Film Noir FAQ (2013) David J. Hogan

Film Noir FAQ: All That’s Left to Know About Hollywood’s Golden Age of Dames, Detectives, and Danger (2013) David J. Hogan

Applause Theatre & Cinema Books (Hal Leonard)

Paperback, 397 pages

$22.95 retail

ISBN 9781557838551

We close Noirvember, not with a film noir, but rather a book about them: Film Noir FAQ.

This is For the Mara Salvatrucha (NF 2009) - Samuel Logan

This is For the Mara Salvatrucha: Inside the MS-13, America’s Most Violent Gang - Samuel Logan

I put this book on my “To Read” list after reading about it in Publishers Weekly, hoping to gain some insight into how gangs work, especially the MS-13. The book does give some insight into the gang, most of it from the point of view of Brenda Paz, a former teen gang member who turned police informant. Rather than a full focus on the gang itself, the book is mostly Paz's story, one that is both gripping and horrifying.*

Paz desperately sought acceptance and friendship. We all do, only most of us have friends and family who provide those needs. When those needs are absent, young people are going to find someone to meet fill the void. Paz discovered that MS-13 did provide acceptance and friendship, but also introduced her to a world of crime and violence.

The story of how Paz turned into a police informant and became the youngest person ever admitted into the Witness Protection Program is the strength of the book. It is a narrative both amazing and sad. I was engaged by Paz’s struggle to find love and acceptance in an atmosphere of violence and death. I was not engaged by the author’s points of view. Logan often recounts events, thoughts, feelings, emotions from the point of view of a character who is about to be murdered. Sorry, you can't do that. It may make your story more exciting, but it's a lie, a falsehood; cheating. This speculative form of writing (omniscient point of view) is fine in fiction; in non-fiction it destroys credibility. Even worse, the book includes no notes or citations, so the reader can never be sure of the accuracy of any of the information presented.

While This is For the Mara Salvatrucha is an often gripping, disturbing look (maybe “glimpse” would be a better word) into gang activity, it’s not a book I can recommend.

*For a more credible (although far less graphic) account of gangs, gang structure and how they work on a day-to-day basis, read Gang Leader for a Day by Sudhir Venkatesh.

Columbine (NF 2009) - Dave Cullen

The front cover of Dave Cullen's Columbine shows a mostly deserted Columbine High School (date undetermined) with a few scattered cars sharing the parking lot with large patches of melted snow. It's a scene you see at countless schools across the country hours after the doors have closed for the day. What makes the cover so striking is that the school grounds only take up a very small portion of the photo. The school is dwarfed by a huge gray sky that seems to stretch on forever.

For a long time, I found myself staring at that photo in wonder. Then I realized that the photo stirred something in me greater than wonder. It haunted me. Then it angered me. Then, strangely, it comforted me.

Although the story of Columine belongs to the students, parents, teachers and surrounding community, it is partly a masterful psychological study of the two killers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. Harris was the mastermind, a true psychopath that literally saw himself as superior to nearly everyone else around him, a young man filled with absolute hatred for most of the people in his universe. He saw himself as a god, but in fact, he was quite small, a small young man raging against the world. Right or wrong, that's what the photo says to me. That one quiet picture unleashes a whole gamut of emotions that you can't deny while reading Columbine.

Regardless of what you've been told about what happened at Columbine, what you know is probably wrong. Dave Cullen spent nearly ten years researching and writing Columbine, which serves not only as a stellar account of what really happened on April 20, 1999, but also how the media got it wrong.

We were led to believe a group calling itself the Trench Coat Mafia was responsible, that they were hunting down jocks, settling long-standing feuds. None of that is true. The truth is far worse and far more chilling. Cullen shows, citing the killers’ journals, videotaped conversations and eyewitness accounts, that the attack was intended to kill not just a few hated students, but every single person at the school, over 2,000 students and faculty.

Cullen masterfully tells the Columbine story in an unconventional manner, using multiple time lines and points of view. This works because Columbine is such an unconventional story. There had been school shootings before Columbine, many of them, but none were quite like this one. Cullen doesn't pull any punches, but he doesn't exploit his subject either. He's got too much respect for the subject, his audience and his profession. That respect comes across on every page.

Columbine is often a painful book to read, but one we should not shrink away from. It belongs to that community, but it also belongs to all of us. It's a necessary reminder and an essential warning of what did and could happen anywhere.

