POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Let’s start with two headlines from yesterday’s Columbus Dispatch: Green Party’s Presidential Candidate’s Speech Delayed after She Flies to Wrong City Fire Department Cancels Charity Campaign after Firefighter Is Struck by Car 7-Eleven Deploys Donut Delivery Drone Aer Lingus Passenger Dies after Biting Another Passenger Banksy Graffiti Vandalized at Sundance…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Today, Ann Coulter published her latest book, sure to be another best-seller: In Trump We Trust: E Pluribus Awesome. I know, the very stupid subtitle makes no sense, in Latin or English, because Coulter hates immigrants and thinks America is being destroyed by too much “pluribus.” Maybe her publisher thought “Unum…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH “Look, having nuclear—my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes, OK, very smart, the Wharton School of Finance, very good, very smart—you know, if you’re a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, OK, if I ran as…
BY MARTIN KICH Hammett, Dashiell. The Maltese Falcon. New York: Knopf, 1930. Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon was not the first hardboiled detective novel. That distinction is commonly accorded to John Daly’s first Race Williams novel, Knights of the Open Palm (1923). But The Maltese Falcon and its film adaptation gave the sub-genre international exposure…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Gardner, Erle Stanley. The Case of the Crooked Candle. New York: Morrow, 1944. Erle Stanley Gardner was not the first mystery-suspense novelist to create a protagonist who was a lawyer. But his most famous creation, Perry Mason, has become the prototype for other criminal attorneys in the genre—so much so that…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH This is from an article in the series The Trump Files being published online by Mother Jones: “Donald Trump’s favorite movie is Citizen Kane, the 1941 film about a publishing tycoon mogul who surrounds himself with material luxury but struggles to find happiness. ‘I loved Orson Welles,’ Trump told Bloomberg‘s Timothy O’Brien. ‘He was…
BY MARTIN KICH The White House has released the books on President Obama’s “Summer Reading List”; Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald Seveneves by Neal Stephenson None of the books are explicitly being recommended by the President, but…
