A couple book notes this week. Commuting on BART is good for reading, at any rate, even though the bites tend to be too small.
Nick Tosches' The King of the Jews knocked me out. It purports to be a biography of Arnold Rothstein, the man who supposedly fixed the 1919 World Series, and who was the basis for Nathan Detroit in Guys and Dolls, and Meyer Wolfsheim in The Great Gatsby. but while Tosches may end with a bunch of the Rothstein story, he starts at a very different place, the book of Genesis and the way it shows the transition from many gods to one. He then picks up the story of Jews in Russia in the 18th century, and the migration to America, making a long pause at the Five Points and crime in New York in the middle of the nineteenth century. Along the way, he's not afraid to put a lot of himself into the book, and there's a lot of with, a lot of rants, and a lot of just plain great writing in the book. Many, many sentences cry out to be quoted. I enjoyed every page of this book, and savored every sentence. He's a prolific writer, and I'm surprised I haven't read him before. It might be hard to read a lot of him, but I have his Sonny Liston bio up next.
I'm almost finished with The Way We Die Now, a reread of a novel I first read when it appeared in 1988. All of Willeford is worth reading, and the Hoke Mosely novels that appeared in the 80s, starting with Miami Blues are terrific. (Last week I watched the excellent movie of that book, with Fred Ward, Alec Baldwin, and Jennifer Jason Leigh; it's a real treat.) In this one Mosely goes undercover to get the dirt on a guy who hires illegal Haitians, and then kills them when they're done with his work. Willeford is great at mixing the several threads of his story together, and Hoke Mosely is just a terrific character. Lots of writers, of course, have done Florida, and it's always been amazing to read them, from John D. MacDonald to Carl Hiassen to Elmore Leonard sometimes, but Willeford puts all the pieces together really well.
Finally, due in part to a conversation I had Thursday evening with some very sharp folks, I've been deep into PHP 5 Power Programming by Andi Gutmans, Stig Bakken, and Derick Rethans. It's a cut above the run of the mill PHP books, with great discussions of the new Object features of PHP, error handling, and a lot more. Now, I hope things work out with those folks so I get to use some of what I'm readin g. My current gig is using old PHP on a couple of the servers, and upgrading them is going to be a bastard.
5:27:56 PM 
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