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Powell's Staff:
Five Book Friday: In Memoriam
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Every year, the booksellers at Powell’s submit their Top Fives: their five favorite books that were released in 2023. It’s a list that, when put together, shows just how varied and interesting the book tastes of Powell’s booksellers are. I highly recommend digging into the recommendations — we would never lead you astray — but today...
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Brontez Purnell:
Powell’s Q&A: Brontez Purnell, author of ‘Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt’
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Rachael P.:
Starter Pack: Where to Begin with Ursula K. Le Guin
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Customer Comments
blackcat49 has commented on (16) products
Raising Trump
by
Ivana Trump
blackcat49
, November 12, 2017
I suspect this had a ghost writer. Other celebrities have written books and have sometimes shown what they've learned in a credible fashion. Ivana Trump seems to want the reader to believe that she and her family are ordinary folks, but her reasoning is contradictory and backhanded. I would give this less than 1 star, but it isn't an option. The writing itself isn't bad, but Ivana wants to show her good parenting skills...except for, you know, the things you can get away with. 1. The children are salt-of-the-earth, dressed in T-shirts and jeans, bought once a year, at...where else, Bloomingdale's. They wanted pets like all children, but when Ivana objected to the rat, they left them in their other house, to be cared for a houseman when no one was there. What about the rat's mental life? Did the houseman play with him or was the rat ridiculously bored? 2. Accountability for actions is absolutely required. Except for when you can get out of school tests, traffic tickets, or into clubs underage based on who you are. And when you go to Taco Bell, expect to order wine there, pay with $100, are surprised that they don't have that much in the register and have to send your driver out to search for ATM. Don't laugh this off. It isn't something to brag about. 3. Daughter Ivanka has special skills -- walking a construction site in stilettos. Don't brag about this. You are not grounded, areunstable anywhere you step. You can’t inspect anything closely and any other person dressed this way would be immediately told to go home and get the proper equipment: gloves, boots with rubber soles, and a hard hat. 4.WheneverIvanacannamedropadesigner,shedoes,downtothedresssoheavyshehastositdownandguestsmustcometoher.Andthenthere'stroublewiththeyacht,andIparodynot,therealhorrorbeginswhenshechipsanail.No.Justno.
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Positively
by
Courtney Sheinmel
blackcat49
, August 27, 2017
This is the first book I have read about AIDS that is fiction and reflects the time when pediatric AIDS became a chronic condition. (The other book I read about it, Positive by Paige Rawl, is about a similar situation, with a daughter being infected by her mother, having to take pills everyday without fully realizing the reason. It’s equally good, and non-fiction). Emmy is just old enough to be both terribly angry by her mother’s death, her apparent intrusion into her father and stepmother’s life, and being forced to go to a camp for children with AIDS, and just old enough to be truly rebeillious and noncompliant. For example, why take pills everyday when you’re not sick? How dare Emmy’s parents take her away from her old house, and how dare they SEND HER AWAY. Emmy’s thoughts, actions, and feelings don’t seem forced here, and they don’t seem to be “in service to the plot,” a technique I really hate in books. They seem real, and they work. While I would like more character development here, that’s just me. The character development is enough to get an idea of what each person might be like, to give them habits and behaviors, and it also makes their responses in relation to Emmy work. The topics in the book don’t bang you over the head, which I really appreciated. Does a loved one see you after death? How can you go on without them? And most of all, in Emmy’s case, what does this mean for her own life span? All of these things come at Emmy at once -- and while she learns about others at camp, she looks over her life. The author’s afterword, and the book mentioned at the end, are well-worth taking a look at...I have the mentioned book in my book list now. Well-written, a topic that hasn’t been explored much recently, and something I wouldn’t mind reading again. 4 stars.
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The Odd Women
by
George Gissing
blackcat49
, August 24, 2017
This was written in the 1800′s sometime, and even though I enjoy reading books from that time period, this one has little interesting to say. What is interesting in it is it’s portrayal of “odd women,” women who wanted a career in a society and time period where they were expected to stay at home. For a book about people who want something other than marriage, it spends a lot of time with marriage. A woman has trouble with her husband, leaves him after he wants to control her thoughts, and then right off wants to marry someone else right away. This is very strange plot. It also has a plot twist no modern writer would think of. Apparently, a man and women couldn’t sit together in a living room alone without suspicion, so of course when the married women knocks on the door of a man she knows, the whole community believes she’s been doing improper things with him. Now a writer today would never think to write that. I guess that’s what townspeople did with no TV to watch. Try it and see if it works for you (this book, not being in living rooms alone with strange men).
