Davis, L(awrence) J(ames) 1940-

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DAVIS, L(awrence) J(ames) 1940-

PERSONAL: Born July 2, 1940, in Seattle, WA; son of Maurice Nelson and Eula Jane (Randall) Davis; married Barbara Frances Ball (a social worker), September 21, 1961 (divorced April, 1994); children: Jeremy Randall, Gabriel Sprague, Barbara Victoria, Tina Rose. Education: Stanford University, A.B., 1962; Columbia University, graduate study, 1962. Politics: Democratic. Hobbies and other interests: Community planning, inter-ethnic relations, Victorian architecture.

ADDRESSES: Home—138A Dean St., Brooklyn, NY 11217. Agent—Sterling Lord, Sterling Lord Agency, 660 Madison Ave., New York, NY 10021.

CAREER: Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), researcher, 1963; Restoration Realty, Brooklyn, NY, salesperson, 1966-69; Sterling Wine and Liquor Co., Brooklyn, NY, morning manager, 1969-70; University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, Writers' Workshop, faculty member, 1970-73, program director, 1974, university instructor, summers, 1974-78. Lecturer, New York University, 1972-75; instructor, Hofstra University, 1972-75. Freelance journalist writer for New Republic, Mother Jones, Penthouse, and others. Contributing editor, Harper's and Buzz magazines, 1980—. Boerum Hill Association, chair of community planning committee, 1965-66, vice-president, 1968-71; chair, United Neighborhood Playground Committee; member, Mayor's Task Force for South Brooklyn. Military service: Idaho Air National Guard, 1957-59. U.S. Army Reserve, 1959-64; became sergeant.

AWARDS, HONORS: Wallace Stegner fellowship in creative writing at Stanford University, 1964-65; Guggenheim fellowship, 1975-76; Gerald Loeb Award for distinguished business and financial journalism, 1982; Champion Tuck Award, Dartmouth University, 1984; National Magazine Award, 1991; William Allen White Award, University of Kansas, 1995.

WRITINGS:

novels

Whence All But He Had Fled, Viking (New York, NY), 1968.

Cowboys Don't Cry, Viking (New York, NY), 1969.

A Meaningful Life, Viking (New York, NY), 1971.

Walking Small, Braziller (New York, NY), 1974.

other

Bad Money (nonfiction), St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1982.

Christina Onassis: A Modern Greek Tragedy (biography), Empire Books, 1983.

Onassis, Aristotle and Christina, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY),1986.

The Billionaire Shell Game: How Cable Baron John Malone and Assorted Corporate Titans Invented a Future Nobody Wanted, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1998.

Fleet Fire: Thomas Edison and the Pioneers of the Electric Revolution, Arcade (New York, NY), 2003.

SIDELIGHTS: L. J. Davis's fiction frequently portrays young men who are at odds with the world around them. In Whence All But He Had Fled, for example, a young artist seems to provoke anger in everyone he meets. While serious in tone, the book also has a humorous side, and Martin Levin commented in the New York Times Book Review that Davis weaves his character's "hapless interludes into an East Village bildungsroman that has a nice comic flair." Granville Hicks, a reviewer for Saturday Review, approved of the "witty writing," while R. F. Cayton of Library Journal found Davis's story to be somewhat "grotesque and grubby," but nevertheless possessing "some substance." Another novel, Cowboys Don't Cry, follows a young teacher as he flees his empty job and troubled marriage for a series of wild misadventures in New York City. While J. D. Foreman in Best Sellers dubbed Davis's effort "lightweight," R. V. Cassill in Book World called Cowboys Don't Cry "a juicy, delectable, stylish, funny, frightening and wise novel."

A Meaningful Life traces the effort of Lowell Lake to restore an old house in the Brooklyn ghetto, an effort that eventually becomes an impossible obsession for him. Richard Freedman, writing in Book World, found that Davis "keeps you laughing to keep you from crying or blowing out your brains. The continuous, hebephrenic laughter … is as restorative as it is nihilistic or hysterical, and it has the authentically crazy tintinnabulation of our times." Although finding parts of the novel to be flat, C. D. B. Bryan in the New York Times Book Review stated: "One reads it through out of appreciation for an author who is clearly capable, funny at the proper times, both brutally and cheerfully perceptive."

