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writesdave's reviews
360 reviews
With the distance of a few years, I don't buy Mitchie's assertions that he didn't know these guys were on the take. For all the time he spent with them, he had to know something and it was his duty to report it. That, plus his yen for embellishing things in his other books (and apparently in his column writing) call the plausibility seriously into question. The rating owes largely to the access he had with his subjects, a hard thing to do in any era of journalism – not that the Fab Five WEREN'T open books, anyway.
My perspective is a bit different because I lived more or less in this culture for three falls. I saw it firsthand as a sports writer and can vouch for Bissinger's faithful account of his year spent in it. It wasn't a life-changing experience, this book, but I'll never look at sport the same way again. You can't help but ponder the role sport plays in our world after reading how grades get changed to keep athletes eligible, and attendance zones get gerrymandered to funnel the best athletes to certain schools. And that's a good thing.
This is the book every sports writer wishes he could write.
This is the book every sports writer wishes he could write.
Just a fun, breezy read — a beach read, if you will. A 50-something picking up a couple of dubious hitchhikers on the lam in upstate NY from drug dealers in the South stretches the suspension of disbelief when our wealthy protagonist sort-of-doesn't hook-up with the hot 23-year-old girl. I knew it wasn't Philip Roth but it kept me interested enough to see it through.
Oh yeah, the protagonist is a Syracuse grad and the story treads some familiar ground, probably why this advance copy ended up on my desk eight years ago.
Oh yeah, the protagonist is a Syracuse grad and the story treads some familiar ground, probably why this advance copy ended up on my desk eight years ago.
It gets four stars for Price's well-developed characters and his stunning proficiency in writing dialogue. I mean, Salinger captured perfectly conversations with a teen on the brink, and Wolfe's ear for conversation puts you as a fly on the wall, but Price deserves mention here, too. Every TV interrogation you've ever seen lands in Price's writing of two cops chatting with a person of interest, a restaurant host debriefing his staff, two hoods casing out a potential mark. He gets right the disaffected dialect of the "too-cool," too; no need for New York eye dialect.
Price also juggles any number of tentacles of stories, prompting you to wonder how they'll all come together. But that's how it ends. The ending was a little too tidy for me, though "Clockers" ends somewhat the same only with a better setup. Most of the time I enjoy detailed descriptions of different locales but I found myself lost at times in Price's Lower Manhattan.
Still, I don't normally read crime novels and I only hipped myself to Price a couple years back after watching "The Wire." I found it an enjoyable and fast-paced read (notwithstanding the two months it took me to finish). I agree that this might make a hell of a screenplay. You game, Richard?
Price also juggles any number of tentacles of stories, prompting you to wonder how they'll all come together. But that's how it ends. The ending was a little too tidy for me, though "Clockers" ends somewhat the same only with a better setup. Most of the time I enjoy detailed descriptions of different locales but I found myself lost at times in Price's Lower Manhattan.
Still, I don't normally read crime novels and I only hipped myself to Price a couple years back after watching "The Wire." I found it an enjoyable and fast-paced read (notwithstanding the two months it took me to finish). I agree that this might make a hell of a screenplay. You game, Richard?
Just a fun batch of short stories about contract killers. One of them involves icing a pet lemur, in another the mark tries to talk the killer out of fulfilling the job. Wish I could write something like this; then I wouldn't think I could pull off such a job.
