Non-Fiction: License to Pawn by Rick Harrison

Today in January Magazine’s non-fiction section, contributing editor Brendan M. Leonard reviews License to Pawn by Rick Harrison. Says Leonard:

Rick Harrison, one of the owners of Las Vegas’ Gold and Silver Pawn Shop, is an unlikely television star. But the History Channel’s Pawn Stars, a blue-collar Antiques Roadshow and advanced negotiation seminar, is one of the most successful reality television shows. It’s also one of the most enjoyable, and it would be easy for Harrison to cash in on his newfound fame by writing a book that’s mostly fluff and filler. Tell a few good stories, make a few jokes, recap some fan favorite episodes, and deliver it to you, the reader, for $24.99. In and out -- from your wallet to his.

The book Harrison wrote with Tim Keown, License to Steal, is not that book. Many of the aforementioned tropes appear, true, but they’re wrapped within a story that is as unlikely as Harrison’s television fame. When it comes to TV show tie-ins, this is one of the better ones in recent memory.

The full review is here.

Crime Fiction: The End of Everything by Megan Abbott

Today in January Magazine’s crime fiction section, contributing editor Brendan M. Leonard reviews The End of Everything by Megan Abbott. Says Leonard:

Megan Abbott makes glass sculptures filled with blood. Her new book, The End of Everything, is no exception. Her prose is beautiful, fragile, and it courses through the pages with a pulsing power. She stains and scars your memory. To read her is to be reminded of Leonardo DiCaprio in Inception (2010), standing still as that shocking wave crashes around him. While you’re turned head over heels with each new sentence, she hits you again and again. You experience guilt, terror, passion, nostalgia, regret -- and that’s just the short list. Every word is overwhelming and heartbreaking. You could drown in it. Part of you wants to.

The full review is here.

Books to Film: Too Big to Fail

When Hollywood decided to adapt The Bonfire of the Vanities, Oscar-winner William Hurt’s name was on the short list to play Sherman McCoy, the Wall Street “Master of the Universe” who finds himself having a very bad year. That role went to Tom Hanks, but twenty-plus years later, William Hurt headlines HBO’s very good adaptation of Andrew Ross Sorkin’s 2009 non-fiction look at the financial meltdown, Too Big To Fail. Hurt plays Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, a former Wall Street master who finds himself having a very bad few months in 2008. The stakes here, are much higher -- instead of a murder charge, Paulson faces the complete meltdown of the financial system world-wide.

While Paulson is the haunted center and Hurt the top-billed actor in this adaptation of the international bestseller, he is not without support. Director Curtis Hanson, of the classic L.A. Confidential, Wonder Boys and the less-than-classic The River Wild, stuffs the film with... well, every character actor in the history of ever. While that's an exaggeration, calling the ensemble cast of Too Big To Fail a Murderer's Row of talent is not. This review could very easily sell you on the picture by listing off who's in it -- when you have Dan Hedeya (as powerful Congressman Barney Frank) and John Heard (as Lehmann Brothers CFO Joe Gregory) show up for a single scene a piece, you know Hanson and his casting directors mean business.

The cast is by far the strongest part of Hanson's movie. The director, working from a script by Peter Gould (Breaking Bad), uses the all-star cast as a kind of shorthand. While animated subtitles inform the audience to folks’ names and jobs, Hanson understands the baggage certain actors bring to their parts as well. So yes, it makes perfect sense that James Woods is the arrogant, self-destructive Dick Fuld, CEO of Lehmann Brothers, whose reluctance to sell his company kicks the whole thing off.

We should all listen to Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, because he’s played by the darkly funny and very serious Paul Giamatti, and heed the sage advice of Warren Buffett, because he’s the grandfatherly Edward Asner. When you put JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon in a room with other executives to find a way to bail out Lehmann, you know Dimon's running the room, because the man speaking his dialogue is former President Bill Pullman. And you know, no matter what, Matthew Modine will find a way to make Merril Lynch CEO John Thain look like a doofus, because, well, Matthew Modine plays a lot of doofuses.

