Rockets and Rodeos and Other American Spectacles - Hardcover

Mallon, Thomas

9780899199399: Rockets and Rodeos and Other American Spectacles

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0899199399 ISBN 13: 9780899199399

Publisher: Ticknor & Fields, 1993

Essays discuss the Fourth of July, rodeo championships, the trial of a bank robber, the launch of the space shuttle Discovery, the fiftieth anniversary of Pearl Harbor, and a death row inmate

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From Publishers Weekly:

Mallon ( A Book of One's Own ), literary editor of GQ , here sandwiches together 12 uneven essays in pursuit of the quintessentially American experience. His wry tone frequently serves him well--the United Nations is "endlessly verbose," the 1992 Sundance Film Festival is "held together with fairly uniform ideological glue"--and he captures the telling ironies of a space-shuttle launch and a rodeo in Tulsa. Most of these pieces first appeared in such journals as the American Spectator , and, unfortunately, not all of them merit preservation in book form: a plodding account of an unexceptional criminal trial in New York City, a bit of ephemera about the 1990 U.S. Senate race in Rhode Island between Claiborne Pell and Claudine Schneider, and a sympathetic but none-too-deep road-trip account of the Vice President, in which Mallon concludes that "Dan Quayle is no Dan Quayle."
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal:

From American Spectator contributor and author, most recently, of the novel Aurora 7 ( LJ 2/1/91) comes this collection of essays on several recent American "spectacles." Mallon succeeds in keeping the reader's interest by the diversity of his subjects (a New York City bank robbery trial; a rocket mission studying the Northern Lights) and his smooth narrative style. Although a couple of the essays are overly long, they are all enlivened by Mallon's flair for characterization (e.g., in a stump speech Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell "speaks in the soothing, excessively sane way of a bereavement counselor"). Rockets and Rodeos will appeal most to readers looking for good writing without requiring high drama. For popular collections.
- Pamela R. Daubenspeck, Warren-Trumbull Cty. P.L., Warren, Ohio
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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