Archive for the ‘review’ Category

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Graham Greene and Shirley Temple

Thursday, February 9th, 2012

The blog 101 Books writes about Graham Greene and eight-year-old Shirley Temple. The English author reviewed one of Temple’s movies and wrote this:

Watch the way she measures a man with agile studio eyes, with dimpled depravity. Adult emotions of love and grief glissade across the mask of childhood, a childhood that is only skin-deep. It is clever, but it cannot last. Her admirers—middle-aged men and clergymen—respond to her dubious coquetry, to the sight of her well-shaped and desirable little body, packed with enormous vitality, only because the safety curtain of story and dialogue drops between their intelligence and their desire.

Blimey! I thought she just sang songs about the good ship Lollipop. 101 Books goes on to reveal how Greene wrote The Power And The Glory.

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Muhammad Ali’s Legendary Trainer Angelo Dundee Dies at 90

Thursday, February 2nd, 2012

Boxing Legend Angelo Dundee, who trained Muhammad Ali, Sugar Ray Leonard, George Foreman and countless other champions, died yesterday.

If the rumors are true, the first words Ali ever spoke to Dundee, upon meeting him for the first time, were:

“My Name is Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr. I’m the Golden Gloves champion of Louisville, Kentucky. I won the Pan American Games a month ago and I’m going to win the Olympics, and I want to talk to you.”

Dundee was with Ali, then known as Cassius Clay, for almost all of his early fights. He toured around the world with Ali, and became known as the best man to have in your corner during a fight.

He died of complications from a blood clot on Wednesday, February 1st, at age 90. But not before he attended Ali’s 70th birthday party, the month before, and caught up.

If you’d like to learn more about the career of Muhammad Ali, including his work and friendship with Angelo Dundee, the Taschen book Greatest of All Time (GOAT) is an unforgettable tribute, full of countless facts, anecdotes, articles, essays and some truly jaw-dropping photographs.

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Video review of R. Crumb’s Heroes of Blues, Jazz & Country

Friday, January 6th, 2012

My colleague Beth offers this review of R. Crumb’s Heroes of Blues, Jazz & Country.

Robert Crumb, better known as R. Crumb, is an American cartoonist, well-known for being outspoken, critical and subversive, for his highly recognizable illustrative style, and for his friendship and collaborations with Charles Bukowski. But many people don’t realize that Crumb is also a musician.

As well as singing, Crumb plays the banjo, the mandolin and more. He is an avid fan of blues, country, jazz, bluegrass and similar styles of music. As a project, Crumb created several sets of trading cards dedicated to the pioneers of his musical passion. Each card was an illustration by Crumb, with a brief bio of the musician in question on the back. In 2006, these cards were reproduced and published together. This book comes with a bonus CD of music selected by R. Crumb.

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Beth’s Favorite Reads of 2011

Tuesday, December 20th, 2011

Have you ever tried keeping a list of all the books you read or all the movies you watch in a year? For the past few years I’ve done both, and have been pleased at how satisfying it’s been to see the list as winter winds down. For someone who finds value in reading, it gives me a real sense of accomplishment to look back over the selection and realize I’ve fed my brain a variety of tasty morsels.

Fiction and non-fiction, poetry and memoir, history and fantasy, new books and old books and more. It’s a veritable feast. As 2011 comes to a close, here are the 25 books I liked best of those I read this year. I hope you find some to add to your to-read list, and look forward to hearing everyone else’s recommendations as well. Enjoy!

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A review of Kim Jong-il’s book

Monday, December 19th, 2011

Daniel Kalder offers a review of Kim Jong-il’s Our Socialism Centered On the Masses Shall Not Perish.

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Video review of Toast by Nigel Slater: my latest food memoir read

Tuesday, December 6th, 2011

Toast: The Story of a Boy’s Hunger by Nigel Slater is the latest food memoir that I have read. I’m a fan of Heat by Bill Buford, Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain and The Hungry Years by William Leith. This memoir is a little softer than those three but that’s part of its appeal.

