Download or read book Dutch Shea Jr written by John Gregory Dunne and published by Zola Books. This book was released on 2013-12-12 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Dunne’s bravura plotting asserts an exhilarating mastery.” —The New York Times Book Review. In John Gregory Dunne’s celebrated third novel, Los Angeles-based criminal defense attorney Dutch Shea, Jr. struggles to keep from falling apart after an act of terrorist violence strikes his family, the loss pushing him towards a confrontation with his past and into a mystery involving the death of his father, a felon who died in prison. Set in L.A. and Dunne’s hometown of Hartford, Connecticut, the novel follows Shea into a labyrinth of deception, corruption, and criminal malice. Fighting to keep a host of disturbing memories tamped down, Shea plunges into his legal work, one embedding him in a world of scammers and burglars, pimps and prostitutes, corrupt cops and shady private eyes. With unrivaled detail and pitch-black humor, Dunne takes us into police precincts and criminal courtrooms, judge’s chambers and city morgues. The novel’s deft noir touches will remind readers of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, while Dunne’s command of legal dynamics and police procedures anticipates fiction by Scott Turow, John Grisham and Michael Connelly. Introducing a sweeping cast of two dozen vivid characters, including Shea’s sometime girlfriend, a judge who packs a pistol under her robe, Dutch Shea, Jr. - a Zola e-book exclusive - is a gripping, bleakly funny exploration of a fallen world through which its past-haunted hero weaves, beset from within and without, for a series of fraught days.
Download or read book Nothing Lost written by John Gregory Dunne and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2005-05-17 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A grisly racial murder in what news commentators insist on calling “the heartland.” A feeding frenzy of mass media and seamy politics. An illicit love affair with the potential to wreck lives. In his grandly inventive last novel, John Gregory Dunne orchestrated these elements into a symphony of American violence, chicanery, and sadness.In the aftermath of Edgar Parlance’s killing, the small prairie town of Regent becomes a destination for everyone from a sociopathic teenaged supermodel to an enigmatic attorney with secret familial links to the worlds of Hollywood and organized crime. Out of their manifold convergences, their jockeying for power, publicity or love, Nothing Lost creates a drama of magnificent scope and acidity.
Download or read book Playland written by John Gregory Dunne and published by Random House. This book was released on 2012-05-02 with total page 574 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A critically acclaimed best-seller set in the glamorous, gangster-dominated Hollywood of the 1940s tells the story of Blue Tyler, a child star who disappears from Hollywood and becomes a bag lady in New York City.
Download or read book Monster written by John Gregory Dunne and published by Vintage. This book was released on 1998-03-17 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Hollywood, screenwriters are a curse to be borne, and beating up on them is an industry blood sport. But in this ferociously funny and accurate account of life on the Hollywood food chain, it's a screenwriter who gets the last murderous laugh. That may be because the writer is John Gregory Dunne, who has written screenplays, along with novels and non-fiction, for thirty years. In 1988 Dunne and his wife, Joan Didion, were asked to write a screenplay about the dark and complicated life of the late TV anchorwoman Jessica Savitch. Eight years and twenty-seven drafts later, this script was made into the fairy tale "Up Close and Personal" starring Robert Redford and Michelle Pfeiffer. Detailing the meetings, rewrites, fights, firings, and distractions attendant to the making of a single picture, Monster illuminates the process with sagacity and raucous wit.
Download or read book Vegas written by John Gregory Dunne and published by . This book was released on 2025-06-17 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The best book about Sin City ever written . . . [Dunne's] grotesqueries aren't drug-induced, they're very real. His is the genuine Vegas." (Esquire) "In the summer of my nervous breakdown, I went to live in Las Vegas, Clark County, Nevada." So begins John Gregory Dunne's neglected classic of first-person writing, a mordant, deadpan, grotesque tale that blurs the line between autobiography and fiction, confession and reportage. Panicked by his own mortality, despondent over his many failings as a writer and a man, Dunne leaves his wife, Joan Didion, and their three-year old child for the solitude of a crummy apartment off the Vegas Strip. His plan: to write a book about the city he describes as a "prison of yesterdays." In his desperation, he connects with a remarkable trio of characters: Artha, a student at cosmetology college by day, a sex worker by night; Buster Mano, a private detective whose specialty is tracking down errant husbands; and Jackie Kasey, a lounge comic who opens for Elvis at $10,000 a night and wonders why he is still only a "semi-name." Pimps, bail bondsmen, parking-lot moguls, used-car tycoons, ex-jockeys, and women who look as if they had "spent a lifetime meeting guys in Vegas or Miami Beach or Louisville for the Derby"--these are the people who wander through the lives of Artha, Buster, and Jackie; and, for a dark season, their world becomes Dunne's. Vegas captures a low point in American culture and in one American life with rare vitality, honesty, and perception. Sad, powerful, wildly funny, Vegas is like no memoir before or since.