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Joe the King
by
blackcat49
, August 24, 2017
I saw Joe the King in the video store when it first came out. I thought it might be something like King of the Hill (and no, not the cartoon…the Great Depression version where the kid is constantly lying and hungry…honestly, it’s a funny movie). But I avoided it because I heard bad reviews about it. So, should I have avoided it? Yes and no. It’s rated R, not necessarily for any violence or special effects, but for the almost constant swearing. I mean it. Parents, teachers, kids, and shop owners regularly cuss each other out in this. That being said, it’s not quite like it would be if the film was set today — there’s no gang members etc. It’s the 1970’s. Again, the film has great sets. The insides (and under porches) of houses, railroad containers in front yards, alleys, and a great visual shot of getting to school (hopping over a K-rail). Really does a good job with setting. But there’s also a problem. I could believe that all this stuff could really happen, and I could believe that it could all happen to Joe, who is 14 — but here’s the thing — the character in King in the Hill, in somewhat similar circumstances has a sense of humor — funny things happen, even though he has to survive. That’s kind of what’s lacking in this story. Where are the things that kept Joe going? The interesting set-up for this movie starts right in the beginning. People throughout this movie are routinely sarcastic and nearly all of them make snotty little comments — all of them. I get that parents and teachers could do this, but even at work, at the pawn shop? Everyone in town? The funny thing is if Joe doesn’t get enough sleep because he works all night and he doesn’t eat because there’s no food, why isn’t he bouncing off the walls? Instead, even though he rarely seems to cause any trouble in class, except by coming in late, teachers single him out and then pull him aside to ask him to pester his father to pay back their money. You’d think they’d want to be nice to him so that the money would get paid back faster. The movie is kind of like what would happen in The Outsiders if the character Johnny Cade was telling the story. (Actually it’s filmed and lit kind of like that too — to the movie’s credit, because if it was filmed today, it would be blue-colored and darker, and it wouldn’t work). The theme is pretty well set right in the beginning — Joe is the scapegoat of the story. The early scene that begins it is kind of freaky. The camera shows all the other kids playing — a seven or eight year old Joe is already smoking. (And no, that’s not the freaky part, it’s the kid’s haircut…Good God…). It’s kind of hard to say why this scene is here, but it’s good to know some background. Joe’s father is the janitor at his school, something he repeatedly denies when asked in class. It’s interesting here that Joe answers the teacher’s initial question correctly — but isn’t praised for it. Some snotty comments from students are encouraged and arrive and Joe is hauled up for a spanking. I was very surprised, considering more snotty comments from both parents when Joe gets home, that they didn’t immediately add to the spanking. I browsed the web and read some reviews — almost all of which described the father in this as drunk and abusive to his wife and kids. Huh. Well, he is a drunk in this, and a later scene shows that he’s clearly abusive to his wife, and it’s pretty well implied by the way he yanks the kids around and threatens to knock their heads off on a fairly regular basis that he likely is abusive toward them as well. But here’s the interesting thing. The movie only shows him slapping Joe twice. I had to read This Boy’s Life in English and afterwards watched the movie — good movie, but grueling, and so I’m happy to say that while this movie is downbeat and somewhat grueling in it’s own way, there’s no knock-down-drag-out fight at the end either. But that’s good for this movie. It’s grueling because of the snotty comments and the work (and stealing) it shows Joe engaged in every day, but the parents don’t inspire much. You can believe that they’re capable of ignoring their kids when not making snotty comments, but they aren’t really menacing characters. The movie shows Joe playing at the roller rink — where he’s so euthusitac he doesn’t know how to act — and thereafter shows him running various places — to a night job, to school, under the porch. There are some vaguely sympathetic characters — Joe’s big brother is like his best friend, although he’s friends with a boy who also has a drunk mother — the man at the record store never makes snotty comments, and the guidence counselor, while asking Joe what he wants to do with his life, and ultimately changing things for him, though not in the way you;d expect, says he looks like a bum. (Other people in the movie say the same thing). But while his brother wears at least an fatigue jacket every day and maybe a different shirt, Joe never changes clothes. Which makes sense. His brother also works at the school, cleaning floors, and it’s unclear whether this is to pay for lunches or not — so both kids have jobs and support each other by sharing food when they find any. His coworker at a diner makes sure he eats so he doesn’t eat off other people’s plates. One of the funny scenes happens when Joe steals some doughnuts. He finds that he has to feed the whole neighborhood’s kids too, because they swarm around the minute food makes an appearance. Joe helps people a little in this movie — he steals everything but he brags about stolen money only once; he pays back creditors; he buys something nice for his mother; he wanders around the house at night tucking in his parents and brother — and interestingly doesn’t appear to know what to do with himself when he’s home alone. While I fast forwarded over bits of slower scenes in Joe the King, I can say that I’m glad they left the slow scenes in, and I even wish they’d included some more. Not because Joe the King is a happy story, but because it does so well making the scenery around Joe’s life work that I wanted to know more about what he thought about. The slow scenes they have are well filmed. The film doesn’t have a plot so much as an everyday life kind of thing. (When Joe falls asleep in class after being up all night, it reminded me of what a substitute said: it was against school policy to wake these students in New York because they paid the rent and needed sleep more than education). The lowest point in the film, if that could be said in a film were almost nothing lighthearted happens, is when Joe’s brother refuses to speak to him. I guess the lighthearted parts are when Joe does something kind to people he has no reason to be kind to. Strangely, nearly all the children in this movie, except in the beginning, are in general supportive of each other. They cuss each other out and there’s some horseplay, but they like each other. So when they don’t along, in the neighborhood where everyone uses swear words as their first language, it’s actually surprising. I’m glad that Joe the King is filmed somewhat brightly. The 400 Blows may be more famous, and this film may be more downbeat than it probably should, but there’s something in this story that I really liked. I would rent it again — whereas I have no desire to watch The 400 Blows again (and that’s kind of tame compared to this). I started watching the commentary on the DVD and I’ve got to say if you want directors to get back to the technical commentaries and stop playing around with various actors on tape, than this a good place to start. So far it hasn’t shown which parts of this movie were semi-autobiographical, but it does show why certain camera angles were used, what was cut out, and why. It’s good to see that. The commentary says a lot of description was removed from the script. Kind of a shame, really. I’d like to read that.
