This is a review for Ripped Apart: Living Misdiagnosed: Gary and Carol Stern’s Epic Fight Against Malpractice in the American Health Care System by David Black which I received a copy of in exchange for this review.
I remember when Suzzane was little and I would take her to the Doctor with a Earache and they always wanted to give her the same Medicine which would only help for a little bit. I had to fight with them to give her anything else. Reading Ripped Apart: Living Misdiagnosed brought those memories back along with the night Suzzie died and the doctors telling me what they thought I wanted to hear not the truth.
I can only imagine how scared and frightened they were at not getting the help they needed and Doctors not listening. But thanks to Carol Stern never giving up things changed. As you read through this book when you go to the Hospital always follow your guts because DOCOTORS are human and they make mistakes just like regular people do.
Don’t be afraid to say no, or even leave and get another Doctor if you don’t feel comfortable with the Doctor you were seeing because this might save your life or the life of someone you love.
RIPPED APART: LIVING MISDIAGNOSED
This is what it is like to suffer due to doctor mistakes and their refusal to admit the mistakes. It is a story of American hospitals, in which 50% of the patients are in the hospital due to having been in the hospital. It is a personal story with a wider look at the failure of our health care system.
This is no polite narrative. The book tells what suffering is – Gary Stern spent three years with his internal organs on the outside of his body – but despite the medical misery and the landmark legal case, the book is a love story, how Carol Stern’s love for her husband overcame the horrors of what they went through. The story of a wife who would not let her husband die until he told her he was ready. A wife who refused to give up, someone who fought the health care system including struggling – successfully – with the White House.
There has never been a more honest book written about the dark side of American health care and about love that knows no boundaries.
About David Black
About:
David Black is an award-winning journalist, novelist, screenwriter, and producer. His novel Like Father was named a notable book of the year by the New York Times and listed as one of the seven best novels of the year by the Washington Post. The King of Fifth Avenue was named a notable book of the year by the New York Times, New York Magazine, and the A.P.
Mr. Black received the Edgar Allan Poe Award nomination from the Mystery Writers of America for best fact crime book for Murder at the Met. His second Edgar Allan Poe Award nomination was for “Happily Ever After,” an episode of Law & Order. His third Edgar Allan Poe Award nomination was for “Carrier,” also an episode of Law & Order.
He won the Writers’ Guild of America Award for The Confession. He was also nominated for the Writers’ Guild of America Award for an episode of Hill Street Blues. He received an American Bar Association Certificate of Merit for “Nullification,” a controversial episode of Law & Order about Militia groups, which the Los Angeles Times called an example of “the new Golden Age of television.”
He has received a National Endowment of the Arts grant in fiction, Playboy’s Best Article of the Year Award, Best Essays of the Year1986 Honorable Mention, Forward’s Book of the Year Special Mention, and an Atlantic Monthly “First” award for fiction. He has also received a Pulitzer Prize nomination for The Plague Years, a book based on a two-part series that he wrote for Rolling Stone and that won a National Magazine Award in Reporting and the National Science Writers Award.
Researching articles, David Black has risked his life a number of times, including being put under house arrest by Baby Doc’s secret police in Haiti, infiltrating totalitarian therapy cults, being abandoned on a desert island, and exposing a white slave organization in the East Village.
Among the television shows he has produced and written are the Sidney Lumet series 100 Centre Street, which was listed as one of the 10 best shows of the year, the Richard Dreyfuss series The Education of Max Bickford, Monk, CSI-Miami, the new Kojak, Hill Street Blues, Miami Vice, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Law & Order: Trial By Jury, the original Law & Order, which received an Emmy nomination for Best Dramatic Show and a Golden Globe nomination, and Copshop, an innovative PBS series filmed in one-take, three camera real time.
He has also been nominated for the PGA Golden Laurel Award.
His TV movie, Legacy of Lies, starring Eli Wallach and Martin Landau, won the Writers Foundation of America Gold Medal for Excellence in Writing and received an ACE Award for Martin Landau for Best Actor.
His feature, The Confession, starring Alec Baldwin, Ben Kingsley, and Amy Irving was praised in New York by John Leonard and in The Hollywood Reporter, among other places, and was described in Metroland as “an almost miraculous act of storytelling.”
