Word: underworld
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
James Ellroy is the real deal. The real, raw deal. The international best selling author of L.A. Confidential, among others, pulls no punches when it comes to the sex, drugs and violence of the American underworld, particularly in his native Los Angeles...
What Ellroy is most famous for is his crime novels—huge, sprawling works with hitmen, thugs, pimps, whores, victims and perps. His most recent series—The Underworld U.S.A. trilogy, which includes American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand and a not-yet-published third installment—fictionalizes American history in the from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. It covers a variety of events including the Bay of Pigs, the Kennedy assassination and will conclude just prior to Watergate...
...result is a lot of fiction. The second installment of the Underworld U.S.A. trilogy weighed in at 688 pages, and the third—due out in about two year—is promised to be even longer...
...largest city in the world 11 years from now; what happens there is just a more dramatic instance of what happens in Jakarta and Bangkok and La Paz. And the only people maintaining standards and facilities in this Jacobean society are, almost inevitably, members of the criminal underworld, who run things more efficiently than do their government counterparts. Even judges turn to mobsters for help. "Our motto," a criminal overlord tells Mehta, "is insaaniyat, humanity." When an ordinary, law-abiding citizen comes to Bombay from elsewhere, Mehta shows, he soon learns that just to buy a movie ticket...
...beneath them. According to one Brazilian friend, 400,000 people arrive at the city's bus station every year, seeking a new life, only to find that all the jobs and houses?and lives?have been taken up by others like themselves. They can survive only by joining the underworld, and a child is seen as irresponsible if he goes to school when he could be supporting his parents by running drugs. If the population of Bombay continues to double every 10 years, it will eclipse that of Italy by the year 2015, says Mehta. We may dream to ourselves...