Joe DiMaggio - The Hero's Life

In a stunning feat of meticulous reportage, Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Ben Cramer ultimately puts to rest the "Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?" question with iconoclastic bravura. In Cramer's evaluation, the hero America held onto so desperately for so long was really a creation of a nation's communal imagination. The Joe DiMaggio that America tried so hard to believe in was never really here at all. There was, of course, a Joe DiMaggio, and he had a splendid career in Yankee pinstripes--once hitting safely in an unimaginable 56 consecutive games--and a troubled marriage with Marilyn Monroe, each augmenting the other in our national mythology.

A Dance to the Music of Time 08 - The Soldier's Art

The Soldier's Art is the eighth novel in Anthony Powell's twelve-volume masterpiece A Dance to the Music of Time, and the second in the war trilogy. It was published in 1966, and touches on themes of separation and unanticipated loss.
The language, always exact, sometimes sardonic, also takes on the quality of blank verse in dealing with episodes that echo classical mythology. Memorable new characters like Finn are introduced with spare precision, but kept separate from the original participants in the Dance for several of whom this proves to be the last turn upon the floor.

A Dance to the Music of Time 09 - The Military Philosophers

The Military Philosophers is the ninth of Anthony Powell's twelve-novel sequence A Dance to the Music of Time. First published in 1968, it covers the latter part of Nicholas Jenkins' service in World War II. It depicts, with ironic detachment, a little-chronicled byway of the war effort, Allied Liaison.
The author draws more directly here than elsewhere upon his own experience, and the novel adopts a tone at times close to that of diary, as it records the improbable events involving the allied military delegations, including the springing of a Polish officer from prison.

A Dance to the Music of Time 10 - Books Do Furnish a Room

Books Do Furnish a Room is a novel by Anthony Powell, the tenth in the sequence of twelve comprising his masterpiece, A Dance to the Music of Time. It was first published in 1971 and, like the other volumes, remains in print.
The book conveys the atmosphere of post-war austerity in which the characters attempt to resume life before the intervention of the conflict. For the non-combatants this time-shift proves manageable, but others find themselves irrevocably altered by the experience, and ill at ease in a landscape that has changed both physically and socially.

Moon Over Soho

BODY AND SOUL
 The song. That’s what London constable and sorcerer’s apprentice Peter Grant first notices when he examines the corpse of Cyrus Wilkins, part-time jazz drummer and full-time accountant, who dropped dead of a heart attack while playing a gig at Soho’s 606 Club. The notes of the old jazz standard are rising from the body—a sure sign that something about the man’s death was not at all natural but instead supernatural.