I wrote the Kirkus Review you will find under Editorial Reviews and I direct you to that. What I failed to note in that review was the wonderful bouquet behind the author's name, Stephen Bloom, which seems to me a conflation of the two heroes of Joyce's Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom. Since Ulysses was the artistic wellspring for the nonlinear New Wave French films of the sixties, in which editing dizzyingly rose above characterization, as in Hiroshima, Mon Amour and Last Year at Marienbad, it struck me that the same nonlinear mode of storytelling in No New Jokes, which digs into our subconscious sense of time and remembrance,was derived from Joyce and that Stephen Bloom is the pen name for some well-known writer who wants to publish something fresh without being reviewed for his earlier work rather than for this inventive new work. I'd like to know if I'm all wet about this or not, should someone know Stephen Bloom.

I nearly overlooked this, the best first novel of 1997. While Stephen Bloom's "No New Jokes" was published in the first quarter of last year, I didn't become aware of it until I read a review in the "Shepherd Express", an alternative newspaper in Milwaukee WI earlier this year.

To call this funny but heartbreaking short novel the best first novel of 1997 may be a disservice. I think it may rank as one of the best of the year, period. It lacks the epic sweep of Pynchon's "Mason and Dixon" and the pretensions of Delillo's great though flawed "Underworld". At 187 pages it is dwarfed by both of them in length. But it packs a wallop, nevertheless.

The story centers on Izzy, forty-something WWII veteran, and the variously aged men who hang out at Bald Sam's diner in 1949 Brooklyn. They talk baseball, current events (the Bomb, Communism) and endlessly recycle the many ethnic (mostly Jewish) jokes, which have formed the fabric of their lives in the shadow of the Holocaust. Stephen Bloom gives us a good taste of post-war New York, much as Delillo does in "Underworld".

Izzy is not quite right in some unexplained sense as a result of the war. He has a 90% disability pension, which he supplements by playing his concertina in the streets. But we soon learn in bits and pieces that what really haunts Izzy isn't the war but a Pogrom in 1919 back in his hometown in Poland. During this pogrom, Izzy's father is brutally murdered, so bloodied that Izzy doesn't recognize his father's corpse when he first sees it.

The foregoing is undeniably grim and it is worth noting that Izzy never tells the jokes, which are peppered throughout, the novel. Nevertheless, the novel is often quite humorous. The jokes themselves are a commentary on the life struggles, both major and minor, of Izzy and his friends. The jokes point up the fact that while jokes are often told at someone's expense, they also serve to cushion life's blows.

The novel ends as it opens: life (and death) goes on.

An interesting & detailed look into the hunting methods & machinations of the notorious corporate raider of the 1980's , Carl Icahn . A shylock-like shady character from Brooklyn ,Icahn comes across as a brilliant Machiavellian Wall Street shark whose humble lower middle class origins seemed to have whetted his appetite for his soon to be corporate preys.Interestingly , like some other legendary investors ( George Soros , Jim Rogers, Benjamin Graham etc) Icahn was drawn to philosophy from an early age and went on to study it at Princeton ______after all Schopenhaur himself was a hard-nosed savvy investor! Also like most legendary investors he grew up poor .This book dissects in detail the anatomy of Icahn's raids on Texaco , TWA and others, along with the doomed(for most investors) but brilliant(for Icahn & his clique) concept of taking control of susceptible companies through leveraged buyouts financed with junk bonds & subsequently selling off the family silver to line his own pocket! He also perfected the art of "greenmail" by blackmailing vulnerable managements and thus enriching himself at the expense of his fellow shareholders . Icahn comes across as a lean,mean, street-smart SOB who had the brains and the chutzpah to take on the most entrenched managements on Wall Street .

This book is fantastic. It is brilliantly written and lets you get right inside Icahn's head as he stalks each prey! You can almost feel the squirming of the CEO's he tortures. The descriptions of his strategic thinking are amazing. This book is a MUST READ for anyone interested in activist investing. My most influential book.

... since it leads you to believe that its subject matter is interesting.

After ordering this book and wading through its first few chapters, I had one overwhelming thought:

Thank you, Amazon.com, for your marvelous return policy.

Bloom is one of our better critics in terms of readability, but still... Unless you have a great appetite for arid erudition, just stick to reading the poetry itself. This book has more to do with some pet theory of Bloom's than with Stevens' poetry, or our climate--both of which could have been fascinating subjects for a book.

Bloom has written this book after an obviously long devotion to reading Stevens and to developing his critical methods, in one of its modes, to a fine precision. The reader of this book benefits most by a slow absorbtion of the varied terminology that Bloom had accumulated previous to this work and the additions then newly made to it. The approach to Stevens' poetry is immediate in its variance from most previous criticism and especially passive reading, or "weak misreading" as B. would call it. To follow him closely is to slough the innocence of idealizing all poetry as committed to presenting its own meaning. Unwitting believers of the like, deterred by Bloom's criticism for appearing so staunchly definitive (though an immediate antidote to a belief in the floppiness of poetry), havn't realized that beyond his belief (on particularly fine display) in the strong potential of formalizing tropes and decoding of intertextualities, is the existance in poetry of its reader's 'becoming' the text that is read, and to do it inventively, eccentrically, and considerately is essentially to further poetry itself.