Those are just a few of the names in the cast of Too Big To Fail, and I’m neglecting others, like Billy Crudup’s Timothy Geitner and Topher Grace and Cynthia Nixon as Treasury aides. I’m also not emphasizing just how good Hurt is as Paulson at portraying the crushing guilt that comes with both causing the financial crisis of the film (as Paulson lobbied for deregulation while in charge at Goldman Sachs) and desperate to fix it. Hurt makes Paulson into a guy with real regrets who becomes frayed over the course of the picture. He’s good at selling the big moments -- threatening CEOS with the weight of the federal government -- and the smaller ones, like casually remarking that nobody did anything to stop deregulation because “We were making too much money.” It’s a fantastic performance, and a sign that audiences never really lost William Hurt -- he just went away for a while.

If the film has flaws that keep it from being a great addition to HBO’s ongoing efforts to dramatize all of American history, it’s that it often feels like not enough time is spent with these characters. Too Big to Fail plays like a thriller, and it’s a terribly exciting movie at times, but there are moments, especially early on, when I found myself wishing the whole thing were longer.

Stretching it out, however, may have eliminated the pace of Hanson’s direction, which is crisp, solid, and while it doesn’t reach the heights of his classic work, it’s still a solid entry from the journeyman filmmaker. Hanson breaks up the tension with some moments of real humor (mostly from the deadpans provided by Grace and Giamatti), as well as stopping the action to explain what a sub-prime mortgage is and how it caused the crisis about halfway through the film -- without missing a beat. That scene, by the way, is succinct and informative enough to be taught in schools for years to come, and it’s to Gould’s credit as a writer that he indulges in hand-holding a few times throughout the course of the picture.

Too Big To Fail is not a perfect film, but it is an engaging, entertaining movie. So if you want answers about how we got into the mess we find ourselves in, or are just looking to watch a bunch of really great performers act their butts off, this might be a film you'll enjoy. ◊

Brendan M. Leonard lives in New York City. He’s a regular contributor to The Rap Sheet. You can also follow him on Twitter..

Non-Fiction: Rawhide Down by Del Quentin Wilber

While the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert are still somewhat shrouded in mystery, more details about the 1981 attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan emerge as time goes on. As Pulitzer Prize-finalist and Washington Post reporter Del Quentin Wilber writes in the prologue to his new book, Rawhide Down: The Near Assassination of Ronald Reagan (Henry Holt), the broad outlines of the day -- John Hinkley Jr. firing six shots at Reagan as the recently inaugurated 40th U.S. president exited the Washington Hilton -- are well-known. The title comes from Reagan’s Secret Service code name, and the image of a cowboy Reagan, who walked into the hospital on his own two feet and joked to his wife, “I forgot to duck,” looms large in American culture. But insider knowledge has been parsed out sparingly over the years, and among those tidbits is the fact that Reagan actually came much closer to dying than we realized.

Based on fresh interviews, historical documents and records, Rawhide Down purports to be the definitive account of what happened on March 30, 1981. Wilbur chooses to focus just on the events of March 30, and while it makes the book short, it serves it well. However, I found myself wanting to know more about the aftermath and investigation into the shooting. Hinkley, such a focus of the book’s first half, all but disappears from view once he is arrested, with Wilbur instead choosing to highlight the doctors and hospital staff who saved the life of a president.

Wilbur’s reporting on Hinkley makes up some of the most compelling sections of Rawhide Down. Rather than a cultural boogeyman or super-soldier in the shadows, the attempted assassin -- in Wilbur’s hands -- is shown as a human being. A wise decision. That’s not to say that the author shies away from showing Hinkley as anything but a sad, mentally unbalanced young man, obsessed with the film Taxi Driver and its star, Jodie Foster. One of the many revelations in Rawhide Down comes during Wilbur’s exploration of Hinkley’s fixation on Foster. For example, I knew that he was obsessed with her; I did not know that he moved to New Haven, Connecticut, and called her dorm room at Yale University in a scene reminiscent of that scene in Swingers. Much like author Dave Cullen does with his portrayal of mass-murderer Eric Klebold in Columbine, Wilbur leaves the reader with great sympathy for Hinkley -- that this was a youth in need of psychiatric care, angry and in his 20s, but not a psychopath. Not beyond saving.