The Score Takes Care of Itself (NF 2009) - Bill Walsh

When I was a band director I read lots of books on leadership. I can’t tell you how much I learned from those books, most of them biographies of successful coaches, athletes or military leaders. In many ways they shaped the way I taught and thought about leading young people. I still have many of those books, works by or about Vince Lombardi, Tom Landry, Lou Holtz, Jack Welch and many others.

You should also know that I am not, never have been and never plan to be a fan of the San Francisco 49ers, mainly because I have been a lifelong Dallas Cowboys fan. (Nausea ensues each time I see any portion of “The Catch.”) So it took a lot of self discipline to read the late Bill Walsh’s The Score Takes Care of Itself: My Philosophy of Leadership. But I’m glad I did.

To be honest, most leadership books are basically the same. The coach/CEO/manager takes over a poorly performing, disorganized, disgruntled, dejected organization and slowly builds a philosophy of winning, hits highs and lows along the way to becoming a recognized dynasty. All of this comes about due to the leader being demanding but fair, working insane hours, neglecting friends and family, etc. There’s some of that in The Score Takes Care of Itself, but there’s also an atypical, candid look at the leadership hero and his weaknesses.

Walsh was an incredible coach. His legacy is undeniable. Just take a look at the coaching tree and see how many coaches can trace their lineage back to Walsh. But his drive and determination almost destroyed him.



I’m not sure when most of this book was written. According to co-author Steve Jamison, interviews with Walsh took place many years before Walsh’s death in 2007. Yet many times you sense Walsh is looking at large parts of his life with regret, wishing he had done things a little differently. The book is also “balanced” with comments from some of Walsh’s players and assistant coaches, whose recollections shed some interesting light on Walsh’s own recollections.

You don’t have to be a leader or a teacher to enjoy The Score Takes Care of Itself. You certainly don’t have to be a 49er fan. You may, however, have to block out that image of Dwight Clark reaching up, extending his fingertips to completely shatter my world in 1981.

No Right to Remain Silent (NF 2009) - Lucinda Roy

No Right to Remain Silent: The Tragedy at Virginia Tech (NF 2009) - Lucinda Roy

If you're looking for an examination of the events leading up to the Virginia Tech tragedy of April 16, 2007 or an investigative look into the killer Seung-Hui Cho, this probably isn't the book for you. This is a memoir about one person's connection to the shooting that left thirty-two students and faculty dead. It is also a cry for reform and for change within academia. Author Lucinda Roy states in her introduction:

It is the story of a university hampered both by its own labyrinthine bureaucracy and by the dogged determination of its administration to protect itself. It is about a system of public education in dire need of reform - one which, is the case of Virginia Tech, resulted in conflicts of interest and a chronic inability to respond swiftly to crisis situations.

Red flags appeared early in Cho's creative writing. A student in Nikki Giovanni's poetry class, Cho wrote poetry accusing class members of cannibalism and genocide, among other things. When Giovanni banished him from the class, English Department Head Roy decided to meet with Cho one on one. The results are both frustrating and chilling. It was clear to Roy that something was deeply disturbing Cho, but after repeated warnings to people who could have helped, very little was done.

Roy examines many interesting points: writing as therapy, how society views killers, access to weapons, what can be done, what can't be done and how we deal with the aftermath of such a tragic event. Recommended.

(As an aside, one thing really bothers me about the book: Roy uses "4/16" throughout the book, comparing the event to 9/11. Yes, the Virginia Tech tragedy was terrible, but it wasn't 9-11. Yes, they were both terrorists acts, both terrible events that shouldn't be forgotten. But do we really need to mark every terrible event that happens in this country with a date?)

Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko (NF 2008) - Blake Bell

Earlier this year we saw the release of Kirby: King of Comics, an excellent look at the life and work of the late Jack Kirby. Now another comics art pioneer finally gets a book worthy of his talent and influence in the form of Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko.

I grew up reading and treasuring the first thirty-eight issues of Spider-Man, all drawn by Ditko. His quirky style was perfect for an awkward teenager like Peter Parker, yet Ditko could also portray the acrobatics of Spider-Man in a way no other artist ever quite captured. I never really got into Dr. Strange as a kid, but now as an adult, I can really see the reaches of Ditko's incredible imagination and creativity. In my opinion, his work on Dr. Strange far surpasses his work on Spider-Man, which is no small accomplishment.

