For The Solomon Scandals I created a fictitious Virginia county with fictitious crooks. Across the Potomac River in Maryland, I didn’t bother with all the niceties. I just called the county by its real name of “Prince George’s,” and my reporter-narrator told of driving past “row after row of grubby garden apartments—the legacy of developers […]
Read MoreWashington’s growing power over the rest of us: ‘Solomonic’ in the wrong way?
The Solomon Scandals vividly depicts a city of lobbyists, crooked lawyers and other manipulators. Herbert Stone, father of Jonathan Stone, the reporter protagonist, works for a provider of PR and “public affairs” services. It’s “a nice, safe pseudo-Civil Service, so to speak, for careerists keen on abetting the more obnoxious of the corporate profiteers.” But […]
Read MoreCrooked politicians mean tumbling buildings—in countries from Egypt to China, not just U.S.
In The Solomon Scandals, my Washington newspaper novel, hundreds of IRS and CIA bureaucrats die in the collapse of a rickety high-rise. Bribery involved? Of course. So how much Real Life is there in this scenario? Just type building collapse corruption into Google and see such headlines as: Corrupt work cited in Egypt building collapse […]
Read MoreTwo Chicagoans: President Bullard vis-a-vis Obama
Both are self-made men from Chicago—intellectual politicians with law degrees. And like me, both are on the liberal side. No doubt, a few superficial parallels exist between my fictitious Eddy Bullard and President-elect Barack Obama. And it isn’t even deliberate. Thirty years ago when I conceived The Solomon Scandals, President Bullard held a law degree […]
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