Below are excerpts from Michael Pastore’s review in Epublishers Weekly. “Three things about this novel impressed me. Real settings (D.C. by someone who knows it intimately), and real events…are skillfully interweaved with the fictional characters and plot. The book’s women are especially likable: they radiate that screwball-comedy pizzazz a la Roz Russell’s Hildy Johnson in […]
Read MoreLike the old whalers
The Solomon Scandals is a little like a novel that a 19th century writer might have written on whaling. In some ways it’s a tribute to a vanishing way of life—to the print culture as manifested in daily journalism. No, paper books are not disappearing tomorrow. But newspapers of a certain size are on the […]
Read More‘Page-turner’? Or ‘page-tapper’? Just what do you call an e-novel you like?
In a review of The Solomon Scandals for the Washington City Paper, Ted Scheinman said, “It’s hard to call an e-book a page-turner—novels like The Solomon Scandals require a new word.” Fair enough. I can live with such uncertainty if need be. But wait. Kirk Biglione over at Medialoper (photo) has come up with a […]
Read MoreThe IRS as fodder for David Foster Wallace and me
In my little overview of D.C. fiction, I quoted Jeffrey Charis-Carlson, a specialist in this area: "It takes a great novel to make bureaucracy interesting." But how about writing about individual bureaucrats? That’s what I did with the love interest of Jonathan Stone, my reporter protagonist in The Solomon Scandals. Margo Danielson is a young […]
Read MoreA ‘snarky’ critique of modern humor? What would Saul Alinsky have thought? Or Lewis Carroll?
Several kinds of snarks exist in Lewis Carroll‘s poem The Hunting of The Snark (free online). Certain of these creatures bite; others scratch. David Denby, author of Snark: Polemic in Seven Fits, may been thinking of the teeth and claws when he titled his book. I look forward to catching up with Snark even if […]
Read MoreScandals available for iPhone via Fictionwise / Stanza store
If you own an iPhone or iPod Touch, you can buy The Solomon Scandals at the Fictionwise/Stanza store. Within Stanza on your iPhone, just go to to the Online Catalog, then choose Fictionwise. The latter screen contains instructions. You can search for The Solomon Scandals by name. The screenshot gives you an idea of what you’ll […]
Read MoreWill politicians grow more crooked if newspapers dwindle in number and influence?
How good are newspapers as corruption-fighters or -preventers? As noted in The Brass Check, a Chicago Tribune reporter actually tried to discredit The Jungle, Upton Sinclair‘s fictionalized depiction of the Chicago Stockyards. Fairly or not, one survey found that four-fifths of Americans do not believe most of what’s in the New York Times—perhaps not so […]
Read MoreCorrections: Any to add to our list for the next printing?
Whoops. Ford Maverick automobiles existed in 1969, but the first model year was 1970. Salary figures on Pages 115-116 of the trade paperback edition contradict each other. And on page 157, there’s a reference to “Eddie LaGassie” rather than “Ernie LaGassie.” Those are among the glitches that made it into the first edition of The […]
Read MoreHeart troubles: Fact-checking in the cardiac ICU, post-bypass
Cardiac worries arise in several places in The Solomon Scandals. My father’s heart attack was one of the defining moments of his life and even mine. Scandals is fiction, not a memoir. But his attack took place in his early 40s when he was about to show us a movie, just as reporter Jon Stone’s […]
Read MoreScandals’s origins
Blame The Solomon Scandals on my lack of ESP. Oh, to have read the minds of the people whose lives and deeds helped inspire the novel! Just why did the late Sen. Abraham Ribicoff end up in the 1960s with a $20,000 investment in a building that the CIA moved into? What were Ribicoff and […]
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