21

Fairly good. Smart kids are recruited by MIT Mathematics instructor to count cards and make bundles of money at Las Vegas. Protagonist, a quasi-nerd who is working on a robotic car with his two nerd buddies, is so smart the instructor recruits him to be the lead card player in the scheme.

Las Vegas, MIT and Harvard are featured, glamorized, and used as props in this quest for an easy way out. In the way of the team stands an anachronism, a human being who monitors card players and their wonts, habits and patterns to detect cheating and card counting.

Decent-enough Friday night fare.

Labyrinthine Life of a Magical Realist

Gara-Archive - Gabriel García Márquez in the mid-1940s.



This intensive, assured, penetratingly analytical book will be the authoritative English-language study of Mr. García Márquez until Mr. Martin can complete an already 2,000-page, 6,000-footnote version “in a few more years, if life is kind.” He compressed that sprawling magnum opus into 545 pages (plus notes and index), a “brief, relatively compact narrative,” so it could be published “while the subject of this work, now a man past 80, is still alive and in a position to read it.” Both author and subject have been treated for lymphoma, Mr. Martin says.

I already took it off the shelf, and started to read.

Gail Martin -Gerald Martin

Hardball

Looking for Chris Mathews's book, Hardball, I came across a film by the same title. The book I read in a few days, and found interesting. Matthews is fascinating, even if his penchant for interrupting guests in his teevee show, Hardball with Chris Matthews, is maddening. The film was okay.







Keanu Reeves plays a compulsive gambler who smokes (didn't inhale once during the film, though he did hold the smoke in his mouth) and drinks to excess. His life is a mess, a series of spasms aimed at making money, but which invariably put him on the edge of having lost too much. A major problem is that he owes money to people who take great exception to his owing them large sums, and who will go to any length to collect. Bad people. People who use bats and fists to enforce their rules.

Conor O'Neill owes $12,000 and sees no recourse – except to go to his yuppie friend, Jimmy Fleming, and ask for a loan. In short, Jimmy gives him a job coaching a bunch of housing-project smart-ass black kids, at $500 a week. The movie drags in spots, but there is continuity to the story. The pretty woman teacher is introduced, played by Diane Lane; the character is pointless and two-dimensional, and Lane delivers her usual performance: wooden, uninspired, relying on being female and a smile to pass the time.

In the end the story is fun, even inspiring, yet predictable. It does work; being predictable does not have to hamper a story. But what is wrong with the film is its reliance on stereotypes: the white guy figures out a way to make the dreams and hopes of the black kids work, he gets the girl, and everyone is grateful.

Utomlennye solntsem

Ah, this was a great film. Saw it quite some months ago, and really liked it. Island Trees Library called to interloan it for one of their patrons.

In Stalinist Russia a decorated Revolutionary War hero shares with his wife and child a loving, passionate family life. He is respected and admired by his neighbors. There is an eccentric family, beautiful countryside, and political paranoia.

Nikita Mikhalkov directs and stars as Colonel S. Kotov, a hero of the Revolution, who is spending the summer in the country with his young daughter (Mikhalkov's real-life daughter), his wife and her eccentric family. But when his wife's childhood love suddenly appears, the idyllic summer day takes a surprising turn. A lyrical film filled with beauty and warmth, it is also an indelible account of a man dedicated to family and fatherland, cruelly destroyed by political paranoia.

Film-making at its best.

Dear friends

Deitcher, David. Dear friends: American photographs of men together, 1840-1918.( 2001). New York : Harry N. Abrams.

An utterly fascinating look at photographs from the 19th and early 20th century of men together. I read mention of the book on the Mark Twain biography by Ron Powers.

This one fell hard

The harder they fall Decidedly not one of Bogey's finest. I only finished it because of Bogart. But that was tough to do.

Tunney

A wonderful book. Well written, with a fluid narrative, it does a historical justice to a champion who was not very popular during his lifetime.

Growing up poor in the West Village in early-20th century New York City, an Irish Catholic, Tunney was given boxing gloves by his father to protect himself from bullies. Soon young Gene became a good boxer, and his skill deterred bullies from picking on him. He also learned to love to read, and his bookishness became a point of contention.

One of Jack Dempsey's corner men is supposed to have said to the then-champ, "He reads books," as a way to disparage the challenger. Tunney beat Dempsey.

He also lectured on Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida when invited to speak before a class of Yale students. And became friends with G.B. Shaw.

Really a fascinating man. He married an heiress of Carnegie's partner's fortune, became a Connecticut gentleman farmer, and lived until age 81. His wife, Polly Lauder Tunney, lived to be 100, and died on April 12, 2008. Jack Cavanaugh, who wrote the book, wrote her obituary in the Times.

Polly Lauder Tunney and Gene Tunney after marrying in 1928.

Eiffel's tower

One of two books on the New Book cart at Information Desk today that intrigued me:

Eiffel's Tower, by Jill Jonnes. The book, of course, has its own website. In it, some pictures are shown, including one I really like: the tower being built.





The Eiffel Tower grows, reads the caption, December 7, 1887. Credit is given to Otis Archives.

Hype Igoe

What a great name. Found him on the pages of the book I'm currently reading, Tunney: boxing's brainiest champ and his upset of the great Jack Dempsey, by Jack Cavanaugh.