His play, An Impossible Life, starred Richard Dreyfuss, Blair Brown, Eli Wallach, and Philip Bosco. He also produced Cardenio, a “lost” play by Shakespeare, reconstructed by Dr. Gary Taylor, the editor of the Oxford Shakespeare, at the Williamstown Theater Festival.
He has published nine books and over 150 articles in magazines, including The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, and Rolling Stone. His new novel, An Impossible Life, has been praised by, among others, Nobel Prize winning author Czeslaw Milosz, Erica Jong, Bruce Jay Friedman, and Leslie Epstein, who called it the best writing about Jewish gangsters since Isaac Babel.
Contemporary Authors describes Black as “a versatile, multi-media writer who has distinguished himself in both fiction and non-fiction.”
He has appeared on TV and lectured at Harvard, Yale, and the National Constitution Center, among other places.
He has taught writing at Lehman College, Mt. Holyoke, Columbia, and Harvard, where he is a scholar-in-residence at Kirkland House. He is a former board member of the Mystery Writers of America, a member of the Century Association, the Williams Club, the Columbia Club, PEN, the Writers’ Guild, the Explorers’ Club, and the Players.
What do Bill Cosby, Nobel Prize Winner Czeslaw Milosz, Alec Baldwin, Graydon Carter, Stuart Woods, Richard Dreyfuss, Anthony Burgess, James Baldwin, Anne Tyler, Lawrence Block, Erica Jong, Ralph Peters, Larry Bond, Stephen Coonts, William Martin, Christopher Kennedy Lawford, Michael Bolton, and Gary Taylor (the editor of the Oxford Shakespeare) have in common?
They all love David Black’s novels.
Keynote:
The Extinction Event is a headlong chase-thriller that plunges a man and woman into an apocalyptic maelstrom of violence and intrigue, John Grisham meets Whitley Strieber, Richard Matheson, William Forstchen, and Thomas Pynchon in this chilling novel.
Body copy:
After Jack Slidell’s discovery of his law partner’s death in an apparent drug/sex killing, he and the beautiful Caroline Wonder are suddenly hurled into a race for their lives, a hair-raising odyssey filled with outrageous characters and violent action. Hit men and sinister government agencies hunt them at every turn, and their quest for justice is determining more than the guilt or innocence of a dead friend: The fate of the earth and humanity’s survival itself hang in the balance.
A page-burning, pulse-pounding chase-thriller of earth-shattering dimensions, The Extinction Event is also populated with colorful characters almost Dickensian in their energy and flamboyance. A book that will stick with you when you are done, you will remember these people a long, long time.
Early Praise for David Black’s The Extinction Event
“I think this is the best thing David Black has ever done!”
Bill Cosby, Emmy and Grammy Award-winning comedian, actor, author, and activist
“Black is a serious writer in the old sense, in the absolute sense. Brilliant, unsettling, and honest, this is David’s best book.”
Alec Baldwin, Golden Globe and Emmy-winning actor, star of 30 Rock
“In a room full of tired thrillers and gumshoe capers, David Black’s sensational new book is the life of the party. The Extinction Event sits at the table of Bradbury and Chinatown, Stieg Larsson and CSI.”
Graydon Carter, journalist, author and editor of Vanity Fair
“David Black is a renaissance man – novelist, biographer, screen and television writer – and this is his best work!”
Stuart Woods, New York Times bestselling author of Lucid Intervals
“Ignites in chapter one and blazes to the final page…a daring book by a daring man, this is by far the best conspiracy thriller in years. David Black’s a superbly skilled author who can draw on down-and-dirty personal experiences that echo international headlines, lending his work an uncommon level of authenticity. Read this book!”
Ralph Peters, New York Times bestselling author of The War After Armageddon and Fox News Strategic Analyst
“David Black is a direct descendant of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Elmore Leonard. No one writing today does sizzling hard-boiled dialog better than Black. He delivers a knockout punch with his latest novel, The Extinction Event.”
Edward Klein, New York Times bestselling author of Ted Kennedy: The Dream That Never Died
“Much more than a well-written detective novel, The Extinction Event goes in surprising, amazing directions. David Black uses an artist’s touch in creating a story, and a master’s skill in telling it.”
Larry Bond, New York Times bestselling author of Cold Choices
“David Black writes like Raymond Chandler on meth. With a taut, spare, leather-tough style, he flash-freezes 21st Century America. Mystery has a new king, and his name is David Black.”
