5 comments about Full of Life: A Biography of John Fante.

1. "Full of Life,: Stephen Cooper's biography of John Fante, is excellent in many ways. It's also, like its subject, flawed. It gets off to a great start, with sympathetic understanding and some brilliantly written passages. But as the book goes on, the author tends to succumb to Biographeritis: dislike of his subject.
   
   It's the biographer's mission to present an honest picture of his subject, warts and all. A book that did nothing but gush over its subject's good qualities wouldn't be worth much. But it's just as uimportant not to get carried away in the other direction, and present the subject in as bad a light as possible, lovingly nurturing every bad thing that everyone has to say bout him (or her), now that the subject is safely dead. It's what J.B. Priestly described as the posthumous assassin, "running out to plunge another knife into the corpse." This is done without trying to ascertain whether or not the charges are actually true, and certainly without taking a look at the not always admirable motives involved. It's not possible to check out every denunciation, of course; but when the accusation is a serious one - cruelty, for instance - the biographer owes it to the person he's writing about to at least make an effort to see if it really happened. In my opinion Cooper lets Fante down in this respect.
   
   By far the worst thing about the book is that there's one episode which I strongly suspect isn't true: the drowning of the kittens. This is a serious charge of cruelty against a dead man who can't defend himself. Given, over, and over, and over again (his acceptance of a rat for a present - when he was drunk, by the way - having his friend pull over to rescue a cat, buying a pig to keep his dog happy, almost breaking up his marriage because he wanted to keep a dog his wife wanted him to get rid of, refusing to get rid of another dog that almost everyone else in the family hated - someone even volunteered to shoot it), how much he loved animals, I find it very hard to believe that Fante could have done this. It was simply out of character, whatever his faults were. At the very least it strains credulity. Yet Cooper reports it as an accepted fact. He should have checked out this alleged incident very carefully, instead of simply taking the word of ex-neighbors who didn't like him, and who still held a grudge (after fifty years!) over a failed joint movie venture. It's fine for Cooper to assert unequivocally that Fante drank too much, stayed out all night, and neglected his wife, because that's the way Fante habitually behaved. He did NOT habitually murder animals. And the usual explanation for aberrant behavior - "Well, he was drunk" - won't wash here, because Fante also behaved tenderly toward animals when he was drunk. In his writing, as well as in his life, Fante had not only love but pity for helpless animals. Cooper must not have read the chapter in "Ask the Dust" where the narrator is sickened by the murder (and he calls it murder) of the calf, and is tormented by pity for the calf's grieving mother. This episode was described with so much revulsion that it hardly seems like the attitude of someone who would drown kittens. I have an alternate theory: I think one or more of the neighborhood boys killed the kittens, and then blamed it on their unpopular neighbor.
   
   Where was Joyce while this was going on? It's hard to believe that this spirited lady would have just stood by passively while Fante the Fiend carried out his murderous action. For that matter, where were his own kids? There's no corroboration by them. How convenient, that everyone in the family was absent that day (which almost never happened), except the Strobel kid. If there's a future edition of this book, I hope Cooper will at least really check out this attack on Fante. At the very least, he owes it to Fante's memory to point out that this seems to be uncharacteristic behavior for someone who was known for his lifelong love of animals.
   
   Cooper's appreciation of Fante's work is much better. I have to say, though, that, like several of the reviewers, he missed the point of "Ask the Dust." He harps on the name-calling and the racial epithets. That's an important component of the book, certainly. But it's not what the book is about, any more than "Vanity Fair" is solely about Becky Sharp, Thackeray's great anti-heroine. "Ask the Dust," like "Vanity Fair" and "Of Human Bondage," examines a basic problem of human existence: why do we love the people who don't love us?
   
   Cooper has a warm appreciation for Fante's writing. As he notes, "Ask the Dust," in addition to being a great Los Angeles book - the city itself, its streets and cafes and boarding houses and skid row, is one of the major characters in the book - has one of the most lyrical and haunting - and saddest - endings ever written. Cooper may not be a fan of Fante the man, but he loves Fante the writer.



