Book Discussion Meeting, Saturday April 2, 2016, 2:00 PM, San Leandro Main Library

The Other Wes Moore by Wes Moore

Wes Moore (L) and Wes Moore (R)

Two boys named "Wes Moore" were born in Baltimore within  a year of each other. One would go on to work for the State Department; the other would wind up in prison for life, convicted of murder.

The author Wes Moore's story is covered in detail in The Other Wes Moore up until he is a graduate of Valley Forge Military Academy and on the point of becoming a college student and a military officer. His website notes that he went on to graduate as a Phi Beta Kappa with a BA in International Relations from Johns Hopkins university in 2001 and then went on to become a Rhodes Scholar  studying International Relations at Oxford University.

After college, Wes Moore completed his military service, serving as a paratrooper and a captain in the army. He did a combat tour in Afghanistan. He talks about his military experience in the TED Talk video below.



After completing his military service, Wes Moore "then served as a White House fel­low to Sec­re­tary of State Con­deleezza Rice. He serves on the board of the Iraq Afghanistan Vet­er­ans of Amer­ica (IAVA), The Johns Hop­kins Uni­ver­sity, and founded an orga­ni­za­tion called STAND! that works with Bal­ti­more youth involved in the crim­i­nal jus­tice system."

According to Wes Moore's website, a portion of the proceeds from The Other Wes Moore go to City Year, an education-oriented volunteer project for young adults from ages 17-24, and the US Dream Academy, an after-school and mentoring program for at-risk youngsters, especially the children of incarcerated parents.

Book Discussion Meeting, Saturday, March 5, 2016, 2:00 PM, San Leandro Main Library

 

The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett, The Big Read selection for 2016

In Robert McCrum's 2014 article on The Maltese Falcon for a series by The Guardian on the 100 all-time best crime fiction books, he quotes Raymond Chandler, creator of the Philip Marlowe detective series:

...“He was spare, frugal, hard-boiled, but he did over and over again what only the best writers can ever do at all. He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before.” He also gave his characters a distinctive language and convincing motivations in a genre that had grown stereotyped, flaccid and uninvolving.

The Maltese Falcon is the Hammett novel that jumps from the pages of its genre and into literature. It’s the book that introduces Sam Spade, the private detective who seduced a generation of readers, leading directly to Philip Marlowe. Dorothy Parker, never a pushover, confessed herself “in a daze of love” such as she had not known in literature “since I encountered Sir Lancelot” and claimed to have read the novel some 30 or 40 times.  

Perhaps The Maltese Falcon is most widely known through the 1941 classic movie starring Humphrey Bogart and Mary Astor, but there were two prior movie incarnations of the novel.

The first movie version of The Maltese Falcon was filmed in 1931 and is somewhat racier due to having been made prior to the Hayes Code, which regulated "morality" in movies. Some critics have rated this movie as equal, if not superior, to the familiar 1941 version.

The second movie version of The Maltese Falcon was made in 1936, starring Bette Davis, and renamed "Satan Met a Lady," and according to critics, sometimes seems as much a comedy as a crime story.

I was able to locate a short documentary about the life of Dashiell Hammett, author of The Maltese Falcon, on YouTube.



On line, I also found a memoir of Dashiell Hammett by his long-time friend and companion, author and playwright Lillian Hellman, from the November 25, 1965 issue of The New York Review of Books.