creative riff » Book Review

Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney – Book Review

Ruth Loose88 — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 16:25:48 +0000

"You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning. But here you are, and you cannot say that the terrain is entirely unfamiliar, although the details are fuzzy. You are at a nightclub talking to a girl with a shaved head. The club is either Heartbreak or the Lizard Lounge. All might come clear if you could just slip into the bathroom and do a little more Bolivian Marching Powder. Then again, it might not. A small voice inside you insists that this epidemic lack of clarity is a result of too much of that already."

Let me say this first - Jay McInerney's Bright

The King of Madison Avenue by Kenneth Roman – Book Review

Ruth Loose88 — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 20:01:49 +0000

“In writing ads, act as you would if you met the individual buyer face to face. Don’t show off. Don’t try to be funny. Don’t try to be clever. Don’t behave eccentrically. Measure ads by salesmen’s standards, not by amusement standards.”

Who is David Ogilvy? Many, including this reader, proclaim him as their main inspiration for entering the advertising field. Why? There are three reasons: 1) Ogilvy’s working philosophy was not the 1960s smoke-filled business pitch as seen in AMC’s Mad Men. He always professed to “sell” the product through detailed feature descriptions and speaking directly to his audience. 2) He interacted and had meaningful relationships with so many assorted major thinkers of the twentieth century that these

Hiroshima by John Hersey – Book Review

Ruth Loose88 — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 01:24:13 +0000

“In a city of two hundred and forty-five thousand, nearly a hundred thousand people had been killed or doomed at one blow; a hundred thousand more were hurt. At least ten thousand of the wounded made their way to the best hospital in town, which was altogether unequal to such a trampling, since it had only six hundred beds, and they had all been occupied. The people in the suffocating crowd inside the hospital wept and cried, for Dr. Sasaki to hear, “Sensei, Doctor!,” and the less seriously wounded came and pulled at his sleeve and begged him to go to the aid of the worse wounded. Tugged here and there in his

Stay Close by Libby Cataldi – Book Review

Ruth Loose88 — Wed, 20 May 2009 05:42:50 +0000

My son is in jail, Miami-Dade County jail. He faces a felony charge for heroin possession and a misdemeanor charge for possession of drug paraphernalia. This isn’t the first time he is in jail; maybe it won’t be the last. Addiction invaded our home in 1991. It slithered in and sat down at our dining room table, grew large and fat, fed on our misery, laughing, mocking us with its power. It claimed Jeff when he was a fourteen-year-old boy. I did everything I could think of to save my son, but in the end I could do nothing, not really, to extricate him or to free our family from addiction’s claw. If you love or care about an addict, you know

The Informers by Bret Easton Ellis – Book Review

Ruth Loose88 — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 20:54:27 +0000

“I’m really thinking seriously about staying out here a little longer. I’ve sort of forgotten what New York and Camden look like and I’ve forgotten a lot of faces from there and I don’t know if I can face going back. I probably won’t stay here but I’ve been thinking about it. I’m dreading seeing those people who I called my friends. I’d rather stay out here and not, as you so often put it, ‘deal with it,’ y’know?”

The Los Angeles of Bret Easton Ellis is bronzed, hazy and smoke-filled. His New York is a cold, neon-lit nightclub. The characters that inhabit his numerous novels rarely fully explain their motives. Instead, Bret holds his audience

To Hate Like This Is To Be Happy Forever by Will Blythe – Book Review

Ruth Loose88 — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 21:39:07 +0000

"It is a basketball rivalry that simply has no equal. Duke vs. North Carolina is Ali vs. Frazier, the Giants vs. the Dodgers, the Red Sox vs. the Yankees. Hell, it's bigger than that. This is the Democrats vs. the Republicans, the Yankees vs. the Confederates, capitalism vs. communism. All right, okay, the Life Force vs. the Death Instinct, Eros vs. Thanatos. Is that big enough?"

What is it about college sports that captivate us so? Is it the fact that the referees actually call traveling or that the stadium does not reverberate with pop anthems such as the Baha Men’s “Who Let The Dogs Out” whenever a star player slams in a dunk? Yes, college sports are the beginning, middle

The Hill – The Switch to Digital

Ruth Loose88 — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 02:20:59 +0000

New issue of The Hill available with my article. The online version can be found here. My article about the digital television switch in June can be found on page 15 of the PDF. Happy reading. Source: [The Hill] Continue reading

Sacred Hunger by Barry Unsworth Review

Ruth Loose88 — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 08:13:57 +0000

‘Money is sacred, as everyone knows,’ said Delblanc. ‘So then must be the hunger for it and the means we use to obtain it. Once a man is in debt he becomes a flesh and blood form of money, a walking investment. You can do what you like with him, you can work him to death or you can sell him. This cannot be called cruelty or greed because we are seeking only to recover our investment and that is a sacred duty.’ Barry Unsworth’s 1992 novel provides a seminal, sometimes frightening window into the British Atlantic slave trade during the mid-eighteenth century. Sacred Hunger was required reading for my history 278 course, The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, but stands Continue reading