Rating: 
Summary: The Last City Room
Review: The finest novel written this year. Strong statement? No doubt. When a writer of Mr. Martinez's quality opens up his cache of visual images with understated elegance, you know you're reading something very special. Didn't live during the 60's or can't remember them? Forget it. The story, the characterization, the plotting, and those lovely Martinez words will take you on a voyouristic journey of one man's attempt to understand the world around him and avoid self-destruction.
Rating:
Summary: A compassionate tale about the '60s
Review: This book brought back the '60s, the newspaper industry as it once was, and the decency of people like Al Martinez who made working at a newspaper both exciting and rewarding. Although the craft is shaky in some areas, the story is strong, and the men and women depicted are people all of us who have worked in newspaper have known. Few survived those times, and this sensitive novels shows why. Treat yourself to a trip back to the less-complicated world of the '60s, in a time it was much easier to tell the good guys from the bad. You'll taste the whiskey, smell the cigarettes and experience a time that will never be again. Bonnie Hearn Hill
Author, Huelga House
Rating:
Summary: The Times They Were A-Changin'
Review: William Colfax returns from Vietnam to find a society in turmoil, and his new job as a reporter for the San Francisco Herald lands him smack in the middle of the action. From his unique vantage point as a member of the hard-drinking, fast-living crowd of reporters and editors at the Herald, we see the escalating war between the old-line Establishment represented by publisher Jeremy Stafford III and his cronies on one side and the young men and women of the emerging new order on the other... When it comes to a writer's infusing a book with authenticity, there's just no substitute for experience, and Al Martinez has it. A newspaperman for more than four decades, Martinez knows that world, and every page of The Last City Room rings with truth. But Martinez brings more than experience to the table, much more. As readers of his bi-weekly Los Angeles Times columns know, he doesn't just observe the human condition, he sees right into it and serves it up in a style that melds humor, irony, compassion, outrage, affection and pathos, often all in the same piece. It's his unique combination of experience, a keen eye, and the ability to render what he sees in clear and affecting prose that makes The Last City Room such a wonderful read. Before the story is over, the bay area Movement will be nearly torn apart by intrigues from both the right and the left, a great metropolitan daily will topple, and Colfax, like the society itself, will be changed forever.
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