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...curious about Joe Eszterhas' memoir, Hollywood Animal (Knopf; 736 pages). Really. It's perfectly natural. After all, Eszterhas is the most (or maybe the only) famous screenwriter in the business, best known for hitting commercial gold in 1983 with Flashdance and again in 1992 with Basic Instinct. He also has several notorious craters to his credit, including Jade and Showgirls. But a word of advice: given its ample girth and its very low signal-to-noise ratio, you might want to approach Hollywood Animal with this handy guide...
Sure enough, Old School (Knopf; 195 pages) soon begins revealing the painful realities beneath its chivalric trappings. The nameless narrator, an outsider desperate to attain the "careless gentility" of his well-born schoolmates, makes a terrible mistake and is expelled. The "sure and finished" teachers prove to be mortals with broken marriages and sham credentials. Recent graduates fizzle out or die young...
...cultural swashbuckling chameleon who, speaking perfect Arabic, might infiltrate the recruiting grounds of al-Qaeda or bazaars of Tikrit and send home the inside dope. It is a weakness in the war against terrorism. In Intelligence in War: Knowledge of the Enemy from Napoleon to al-Qaeda (Alfred A. Knopf; 387 pages), the military historian John Keegan half playfully suggests that Western spy shops might study the model of Kipling's culturally ambidextrous...
...slippery thing. Just ask Peter Carey. In True History of the Kelly Gang, which won the Booker Prize three years ago, the cunning Australian built a palace of fiction from the "true story" of a legend, the Aussie outlaw Ned Kelly. For My Life as a Fake (Knopf; 266 pages), his point of departure is an even more intricate falsehood, the Ern Malley affair...
...kinds of enduring truths in memory's fog banks that has made him one of the most popular living writers. When it was first published in Spain and Latin America last year, this ambling but rich book became the fastest seller in the history of Latin American publishing. Knopf took the unusual step of issuing a Spanish-language edition in the U.S., and the first printing of 50,000 sold out in weeks...