Leisure Architecture of Wayne McAllister, The Review

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(More customer reviews)Nichols gives a nostalgic retrospective on the long live and prodigious output of Wayne McAllister. In no small part, the book walks the reader back through the last 60 years of urban commercial architecture in the southern California region. McAllister lived a very long time, and he was responsible for designing iconic landmarks that at least in the hazy afterglow of memory, epitomise a classic time.
The book is replete with many photos and illustrations, the cover being an example of the latter. The most common image, if not exactly the most enduring, is Bob's Big Boy. I remember in the early 80s, when I arrived in Los Angeles, how these fast food restaurants and their mascots were everywhere. Even getting a cameo role in Terminator. Alas, as the years wore on, the Bob's Big Boys got steadily deprecated. Not many left.
Another type of McAllister's work has also fallen into the tar pits of history. He designed many of the drive-ins that dotted Los Angeles. And which were an indelible part of many teenagers' experiences. Sadly, most are long gone, brought down by the VCR and its successors. At least in the book, you can see several as they once were, at the peak of their glory. Actually, no matter how pretty the architecture, the sound was often bad, the food dreadful, the movies second rate and the nearby cars often had loudmouths.
Great book. But for some readers old enough, there is a certain bittersweet tinge to all this.

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The work of late commercial architect Wayne McAllister (1907-2000) is responsible for much of the character of Southern California today. His Fred-and-Ginger nightclubs and glinting-steel-and-blazing-neon circular drive-ins brought Hollywood to life. His Sands Hotel in Las Vegas became the home of the Rat Pack; the mythology of Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis Jr. owes a great deal to the swank glamour of the Copa Room and the Sands Hotel, one of McAllister's finest.

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Heartbreak Hotel Review

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(More customer reviews)Oh yes, some would say that this story and its characters are "trite and cliched", but, folks, if you grew up in the south in the 50's and 60's you cannot help but recognize yourself - or gain a brilliant glimpse of a southern girl and all that was expected of her. The last thing your parents wanted was for you to, Heaven forbid, have any thoughts of your own - especially if they were in opposition to the standards of the time. Those were the days when you cared what your parents thought of you and you bore bitter consequences if you were a disappointment. It took a lot of courage to venture away from the norm. Ann Rivers Siddons paints vivid pictures of the small town and college settings and the workings of an evolving young mind in that era.
As an avid fan of Mrs. Siddons, I received a flash from Amazon that her new book, "Off Season" is coming out August 13th, so, in preparation for that and because it seems like an eternity since her last book came out, I immediately went down the list of her books to see if there was anything I had not read. Heartbreak Hotel was the only one - and I enjoyed it thoroughly. If this was Siddons' debut novel, she was off to a great start back in 1976 - and she's only gotten better with each novel. After reading Heartbreak Hotel, I will now chomp at the bit until "Off Season" emerges in August.

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Anne Rivers Siddons "cannot be surpassed in evoking a kind of life peculiar to the South," says Publishers Weekly. Her classic novel Heartbreak Hotel, praised as "anything but nostalgic" by The New York Times, excels with an insightful, troubling tale of the coming of age of a privileged young Southern woman during the turbulent Civil Rights era.In Montgomery, Alabama, Martin Luther King has organized a bus boycott. In Tuscaloosa, outrage surrounds the entrance of the state university's first black student. But at little Randolph University, sweltering in the summer heat, life remains dreamily the same. At Kappa House, the sorority sisters talk of who has pinned whom, and whether they can sneak past their housemother so they can party at an out-of-town bar. Even among this privileged group, pretty, popular Kappa sister Maggie Deloach is unquestionably one of the elite...until she commits a single act of defiance and courage that forever alters the way others think of her, and how Maggie thinks of herself.

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Hotel Paradise (Emma Graham Mysteries) Review

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(More customer reviews)I must disagree with the reader who skewers this book so dreadfully (regarding a 12 year-old's vocabulary). Perhaps one of the reasons I responded so viscerally to Grimes' book is that I was a 12 year-old exactly like this narrator--bookish and full of Victorian words better written than pronounced. In "Hotel Paradise," Grimes creates a book that completely pulled me in and when it ended, I was saddened because then I had to give up the narrator's world, one I happily entered for a period of hours. I will collect Martha Grimes' books happily now (this was my first one). I most heartily recommend this book to anyone who likes books for the way they are written, and to those who can use their own imaginations when they read--after all, isn't that part of the fun of reading fiction? Grimes is no dime-store novel simpleton. Her words leap off of the page and the phrases in "Hotel Paradise" are almost edible. Buy this book in hardcover and loan it to a friend when you are finished.

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