New Book by Lionel Rolfe: The Misadventures of Ari Mendelsohn
We are pleased to announce the publication by Boryanabooks of a new novel by Lionel Rolfe. “The Misadventures of Ari Mendelsohn” is now available in both paperback and Kindle editions from Amazon.com at the links immediately below.
Available In Paperback from Amazon.com
$11.95 6″ x 9″ 172 pages
or try the Kindle edition at $9.00
Please accept for your thoughtful consideration THE MISADVENTURES OF ARI MENDELSOHN: A Mostly True Memoir Of California Journalism. This picaresque memoir by noted author and journalist LIONEL ROLFE recounts the sexual and political travails of the irascible, blacklisted title character, a reporter still harboring his besieged idealistic belief in humanity’s innate goodness and America’s dubious potential for good amid a reality of avarice, pragmatism, cynicism, and materialism.
With his usual sharp self-deprecating wit and affable honesty, ROLFE describes Ari’s astonishing array of encounters that run the gambit from the hilarious to the horrific, from the astute to the bewildering, from the desirous to the dangerous, from the death-defying to the life-affirming. As he searches for purpose in a life of drudgery and debacle, along the way Ari must contend with a Military Academy captain with an all-too-avid interests in the students under his “command”; old-time police reporters and the corrupt detectives whom they depend on for the inside scoop; old Stalinists and labor radicals; the long-established, well-entrenched defenders of America’s conservative, God-loving majority; porn stars and gurus false and true and a holographic pin-up; and the all-too-real one-dimensional political operators and kingpins. Read more
ART SNYDER: A Genuinely Interesting Dude
By LIONEL ROLFE
Having just turned 70, I’ve been swimming in reveries about folks who affected me a lot. Which got me to thinking about Art Snyder, my debating coach at Los Angeles High School in the late ‘50s. A random thought crossed my mind–I wondered if he were still alive. I wasn’t young anymore, so he certainly wasn’t.
The next morning–it was a week ago–I woke up and read that Art Snyder had died the previous day. He died just shy of being 80. Read more
MY CHARMED LIFE AS LITERARY VALET
Pat Conroy (L) and myself at the kick-off of the publication of his 1986 novel, "Prince of Tides" in New Orleans
By Bob Vickrey
I must confess that I discreetly borrowed the expression “literary valet” from the memoir of distinguished former Random House editor, Jason Epstein. Although my career hardly paralleled his, I liked his analogy of our two distinctly diverse job descriptions.
I spent most of my working life as a field representative for an East Coast publishing house, which incorporated the duties of sales, marketing, and promotion of books for my company—a decidedly dry and ordinary business definition of a job. It wasn’t that way at all. Read more
A Real Los Angeles Musical Treasure Is Beginning To Reappear Again
By LIONEL ROLFE
Sonji Kimmons, one of the last great but mostly unheralded blues pianists and singers in the world, made a rare appearance at MJs, a gay nightclub in Silver Lake one recent Saturday, and was set to appear the following Saturday.
But due to a not untypical fight between the promoter and the owner, that appearance, which had been scheduled, was cancelled. It wasn’t that Sonji had played unnoticed–she had a large turnout who hung on her every note.
Hopefully this misstep will not occur again. Sonji has been of of sight recently because of medical problems. Now she’s waiting to start playing around town again.
Read more
WHAT IS IT ABOUT ROMNEY THAT IS SO OBJECTIONABLE?
By LIONEL ROLFE
For the last few weeks–ever since that first debate between Obama and Romney–my dislike of Romney has deepened. That first debate forced me to figure out why the man so got on my nerves. He obviously gets on other people’s nerves as well, even including some conservatives, and even other Mormons like Jon Huntsman and Harry Reid.
I’m afraid in that first debate, poor old Barak Obama was having a tough time concealing his disdain for Romney. I’ve heard that Obama is disdainful because Romney is a man without a core, without real beliefs–except for the tenets of his religion, which like most religions has very bizarre beliefs. Read more
The Hunger Ahead
Leslie Evans
The Coming Famine: The Global Food Crisis and What We Can Do to Avoid It . Julian Cribb. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. 248 pp.
The Race for What’s Left: The Global Scramble for the World’s Last Resources. Michael T. Klare. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2012. 306 pp.
