A fun, fast read if, like me, you’ve seen Goodfellas about a bazillion times.

It is — to the surprise of nobody, I’m sure — an excellent book.   It’s funny, it’s touching, and it’s so smoothly written that you just can’t stop reading it; I finished it in …

While it’s hardly even-handed (and also REALLY hard to read because, in the original, he typeset it himself and his caps alignment is fucked, so it’s like reading a really small-fonted term paper), it’s really …

Eh.   Not nearly enough dirt, the interstitial bits with Jerry are forced — if you read the excerpt in Vanity Fair, you don’t need to read the whole thing.

The problem here is that it’s pretty clear early in the book what had actually happened (sorry for the vagueness, I don’t want to ruin it for anyone), which is a shame; Jackson’s first-person narration …

Parts of it haven’t dated well, I don’t think, and while I like the build, the ending is not my favorite — I got that inorganic “because I said so” feeling from it.   Still …

It’s a good read; it seems overly long for a true-crime book when you start it, but I can’t see where I would have cut it.   (In fact, I might have added to it; …

It’s excellent, both as a true crime account and as an overview of the birth of Mormonism (although I don’t imagine Mormons look too kindly on it, but it’s quite evenhanded).   Fast read, fascinating …

So gossipy and good; I loved it.   It’s all the best parts of Capote and that SNL oral history, and even when you aren’t sure what (or whom) they’re talking about, it’s very bitchy …

It’s a collection of Gould’s baseball writings over the years — and a disappointment as such.   He’s a wonderful writer, ordinarily, and I loved his contributions to the Ken Burns series, but because this …