The Hinkley section, however, is also where Wilbur falters in the writing of Rawhide Down. Throughout this book, but no more so than in the early chapters about Hinkley, Wilbur attempts to create a false sense of suspense. He describes Hinkley’s obsessions with Foster in broad, vague terms, obfuscating her identity. Wilbur is trying to make the moment of revelation that it is in fact Jodie Foster, Oscar nominee, into one of those stunning twists that, were this a 1940s suspense flick, might be punctuated by a “dun-dun-dun.” Perhaps Hinkley’s obsession with Foster isn’t as well-known as I think, but by the second time Wilbur tried hiding the fact that it’s Jodie Foster Hinkley’s thinking about, I exclaimed, “IT’S JODIE FOSTER, ALREADY!”

While Wilbur continues to develop this false suspense in the sections dealing with Alexander Haig, who was secretary of state at the time (and who, after misunderstanding the line of succession, claimed that he was in control of the White House in the aftermath of the shooting), it’s less obvious and annoying than in the Hinkley sections.

Wilbur’s prose is clean, crisp and indicative of his background as a longtime reporter. He’s concise when discussing the players in Rawhide Down, using elements of their past to emphasize the importance of their roles in the aftermath of this attempted assassination. Wilbur’s real gift in Rawhide Down is handling the many characters involved -- from Hinkley to the president’s chief of staff, the police and Secret Service members, and the doctors and nurses saving Reagan’s life. Even the president himself comes off as a person rather than an icon -- though early in this book, I worried that it would be become some “why Reagan was great” hagiography.

In many ways, Rawhide Down succeeds. Although this isn’t In Cold Blood, it is a brisk, engaging read that’s precise and exhausting in its detail. Wilbur shows his research with dozens of pages of footnotes. So even if you’re not interested in fact-checking, Del Quentin Wilbur has written an excellent non-fiction thriller about one of the most notable close-calls in American history. It’s worth your time. ◊

Brendan M. Leonard lives in New York City and is a regular contributor to The Rap Sheet.

Fiction: Then Everything Changed by Jeff Greenfield

Today in January Magazine’s fiction section, Brendan M. Leonard reviews Then Everything Changed: Stunning Alternate Histories of American Politics: JFK, RFK, Carter, Ford, Reagan by Jeff Greenfield. Says Leonard:

Greenfield packs Then Everything Changed with some wonderfully fresh alternative realities. His gifts as a journalist and a student of American politics lend Then Everything Changed a real authenticity. Some of the scenes presented here, such as Robert Kennedy facing down protesters in Chicago’s Grant Park at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, are inspiring and memorable. Greenfield also peppers his tales with little winks and nudges. When writing about VP nominee O’Connor, for instance, the author has a Reagan aide remark, “It’s not as if she’s stuck for an answer when you ask her what she reads.” In another case, he has a young Newt Gingrich praising President Robert Kennedy’s domestic policies.

The full review is here.

Non-Fiction: Bringing Adam Home: The Abduction That Changed America by Les Standiford

Today in January Magazine’s non-fiction section, Brendan M. Leonard reviews Bringing Adam Home: The Abduction That Changed America by Les Standiford. Says Leonard:

By now, the facts of the Adam Walsh case are so well-known, so embedded in the nightmares of parents and their children’s imaginations, that they have almost become part of American folklore. That doesn't make those facts any less terrifying: One morning in July 1981, Revé Walsh and her son, Adam, went shopping for house lamps at a Sears store near their Hollywood, Florida, home. Entering the store, Revé let Adam out of her sight to play a videogame while she shopped. When she returned minutes later, her son was gone. A local, then national search for Adam followed, ending in tragedy when the boy’s severed head was found. Along with the parents of other missing children such as Etan Patz, Revé and her husband, John Walsh, became advocates for reforming the response to missing-children cases. Their achievements include lobbying Congress to pass the Missing Children Act in 1982, and the establishment of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in 1984. John Walsh later became the host of America’s Most Wanted, the long-running TV series that’s reportedly responsible for the capture of more than 1,000 fugitives.

The full review is here.