Slater is an English food writer on The Observer newspaper and is well known the UK. This book concerns a very English childhood in the West Midlands during the 1960s – a part of world hardly known for its fine dining. Every day was defined by what he ate and Nigel offers comment on everything toast to lamb chops.

In reality, Nigel is actually telling the story of his childhood through his meals. He explains the relationship between his mum and dad, and charts his mother’s descent into ill health. It’s a fast read and by the end we are seeing the author’s teenage years where he finds salvation as a dog’s body in a pub kitchen and realizes that his future lies in the food business.

The memoir moves effortlessly from a mundane meals to sudden references to his sexuality and then back again to lamb chops and gravy. The American edition has a glossary at the back so English food terms can be understood.

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C.S. Forester’s lost crime novel, The Pursued

Thursday, November 17th, 2011

The Independent has a little review of The Pursued by C.S. Forester. It’s a ‘lost’ novel in that it was actually lost. Forester wrote the crime novel as Cecil Louis Troughton Smith in 1935 but then it was misplaced. I wonder where it went. The manuscript didn’t turn up until 2002. Of course, Forester is more famous writing the Hornblower novels than crime fiction.

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Hunger Games Trailer – Movie Preview

Wednesday, November 16th, 2011

So, it’s no secret that around here we love The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins:

A more exciting, fast-paced, engaging read than I’ve come across in a long time. A real adventure. And now…now! At long last, the trailer for The Hunger Games movie is out.

If Jennifer Lawrence (who plays main character Katniss Everdeen)’s performance in the film Winter’s Bone is any indicator, I’m very optimistic.

Start popping that corn, everyone – it’s all happening in March.

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Review of It’s Fine by Me by Per Petterson

Friday, November 4th, 2011

The Daily Telegraph carries a review of It’s Fine by Me by Per Petterson. Fans of Out Stealing Horses will be tempted to take a look.

This new novel is a coming-of-age story featuring 13-year-old Auden Sletten in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Auden’s older brother has drowned in a car accident and it sounds like Petterson has written quite a brooding novel. Petterson is familiar with grief – his mother, father, brother and nephew died in a ferry tragedy in 1990.

Petterson was born in Oslo in 1952 and has worked in many trades, including bookselling and being a translator. He made his literary debut in 1987 with a short story collection called Ashes in My Mouth, Sand in My Shoes. Out Stealing Horses has been translated into 40 languages and won many prizes, including the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.

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Review of Stephen King’s 11.22.63

Wednesday, November 2nd, 2011

Mark Lawson reviews Stephen King’s latest book in The Guardian. Sadly, it has a rubbish title that’s right up with It in terms of naming nonsense. 11.22.63 is King’s take on the assassination of US president John F Kennedy.

People are commonly said to remember their location when told of President John F Kennedy’s assassination, but many must also wish the place they had been on 22 November 1963 was Dallas, where they might somehow have diverted the motorcade or prevented Lee Harvey Oswald from entering the Texas School Book Depository. The possibility of such an intervention must number, along with its darker twin of going back and killing Hitler, among the principal fantasies of time travel, and is explored in the 54th work of fiction by Stephen King.

The blurb about the book goes something like this….Jake Epping is a 35-year-old high school English teacher in Lisbon Falls, Maine, who makes extra money teaching adults in the GED program. He receives an essay from one of the students – a gruesome, harrowing first person story about the night 50 years ago when Harry Dunning’s father came home and killed his mother, his sister, and his brother with a hammer. Harry escaped with a smashed leg, as evidenced by his crooked walk.

Not much later, Jake’s friend Al, who runs the local diner, divulges a secret: his storeroom is a portal to 1958. (We have one of those in the AbeBooks storage room where we keep old bookmarks and the Santa costume.)

He enlists Jake on an insane – and insanely possible – mission to try to prevent the Kennedy assassination. So begins Jake’s new life as George Amberson and his new world of Elvis and JFK, of big American cars and sock hops, of a troubled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald and a beautiful high school librarian named Sadie Dunhill, who becomes the love of Jake’s life—a life that transgresses all the normal rules of time.