Download or read book The Studio written by John Gregory Dunne and published by Vintage. This book was released on 1998-04-14 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1967, John Gregory Dunne asked for unlimited access to the inner workings of Twentieth Century Fox. Miraculously, he got it. For one year Dunne went everywhere there was to go and talked to everyone worth talking to within the studio. He tracked every step of the creation of pictures like "Dr. Dolittle," "Planet of the Apes," and "The Boston Strangler." The result is a work of reportage that, thirty years later, may still be our most minutely observed and therefore most uproariously funny portrait of the motion picture business. Whether he is recounting a showdown between Fox's studio head and two suave shark-like agents, watching a producer's girlfriend steal a silver plate from a restaurant, or shielding his eyes against the glare of a Hollywood premiere where the guests include a chimp in a white tie and tails, Dunne captures his subject in all its showmanship, savvy, vulgarity, and hype. Not since F. Scott Fitzgerald and Nathanael West has anyone done Hollywood better. "Reads as racily as a novel...(Dunne) has a novelist's ear for speech and eye for revealing detail...Anyone who has tiptoed along those corridors of power is bound to say that Dunne's impressionism rings true."--Los Angeles Times
Download or read book True Confessions written by John Gregory Dunne and published by Da Capo Press. This book was released on 2005-11 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Investigating the 1940s Los Angeles murder of an unidentified victim whose case has been sensationalized by the media, homicide detective Tom Spellacy and his priest brother, Des, find their loyalties tested, in a new edition of a popular novel that became the basis of a Robert Duvall and Robert De Niro movie. Reprint.
Download or read book Mornings on Horseback written by David McCullough and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2007-05-31 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The National Book Award–winning biography that tells the story of how young Teddy Roosevelt transformed himself from a sickly boy into the vigorous man who would become a war hero and ultimately president of the United States, told by master historian David McCullough. Mornings on Horseback is the brilliant biography of the young Theodore Roosevelt. Hailed as “a masterpiece” (John A. Gable, Newsday), it is the winner of the Los Angeles Times 1981 Book Prize for Biography and the National Book Award for Biography. Written by David McCullough, the author of Truman, this is the story of a remarkable little boy, seriously handicapped by recurrent and almost fatal asthma attacks, and his struggle to manhood: an amazing metamorphosis seen in the context of the very uncommon household in which he was raised. The father is the first Theodore Roosevelt, a figure of unbounded energy, enormously attractive and selfless, a god in the eyes of his small, frail namesake. The mother, Mittie Bulloch Roosevelt, is a Southerner and a celebrated beauty, but also considerably more, which the book makes clear as never before. There are sisters Anna and Corinne, brother Elliott (who becomes the father of Eleanor Roosevelt), and the lovely, tragic Alice Lee, TR’s first love. All are brought to life to make “a beautifully told story, filled with fresh detail” (The New York Times Book Review). A book to be read on many levels, it is at once an enthralling story, a brilliant social history and a work of important scholarship which does away with several old myths and breaks entirely new ground. It is a book about life intensely lived, about family love and loyalty, about grief and courage, about “blessed” mornings on horseback beneath the wide blue skies of the Badlands.
Download or read book Delano written by John Gregory Dunne and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In September 1965, Filipino and Mexican American farm workers went on strike against grape growers in and around Delano, California. More than a labor dispute, the strike became a movement for social justice that helped redefine Latino and American politics. The strike also catapulted its leader, Cesar Chavez, into prominence as one of the most celebrated American political figures of the twentieth century. More than forty years after its original publication, Delano: The Story of the California Grape Strike, based on compelling first-hand reportage and interviews, retains both its freshness and its urgency in illuminating a moment of unusually significant social ferment." -- Book cover.
