Yet this is neither a whiny nor an angry-at-the-fates book, but rather a helter-skelter romp, an episodic effort to defend, explain and understand a life.
How he and Ian Fleming would have chuckled over the irony of its fate: the book's publisher, Hamish Hamilton, successfully sued for libel, for the suggestion in the book that Lord Rothermere, the then-owner of the Daily Mail, was a snob!
For those fortunate enough to have avoided a criminal fate, the book implies, loneliness is the reward.
In was in that moment, Mr. Melcher recalled, that he decided to stop mourning the questionable fate of book publishing.
That is why "law-enforcement agencies acted with reticence when it came to intervening with Malcolm's fate," the book asserts.
A more serious novel to top the best-seller list (albeit briefly) was Jewish Ukrainian Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate, a book completed in 1960 but published only after having been smuggled out of the Soviet Union in 1980.
'In a sense,' muses Bruno in a characteristic aside, 'the serial killers of the 1990s were the spiritual children of the hippies of the 60s.' For those fortunate enough to have avoided a criminal fate, the book implies, loneliness is the reward.
The fate of book authors all over the world rests with your bookers -- and with you.
There were more important things to worry about than the fate of books.
By contrast, the fate of books and libraries in the Muslim East was decidedly different.
