Most Helpful Customer Reviews
|
|
21 of 32 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"CLAY LIES STILL, BUT BLOOD IS A ROVER", 1 Jan 2010
To paraphrase Winston Churchill, America is a lie, wrapped up in a deception, inside a thin shell of morality. And James Ellroy keeps taping that shell, testing for weak-points and showing us it is hollow. Do you have the stomach to see what they have been feeding us all this time?
DIG IT: any bootlegger's son can become the President - assassination will automatically activate sanctification. Organized crime does not exist - but that never stopped it from running the country. And elections are not easy to fix - but in any case easier to fix than the World Series.
DOCUMENT INSERT: the most powerful man fighting Communism is a cross-dressing director with a wiretap fetish - morality standards and irony galore. Dominican Republic is the new location-location-location for blackjack-tables and chorus-line girls - if el Jefe can thwart the voodoo-slaves from revolting. And Tricky Dick's price is 5 million - uncontrolled scatology at no extra charge.
CAREFUL NOW: infiltrate means collaborate; collaborate means condone; condone means finance; finance means plan; plan means precipitate - at which point did the investigation turn into instigation?
This is the third installment of the American-Underbelly trilogy (the masterpiece American Tabloid being the first and the excellent The Cold Six Thousand being the second). One does not necessarily have to read them in succession - but it surely helps. This is not an easy read, the story will serpent back and eat any one of its multiple tails, more than once. A second reading is recommended. And it will up the pixel-count of the images projected. In CinemaScope and Technicolor.
As the trilogy goes, this is the weakest of the three books, mostly because Ellroy hesitated in taking up major players with his brush painting the picture. Hoover and Nixon make cameo appearances - and sprinkles cannot be as filling as a square meal. I also missed the cool tabloid excerpts. The story is dark enough, some direct humor (even of the hush-hush kind) could be used.
Other than that, expect the familiar hard-boiled noir story. Where men are complicated and cruel yet witty and dames are desirable and decisive yet in constant distress. And no one is innocent.
There be time enough to sleep. For now, let James tell you (almost) everything.
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you?
 
|
|
|
|
|
|
39 of 62 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
3 Stars Overall -- A 4-Star Story Embedded in A 2-Star Writing Style!, 6 Oct 2009
Having enjoyed some of Ellroy's earlier books but not being a fan of his more recent books, I was hesitant about reading Blood's A Rover. However, since I received it for free through the Amazon Vine program, I decided to read it since, at worst, all I had to lose was some time I could have spent reading another book. Well, after investing the considerable time to read the 647 page advance reader copy, I have very mixed feelings about Blood's A Rover. If you're willing to "work" at reading this monster of a book, I think you'll find the basic story to be pretty interesting. Without going into detail (and giving myself a headache in trying to describe what Blood's A Rover is about), I'll just say that it involves an incident between a milk truck and a Wells Fargo armored truck, which then takes the reader through a detailed, yet topsy-turvy examination of the late 1960s-early 1970s. The story bounces -- make that thuds -- its way across, LA, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. In doing so, the reader needs a scorecard to keep track of the many Ellroy-created and real-life characters (such as Howard Hughes, J. Edgar Hoover, Richard Nixon, Sam Giancana, and Sonny Liston just to name a few). As I said, the reader must be willing to be 100% focused on the book in order to appreciate its story, and if they make this committment their payout will be an entertaining story. However, for me, personally, I felt I had to work harder then I want to when I decide to read a book for pleasure -- especially when the book turns out, at best, to be just entertaining, and not great. As a consequence, I, in all likelihood, won't be willing to invest the time to read the next tome by Ellroy -- even if I was able to get the book for free, as I did Blood's A Rover. While many consider Ellroy to one of today's literary masters, I find his writing style in Blood's A Rover too-often to be annoying, over-the-top, choppy, and repetitive, and in desperate need of a good editor. Further, I found many of his characters to be not dimensionalized enough for me to care about them. But that's only my opinion. If you choose, you could let James Ellroy, himself, tell you how great Blood's A Rover is by accepting his introductory description of his new book in his letter to booksellers -- i.e., "Dear Booksellers -- In all its mellifluous and macho-maimed magnificence: my new novel, Blood's A Rover."
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you?
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
by James Ellroy
by James Ellroy
by James Ellroy
by James Ellroy
by Don Winslow