2. I hope the interest in "Ask the Dust" (reprint and Hollywood film) will send many readers to this excellent biography. If you want to learn more about Fante and the Los Angeles literary and screenwriting scene of his era, this book is a gold mine. Recognition came late for Fante, and it wouldn't have come at all without Charles Bukowski's advocacy, but this biography, Robert Towne's feature film, and the Independent Lens documentary that aired recently on PBS ("A Sad Flower in the Sand") are helping to rectify the critical neglect. Two comments on the other reviews. Yes, it will be useful in the classroom. I just taught "Ask the Dust" in a course at San Francisco State University, and this work was a huge help. And to those who could do without the endnotes, they were indispensable for me as I researched the life of Fante's friend Carey McWilliams.



3. Lest anyone believe the dribble of the last reviewer who gave Cooper's biography one star, I thought I'd send in a review that at least strives for honesty, to say nothing of accuracy, which that other reviewer made no attempt to show. Stephen Cooper's biography of John Fante is a thoroughly enjoyable if occasionally painful read. Enjoyable because he presents a well-rounded picture of the man who penned such American classics as: Ask The Dust, The Brotherhood of the Grape, My Dog Stupid, Dreams From Bunker Hill, and others, including a number of very fine and moving short stories. Painful, because John Fante certainly was a flawed human being, as this biography clearly shows. To complain that Fante drank, or was lazy, or abused his wife, etc. is silly. What, we can or should only read books by people who are saints? If that's the criteria for what writers we read then there'd be nothing to read on the fiction shelves by either men or women. Should I refrain from reading Claire Boothe Luce or Dorothy Parker because they were less than perfect people? Should I dump my Dostoyevsky books simply because he treated everyone monstrously, or my Dickens, because he was a lousy father and husband? I'm sorry to destroy the illusions of the simpleton who wrote that review, but writers are sometimes petty, self-centered, back-biting, bores, many of whom drink to excess or gamble, or cheat, or womanize, etc., etc. If you want nice problem-free people to emulate go for film stars or musicians, or jocks, right? Maybe certain people shouldn't read biographies, but can instead continue to march along the primrose path believing idiocies like the writers they admire are as perfect as the works they create.
   
   For this person to state something like: "There is nothing new or interesting here, not even a great work of art to point to and wonder. Cooper looks behind the curtain of Fante's existence, finding that whatever wizard we had imagined there had long ago crumbled to dust." --I'm sorry, but that's not even half intelligent, it's sheer wanton stupidity. Yeah, that's why John Fante has admirers from John Fowles all the way down.
   
   Cooper's book gives us the externals that formed John Fante the writer. If that is uninteresting to the previous reviewer, that's sad. That he or she doesn't appreciate Fante work, and feels the need to attack it is pathetic. Fante will long outlast you, and I'd sure hate to see what lies on your bookshelves. Fante's books continue to sell and be reprinted, here in the U.S and in Europe. While there's no accounting for taste, there's no accounting for its absence in this case. Set Fante beside anyone who wrote in the 1930s or 1940s-Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, etc.-and you will see that Fante's writing is not dated, but is incredibly fresh. And while he writes a clean simple prose, at the same time there is poetry there, too. How many writers can you name who are capable of accomplishing that? Add Fante's humor, and you have writing that is a miracle. Sure there are passages that are cruel-life was very cruel for Mexicans, Italians, Philipinos, and others living in the U.S. all vying to fit in as Americans, to survive. And that was the world John Fante worked to depict in his writing. If that a failure of a life, then give me more failures!
   
   Fante's writing is brilliant, but of course you have to have some taste to realize this. And if you've got any sense, you'll find it hilarious; it will make you laugh out loud, and yes, wince on occasion. It will move you, because there's an emotional content in his writing that is sorely lacking in 95% of the writers out there.
   
   Stephen Cooper's biography is not adulatory. Instead, it's honest, as Fante's writing is honest. Cooper writes of the whole man, not a part of him. To the other reviewer who complained that Fante's fictions were so frequently full of fabrication, well, that's why they call it fiction, silly. People do themselves and Fante a huge disservice by assuming what he wrote was autobiographical. Fante clearly infused his character, his alter ego, Arturo Bandini, into a framework wherein he used bits and pieces of real life, but his writing is not a mirror of his life. John Fante the person is not the same as John Fante's writing. Again, for those of you who are troubled by the definitions of `novel' and `fiction,' he made it up.
   
