37 posts tagged “books”
Marketing is the massage. Again. Always claim to have knowledge of the unknown, because it is so much cooler to say you are using secret Urawaza rather than claim you're relying on Heloise's hints. To one up your friends, family or enemies even further, claim your life hacks are stolen from the "Ito Family Dinner Table" (second post) and hope your audience isn't familiar with Japanese television ... or the internet.
Can you really kill by revealing a secret? Litterateur V.S. Naipaul believes so. In the just-published, authorized biography The World is What It Is he admits that letting the world know that he had paid prostitutes during the early years of his marriage was likely what pushed the state of wife's cancer from remission into terminal.
On television, in shows such as "Perry Mason" and "Ironside," Raymond Burr ferreted out the secrets of others. Off screen, he had secrets of his own to hide, include a love of fine wine and orchids he shared with his partner of 35 years -- the less successful thespian Robert Benevides. That career-damning relationship was hidden by the creation of deceased wife and children, according to the new biography, Hiding in Plain Sight.
For those who crave the knowledge only select others have or share it must be impossible to conceive of knowing too many secrets. But secrets can be a burden and setting them free a personal liberation. Or so is the story of author Ian Fleming, subject of an exhibit at Britain's Imperial War Musuem. Working during WWII as assistant to the director of Naval Intelligence Division he became the man who knew too much. Ready for real action and too important to be risked ... and so came the books about a man always ready for action who is risked and often risks everything. Bond ... James Bond.
Thriller writer Charles McCarry is precise in his prose. But everyone is clunky at some point in their oral communication, so while he would surelynot use "dying" and "torture" so closely in prose, it still rings true when the ex-CIA operative said in a recent interview that he doesn't believe in torture: "People are dying to tell you their secrets. It’s just a matter of getting the conversation going."
Imagine if your public identify was a secret one. Such is the life of avocating card counter Rick Blaine, who supplements his Fortune 500 worker bee lifestyle by remaking his looks (spray tans, sunglasses, hair adjustments) to go and count cards at blackjack. Unlike the current "21," the movie made from the Ben Mezrich story of MIT student card counters,"Bringing Down the House," Blaine's story is significantly more downlow and with more up and downs with years of six-figure success and nearly equal failure. He'll offer his card counting secrets in courses or his book, "Blackjack Blueprint," but you'll have to work much harder to discover his life. Which would you rather know?
Perhaps a little secret (that you don't confess until you realize it made you dumber) is buying the "cheat notes" for Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin." Perhaps a big secret to not reveal is how your government helped undermine another. But when the little secrets are revealed the big secrets unravel and when the big secret is undone the little secrets spill out as well. The best example of that may be the Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick administration and personal life, the threads of which are coming ever more undone with the towel slipping further down every day on big secrets and little secrets.
Apparently,ex-Soviet Union spies come in two sizes. Blabby and tight/thin-lipped. Among the former is Sergei Tretyakov, or at least the character who tells the tales in Comrade J, the story of his post-Cold War spying for Russia. In the latter category is Bondlike girl Maria Lyovina, the 100-year-old Russian counter-intelligence officer who still won't dish.
Drawing on the secrets of his own family, Edward Docx created Pravda, a novel of family secrets colliding. Unkown siblings; marital infidelity; lies about money; and an fearsome St. Petersburg locale with all the secrets of Russian society oppressing are the heat of the book "long listed" for Britain's 2007 Booker prize.
** How much of her own truth will Big Jo find in the fiction. **
Digging through family secrets of the past can be entertaining and amusing, assuming you can figure out which secrets to still keep. But discovering family secrets of the present, say the link between financial and sexual infidelity -- and the link is almost always there, according to an expert (?) Bonnie Eaker Weil -- is a bit less entertaining if you happen to be the betrayed, although individually or together they will always provide something for audiences to appreciate.