Yet Ditko was (and apparently still is) a strange one indeed. Ditko was always a quiet loner, but his growing devotion to Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism separated him even further from his coworkers and fans. Unfortunately, it affected his work to the point that he became obsessed with devoting all of his work to Objectivism. Of course it didn't help that Stan Lee didn't give Ditko his due while he was at Marvel. Come on, the guy co-created Spider-Man! (It's ironic that Ditko spent years drawing Daily Bugle publisher J. Jonah Jameson gypping Peter Parker in nearly the same way.)

In the end, Ditko refused to have much of anything to do with anyone, even turning down offers (many of them quite lucrative) that would help him finance his Objectivist ideals in comic form. For the past several years, the quality of Ditko's art (what little there has been) has been disappointing, but Bell's book displays some stunning images that helped influence comic art and storytelling for decades. An outstanding book/biography/retrospective that any comics lover will want to own.

Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling (NF 2008) - Andy Crouch

Crouch understands and acknowledges from the get-go that his topic is enormous, so he begins by looking at just how enormous it is. He's not talking only about the arts, trends and fashion, science, technology, celebrities, ethnic identity, government and politics, education and about a zillion other things you can think of. He's also talking about the scope of culture from the beginning of human history until...well, the end and beyond.

That's a pretty big scope.

More specifically, how have Christians responded to and helped shape culture? Or failed to do so? What about today? Do we engage the culture or withdraw from it? Crouch looks at these topics and culture in general in the first section of the book, simply called Culture. In the second section, Gospel, Crouch takes an interesting look at culture from a gospel perspective. I'd never thought about it before, but the cultural aspect of the Bible begins in a garden in Genesis and ends in a city in Revelation. Significant? How about Jesus as a culture maker? How did culture change in the early church from Pentecost and beyond?

In the third section, Calling, Crouch asks the question "Can we (or anyone) really change the world?" Should we even try? One of the most interesting concepts in the book is that of The 3, the 12 and the 120. Crouch states that it may be a mistake to say that "all culture is local," but maybe all culture making is local. A cultural influence may be global, but it must be created by the efforts of a small group (3), shaped and refined by a slightly larger concentric circle of people (12), and distributed by a larger group on a larger level (120). As an example, Crouch's book was conceived by a publisher, an editor and an author. The circle of 12 expanded to an editorial director, a marketing director, publicists, designers and a few reviews and readers. The largest circle consisted of people endorsing the book, newspaper/magazine/media editors and reviewers and friends to spread the word. When you think about it, you start seeing the 3-12-120 concept all over the place.

But what do we do with all of this? Crouch challenges us to do something, to create something or at least be involved in engaging the culture rather than sitting by watching things happen. This is not an in-your-face "We're taking over the culture for Christ!" type of book. It's a call to pursue our passions in a way that allows us to use and celebrate the diversity of our gifts without condemning others of theirs.

A single reading of Culture Making was not enough for me. There's so much in there, it demands a second read, at least from me. For anyone interested in culture, I highly recommend this one.

The Post-American World (NF 2008) - Fareed Zakaria

Zakaria opens The Post-American World with the following sentence:

"This is a book not about the decline of America but rather about the rise of everyone else."

Zakaria goes on to describe three significant power shifts that have taken place in the world over the last 500 years, events that have had global significance:

The rise of the Western world (early 15th century - late 18th century), including modern “science and technology, commerce and capitalism, the agricultural and industrial revolutions,” all resulting in dominance in the West.

The rise of the United States (late 19th century until roughly the last 20 years), which Zakaria calls “the most powerful nation since imperial Rome, and the only one that was stronger than any likely combination of other nations.”

The rise of the rest. “Look around,” Zakaria says. “The tallest building in the world is now in Taipei... The world’s richest man is Mexican, and it’s largest publicly traded corporation is Chinese. The world’s biggest plane is built in Russia and Ukraine, its leading refinery is under construction in India, and its largest factories are all in China.”

And on and on. Yet while Zakaria insists that we still live in “a single-superpower world,” power is shifting away from American dominance. Just because we’re living in a post-American world, however, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s an anti-American one. (Hmmmm.... Wonder where’s he’s been for the past eight years?)

Has the United States been responsible for the rise of the rest? This section is a bit lengthy, but worth a look:

The irony is that the rise of the rest is a consequence of American ideas and actions. For sixty years, American politicians and diplomats have traveled around the world pushing countries to open their markets, free up their politics, and embrace trade and technology. We have urged peoples in distant lands to take up the challenge of competing in the global economy, freeing up their currencies, and developing new industries. We counseled them to be unafraid of change and learn the secrets of our success. And it worked: the natives have gotten good at capitalism. But now we are becoming suspicious of the very things we have long celebrated - free markets, trade, immigration, and technological change. And all this is happening when the tide is going our way. Just as the world is opening up, America is closing down.

