Crime Writer Andrea Camilleri, 88, Wins Award, Takes On Imbeciles

Hector Tobar at the Los Angeles Times offers a piece on Andrea Camilleri, author of The Age of Doubt.

The Italian novelist Andrea Camilleri accepted the prestigious Pepe Carvalho prize for lifetime work at the BCNegra noir literary festival in Barcelona last week. And he made it clear that, at 88, he’s still got a lot of crime writing left in him

Camilleri was born and raised in Sicily and writes in a mixture of Italian and Sicilian. His novels are populated with a host of characters and settings, including corrupt politicians, illegal trash dumps, goat herders, the underground sex trade and, of course, the Mafia. Camilleri’s alter ego is Inspector Salvo Montalbano, the protagonist of more than a dozen novels published in English by Picador and Mantle.

The fictional Montalbano also lives in Sicily. Born in 1950, the fictional Montalbano is getting on in years too. And, like his creator Camilleri, he has no plans of retiring.

“He feels older than he is because he’s spent his whole life surrounded by imbeciles,” Camilleri told the Madrid newspaperABC. “That’s what 90% of criminals are, and if you live surrounded by imbeciles, life isn’t very nice, but he’s terrified of retirement. What will he do? Walk the dog?”

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-et-jc-crime-writer-andrea-camilleri-88-award-imbeciles-20140211,0,2457282.story#axzz2tVoiaIcD 

Reading A Novel Exercises "Muscles" In The Brain, Researchers Find

Hector Tobar at the Los Angeles Times offers a piece on what researchers found out about the brain when they conducted a study of people who read Robert Harris' novel Pompeii.

We all know that reading a novel can transport you, delight you and intrigue you while you’re reading it. Now, thanks research by scientists at Emory University, we know that immersing yourself in a novel causes measurable physical changes in the brain that can be detected up to five days after the reader closes the book.

The Emory researchers, in a paper for the journal Brain Connectivity, compared the effect to "muscle memory."

"The neural changes that we found associated with physical sensation and movement systems suggest that reading a novel can transport you into the body of the protagonist," neuroscientist Gregory Berns said, according to a report in the journal Science Codex. "We already knew that good stories can put you in someone else's shoes in a figurative sense. Now we're seeing that something may also be happening biologically."

 

You can read the read the rest of the piece via the below link:

 

http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-et-jc-reading-a-novel-makes-muscles-in-the-brain-researchers-find-20140103,0,6975108.story#axzz2pWGhyTTL 

Case Closed: The Book That Cured Me Of JFK Conspiracies Once And For All

Hector Tobar at the Los Angeles Times tells readers that his reading of Gerald Posner's Case Closed cured him of Kennedy assassination conspiracies.

For a few years after seeing Oliver Stone’s 1991 political thriller "JFK," I was an assassination buff. I bought one of the books on which the film was based: “On the Trail of the Assassins” by Jim Garrison. I reread “Libra,” Don DeLillo’s masterful 1988 novel, in which Lee Harvey Oswald, assorted New Orleans spies and underworld figures conspire to kill the president. The assassination is the greatest mystery of our times, and in those books I found clues that left me feeling tantalizingly close to solving it.

But 20 years ago I was cured of my conspiracy-theory fever forever. A single book was the antidote.
Gerald Posner’s “Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK” was published in 1993, on the 30th anniversary of the assassination. As the title suggests, its chief protagonist is Oswald, a man with the kind of lonely, tortured and eventful biography that American culture has produced pretty routinely in the decades since. In fact, I would argue that there are echoes of Oswald’s life in figures as diverse as Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and the two teenage boys who massacred their classmates at Columbine High School in Colorado.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-et-jc-book-jfk-conspiracies-cure-20131120,0,928971.story#axzz2ladTgHPE

Note: Like most of the military, intel and security people I worked with and knew during my years in the Navy and as a Defense Department civilian employee, I suspected that Fidel Castro killed President Kennedy. President Johnson also suspected Castro. But, like Hector Tobar, I too was cured of that suspicion by reading Gerald Posner's Case Closed.