   I say hats off to Stephen Cooper for writing a good solid biography of a man who deserves a much wider audience. Perhaps when the film Ask The Dust comes out in December, and Robert Towne doesn't blow it, that will happen.



4. For a book called "Full of Life," this work is surprisingly flat and boring. Not much happens in the life of John Fante. He drinks a lot, writes a little, drinks some more, abuses his wife, drinks even more, and saves just enough time to drown a sack of kittens in the kitchen sink while his children cry horrified. That's it for the drama, though. There isn't much life here, just a sad example of a generation of gruff and abusive alcoholic men slowly fading into memory. "Life" in these terms seems defined by random violent outbursts, failure and the bottle. Even Cooper's prose, fashioned to echo his idol, falls flat on the page with sentences like, "He was full of piss and vinegar." This isn't a biography as much as a eulogy to a time and a man better left forgotten. Fante's literary achievements were limited in his lifetime at best, perhaps in no small part due to his heavy alcoholism. There is nothing new or interesting here, not even a great work of art to point to and wonder. Cooper looks behind the curtain of Fante's existence, finding that whatever wizard we had imagined there had long ago crumbled to dust. There is no life here, full or otherwise...



5. Overall, a good first biography of John Fante. Fante's extensive screenwriting efforts are documented in detail here, and there are interesting insights into the writing of Ask the Dust. I found some portions a bit dry, like the delving at length into Fante's family tree at the beginning. Likewise, the fifty pages of scholarly Notes at the end are tedious reading and seem superfluous. Invaluable are facts surrounding incidents such as Fante's car accident later in life (Stephen Cooper hinting that perhaps it was an attempt at autocide), and Fante's purchase of a revolver (the biographer suggesting that Fante may have been planning to kill himself). Inexcusable, however, are omissions like the failure to note the recent writing achievements of Fante's son, Dan, whose books are big business in Europe. Dan may have his father's gift of braggadocio, and the curse of ten times the old man's bitterness, but the oversight (?) is bizarre in the context of such an obviously well-researched bio. The few glossed-over gaps in Full of Life are almost to be expected since John Fante's own letters and fictions were so frequently full of fabrication themselves.

5 comments about Truth and Duty: The Press, the President, and the Privilege of Power.

1. Mary Mapes' story about President Bush's National Guard service was "fake but accurate" we are told. This book, however, is just fake. Every once in a while I force myself to read a book by someone on the other side of the political divide from myself. This book was a bad choice. Now, Mapes is good at recasting facts and history to present herself in a good light. But the fact is that she was grinding this particular axe for many years, and was delighted to accept "evidence" that was incontrovertibly fake in order to "prove" a story that was equally fake.
   
   This book's real bias is evident from its title. The "power" that Mapes really wants to see is the privilege and power of the media to distort the news, or tell outright lies and get away with it.
   
   American politics will be in a bad way as long as the news media cuts in only one direction, and is infested by political axe-grinders like Mapes. Thank goodness that the internet and other "new media" are rapidly destroying the media Oligopoly's ability to distort the news to the American people.



2. My impression about Mary Mapes changed substantially after reading her book. After the broadcast of GWB's ANG service in Texas, a nationwide impression of her attempting to manipulate the presidential election with a false document was created and destroyed a brilliant career.
   
   CBS's poor handling of the broadcast and the way it handled those staffers afterwards contributed significantly to this. Mary Mapes should have appeared on every possible media outlet after the broadcast to explain and defend the broadcast and this large amount of silence demanded by CBS executives allowed the perception to become reality.
   
   History is now vindicating Mary Mapes, we went to war in Iraq on a lie pushed by this president. His National Guard service was a lie and it was a lie she tried to expose because it spoke volumes of the man now president. Unfortunately for her the main document exposing him cannot be proven definitively to be valid or a clever forgery. She is correct to assert that it was typed on a typewriter, having transitioned from electric typewriters to computers I clearly remember that typewriters never line up letters vertically like software programmed laser printers, there's a certain lawyer in Atlanta who should have been sued for defamation or at least had a bar complaint placed against him.
   
   When the Col. Killians secretary asserted that the letter was not typed by her or Col. Killian then the letter clearly could not be authenticated could well be a clever forgery. Trying to use the argument that it still accurately reflected the sentiments of the time only makes her appear foolish.
   