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I Am Because We Are
by
blackcat49
, August 24, 2017
I wanted to like I Am Because We Are, a documentary about AIDS orphans in Africa…but I disagreed with the delivery. The film is narrated by Madonna and within the first few minutes or so I was hooked. The film draws you in with the opening lines, has excellent snippets of news footage about the area’s history…a large percentage of child-headed households, an orphanage basically run by children who are assigned or at least take care infants (with an 9-year-old carrying a baby); juvenile prisons where children wait to be aged out into adult prisons. for crimes like stealing a radio; the witchcraft form of disease such as alcoholism (and very likely AIDS as well), and mutilations. So many interesting things. Anthropologically interesting, humanly interesting…excellent, startling photographs, a wonderful though impoverished area to film in, and an intriguing question somewhere in the middle. How can these people, who sing and are so happy, be happy with such poverty and disease, while we in America cannot? It raises the question of the modernized society and whether a modernized society is right under these circumstances. I thought this was a wonderful question. And yet… I actively watched for 30 minutes, and fast forwarded every so often thereafter. The film has the usual talking heads, officials, doctors, etc. which is fine. It explores the stories of a number of adults and children and gives a good overview of the problems in the country…but talking heads do not always make a good documentary. After 30 minutes or so of the Poverty Hotline soundtrack playing constantly in the background, the talking heads restricted eventually to an almost constant appeal for help in the area, actually saying that we were all people, etc. I wanted it to end. It felt as though I was watching a station break program. You know, with the starving children that you need to help. Are they starving? Most likely. Do they need help? Most likely. Is it a shame they’re orphans? Yes, it is. Do I wish the film had shown me more in-depth stories of the children and their remaining parents? Certainly. The film explains how Madonna adopted one of her children there. Now if she felt the need to adopt, she must surely have seen something in the people she liked, or at least been sincerely interesting in helping one of the children. But this film does not convey that. It tries so hard to convince the viewer that these are humans in need of assistance, that ultimately it fails, in my opinion. The tone is wrong. For example, one child explains that he is only fed once a day and he is seen to be wringing out his spare shirt and hanging it out to dry. He has friends with families and envies them. But that is all it explores. I wanted the camera to follow this child…what does he do for fun? When? Where? Does he get his shirts at the same place as the food? If there were only 2 adults to be seen at the orphanage, what else did the children do there? Obviously, as in the child-headed households, they had taken on adult responsibilities, but show me that… This film has great scenery and good overview, but what I have highlighted above is unfortunately what I felt it showed that was different and better than the usual Help-Children station break. The rest, I felt, was standard…filmed well, but standard. Maybe I only have a different view of documentaries…But then again, I find nothing wrong with historical documentaries, which are almost nothing but talking heads, photographs and reenactments. This leaned too heavily on the side of the talking heads, and spent astonishingly little time interviewing the children involved. The DVD does include additional interviews in the extras, but I didn’t watch those. I wanted the film to show me a human side of the story…what could it tell me that no other film on the subject could? They had the subjects, the landscape, the experts, but if the film was about the children, then show me directly and without preaching why their stories are important. Well, the film doesn’t preach, but you get the idea. There are some things I was fairly surprised to see, like the anthropological witchcraft, but all in all… I wouldn’t rent this again. The tone did not sit well with me.
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Out of the Ashes
by
blackcat49
, August 24, 2017
It’s about a inmate-doctor at Auschwitz, a Holocaust movie and has the — well, if you can say so — usual horrors about it — tattooing, life before the war, how that life was changed, adjusting, causal cruelty — you name it, it has it. What makes the film spooky is not that Gisella Perl was forced to participate as a doctor, against her will, but using her training to better the lifes of those around her — but the use of flashbacks. These flashbacks are short cuts of film or longer versions as Dr. Perl tells her story to New York officials who want to stop her from practicing in the U.S. What makes them spooky is their suddenness, the change from a perfectly normal conversation in the film to a memory of Dr. Mengele, music on the radio, sudden accusations from other inmates in broad daylight, and also, a very distinct palette change. Scenes in New York in this film are bright and colorful and except for when Dr. Perl is in her house, which has wood paneling, generally not dark. The scenes from Auschwitz are dark, lit only by one or two bulbs, dingy — often oddly green colored from security lights. These scenes are intercut and the results are striking. You know instantly where you are in these flashbacks — standard colors are “modern-day” post-1945 New York, green or drab colors are Auschwitz, and a gold sepia color are flashbacks from when Dr. Perl was a child. This is a good cable-produced movie, but not one I generally watch at night.
