What was Sy Solomon—the D.C. real estate tycoon in The Solomon Scandals—-doing on the book’s blue cover shown here? Picking up a refrigerator with one hand? Or a gargantuan keyboard? Or plunking down a high-rise in a favorite location, with a little help from well-bribed zoning officials? The correct answer is the last one. But […]
Read MoreWashington Post iPhone app panned by gutsy WaPo technology writer: Symptom of worse woes?
Update, March 19: Hooray! The Post app in its current form now lets you change type size more gracefully. Tap the screen while reading a story and you’ll see the options. – D.R. Seymour Solomon, the real estate magnate in my D.C. newspaper novel, is among the Washington Telegram’s biggest advertisers and pals around with […]
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 MoreSolomon for real?
Sy Solomon, the real estate millionaire in The Solomon Scandals, never existed. Like many of the characters in my novel, he is a composite. The late Charles E. Smith, however, the founder of the construction company of the same name, would have been the most like Solomon. He and associates controlled at least $150 million […]
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