Book and Movie Reports by Ed

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...