Posted in author, history, review, video | 2 Comments »

The Night Eternal by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan

Tuesday, October 25th, 2011

Today is the day, funseekers! The third and final instalment in the vampire trilogy by Chuck Hogan and Guillermo del Toro is out. It’s called The Night Eternal and I’m very excited. If you like vampire books, suspenseful reads or well-written horror, definitely add this trilogy to your list. It isn’t highbrow and thought-provoking literature by any means. But it’s creepy and detailed, fast-paced adventure with fangs and silver bullets and a city being laid waste to as a motley crew of survivors in the know try to battle on. In short, it’s fun. Love it.

Here is my review of the first two books in the trilogy, called The Strain and The Fall.

Hooray! If you need me, I’ll be staying up too late reading, then sleeping with the lights on.

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Video review of Posters of the Canadian Pacific

Tuesday, October 25th, 2011

This video review showcases some beautiful, beautiful posters. I found Posters of the Canadian Pacific by Marc H. Choko & David L. Jones to be hard to put down.

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Canadian Pacific Railway Company was hailed as one of the wonders of modern travel. The Canadian Pacific railroad spanned North America from the Atlantic to Pacific. The company also operated luxury hotels, passenger ocean liners, cargo ships, and an airline. To promote the company and also Canada as a destination, the Canadian Pacific produced more than 2,500 lithographic and silkscreen posters – 1,000 of which were created in its own design studio.

Posters of the Canadian Pacific showcases 300 of the best posters from this company. These posters were displayed in Canadian Pacific offices and travel agencies worldwide from the 1880s until the 1970s. They enticed millions to visit and perhaps even settle in Canada. The imagery is often about travel and leisure and the great outdoors – skiing, golf, hunting and beach life. There is a stunning array of Art Deco style work of the 1920s and ’30s.

Posted in AbeBooks, art, Canada, design, review, travel | No Comments »

Video review of illustrated edition of Cape Cod by Henry David Thoreau & Scot Miller

Monday, October 24th, 2011

Cape Cod by Henry David Thoreau is one of the great travel books. Published in 1865, Thoreau describes the natural environment and people of ‘the bare and bended arm of Massachusetts’ during three short visits to Cape Cod spread over six years. A first edition will cost over $1200 but a great alternative is the illustrated edition of Cape Cod featuring photography by Scot Miller. Published in 2008, this book combines Thoreau’s original text with Miller’s beautiful photos. The images are often startlingly blue and reinforces Thoreau’s opinion that Cape Cod is all about the ocean.

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Cool scooters galore – a video review of Vespa: Style in Motion

Thursday, October 20th, 2011

My acting talents have gone from strength to strength since we started making videos. In this one, you’ll see an Oscar-nominated ‘walk across the parking lot’ from me and then lots of useful information about a great book called Vespa: Style in Motion (it’s basically a biography of the famous Vespa scooter). Watch out for the stunt sequence where the scooter flies off a bridge while evading the police.

Who knew Steven Spielberg was a Vespa fan?

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Video review of Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese

Tuesday, October 18th, 2011

Beth offers this review of Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese – this author’s debut novel. But you don’t have to take her opinion. Listen to a man called John Irving, who knows a thing or two about writing memorable fiction.

“That Abraham Verghese is a doctor and a writer is already established; the miracle of this novel is how organically the two are entwined. I’ve not read a novel wherein medicine, the practice of it, is made as germane to the storytelling process, to the overall narrative, as the author manages to make it happen here. The medical detail is stunning, but it never overwhelms the humane and narrative aspects of this moving and ambitious novel. This is a first-person narration where the first-person voice appears to disappear, but never entirely; only in the beginning are we aware that the voice addressing us is speaking from the womb! And what terrific characters–even the most minor players are given a full history. There is also a sense of great foreboding; by the midpoint of the story, one dreads what will further befall these characters. The foreshadowing is present in the chapter titles, too–‘The School of Suffering’ not least among them! Cutting for Stone is a remarkable achievement.”

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