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No Pity: People with Disabilities Forging a New Civil Rights Movement
by
Joseph P. Shapiro
blackcat49
, August 24, 2017
I finished Joseph P. Shapiro’s book No Pity: People with Disabilities Forging a New Civil Rights Movement last night. I liked this book. It covers quite a bit of disabled history and does so with a wide range of disabilities, including blindness, ALS, autism, mental retardation and physical disabilities. I wanted to read this book after seeing it in the legal section in a bookstore, flipping to a page about the Behavior Research Institute, and thinking that it sounded just like the Mother Jones magazine expose I had just read. (And as it turned out, when I researched it, it was; the center changed its name to the Judge Rotenberg Center). I’m torn between debating this particular problem on ethical reasons, or siding with parents, who do need a last-resort option for children and adults who yank their own hair, bang their heads, or engage in any other violent behavior. The parents do need respite and an option of somewhere to put their children where they will be safe. Shapiro addresses this issue first by showing a job center where people with temper tantrums can work. He reports that due to positive intervention on the job, the temper tantrums eventually subside. During the time the author examined this center in the 1980’s, it used a device to electrically shock students who misbehaved — reportedly about the voltage of a rubber band slapped across you. Students could also be pinched, spanked with a spatula, slapped, have portions of food withheld or — and here’s a chilling part — restrained with their heads between their knees, masked, and with white noise helmets on their heads. Now addressing this issue is tricky. Food rewards for proper behavior are a part of public school special education for some students. So that makes sense. Restraints are allowed in at least one center I know of, as well as time-outs. So here’s the thing. A shock device like that would probably be not very painful, but a reminder, equivilant to (and I hate to say it) training your dog. And students particularly sensitive to noise and touch would hate these punishments. All right. But let’s review. Let’s assume the students engage in behavior that is threatening to themselves (throwing chairs, banging their heads, biting their fingers severely etc.) So. In a prison, inmates engage in behaviors that can be harmful to others (rape, murder,etc.) and they are in prison to rehabilitate them. In the Mother Jones expose (August 2007, http://motherjones.com/politics/2007/08/school-shock), the voltage of the device had increased to about the strength of a bee sting — according to the reporter, like a whole swarm at once. Shapiro predicted this in his book, saying that the school was like a giant Skinner box, principles that the school extended to not only the students but also to supervisors as well. Well, Shapiro points to the students doing tedious work on computers. (Now some tedious work on computers might not be tedious for them, and I’m hoping this is not one of those false-education things). So a man protests by verbalizing and taking his hands off the computer. When he is pinched, he complies. When he tries to get up from his seat, he is instantly thrown to the floor and held there until he complies and goes back to work. Now this makes me wonder. How long and how often are the breaks? Does this person need a different schedule or is everyone on the same one? Is this person known to immediately engage in violent behavior to himself or others upon getting up? Also, the student attempted communication which was appropriate to express that he wanted to stop. And lastly, if you worked in an office and decided to take your coffee break early, would your boss body slam you? So the students engage in difficult, hard-to-control behaviors. Shapiro notes that if the students are subject to a system of rewards and punishments for their behavior, then the supervisors get rewards for how they respond. What this could potentially mean (and scientifically, according to Skinner’s priniciples, it does) is that the more a supervisor rewards (or punishes) a student, they get a vacation. They are rewarded for something good they did, and they will do more of it because of this reinforcement. So, for example, shocking or restraining a student will bring you good things. Think of the Stanford experiment: students became jailers or prisoners; those with the power quickly engaged in excessive force. In Milgram’s study, people were asked by a doctor in a white coat to shock a person, and to up the voltage when asked. It was proven that when asked by a person in authority, the subjects would up the voltage to the point of death, despite protesting, if they were asked to by someone in authority. What they didn’t know is that the person being shocked was an actor. ThisisonlypartofShapiro'sexcellentbook,whichcoversothersubjectsaswell.Highlyrecommended.
