well, that was certainly enlightening, which is exactly what I expected. my information is stuff I just sort of picked up, based on what my father told me. I totally got the dates and circumstances wrong. is your history of the Eighth out yet? I noticed the previous ones are all e-books and most of them are audiobooks, which is how I…
well, that was certainly enlightening, which is exactly what I expected. my information is stuff I just sort of picked up, based on what my father told me. I totally got the dates and circumstances wrong. is your history of the Eighth out yet? I noticed the previous ones are all e-books and most of them are audiobooks, which is how I tend to get most of my reading done these days (something about how my eyes work now, or, to be more more accurate, DON'T work). I'll grab the Eighth history as soon as it's available. and I DID know they were considered prima donnas and "glamor boys."
a mo0vie scene that ALWAYS makes me cry is Dana Andrews in the bomber cemetary in "The Best Years of Our Lives." incidentally, I got to know Joe Heller a little bit when he started teaching at CCNY (he also had an office the building on West 57th Street as my father did for a time), and his actual, personal take on the officers he knew was pretty much the opposite of the way they were portrayed in "Catch-22." I can recall being on the subway with my father when he read "Catch-22" and I can remember being a little mortified that I was with this guy who was laughing so hard he had trouble catching his breath. I read it again last year, and hadn't remembered how fabulous it was, just for the sheer quality of the prose.
The book on the Eighth comes next year. Downtown came out today, and "the Cactus Air Force" (the four critical months at Guadalcanal) which I wrote with my friend and mentor the late Eric Hammel from his 40 years of interviews with people nobody else talked to will be out this October.
My book "The Bridgebusters" is the true story of the "Catch-22 bomb wing" and introduces an interesting theory as to why the novel got written. It turns out to have been far more a "Roman A Clef" than Heller ever admitted to. As Buck Henry told me about him, "Joe Heller was the angriest guy I ever met," which was the door into the theory - that and having the son of the guy who made the documentaries Heller participated in that got him the "milk runs" he talked about when everyone else was flying tough missions in the Battle of the Brenner Pass, before he went home on 60 missions when everyone else was stuck with 75 and then "for the duration," find photos Heller said never were taken of him during the war. That book is having a special trade paperback edition come out in October, or you can get the hardback used on Amazon - there is no audiobook for it.
the audiobook might be out of print (I can't figure out why this happens, but there was one, and it's pretty good). I have a copy somewhere, which I can TRY to get to you, although it very well might have copy protection or some other bullshit going on. but I'm on it...
ha!...I just checked and the audiobook is very much available on Audible (Unabridged, 19 hours).
Interesting. I have had very little dealings with this publisher. If you know who/what they are, you'll understand. They wanted to get a "real" history line going, and were willing to work with authors who weren't part of their usual crowd, but then right when this book - the first of those - happened, 2016 happened.
all of us are going to keep paying and paying for those four or five years. it's pretty amazing and very much like a bad dream, in which the worst thing imaginable is exactly what happens five minutes later.
....and Bob Gottlieb's excellent autobiography has a long section on his editing of "Catch-22," in which he was very much a part of what that book was.
well, that was certainly enlightening, which is exactly what I expected. my information is stuff I just sort of picked up, based on what my father told me. I totally got the dates and circumstances wrong. is your history of the Eighth out yet? I noticed the previous ones are all e-books and most of them are audiobooks, which is how I tend to get most of my reading done these days (something about how my eyes work now, or, to be more more accurate, DON'T work). I'll grab the Eighth history as soon as it's available. and I DID know they were considered prima donnas and "glamor boys."
a mo0vie scene that ALWAYS makes me cry is Dana Andrews in the bomber cemetary in "The Best Years of Our Lives." incidentally, I got to know Joe Heller a little bit when he started teaching at CCNY (he also had an office the building on West 57th Street as my father did for a time), and his actual, personal take on the officers he knew was pretty much the opposite of the way they were portrayed in "Catch-22." I can recall being on the subway with my father when he read "Catch-22" and I can remember being a little mortified that I was with this guy who was laughing so hard he had trouble catching his breath. I read it again last year, and hadn't remembered how fabulous it was, just for the sheer quality of the prose.
The book on the Eighth comes next year. Downtown came out today, and "the Cactus Air Force" (the four critical months at Guadalcanal) which I wrote with my friend and mentor the late Eric Hammel from his 40 years of interviews with people nobody else talked to will be out this October.
My book "The Bridgebusters" is the true story of the "Catch-22 bomb wing" and introduces an interesting theory as to why the novel got written. It turns out to have been far more a "Roman A Clef" than Heller ever admitted to. As Buck Henry told me about him, "Joe Heller was the angriest guy I ever met," which was the door into the theory - that and having the son of the guy who made the documentaries Heller participated in that got him the "milk runs" he talked about when everyone else was flying tough missions in the Battle of the Brenner Pass, before he went home on 60 missions when everyone else was stuck with 75 and then "for the duration," find photos Heller said never were taken of him during the war. That book is having a special trade paperback edition come out in October, or you can get the hardback used on Amazon - there is no audiobook for it.
the audiobook might be out of print (I can't figure out why this happens, but there was one, and it's pretty good). I have a copy somewhere, which I can TRY to get to you, although it very well might have copy protection or some other bullshit going on. but I'm on it...
ha!...I just checked and the audiobook is very much available on Audible (Unabridged, 19 hours).
Interesting. I have had very little dealings with this publisher. If you know who/what they are, you'll understand. They wanted to get a "real" history line going, and were willing to work with authors who weren't part of their usual crowd, but then right when this book - the first of those - happened, 2016 happened.
all of us are going to keep paying and paying for those four or five years. it's pretty amazing and very much like a bad dream, in which the worst thing imaginable is exactly what happens five minutes later.
....and Bob Gottlieb's excellent autobiography has a long section on his editing of "Catch-22," in which he was very much a part of what that book was.