Recent Books Columns

I hate it when a film takes a brilliant literary work and turns it into what it thinks the literary work should be.

Friday, April 24 2009

Sherlock Holmes and the Shanghai Gesture

“We have become archetypes,” laments Holmes to Watson, “we were created and published before the year 1923, which places us and many of our adventures into the realm of public domain.”

Thursday, April 2 2009

Far Cry 2: The Heart of Darkness Game

By L.B. Jeffries

This is a game that is incessantly hostile. It is constantly pushing the player to become more efficient at destruction.

(more Moving Pixels)

Wednesday, April 1 2009

The Jester in the Fisherman

By Chris Justice

Lines tangled and broke, feet tripped and slipped, rods and tempers snapped, and sometimes, even anglers fell overboard. It wasn’t funny … unless you were sober.

(more The Tackle Box)

Tuesday, March 31 2009

Chok(ing) Onscreen and In Print

Whether served up on the page or on the screen, this is an intimate assessment of a twisted mother/son relationship with plenty of sardonic humor and scathing satire.

Monday, March 30 2009

Time for a Repress: ‘The Gilded Palace of Sin’

By Bob Proehl

For people lucky enough to stumble upon the Flying Burrito Brothers, they made country cool. The music's simplicity and emotive directness, often derided and mocked by hipsters, could now be valid, vital and mean something to a modern audience.

(more Pickin' Down the Line)

Friday, March 27 2009

Panic! The Story of Modern Financial Insanity

By Rob Horning

In a sense, panic is an imprecise word to describe the emotion of financial crashes; paranoia better suits.

(more Marginal Utility)

Friday, March 20 2009

Little Murders: And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks

This is not Tom Brokaw’s Greatest Generation but, rather, Hunter S. Thompson’s Generation of Swine, the urban home front during the waning days of World War II, gritty and unvarnished, and chillingly reflective of modern sociology.

Tuesday, March 10 2009

Don’t Touch that Dial

By George A. Reisch & Phillip S. Seng

If Congress had its way, Dorothy would have clicked her ruby slippers together and chanted, “There’s no place like home theater. There’s no place like home theater.”

(more Pop Goes Philosophy)

Sunday, March 1 2009

Woolf at the Door

Both Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and Michael Cunningham's The Hours offer an illuminating look at the choices we make, the roles we play, and the hours that hinge our lives together.

Friday, February 27 2009

Herb Kent: Another Reason Why Black History Month is Still Relevant

By Mark Reynolds

Throughout the late ‘50s and ‘60s, every city with a significant black population turned to a black-formatted radio station for the hottest sounds and pulse of the street.

(more Negritude 2.0)

Thursday, February 26 2009

Blind Man with a Pistol: Ishmael Reed’s Misguided Pow-Wow

Anyone who has witnessed affirmative action policies in play can tell you that bad apples are chosen to fulfill a quota, not unlike a cop who harasses every citizen who bears a vague resemblance to a wanted suspect.

Friday, February 6 2009

Conversing with Rudy Wurlitzer: ‘A Beaten-up Old Scribbler’

My conversations with Rudy Wurlitzer were not unlike a road journey itself with plenty of unplanned side trips along the way.

By Raphaël Costambeys-Kempczynski

Friday, January 30 2009

Art Imitates Death

By Andrew Gilstrap

One of the misconceptions that Graeme Thomson deals with in his book I Shot a Man in Reno is that music about death is somehow out of the norm. In fact, death finds its way into pretty much every type of music.

(more Field Studies)

Tuesday, January 27 2009

Where the Frak is All My Money?

By George Reisch

Battlestar Galactica is like Wall Street—it’s hard to tell Cylons from humans, especially when it comes to galaxy-size Ponzi schemes.

(more Pop Goes Philosophy)

Thursday, January 15 2009

Linton Kwesi Johnson and the Eloquence of Rioters

This poetry, symbolically violent in its choice of literary form and symbolically subversive in its choice of Creole, reveals the literacy of rioters.

(more Channel Crossings)

Thursday, January 8 2009

Bret Hart: A Real Life in a Cartoon World

By Monte Williams

In a surreal world dedicated to a uniquely haphazard and comically inept breed of pretense, Bret Hart’s appeal was simple: he made everything seem 'real'.

(more Lowbrow Literati)

Wednesday, January 7 2009

Twilight Takeover

The film is a successful adaptation of the book not only because Pattinson is so talented and dreamy, but also because Hardwicke knows a thing or two about filming adolescents.