Book and Movie Reports by Ed

Book report: Mort, by Terry Pratchett I love Terry Pratchett’s writing. He does for sword-and-sorcery fantasy what Douglas Adams did for science fiction: makes it howlingly funny. Mort is another in his series of books that take place on the Diskworld, that round flat world supported on the backs of four elephants, all on the back of a turtle swimming through space. These books feature heroes, villains, and wizards in ludicrous situations. One recurring character in the series is Death. You know him: skeletal, dresses in black, carries a scythe? His eternal job is to be there when each person dies and usher their soul to whatever comes next. In this book, Death takes on an apprentice to learn the trade, a fellow named Mort. Mort does pretty well, until he can’t bring himself to harvest the soul of a beautiful young princess. He spares her, which sets off a chain of consequences while Death is off on a pub crawl. Hijinks ensue, along with the usual impossible ending. What’s amaz

Book report: Extraordinary Knowing, by Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer An expensive harp was stolen from Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer’s daughter in Oakland, California. All usual efforts to find the thieves and the harp failed. A friend suggested that Mayer contact a dowser, one of those guys who find water with a stick, in Arkansas. On a whim, she called him. Over the phone, from two thousand miles away, he described where in Oakland the harp was located. She made inquiries and within two days found the harp where the dowser described. That incident turned her ideas of human perception upside down. A well-known psychoanalyst and psychological researcher, she set out to try to learn more about what she calls “anomalous cognition.” Her grounding in scientific skepticism is evident in the book. She clearly understands good experimental design and proper statistical analysis of results But she is also willing to listen to anecdotal accounts, and the discrepancy between the two is striking. Contrary

Movie report: Alice in Wonderland (2010) A few words about my qualifications. I’ve read the two Alice books umpteen times. I’ve seen at least half a dozen movie and TV versions of the stories, and a couple of stage versions. I’ve been on the ride at Disneyland. And I’ve listened to Jefferson Airplane. So, I’m familiar with the Alice story. That said, if you’ve never seen an Alice in Wonderland movie before, Tim Burton’s version is not the one you should start with. It has none of the wit and cleverness and sly wordplay of the books or the best of the movies. If you started with this version, you would wonder why Alice is such a big deal to people, kind of like reading ads for Christmas sales and wondering how anyone could build a religion around such things. Mind you, this version has some good parts. It starts years after the events in the original two books. Alice is now a nineteen-year-old young lady, about to become engaged to an upper-class-twit-of-the-year on the Victorian

Book report: The Road, by Cormac McCarthy What’s left when civilization is burned away? In The Road, an unspecified catastrophe has reduced most cities to cinders. Knee-deep ash is everywhere. Permanent clouds block the sun, moon, and stars. Every plant has died, every animal that eats plants has died, and every animal that eats animals has died. The only animal left is the one able to open cans. In this world, a tin of peaches is a treasure beyond imagining. This book is kind of like The Grapes of Wrath meets The Road Warrior. The population of North America is maybe a few hundred, most of them nasty enough to kill and eat anyone they happen meet on the road. Traveling the road is a man and his young son, both unnamed, moving from the inland north to the coastal south to escape the brutal winters. Along the way, they live by scavenging among whatever our plenty has left them, avoiding everyone else they come across, but still stumbling across horror upon horror. The boy regularly

Book/movie report: Fight Club by Chuck Pahlaniuk All together now: The first rule of fight club is you don't talk about fight club. Having now broken it, yes, this book and movie are the source of that ironic meme. I saw the movie several times before ever reading the book. I never saw the surprise coming in the movie. I know I never would have picked it up in the book, even though it's far more obvious in the book. I'm just not that clever. The book starts with the first-person unnamed narrator attending support meetings for people with horrible diseases. He doesn't have any of these diseases: this is the only way he has to make a connection with people. It's at one of these support meetings that he meets Marla Singer, whom he hates on sight, because she, too, is a faker and is ruining his experience of faking. As you can tell, this is a darkly comic book. Shortly afterwards, he meets Tyler Durden, a charismatic guy whose goal is to destroy civilization. Go

