American Rhapsody – Joe Eszterhas

Description

Condition: Very Good for both book and dust jacket.  1st Edition

432 pages, Hardcover,

The setting . . .
Washington, Hollywood, and the landscape of the American Republic.
The writer . . .
Joe Eszterhas, ex- Rolling Stone reporter, National Book Award nominee for Charlie Simpson’s Apocalypse, and screenwriter of such blockbusters as Basic Instinct and Jagged Edge.
The stars . . .
Bill and Hillary Clinton, George W. Bush, Al Gore, John McCain, Ken Starr, and Monica Lewinsky.
The supporting players . . .
Warren Beatty, James Carville, Sharon Stone, Larry Flynt, Vernon Jordan, Linda Tripp, Matt Drudge, and Bob Packwood (with cameos by Richard Nixon and Farrah Fawcett, Eleanor Roosevelt and David Geffen, Robert Evans and Richard Gere).
The story . . .
The most basic, and basest, in many years — an up-close and personal look at the people who run our world. A tale filled with humor, tragedy and romance; suspense, absurdity and high drama; and, of course, lots and lots of sex.
In American Rhapsody , Eszterhas combines comprehensive research with insight, honesty, and astute observation to reveal ultimate truths. This is a book that flouts virtually every rule, yet joins a rich journalistic tradition distinguished by such writers as Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe.
A brilliant, unnerving, hugely entertaining look at our political culture, our heroes and villains, American Rhapsody will delight some and outrage others, but it will not be ignored.  What Joe Eszterhas has produced is a penetrating and devastating panorama of all of us, a fun-house mirror held up to our own morals, hypocrisies and desires.

If the Watergate scandal was a previous generation’s National Nightmare, then maybe the Clinton scandal was our National Wet Dream, and who better to narrate it than the screenwriter Joe Eszterhas?

In American Rhapsody , Eszterhas, whose credits include Basic Instinct and Showgirls, and Charlie Simpson’s Apocalypse, for which he was nominated for a National Book Award, takes us through the events that threatened to topple a president and left most of the nation’s citizens with, at the very least, a bad taste in their mouths.
Taking full advantage of his considerable journalistic and storytelling talents, Eszterhas gives us every fact, rumor, or innuendo surrounding the president’s foibles in the context of late century American politics and entertainment.  Here Washington and Hollywood do more than just flirt with each other; they share the same bed.

From scandalmongers Matt Drudge (who began as a Hollywood gossip) and Ken Starr, to would-be president paramours Sharon Stone and Barbra Streisand, to his final, unimpeachable witness, Willard—none other than President Clinton’s talking penis—Eszterhas gives us the goods on the story that nobody could stop talking about and, thanks to American Rhapsody, will be impossible to think about the same way again.