Copyright 2008 The New York Sun Wed, 18 Jun 2008 16:41:58 -0400 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Nathan Ward :: Stories from The New York Sun http://www.nysun.com/authors/Nathan+Ward istoll@nysun.com (Ira Stoll) webmaster@nysun.com en-us NATHAN WARD http://www.nysun.com/arts/good-doctor/56433/ Wed, 13 Jun 2007 00:00:00 EST New York City plays a strong supporting role in most of Pete Hamill's work, from the decades-long pub crawl remembered in "A Drinking Life" to his celebration of the man whose voice filled so many of those saloon hours in "Why Sinatra Matters." His 10th novel, "North River" (Little, Brown; 341 pages, $25.99), digs deep into the hard details of the city's life in 1934, five years buried under the Depression and at the beginning of the administration of Fiorello La Guardia. The North River, the... NATHAN WARD http://www.nysun.com/arts/running-the-germans-ragged/52678/ Wed, 18 Apr 2007 00:00:00 EST More than 70 years on, the summer Olympics of 1936 are popularly remembered for the exploits of the American track star Jesse Owens, and for the legend of Adolf Hitler's refusal to shake Owens's hand, which probably never happened. The best-known images of those long-ago German games are still those captured by Leni Riefenstahl in her epic documentary "Olympia," which, while produced with lavish funding from Joseph Goebbels's Nazi Propaganda Ministry, remains the most influential sports film... NATHAN WARD http://www.nysun.com/arts/master-cheaters/18639/ Tue, 16 Aug 2005 00:00:00 EST Like vaudeville itself, the magic profession was dealt a stiff blow when the first movies appeared. The big stage illusionists, mind readers, escapists, and peddlers of other mirrored trickeration were suddenly in competition with a miraculous spectacle on screens from coast to coast: A light flickering through a loop of film could conjure any thing or action found under the sun, from cowboys robbing a train to Russian sailors mutinying on the Potemkin. For most magicians and other stage folk... NATHAN WARD http://www.nysun.com/arts/big-fellow-of-jersey-city/13598/ Tue, 10 May 2005 00:00:00 EST After a lifetime of telling stories, of reimagining history both Irish and American in popular novels and nonfiction works ("The Officers' Wives," "Liberty!: The American Revolution"), Thomas Fleming has turned his scrutiny to the story of his own family, and the rise and fall of its political fortunes in Jersey City in its heyday. "Mysteries of My Father" (John Wiley & Sons, 352 pages, $35.99) is the story of his parents' marriage. But it is also the story of the Irish arrival in America... NATHAN WARD http://www.nysun.com/arts/from-the-georgia-jabber-to-nathan-detroit/11628/ Mon, 4 Apr 2005 00:00:00 EST Damon Runyon was a sportswriter who made good, but he could just as easily have started out working the police or political beats, any hunting ground that promised a steady supply of vivid characters ripe for the capturing by such a quick-sketch artist. From the evidence of the quirky and lively accounts in this new collection of his baseball writings (Carroll & Graf, 416 pages, $16.95), the game itself did not seem to interest Runyon as much as the characters of which it was composed: the... NATHAN WARD http://www.nysun.com/arts/killers-strikebreakers-mob-bosses-fixers-other/10246/ Tue, 8 Mar 2005 00:00:00 EST About a decade and half ago, after having a few preparatory pints in one of the mirrored booths of a landmark Irish pub near the theater, a few guys from my office went to see the film "State of Grace," starring Sean Penn and Garry Oldman as Hell's Kitchen Irish gangsters. Partway through the movie, the cozy drinking spot we'd just left turned out to be the site of a vicious, glass-shattering beating by one of the film's gangsters. Other familiar Gaelic parts of the city later came bristlingly... NATHAN WARD http://www.nysun.com/arts/dazzling-talents-of-aj-liebling/1418/ Wed, 8 Sep 2004 00:00:00 EST In 1965 Tom Wolfe wrote a career making send-up of the New Yorker and its saintly editor, William Shawn. Among the crimes Wolfe laid at Shawn's feet in the piece was what Mr. Wolfe saw as the lamentable evolution of the magazine's signature style after World War II, when the "nice flat-out" prose style of Lillian Ross became "the model for the New Yorker essay "instead of "those confounded curlicues of the man at the other extreme, Liebling." Those confounded curlicues are among the best of... NATHAN WARD http://www.nysun.com/arts/liebling-back-in-print/1421/ Wed, 8 Sep 2004 00:00:00 EST Liebling's voice, the novelist and Francophile James Salter wrote in 1986, was "unmistakable, that of a large, unkempt man with a gift as exact as Cyril Connolly's, rummaging around in a huge bin of what might be called demi-classical references: literary, gastronomic, sporting, historic." It is Liebling's very breadth of appetites and subjects that has kept his books sliding in and out of print in the four decades since his death. But his 100th birthday this October provides a happy publishing...