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Snow Mountain Passage
by
James D Houston
blackcat49
, August 24, 2017
I just finished Snowy Mountain Passage by James D. Houston. The occasionally shifting tense didn’t work for me, and I didn’t get particularly attached to the story. That’s either because I know the story all ready — it’s about the Donner Party — or because I find the way the sentences are structured jarring. I haven’t figured out which. However, as historical fiction it explores one particular aspect of the Donner Party that I’ve always considered underdocumented and that is, what happened when James Reed and William McCutcheon went over the mountain? MCCutcheon is always described in historical accounts, if at all, as a big man who liked to swear, recite Shakespeare, and didn’t much care what people thought about what he said. Houston remembers this when he makes McCutcheon a character. Houston also remembers several things that are trickier to find — such as the fact that rescuers were paid large sums to retrieve the survivors of the Donner Party, that streets in San Jose are named for the Reed family (Reed, Martha and Virginia Streets — though Houston only mentions Reed), and that McCutcheon left behind a daughter in the camp. The story mentions in passing that the child died — but doesn’t detail how, which is probably just as well, since the one account I’ve found is shaky at best. If Houston found the same account, perhaps he thought it was too historical unreliable. Houston also mentions that the Reed family settled on Market Street, and that Reed was given a (later contested) orchard. I haven’t heard of the orchard before, or that Salvador’s brother came looking for him. I think maybe that’s fictional. But Houston mentions that the Donner Party were a bit out for themselves after awhile, that when a second murder occurred they didn’t try to string that person up as they wanted to with James Reed (something I hadn’t heard before). In alternating chapters, he cuts between Reed’s banishment from the camp and journey back to his family, and Patty Reed’s remembrances as an old woman. Occasionally, he makes good use of other cultures which would not have recieved much notice at the time: John Sutter’s native Hawaian wife, or Salavador’s memory of the priests at the mission. Somehow it hadn’t occurred to me that the Donner Party happened right between the Spanish missions and Native Americans, and just before the Gold Rush. Houston points out these things. Does make me wonder though…did John Sutter have a Hawaiian wife? This book (and Sutter’s Fort museum) say he was Swiss, which I had never read until I went on a field trip there. Houston also tries to get inside Jim Reed’s head as he’s getting help for his family and the others. What is he thinking about? What does he regret (other than the stabbing that led to his banishment). Houston raises an interesting point here. [If I could only remember what it was…] I always thought Jim Reed was, in a way, remarkably lucky that he almost got himself hung, because if he hadn’t gotten banished, the liklihood that anyone else would have been so determined to go into the mountains in a snowstorm, seems less. Of course, Houston makes it clear that Jim Reed the character may have felt very differently. Now of course, I’m wondering where the Reed orchard was located… In the end, Houston wraps up the story by giving a summery of people. He notes one of things I always founds neat, but sometimes hard to find: that kids threw rocks and things at Keseberg later on because of what he did; that Jim Reed was involved in the city council. If I remember right, although he mentions San Jose’s contest for state capital, he doesn’t mention that Reed was involved in that, or that Reed and McCutcheon got into some kind of argument through the newspapers. What Houston does say is that the Reed’s house on Market Street was eventually lost when Patty Reed was grown. Now there’s something I didn’t know. Now I have to look that up. I know Virginia Reed’s house burned down in downtown San Jose fairly recently, historically speaking, because I’ve handled the historic resource inventory for the address at internship. I know that McCutcheon and Amanda his wife had other children — if I remember right, one of them was given to the family doctor, and that child may have been the one to become a lawyer in San Francisco — but I’m not sure, as I haven’t looked at paperwork in the California room for awhile. I know that McCutcheon became the sheriff, though it’s a shame there’s not more documentation after that about him. If I remember right, there was a William McCutcham who was a general laborer after a time, and due to spelling differences, that might be have been William McCutcheon. But I don’t know. In his account, Houston has other characters refer to William as Bill or Mac. Well, even though I know James D. Houston has done history books before, I haven’t read many of them, aside from the book Farewell to Manazar, coauthored by his wife (which I’ve always enjoyed). I met him briefly once at a booksigning at SJSU — I forget for which book. I won’t try and argue historical scholarship here — Houston has enough little throw-away lines in this book that are historically hard to find, that I suspect he’s really done some research. But even though I’m historically and personally interested in the Donner Party, and especially in William McCutcheon and company, I can’t say the story here ultimately grabbed me. Something about the way it was written. I gravited more toward the Patty Reed entries, the more commonly fictionized character, than I did to the Jim Reed sections. It’s not the language — sentences in this often have great imagery — but some of the rest I found too abrupt. Maybe that’s just me. Other people no doubt will find that this book moves along fine, that they love what’s been done with it. I have to say i’m impressed with what’s in this book — but not necessarily with the way it was done. I’m not sure why. But because it deals with a part of the Donner Party that’s somewhat neglected and reimagines it, and because it has a better epilogue portion than most, I can’t be too harsh about it. I would refer to this in future if I needed a memory jog about a historical location or something, if I already knew where to search — but I would not refer to it for its fiction alone.
