The Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy, Volume I: American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand

Description: The Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy, Volume I by James Ellroy, Thomas Mallon "America was never innocent."Thus begins the Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy. Its James Ellroys pop history of the 1960s, his window-peepers view of government misconduct, his dirty tricksters take on the great events of an incendiary era. Its a tour de force of the American idiom, and an acknowledged masterpiece. American Tabloid gives us Jack Kennedys ride, seen from an insiders perspective. Were there for the rigged 1960 election. Were there for the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Were the eyes and ears and souls of three rogue cops whove signed on for the ride and come to see Jack as their betrayer. Were Jacks pimps and hatchet men, and were there for that baroque slaying in Dallas.The Cold Six Thousand takes us from Dallas to Vietnam to Memphis to the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in L.A. Were rubbing shoulders with RFK and MLK, calamitous klansmen, noted mafiosi. Were forced to relive the American sixties--and we come away breathless.The first two books of the Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy revisit the most anarchic decade in our history. They are defined by their brutal linguistic flair and reckless panache. FORMAT Hardcover LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Author Biography JAMES ELLROY was born in Los Angeles in 1948. He is the author of the Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy--American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand, and Bloods A Rover--and the L.A. Quartet novels, The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz. He lives in Colorado. Excerpt from Book Introduction In a review of American Tabloid (1995), William T. Vollmann made the extraordinary and correct observation that every sentence advances the plot in James Ellroys 576-page novel. The two subsequent books of Ellroys Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy are even longer, even more densely sequenced, so I wont make a fools attempt to describe their narrative action. Nor will I even try to expound upon their themes--no matter that they show Ellroy long ago embracing what everyone now calls the Deep State, whose extreme-high and extreme-low hidden forces squeeze history out of the vast citizenry caught in the middle. What I can only hope to suggest is the intimacy of these novels, how they remain wondrously suffused, even in moments of spectacular mayhem, with the inner torments of those inflicting violence on others. These relentlessly plotted books are finally not about events; theyre about characters. Some are tormented by crude certainties and brutal secrets. The most important of these is Pete Bondurant, Ellroys big Caucasian madman, forty years old in 1960, who began piling up a vertiginous body count in the battle of Saipan (He killed them and killed them and killed them). Those deaths, along with the subsequent murder of his own brother back home, become the first reel of Bondurants standard nightmares. Later, he is at the bone-breaking beck and call of Jimmy Hoffa and Howard Hughes and a rogue CIA officer named John Stanton. Though he rampages freely, Pete has the wild sentimentality of a convict: he is able to strangle Betty McDonald, an inconvenient witness, before becoming helplessly devoted to her cat. For years he has the love of Barb Jahelka--dedicated, damaged, implicated--but he has to worry hell lose her over his involvement in Jack Kennedys death and then Bobbys. It is an absurd triumph of Ellroys artistry, a testament to his own depths of feeling, that Bondurant remains believable. But it is the characters tormented by ambivalence, the ones sickened more by doubt than gore, who compel the readers own disturbed devotion. In American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand (2001), we are ensnared by the existence of Ward Littell, a lifelong weathervane in an unending electrical storm. This orphan raised in Jesuit foster homes, an ex-seminarian and trained lawyer turned disillusioned FBI agent, continually divides into Angry Ward and Cautious Ward. He is flooded with guilt, drink, paranoia and masochism; Hoover sees him as the worlds most dangerous wimp. Drifting left, he gives his heart to the young rackets-busting Robert Kennedy, even while hes supposed to be undermining him for Hoover. Littell embarks on a Grail quest for the Teamsters secret pension-fund books, a potential offering to RFK, but ends up being pulled into the servitude of the Mafia and of Hoffa himself. Five months of sobriety teaches Littell one essential fact: Youre capable of anything. Anything runs