Stephen Coonts, New York Times bestselling author of The Assassin
“As vivid and enthralling as any movie. A rival for John Grisham, Black blends a revealing and cautionary tale with romance, erotic tension, and suspense to create a literate page-turner. A wondrous 21st Century thriller.”
James Grady, author of the international bestseller Six Days Of The Condor
“For three decades, David Black has been one of our most significant cultural voices. He’s delivered award-winning work in magazines, between hardcovers, and on the screen. His career would make any writer envious, and The Extinction Event is so good, so riveting, so entertaining that I’m envious. I wish I’d written it. It’s the work of a major and multifaceted talent at the top of his game. Don’t miss it.”
William Martin, New York Times Best Selling Author of Harvard Yard, The Lost Constitution, and The City of Dreams
“The Extinction Event by David Black is an electric thriller, crackling with action, believable characters, witty dialog, and fine, literate writing. The scientific twist at the end, which is as plausible as it is frightening, will shiver your soul. What a spectacular novel.-Douglas Preston, New York Times bestselling author of Impact
“The frightening power of The Extinction Event will stay with me for a long, long time. It’s the kind of story that sweeps you up, then carries you far into a night of intense reading entertainment. And then you begin to think about it…and–well, you’ll see what happens. Not to be forgotten.”
Whitley Strieber, New York Times best-selling author of Critical Mass
“David Black’s new novel The Extinction Event is an intelligent, well-written thriller that will keep you up all night reading, guessing, and enjoying. I can’t wait to see the movie!”
Michael Bolton, Grammy Award-winning singer-songwriter
“David Black’s new book is Raymond Chandler on the Hudson, Pablo Casals on the prowl, a swift, funny, engaging mystery. I could not put it down!!!”
Judy Collins
“David Black has written a novel that is not only a literary tour de force, but a great read. I can hardly wait for the movie.“
Christopher Kennedy Lawford, New York Times bestselling author of Symptoms of Withdrawal, actor, and recovery activist
“There are always surprises within David’s work, more so because he
writes of the familiar and makes the familiar surprising. There are amazing surprises in this one.”
Richard Dreyfuss, Academy Award, Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild award-winning actor
“Hardboiled to perfection by a master of narrative alchemy. Here is a thriller yielding philosophical gold.”
Frederic Morton, New York Times bestselling author of A Nervous Splendor
“A neo-noir, with that Marlowe voice and heavy-lidded attitude transported to upstate NY, to weird small town scenes, high and way low, that no one would ever stumble on but a desperate private citizen trying to investigate his way out of a bogus murder rap. As the bodies pile up, hard boiled dialogue, nasty sex, and extravagant violence ensue, and the specter of a powerful eco-conspiracy begins to take shape — so Raymond Chandler meets Russell Banks meets Karen Silkwood — until finally things get even bigger than that: as big as the title, posing a problem next to which all other problems pale to insignificance.”
Jacob Brackman, film critic (Esquire), screenwriter (“The King of Marvin Gardens”), producer (“Days of Heaven”)
“A guilty pleasure. This sexy noir thriller spins an intriguing puzzle and then casually blackmails you into the next galaxy with the following: The trouble with immediate gratification is it takes too long. Few writers could handle the concept of humanity’s end time so well as author David Black does in this suspenseful novel The Extinction Event.”
Lori Singer, “Footloose,” “The Falcon and the Snowman,” Robert Altman’s “Short Cuts”
“I haven’t been as hooked on a character since Mike Hammer….or……. Hold on tight, this novel has more dangerous twists and turns than the Taconic Parkway, where it takes place…..or….Who knew a couple of small towns on the Taconic Parkway could have so much sex, violence and intrigue…apparently David Black, and he tells it all….or…The world created by David Black, it’s provocative, surprising and dangerous…a great place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there…..”
Bill Persky, Director, writer, five time Emmy Award winner, “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” creator of “Kate & Allie,” “That Girl,” and other TV shows
“A nonstop narrative train ride: from the textured, eccentric ordinariness of upstate New York through noir thriller to apocalyptic vision. As surprising and real as the early morning jogger who suddenly encounters Adam and Eve copulating on his path–and jumps over them. “
Gary Taylor, co-editor of the Oxford Complete Shakespeare and editor of the Oxford Complete Middleton
“This book is so intense, I feel like I’ve just been hit from behind in a dark alley. And the alley in question is the ever-fertile, ever engaging imagination of David Black.”