   In the end journalism was further diminished. Our newscasts appear to be more and more state run, the government at every level manipulate and determine a lot of the newscasts. There are some very good reporters, producers and editors out there who try day in and day out to get the story out, their efforts are often stymied by their corporate masters who are dearly afraid of offending the powers that be.



3. Mary Mapes's "Truth and Duty" is a book written for vindication. Mary Mapes, a former respected and veteran investigative journalist at CBS did a very bad thing: she did her job. She investigated (thorougly) the story about how George W. Bush used his privilege (the Bush family) to avoid Vietnam by jumping ahead of 100,000 people on the National Guard waiting list, and then again to get out of the National Guard prematurely. It was gutsy and painstakingly time-consuming investigative work, driving around Texas obtaining original documents and interviewing Bush's National Guard supervisors. But the problem was the timing of airing the story. It was September, 2004. The American Corporate State HAD to maintain a criminal White House so they could continue the genocide of Middle Easterners and expand their markets while plundering the ill-gotten natural resources. There was too much wealth at stake, exactly the same scenerio of Great Britain's military support of Cecil Rhodes in his 1897 slaughter of the Dutch farmers (Boers) in South Africa. The corporate state, using their vast resources and power, was able to squash the story and get Mapes fired. Bush was re-elected and the genocide and plunder continues. The story is just another vein of criminality by the American Corporate State on their road to globalization as described in the book Don't Weep for Me, America: How Democracy in America Became the Prince (While We Slept).



4. Truth and Duty is a fascinating read and a very sad commentary on the state of the news media in our FauxNews World.
   
   Mary Mapes worked very hard on every story that she had ever done and did it with professionalism, that is, she gave an unbiased and fair account of every story that she had covered. However, when she prepared a story on the Bush National Guard years, she was bloggerized and demonized.
   
   Bush was, for most of his two terms, a Teflon President; one protected from the truth by a non-stick surface, Internet bloggers; and, as David Brock would call it, the Republican Noise Machine.
   
   I was a victim of the same type of attacks but on a much smaller scale. Before the Iraq war, I wrote columns for a local newspaper, the Lee's Summit Journal. I had written on many topics and offered my views with a touch of humor. I was well liked by readers, the editor and the publisher, until I wrote a column that criticized Bush for preparing this country to go to war with Iraq. I turned his own propaganda on him using his language to describe George W. Bush as an "evil man". That was too much for the publisher of the Journal who promptly blackballed me from writing in that paper ever again. Today, over five years later, I am still blackballed at that and another paper where the former publisher of the Journal is now publisher.
   
   Bloggers did not attack me as they did Mary Mapes, but local neo-con apologists wrote scathing letters to the Journal to attack and slander me. When I demanded a disclaimer from the publisher, he told me, "You will never write for this paper again."
   
   After two and a half years of writing free columns for the Journal, I was ostracized for writing what most people now recognize is the truth. So, I can totally understand how Mary Mapes, without political bias, reported the truth and suffered for it. I was an unpaid columnist; I lost nothing but my column space. Mary was a professional who, for doing a thorough job, suffered great damage to her reputation and financial harm, so, to a lesser extent, I can certainly relate to her experience.
   
   Mary Mapes, Dan Rather and the rest of the crew that reported the Bush National Guard story made one huge mistake. Instead of offering real evidence, they should have adopted the FauxNews tactic of saying repeatedly, "Some people say". On Fox, they never identify the "people" who say what Rupert Murdoch wants them to say, people who are probably other Fox employees standing around the coffee machine making up tripe.
   
   If you want to read a great story, written by a professional writer who suffered from the political fall out of the Republican Noise Machine, read Truth and Duty. And if you want to know more about how the news media has become infiltrated by the neo-con fifth column, read David Brock's great book, the Republican Noise Machine.



5. I am most of the way through the book and while I find her story compelling some of it is self serving. In some places she really comes off as wishy washy and at other times grows a backbone. There are many reviewers, for whatever reason, who want to rationalize Bush as having served well in the TANG when there are many questions about the missing time that need to be answered honestly. With that in mind this book does not, in my mind, provide definitive answers but should make the more thoughtful troubled by the smears Mary Mapes endured by some. The people behind those smears, that Mary Mapes writes about, appear to be on a witch hunt more than a search for inconvenient truths that would force them to confront their cognitive dissonance about the detestable political world they inhabit. I think, even with the caveats about the author, this is an important book that should be read for what if says about the willingness of those on the political right to destroy dissenting voices in the land of the free.

