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Alan Cheuse Read an original essay by Alan Cheuse and save 30% on To Catch the Lightning: A Novel of American Dreaming

  1. To Catch the Lightning: A Novel of American Dreaming
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    To Catch the Lightning: A Novel of American Dreaming

    Alan Cheuse

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ISBN13: 9781840232578
ISBN10: 1840232579
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Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

Republished to coincide with the DVD release of this classic post-apocalyptic Manga saga. B/w illus.

Synopsis:

This post-apocalyptic saga charts the coming of the creature known only as Akira, a power both feared and prized for its potential to shake the recovering world. Caught in a power play between factions of a brutal military organization, Kaneda and Ryu are pulled into an escalating nightmare.
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Average customer rating based on 1 comment:
acid42, October 8, 2007 (view all comments by acid42)
Let’s get this out of the way first: I watched the animated AKIRA before I ever laid eyes on the actual manga that inspired it. And was blown away by the animation and the themes of teenage rebellion, power and greed. Though, understandably, there seemed to be a lot of loose ends and a lack of characterization in the struggle to remake the story from comics to film. Still, it blew me away.
___And so I finally read the entire epic manga over the course of the past week, slowly at first, drinking in the gorgeously detailed line art, and the complex plotlines, and then frantically near the end, wanting to find how it all played out. And boy, does the film suffer in comparison. (Admittedly, any film adaptation of a story that is 3000+ pages in length will never live up to the original.)
___What author/artist Katsuhiro Otomo has done is to create a world not that distant from our own, where scientific experiments have led to children possessing earth-shattering powers, in some insane scheme to evolve the human to the next step. The boy named Akira is the summation of the experiments, and his power actually led to the 3rd World War. Many years later, Tetsuo, a rebellious teenager whose latent power manifests itself suddenly, reawakens Akira from a cryogenic chamber and the power is loosed upon Neo-Tokyo. The rest of the story is the battle to stop power-mad Tetsuo from wrecking the world.
___If you thought the Spider-Man movies successfully handled the themes of corruption and power, then you will love how AKIRA takes it one step further. The mutated children are able to tap into the energy “stream” of the universe and use it. But when Tetsuo’s hubris and substance- abusive personality comes into the picture, his power only heightens his ego, tainting his usage of the energy and later his own body.
___What you get here are complex story lines coupled with detailed art. And characters that come alive because there is enough space to flesh out their back stories. Some of the most beautiful panels in the manga are the page-wide city destruction sequences (of which there are many), where skyscrapers crumple like paper, and explosions blind the eye. An engaging read, and truly a classic graphic novel, in any language.
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Product Details

ISBN:
9781840232578
Author:
OTOMO, KATSUHIRO
Publisher:
Libri
Location:
N
Copyright:
2001
Series:
AKIRA
Publication Date:
20010223
Binding:
TRADE PAPER
Pages:
364
Dimensions:
258 x 170 in.
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