We picked up Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild after seeing it in one of the Alaska bookstores, in the large “local interest” section. I had actually heard of the story before, around the time it happened. As Krakauer noted, it made national news for a little while, and he wrote an Outside magazine [...]
I read it a couple of weeks ago, shortly after finishing The Dark Tower. It was an interesting contrast, if only because both Potter and The Dark Tower are seven-book series that are long in the making. As noted, King didn’t really have a plan on how his books were going to turn [...]
Unlike most Stephen King fans, my road to the Dark Tower only began a couple of months ago, when I packed The Gunslinger and The Drawing of the Three into our bags to go to Alaska: airplane reading. I had had all the books at home for months, but hadn’t gotten around to starting [...]
I read Victor David Hanson’s Carnage and Culture last year, coincidentally soon after reading Creasy’s Victorian-era survey book Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World
The earlier book consisted of relatively brief descriptions of the various battles that Creasy believed shaped history, the pinnacle of history being (of course) the British Empire of the 19th Century. [...]
Last weekend, Grace and I did what we couldn’t quite do in New York: catch The Producers, the Broadway musical. Albeit at Playhouse Square in Cleveland, albeit the travelling company without Broderick and Lane. But what can you do?
I haven’t seen the original movie in a very long time. I remember it [...]
A couple of weeks ago, I was stuck in the queue at Sam’s Club waiting for new tires for the Honda. The mechanic told me it’d take a couple of hours before they’d even get to my car, so I might as well go out and get some food (it was around noon) and [...]
Nine Innings From Ground Zero is HBO’s new documentary on baseball in the weeks following 9/11, where this game fulfilled some of its brilliant promise — “they’ll watch the game and it’ll be as if they dipped themselves in magic waters…. It reminds of us of all that once was good and it could be [...]
A couple of weeks ago, I finished Castles of Steel, Robert Massie’s history of the Great War at sea, and a follow-up to his earlier
Dreadnought, which chronicled the naval arms race between Britain and Germany up to the eve of the First World War. I’ve had bits of draft for this review lying around [...]
This was a wonderful movie, in ways a Philip K. Dick story with heart and hope and mercy, and I can’t tell you how much I liked it. The basic plot is about two people, Joel and Clementine, who don’t quite fit in the world without each other. They’ve broken up and have [...]
By now, we’ve heard the phrase “Dances With Samurai” applied to this movie. It’s a fine phrase, wholly appropriate: a American Civil War veteran finds the native Other more compelling and joins up in their fight against industrialization/Westernization/Progress-with-a-capital-P. But being somewhat like another movie is not necessarily a flaw, and taken for itself, [...]