No comments about From Canton to California: The Epic of Chinese Immigration.

2 comments about Always a Rebel: Ricardo Flores Magon and the Mexican Revolution.

1. From the DJ: Often described as the primary mover behind the Mexican Revolution, Ricardo Flores Magon was a liberal journalist working in Mexico in 1900. By 1910 and the Revolution, he was a radical anarchist in exile in the U.S. This book studies Magon's transformation during those crucial ten years, placing his changing ideas in the context of the liberal movement in Mexico, government suppression, the development of the "Partido Liberal Mexicano" in the US, and thwarted attempts at revolution in 1906 and 1908. The first work to concentrate on Magon himself, this book makes clear the journalist's significance in Mexican history and explains modern Mexico's growing appreciation for him.



2. This study of Ricardo Magon is a fabulous addition to any library's collection on the Revolution. It is thoughtful, well-researched and entertaining.

3 comments about Memoirs: Fifty Years of Political Reflection.

1. Raymond Aron was unique among intellectuals: at once a journalist and scholar, he was a prolific writer on, and noted expert in, a huge aray of subjects from philosophy to military strategy to economics. As it turns out, his life was also fascinating: he was a classmate and best friends with Sartre before becoming his great adversary during the post war debates on Marxism, was in London for the French resistance during the war, and became a television personality late in life.

   In French, Aron writes with a grace and clarity that are astonishing. Now I have finally read his memoires, one of the last things he wrote. When you compare any contemporary intellectual to him, they simply can't measure up.




2. Simply put, Rayomd Aron's memoir is proufound and interesting. Those who want to affect society in terms of knowledge should read this book. Aron just before his death tells us what intellectual ethics is, how unconscious intellectuals can be far from mass, and why we need philosohpy to understand society. Through the entire of the book, there is a specter of Sartre who used to be Aron's "little comarade" but turned out to be his ideological enemy. In contrast to a Sartre's monstrous genius who declined a Nobel prize, Aron commits himself as a humble humanutarian. This book is a critical review of the French intellectual history.



3. Raymond Aron is one of the most interesting intellectuals of this century. His writing is deeply appealing. He is not just telling the political history of the century he lived. The pages are like a wave that drifts from the right to the left inside the parties, from his childhood to poetry, passing through comunism, nazism, the wars, the fall of the ideologies, till reach the decade where the giant (USA) starts its fall - the seventies. He throws you into the political sense, into the racionality of the inteligentsias throughout Europe. It's not just about past, present and future. It's a different history. It's a guest for reason, it's a guest for the most challinging steps of man.

No comments about Standing Before the Shouting Mob: Lenoir Chambers and Virginia's Massive Resistance to Public School Integration.

5 comments about Trail Of Feathers: Searching for Philip True.

1. In December, 1998, San Antonio Express-News reporter Philip True vanished during a solo backcountry trek in western Mexico, home of the reclusive Huichol Indians and the Chapalagana, the Twisted Serpent Canyon, a 150-mile long gash that twists and plunges through the heart of the Sierra Madre. Five days later his editor, Robert Rivard, was part of a small search party that, tracked a trail of feathers that had leaked from True's sleeping bag to find his hidden grave." "Trail of Feathers is the story of the search for True and of the quest to find his killers and bring them to justice. It is also the story of: Why had True taken such a dangerous trip, into such a raw, uncivilized wilderness, alone and without sufficient safety preparations, in the first place? I'm more of a "get to the meat of the story kind of reader". Too much background information in the beginning and too much droaning on about how corrupt the Mexican court system is.



2. a riveting account of a troubled man looking for himself. The story behind the story is the author's and also boss, never ending search to find out who killed him. Rivard is truly the hero in this story.



3. ...but she knows where you live. And if it's in another country, you better weigh your side of her scale with the most pesos. This is illustrated vividly south of the border, where much of Robert Rivard's new book, Trail of Feathers, takes place. In it, he recounts his physically and emotionally grueling foray into the remote canyons of Mexico in search of his vanished colleague, Philip True. True was a San Antonio Express-News correspondent who made the controversial decision to attempt a 10-day, solo foot trek through territory that would deter all but the most Spartan of adventurers.
   