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Regeneration (Large Print) (Thorndike Young Adult)
by
L. J. Singleton and Linda J. Singleton
blackcat49
, August 24, 2017
This book is printed by Thorndike Books, and I picked up for two reasons: It had a cover that didn’t draw me in, but tag lines that did, and it is a large-print that is not a 1950’s mystery for adults…very unusual. Hav’sing finished it, I can say it has a good idea — Varina, a 15 year old girl, meets a boy, Chase, who proceeds to inform her that she is really a clone, and that they must round up the other clone children. The story starts with an interesting flashback of Chase as a little kid, on a boat with 3 scientists, two of whom treat like a son, and a startling event that occurs. Did I mention this book has cliffhangers all over? Not that that’s a bad thing, but some of them seem far-fetched. At times I could ignore the writing style, which I found had abrupt spots, with exclamation points here and there, or sentences that just didn’t read right to me. I was hoping for another The House of the Scorpion, which like this book, dealt with power struggles and human cloning, with a child narrator, and even though this is the first book in a series, I have no need to look at the others. The main character, Varina, may be confused and disoriented with the news that she is a clone and scientists are out to get her, but she swings wildly between trusting whoever she meets completely one moment, and being suspicious of their intentions the next. While this makes sense under the conditions the book sets — for instance, that she’s just met this boy Chase when he starts telling her stories — it ends up tiresome and doesn’t serve any purpose. I was interested with the initial trouble on the boat in the beginning, and I maintained my interest during Varina’s introduction to her life with her uncle Jim, despite some reading problems I had with the story, but as the story goes on, it lose momentum quickly. Each clone is revealed to have a particular kind of superpower (which, if they actually had them in real life would probably more a lot less controllable — like the kids who can hear people through walls but wear headphones to school). And as each clone is selected into the group, the story of each character is repeated, so that by you get two or three characters introduced, this one story seems to take up most of the short book. That’s rather annoying. In the meantime, guardians pop up out of the woodwork with regualarity to take care of Varina and the others — commonly people she has never seen before. Meanwhile, cliffhangers on all sides, Varina’s Uncle Jim lays in the hospital, and while Varina mentions every so often, that she wants to be at his side, that she trusts him absolutely, she goes on shopping trips with an aunt she has never met before, spents one day with the woman and concludes that with all the time spent with her aunt, she’d never learnt of her family. Well, in a day, that might not always be something mentioned on the first day. Somehow I don’t consider a day much time. Varina and the others manage to get cars and planes with ease and always escape just ahead of the scientists — which makes sense, as all good serials do. However, even if this is for younger readers, its cliffhangers and wording jarred me out of the story on several occasions. It’s excellent that I found it in large print…something that should happen more with books. It’s also excellent to see a large family of adopted handicapped children in the story at one point. It is however hilarious when Varina comments that her mouth dropped open when a child in a wheelchair stood and walked. I laughed. This is kind of a joke in the disabled community, you understand. While it makes perfect sense that Varina would think that, it’s really old. To the author’s credit, the family does explain why the child walks — and it’s a reason I can believe. But here’s the thing, you can be in a wheelchair and still walk, or at least some people can. You may only be in the wheelchair for long distance walking, etc. The story ends with a cliff hanging that’s been hinted at. But most of the book, unfortunately, instead of minor world building or charactors, is spent collecting children, running from scientists, and repeating, just so the reader doesn’t forget, that they are all clones, most with special powers and tattoos. when they’ve nearly escaped at the end, it makes me wish the characters had been developed, or had done something other than the very beginning of a story. It’s the first of a series, but there’s nothing for me to hang on to in it, nothing I can’t wait to read. Maybe they have an adventure in the next book. But this one, I’m very sorry to say, can be summed up in a sentence: “There was once a story about clone children and they had to run from evil scientists.” That’s the start of the story. It’s a great idea. But I needed more story here.
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Growing Pains:First Season
by
blackcat49
, August 24, 2017
Well, this is another disk of Growing Pains the series, and I have to conclude after watching several that they haven’t aged well. I remember when the show went off the air. I watched it then. I like watching many things that I enjoyed at the same thing as this show — even those shows which stress morals — like some episodes of After School Specials. And there are times lately where I want to watch unambigious shows — now it’s getting harder to tell who at any given moment is the bad person or good guy in a series. Something to do with filming. And it’s not just this show — others like the Andy Griffith Show and The Waltons are preachy by today’s viewpoint. But every episode in the series so far seems to be about a Very Special Episode — sex, drugs, AIDS, stealing — and here, I’m not only speaking of this show but of Mr. Belevedere too, which I watched reasonably recently. If today’s shows could be said to cater to a common person, these shows spoon fed the masses their daily moral lesson. This is something I don’t remember continuing into the 1980’s-early 1990’s, but apparently it did. That’s all right, so long as there are enough episodes without that to stand on their own. And there don’t seem to be. And that’s too bad. It’s not that this is a bad show, it’s easy to see that the characters in it are a happy family, but still…just in this one disk, the father threatens to hit his son twice…and there’s a moral right there, for the audience. In a show like Home Improvement some years later, a Very Special Episode came alone once a year, not once a night. I’m sad to say that maybe I’ve outgrown these. It’s nice to see shows where people are nice to one another, but the morals on top are sometimes a bit much.