Tom Fontana, Award Winning Writer/Producer of “Homicide”, “Oz,” and “The Philanthropist”
“This is a really fun read. It’s chock-full of characters you’d like to run into (and some you wouldn’t) — Hudson Valley lowlifes, warped aristocrats, black ops killers — all spun around a plot that’s utterly fantastic, until you start to think about it. Cheers to Jack Slidell and Caroline Wonder.”
Nick Taylor, American Made, Sins of the Father, A Necessary Evil, President of the Authors’ Guild (2002-2006), Director of the Authors Guild Foundation
“ A compelling yarn filled with crisp and crackling dialogue and more twist and turns then on any roller coaster.”
Julian Schlossberg, Broadway Producer and Documentary Film Maker, “Witness to the 20th Century,” founder Castle Hill Productions and Gold Castle Records, lecturer (NYC, Columbia University, Cannes Film Festival, Peoples Republic of China)
“David Black is a master screenwriter and novelist. Just when you think he’s done it all, he gives us The Extinction Event. This is one of those books you’ll put down and wonder if Hollywood can possibly make the movie as riveting.”
Louis Ferrante, author of Unlocked: The Life and Crimes of a Mafia Insider
“In David Black’s The Extinction Event one inexplicable murder plus one relentless investigation equals too much scary information. And when things go this bad, this fast, sometimes all you can do is laugh like hell and hard-boiled horror cracks wise in “The Extinction Event” like a beaten, bloodied Bogart racing to cover the Apocalypse for the Inter-Galactic Herald Tribune. Black teases-out the outlines of a terrifying future while painting the present with a ghostly, water-wash of echoes from the dead, like history’s own cinematographer pulling focus from multiple dimensions. His dark vision projects us into a looming cosmic crime scene: scary, harsh and worst of all, possibly prescient. There is flat-out not enough yellow police tape on Earth to contain The Extinction Event.”
Gary Tigerman, actor (Saturday Night Live), songwriter (for Peggy Lee, Leon Redbone, Canned Heat, songs choreographer by Elliot Feld for Michail Baryshnikov), four time winner of the Clio Award, writer (The Orion Protocol)
“David Black’s The Extinction Event is a master storyteller at his superb best. It is smart and sexy, and full of memorable characters being human in constantly surprising ways. I couldn’t put it down.”
Harry Stein, Hoopla, The Magic Bullet
“The Extinction Event is entertaining, engrossing and enlightening. Black’s new novel outdoes Thomas Pynchon channeling Elmore Leonard. No one will ever think about this picturesque corner of rural New York State the same again. A thrilling ride full of disturbing surprises.”
William O’Rourke, author of Criminal Tendencies and Notts
David Black’s prose soars majestically above a landscape of mystery and intrigue. The Extinction Event, with it’s irresistible characters, devilishly clever plot twists, and stunning conclusion, is a phenomenal work destined to become a classic.
Charles Kipps, Columbo, Law & Order; Author of Hell’s Kitchen Homicide and Cop Without A Badge
Scary, provocative, sexy, haunting in a very important way–what more
can one want in a book?
Pat Birch, choreographer (“Grease,” “The Nanny Diaries,” “The Stepford Wives,” “The Human Stain,” “The First Wives Club,” “Billy Bathgate,” “Sleeping With The Enemy,” “Big”)
“David Black writes extremely well, with a style that has verve and that is gritty and real. There is balance and harmony to the book. This is a terrific read with its grim actuality and tight plot and a moral center that elevates it above any genre.”
Harvey Goldblatt, Ph.D.
Professor of Medieval Slavic Literature
Professor of International and Area Studies
Master, Pierson College
Yale University
“Sleaze, grit and hope under the heavens: like its hard-boiled characters who use wit to survive in the dregs of rural New York, The Extinction Event teaches us a delicate art of living in a world in decay. Beginning as if it were of the tawdry color of neo-noir, the novel brings us language that crackles and bristles with excitement and even the warmth of promise. It is, in the strongest philosophical sense, an event.”
Tom Conley
Abbott Lawrence Lowell Professor
Romance Languages and Visual Studies
Harvard University
David Black, triple-threat master storyteller on the big and small screens, has brought to these pages a riveting thriller as only he could. THE EXTINCTION EVENT is a non-stop tale for today with a heart-stopping glimpse of our future.