Back in 1798, Thomas Malthus published his Essay on the Principle of Population . He put forth the simple proposition that, land being finite, the food supply increases only arithmetically, by small percentages, while humans have multiple births that in the next generation have multiple births so that population increases geometrically and will periodically locally, and in the end globally, outrun the food supply. The premise would seem irrefutable, though the date when the ultimate bill comes due is uncertain. On the right, Malthus was rejected on the ground that God would take care of his own. On the left, for two centuries Malthus was dismissed with the argument that there would always be sufficient food if distribution were more equal. We are now in the endgame.
A CITY THAT BECKONS AND SUMMONS THE PAST
Views of Santa Barbara
By Bob Vickrey
As I drove north on Pacific Coast Highway and caught a glimpse of the place where mountains meet the ocean, there suddenly appeared a vista that rekindled old memories and also marked the dramatic passing of time. Read more
Chapter 1: Ishi. The First Chapter Of “Travels Through California Literature”
This is a painting of Ishi on the Oroville jail wall.
Phyl van Ammers
The highways, freeways, streets and back roads of the state lead through California’s literature. Califia is the beginning of the journey for Europeans. The real beginning is the immense literature of the native people.
Around 1500, Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo introduced Califia in The Adventures of Esplandián. She ruled black women in her kingdom of California.
Whoopi Goldberg narrated her fictional life in a former attraction in Disney’s California Adventures before that site became the Little Mermaid ride. From there, the trip should head northeast to Riverside County. Read more
Chasing Endeavour
By LIONEL ROLFE
I stood on the banks of the Los Angeles River in order to get a glimpse of Endeavour flying over the southeast end of the Santa Monica Mountains on its way to Griffith Park Observatory.
It would have been much better, of course, to get up to the observatory, a mile or two west of the river bank. Endeavour was scheduled to fly as close to the observatory as it safely could. Whereas here by the river, the precipitous southeastern mountains blocked a direct view of the action around the observatory. Read more
The Strange Career of Ahmad Kamal and How He Helped the CIA Invite Radical Islam into Europe
Leslie Evans
A Mosque in Munich: Nazis, the CIA, and the Muslim Brotherhood in the West. Ian Johnson. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010. 318 pp.
Oh what a tangled web we weave,
When first we practise to deceive!
– Sir Walter Scott
Ahmad Kamal in 1935
Everyone is familiar with the disastrous after effects of the American effort to mobilize radical Islam to defeat the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, a project that gave birth to Al Qaeda. Ian Johnson’s A Mosque in Munich is an account of a much older, less violent, and smaller-scale chapter in Western attempts to co-opt Islam in the battle with Communism, tracing ill-considered U.S. help to radical Islam in establishing a base in Western Europe. It opens with Nazi use of Soviet Muslim defectors and prisoners of war to try to incite revolt against Soviet rule among the Turkic peoples of Soviet Central Asia. During the war the center of this operation was Berlin; in the postwar period it moved to Munich in West Germany, where, as the Cold War blossomed, both the West German government and the American CIA took over the group of aging Soviet Muslims who had fought on the Nazi side, as well as their German handlers, to use as propagandists to the world’s Muslims, exposing Soviet oppression of Central Asian peoples. Read more
Honey on the road to San Francisco with some of the Spanish explorers
NOTES FROM ABOVE GROUND
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste)
"Cities of the Golden Gate," Raymond Dabb Yelland, 1893. Most illustrations can be enlarged by clicking on them.
Prologue to the story of the Spanish exploration and settlement of California
Seasonal migrations of animals now extinct in California probably created the roads the native people used before the Spanish land exploration of California. “The heyday of giant mammals in North America was the middle and late Pleistocene, an epoch that started 2.6 million years ago and ended 11,700 years ago, around the time the Earth was thawing out from the Ice Age. The gigantic beasts, which migrated from Asia across a now-vanished land bridge called Beringia, are known as Rancholabrean megafauna, after the famous La Brea tar pits in downtown Los Angeles — the graveyard of thousands of saber-toothed tigers, giant bison and other extinct animals.”[1]
The seasonal migrations of the large mammals may have created the substantial roads used by the indigenous people after their arrival.[2]
Paul S. Martin and Richard G. Klein argue that Paleoindian over-hunting led to the extinction of the megafauna.[3] Others argue that climate change was responsible for mammoth and mastodon extinctions. As the last major glaciation ended around 12,000 years ago, climate warmed too quickly for the megafauna to adapt.