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I know my first name is Steven
by
Cindy Pickett
blackcat49
, August 24, 2017
I know My First Name is Steven shows the true Steven Stayner kidnapping case.I can say having watched a lot of contemporary movies and TV series for this time period lately (Growing Pains, A Son’s Promise) that this film has aged very well. Considering that at the time this film was made, the writers could have beat you over the head with the plot alone, with a Very Special Miniseries about strangers, complete with foreshadowing music and much wailing going on, it’s a relief to say that whoever put this together did any extremely good job. Because it’s a miniseries, a lot of standard camera shots are used — a few closeups, a few establishing shots. Not fancy camera work, no special effects — and not that that’s a criticism. They have good locations in this movie, and it’s more of a character study — of Steven’s family, but particularly of Steven and how he changed. There’s also some chilling throwaway lines in this script, that the scriptwriters had no way of knowing about when they wrote this. Funny. One of them is pointed out by the actor who plays the older Steven Stayner, in The Yosemite Murders by Dennis McDougal: the screenplay has Steven’s older brother make him a list of available girls at school — something I guess that was done in real life, and seems perfectly normal. The other is something I noticed. The grandfather in the story comments to Del, Steven’s dad, that if he didn’t have so many kids, he could afford a car that runs, and that if the kids were animals, they could pick the best and drown the rest. The statement is obviously meant to show the grandfather’s relationship with the family — and one of the reasons he’s suspect later on — but wow, what a statement, considering more recent events. The film comes on two discs, no extras, and it is quite good all by itself — in fact, it looks better visually than the last time I saw it on TV — but this is one film that really needs extras. A few documentaries, a TV promo trailer, other things, would really be wonderful. The actors all do a good job in this film — and you get to know the characters pretty well. Steven’s brother Cary isn’t given much to say in the script — rightly so, considering when it was written — but as Steven’s big brother, the script does show him than the younger sisters. “Mom and Dad never come in here,” says Cary in the movie, when Steven compliments him on his drawing ability. Huh. But the focus of the movie is about Steven, of course, and the film actually has an arch to it that works — things get worse for Steven after he tries to go back home. This was in the book, too, but it’s great the movie explored it (as it could very well have ended happily like A Son’s Promise, regardless of the outcome). The little title card epilogue at the end of the film has been updated to 2004 — something I haven’t seen before– with one notable, but perhaps appropriate omission. Great movie. Highly recommended. The people who made it took the time to allow it to be a miniseries and didn’t squash it down to a hour.
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The Flight of Dragons
by
Bass, Jules
blackcat49
, August 24, 2017
The Flight of Dragons is a cartoon — one of the animes I remember enjoying before anime was a popular word. I never owned this one or saw it on television…my friends owned a copy. Now of course I understand that Rankin Bass did the cartoon, as they did The Last Unicorn, and the two films are very similar — drawing styles, music, credits, backgrounds, still pictures, etc. Rankin Bass is better known for their stop-motion work on Christmas specials like Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer. Like the Last Unicorn, they have an excellent script, great characters, animation that’s detailed etc. Some yearsbefore I found one of the books the film was based on, The Dragon and the Geiorge by GordonR.Dickson, which I recognized only by the character names. I read it and then got rid of it — the basic plot of the movie was there, but the storyline with the main character’s wife, Angie, was thankfully left out of the film entirely. The film was also based on the book The Flight of Dragons by Peter Dickinson, an attempt to explain how dragons might have flown scientifically. I think I have seen this book but I haven’t bothered with it. The film combines the two ideas of the books and does very well. Actually, that’s a very interesting idea, combining two books with similar themes. In the film, Peter is transported a magical land, where he must help the wizard Carolinus defeat his evil brother — something the scientific Peter must do while trapped inside the body of a dragon. (Actually, a plot very similar to The Last Unicorn in a way). This is a good film, and I’m enjoying it.
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Where the Wild Things Are
by
Spike Jonze
blackcat49
, August 24, 2017
I liked this film more than the recent Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. I love both books. The part I loved in the book — the trees growing in Max’s room is not shown here, but the illustrations of Max wearing a costume and chasing animals downstairs is certainly shown. In this version, the reasons why Max meets the wild things is developed further. Max is a hyperactive, lonely child and the catalyst of the movie is something far enough away from standard that I wondered why his parents didn’t relinquish ownership of him. Max thinks so too, because he flees immediately, The script in this movie is minimal. We learn little from this point on about the wild things other than their names; they function mainly as extensions of friends for Max. As when Max is making up stories for his mother or playing “what-if” with one of the wild things, the script seems remarkably similar to actual conversations children have. Just like an ethnographer recorded them. In this concept, the story is not so much what happens as how it happens — Max and the wild things run about, play, build things and demolish them again — the sort of “doing nothing” that was done in Winnie the Pooh. That’s good. But although the scenery is beautiful, and everything in it has some basis in real life, the movie is also slow, in script, motion and setting. There are, however, things that I thought were clever because this is not a film that follows a standard format at all — too slow for the story-book audience, with darker areas, like an adult version. Some of the time I was able to catch the lessons Max took away from his time with the wild things; at other times, it appeared it only provided him entertainment and friendship (which may or may not have been applied back at home). Like real life, some of the things Max encounters aren’t fixed entirely when he returns. And if everything had its own basis in real life, when the turning point occurs and things grow worse for Max, who was that actually based on? This was a slow, sometimes unrevealing, unusual movie which I would watch again just because I like how it’s made. Even if parts of it annoy me, it appears to have been created with someone’s viewpoint in mind because it is so far out of “Hollywood” style that i think for that alone it should be given a try.