Book report: Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell Okay, I'm officially a Malcolm Gladwell fanboy. I read and loved "Blink" and "The Tipping Point". First off, he has brilliantly clever ideas. Then, he does an amazing amount of research of all kinds to delve into unexpected aspects of these ideas. Finally, he writes so clearly and beautifully about each of these topics that it's a pleasure to read. For example, "Outliers" starts with a fascinating presentation of the immigration of poor peasants from a small Italian village to a town in Pennsylvania. His storytelling is wonderful, but then he provides an unexpected puzzle: in this little town, heart disease is practically unknown. How can this be? His examination – and elimination – of all the obvious possibilities introduces the main theme of "Outliers": the reasons behind success. In statistics, an outlier is a data point that lies far beyond most of the other data points. In the world of

Book report: Velocity, by Dean Koontz I guess that bestselling novelists can get away with this. By "this" I mean 416 pages of filler wrapped around a plot that makes no sense. I picked this book up because I was looking for something escapist to read. I had enjoyed a couple of Koontz's thousand other novels. "Lightning" was a pretty good science fiction story. Maybe "enjoyed" doesn't really apply to his "Intensity" as much as "held on with both hands afraid to let go". Anyway, that's why I started reading "Velocity". It begins with several dozen pages of a barroom windbag that, as near as I can tell, has nothing to do with the rest of the story. I can see how these bestselling authors can turn a fairly slim story into a brick of a book. Description. Lots of description. What the bar looks like. What the glasses look like. What everything looks like. When, later, a character walks up to a house, we get every

Book report: A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini This is an absolutely harrowing novel about one woman, Mariam, then another, Laila, suffering in male-dominated and Islam-dominated Afghanistan from the 1970s to the 2000s. They face near-constant abuse and cruelty from beginning to end. This is one of those stories where, just when you think things can't get any worse, things get MUCH worse. I found myself saying, "Oh, please, no," many times through this book. The nightmare of the lives of Mariam and Laila takes place while Afghanistan goes through a number of upheavals. I’m no historian, but these include a president overthrown, a dictatorship, a Communist puppet-state of the USSR, a civil war against the Soviets, more civil war as the victorious mujahedeen (sp?) lead factions against each other, the brutal rule of the fundamentalist Taliban, the post-9/11 attack of the US against the largely-innocent population, and the comparative freedom afterward. Not su

Fountainhead Babysitting Service (not really a book report on The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand) "Hello. Is this the Fountainhead Babysitting Service?" "Yes." "We need a babysitter for tonight." "Why?" "We're going to the movies." "Movies are a mindless distraction from reality." "But we're going to see Shrek." "You should be spending your time in profitable work." "I worked all day. Now we're going out to relax." "You must give of your all, exploding in a paroxysm of creation, only to rise again from exhaustion to begin the promethean act of creation anew." "I install sinks." "Oh." "So, you come highly recommended, but I just want to ask you a few questions." "Very well." "What will you do if the baby starts crying?" "Endeavor to explain that crying is contrary to a life of rational self-interest." &qu

Book Report: The Supergirls, by Mike Madrid This book traces the history of female super-powered characters from the 1930s to today. It's a remarkable fact that, although society has tended to deny power to women, women with amazing powers began to appear shortly after the introduction of Superman and Batman. Indeed, as the book points out, female superheroes have often been role models for girls and women, representing in many cases women having powers beyond men and women triumphing over men. One theme of the book is how this image of power has changed as the roles of women in society have changed. Madrid has done a remarkable job in reconstructing the early history of female superheroes, considering that most of the original stories have been out of print since the 1930s and 1940s. At first, these characters were simply adventuresses and female detectives, but it wasn't long before women with genuine superhuman powers began to appear and gain popularity. This isn't d

