> Mention of a piece on Liston reminds me that Norman
Mailer has done some
>nice work on boxers (as well as murderers), but not
sure I'd call him HB,
>though _Armies of the Night_ (March on Pentagon) had
some passages as
>good as any Chandler "rants." What used to be called
the New Journalists,
>early Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson, Ed Abbey, and some
of the underground
>press writers (Paul Krassner, editor of _The
Realist_), had moments of
>hard-edged lucidity -- along with the
posturing.
Interesting to note that the recommendations for HB
non-fiction have
included some biographies. While Robert Conquest's _Kolyma:
The Arctic
Death Camps_ and _Stalin: Breaker of Nations_ and Zhisui Li's
_The
Private Life of Chairman Mao: The Memoirs of Mao's Personal
Physician_
are in no way hard-boiled *writing*, they certainly do cover
a couple of
the hardest-boiled characters ever. These were mafioso dons
without a
glint of law inhibiting their actions.
The sheer cunning of the Soviet secret police to march
someone, anyone,
down into the cells of Lubyanka and make them confess to
anything is
absolutely ingenious. China's late 1950s drive to become a
steel
producer on par with Great Britain, by melting pots and pans
in backyard
steel "mills," is absurdly hilarious -- were it not now known
the real
and devastating effects this truly had.
Off topic? Sure. Sorry.
-- Ned Fleming # # To unsubscribe, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to majordomo@icomm.ca. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.vex.net/~buff/rara-avis/.