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Stevie
by
Steve James and Tonya Gregory
blackcat49
, August 24, 2017
I first saw several years for a very good price. I made a note to watch it, since there are very few documentaries I can actually concentrate on. Luckily, this apparently disliked documentary is one i could not only concentrate on, but actually enjoyed, as difficult as the subject matter is.More interesting than the documentary itself was reading reviews of it afterward. Since it occurred to me that I may be one of the few people with a particular perspective on this film, I decided to write about it.Here’s the neat part: I would consider this a disabled film, though I swear to you I actually wasn’t looking for it to be one. The “main character” in it, the Stevie of the title, isn’t the filmmaker himself but his “little brother,” who he lost track of (with some obvious relief) when he went off to make movies. In fact, considering that Stevie has some obvious mental disabilities (and mental illness), anger control, and other problems, I can see why his family consistantly refer to him as about twelve years old. Most reviewers described the film as difficult to watch because Stevie is unlikeable.Yes, but that’s what makes the film interesting. That, and the different things people took away from this than I did.Steve James, who made the film, stresses in the commentary that Stevie is actually bright and able to build many things mechanically. Doesn’t suprise me — especially the ability to build things. What does interest me is that Steve James places himself in front of the camera in this documentary, so you can see the questions being raised. Reviews I read afterward criticized him for this, because at one point he has an anthropological ethical dilemma: do I continue observing and doing my job, or do I interfere and attempt to change the course of events?In the commentary, Steve James also states that people were surprised at Stevie’s girlfriend, Tanya, a developmentally disabled adult, and that most classified her as the only girl he was likely to meet.Hmm.Possibly. After all, that kind of disability would leave you vulnerable to being taken advantage of, but isn’t this is a small rural town? (another fact that apparently bored reviewers to tears but that I enjoyed). How many disabled people are likely to be in such a town? (Although one of her comments does suggest a very trusting person). And there’s a kind of comeraderie among special ed students who have had similar experiences. Also, for the record, Tanya sounds mildly retarded, and folks, believe me, that is not a profound speech impediment…that’s actually really good speech. Reviewers appeared astonished that this woman could function at all — Stevie’s “guardian angel,” a woman who appears at the end of the documentary to have a good well-thought out answer.Really? Yes, strangely enough, being developmentally disabled doesn’t automatically mean you don’t notice things. On another note, what reasons do “normal” women give for why they stay with their boyfriends or husbands?Reviewers also seemed extremely surprised at the wisdom from Tanya’s friend, a woman I was pleased to see in the film. I started paying more attention. Stevie appeared to respect this woman as a person and didn’t mock her disability (the parts where he lost it and mocked both his girlfriend and her friend are largely cut out of the film. The disability I assume she has does not in general have developmental disabilities associated with it, so ta-da…I perked up because a disabled person was going to have an opinion and it was going to be good.Most reviewers apparently perked up because a disabled person had an opinion…and, oh my God, it actually was a wise, well-informed. Irecommendthisfilm.
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Article 5
by
Kristen Simmons
blackcat49
, August 24, 2017
This started out well...I don't usually like dystopian novels, but this one looked like it had a good society plotline going. Disappearing students. Random unprovoked arrest. A main character torn from a loving mother....And then things got overly-emotional and I lost interest. Not enough to stop reading, just enough to lose credibility in the character. And then there's this rebel girl the main character meets in a reform school. Great option. Does the story go there? Not really. Because, you know, there's THE LOVE INTEREST and what is most unfortunate about YA novels lately is they must all have one, without exception, and all are made of cardboard. He's big and protective, and the main character wavers literally paragraph to paragraph between her undying love for him, her tending of injuries, and her unrelenting fear of him because he's a soldier. Paragraph to paragraph. Hard to follow. Are all these responses appropriate? Absolutely, if done well. Here, unfortunately, it just makes the main character seem very odd. PTSD is briefly mentioned, but serves no real purpose; I could guess several plot lines well beforehand, and most of the time I wanted the "will-they-or-won't-they" to end, because then the story could happen. But no. Sorry, but some of the time, while running for your life, you're going to trust somebody as what they were first -- just your friend. You're going to want comfort that isn't "Oh, his shirt is off. AH!" And the problem is, the dystopia doesn't matter.
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For the Sins of My Father A Mafia Killer His Son & the Legacy of a Mob Life
by
Albert Demeo
blackcat49
, October 25, 2016
One of the better Mafia-childhood memoirs I've read so far. DeMeo has a nice flow to his writing, introducing the reader to family, friends and his many "uncles," members of the Mafia. Characters are mostly well-fleshed out, and there is a good balance in the story between funny moments and frightening ones. The thing I like best about this book is that DeMeo writes about his father as he saw him, starting from the beginning and showing little by little what he learned about his father's life. What I like best about this is that it is easy in this case to see yourself in DeMeo: he goes camping, worships his Daddy, has Christmas, and in general has a normal family life. No raging Mafia fathers here. The only problem, of course, is that DeMeo's father's carefully constructed family life wasm't really what it seemed, and as he begins to grow up, he starts to learn uncomfortable things about his dad. Something I will definitely read again and would love to see as an audiobook.
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