Mark St. Germain is an award-winning playwright and television writer and producer
Praise for David Black’s Previous Work
Ekstasy (1975)
“Ekstasy is the most discriminating, best-written volume of psychic phenomena I have yet read.”
Francine du Plessix Gray
“An eminently sensible and comprehensive job on a difficult subject. Ekstasy has more than literary merit.”
John White, editor of The Highest State of Consciousness
“Superb…fascinating…refreshing…can be unhesitantly recommended…”
Parapsychology Review
Like Father: A Novel (1978)
The Washington Post, Seven Best Books of the Year
New York Times Notable Book of the Year
“Like Father is written with painful and beautiful understatement.”
James Baldwin
“I loved it from the first paragraph. It’s a rich, complex fascinating book; I ached for all the characters and was sorry to say good-bye to them at the end.”
Anne Tyler
“David Black’s first novel is full of skill, humor, and humanity. The voice is individual, the dialogue real, the characters three-dimensional. The vision belongs to the great American tradition, but the eye that sees it is wholly original.”
Anthony Burgess
“Extraordinary for being so simple and good. I think, without sentimentality, he makes come alive for us a grandfather of the proportions of Falstaff, his resentful son and the son of that son, in a confrontation of days and years for which there can be no judgement and no judge; only tenderness, compassion and life as we have too often come to know it.”
Richard Elman
“Written in an inventive style rich in metaphor and barbed wit, Like Father exposes the Oedipal struggle in all its bare intensity. This is no polite parlor drama; unconstrained emotions – rage and jealousy, the hurt of abandonment, and the desperate need to be loved – spill onto the pages.”
The New York Times Book Review
“Like Father, a vigorous and tender first novel by David Black compels your attention from the opening sentence… Black firmly controls the narrative pace, conveying scenes of intense and unexpected violence in tightly expressed sentences that explode on impact.”
The Washington Post
“Like Father is a novel to be read and reread, to remember in snatches like a good poem. David Black is an extraordinary new writer.”
Chicago Tribune
“David Black reveals a remarkably strong talent, powerful perceptions, and a wonderful skill at story-telling and characterization. He is definitely a writer to watch.”
The Sunday Plain Dealer, Cleveland
“Splendid!”
Los Angeles Herald Examiner
“Graceful, funny, moving!”
The Washington Star
“Powerful and outrageous… Lyrical and passionate… Ruthless and vibrant. The rich humor will break your heart.”
The Chicago Tribune
The King of Fifth Avenue: The Fortunes of August Belmont (1981)
New York Times Notable Book of the Year
A P Best Books of the Year
New York Magazine Best Book of the Year
W Magazine Best Books of the Year
“In David Black’s hands, the scene and the people live vividly…”
The New York Times Book Review
“The Belmont family was nothing if not extraordinary, and such vignettes make reading David Black’s biography of August Belmont, The King of Fifth Avenue, a pleasure.”
Business Week
Minds: A Novel, 1982
“David Black is a serious and sophisticated talent, the equal of a Pynchon or a Robert Stone, and one of our finest novelists of the generation who came of age in the late 60s and early 70s. Minds is his best work to date, a subtle and careful evocation of place, character, and obsession. First-rate writing.”
Richard Elman
“Most of the books people send me aren’t worth reading. Minds is so good I can’t stop.”
Joanne Greenberg
“Engrossing. This is no ordinary family saga. Black tells his story in bright barbed incidents, shot through with perfectly observed details. Minds illuminates, with economy and grace, a particular sort of American genius. It is truly stirring.”
The Washington Post
“Secret obsessions – those that haunt our dreas and creep into waking moments – draw us into Minds. Black’s images are perfect. His writing has great power and vast ambitions.”
The Los Angeles Times
Murder AT The Met (1984)
Mystery Writers of America Edgar Nomination Best Fact Crime Award and Special Award
“Black uses his skill as a novelist to its most chilling effect.”
The New York Times
The Plague Years (1985)
Based on the two-part series in Rolling Stone that won the National Magazine Award for Reporting
Winner of the 1985 Science-in-Society Journalism Award: A “brilliant structured, stunningly written effort, an eloquent and sophisticated interweaving of the many issues – human, political, scientific – that surround this highly volatile subject.”
Pulitzer Prize nomination
“With all of its horror, one forgets what a fascinating story surrounds America’s efforts to cope with AIDS. Fortunately, David Black didn’t forget and wrote it all down. His book is important – and as readable as a good novel.”
