Omaha Blues: A Memory Loop, by Joseph Lelyveld. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 226 pages, $22.
In 1964, an Ohio rabbi named Arthur Lelyveld went to Hattiesburg, Miss., and started knocking on doors in black neighborhoods, encouraging people to register to vote. A local white man promptly bashed his head in with a tire iron.
Why is Conor Oberst so desperate to reveal everything about himself-except his name? The 22-year-old Mr. Oberst, who hails from Omaha, Neb., and records under the stage moniker Bright Eyes, has always come across musically as something of a changeling-the High Plains Drifter of singer/songwriters. But Bright Eyes also seems to be sending the message Read More
I have never been much of a guy’s guy. But recently, I got an e-mail inviting me to a boys-only poker game; the pitch promised me (and a half-dozen friends) “an evening of gambling, drinking & telling tall tales about sexual performance … smoking allowed.”
My first reaction was anxiety-and not because of my aversion Read More
You’d need a bolt-cutter to get into the Mayfair Club now, where once all you needed was an introduction from a regular. It was a carpet joint, the last classed-up poker room in a city that used to be lousy with them. I got my introduction from a guy named Scott, who played in the Read More
My buddy and I walked the D-Day beaches of Normandy in the spring of 1984, 40 years after civilization came to grips with barbarism in a crusade whose outcome was far from certain. We identified the beaches not by their political boundaries but by their once-secret code names: Juno, Sword, Gold, Utah and Omaha. At Read More
