Crooning: A Collection

A collection of essays by the popular novelist address such issues as the Chappaquiddick tragedy, Hollywood, and reports on the Intifada

In his first collection of nonfiction since Quintana and Friends , Dunne returns to four themes familiar from his fiction: the casual violence to be found in Los Angeles; the arrogance of the rich, famous and/or powerful; the vulgarity of Hollywood; and his firm belief that "writing is manual labor of the mind: a job, like laying pipe." Dunne is a tough-minded journalist in the first three areas--he coolly details the "festival of death" in an L.A. morgue, savages the Kennedy "cult of personality" and the deceit of Washington "war wimps," and punctures the inflated self-importance of scriptwriters, dealmakers and film studios. But Dunne's essays on the art of writing--which requires "a ninja's stance toward the world"--often display the "macho posturing" he criticizes in other professions: he is convinced that "writing is an aggressive act" and that "a failure of nerve is the best definition I know for writer's block." Though a fine writer, Dunne perhaps has taken his two-fisted persona as far as it can go.
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