Word: authorly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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After a decade of grim headlines about spiraling hospital bills and shifty HMOs, the boom in self-medication comes as no surprise. "People are fed up with the high costs and side effects of drugs," says Earl Mindell, a registered pharmacist and author of Secret Remedies (Simon & Schuster, 1997), a new study of the self-care movement. "We're doubling our knowledge about nutrition every 18 months. So people wonder, instead of treating the symptoms as we've always been taught, why not help your body fight off the problem in the first place...
Just in case we haven't sussed out the metaphor from dozens of other movies and books devoted to romanticizing Cosa Nostra, Mario Puzo's The Last Don, a six-hour mini-series (beginning May 11, 9:00 p.m. E.T., CBS) based on the author's best-selling 1996 novel, is here to remind us that the Mob functions no more or less rapaciously than any corporation or government, and at least its employees know a good prosciutto when they see one. Hollywood studios are run by vicious souls, the movie tells us; politicians are a meretricious and evil-thinking...
What she has on her side is a top-notch co-author, Teresa Carpenter, who is a Pulitzer-prizewinning journalist and the author of the riveting true-crime tale Missing Beauty. So while Without a Doubt has little to offer for the history books, it is well written, sometimes moving and occasionally amusing. At one point, Judge Lance Ito is compared with Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now: "increasingly cryptic and vain." And the anecdotes about fellow prosecutor Christopher Darden reveal a sweet rapport and a complex relationship. (As for the $64,000 question, Clark writes, tough-guy style, "The question...
...beyond the scope of this reviewer's expertise to adjudicate the accuracy of events as related by the title figure to author Peter Maas in Underboss: Sammy the Bull Gravano's Story of Life in the Mafia (HarperCollins; 308 pages; $25). Like most people when you get right down to it, our protagonist--the most famous snitch in Mob history, the man whose testimony helped put "Teflon Don" John Gotti behind bars for good--sees himself as a voice of reason in a world of blowhards and sociopaths. A contract on his brother-in-law, which Gravano himself doesn...
Like Nicholas Pileggi's Wiseguy, Underboss is fascinating for its anthropologically detailed portrait of a subculture some of us can't get enough of, Al Pacino or no Al Pacino. Both Gravano and Maas (author previously of The Valachi Papers) claim Gravano will get no money from this de facto memoir. But why a man who recently left the federal witness-protection program would want to draw such attention to himself is a mystery. Maybe, given his gift for aphorism, he's thinking about going out on the corporate lecture circuit. "There's enough people to shoot in the head...