The Cold Six Thousand: A Novel [Anglais] [Broché]

With its hypnotic, staccato rhythms, and words jostling, bumping, marching forward with edgy intensity (like lemmings heading toward a cliff of their own devising), The Cold Six Thousand feels as if it's being narrated by a hopped-up Dr. Seuss who's hungrier for violence than for green eggs and ham. In spinning the threads of post-JFK-assassination cultural chaos, James Ellroy's whirlwind riff on the 1960s takes nothing for granted, except that absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Hurtling from Las Vegas to Vietnam to Cuba to Memphis and back again (and all points in between), from Dealey Plaza to opium fields to smoke-filled back rooms where the mob holds sway, the novel traces the strands of complicity, greed, and fear that connect three men to a legion of supporting characters: Ward Littell, a former Feeb whose current allegiance to the mob and to Howard Hughes can't mask his admiration for the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King; Pete Bondurant, a hit man and fervent anti-Communist who splits his time between Vegas casinos and CIA-sponsored heroin labs in Saigon; and Wayne Tedrow Jr., a young Vegas cop who's sent to Dallas in late November 1963 to snuff a black pimp, and who is fighting a losing battle against his predilection for violence: "Junior was a hider. Junior was a watcher. Junior lit flames. Junior torched. Junior lived in his head."

And behind these three, J. Edgar Hoover is the master puppeteer, pulling strings with visionary zeal and resolute pragmatism, the still point around whom the novel roils and tumbles. At once evil and comic, Hoover predicts that LBJ "will deplete his prestige on the home front and recoup it in Vietnam. History will judge him as a tall man with big ears who needed wretched people to love him," and feels that Cuba "appeals to hotheads and the morally impaired. It's the cuisine and the sex. Plantains and women who have intercourse with donkeys."

The Seussian comparison isn't that far-fetched: Ellroy's novel, like the children's books (and like the very decade it limns), is flexible, spontaneous, and unabashedly off-kilter. Weighing in at a hefty 700 pages, The Cold Six Thousand is a trifle bloated by the excesses of its narrative form. But what glorious excess it is, as Ellroy continues to illuminate the twin impulses toward idealism and corruption that frame American popular and political culture. He deftly puts unforgettable faces and voices to the murkiest of conspiracy theories, and simultaneously mocks our eager assumption that such knowledge will make a difference. --Kelly Flynn --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

Clipped, stylized, hard-nosed and repetitive, this novel cuts like a dark, 24-hour Beat poem and sounds like Jack Webb on crack. Ellroy's latest noir tale is full of his trademark violence, sex and rough language. Readers follow five years in the life of Las Vegas police officer Wayne Tedrow Jr., who begins the novel making a trip to Dallas to kill a pimp for $6,000. From there, Tedrow is inadvertently mixed up with practically every cultural and political event and figure of the 1960s: Vietnam, Cuba, the Kennedy assassinations, Oswald, Ruby, Sirhan Sirhan, James Earl Ray, Sonny Liston, mobster Carlos Marcellos, Martin Luther King Jr. and J. Edgar Hoover. Craig Wasson does an excellent job of translating the written page into a day-length rap of short phrases, peppering listeners with rapid cuts and jabs until they are exhausted yet exhilarated.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

Ellroy's latest novel looks at the dark side of American life during the 1960s, focusing on a Las Vegas police officer, Wayne Tedrow Jr., and his inadvertent role in the cover-up of John F. Kennedy's assassination. The narrative spans a five-year period and traces Tedrow's dealings with the Mafia, the Ku Klux Klan, and various political and cultural icons of that time period. Ellroy's fast-paced tale takes the reader on a breathtaking ride through the underbelly of America. It is readable yet complex in its character development and critical examination of U.S. public policy. Like most of Ellroy's works among them L.A. Confidential and The Crime Wave it is graphic in its description of violence and should be reserved for a mature audience. Recommended for public and academic libraries.
- Thomas Auger, Georgia Inst. of Technology, Atlanta
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

Ellroy's prose is easy to absorb sentence by sentence, thanks to his simple subject-verb-object constructions, but monstrous as it acquires cumulative force over hundreds of pages. This bruiser of a novel picks up Ellroy's deeply pessimistic history lesson where his last, "American Tabloid," left off, with the murder of J.F.K., and builds toward the twin tragedies of the King and Robert Kennedy killings. Though characters reappear—most notably, the hit man Pete Bondurant and the Mob lawyer Ward Littell—there's no comfort in the familiar faces. In fact, there's no comfort at all. The novel is an exhausting, masochistic, often revelatory rereading of the allegedly idealistic sixties— an assassination, finally, of the decade rather than of its leaders.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