In addition to his fiction, Davis has worked as an investigative journalist, digging into such issues as pharmaceutical companies and price gouging on drugs, the Whitewater scandals and Arkansas politics, Republican entanglement in the Savings and Loan debacles, medical ambiguity in diagnosis of mental illness, and other challenging subjects. In one of his nonfiction books, Bad Money, Davis wrote about banking and finance. Reviewing the book in Chicago Tribune Book World, R. C. Longworth commented that "Davis is a prize-winning financial reporter who understands the system he writes about: unlike most financial reporters, he writes in straight-forward prose." In the Washington Post Book World, Robert Lekachman described the book as "exceedingly well-written and researched" and concluded, "Among popular financial and business writers, L. J. Davis belongs in the company of Adam Smith and Anthony Sampson—the best in the trade."

In Onassis, Aristotle and Christina, Davis turned to biography, writing about the life of Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis and his daughter Christina. Andrei Navrozov, a writer for World and I, praised it as "highly readable," pointing out that Onassis's "autocratic management style and misplaced dynastic ideal would be the undoing of both his enterprise and his family. The setting for this drama is literally the world's stage. The spectacle it provides is fascinating."

Davis sketched out a history of electricity in Fleet Fire: Thomas Edison and the Pioneers of the Electric Revolution. Gilbert Taylor of Booklist called it a "jaunty narrative" that "regales readers with tales of the thinkers, tinkers, and tycoons who fiddled with electricity and made it profitable." The author put more emphasis on interesting anecdotes about electricity rather than focusing on the most historically significant events. According to a Publishers Weekly reviewer, the "best narratives" are drawn from obscure biographies, and the author "frequently interrupts himself with declamations about the lone inventor and the pace of progress." Woody West, writing in Washington Times, noted that "Mr. Davis … brings to the account the novelist's grasp of character and context and the journalist's eye for the pungent and anecdotal—in both of which callings he has credentials. As a result, this is a coherent and informative narrative." The book's accessibility was commented on by a Kirkus Reviews writer, who described Fleet Fire as an "anecdotally rich, eminently entertaining tale of how fluorescent bulbs, boom boxes, and other fruits of electricity came into being." The writer concluded, "Davis brings a light touch to the story without dumbing it down."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

periodicals

Atlantic, July, 1969.

Best Sellers, January 15, 1968; July 1, 1969; October 1, 1971.

Booklist, August, 1998, David Rouse, review of The Billionaire Shell Game: How Cable Baron John Malone and Assorted Corporate Titans Invented a Future Nobody Wanted, p. 1916; November 1, 1998, Brad Hopper, review of The Billionaire Shell Game, p. 472; June 1, 2003, Gilbert Taylor, review of Fleet Fire: Thomas Edison and the Pioneers of the Electric Revolution, p. 1719.

Books, January, 1968.

Book World, March 24, 1968, p. 16; June 22, 1969, p. 5; September 26, 1971, p. 3.

Business Week, September 28, 1998, Ronald Grover, "John Malone and the Cable Tangle," p. 19.

Chicago Tribune Book World, January 16, 1983, R. C. Longworth, review of Bad Money.

Commonweal, May 10, 1968.

Harper's, May, 1968; July, 1969.

InternetWeek, January 18, 1999, Bill Frezza, review of The Billionaire Shell Game, p. 29.

Kirkus Reviews, May 1, 2003, review of Fleet Fire, p. 653.

Library Journal, January 1, 1968; October 1, 1969; August, 1971; October 1, 1982, review of Bad Money, p. 1865; June 15, 1986, Terrill Brooks, review of Onassis, Aristotle and Christina, p. 64.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, December 12, 1982; August 17, 2003, Patricia Fara, "The Birth of Wonders," p. R11.

New Leader, April 22, 1969.

New Yorker, April 20, 1968.

New York Times Book Review, January 14, 1968, p. 40; June 15, 1969, p. 34; October 10, 1971, p. 44.

Publishers Weekly, June 6, 1986, review of Onassis, Aristotle and Christina, p. 63; August 31, 1998, review of The Billionaire Shell Game, p. 54; April 28, 2003, review of Fleet Fire, p. 59.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 17, 2003, Joseph Losos, review of Fleet Fire, p. E3.

Saturday Review, January 20, 1968.

Science News, April 24, 2004, review of Fleet Fire, p. 271.

Virginia Quarterly Review, spring, 1968.

Wall Street Journal, April 13, 1994, "TNR, TRB and Us," pp. A14, A12.

Washington Post, April 23, 1994, Howard Kurtz, "Whitewater Weirdness," p. G1.

Washington Post Book World, October 17, 1982, Robert Lekachman, review of Bad Money.