Amazon.com Review
One part intellectual and one part journalist, Ron Rosenbaum offers a thick book full of his writing from
Esquire,
Vanity Fair,
The New York Times Magazine, and
The New York Observer (where he is currently a columnist). Perhaps not every selection will interest every reader--the diversity of topics is incredible--but there is probably something, or many things, for everyone in
The Secret Parts of Fortune.
An outstanding entry is an excerpt from his celebrated book Explaining Hitler. Other highlights include a hilarious interview with Robin Leach (entitled "The Frantic Screaming Voice of the Rich and Famous"), an explanation of why Murray Kempton "is the best prose writer in America," and a short history of computer hackers. One of Rosenbaum's finest pieces focuses on the cancer-cure underground: "False hope springs eternal," he writes, describing how phony cancer "cures seem to spring up and sweep the nation like religious revivals, a new one at least every decade." Yet he's sympathetic--or at least mildly understanding--of the motivations behind the fake healers: the movement isn't "composed mainly of cash-hungry charlatans and snake-oil salesmen eager to make an easy killing off the sufferings and hopes of cancer victims. In fact, among the healers, the prophets, and the alchemists, you find less greed than evangelical fervor--the rapturous conviction of religious visionaries."
Rosenbaum is rougher with Bill Gates; he lights into the billionaire's fabled high-tech home, which he says "exhibits the distinctive feature of the totalitarian mind: the inability to distinguish between private and public spheres. It suggests this isn't just the way he wants to run his house, it's the way he wants to run the world: total surveillance, enforced entertainment, everyone isolated in programmable pods." Yet another standout is Rosenbaum's article on Kim Philby, the British intelligence officer who spied against his native land on behalf of the Soviets. Or did he? Rosenbaum considers the fascinating "possibility that Philby had been not a Soviet double agent but a British triple agent." And there's so much more. This rich book is full of provocative and gripping prose, and highly recommended. --John J. Miller
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
Rosenbaum's third collection of articles and essays (he's "The Edgy Enthusiast" columnist for the New York Observer) shows again that he is one of our most original writers of nonfiction. His two previous compilations made sense, respectively, of the 1970s and '80s; this much thicker volume collects a dozen or so pieces each from these decades, and adds 33 from the 1990s. Prefaced by a long anecdotal introductory essayDin which the journalist explains both his own history and the story behind the compiled articlesDthe book offers up consistently lively and thoughtful writing that combines investigative reporting, cultural context, humor, self-deprecation and erudition. A Yale graduate with a degree in English, Rosenbaum (Explaining Hitler) started contributing in the 1970s to such publications as Esquire, New York, Harper's and the Village Voice almost by accident; later, propelled by his interest in finding out what is hidden beneath the surface of things, more essays appeared in Vanity Fair and the New York Times Magazine. His pieces tackle the theories of conspiracy buffs (Rosenbaum aptly calls himself a "buff buff")Dfrom rumors about the real motivations of notorious double agent Kim Philby to the possible existence of Shakespeare's lost works. He also meditates on the link between Yale's Skull and Bones Society and the CIA; J.D. Salinger's walled-in house; the Zagat restaurant guide; Borges's efforts to disprove the existence of Time; and a score of other hidden aspects of American culture. Filled with literary allusions, ruminations on the motor of human history and a straightforward sensitivity, Rosenbaum's essays are gems of narrative nonfiction.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
