43 posts tagged “books” (page 2)
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.
It is -- can you beat a dead horse back to life? -- once again time to face that the most interesting secrets are the ones someone dangles in front of you but says s/he will not share. So it is with stories only The Lips, Mick Jagger, knows. (Gene Simmons can still be "the tongue.") Mick has announced that even $4 million doesn't interest him into sharing secrets from his past. I didn't care before, but now I am kinda curious, although I do suspect it is not that he doesn't want to share them. More likely he just can't remember them. (He is old ... and lots of drugs and alcohol were involved.)
Once again, the secret is the sales pitch. Apparently, American hero and (then) Nazi sympathizer Charles Lindbergh had German families and children. Which is certainly uncomfortable for his American kids, although daughter Reeve Lindbergh will be able to sell a great many more copies of her collection of essays, "Forward from Here," thanks to publicity and reviews about her including the thoughts of a betrayed daughter, who doesn't find out until 30 years after her father's death and two after her mother's passing that she has half-siblings around the world.
It may be the oldest, but it is still the goodest: "the secret is I lied." And it works, whether it is Hollywood honeys who claim their diet secrets aren't due to psychotic episode-inducing drugs -- or just plain overreliance on coffee and cigarettes or the creator of teen girl book and TV phenomena who was telling her own story as a pampered upper New York city school girl, only coating it with beauty and drenching it in sex, drugs and alcohol.
Utopian and intrusive. That's the intriguing dichotomy of understanding someone's secret language. The dividing point seems to be whether or not they want to be understood. On the one hand we have babies signing when they don't know the word for hunger or wet (or, presumably antidisestablishmentarianism, although I'm not sure that's been tested yet.) And on the other we have the ability to read what people don't want told, such as their life or poker tells.