Movie Report: It Might Get Loud "It Might Get Loud" is a fascinating documentary about legendary rock guitarists Jimmy Page, The Edge, and Jack White. (If you haven't heard of at least one of these guys, you can stop reading now.) These three may be from three different generations of rock, namely the 60s, 80s, and 00s, but each has an obsession about guitars and the music they make. Jimmy Page is best known as the lead guitarist of Led Zeppelin, a rock group that was on top from day one. They pretty much created heavy metal. Page is a master of the dynamic range possible in both acoustic and electric guitars, from delicate strumming to absolute hurricanes of sound, sometimes within the same song. In the movie, he starts playing some immediately recognizable riffs and you realize: this song that I know by heart? This is the guy who first created and played that song. And that song. And that song. Dozens. Hundreds. Amazing. Before this movie, I wasn't very familiar

Movie Report: Despicable Me In Gru's first scenes of this animated movie, he pops a little boy's balloon with a pin, petrifies waiting customers at a coffee shop with his freeze ray so he can cut to the head of the line, and crushes cars with a bludgeon-like vehicle that makes SUVs look wimpy. Gru is an arch-villain, and he's feeling pretty good about himself until he gets topped in the Crime of the Century runnings by a rival. He vows to his hordes of yellow pill-shaped minions to get back on top by stealing – wait for it – the Moon! (Cue maniacal laughter.) Meanwhile, as they say, three little orphan girls trudge around town taking orders for boxes of cookies. Level-headed Margo, instigator Edith, and deeply cute Agnes are essentially slave labor for Miss Hattie, the inert and rotund dictator of the orphanage. Their paths cross when Gru sees a way to use these little girls to infiltrate his rival's lair and steal a shrink ray that would be handy for his planned thef

Movie Report: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince J.K. Rowling doesn't get enough recognition. I don't mean about the success of her books and the movies made from them: she gets plenty of recognition for that. I mean recognition for what she has managed to accomplish with her writing. The Harry Potter stories are, essentially, an account of a civil war in the world of wizards. Snore! Yet, she has managed to take what could have been a fairly dull and pedantic fantasy history and create tales so engaging that most people don't even notice what the main story is about. She does this by focusing on the people involved, their everyday lives, and the wonder of magic in their world. The movies made from the books have followed the same strategy. This is the sixth installment out of seven, and their world is tipping toward all-out war. The impact of magical warfare is even affecting the world of muggles (non-magic folks like me and, presumably, you), as in the first scenes o

Book report: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, by L. Frank Baum It's hard to believe that the movie, The Wizard of Oz, started out as a children's book. The movie is so perfect an entity, and the source of so many quotes and images in our culture, that it seems like it must have been born fully formed. In fact, the book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was published in 1900 (39 years before the movie), and was so popular that author L. Frank Baum (is Lyman really so bad a first name?) wrote 13 sequels – and his own stage musical version. Probably the first thing you have to do when reading this book is to unlearn the movie that you know by heart. For example, Miss Gulch, Professor Marvel, and the three farmhands aren't in the book at all. The Wicked Witch of the West is a very minor character, appearing in only one chapter, after the Wizard orders Dorothy to kill her – not bring back her broomstick. That might seem like losing a lot from the story, but it isn't. The book is fu

Book report: The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde Oscar Wilde was so clever and witty that knowing him in person must have been quite tedious. That's an example of an epigram: a pithy quotable phrase, often paradoxical or satirical. I couldn't write one to save my life, but Oscar Wilde was famous for them ("I can resist everything except temptation.") and most of his characters talk just like him. You probably already know the story of this book. Dorian Gray is an extraordinarily handsome young man. An artist friend, Basil (Why, yes! This *is* a British novel.), paints a portrait of Dorian that captures not only his beauty but also his still-innocent soul. Another friend, Lord Henry, lets Dorian in on the news that youth and beauty are fleeting, so Dorian makes a wish that his own appearance should never change, but the ravages of life and aging should only appear on the portrait. He gets his wish. He never ages or shows any signs of the harrowing life he l

Book Report: Becoming Batman: The Possibility of a Superhero by E. Paul Zehr How could I *not* read a book called "Becoming Batman"? If I were a little taller, a little stronger, and a little more talented with a batarang, "becoming Batman" might have been a viable career choice for me. I started reading this book full of hope. The idea here is that Batman is an extraordinary physical specimen. Perfectly human, with no super powers at all, he's still able to fight and defeat criminals, perform amazing acrobatic feats, and survive extreme danger of all kinds. Unlike a character with inhuman super powers, we can imagine someone actually being Batman. What kind of person could do this? How would they need to train to achieve this level of performance? What kind of diet and exercise would they require? And, for how long could they keep it up? Zehr is a neuroscientist and a black belt in martial arts, so he's in a good position to present this kind of mate

