Perfect or near-perfect matches between author and subject are rare, indeed, in the world of publishing. Jay Parini’s Empire of Self, a new biography of Gore Vidal, is one of them. A long-time biographer as…
Posts published by “Jonah Raskin”
“Droughts come and go,” Stroeh tells me on a hot dusty August afternoon. “They’re part of the way we live, though now we also have global climate change, along with extremes such as floods and droughts.” Michael McCarthy, the author of the Man Who Made it Rain, and Stroeh’s biggest fan, argues that there are two obvious truths about hydrology today: “water is the new oil”; and “when water becomes a commodity, wars start.” Wars haven’t broken out yet in Marin but skirmishes have. This summer deputies from the Marin County Sheriff’s office raided commercial pot farms in Nicasio where growers purloined water from adjacent farms and diverted it from streams and springs to irrigate their crops. Then, too, several years ago, residents of Marshall nearly came to blows when Hog Island wanted to dig a new well on the uplands across from highway one.
In Roman Polansky’s Chinatown — arguably the coolest movie ever made about the murky political world of H2O — private eye Jake Gittes never nails the man who murders Hollis Mulwray, the chief engineer for…
The waiters and waitress at my favorite pizza place in Santa Rosa wear T-shirts that say, “Support Local Produce.” The menu repeats that slogan; it also appears in big letters on a wall for one…
Dreamers, schemers, dealers and profiteers go to Humboldt County to grow, sell and transport marijuana. They’ve gone there to smoke it, steal it, write and make movies about it. They’ve been going there for nearly…
The Weather Underground wasn’t as crazy as it seemed, though at the time it seemed anything but sane. On March 6, 1970, three members of a Weatherman cell or collective accidentally blew themselves up in…
Do New Yorkers smoke weed? Yes, indeed, and apparently lots of it, though most of the New Yorkers on the new web series “High Maintenance” don’t seem to know where it comes from or how…