“America was never innocent.”“It's time to demythologise an era and build a new myth from the gutter to the stars. It's time to embrace bad men and the price they paid to secretly define their time.”American Tabloid is one of three big books by major authors I’ve read in the last twelve months focused on what they would all agree is a key event in twentieth-century American/world politics, the killing of JFK: 11/22/63 by Stephen King; Libra by Don DeLillo, and this 1995 publishing and award-winn...

The fates of three men, Ward Littell, Kemper Boyd, and Pete Bondurant, are forever entwined in the era of mobsters, Fidel Castro, and the Kennedys.Yeah, that's not much of a teaser but there's no quick way to sum this one up.American Tabloid takes key figures of the late 1950s and early 1960s and pisses all over them. Ellroy is back to the trinity of sin structure that worked so well in The Big Nowhere and LA Confidential. His three leads, Ward Littell, Kemper Boyd, and Pete Bondurant, rise and ...

I began reading this book around mid-December but given the chaotic nature of my life at the time, I found it nearly impossible to focus. Seeing as Ellroy’s American Tabloid is a novel that commands your attention, a wandering mind will do you no favors. So when things settled down, I picked it back up, determined to dive back into the world of mid-20th century America and read all about The Kennedys, the FBI/CIA, Jimmy Hoffa and the Communist Red Scare.With American Tabloid, Ellroy is uncomprom...

Questo romanzo si può dire che segni un confine netto nella mia vita di lettore, la mia linea d'ombra.Ricordo che lo comprai il giorno stesso dell'uscita, o quello dopo, avevo letto qualche anticipazione sui quotidiani (forse conservo ancora un ritaglio della Stampa da qualche parte) e quando lo presi dall'espositore all'ingresso di una minuscola libreria oggi chiusa, il libraio, caro amico, mi guardò annuendo con intima soddisfazione.Conoscevo Ellroy solo di nome all'epoca, ma il suo progetto s...

James Ellroy has called me a panty sniffer to my face. Granted, he calls everyone at his book signings a variety of colorful names, but I still like the idea that I’ve been personally mock-insulted by one of my favorite authors. This is his best novel, and my love for it is pretty much unconditional. As proof of my devotion: My internet alias is from a character in it, and I’ve got an autographed copy of it sitting on my shelf along with an signed copy of the sequel, The Cold Six Thousand. The t...

This is a LONG read, loaded with umpteen characters and written in choppy, gumshoe detective language. The basic run down -this is a chronologically presented story of three characters who played a role in the eventual assassination of JFK.My curiosity about Jimmy Hoffa, Howard Hughes, J Edgar Hoover, the Mafia, the Cubans, and the government are what kept me reading, but the language and content was very much a throwback (read offensive). Here were lots of babes and their booberage, very violen...

He used to pimp and pull shakedowns. Now he rode shotgun to History. Whoa, Ellroy's done it again: another 5-star read. So far, that's 5 out of 5 for me. This time, he takes his talent for weaving complex plots and conspiracies from his 50's Los Angeles setting and unleashes it nationwide in an epic re-shaping of the country's turbulent history between 1958 and 1963 as we follow three men who play pivotal roles in the events that ultimately lead to that infamous day in Dallas, Texas ...

Whoa. This book is the literary equivalent of sticking your head out of a car window at 80mph.I don’t hear this talk much anymore, but at one point folks were very interested in defining and/or writing “The Great American Novel.” I assert that this may be it. Forget everything about grandma and her apple pie, with this book Ellroy grabs us by our collective red, white, and blue lapels and flings us out of the barn loft into a big warm pile of the real history of the United States. As unpleasant ...

the nearest representation of what 20th century american history feels like. fuck the facts, we'll never really know what that is. and when ellroy's riffing away and it's all over-the-top and just plain stupid and threadheaded to a plot by the american government and CIA to hire the mafia to put a hit on a cuban commie head of state i wanna toss the shit aside because of how implausible ellroy can get and then i realize that this did actually happen and JFK did put a hit on Castro and JFK was ba...

Check out the prose. Dig the style. Raymond Carver looks verbose. Hemingway looks weak and fey.

Dig the streamlined story. 1500 pages of plot compacted into 576.

Dig the violence. The greed. The manipulations, the conspiracies.

Check out the Outfit. The Beard. The Cadre. Jimmy and the Klan. The Hair and Little Brother all gunning towards history like a hophead mainlining a speedball.

Check out the geek posing at writing this review.