| I posted the week's worth of guest details yesterday, so I'll point you there and just add a few more recent bits.
Jon's guest is the investigative-journalist (and writer) half of the team that put together Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune, a book that sounds both interesting and free of politicalized controversy. Hugette was the daughter of one of the western robber barons who grew up in the largest home in NYC, owned mansions all over the place, and spent the last decades of her life living in a hospital as if it was a hotel (she died a couple years ago at 104). The co-author, Paul Clark Newell, Jr, is the family historian and an out-of-the-inheritance-battle relative who kept up with her. Might read this one.
And Stephen's got the producer of the movie Salinger, about the life of "famed recluse" JD Salinger. Whose writing bored me, but anyway. @SecretSalinger is full of Yay! tweets & links, but the tomatometer is lower today than yesterday -- 32%, with 37 reviews in. Though the audience rating is up from 50% to 51%, so.
I came across this, from The Paris Review via twitter, this afternoon:
On Sunday, I saw Salinger. Having seen the trailer, not to mention the posters, my companions and I had reason to expect a certain degree of bombast. As such, we came armed with skepticism and whiskey, hoping to hear some interesting interviews, see some neat archival footage, and learn a little something in the bargain. What we learned is that you cannot go into this movie without a highly organized game plan.
I will not attempt a review of Salinger; plenty of people much smarter and better qualified than I have done so already. What I can do, by way of a public service, is extend the following warnings to anyone who would attempt to play a drinking game while watching Salinger, because it is a road fraught with peril.
We entered into the experience with a level of naivete that, today, seems laughable. We had only one half-formed rule: whenever anyone on screen says “recluse,” everyone takes a drink. Alas! Within fifteen minutes we had depleted the miniature bottle of whiskey I had recently been given in a gift bag. The documentary clocks in at 129 minutes. On the other hand, sufficient supplies would have left us supine and slack-jawed. In order to help other moviegoers, my companions and I quickly compiled a list of warnings...
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