I first listened to the audiobook version of The Post-American World. I pointed out to my friend John that I wanted to get my hands on a print version, since Zakaria makes many broad generalizations that I wanted to see documented. (And as John correctly reminded me, what political writer doesn’t make broad generalizations?) Zakaria does document frequently, but undocumented generalizations are aplenty, such as some of the ones in the above paragraph. There’s a lot of truth in that paragraph, but some of it is wrapped up in a package that's just a little too tidy. Yes, some countries have embraced capitalism. We are suspicious of some countries, sometimes for good reason. But it’s a lot more complex than that.

That’s not to say that Zakaria doesn’t have some very interesting thoughts and ideas. He does and the book is certainly worth reading for them. His look at the education systems in the U.S. and other parts of the world is striking, but he makes some conclusions that sometimes seem to be illogical, especially based on some of his own information. Zakaria claims on page 198 that by “2010, foreign students will get more than 50 percent of all Ph.D.” degrees in the U.S. He further claims that “If America can keep the people it educates in the country, the innovation will happen here. If they go back home, the innovation will travel with them.”

Not necessarily. Just a few pages previously, Zakaria claims that most foreign countries lack cultures that regularly challenge conventional wisdom, leading to more risk-taking and opportunities for innovation. Even if the innovation does travel with them, if it finds itself in a country that stifles it, what good is it?

Yes, I am nit-picking somewhat. Zakaria does a fine job of focusing on the history of two hugely emerging nations, China and India, two nations that the rest of the world simply cannot ignore if they want to compete globally. This nearly 100-page section is excellent.

Also thought-provoking is Zakaria’s New Rules for a New Age in the chapter called “American Purpose.” Americans can no longer simply copy history; we must learn from it. We have to realize that we can’t have it all. (I’m not even sure we should want it all.) We have to take a 21st century look at our foreign policy, not a 19th century one. We’ve got to stop thinking that the military is the ultimate answer to every problem. And we’ve got to stop being so damn scared of everything and everyone.

It may not sound like it, but The Post-American World is largely optimistic. The 21st century has brought with it globalization, enormous leaps in technology, and just a couple of days ago, evidence of a big shift in American thinking. Maybe there's good cause for optimism.

Islam: The Religion and the People (NF 2008) - Lewis & Churchill

Islam: The Religion and the People (NF 2008) - Bernard Lewis and Buntzie Ellis Churchill

An overview of Islam in under 250 pages certainly sounds like an exercise in futility. Just imagine an overview of other broad topics such as The History of Western Music or American Political Thought in under 250 pages. It’s impossible. Yet Lewis and Churchill, with 167 pages of actual text (The rest of the book’s pages are devoted to the appendixes “Some Practical Matters” and a fairly large “Terms and Topics.”), give it a pretty good shot.

The authors generally do a good job of covering the basics of Islam such as the pillars of Islamic faith, the Koran, significance of mosques, the difference between Sunni and Shi’a, Islam and the economy, women in Islam, war and much more. Just exactly what is the difference between Islam and Christianity and where does the divergence begin? Why is it that reform and Islamic law just don’t mix? And is Islam really a religion of peace or one of violence?

I applaud Lewis (widely acknowledged as the West’s leading scholar on all things Middle Eastern) and Churchill for producing a badly-needed summary of Islam. Even though it’s not perfect, I hope many Americans will read it and that they will read it as a starting point, not as an exhaustive treatment of the subject. Some issues in the book need further clarification, such as the vast history of Muhammad, the spread of Islam since the 7th century and how things changed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And although the spotlight on Islam during the last seven years has been covered in many other books, not enough attention is given to it here.

The unencumbered writing style and short chapters make for fairly rapid reading and the authors sprinkle several photos and examples of (apparently rather dated) Islamic humor. The “Some Practical Matters” appendix covers much of the Arabic language, but could have greatly benefited from examples of actual Arabic letters. The “Terms and Topics” at 44 pages reiterates several definitions included in the actual text, but omits other important terms from the text such as jihad and mosque. That might be a little picky, but for book browsers with little or no knowledge of Islam, the “Terms and Topics” section might be the first place they turn, only to find common terminology missing.

Still, Islam: The Religion and the People is a valuable starting point for anyone interested in understanding the complex world of Islam.