Book and Movie Reports by Ed

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...