REVIEWS
My Kitchen Wars: A Memoir
"Paul Fussell is laid out a capon, on the butcherblock counter,
doused with an elegant sauce, then deboned
before being cooked up on a spit. It's Hubby, Dearest ---
with a béchamel sauce out of Provence."

The Night Inspector
"He had a pasteboard mask made up, with holes for eyes and mouth,
painted brows and nose. He moved to New York where he
traded pork bellies, got rich, and spent time jawing
with Herman Melville, and whoring with a mulatto named Jesse."

Dr. Freud: A Life
"Some have called him the greatest novelist of the turn-of-the-century --- besting Joyce, Proust, and James. Civilization and its Discontents and
The Interpretation of Dreams are as stunning to read and contemplate now
as they were a century ago. Not according to Ferris ---
a real Freudian party pooper if there was one."

Devil Take the Hindmost:
A History of Financial Speculation
Part I
"Mother comes to me in my dreams and tells me what stocks to buy.
(I don't make this up: these stentorian voices never came to me
until after she died in 1995). Now, the moment I wake up,
I have firmly planted in my brain the name of a stock,
and often its price."

Part II
"Everyone in their right mind knows the current lunacy
in the stock market has to end, and that its ending is going to be
painful, destructive --- and quite possibly, disastrous
for the political and economic system we operate under."

BRIEF REVIEWS
Grand Central Winter
The Marines of WWII, and
Getting Drunk in the Bar Stories

ARTICLES
Funny Book Nominated for the Pulitzer Prize
"Pulitzer, who came to the U.S. from Hungary as a teenager,
never actually learned the English language.
The first newspaper he published, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch,was written entirely in Hungarian,
and still is to this day. People in St. Louis don't notice the difference
because the paper has plenty of pictures."

Captain Hook
"He had two hooks for arms. He'd go around the town, and
on the beach, all day, bare-chested, showing off his hooks,
fake arms that connected to his shoulders, with the "flesh" being that
Motel 1950 shiny plastic seat-cover orange/tan so favored
by orthopaedic manufacturers."