"On Location: New book presents a photographic history of filming in Los Angeles" from the Los Angeles Times by Richard Verrier

For nearly four decades Hollywood historian Marc Wanamaker has indulged his passion: collecting photographs from location film shoots in Los Angeles dating back to the early 1900s. Now, he hopes his new book featuring more than 200 vintage images, including Harold Lloyd dangling off the side of a building above 8th and Spring streets in the 1930 film “Feet First,” will remind the film industry of the city’s rich heritage at a time when much of production is migrating elsewhere. Wanamaker, a film history consultant and former curator of the Hollywood Heritage Museum, has collected about 250,000 still photographs that document the countless hotels, ranches, parks and beaches across Los Angeles that supplied the backdrop for some of Hollywood’s greatest films. [...] Wanamaker, who co-wrote the book with local authors Karie Bible and Harry Medved, said he wanted to use the photos to highlight L.A.’s deep ties to the movie business as film industry promoters and city officials attempt to stem runaway production. This week the nonprofit group FilmL.A. unveiled a new marketing campaign to boost the local film industry.

See also: Early Beverly Hills (CA) (Images of America), Location Filming in Los Angeles (Images of America Series), Early Warner Bros. Studios (Images of America) (Images of America Series)

At 51, David Shannon stays in touch with his inner child‎ Los Angeles Times - Susan Carpenter

There will be no peeking. No snitching. No playing with the Christmas ornaments. There will be no opening presents early. No staying up late waiting for Santa. And definitely no peeing of one's name in the snow. No, it isn't fair. That's just the way it is for a kid. 'Tis the season for temptation. It's these off-limits holiday enticements that are the focal point of "It's Christmas, David!" (Blue Sky Press), the new picture book from Los Angeles-area author and illustrator David Shannon, who paints this festive time from a child's point of view, with an impish spirit and in full-color detail. "Christmas is when you get in the most trouble and you get told 'no' the most. There's all this excitement that you have to be patient for," said Shannon, who, many years ago, was the David at the center of "It's Christmas, David!" and the other "David" books he's penned over the last dozen years on subjects as varied as potty training and getting ready for school.

Check the LA Times piece out, here. See also: Oh, David!, No, David!, David Gets in Trouble, David Smells!: A Diaper David Book

Mosley's 'Last Days' Restores Memory, But At A Cost from NPR Podcast Fresh Air

Walter Mosley is the author of more than three dozen novels, including many mysteries featuring the L.A. detective Easy Rawlins. His latest novel, The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey, is about a 91-year-old black man entering the early stages of dementia and the last years of his life. But Grey's life changes after he meets a 17-year-old teenager named Robyn, without a family of her own. Robyn cares for Ptolemy and introduces him to a local doctor, who invites him to join an experimental drug study that will help bring back his memory — but will simultaneously also shorten his life span. And Ptolemy must decide what to do.

Read the full NPR feature story here. Download the Fresh Air podcast here. Also, the LA Times had this to say about the novel:

In "The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey," Mosley returns to contemporary Los Angeles with a daring, beautifully wrought story that incorporates elements of allegory, meditative reflection and the lilt of lyric tragedy. For obvious reasons, we can never know the confusion and loss of intellectual faculties that so often attend old age, but in this novel Mosley gives as convincing an evocation as you're likely to encounter in literature. The result is an unexpectedly profound novel of the subtle links between memory and identity, of the difference between forgetting and having the past stripped from you, of what it may mean to be lost, first to those around you, then to yourself. Mosley's unlikely protagonist is Ptolemy Grey, a 91-year-old African American living as a near-recluse in a filthy, rented apartment in one of South L.A.'s meaner neighborhoods. His flat is cluttered with trash and the material fragments of a life dissolving in dementia. Ptolemy's beloved second wife, Sensia, is decades dead; roaches patrol his kitchen counters; his bathroom hasn't worked for years and he sleeps under a table in the living room, perhaps because his bedroom is stuffed with a pack rat's junk, perhaps for darker reasons. Even he is no longer quite sure. His real companions are a classical music radio station and an all-news television channel that he keeps on simultaneously, day and night.

