The readings for Last One In are off to a great start. So far I’ve read at Politics & Prose in Washington with a young writer named Ben Dolnick, at the Olsson’s in Arlington, Va., and at the Barnes & Noble on Astor Place in New York. If you missed those, I can still be found nervously reciting passages Thursday July 12th at Pete’s Candy Store in Brooklyn, and in Boston and Los Angeles the following week.
Each reading was completely different, but also notable. (more…)

First of all, the New York Water Taxi is amazing. Motoring up from the Fulton Landing to Long Island City on surprisingly clear water was the best possible way to start an after-work party that I can think of. If you’ve never taken one of these, do it the next time you get out of work twenty minutes early. You won’t regret it.
Lauren and I landed at the sands of Water Taxi Beach a little before 6 p.m. Siobhan Foley, who was so kind as to organize the event, and Hamilton Boardman, the man who built this site, were holding down a few tables and sorting the free drink tickets into envelopes.
Ham remarked on the helicopter rotors beating loud as they ferried passengers in an overhead rush hour. That sound always takes me back to the air strips at Ali al Salem with the Stingers (HMLA-267). In the heat, under the bright sun, with the sand underfoot, it was almost overpowering.
The afternoon was cloudless despite the weather reports. On Weather.com the radar images were streaked with ominous red, green and yellow pixels. A lot of people had called to see if we were moving to a bar in Manhattan. We decided to take our chances with the beach. (more…)

Thanks to my friends Liz Farrell, Helene Cooper, Ken Bazinet and John Wilke for hosting a get-together at the 18th Street Lounge in Washington DC. The party happened in the Gold Room, which had a shabby-chic collection of old gold couches and brass fixtures. As Liz put it in the invitation, “the opulence of The Gold Room may pale in comparison to Saddam’s palaces, but the open bar will be flowing with libations of your choice.” Her predictions proved correct. The turnout was great, the free books flew and so did the alcohol. I’m going to post a couple of pictures in the next day or two.

I need to ratchet back on the review references a little. They won’t be the focus of the blog soon. They are kind of the game at the moment but I can’t go writing about every one and annotating all of them. At this point everyone gets the picture. But I couldn’t quite let it go without posting the link to the brief review in the New Yorker. (more…)

Troy, yet upon his basis, had been down,
And the great Hector’s sword had lack’d a master,
But for these instances.
The specialty of rule hath been neglected:
And, look, how many Grecian tents do stand
Hollow upon this plain, so many hollow factions. (more…)

The Entertainment Weekly litter, that is. The magazine made Last One In its “EW Pick,” with a nice review (A- on the grading scale). “Kulish, a former war correspondent, devises the perfect carrot/stick combo for our Paris Hilton-ized generation: a passionate critique of modern warfare disguised as lad lit. This one’ll sneak up on you.”

Here’s a nice piece by N.L. Belardes about Last One In. It includes an essay mixing his experiences watching the war with his thoughts on the book. There’s also an interview and some pictures. We met through MySpace and I’ve been impressed with what I’ve been reading from and about his review, noveltown.

Thursday night the Times had a beer bash to say farewell to the building on 43rd Street that the paper called home since 1913. Before I share my thoughts, I think this post is a decent place for me to lay out a personal ground rule for this blog. I won’t be discussing any Times stories, ones that I write or ones that I read, except maybe to recommend one by posting a link. It’s too easy to muddy the waters, second-guess and create conflicts of interest after the fact. I don’t want to get into any of that. But leaving the building was more of a historic event and plenty of outsiders were there to witness it. (more…)

If I saw my book in a store, I might be a little leery. Here’s a very positive review on a blog that I thought matched my own misgivings about writing “the Iraq embed novel.” The blogger wrote that he or she liked it “despite the sinking feeling in my gut when I realized that a guy who was an embedded reporter in Iraq in 2003 was writing a book about a guy who’s an embedded reporter in Iraq in 2003. That way, ninety-nine percent of the time, lies madness.” Better to win over a single skeptical reader…

Here’s a little high-brow cultural critique for you. Lauren and I were watching “Mission: Impossible 3” the other day. In general it was a lot more fun than I expected. After Tom Cruise broke down the wall between actor and personality, making it difficult to watch his films anymore, I decided to take a pass. But on a lazy Saturday one will make exceptions. Aside from Mr. Cruise, there was another jarring element though. They got really cute with the MacGuffin. That would be fine in a knowing film like “Ocean’s Twelve,” but was just plain out-of-place in this straight thriller.

The MacGuffin is the object that everyone chases in a book or film. The Maltese Falcon is probably the easiest example, but anytime someone is chasing “the microfilm” or “the plans for the bomb,” and it could just as easily be “the golden screwdriver” or “the ficus,” you have a MacGuffin. (more…)