from maudlin tenderness to multiple murders; even to an ugly wave of love for Hoover. Hell imagine hes protecting Martin Luther Kings movement even as hes duped into a white-supremacist plot. After the decades trinity of King and Kennedy assassinations, hell be able to cry: Their bloods on me. And he will be left with no alternative to the self-erasure hes been seeking all along. As he exits the trilogy, the reader is left terrified of his own suppressions and contradictions. The novels are driven by men whose longings and impulses cannot suppress or resolve themselves. Wayne Tedrow, Jr., lives through the last two volumes in the same kind of polarized pain that Littell endures for the first two. A young officer considered incorruptible by Las Vegas Police standards, Wayne is sent to Dallas by his father, a friend of Hoovers, just prior to the Kennedy assassination. (You never know when you might rub shoulders with history.) He experiences incestuous flirtation, revenge-fucking and finally a tender, intense connection with his stepmother, Janice. Wayne Jr. despises his own race hatred and spends his psychological energy trying to control and atone for it, even as he keeps killing blacks. Sonny Liston, the onetime heavyweight champion and occasional goon-savant of the trilogy, puts it this way: That boy just didnt have no hate for anybody, but shit kept finding him. He kept trying to find niggers to kill and niggers to save, and this woman of his thought it was all the same goddamn thing. Wayne Sr. explains his son to Ward Littell, who ought to know: Junior was a hider. Junior was a watcher. Junior lit flames. Junior torched. Junior lived in his head. By the spring of 68 hell be muscling Sirhan Sirhan toward RFK at the Ambassador Hotel, and when he watches the riots that follow the killing of Martin Luther King, he thinks: I Did That . When the Nixon years begin, he abets the Mobs scheme to recreate its old Cuba-style action in the Dominican Republic--until he flips again and literally cuts the shackles from the slaves building the casinos. The greatest of Ellroys doomed ambivalents, and the biggest stretch of his imagination, is Marshall E. Bowen--Anomaly. Incongruity. Anti-white hate-tract subscriber, potential L.A. cop--who doesnt come along until the last volume, Bloods A Rover (2009). This African-American who infiltrates left-wing and black militant groups appears cool and pacific but actually lives for the game. On the downlow sexually and in every other way possible, Bowen keeps a journal about the mental vise he lives inside: As always, I abut that maddening disjuncture: the viable construction of black identity and the dubious construction of revolution, as implemented by criminal scum seeking to cash in on legitimate social grievance and cultural trend. (He cant live authentically even in the diary; it ends up being doctored by those who need to frame him.) Bowen finds romantic escape in his obsession--shared by a number of characters, including the white-racist cop Scotty Bennett--with the years-old unsolved heist of an armored car full of emeralds. But like Littell and Tedrow he can reach only death, not fulfillment. Its the same with Dwight Holly, another rogue FBI agent who figures largely in the last two volumes, a man Hoover calls my obedient Yalie thug. Holly shoulders the guilt of some long-ago drunk-driving murders; heads up the racist Operation Black Rabbit; becomes enthralled with two different women of the far left and is nearly, but not quite, persuaded to take out Hoover. In Ellroys political-psychological calculus, he too has to die, unresolved and unredeemed. Which leaves a transfiguring space for the most unlikely character of them all, the real-life Don Crutchfield, a twenty-three-year-old wheelman for an L.A. private investigator, universally regarded as a dipshit, who stumbles into the last volume of the trilogy. Crutch seems at first to be a throwaway, a goofball version of the authors feckless youth: his r Details ISBN1101908041 Author Thomas Mallon Short Title UNDERWORLD USA TRILOGY VOLUME Pages 1176 Language English ISBN-10 1101908041 ISBN-13 9781101908044 Format Hardcover Series Everymans Library Contemporary Classics Series Year 2019 Publication Date 2019-06-04 Country of Publication United States AU Release Date 2019-06-04 NZ Release Date 2019-06-04 US Release Date 2019-06-04 UK Release Date 2019-06-04 Place of Publication New York Publisher Random House USA Inc Imprint Everymans Library USA Subtitle American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand; Introduction by Thomas Mallon DEWEY 813.54 Audience General We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and well over a million items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love! TheNile_Item_ID:138003553;

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