See also: Known to Evil (A Leonid McGill Mystery), The Long Fall, The Long Fall: The First Leonid McGill Mystery, Devil in a Blue Dress (Easy Rawlins Mysteries)

Book review: 'Decoded' by Jay-Z from Los Angeles Times - Book Reviews and News - latimes.com

Jay-Z reveals pieces of himself and makes a passionate defense for oft-misunderstood rap music. Jay-Z is a great American artist — and he'd be the first to tell you so. "Decoded" is an elegantly designed, incisively written bid for cultural legitimacy by a man whose XXL ego is underscored by an equally outsized inferiority complex (as big egos so often are).

Read the full LA Times story here. See also: Decoded, The Hits Collection, Vol. 1, Empire State of Mind: How Jay-Z Went from Street Corner to Corner Office

Book review: 'The Passages of HM' Los Angeles Times - By Heller McAlpin - ‎Nov 4, 2010‎

"The time for me hasn't come yet: Some men are born posthumously," Nietzsche wrote in "Ecce Homo." It's a statement that might have provided comfort to Herman Melville, whose books — including "Moby-Dick" and his more popular early tales of seafaring adventures, "Typee" and "Omoo" — had been out of print for years when he died in 1891, at age 72, in his Manhattan home. Jay Parini's deeply absorbing seventh novel, "The Passages of H.M.," is an agile mix of fact, fiction and embedded literary quotation. It adds strongly to Melville's posthumous presence. Grossly underappreciated in his lifetime, Melville received overdue acknowledgement as a genius [...]

Read the full LA Times feature here. See also: The Passages of H. M.: A Novel of Herman Melville, Danzig Passage (Zion Covenant), Nostalgia, Contemporary Authors: Biography - McAlpin, Heller (1955-)

Beverly Hills Literary Escape brings together fans, authors - Carolyn Kellogg, Times Staff Writer

Book club members make up the majority of participants at the initial event. Backers hope it becomes an annual gathering. While many festivals that bring readers and authors together strive for volume — a little something for everyone — the first Beverly Hills Literary Escape made a point of being intimate, an experience that's at the root of how book club readers experience books. The event — which attracted a few hundred participants this weekend, mostly women — offered the chance for book club discussions with authors who generally appear at large literary festivals. Among those participating were Ethan Canin, Susan Straight and National Book Award winner Colum McCann, who accepted the inaugural Medici Book Prize on Sunday night before an audience of 250. Panels opened for audience participation and elegant lunches at venues such as Spago were accompanied by author discussions.

Read the full LAT story here. See also: The Book Club

An 'Emergency' for Robert Downey Jr. from Los Angeles Times - Entertainment News

He's been Sherlock Holmes, Charlie Chaplin and Iron Man. So it shouldn't be too much of a stretch for Robert Downey Jr. to play a gun-toting, lock-picking, plane-flying, government-defying survivor. Columbia Pictures announced Wednesday it had optioned the rights to Neil Strauss' non-fiction 2009 bestseller "Emergency! This Book Will Save Your Life." The book is to be developed into a feature produced by Team Downey — that's Downey Jr. and his wife, Susan Downey — and Michael DeLuca. The project is being considered as a vehicle for Downey. Allan Loeb ("Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps") is writing the screenplay.

Read the full LAT piece here.

Book review: 'The Fall' by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan from Los Angeles Times - Entertainment News

Long before vampires were posing naked on the cover of a recent issue of Rolling Stone , they were vile, terrifying creatures that looked like rats, lived in crypts and hardly ever turned up at the gym. Fortunately for fans of the old-school literary villains, writing partners Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan are determined to resurrect that archetype with a series of novels centered on the exploits of the Master, an imposing, murine-like figure with long talons, no ears and a hinged jaw that conceals a shooting stinger to extract his victims' blood.

Check the LA Times piece here.

Book review: A writer in search of good material from Los Angeles Times - Book Reviews and News - latimes.com

In 1966, Alan Bennett was just beginning the career that would endear him to his native England as one of the country's most prolific and acclaimed playwrights. But, surveying his own life at the time, he was conscious of something lacking: He could not claim any of the things some writers suffer through and later mine for material — a miserable childhood, maybe, or a backdrop of political upheaval. Or, at the very least, eccentric parents. In his memoir, "A Life Like Other People's," Bennett writes that, at that early point, "I … had already given up on my own background because the material seemed so thin.". Even World War II — which, as a world-historical event of considerable sweep and import, would seem to qualify — passed over the family: His father's work as a butcher exempted him from military service. So much for that. Bennett, like other writers of reasonably good fortune, would have to look elsewhere.

Read the LA Times feature here.