   True had always been a model of self-sufficiency and stoicism throughout his rough life; paradoxically, he often relied, perhaps naively, on the inherent kindness of his fellow man to survive, and planned to camp with the primitive Huichol Indians who had inhabited the land for hundreds of years. His impetuous journey didn't exactly surprise his wife, who knew better than anyone of her husband's affinity for nature and the solace he took in hiking. But she secretly hoped that this would be his last dangerous hurrah into the wilderness before settling down to his new family.
   
   When word reached Rivard that True's return date had come and gone, the story evolved into a reporter-as-detective narrative. He saw it as his editorial duty to locate the whereabouts of his missing employee. Both men are spurred on by a journalist's idealism and relentless thirst for knowledge, and as we learn more about True's life and family secrets through Rivard's meticulous research, intriguing parallels emerge and the fate of the two becomes inextricably intertwined.
   
   The obstacles that spring up at every switchback on the trail of Rivard's surrealistic odyssey are formidable. Mysterious Huichols, brazenly corrupt authorities; crossing the border becomes akin to crossing through Alice's looking glass, which like a funhouse mirror, reflects back America's own democratic and judicial shortcomings and magnifies them into grotesque distortions. Retracing True's footprints, we feel as though we're stepping back in time, our gringo presence and notions of justice appearing increasingly anachronistic the less civilized the lands become.
   
   We learn about True's motivations through his enigmatic journal entries, and while we gain a deeper understanding of the complex man, the great insight as to why he left behind his family in their time of need remains frustratingly elusive. The "terrible beauty," as Yeats might say, of the harsh terrain that they have to contend with becomes almost like a character in the book as well, complicit in True's death. Rivard's search party eventually locates True's body in a shallow grave outside a Huichol camp, and the Mexican investigation begins. But CSI, this ain't. If you think the wheels of justice turn slowly in America, wait until you see them on a Mexican jalopy.
   
   Two suspects, an obsequious Huichol and his domineering friend, who reminded me of the killers in that most famous of true-crime novels by Capote, are soon apprehended, and deliver unrepentant confessions. Yet each time the case against them appears crystal clear, the waters are promptly muddied darker than the Rio Grande. Rumors of coercion surface, and soon international politics, bureaucratic red tape and nationalistic media are all further postponing justice.
   
   Mexicans see it as hypocritical that one lost American would receive such attention when locals go missing all the time without a trace, much less a trial. Ever-resentful of foreign intervention into their affairs, many of them view the writer's mission as just one Texan "trying to re-fight the battle of the Alamo," as Rivard memorably puts it.
   
   The more we begin to understand the psychology of the people that killed True, the more we begin to understand why the Mexican judicial system resists upsetting its stultifying lack of inertia. Miraculously, due to Rivard's perseverance, he and several other key players manage to not only achieve closure for True's widow, but also to throw some much-needed light on the withering judicial wasteland lying in the shadow of our own "Tree of Liberty," and write a riveting story in the process.



4. In a way, Philip True had the dream life of a reporter, in which after one's death a top editor leaves his comfy chair and tries to find the path of righteousness you led him to. It was a trail of feathers, from a leaky sleeping bag, that led Robert Rivard to the grisliest of all discoveries: the puffy, bloated and decomposing body of the man whose boss he had been and who had once deceived him, never even telling him by word or sign that he was headed once more for the Sierra Madre, in Western Mexico. But by this time we have found out some heartbreaking facts about poor old True, the man who had survived everything, from child abuse to being a hippie, and who had finally found happiness with a Mexican bride, Martha, who was pregnant when he went larking for one last investigative jaunt, and whose son, little Teo, was born way after True had already been killed by a pair of vengeful Mexican First Nations people of the Huilchol tribe.
   
   It's a tale that, to my knowledge has never been told before. How often do you listen to a man tell you what it's like to dig up the corpse of an employee--without tools, so that we become disgustedly fascinated with the mechanics of using one's bare hands as tools, while little by little corruption meets the air. Not only bodily corruption but a dismal disjunct between our two countries, the USA and Vicente Fox's Mexico.
   
