Latest news with #RobertPennWarren
New York Times
02-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
What's in Our Queue? ‘Face in the Crowd' and More
I'm a White House correspondent. I spend a lot of time and psychic energy reporting on the daily convulsions in Washington. I think it's good to unplug from the warp-speed news cycle from time to time, to let my mind wander to faraway places and the past. It helps → Elia Kazan's 1957 movie about another charismatic loudmouth who whips up a populist furor and rides it all the way to the pinnacle of power is another thing worth revisiting. It's a movie about mass media as much as about politics. I finally read this most famous of Russian novels and loved it for its cynical, florid absurdism, and most of all for the chapter on Satan's grand ball. The writing is so over the top and the guest list so wicked, it reminded me almost of Tom Wolfe describing a 1980s Park Avenue dinner party. This comprehensive, compulsively watchable docuseries about what happened after 9/11 features original interviews from big players in the Bush administration and beyond who played pivotal, often disastrous, roles in those years leading up to these wars we've only just disentangled ourselves from. I recently read for the first time Robert Penn Warren's Pulitzer Prize-winning opus of a novel based on Huey Long, a.k.a the Kingfish, a.k.a the Dictator of Louisiana. It's such a dark, riveting tale of politics, power, the press, populism and elites, and I love the way he writes about the land itself. It's all sulfuric atmospherics. This masterpiece from 1969 unravels what life was like in one small town in France that collaborated with the Nazis. It's more than four hours, but gets better as it goes — the sort of thing you put on on a gloomy Sunday when you want to put your phone in the other room and really get lost in something.
Wall Street Journal
04-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
Appreciation: John Casey (1939-2025)
In 1991, the summer before senior year, my high school assigned three books for reading. Summer books weren't those considered classics, like 'King Lear' or Robert Penn Warren's 'All the King's Men,' but they were contenders, near-greats: 'The Street,' Ann Petry's 1946 novel about black life in Harlem; 'The Road From Coorain,' Jill Ker Conway's (1989) memoir of her bleak childhood in the Australian grasslands; and John Casey's 1989 novel, 'Spartina.' In the first English class meeting of the school year, the only book we wanted to talk about was 'Spartina.' How could we not? For starters, there were the main characters' names: Dick Pierce and Elsie Buttrick. Ponder those names as if you were 17. But once Mrs. Archibald waited out our tittering and steered us toward the text, we agreed this maritime thriller was special. The story follows middle-aged Yankee Dick Pierce as he negotiates the class politics of his coastal Rhode Island community, works odd jobs for the summer vacationers, and slowly builds the boat that will give him financial freedom as an independent fisherman.