Download or read book The Escape Line written by Megan Koreman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-09 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Of all the resistance organizations that operated during the war, about which much has been written, one stands out for its transnational character, the diversity of the tasks its members took on, and the fact that, unlike many of the known evasion lines, it was not directed by Allied officers, but rather by group of ordinary citizens. Between 1942 and 1945, they formed a network to smuggle Dutch Jews and others targeted by the Nazis south into France, via Paris, and then to Switzerland. This network became known as the Dutch-Paris Escape Line, eventually growing to include 300 people and expanding its reach into Spain. Led by Jean Weidner, a Dutchman living in France, many lacked any experience in clandestine operations or military tactics, and yet they became one of the most effective resistance groups of the Second World War. Dutch-Paris largely improvised its operations-scrounging for food on the black market, forging documents, and raising cash. Hunted relentlessly by the Nazis, some were even captured and tortured. In addition to Jews, those it helped escape the clutches of the Nazis included resistance fighters, political foes, Allied airmen, and young men looking to get to London to enlist. As the need grew more desperate, so did the bravery of those who rose to meet it. Using recently declassified archives, The Escape Line tells the story of the Dutch-Paris and the thousands of people it saved during World War II. Author Megan Koreman, who was given exclusive access to many of the archives, is herself the daughter of Dutch parents who were part of the resistance.
Download or read book Regards written by John Gregory Dunne and published by Da Capo Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of key nonfiction works includes the writer's frank observations on the film industry, politics, sports, and other topics; his reflections on raising an adopted daughter; and depictions of Las Vegas and a Hollywood film studio. Original.
Download or read book The Accidental Victim written by James Reston, Jr. and published by Zola Books. This book was released on 2013-09-09 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Was the assassination of one of America’s most beloved presidents an accident? That is the shocking argument put forth by acclaimed historian James Reston, Jr. Based on years of research and interviews, this revelatory new book makes the case that Texas Governor John Connally, not President John F. Kennedy, was the intended target of Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald's motive was personal, not political. After he attempted to defect to the Soviet Union, his military discharge was changed from honorable to dishonorable. The proud ex-Marine protested directly to fellow Texan Connally, then Secretary of the Navy, and received a classic bureaucratic brush-off. From that day on, Oswald began nursing a deep, even murderous grudge. Reston masterfully charts the path Oswald took toward that fated moment in Dallas, his hatred of the governor driving him to purchase a mail-order rifle, position himself in the Texas School Book Depository building, and attempt to settle his score with Connally. There was no conspiracy. There was Lee Harvey Oswald, a mail-order gun, and a missed shot. Marshaling all the available evidence – some of it never before seen – Reston will change the way we understand this epochal event: In one of American history’s most tragic ironies, President John F. Kennedy was as an accidental victim on November 22, 1963. With nearly 30 photos, the book may take a few minutes to download over 3G or slower connections.
Download or read book The Red White and Blue written by John Gregory Dunne and published by Zola Books. This book was released on 2013-12-12 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Crackling dialogue, gritty characters, a fierce, unblinking stare at acts of brutality.”—Anne Tyler, The New York Times Book Review. A brilliantly panoramic novel spanning a quarter-century of American life, John Gregory Dunne’s The Red White and Blue tells the story of California's high-profile Broderick family, a tale beginning in the tumult of the 1960s. The clan includes a billionaire San Francisco patriarch, his sons the celebrity priest and Hollywood screenwriter, and his daughter, wife to the brother of the American president. Rounding out the front-line cast is Leah Kaye, a politically radical lawyer once married to the screenwriter Jack Broderick, an ex-newspaperman and the book's narrator. The influence of wealth in American politics. A California agricultural strike. A South American election. The black-power movement. Hollywood movers and shakers. All of this and more is deftly navigated as Dunne sets his main characters and big-canvas forces in motion. Jack himself is pulled into the swirl, his ironic detachment proving insufficient bulwark against dramas that grow darker, more dangerous and more personal as Dunne’s epic unfolds. A robust, bitterly comic portrait of America in the Viet Nam era and after, with a storyline headed towards tragedy, The Red White and Blue — appearing here in digital format for the first time — is John Gregory Dunne at his most ambitious and far-seeing, his gaze sweeping from coast to coast and from decade to American decade.