Book report: Pompeii, by Robert Harris I'm apparently a big fan of Robert Harris. I've read every novel he's published so far. One interesting thing about him is that he writes in several different genres, which you don't see a lot. Usually, a person is just a mystery writer or just a romance writer, and they don't stray outside their area. But Harris has written books in all these areas: * What-if history: Fatherland (what if World War II ended in an armistice and Nazi Germany continued to the 1960s); Archangel (what if Stalin had an heir) * Historical: Enigma (cracking the German secret code in WWII), Imperium (Cicero, the famous Roman orator) * Modern political thriller: Ghost (ghostwriter for fictional Tony Blair discovers his secret) Maybe the common denominator is politics, but I doubt I would have read so many books about politics. This novel puts us back in Rome. In 79 AD, Mount Vesuvius erupted, burying the Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum i

Book report: The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck Is there a word for killing the poor? There's homicide and suicide and regicide and fratricide and genocide. But is there such a word as paupricide? I doubt it, because the poor aren't important enough to worry about killing. The poor exist to pick our lettuce and sweep our floors and dig our ditches and anything else we don't want to do. Who cares if they die? This is a story about the poor tenant farmers in the 1930s who could not make the payments on the small plots of land that kept them alive in Oklahoma and other states tormented by bad weather. They were evicted, their houses plowed under by tractors. Many of them fled to California, where they were told there was plenty of work as farm laborers. The Joad family – Tom (just paroled), Ma, Pa, Grampa, Granma, Noah, Al, Ruthie, Winfield, and Rose of Sharon (pregnant wife of Connie) – is only one among many thousands that crowded into the state, competing after to

Book report: The Luck Factor, by Richard Wiseman Read this book! We all know lucky people, whose lives sail along on a sea of good fortune. They get into the right schools effortlessly, meet and marry their perfect mate, move from triumph to triumph in their jobs, enjoy good health, have many friends, and receive gifts from the world. They're lucky, and it's tempting to dismiss this as fate or happenstance. Richard Wiseman has gone far beyond this, however. He has studied both lucky and unlucky people, and has made the amazing discovery that lucky people behave differently from other people, usually without realizing it. They unconsciously act in ways that bring them "luck" constantly. What's even better, the less lucky can learn these behaviors and make their own lives luckier. You can't escape random misfortune: no one can do that. But you can change the way you are in the world and reap many benefits. The author is a scientist, an experimental psyc

Book report: Guards! Guards!, by Terry Pratchett I love Terry Pratchett’s books, and this is one of the best. If you aren’t aware of Terry Pratchett, he writes what I would call comedy fantasy. Think along the lines of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy meets Lord of the Rings. These stories all take place on DiscWorld, which is a world of oceans and continents like ours, only flat and round like a pancake, and sitting on the back of four immense elephants, which are in turn on the back of a gigantic tortoise, which is swimming endlessly through space. Given that setting, almost anything can happen. This installment has two main plot lines, which at first seem to have nothing to do with each other, but soon intersect and intertwine. One plot has to do with the City Watch, the city being Ankh-Morpork, that hive of low-level villainy. As you’d imagine in a hive of low-level villainy, the police don’t so much fight crime as hold crime’s coat while crime goes about its business. To th

Book Report: The Physics of Superheroes, by James Kakalios How could it have taken me so long to read this book? Considering my heavy background in physics, and the fact that I practically marinate in the lore of superheroes and super powers, you’d think this would be on my bedside table. Well, better late than never. This book uses examples of situations from superhero comics to illustrate many of the basic concepts of physics. For example, given that the original Superman (pre-flying) could jump an eighth of a mile, could he really jump over a skyscraper? The book covers motion and energy, light and heat, electricity and magnetism, and even a little quantum mechanics, all presented with such lively and interesting examples. Plenty of pictures from real DC and Marvel comics illustrate his points. Is this, then, a spoil-sport book, exposing how super powers are impossible and fictitious nonsense? Not at all. In fact, early on the author makes it clear that very often, if you gran

