The Molotov hit the pavement AND DID NOT SHATTER."
The book also shares the biggest problem of most conspiracy theories: a basic lack of understanding of how humans behave. It treats each person as essentially identical, a person to put in place, as if the plot were a chess puzzle, and you merely need to worry about getting each piece in the right location at the right time, and it doesn't matter how or why they got there.
This book is garbage.
The characters are almost entirely identical: They talk the same, they think the same, they all stumble through the plot in the same way: numb, cocksure, and without any discernible motivation for any of their actions. This book lacks even the cookie-cutter archetypes of a standard noir, which it so clearly wants to be. Instead, each character simply goes from crime to crime with no particular purpose. They are devoid of morals, but Ellroy has failed to give anything interesting to make up for that. They seem to care a little about money, but not particularly. Why do things happen? Who the fuck knows. Things happen, and the characters consistently pat themselves on the back for their actions, but it's all meaningless. Near the end of the book, there is a clumsy attempt at giving each of the main characters a motivation, but by that point it is so late, and so much has happened, that it no longer matters.
The plot is essentially a shaggy dog story. Alliances shift and twist, but not towards any particular goal. Characters frequently have to repeat to themselves and each other exactly what is happening, because the plot changes so often. Characters will instantly offer up indiscretions to people they have just met for the sole purpose of either re-explaining the current plot or to give another character some leverage, to force yet another shift in allegiances and power. Every plot point is cartoonish, an over-the-top attempt at shocking the reader via sex (typically homosexual sex) or violence. It quickly gets boring.
I'll give Ellroy the benefit of the doubt and assume that the narrator is not Ellroy, but simply a character whom we never meet. In that case, the narrator is a racist, homophobic, fumbling writer. Although he tries to write in a Chandler-esque hard-boiled noir style, with short, choppy sentences, he isn't an adept enough writer to pull it off. Sentences end up limp and vague, with ambiguous pronouns and misplaced modifiers littered throughout. The only reason this doesn't completely stall any forward momentum is that Ellroy tells, rather than shows. He describes little actual action, and instead has the characters tell and retell each other what has happened, or is happening.
However, even assuming the narrator is not Ellroy, there are two problems that fall purely in Ellroy's lap: the dialogue and the document inserts. Every character in this book speaks in the exact same way. The dialogue of Pete Bondurant, a gigantic French-Canadian tough, and the dialogue of Kemper Boyd, a highly educated FBI agent from Tennessee, are both interchangeable. Ellroy is obsessed with regional dialects (characters often remark on the accents or dialects of other characters), and yet Ellroy has a tin ear for human speech. The only time Ellroy changes any dialogue at all is for his Jewish characters, who throw in an absurd number of Yiddish terms into their conversations. Then, there are the document inserts: They read like more Ellroy, rather than any sort of official document.
This isn't a novel, it's a conspiracy theory, and as such it shares the problems of most conspiracy theories. It is sprawling, tying in every conceivable person in the area with no rhyme or reason. Any famous person from the late 50s and early 60s shows up here. Ellroy's favorite tactic is to name-drop a celebrity and then casually mention what sexual deviancy they were guilty of. Ellroy is obsessed with certain details, such as the makes and models of firearms, but knows nothing about the other elements, such as what happens when someone gets shot, or when a toaster is thrown into a sink, et cetera. The few action scenes in the book are therefore rushed through, with ludicrous all caps lines such as "The Molotov hit the pavement AND DID NOT SHATTER."
The book also shares the biggest problem of most conspiracy theories: a basic lack of understanding of how humans behave. It treats each person as essentially identical, a person to put in place, as if the plot were a chess puzzle, and you merely need to worry about getting each piece in the right location at the right time, and it doesn't matter how or why they got there.
This book is garbage.