cover image Notes from the Jungle's Edge: The Journalism of Barry Farrell

Notes from the Jungle's Edge: The Journalism of Barry Farrell

Barry Farrell. Creative Arts Book Company, $16.95 (0pp) ISBN 978-0-88739-070-8

Hawk, a former student of Farrell, and Dunne, a Southern California newspaper editor, write of their high regard for Farrell's journalism, which appeared in Time , Life , Harper's and elsewhere for 20-odd years beginning in the 1960s. Scanning this collection, their admiration is easily understood. A superb wordsmith, Farrell, who died in 1984, was equally at ease writing in a personal vein of his collapsed friendship with actress Patricia Neal and her husband, writer Roald Dahl, and, in a more public mode, of the mid-'70s negotiations between convicted murderer Gary Gilmore and Hollywood producers, the National Enquirer and others for film and publication rights to his life story. In addition, the versatile Farrell paints a prose portrait of poet Allen Ginsberg (``voluptuary and all-weather mental navigator'') getting his bearings in heartland Lawrence, Kans., and reports on Frank Sinatra masterminding the firing of a ``peculiarly literate disc jockey'' in New York City for criticizing a Sinatra album. All is couched in alert, poised language well equipped to make sense of two decades of American experience. (July)