Auf Wiedersehen, Herr Grass

On the day of his unexpected death in Lübeck, here’s a video of Günter Grass reading a poem. It’s in German, and the poem is called, “I Dreamt I Had to Say Goodbye.” The Guardian lists four key works you should read, but I’ll add my review of the book that tipped him for a Nobel, My Century. Grass refrained from revealing his SS past until after he won the Nobel. Not a flattering observation. But he was a great writer.

The New York Times looks over some critical reaction to Grass, including Orville Prescott’s 1959 assessment of The Tin Drum: “It is gross, grotesque, gruesome and horrible throughout. Even those who think themselves inured to the indecencies of modern fiction will find much of [it] excessively nasty … How much more effective ‘The Tin Drum’ would have been if written with a modicum of restraint, selectivity and taste!”

Right. Well, times have changed. The Tin Drum hasn’t.

Michael Scott Moore is a journalist and a novelist, author of a comic novel about L.A., Too Much of Nothing, as well as a travel book about surfing, Sweetness and Blood, which was named a best book of 2010 by The Economist. He’s won Fulbright, Logan, and Pulitzer Center grants for his nonfiction, as well as a Silver Nautilus Award in Journalism and Investigative Reporting; and Yaddo, MacDowell, and DeWitt Wallace–Reader’s Digest fellowships for his fiction.

He’s been a visiting professor at the Columbia School of the Arts and UC Riverside. He worked for several years as an editor and writer at Spiegel Online in Berlin. Michael was kidnapped in early 2012 on a reporting trip to Somalia and held hostage by pirates for 32 months. The Desert and the Sea, a memoir about that ordeal, became an international bestseller.

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Hellfire from Paradise Ranch

My review of a book about the drone war, Hellfire from Paradise Ranch, is up at the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Planet Waves

While I was in Somalia a man called Geoff Carter wrote about a picture of Indian men surfing on stand-up boards around 1800 off Chennai, which altered the known history of surfing a bit, even though the picture was hiding in plain sight at the Australian National Maritime Museum.

The Language of Torture

My review of Ingrid Betancourt's first novel, The Blue Line, is up at the Los Angeles Review of Books.

26 Hostages Freed

The men from the Naham 3 are all friends of mine — a crew of 26 sailors from southeast Asia who worked on a tuna long-liner flagged in Oman but owned by a company in Taiwan, which abandoned them after Somali pirates hijacked the ship in 2012.