Amazon.com Amazon.com Review (ISBN 0060934468, Paperback)
One part intellectual and one part journalist, Ron Rosenbaum offers a thick book full of his writing from
Esquire,
Vanity Fair,
The New York Times Magazine, and
The New York Observer (where he is currently a columnist). Perhaps not every selection will interest every reader--the diversity of topics is incredible--but there is probably something, or many things, for everyone in
The Secret Parts of Fortune.
An outstanding entry is an excerpt from his celebrated book Explaining Hitler. Other highlights include a hilarious interview with Robin Leach (entitled "The Frantic Screaming Voice of the Rich and Famous"), an explanation of why Murray Kempton "is the best prose writer in America," and a short history of computer hackers. One of Rosenbaum's finest pieces focuses on the cancer-cure underground: "False hope springs eternal," he writes, describing how phony cancer "cures seem to spring up and sweep the nation like religious revivals, a new one at least every decade." Yet he's sympathetic--or at least mildly understanding--of the motivations behind the fake healers: the movement isn't "composed mainly of cash-hungry charlatans and snake-oil salesmen eager to make an easy killing off the sufferings and hopes of cancer victims. In fact, among the healers, the prophets, and the alchemists, you find less greed than evangelical fervor--the rapturous conviction of religious visionaries."
Rosenbaum is rougher with Bill Gates; he lights into the billionaire's fabled high-tech home, which he says "exhibits the distinctive feature of the totalitarian mind: the inability to distinguish between private and public spheres. It suggests this isn't just the way he wants to run his house, it's the way he wants to run the world: total surveillance, enforced entertainment, everyone isolated in programmable pods." Yet another standout is Rosenbaum's article on Kim Philby, the British intelligence officer who spied against his native land on behalf of the Soviets. Or did he? Rosenbaum considers the fascinating "possibility that Philby had been not a Soviet double agent but a British triple agent." And there's so much more. This rich book is full of provocative and gripping prose, and highly recommended. --John J. Miller
(retrieved from Amazon Thu, 14 Feb 2013 14:00:04 -0500)
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It's hard for me to imagine an essay collection that is as thought-provoking, pleasurable, and varied (in equal proportions) as this one. Rosenbaum is a "buff buff"; in other words, he's fascinated by the phemonena that generate obsessive study. He's especially fascinated by such phenomena that have unanswerable questions at their heart. As such, the best pieces here concern the Dead Sea Scrolls and their effect on the men who've tried to unlock them; Lee Harvey Oswald and MaryMeyer, two murder victims at the heart of the JFK assassination; the Marcus Brothers, twin gynecologists who came to a mysterious end and inspired the film DEAD RINGERS; Henry Lee Lucas, who claimed to have serial-killed 600, only to recant and admit he was stringing along the Texas Rangers who were using him; Kim Philby, the double- (or triple-?) agent at the heart of the Cold War; the Skull and Bones Society; as Rosenbaum puts it, "Elizabeth Kubler Ross's Torrid Love Affair with Death"; and "The Octopus" that might/might not have gripped the Bay of Pigs, Watergate, "The October Surprise," and Iran-Contra--and the reporter who died trying to decide. That's only a few! Then there are Rosenbaum's own obsessions, like America's greatest unheralded "Great Novelist" Charles Portis, Rosanne Cash, Oliver Stone vs. Quentin Tarantino, and Vladimir Nabokov's PALE FIRE. Now that you don't have time to read entire books, you should find this, put it on your night stand, and read one essay a night (its 760 pages should keep you occupied for awhile). HIGHLY RECOMMENDED. Note: Also included is the magazine piece that turned into Rosenbaum's shattering EXPLAINING HITLER; you can decide if you'd like that book by reading the much shorter feature here. (