Googling the name Hype Igoe led me to a blog, Yesterday's Papers, of a cartoonist

A League of His Own

Branch Rickey in 1962.
Rickey is one of the really fascinating characters in baseball history. He brought Jackie Robinson into Brooklyn, into baseball, and forced the issue of race. He was a complex character

Occupied France: 5 Books

1. Occupation 944.0816 O
By Ian Ousby
St. Martin's Press, 1997

Nothing can be more degrading for a nation than to be occupied. In the case of France, the German Occupation even extended to the ancient practice of hauling people off to be slaves -- in this case as forced laborers in German factories. Ian Ousby's "Occupation" is an outstanding introduction to this horrible-fascinating subject. The author's apparent disqualifications -- not a historian and not a scholar of French history -- are the very qualities that make him an excellent guide for the general reader who knows nothing about the subject and wants lucid answers to the simple questions: What really happened, what was heroic, what was shameful, and in what proportions did they flourish in the same soil and why?



2. Vichy France 320.944 P and 944.0816 P *
By Robert O. Paxton
Knopf, 1972

Nearly four decades ago, Robert O. Paxton's "Vichy France" touched off what came to be regarded as a sort of Copernican revolution in studies of French collaboration. Paxton was the first to show that the collaborationist policy of the French government in occupied France was voluntary -- even, as with Vichy's anti-Semitism, anticipating and going further than the Germans had asked. Paxton's classic inspired young French scholars, opening the way to a flood of works that seems to widen with the passage of time. Justice done? Far from it. French television regularly broadcasts fictional stories of the Resistance but rarely one of collaboration. A year ago, President Nicolas Sarkozy said in an address to his nation: "The true France was not at Vichy [and] never collaborated." Official myth and historic fact continue to live side by side. And shame persists.

3. France: The Dark Years, 1940-1944 [also gets differing Deweys: 944.0816 J, 940.5421 J]
By Julian Jackson
Oxford, 2001

This is the fullest one-volume account of both the high politics of Vichy and the daily life of the French populace, written by Julian Jackson, an eminent authority on the Occupation. One of the book's many virtues is the honest way it explores the subtleties and complexities of "collaborationism." Was a mayor, honest and efficient before the Occupation, a collaborator for continuing to be an honest and efficient mayor under the Nazis? Was the owner of a factory making equipment for the Germans guilty of collaboration for keeping his plant going so that his employees could earn money to buy food? "France: The Dark Years, 1940-1944" is densely packed with fact and analysis and may be too detailed for some readers, but it is an indispensable reference work for anyone interested in the topic.

4. Paris in the Third Reich
By David Pryce-Jones
Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1981

After having been stranded in 1940 in France as a 4-year-old, David Pryce-Jones returned to the country many years later to write this eminently readable and marvelously illustrated large-format book about daily life in the capital during wartime. The text concludes with a number of historically valuable interviews with German Occupation officials and some key collaborators. The book includes more than 100 photographs, many of them in color, rare at the time. But reader beware: Some of the photos are by André Zucca, a collaborationist photographer for Signal, a magazine established by Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels to convey the idea that occupied France was a happy place. An exhibition in Paris last year of 250 of these photographs created a scandal, demonstrating how the Occupation remains a raw subject to this day.

5. Occupied France
By H.R. Kedward
Blackwell, 1985

In a mere 80 pages, studded with shrewd observations distilled from years of study, H.R. Kedward, now an emeritus professor at the University of Sussex, takes the reader through the Occupation at a gallop. Collaboration and resistance began the same day -- the moment the armistice was signed on June 22, 1940 -- and Kedward shows that from the start, the two responses to German rule had myriad meanings and myriad practitioners. Blacks and whites shade into gray in this account, but true villains and true heroes remain. Resistance, whether refusing to speak to a German on the street or committing acts of violent sabotage, may often have been ineffective, but it was a vital help to Allied forces come D-Day. The central lesson of "Occupied France" and the other titles is simple. Collaboration -- like appeasement before it -- failed totally because it willfully misread Hitler's intentions.

Mr. Spotts is the author of "The Shameful Peace: How French Artists and Intellectuals Survived the Occupation" (Yale University Press, 2009)

*: 320.944 P and 944.0816 P
An interesting commentary on libraries and cataloguing. Same book is classified in two different ways: 320 is political science; 944 is General history of Europe; France & Monaco.

Friendlyvision

"Friendlyvision" B Friendly E
By Ralph Engelman
Columbia University, 424 pages, $34.50

Shawshank Redemption

King, Stephen. Different seasons. New York: Viking Press, 1982.

Contents: Rita Hayworth and Shawshank redemption
Apt pupil
The body
The breathing method.
Genre: Horror tales.




















Wikipedia has an article about the film:

The Shawshank Redemption is a 1994 American prison drama film, written and directed by Frank Darabont, based on the Stephen King novella, Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption. The film stars Tim Robbins as Andrew "Andy" Dufresne and Morgan Freeman as Ellis Boyd "Red" Redding.

The film portrays Andy spending nearly two decades in Shawshank State Prison, a fictional penitentiary in Maine, and his friendship with Red, a fellow inmate. This movie exemplifies the potential gap between initial box office success and ultimate popularity. Despite a lukewarm box office reception that was barely enough to cover its budget, The Shawshank Redemption received favorable reviews from critics and has since enjoyed a remarkable life on cable television, home videotape, DVD and Blu-ray. It continues to be hailed by critics and audiences alike, 15 years after its initial release, and is ranked among the greatest films of all time.

Greatest films of all time.

Catch a fire

Excellent film. Derek Luke is magnificent as Patrick Chamusso, Bonnie Henna does a very good job as Precious, and the film evokes the South Africa of 1980 quite well. A grand film.

The true story of a South African hero's journey to freedom. In the country's turbulent and divided times in the 1980s, Patrick Chamusso is an oil refinery foreman and soccer coach who is apolitical. That is, until he and his wife Precious are jailed. Patrick is stunned into action against the country's oppressive reigning system, even as police Colonel Nic Vos further insinuates himself into the Chamussos' lives.

Tim Robbins is very good as Vos, and deserves credit for playing such a vicious, despicable character.