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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GSA: A checkered past
A variant of a Shakespearian quote shows up on the base of a statue outside the National Archives, once within the domain of the General Services Administration: “What is past is prologue.” Why have so many scandals broken out at the government’s business agency over the years? And will we see more of them in […]
Read MoreDavid Rothman’s No Frills Home Page (Archived Item)
DAVID ROTHMAN’S NO-FRILLS HOME PAGE TeleRead Home Page | Arthur C. Clarke Chapter from The Silicon Jungle Harry Rothman Eulogy Thanks for dropping by my No-Frills Home Page. Alas, many of the links are out of date since this page goes back to the 1990s and I haven’t heard time to update it. My latest book is The […]
Read MoreScandals as a Northern Virginia Jewish novel
Jonathan Stone as an Afro-American? Because Jewish protagonists are such old hat? So suggested a buddy of mine—not an anti-semite or self-hating Jewish, but an intelligent man of the observant, practicing variety. May I respectfully disagree? In fact, The Solomon Scandals in some respects is as much a Northern Virginia Jewish novel as a newspaper […]
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 MoreThe ACTUAL Telegram?
A friend and I had just seen a movie with a soft-spoken and obscenity-free editor, a balding Boy Scout of the city room. Now she wondered if my novel hadn’t sinned in making such a wild character out of George McWilliams, editor at the fictitious Washington Telegram. Her message couldn’t have been clearer. Ben Bradlee, […]
Read MoreSolomon for real?
Update, April 10: A long essay in the back of the second edition of The Solomon Scandals discusses the Smith family’s government leases and other ethics-related issues in D.C., including the Clarence Thomas controversies. Sy Solomon, the real estate millionaire in The Solomon Scandals, never existed. Like many of the characters in my novel, he […]
Read MoreSen. Ribicoff’s spooky investment
Sen. Abraham Ribicoff, the late Connecticut senator who also served in President John F. Kennedy’s cabinet, secretly held a $20,000 investment in a GSA-leased building that the CIA moved into. My story for States News Service, reproduced below, appeared in the New Haven Register on May 29, 1975, and later made the NBC Nightly News. […]
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 […]
Read MoreBlurbs
A New York Times contributor offered the best take on blurbs. Maybe we should call in the Bureau of Consumer Protection. He was talking about “misblurbing” of existing book reviews, but original blurbs come with their own perils. Just the same, as others have noted before, positives exist. Honest blurbs can be a useful form […]
Read MoreTwilight Times Books
Phone: 423-323-0183 Email: publisher@twilighttimesbooks.com Publisher: Lida Quillen Web site: Here.
Read MoreHarry Edward Rothman’s Eulogy (Archived Item from 1997)
Dad was born in Manhattan on September 28, 1910, to Max and Dora Rothman. Max was a house painter and decorator, a craftsman; and from him my father may very well have inherited his own love of the brush. Dad grew up in Brooklyn and bus-boyed his way through New York University, from which he […]
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