The Time Traveler's Wife (2009)

Cute as Rachel MacAdams is, and her cuteness tends to be the feature that films concentrate on, she can not quite make this film work. But this is a far better film that than piece of merde Lord of War.

Road to Perdition

Good, but quite violent. And Tom Hanks's moustache?

The Catcher Was a Spy

Dawidoff, Nicholas. (1994). The catcher was a spy : the mysterious life of Moe Berg. New York : Pantheon Books.


New York-born (March 2, 1902), Newark-bred, Moe was the youngest of three children. Precocious, he had his father's facility for languages. After attending NYU for a year, he went to Princeton, and graduated (in the top 10% of 211 students) in 1923. He was, and perhaps remains, Princeton's best baseball player.

Signed by the Brooklyn Robins upon graduation, Moe played in 49 games, and had 138 plate appearances. At the end of the season, having made some money, he travelled to Paris. 1924 and 1925 he played in the minors, then joined the White Sox. Never a starter, he lasted in the buig leagues until 1939 as a player, his last 5 years in Boston, then coached. He was considered an excellent catcher, and some pitcher preferred him over other catchers.
Then came WW2. Through contacts, Moe was recruited by the OSS, and sent to Europe. His assignment was to help figure out if Germany was developing an atom bomb. His facility with languages, his proclivity for secrecy, and his charm, all combined to make him an effective operative. He was ssigned to figure out of Germany's leading phycisist, Werner Heisenberg, had the necessary resources for building the bomb. He didn't.

Once the war ended Truman disbanded the OSS, and the CIA retained about 10% of its operatives; Berg was not one of those. For the third part of his life, Moe defined his own existence, even if a shabby one at times.

Fascinating is an overused word (I'm guilty as charged), but Moe Berg was a fascinating individual. It would be difficult to botch such a book, and Dawidoff did a very nice job of it.

Dawidoff writes that a good piece on MB was written by Ira Berkow in the NY Times, 24 June 1972: The Catcher Was Highly Mysterious

Radical

In a nation that abhors the word liberal, what a refreshing look at an old-style activist.

When Barack Obama came to prominence as a presidential candidate, his Chicago background—in particular, his efforts as a "community organizer"—reignited an interest in Saul Alinsky (1909-72), the hard-charging activist whose 1971 book, "Rules for Radicals," was said to have had a formative influence on Mr. Obama's thinking. Some critics worry that Alinsky's ideas guide Mr. Obama even today, in the White House. About such matters Nicholas von Hoffman cares little. But about Alinsky himself Mr. von Hoffman cares a great deal. He knew Alinsky, worked with him for 10 years in Chicago community groups and now offers a portrait of him in "Radical."

Von Hoffman, Nicholas. (2010). Radical: a portrait of Saul Alinsky. New York : Nation Books.

Alinsky's activism began when he left his studies and joined in labor-union agitation on Chicago's South and West sides. Before long he was organizing community groups in rent strikes and store boycotts, arranging safe passage for blacks on their way to jobs in bigoted neighborhoods, and conducting negotiations among feuding ethnic groups. He could be daring with his tactics, but he drew the line at jail: "Saul had an absolute prohibition," says Mr. von Hoffman. "He would explain that a staff person cannot operate behind bars." In this respect Alinsky's methods differed from those of his contemporaries in the civil-rights movement.

Emphasis added, for these are important points. Nincompoops on the right, even on the left, dismiss radicals far too easy with cartoonish looks and superficial characterizations.

Weather man

Piece of crap. Doesn't work. A waste of time. Michael Caine is miscast. Nicolas Cage is two-dimensional, and can not rescue a role fated to fail from failing.

Lady Q

Went looking for Paul Quinichette,by googling Lady Q, and wound up with this book as the first result: Lady Q : the rise and fall of a Latin queen / Reymundo Sanchez and Sonia Rodriguez.

High Fidelity

Turned it off. Too juvenile.

The Curse of Promise Unfulfilled

Isaac Rosenfeld: The highs not so high, the lows not so low





In "Enemies Of Promise," the British literary critic Cyril Connolly famously tried to account for his failure to live up to his own expectations of literary greatness and those of others. It was a merciless self-portrait, but it was meant to describe more than a single author's plight: There is a special precinct of literature reserved for those who never became the major writers that everyone expected them to be.