Matthew McConaughey and a Car

With The Lincoln Lawyer, the film based on Michael Connelly’s award-winning 2005 novel of the same name, opening at a big screen near you tomorrow, reviews are appearing from various sources. Not the least of these is the one over at our sister publication, The Rap Sheet, where discussion of work of Michael Connelly in its various forms is nothing new.

Today Rap Sheet contributor Brandon M. Leonard weighs in on the film version of Connelly’s book. Though there are places where he spots weakness in the movie, overall he likes it well enough to recommend a few hours in the dark:

Ladies and gentlemen, Eddie lives.

After years spent in the B-movie wilderness, Michael Paré, the star of Eddie and the Cruisers (1983) makes a triumphant return as Detective Kurlen in The Lincoln Lawyer, the big-screen adaptation of Michael Connelly’s 2005 Edgar-nominated novel, scheduled for release tomorrow. While he’s no longer the James Dean-throwback that he once was, he’s not a bloated monstrosity à la Mickey Rourke either, and he brings a gruff effectiveness to his role. One of the many pleasant surprises in this new film was seeing Paré use the same low-key, tough-guy charisma on Ryan Phillippe and Matthew McConaughey that he once used to face Willem Dafoe in 1984’s Streets of Fire (also known as the best movie ever made--take that, The Rules of the Game!).

”Pleasant surprise” is an excellent way to describe The Lincoln Lawyer, starring McConaughey as Connelly’s series criminal defense attorney, Michael “Mick” Haller (changed from “Mickey” in the original novel). After an excellent opening credits sequence by Jeff McEvoy, set to Bobby “Blue” Bland’s soul classic, “Ain’t No Love (In the Heart of the City),” the film wastes little time throwing us into the life of Mickey Haller and the case that will fuel the plot. While the original novel takes a few chapters to establish Haller and his world, in the movie it’s developed alongside the case of Louis Roulet (Ryan Phillipe), a rich young man accused of attempting to murder a prostitute. This new balance might give fans of the novel whiplash, but screenwriter John Romano balances plot and character with a comfortable ease.

The piece in its entirety includes much insight and many asides and it’s here.

Crime Fiction: The Hanging Tree by Bryan Gruley

Today in January Magazine’s crime fiction section, Brendan M. Leonard reviews The Hanging Tree by Bryan Gruley. Says Leonard:

I grew up in small-town northeastern Ohio, which shares many similarities with the small-town Michigan of Bryan Gruley’s Starvation Lake (2009). Those similarities ran deep enough that Gruley’s first novel, nominated for an Edgar Award this year, resonated with me. In addition to being a son of the fabled land that gave the world rock ’n’ roll (as well as Drew Carey, Devo and Chrissie Hynde), I’m also the son of a newspaperman and spent much of my youth in newsrooms. Gruley, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, evoked in his debut novel that twilight time in the late 1990s, before the Internet gutted the newspaper industry but after everyone knew it was only a matter of time for the ink-stained wretches, with the same simple, memorable prose that he used to describe daily life in a post-industrial town.

The full review is here.

Crime Fiction: Savages by Don Winslow

(Editor’s note: Today we welcome to January Magazine a new book reviewer: New York City resident Brendan M. Leonard, who, since 2004, has written about television and film for Web sites such as CHUD.com. He was also the creator of New York Noir, a short-lived podcast anthology series.)

Jesus Christ, this book.

Pretty much my thoughts about Savages
these days.

Fans of Don Winslow, the author of Savages (Simon & Schuster), have been waiting on his breakout novel for a while. His last work, The Dawn Patrol (2008), with its effortless cool, laid-back style, and characters tailor-made for Hollywood, felt like it was going to be “the one.” Not so much -- Dawn Patrol became yet another book for those in the Winslow cult to give as presents, while waiting for the next one, the big one. The book that arrives amidst critical acclaim. The book that wakes up mainstream America to Winslow’s tsunami-sized talent. The book that allows him to take his place alongside John D. MacDonald, Robert B. Parker and Elmore Leonard as one of America’s all-time best crime writers. The book.

In many ways, Savages is the Ultimate Don Winslow Novel. A tale of 20-something marijuana dealers in Southern California, the novel starts off like this:

Fuck you.