   Just as shocking is the list of True's own secrets, for he confided only to one woman and to a therapist that he had been the victim of a rapacious mother who had fondled him sexually as a boy, and a father who had a secret BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN cigar box stuffed with Polaroid photos of himself enjoying sex with other men, and who was caught in bed with his own seven year old daughter, poor thing. No wonder Philip never really grew up, or so it seems.
   
   It's hard to believe that his killers are still out there, in the cavern of the Sierra Madre the Indians call the "Twisted Serpent." Rivard writes like lightning, and with furious vengeance he has targeted his prey with nooses of a thousand paragraphs long. This book should be required reading for all those who believe in investigative journalism. Sometimes you have to ask yourself, is it all worth it? The answer, as far as I can tell, is still blowing in the wind. A painful answer but one we should have tattooed to our arms like sailors their anchors and roses.



5. Trail of Feathers, by Robert Rivard, ranks up there with the best of so-called true crime literature - Capote's "In Cold Blood" and Mailer's "The Executioner's Song" come to mind. This book is really about searching for the essence of the man that was Philip True and will be an invaluable legacy for his son.
   
   I note most of the reviews have been written by Texans. I hope this book reaches a far wider national and international audience because the themes it touches upon are universal. Other reviewers have given a synopsis of the story - I will just say this book should be read by everyone interested in the conflicts between indigenous people and modernity and for those readers that just want to enjoy a really good read.

5 comments about Words of Fire: Independent Journalists who Challenge Dictators, Drug Lords, and Other Enemies of a Free Press.

1. Tony Collings writes stories of courageous men and women who are fighting to bring the truth to their readers. Collings writes from the vantage point of an international correspondent who has risked his own life to cover world danger spots. This book should be read by anyone who values a free press.



2. For the American layperson who may not be familiar with the dangerous situations and murky but volatile undercurrents journalists often face in foreign trouble spots, Tony Collings book "Words of Fire" will be revealing in its accounts of journalists who have given much--even their lives--to the cause of truth and democratic ideals. As an international journalist himself, Collings knows well of what he writes. This work might even raise the level of regard in which journalists are held as defenders of the people's right to know. Here Collings is talking about the important issues shaping the growth and development of any of a myriad countries, not the latest American fad-gossip which passes for "news" on tabloid TV in the U.S. For the professional journalist with overseas experience--and I include myself in that category with friend and former CNN colleague Tony Collings--I found his work well researched, well written and a good account of what is the best in our craft.



3. At a time when print journalism has often been justly criticized in the U.S. as medium of entertainment, without independent moral backbone, Tony Collings has written a moving, brilliant record of the deadly struggle between a free press and totalitarian goverments around the globe. Collings is an experienced broadcast journalist and an eye-witness to much of the corruption and terror hidden and sustained by censorship everywhere, from Russia to Columbia. He argues that press freedom is an essential and enabling condition for the expansion of democratic reform in reactionary regimes. But perhaps what is most moving about WORDS OF FIRE is the many true stories of personal courage, the harrowing dangers faced by journalists in our historical era as they attempt to unmask the face of tyranny with only the truth of their words.



4. At a time when print journalism has often been justly criticized in the U.S. as medium of entertainment, without independent moral backbone, Tony Collings has written a moving, brilliant record of the deadly struggle between a free press and totalitarian goverments around the globe. Collings is an experienced broadcast journalist and an eye-witness to much of the corruption and terror hidden and sustained by censorship everywhere, from Russia to Columbia. He argues that press freedom is an essential and enabling condition for the expansion of democratic reform in reactionary regimes. But perhaps what is most moving about WORDS OF FIRE is the many true stories of personal courage, the harrowing dangers faced by journalists in our historical era as they attempt to unmask the face of tyranny with only the truth of their words.



5. Author Anthony Collings knows how to bring this vital topic alive. In the USA, we take press freedom for granted. If anything, some of us feel there's too much of it about: we often sympathize with Hollywood stars who punch out swarming paparazzi. But in much of the world (and not just the kleptocracies and one-party regimes), simply getting the basic truth to press can be a career-ending or even life-threatening endeavor. Collings wisely decides to illustrate this by focussing on individual cases, many of which will astound you. This is an important book on an important subject.

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