snip

>Here's a more current choice - Craig McDonald. Head Games and Toros & Torsos
>
>The former involves Prescott Bush funding a quest for Pancho Villa's skull for Skull and Bones at Yale, the later begins in Key West in 1935 and involves Hemingway, Dos Passos, the Surrealists, Spain in 37, Hollywood and HUAC in the 50s etc. Fun stuff.
>
>http://www.amazon.com/Craig-McDonald/e/B002BLFFQU/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_pop_1

Maybe it's an irrational bias but I have zero interest in works of fiction with real people as characters. I mean with their real names, not fictional characters whose origins are clear. Willie Stark in "All the King's Men" (IMO the best book ever written in this country), for instance. He was clearly based on Huey Long but he's called Willie Stark, not Huey Long. Just don't like it, as Prescott Bush's son liked to say ;-)

One of the highlights of my brief time in Louisiana was visiting the state capitol, an enormous building which practically defines the word towering. (It is the tallest state capitol in the country, by some margin I believe). It gave me a chill to be on the spot where Huey Long was shot. I also did not know he is buried on the grounds, underneath a suitably immense statue of himself. Talk about irony -- he was the driving force behind having the (then) new capitol built, then was assassinated in it a few years later.

PS -- Someone please remind me who I said I would send Glenn Beck's book to. I didn't make a note of it and now I don't remember.

UPDATE: Uh, Bill Kuhn?