Download or read book The Alps A Human History from Hannibal to Heidi and Beyond written by Stephen O'Shea and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2017-02-21 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “An entertaining, turbocharged race among the high mountain passes of six alpine countries.” —Liesl Schillinger, New York Times Book Review For centuries the Alps have been witness to the march of armies, the flow of pilgrims and Crusaders, the feats of mountaineers, and the dreams of engineers. In The Alps, Stephen O’Shea ("a graceful and passionate writer"—Washington Post) takes readers up and down these majestic mountains. Journeying through their 500-mile arc across France, Italy, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Germany, Austria, and Slovenia, he explores the reality behind historic events and reveals how the Alps have profoundly influenced culture and society.
Download or read book A Confederacy of Dunces written by John Kennedy Toole and published by Grove/Atlantic, Inc.. This book was released on 2007-12-01 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Pulitzer Prize “A masterwork . . . the novel astonishes with its inventiveness . . . it is nothing less than a grand comic fugue.”—The New York Times Book Review A Confederacy of Dunces is an American comic masterpiece. John Kennedy Toole's hero, one Ignatius J. Reilly, is "huge, obese, fractious, fastidious, a latter-day Gargantua, a Don Quixote of the French Quarter. His story bursts with wholly original characters, denizens of New Orleans' lower depths, incredibly true-to-life dialogue, and the zaniest series of high and low comic adventures" (Henry Kisor, Chicago Sun-Times).
Download or read book Quintana Friends written by John Gregory Dunne and published by Zola Books. This book was released on 2013-12-12 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Dunne has a wicked eye for the telling details, an uncanny ear for the revealing phrase.”—The New York Times. Quintana & Friends gathers thirty-three brilliant essays written by a pioneer of New Journalism between 1963 and 1978. John Gregory Dunne's gifts for keen reportage, subtle storytelling, and articulate opinion on full display, he covers topics ranging from the Hollywood machine to America’s last fight club to departure day for young soldiers shipping out to Viet Nam. In a celebrated baseball essay, he follows San Francisco Giant outfielder Willie Mays as the slugger seeks to break the National League career home-run record, his portrait capturing a prickly veteran not shy, in an age before PR handlers for athletes, of expressing his annoyance with reporters. In “Sneak,” Dunne brings us inside Twentieth-Century Fox’s Minneapolis advance screening of the movie Dr. Doolittle. In “Quebec Zero,” he spends 24 hours underground with a crew of four young men manning nuclear missiles aimed at the Soviet Union, Dunne’s goal “to see how it worked on the mind, to have World War III only an arm’s length away.” In the title essay, Dunne writes of raising his adopted daughter Quintana with wife Joan Didion, speculating about the day the girl might wish to seek out her birth mother. In “Friends,” he writes movingly of a best friend, screenwriter Josh Greenfield, father to an autistic son. “Eureka” celebrates Los Angeles. “Pauline” famously takes down revered New Yorker movie critic Pauline Kael. And in the much-discussed essay “Gone Hollywood,” Dunne blasts the notion that the movie business is a destroyer of writing talent. “The ecology of Hollywood eludes them,” he writes of those who bemoan the studio system’s effects on writers. Echoing this point in the Kael essay, occasional screenwriter Dunne, making reference to an Upper West Side of Manhattan grocery store, famously declares: “The writers who fell apart in Hollywood would have fallen apart in Zabar's.” Download this first-ever digital edition of Quintana & Friends and enjoy John Gregory Dunne at his wittiest, most observant, and powerfully eloquent best.
Download or read book 1001 Children s Books You Must Read Before You Grow Up written by Julia Eccleshare and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 960 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 1001 Children's Books You Must Read Before You Grow Up is the perfect introduction to the very best books of childhood: those books that have a special place in the heart of every reader. It introduces a wonderfully rich world of literature to parents and their children, offering both new titles and much-loved classics that many generations have read and enjoyed. From wordless picture books and books introducing the first words and sounds of the alphabet through to hard-hitting and edgy teenage fiction, the titles featured in this book reflect the wealth of reading opportunities for children.Browsing the titles in 1001 Children's Books You Must Read Before You Grow Up will take you on a journey of discovery into fantasy, adventure, history, contermporary life, and much more. These books will enable you to travel to some of the most famous imaginary worlds such as Narnia, Middle Earth, and Hogwart's School. And the route taken may be pretty strange, too. You may fall down a rabbit hole, as Alice does on her way to Wonderland, or go through the back of a wardrobe to reach the snowy wastes of Narnia.
