david kipen Book Recommendations & Book Mentions

david kipen

Starr marshals facts and stories with the administrative genius of a gifted field general. His work is ebullient, nuanced, interdisciplinary history of the grandest kind. He’s a born storyteller too, mining a rich seam of anecdotal coal to animate complex, enigmatic figures.

david kipen

Nobody has ever used the second person as intimately as Gold did. He just assumed that you too knew and loved L.A. — and somehow, if only while you read his reviews, you did.

david kipen

Maybe the best thing I ever did at the @sfchronicle was signing up Ferlinghetti to write his “Poetry as News” column. Second best was having Regan McMahon edit it. Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s editor remembers: “it was a thrill to get to work on his stuff.” https://t.co/FLhKnz2YFD

david kipen

Late Pynchon at his finest. Dark as a vampire's pocket, light-fingered as a jewel thief, Shadow Ticket capers across the page with breezy, baggy-pants assurance -- and then pauses on its way down the fire escape just long enough to crack your heart open.

david kipen

Some prefer Macdonald’s perverse, Edgar-winning mystery “The Chill” — without whose example “Chinatown” is hard to imagine — but more votes went to this other gem, the author’s own favorite among his many books about private eye Lew Archer.

david kipen

Widower Robert Neville, sole survivor of a plague that’s turned everyone else in L.A. into ravening but stupid stalkers, fortifies his house against assault every night, all the while pining for someone to love. Soon he’ll wish he hadn’t.

david kipen

Plenty of his language is as ripe for cancellation as an unwatched sitcom, but the man could bloody well tell a story.