Betty Rollins, Last Wish and First, You Cry
Medicine Man (1985)
Based on the two-part series in The New York Times Magazine that won a Lasker Award and an article in Playboy that won Playboy’s Best Article Award for 1980.
Peep Show: A Novel (1986)
“Peep Show is an extraordinary meditation on storytelling – an update of Scheherazade for modern times.”
Madison Smart Bell, The Washington Square Ensemble, Waiting For The End Of The World, Zero db, Doctor Sleep, All Souls’ Rising, Freedom’s Gate: A Brief Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture
“David Black tells a series of wry, erotic, and sometimes frightening stories that tug at the edge of out hidden desires and fears until they emerge, wriggling and bawling, into the light of day. The guy’s dangerous.”
Tim Cahill, Buried Dreams, Jaguars Ripped My Flesh: Adventure Is A Risky Business, Lost In My Own Backyard: A Walk in Yellowstone National Park
“Here are the socio-historical linkups of the sexual circuits of a man’s brain. A rare glimpse of that erotically powerful netherworld between a mother’s breast and lover’s breast that is the bizarre backstage to any male act of seduction.”
Emily Prager, A Visit From The Footbinder, Clea & Zeus Divorce, Eve’s Tattoo,
“A peep show, yes, but one entirely elegant and erudite. The novel’s portrait of a marriage – and the disturbing and unusual triangle which ensnares it – is both highly intelligent and daring, full of passion and understanding. Peep Show is the Couples of the Baby Boom generation.”
William O’Rourke, Criminal Tendencies, Idle Hands, Notts
“David Black is quite simply one of the best writers of our generation. He can write wonderful journalism (see Murder At The Met) and wonderful novels (see Like Father or Minds). In Peep Show, he combines both worlds in a brilliantly realized fiction about the adventures of a sophisticated, funky, ironic, and sexy journalist. Along the way, he illuminates the meaning of fame, friendship, desire, and, most importantly, love. A wonderful, brave book and not to be missed.”
Robert Ward, novelist (Shedding Skin, Red Baker, Four Kinds of Rain), screenwriter (“Hill Street Blues,” “Miami Vice,” “Cattle Annie and Little Britches”)
An Impossible Life
“Hilarious!”
Czeslaw Milosz, Noble Prize for Literature, 1980
“A fascinating, richly rewarding book. It’s the very sort of novel Isaac Bashevis Singer might have written if he’d known the Godfather. Or been the Godfather. Or if he;d been David Black.”
Lawrence Block
“David Black’s An Impossible Life is a brilliant depiction of a Jewish-American family unsparingly portrayed with all its craziness, eccentricity, and wild humor.”
Erica Jong
“An Impossible Life is a triumph – and taught me a lot about what it means to be Jewish.”
Jonathan Alter, Newsweek
“David Black’s An Impossible Life is a fantastic swirl of memoir, myth, folktale, family history. And Cabalistic mysticism; it gives magic realism a whole new mobius twist. This compelling novel has all the grit and grain of real history combined with the fascination of legends that survived for centuries.”
Madison Smart Bell
“Some of the tales are told with vaudeville rhythms, some with the inflection and diction of the shtetl. All are impossible, wonderful, irresistible.”
