Letterman: the Last Giant of Late Night; There I Go Again; Streets of Laredo; The Day I Died

I loved David Letterman. I didn't really watch him on NBC, and was only vaguely aware of the whole mess they made when Carson retired (although I did read a great book about it later by Bill Carter called "The Late Shift"). My sister and I had a friendly rivalry: she preferred Leno, I liked Letterman, so I used to watch him on CBS when he first started his new show (we both agreed on how much we loved Conan O'Brien). I was enjoying this book, up until the very end, when, six pages before it ended, he claimed that Bob Dylan was Dave's last musical guest before he retired.
What?
What?!!
It was the FOO FIGHTERS. Singing "Everlong". Dave's favorite song, he said. It was an incredible, moving performance, and quite easy to remember, I might add, especially for someone who claimed to have exhaustively researched Letterman's life. Did no one fact check? No one reading the book before it went to press who said "wait, hold the phone, this is wrong"? No one?
Sad.
I hate when good books are ruined like that. I found myself questioning the whole rest of the book. If he could get something that fundamental wrong, what else wasn't right?

I, of course, know William Daniels from "Boy Meets World" and the brief reboot "Girl Meets World". I didn't realize he was the voice of KITT from "Knight Rider" until I saw this book and went oh yeah! I loved that show. Apparently Daniels has been in show business his entire life, he started out as a kid during the Great Depression doing radio shows with his sisters. I wanted to like this book, I really did, but he came across as curmudgeonly, which was disappointing. Maybe in real life he's friendlier and more personable, but it didn't come across in his writing.

I also reread "Streets of Laredo" by Larry McMurtry over the long holiday weekend. I've never liked this one much, since everyone's dead and Call doesn't really have anyone to humanize him like Gus did in "Lonesome Dove". But it's still good (even when McMurtry's not great, he's still better than most) and now I'm trying to decide if I should reread "Dead Man's Walk", since that's the only one I didn't get to. I made a good dent in my library books, so we'll see :)

I loved Rader-Day's last book, "Pretty Little Things", so I was super excited to see she had a new book out. I enjoyed it, just not as much as the last one. When the book starts we meet Anna Winger, a single mom to a thirteen year old boy, Joshua. Anna is a handwriting analyst, and the police in her new Indiana town are consulting her on a case involving the murder of a babysitter and the kidnapping of a two year old boy. Most of the town is skeptical of what Anna does, the rest are afraid of her. Anna herself is clearly hiding a big secret, she eludes to it throughout the first half of the book. She finally reveals (and it was pretty easy to guess) that she faked her own death when she was pregnant with Joshua because she feared for her life. She's been on the run ever since, never staying in one place too long. Joshua is starting to resent their nomadic lifestyle and is acting out, falling in with a bad crowd. It was nicely tied together in the end, and not in a cheesy sort of way, it seemed plausible.

Axeman of New Orleans

I watched "American Horror Story: Coven" a few years ago, and they mentioned the famous Axeman of New Orleans (side note: I miss Jessica Lange something fierce). I was intrigued, I had never heard of this guy. Unfortunately there aren't very many books about him, at least none that my local libraries owned, so when I saw this one was coming out I was excited to get my hands on it. It was interesting, if not really so much about the axeman, but rather crimes that were attributed to him that he probably didn't commit. It's incredibly difficult, 100 some years later, to try to piece together what might have happened, especially considering the axeman's targets were Italian grocers who didn't speak English very well. Eyewitness accounts were all over the map as to what he looked like (they couldn't even agree if he was black or white). He was pretty bold: he'd use the grocers' own axes to attack them.

Comanche Moon; Los Angeles in the 1970s; Lincoln in the Bardo

I finished rereading "Comanche Moon" for the millionth time (approximately). I remember how excited I was when I bought this book and opened it up to the first page and saw Call and Gus's names. I raced through it, I didn't even care that it didn't match up to what McMurtry had written in "Lonesome Dove", it was just so much fun to read about Call and Gus again. I use Call's last line from the book all the time (and I'm sure it sums up how McMurtry felt about the whole thing): "It may be over, but it wasn't fun". Brilliant.

"Los Angeles in the 1970s" was a fun collection of essays about the City of Angeles in one of the strangest decades in recent memory. There was a remembrance from Steve Hodel, which I wasn't expecting, about a murder case he worked. He wrote a really interesting book about his theory that his father, Dr. George Hodel, killed the Black Dahlia. I read it years ago when it first came out (I own it, actually, he came to the B&N where I worked and I got a signed copy) and enjoyed it. I enjoyed most of the essays in this collection, too, they did a good job of bringing the time and place back to life.

I didn't enjoy "Lincoln in the Bardo" by George Saunders, it was really disappointing. It's gotten such good buzz, and I love reading about President Lincoln. When I heard this one was about him dealing with his young son, Willie's, death while he was in the White House, I put it on hold. At least it went quick, but there wasn't much story to it. There were whole chapters of snippets from other people's previously published works, discussing the party that took place the night Willie was dying, how Lincoln and his wife handled their grief, etc. The main story was about how Willie didn't realize he was dead, he was in the cemetery with all the other spirits who refused to acknowledge their deaths so they could move on to the next phase. Lincoln visits him and by entering his thoughts Willie learns he's dead and is able to move on. The end. Hmm. Well, like I said, it least it was quick so I didn't feel like I wasted too much time.

Will to Kill

Boy, did I enjoy the heck out of Mickey Spillane and Max Alan Collins' latest Mike Hammer mystery, "Will to Kill". So much so I stopped rereading "Comanche Moon" to finish it! Mike is out walking late one night when he spots half a body stuck in an ice floe in the Hudson. So Cal girl that I am, I had to look up what an ice floe is :) It turns out it's the body of a butler named Jamison, he worked for an old friend of Pat's named Dunbar. Chester Dunbar died three years earlier in what the investigating police called an accidental death (he had a heart attack and couldn't reach his nitro pills in time). Pat thought it was fishy then, but he didn't have jurisdiction, and now Jamison's weird death, which the police also determine was a bizarre accident, has Pat asking Mike to step in and investigate. Mike does, and travels to the Dunbar mansion to meet Chester's heirs: his two stepsons, Dex and Wake, his daughter Dorean, and his son Chickie, who is mentally unwell (my only beef with the book: supposedly it's set in 1965 and they call Chickie autistic, which they probably wouldn't have at the time, since it wasn't as prevalent or diagnosed back then as it is now). Dex and Wake are both awful human beings, more concerned with getting the car back that Jamison was driving than anything else. Mike is soon approached by each of the Dunbar heirs in turn to investigate something else: Dex is in up to his eyeballs in gambling debts and thinks the mob is after him and Wake is a closet homosexual who thinks his wife is trying to kill him. As if Mike doesn't have enough to investigate, then the local state trooper asks for his help with some missing teenage girls. Of course Mike is able to solve everything all in one fell swoop, because he's Mike Hammer and he's awesome. It was a lot of fun.