Channeling Elvis: How Television Saved the King of Rock ‘n Roll, by Allen J. Wiener
Earlier this year, author Allen J. Wiener asked me to read his manuscript on Elvis Presley’s television career, and to provide a cover blurb if I liked the book. I am neither an authority on Elvis nor on television history, but I said, “sure.” I was not only a fan of Elvis’s music, but, as a college disc jockey during the 60s and 70s, I played his music, even when his better songs of the period (e.g., the Jerry Reed penned songs U.S. Male and Guitar Man, 1967-68) missed the Top 40 and were considered particularly unfashionable in psychedelic San Francisco. I found Wiener’s book to be a very remarkable study. The blurb I submitted ran 340 words long because I could not stop gushing. Of course only a relatively few words made it to the cover blurb. I let Allen...
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The books that might sit on YOUR 1st Ed. shelf: Collecting 1st Eds on Wyatt Earp and Tombstone
As I have written, I am much more a book aggregator than book collector. I have gone looking for very few first editions; and I’ve never gone looking for signed copies. Consequently, there are very few books that I have paid hundreds for, none that I’ve approached $1,000. The most expensive was a privately bound, limited edition 10-volume set of scripts for the 77 (I think is the number) Tombstone episodes of THE LIFE AND LEGEND OF WYATT EARP. These were for the final 2 seasons of the 6 for the series, 1955-1961. From internal evidence, the bound scripts seem to have been the property of the series chief writer, Frederick Hazlitt Brown, who wrote 189 of all 229 episodes. (A complete set of scripts for all 6 seasons, contained in 31 volumes (picture shown), bound and embossed in...
Read MoreSee “Publications and Talks” page for new works so far in 2014
The “Publications and Talks” page now includes listings for upcoming article on the Arizona Cow-Boys in the Wild West History Association Journal, and new book reviews of some must-have books: on Lynn Bailey’s “The ‘Unwashed Crowd'” (WWHA Journal), with much new material on the origins of the Arizona Cow-Boys, and “A Lawless Breed,” the new John Wesley Hardin bio by Chuck Parsons and Norman Wayne Brown (Journal of Arizona History). More articles and reviews on the way, plus am readying a proposal for my book manuscript, The Girl in the Iron Box: J. Edgar Hoover’s G-Men and the Myth of the Infallible...
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The books that… fill my Churchill shelf. PART 3: History of the English-Speaking Peoples
Churchill, The History of the English Speaking Peoples (hereinafter HESP), (my copy is the American edition, Dodd, Mead, & Co., 1962 reprint; first published 1956-1958). Volumes I-IV: The Birth of Britain; The New World; The Age of Revolutions; The Great Democracies. The four-volume History of the English-Speaking Peoples, begun by Churchill before the Secord World War, is the last book he completed and published. It’s a highly personal view of British and American history (with very little on the English speaking nations of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and even next-door Ireland. As for Indians, Africans, and other non-white colonials, for Churchill they are merely the beneficiaries of British imperial rule.). Largely written in the late 1930s, it was left unfinished when the war erupted. He returned to it after his second prime ministry ended in 1955. By that time,...
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The Books That…. Fill My Winston Churchill Shelf: PART 2: Why Read Churchill Anymore? The Second World War (abridged)
I’m not a book collector. I own very few first or special editions purchased to create or build a valuable collection. Mostly, I just buy, a book aggregator forced to periodically cull my library in order to continue aggregating. I’ve owned very few books written by Winston S. Churchill, but have never culled any of them. Each I’ve always considered special enough to keep, to read over and over when, in childhood, I owned few books; later to prominently place on my first college-era bricks-and-wood plank shelving; later still to repeatedly cart from state to state as my entire library grew from a few books to twenty cases worth; and occasionally to shell out for better editions of old friends. Book collectors and aggregators own books by the scores and hundreds that they’ve never read or will never read...
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