The New York Times Book Review
“Best writing about Jewish gangsters since Isaac Babel…”
Leslie Epstein
Forward’s Book of the Year Special Mention
“Novelist Black (Peep Show, 1986, etc.) takes readers on an odd but affecting journey through Jewish history… He begins working his way backward through the generations, through the manifold sufferings of East European Jews in the 19th and 18th centuries, as well as through the haunting tales of demonic possession and wonder rabbis… Interspersed with these tales is a series of dialogues between Leo and the ghost of his father; these are anything but Hamlet-like, owing more to the Borscht Belt and Woody Allen than to the Bard of Avon. Black brings to all this narrative movement a tremendous joy in the sheer act of storytelling, piling on gangsters and children, musicians and peasants, adultery, insanity, pogroms, transmigrating souls, the whole of it with gusto. [A] mélange of Jewish history and myth… [T]he authorial voice has considerable charm. Brisk and often funny…”
Kirkus Review
“In an effort to get to the bottom of his mother’s mental illness, Leo Polishook reaches back into his family’s history, recalling the stories (both real and imagined) passed down to him from generations of loved ones. What emerges from these memories is a kind of modern folklore, a blending of hard-bitten gangster dramas and magical tall tales… Leo sifts through seven generations of family legend, much as his mother, in a state of dementia, sifts his father’s ashes through his sister’s marijuana strainer, “trying to save his gold.” The real gold here is the imaginative manner with which Black structures his bobeh myseh (a Yiddish term for “old wives’ tale”), hiding kernels of truth and moral in the center of fantastic stories. There’s Leo’s kindly but vicious grandfather, an infamous local mobster (“the Pasha of Allen Street”) who counsels and gossips with God Himself over glasses of Slivovitz at a local café. There’s his great-grandfather, who strangled a wolf because the beast stood between him and his outhouse. Throughout the novel, Leo also carries on a conversation with his father’s ghost, a witty, biting dialogue that provides the book with some of its most moving moments. “The living are surrounded by ghosts,” Leo’s father explains at one point. “Usually, they ignore them.” Black seems to say we do so at our own peril throughout An Impossible Life. In crafting so vivid a narrative, Black shows the reader that to ignore those spirits, their stories, and their collected magic and wisdom is to deny ourselves something greater-a means of self-discovery.”
Independent Publisher
Film and TV
Hill Street Blues: “More Skinned Against Than Skinning”: Writers Guild of America Nomination Best TV Episode of the Year
Legacy of Lies (TV movie starring Eli Wallach and Patricia Clarkson): Writers Foundation of America Gold Medal Award for Excellence in Writing
Legacy of Lies: ACE Best Actor Award for Martin Landau
Legacy of Lies: Houston International Film Festical screening
Law & Order: “Happily Ever After”: Mystery Writers of America Edgar Nomination Best TV Episode
Law & Order: “Nullification”: Mystery Writers of America Edgar Nomination Best TV Episode
Law & Order: “Nullification”: American Bar Association Certificate of Merit
Law & Order: “Nullification”: PGA Golden Laurel Award
Law & Order: “Nullification”: an example of “the new Golden Age of television” The Los Angeles Times
The Confession (a movie starring Alec Baldwin, Ben Kingsley, Amy Irving): The Writers Guild of America Best Script (Adapted)
The Confession raves in the New York Times, New York (John Leonard), and Metroland (“an almost miraculous act of storytelling”)
Law & Order multiple Emmy nominations
Law & Order Golden Globe nomination
Writer/Producer on Sidney Lumet’s 100 Centre Street: Listed as one of the Best Show of the Year
Other Awards and Biographical Information
“Medicine and the Mind” Playboy’s Best Article of the Year
National Endowment of the Arts Grant (Fiction)
Atlantic “First” Award (Fiction)
“Walking the Cape,” Harper’s, Best Essays of the Year 1986 Honorable Mention
David Black has worked on some of the best TV shows of all time, including Hill Street Blues, Miami Vice, Law & Order, The Cosby Mysteries, Richard Dreyfuss’s The Education of Max Bickford, CopShop, and Sidney Lumet’s 100 Centre Street
He has written for, among other places, Harper’s, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, The New York Times Magazine, New York Magazine, Cosmopolitan, and Crawdaddy
He is a Scholar-In-Residence at Kirkland House, Harvard University, and a Fellow of Pierson College, Yale University
He is a member of the Mystery Writers of America, the Century Association, the William’s Club, the Columbia Club, PEN, the Writers’ Guild, the Explorers’ Club, the Players, and the National Arts Club
Author bio:
David Black is an award-winning journalist, novelist, screenwriter, and producer. He has written and produced television shows, including Law And Order, CSI: Miami, Hill Street Blues, and Miami Vice. Among his prizes are a Mystery Writers’ of America Special Award for Murder At The Met, two other Edgar nominations, the National Magazine Award for Reporting, a Pulitzer Prize nomination for The Plague Years, a National Endowment for the Arts Grant in Fiction, the Science-in-Society Award, the Writers Guild Award for Best Screenplay for his movie The Confession, multiple Emmy nominations, and Playboy’s Best Article of the Year Award. His novel Like Father was named a notable book of the year by the New York Times and listed as one of the seven best novels of the year by the Washington Post. The King of Fifth Avenue was named a notable book of the year by the New York Times, New York Magazine, and the A.P.
Thank you,
Glenda, Charlie and David Cates
