Rockets and Rodeos and Other American Spectacles

Essays discuss the Fourth of July, rodeo championships, the trial of a bank robber, the launch of the space shuttle Discovery, the fiftieth anniversary of Pearl Harbor, and a death row inmate

Mallon ( A Book of One's Own ), literary editor of GQ , here sandwiches together 12 uneven essays in pursuit of the quintessentially American experience. His wry tone frequently serves him well--the United Nations is "endlessly verbose," the 1992 Sundance Film Festival is "held together with fairly uniform ideological glue"--and he captures the telling ironies of a space-shuttle launch and a rodeo in Tulsa. Most of these pieces first appeared in such journals as the American Spectator , and, unfortunately, not all of them merit preservation in book form: a plodding account of an unexceptional criminal trial in New York City, a bit of ephemera about the 1990 U.S. Senate race in Rhode Island between Claiborne Pell and Claudine Schneider, and a sympathetic but none-too-deep road-trip account of the Vice President, in which Mallon concludes that "Dan Quayle is no Dan Quayle."
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From American Spectator contributor and author, most recently, of the novel Aurora 7 ( LJ 2/1/91) comes this collection of essays on several recent American "spectacles." Mallon succeeds in keeping the reader's interest by the diversity of his subjects (a New York City bank robbery trial; a rocket mission studying the Northern Lights) and his smooth narrative style. Although a couple of the essays are overly long, they are all enlivened by Mallon's flair for characterization (e.g., in a stump speech Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell "speaks in the soothing, excessively sane way of a bereavement counselor"). Rockets and Rodeos will appeal most to readers looking for good writing without requiring high drama. For popular collections.
- Pamela R. Daubenspeck, Warren-Trumbull Cty. P.L., Warren, Ohio
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.