:: Non-Fiction

“Elizabeth was passé, decayed. A new king, with wife, and children, an heir for goodness’ sake, a passionate huntsman full of vigor, a poet, an intellectual of European standing, a new king, a new reign and a new way of looking at the world; of course, the country longed for that… A change of monarch in an age of personal rule meant not only a change of government and policy, but a change of culture, attitude and belief. A new king meant a new world.”

"I lay down reflecting on my first day of walking – the gravel underfoot, Quasim’s lies, our host’s dead son, the old man who had scrutinized Abdul Haq, the terrified boy. The abrupt episodes and half-understood conversations already suggested a society that was an unpredictable composite of etiquette, humor and extreme brutality. I dozed off, thinking of the stubby shadow of Abdul Haq’s Kalashnikov; a weapon designed by Russians, made by Iranians, and now used by Afghans on the American side. In this room the weapons were, I thought, the only piece of machinery that could connect us to the modern age … ."

"As I've gone through life, I've found that your chances of happines are increased if you wind up doing something that is a reflection of what you loved most when you were somewhere between nine and eleven years old...At that age, you know enough of the world to have opinions about things, but you're not old enough yet to be overly influenced by the crowd or by what other people are doing or what you think you 'should' be doing. If what you do later ties into that reservoir in some way, then you are nurtering some essential part of yourself. It's certainly been true in my case. I'm doing now, at fifty-eight, almost exactly what most exited me when I was eleven."

"(My mother's) Daddy was a great believer in the rod. When my mother was still in her cradle he slapped her for sucking her thumb. To correct her toddler's habit of walking with her toes turned slightly inward he forced her to walk with her toes turned out, like a duck. Once she started school, Daddy spanked her almost every night on the theory that she must have done something wrong that day whether he knew about it or not. He told her that he was going to spank her in advance, as the family sat down to dinner, so that she could think about it while she ate and listened to him talk about the stock market and the fool in the White House. After dessert he spanked her. Then she had to kiss him and say, ''Thank you, Daddy, for earning the delicious meal.'"

"When the Black Dahlia murder hit the headlines on January 15th, 1947, it led to one of the biggest press runs in the history of the newspaper. More copies of the Los Angeles Examiner were printed and sold on that day than any edition during World War II. It was the beginning of a rabid running war between the L.A. newspapers to scoop their rivals in the Dahlia case, a bitter battle fought with words, ink, payoffs and news pulp from day-to-day, for weeks and weeks - right down to the daily deadline. Back in those days you could "read all about it" for a nickel, though there were those in the City of Los Angeles Police Department who knew that what was printed in the L.A. newspapers about the Black Dahlia case wasn't worth two cents."