It's generally taken for granted that crime organizations are operated by men. In her debut novel, Lola (Crown, $26), Melissa Scrivner Love uses that expectation as a narrative device, to wonderfully subversive effect. Protagonist Lola is the secret leader of a South Central L.A. gang called the Crenshaw Six. To......
When Casablanca came out in 1942, it was a popular and critically acclaimed film that helped America understand exactly why it was fighting yet another world war. As time went by, it came to be considered one of the greatest films ever made. Seventy-five years later the classic film is......
Imagine bringing a cute little baby alligator home from the pet store only to see it grow into a giant 15-foot gator that takes over your house and dominates your daily life. That’s how David Thomson sees the history of television in his blockbuster new book, Television: A Biography (Thames &......
The only predictable thing about Born to Run (Simon & Schuster, $32.50), Bruce Springsteen’s sonic blast of an autobiography is the title. Everything else about it — the riveting narrative arc, the astonishing level of candor, the unflinching self-criticism, the lyrical poetry of its workingman’s prose — is so fresh......
When Bill Murray went to Japan to film the indie classic Lost in Translation back in 2002, he brought along a little novelty book called Making Out in Japanese. It included colloquial phrases for lovers such as “You have a beautiful body” and “I don’t want to get married yet.”......
There’s been a lot of buzz lately about “rapid radicalization,” whether it’s the crazy couple in San Bernardino who killed 14 co-workers last fall, the allegedly self-hating gay man who killed 49 patrons of a gay club in Florida last month or the truck driver who killed 84 strolling revelers......
There’s a long literary tradition of celebrities’ children writing vicious take-downs of their parents. Bette Davis and Joan Crawford both had daughters who wrote books painting them as drunken tyrants who used their children as props to enhance their public image; one of Bing Crosby’s sons wrote a similar screed......
There are plenty of reasons to detest Kanye West: his huge ego and constant bragging, his chronic dissing of Taylor Swift — no, you did not make her famous and no, she definitely won’t have sex with you — and of course his general all-around doucheyness. Even President Obama has......
There's been a tidal wave of early- and midlife memoirs recently, most of them self-indulgent, self-referential and occasionally even wildly narcissistic. But Lauren Weedman's Miss Fortune is like a pearl that washed up on a beach full of seaweed, tar balls and plastic six-pack holders. It's a jewel sparkling amid......
How many references to famous L.A. landmarks does it take for a book to qualify as a classic L.A. crime book? What's the probability that familiar L.A. types — self-righteous vegetarians, slimy bookies, wealthy Beverly Hills widows — will all appear in the same book but in different stories? These......