That’s the first sentence. The first page. And it gets better from there, following the aforementioned drug dealers -- Ben, a science genius turned Third World do-gooder; Chon, a Navy veteran who’s everything but shell-shocked; and their mutual girlfriend, O (for Ophelia), who’s not quite a party girl but not much of anything else either.

When the boys turn down an offer to work for the Baja cartel, the cartel kidnaps -- on orders from Elena, the beautiful head of the organization (as the book puts it, “Hillary would be pissed.”) -- O. Blackmailed into providing Elena’s organization with a steady stream of marijuana to pay O’s ransom, Chon decides to take the fight to the cartel. To say any more would destroy the fun, so let’s just say this:

Shenanigans ensue.

Part of the joy of reading Don Winslow is how he writes, and he continues to refine his “guy telling you a really great story at a bar” style in Savages. Here, his style is more experimental, with chapters in screenplay format and the style of Skype. The book is literal poetry at times, as when Winslow spends an entire chapter describing stores at Costa Mesa’s giant South Coast Plaza, one of the book’s highlights.

Winslow never lets his writing style overwhelm the story, though, and doesn’t forget to fill the book with anecdotes and historical asides that place this tale in a larger cultural context. I always come away from reading a Winslow book feeling like I learned something about the history of Southern California or the ongoing drug war. Both are featured here.

It’s a brilliant way of writing, although I would recommend starting with The Dawn Patrol and The Winter of Frankie Machine (2006) if you’ve never read Winslow before, just to see if you like his style.

Like other Winslow books, Savages gets its teeth in you and doesn’t let go. I tried to spread the novel out over a week or so, but once I got started, I couldn’t stop, reading the book in a couple of days. The plot is a straight Western with a modern coat of paint, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in the world of Alpha Dog; and in telling this story, Winslow achieves something few authors have. While this might not be the book to push him into mainstream success, it still achieves a different kind of success. It turns out to be a different kind of book.

Savages is the book of my generation.

Savages is nothing short of revolutionary, a flash grenade into the ineffectual heart of Generation Y. A message for the kids who grew up in unparalleled economic prosperity with overeducated parents. The kids, to steal a line from another of Winslow's novels, who have a problem with impulse control. The kids who hit the brick wall of the Great Recession and wound up asking, “What do we do now?”

Ben and Chon are the answer to that question, a call to action, to wake up and to push back. They deserve to become the same kind of beloved anti-heroes as Tyler Durden and Quentin Tarantino’s protagonists.

And in using Ben and Chon and O and the whole Millennial Generation as characters, Winslow posits this generation as the end of a long era in American history, which he sums up in a beautiful passage near the end of the book:

We proclaimed the freedom of the individual, bought and drove millions of cars to prove it, built more roads for the cars to drive on so we could go the everywhere that was nowhere ...

We built temples to our fantasies -- film studios, amusement parks, crystal cathedrals, megachurches -- and flocked to them ...

We reinvented ourselves everyday, remade our culture, locked ourselves in gated communities, we ate healthy food, we gave up smoking, we lifted our faces while avoiding the sun, we had our skin peeled, our lines removed, our fat sucked away like our unwanted babies, we defied aging and death.

We made gods of wealth and health.

A religion of narcissism.

In the end, we worshipped only ourselves.

In the end, it wasn’t enough.

With the push Savages is receiving from its publisher, and director Oliver Stone’s plans to make a movie from the book, it looks as if the cult of Don Winslow is going to become a movement. That’s a very good thing for us all, because this novel solidifies Winslow’s reputation as not just one of the best crime writers working today, but one of the best writers, period.

Savages is a Great Book and it deserves to be thought of as such. But it also deserves a smaller, more resonant life. Not just a shelf life, but a pocket life. A book to be discovered in library stacks and used bookstores, faded and worn with love, a book teenagers find leaves them breathless and looking at the world with new eyes.

It should be a book older brothers pass down to younger brothers, and that senior students push into the hands of impressionable freshmen, saying, whispering:

“This book will change your life.”

Because that’s the kind of book it is, and reading Savages will make you feel like you’re that kind of kid again. I don’t care how old you are.

I want to be able to read it again. I want to read it for the first time again.

Jesus Christ, this book.