Enemies Of Promise - 820.9 C

Isaac Rosenfeld (1918-56) is surely one of this number. His 1946 novel, "Passage From Home," earned him accolades from the New York intellectuals, a crowd not given to accolades. It was written when Rosenfeld was 28, and it seemed to mark the coming-of-age of a writer who would sweep all before him. Certainly, at that moment, Rosenfeld had outstripped his friend Saul Bellow, whose "Dangling Man" seemed partly caught in the constricting embrace of its European models.
But Mr. Zipperstein's account suggests, perhaps unintentionally, that the real story of Isaac Rosenfeld is less a matter of extremes: Yes, he was gifted, but he was never destined for greatness -- nor did he entirely fail. The highs were lower, and the lows higher, than the myth would have it. As for the highs, Mr. Zipperstein notes that the critic Irving Howe faulted (not unfairly) "Passage From Home" for relying, weakly, more on rumination than on description. As for the lows, the Rosenfeld reviews and stories routinely collected under the rubric of a sorry falling-off from early promise are in fact "a marvel of output," as Mark Schechner has written. A 20th-century Jewish Hazlitt, Rosenfeld turned every subject to his own purpose, so that the judgments in nearly every review became an implicit manifesto, pointing to what writing should be. He was often more acute than the professional critics who would later lament his "failure."

Why not unfairly, rather than, simply, fairly?

Mr. Zipperstein does a splendid job of sifting through the details of Rosenfeld's life, reminding us of his importance and acquainting us with his work. He does not, thank goodness, impose his reading of Rosenfeld's place in literary history too insistently, perhaps recognizing that, in a first full biography, the life must take precedence over the work. What he offers instead is the kind of attention for which Rosenfeld should not have had to wait, after his death, half again as long as he lived.

Photographed by Bachrach

Rick Fox showed me this book. David Bacharach Jr., German born, a photographer's assistant, was sent to Gettysburg to photograph the dedication of the cemetery (to which President Abraham Lincoln had been invited).

Collins, D. (1992). Photographed by Bachrach. New York: Rizzoli











Lincoln is supposed to be in this photograph. Bacharach had gotten to Gettysburg on a "bulky, horse-drawn portable darkroom necessary for the production of wet-collodion negatives then used by most phtotographers." p.16

"Wet-collodion negatives were ...heavy, breakable glass plates that were made camera-ready by flowing a sticky, photochemically sensitive liquid across the surface of the glass." ibid

"Arriving in Gettysburg, his plates still intact, Bachrach took up a position on a temporary platform about ninety feet from the speaker's stand." (pp. 16-17)

Edward Everett, the principal orator, went on for two hours. Then Lincoln rose. Historians state that a photographer was nearby, perhaps the one Bachrach had been sent to assist. The apocryphal story has it that the photographer could not get a picture of Lincoln because the President spoke for three minutes. His remarks did not impress. "A Chicago newspaper described the address as the silly, flat, dish-watery utterances of the man who has to be pointed out to intelligent foreigners as the President of the United States.

Unafraid of the dark

McNatt, Rosemary Bray.
Title	Unafraid of the dark : a memoir / Rosemary Bray.
Publication Info.	New York : Random House, 1998.

Amid the current heated debate on welfare reform, Bray offers a compassionate and, more important, informed and knowledgeable voice. As a child growing up in Chicago, Bray's family received welfare to supplement the father's erratic income, a situation that embittered an already troubled man and worsened a volatile marriage. She laments the culture of the welfare program, the misguided policies that have marginalized the role of fathers in too many low-income families, particularly black families. She speaks out in the face of welfare reform tinged by mean-spiritedness, aimed at punishing adults who make ill-advised decisions even if it means harming children as well. Bray's memoir is also a coming-of-age story of a black woman growing up in the 1960s and 1970s. She recalls stifling poverty that had her envying rich classmates enough to steal from them to replicate the easy leisure of buying snack food and cosmetics, even as the costlier luxuries of well-appointed homes remained beyond her reach. Bray's self-discovery continues through her college years: falling in love, questioning career goals, struggling for a political place in a turbulent period of growing race and feminist consciousness. Some years after college, a lucky break lands her at Essence magazine, where she finds the nurturing support needed even by a Yale-educated black woman. A voracious reader, Bray eventually lands the ultimate book-lover's job: an editor for the New York Times Book Review. Bray's is an eloquent voice, advocating on behalf of all the children and families that continue to need help to make the transition out of poverty. ((Reviewed January 1 & 15, 1998)) Copyright 2000 Booklist Reviews