Listening to an Ellroy book is such hard work. That is because he writes in terse bursts of hip prose. Before the listener knows it, the thought is gone and almost forgotten. The listener must concentrate. Ellroy's latest epic starts a few moments after President Kennedy is assassinated. The listener follows three principal characters through a cynical five-year period of Americana ending with the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. Along the way, Ellroy fashions his conspiracies everywhere, using some of our favorite scapegoats--the CIA, FBI, and the Mafia. Craig Wasson's performance is true to Ellroy's style. His terse voice matches the writer's lingo. Even so, when called upon, he takes time to be detailed and expressive--his accents are near perfect. Looking for a different listening experience? This is it. A.L.H. © AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

If American Tabloid (1995) was Ellroy's Ulysses, then The Cold Six Thousand is his Finnegans Wake. The earlier novel used the author's signature staccato style to forge a groundbreaking exploration of the early 1960s and the events leading up to the assassination of JFK from the multiple points of view of a group of underworld foot soldiers. Now he takes the story through the escalation in Vietnam and the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr and Robert Kennedy. As the chaos in the country swirls out of control, so Ellroy's always edgy style ratchets up several notches beyond mere staccato, attempting to mirror the drug-addled, variously obsessed compulsions of his lowlife players with a hallucinogenic, rapid-fire repetition of subject-verb-object: "Pete shook his head. Pete pulled his silencer. Pete tapped his piece." It goes on like that for nearly 700 pages, the simple sentences building to a throbbing crescendo, like a three-chord rock song pounding its way into your brain. The action reverberates around three characters, two familiar from the earlier novel: Pete Bondurant, a stone-cold killer with a fondness for cats and an idealistic devotion to the anti-Castro cause; Ward Littell, a Kennedy loyalist turned Mob lawyer who somehow always helps kill the ones he loves, whether girlfriends or presidents; and Wayne Tedrow Jr., the new player, who is paid $6,000 to fly to Dallas on November 23, 1963, and kill a black pimp. That simple if unsavory task throws the naive Tedrow into a quicksand of sleaze that eventually finds him in Vietnam smuggling heroin and, later, outside a Memphis motel making sure a fall-guy named James Earle Ray does his job. Behind it all, orchestrating the action, is perhaps the most fascinating character in the story: J. Edgar Hoover, whose voice we hear only in memos and phone-conversation transcripts. Like Milton's Satan, Hoover emerges as utterly evil and utterly compelling. If it is hard to make sense of the '60s, it is equally hard to make sense of this novel. As an experiment in form and content, in style as a metaphor for meaning, it is ambitious and often brilliant; like the decade, however, it is also an exercise in glorious excess. By reinventing language, Finnegans Wake became unreadable; by re-creating the psychic turmoil of the '60s, The Cold Six Thousand makes reading unbearable. Bill Ott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

?Ellroy rips into American culture like a chainsaw in an abbatoir. . . . Pick it up if you dare; put it down if you can.? ?Time

?A wild ride. . . . An American political underbelly teeming with conspiracy and crime. . . . So hard-boiled you could chip a tooth on it.? ?The New York Times Book Review

?A ripping read....the book is pure testosterone.? ?The Plain Dealer

?A great and terrible book about a great and terrible time in America.? ?The Village Voice

In this savagely audacious novel, James Ellroy plants a pipe bomb under the America in the 1960s, lights the fuse, and watches the shrapnel fly. On November 22, 1963 three men converge in Dallas. Their job: to clean up the JFK hit’s loose ends and inconvenient witnesses. They are Wayne Tedrow, Jr., a Las Vegas cop with family ties to the lunatic right; Ward J. Littell, a defrocked FBI man turned underworld mouthpiece; and Pete Bondurant, a dope-runner and hit-man who serves as the mob’s emissary to the anti-Castro underground.

It goes bad from there. For the next five years these night-riders run a whirlwind of plots and counter-plots: Howard Hughes’s takeover of Vegas, J. Edgar Hoover’s war against the civil rights movement, the heroin trade in Vietnam, and the murders of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy. Wilder than L. A. Confidential, more devastating than American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand establishes Ellroy as one of our most fearless novelists.

From the acclaimed modern master of noir – a huge, electrifying, explosive new novel, his first since the international bestseller American Tabloid. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

“Ellroy rips into American culture like a chainsaw in an abbatoir. . . . Pick it up if you dare; put it down if you can.” –Time

“A wild ride. . . . An American political underbelly teeming with conspiracy and crime. . . . So hard-boiled you could chip a tooth on it.” –The New York Times Book Review

“A ripping read....the book is pure testosterone.” –The Plain Dealer

“A great and terrible book about a great and terrible time in America.” –The Village Voice

James Ellroy lives in Kansas City.