Charles Einstein (1926–2007)

This is pulp fiction, so clearly not "literature". None the less, it isn't bad. It revolves around a struggle in a news organization between the top department chiefs to succeed in becoming the head honcho, so to speak. So we follow their Machiavellian machinations, which appear to involve a good deal of sleeping around with other people's women, or else catching others doing same (hey, it's pulp fiction). There's an understory, a series of lurid murders, naturally. The news guys figure the person to solve the murders, or at least the first one to break the news of the solution to the world, will win the coveted head-honcho status.

So, in keeping with the pulp fiction genre, we have lots of floozies sleeping around (it's manly to sleep around, but women who do the same are, by definition, floozies), a deranged murderer with weird fetishes and so forth. There's also lots of nerd details about the workings of the press back some 60 years ago when people didn't have computers or cell phones, just typewriters and the need to hunt up a public phone when necessary. The nerd details got a bit much at times, but overall, this was fairly well written. I think in terms of pulp per se, it deserves to be 4*s, but since we kind of have to have a one-size-fits-all grading system, and because this isn't exactly Dickens, it has no chance to be better than 3*s.
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Oh boy I loved this. It was lots of fun to read. The writing is somewhat stylized -- it reminded me a bit of Mark Harris but I think both authors got it from somewhere else -- somewhere in the history of baseball writing. Marichal is full of funny stories, and he likes to heap praise on Willie Mays and others. The book was written after the 1966 season. He tells detailed stories about some of his games. I totally enjoyed it.

I hate my job! I hate that books like this are being withdrawn & discarded, with a couple of copies left in some hidden place...and a digital scan of the content that we hope is perfect.… (mehr)