Movie report: Primer (2004) So, you build this time machine. Or you build something, and you think it's a time machine. Only here's how it works: you can go back in time, say, six hours, but that means spending six hours in the machine. While you're in there, the world goes on. And when you come out, it's six hours earlier. And there are now two of you: the you there was before at this time, and the you that just stepped out of the machine. So, you buy shares in a stock that you know is going to go up in value during those six hours, and do other things to get rich quick, all while avoiding your other you. But can you stop there? Aren't there other things you could straighten out, things that occurred during those six hours? Bad things, maybe? And when you start changing what you yourself already went back in time to change, well… Primer is a movie that was supposedly made for about $7,000, won all kinds of awards, and deserves them. It focuses on Aaron and Ab

Movie Report: My Super Ex-Girlfriend [SPOILER WARNING] In my never-ending quest to find interesting super-powered characters and stories, I watched My Super Ex-Girlfriend on Netflix. Matt (Luke Wilson) is an extremely ordinary but sweet guy who asks out Jenny Johnson (Uma Thurman), a deliberately nondescript total stranger. They hit it off pretty well, and after a few dates she reveals her big secret to him: she is, in reality, G-Girl the superheroine. G-Girl's powers include flight, super-speed, super-strength, and laser vision, and she routinely saves the citizens of New York from calamity. Matt really likes the idea of dating Jenny/G-Girl, but the reality isn't so great: she's jealous, insecure, and controlling. He breaks up with her. Bad move. Hell hath no fury like a superheroine with laser vision scorned, and Jenny/G-Girl proceeds to make Matt's life unbearable. Hijinks ensue. What is one to do when one has pissed off the most powerful being on earth? Als

Book Report: Tales of the South Pacific, by James A. Michener It's the "Tales" part of the title that throws me. When you read these chapters, you don't feel like you're reading tales. They sound like the reminiscences of a US Navy Commander stationed near Guadalcanal during 1942-1943, which wouldn't be surprising, because Michener did serve there then. But they are stories, works of fiction. I'd hate to tell you how many of the people, places, and events I've tried to look up online, only to find that they're not real. I have no doubt that they're based on real people, places, and events, but they've been carefully shaped to be extremely realistic stories. It's an amazing effect. (Aside: Michener is probably responsible for naming more Asian restaurants in the US than anyone in history, by inventing the name Bali Hai for an imaginary island.) Each of these tales is a little gem that captures the essence of humanity. If a Martian

Book report: The Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin When it comes to subjects like biology and medicine, I am an absolute moron. I only barely avoided failing the one and only biology class I ever took, thanks to an absurd amount of extra-credit outside reading assignments and a science fair project that I still don't understand. I can never remember if DNA is made out of chromosomes or the other way around. Same with proteins and amino acids. I'm not a generally stupid person, but I do recognize my limits: biological matters are opaque to me. It was with the hope of redeeming myself that I read "The Origin of Species". I felt that, if I could read and somewhat comprehend probably the most influential and controversial book ever written on biology, then I might once again be able to present myself in modern society without wearing a veil. "The Origin of Species" sold out its entire first printing on the day of publication in 1859, largely because of

Book report: The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God, by Carl Sagan In The Republic, Plato proposes government by philosopher-kings, benevolent and wise dictators who would rule justly and fairly. I would have nominated Carl Sagan to be a philosopher-king. He wasn't just a smart guy in his own field (planetary astronomy and exobiology). He was erudite in a number of fields, an expert teacher and popularizer of science, and had what I consider wisdom. He also seemed to appreciate people and the human condition. In my experience, this is unusual in scientists. Sagan also had a characteristic and vivid style both in speech and in writing that makes all his books entertaining and illuminating to read. This particular book is the edited transcript of the Gifford Lectures in Natural Theology ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gifford_Lectures ) that Sagan delivered in 1985 (the same year he wrote Contact, one of my favorite books and movies). The Gifford