Finishing 2017

14: Hunting Eichmann, Neal Bascomb

About the Mossad capture of Eichmann. I'm not a fan of Bascomb's writing. It's not airline magazine level, but it's definitely aiming-to-be-a-bestseller-bland. After reading Arendt's report on the Eichmann trial, the difference in depth is shockingly obvious. The story is of course thriller-level fantastic.

Bizarrely, Bascomb insists that Mossad treated Eichmann like some sort of spy master. He attributes all sorts of "highly intelligent, highly trained, omg, so spy, very secret agent" qualities to Eichmann, which he clearly did not have. I cannot tell whether that's Bascomb inventing or misrepresenting things, or Mossad at the time not knowing any better. (The latter is entirely possible. After all, Eichmann was a fairly shadowy figure for most of the time before his arrest.)

15: The Kings of New York, Michael Weinreb

Oy. Now we're back to airline magazines, I'm afraid. Weinreb's subject is an interesting one (highly successful chess team at an experimental public school in a poor area of NYC), but his lack of knowledge about, you know, the fucking subject he's covering is painful. His descriptions of chess games are utterly useless; he writes like he's reporting on a NASCAR race. It's not clear why Weinreb even bothers to mention pieces or certain squares, e.g, "he pushes his bishop to d6". That's wonderful, mate, but without a diagram of the position or a list of all previous moves this is a useless bit of data.

Given that it would have been trivial to get the games, there's no excuse for not including some of them in an appendix, at least.

How much did I dislike this? Well, not enough to not finish it, but enough that I might actually give it away. Did it make me want to play chess? Eh. Only a little.

16: Showtime at the Apollo, Ted Fox

I finally finished this. The last few chapters (covering the 50's, 60's, and 70's) are less interesting to me, so it was hard work. The earlier parts include interesting anecdotes. At times it reads like oral history, at others like a never-ending listing of names.

It has one of the better accounts of Ella Fitzgerald's discovery (p. 97), mentioning that it was actually at a Harlem Opera House amateur night that she was discovered, rather than at the Apollo. It agrees in places with other popular accounts (including that she was a dancer and that Bardu Ali made the discovery), but in important points it does not (no mention of her originally planning to dance on stage, a passing mention of there having been previous amateur appearances (though note that Timmie Rogers makes no mention of this in the direct quotation)).

The story of [Ella's] early days as a nervous amateur has frequently been recounted&emdash;usually erroneously stating that she got her start at the Apollo's Amateur Night. In fact, she was discovered by friends of Chick Webb at an amateur-night performance at Schiffman's Harlem Opera House in 1934, although she had made the rounds of the Amateur Nights at the Apollo, and probably the Lafayette and Loew's Seventh Avenue, too.

"I was sitting right there in the audience [at the Harlem Opera House]," said comedian Timmie Rogers. "She was a Lindy Hopper at the Savoy Ballroom who could sing. She sang 'Judy' and 'The Object of My Affection Could Change My Complexion from White to Rosy Red.' She didn't know that she could sing that well. She stopped the show cold. They made her take an encore. Bardu Ali [the bandleader and later manager of Redd Foxx] rushed backstage and grabbed her immediately and said come to the Savoy tomorrow for rehearsal and meet Chick Webb. He asked her where she lived and she told him. The next day, he didn't trust her; he went and got her. I was there. She broke the mother up."

Sadly, the book does not include an listing of sources (for fuck's sake...), so it's hard to track the Timmie Rogers statement down. It may have been from a private interview.

The wartime 20% cabaret tax ("amusement tax") and the midnight curfew brownout are mentioned in passing (p. 133).