Avidmom's 2014 Journal of Books, Chocolate, Music and Movie Magic!

*Reserved for this year's "reading quilt"



1. Two Parties, One Tux, and a Very Short Film About the Grapes of Wrath by Steven Goldman
2. I Am A Pole (And So Can You) by Stephen Colbert
3. Billy Joel: The Life and Times of An Angry Young Man by Hank Bordowitz
4. The True History of Chocolate by Sophie Coe
5. Emotional Vampires: Dealing With People Who Drain You Dry by Albert Bernstein
6. Love Is The Cure: On Life, Loss and The End of Aids by Elton John
7. The Minor Adjustment Beauty Salon by Alexander McCall Smith
8. An Easy Burden by Andrew Young
9. The Pearl by John Steinbeck

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Currently Reading:

Reading life in 2013 proved far better than my real life. I'm pretty sure that my involvement with Club Read (now my third year here!) and my books saved my sanity. Here's what last year's reads looked like:



It was an odd assortment of things. I did find myself reading quite a bit of American history and those books ended up being my faves for the year, but quite honestly, there isn't a book in this pile that I didn't like.

1. Sweet Thursday by John Steinbeck http://www.librarything.com/topic/147245#3800779
2. Get Out of That Pit by Beth Moore http://www.librarything.com/topic/147245#3805683
3. The Neverending Story by Michael Ende http://www.librarything.com/topic/147245#3837402
4. Waking Up the Karma Fairy http://www.librarything.com/topic/147245#3837487
5. A Life of Jesus by Shusako Endo http://www.librarything.com/topic/147245#3890678
6. The Summons by John Grisham http://www.librarything.com/topic/147245#3890744
7. Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin http://www.librarything.com/topic/147245#3948245
8. Soul Survivor: How My Faith Survived the Church by Philip Yancey http://www.librarything.com/topic/147245#4048161
9. Man in the Music: The Creative Work of Michael Jackson by Joseph Vogel http://www.librarything.com/topic/147245#3980374
10. Major Pettigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simonson http://www.librarything.com/topic/147245#4063971
11. No! I Don't Want to Join A Book Club: Diary of a Sixtieth Year by Virginia Ironside http://www.librarything.com/topic/147245#4083200
12. Hick by Andrea Portes http://www.librarything.com/topic/147245#4096810
13. Maus II by Art Spiegelman http://www.librarything.com/topic/147245#4101178
14. Every Zombie Eats Somebody Sometime
15. Santa Evita by Tomas Eloy Martinez http://www.librarything.com/topic/147245#4125007
16. Everything I Know About Life I Learned From My Horse by Gwen Petersen http://www.librarything.com/topic/147245#4136279
17. True You by Janet Jackson http://www.librarything.com/topic/147245#4137775
18 The Other Great Depression by Richard Lewis http://www.librarything.com/topic/147245#4137943
19. No Ordinary Time by Doris Kearns Goodwin http://www.librarything.com/topic/155950#4177752
20. Eleanor Roosevelt's My Day: Volume II by Eleanor Roosevelt, David Emblidge, Pamela Harriman http://www.librarything.com/topic/155950#4193393
21. The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein http://www.librarything.com/topic/155950#4205247
22. Inside Scientology by Janet Reitman http://www.librarything.com/topic/155950#4228182
23. The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton http://www.librarything.com/topic/155950#4254078
24. Life Without Limits by Nick Vujicic http://www.librarything.com/topic/155950#4268851
25 The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom http://www.librarything.com/topic/155950#4284463
26. Douglass and Lincoln by Paul Kendrick http://www.librarything.com/topic/155950#4302802
27. Unclay by T.S. Powys http://www.librarything.com/topic/155950#4311732
28. One Doctor, Cold Cases, Close Calls and the Mysteries of Medicine by Dr. Brendan Reilly http://www.librarything.com/topic/155950#4322884
29. The Wounded Spirit by Frank Peretti http://www.librarything.com/topic/155950#4323695
30. V for Vendetta by Alan Moore http://www.librarything.com/topic/155950#4335119
31. Misery by Stephen King http://www.librarything.com/topic/155950#4344010
32. Also Known as Rowan Pohi by Ralph Fletcher http://www.librarything.com/topic/155950#4349659
33. I Am America (And So Can You!) by Stephen Colbert http://www.librarything.com/topic/155950#4360399
34. When the World Ended: The Diary of Emma LeConte edited by Earl Schenck Miers (New York University Press 1957) http://www.librarything.com/topic/161111#4365827
35. Chocolate Wars by Deborah Cadbury http://www.librarything.com/topic/161111#4428230
36. In the Dark Streets Shineth: A 1941 Christmas Eve Story by David McCullough http://www.librarything.com/topic/161111#4396279
37. So Long Insecurity: You've Been a Bad Friend to Us by Beth Moore http://www.librarything.com/topic/161111#4437888

*7. Team of Rivals reading journal: http://www.librarything.com/topic/147245#3897239; http://www.librarything.com/topic/147245#3902275; http://www.librarything.com/topic/147245#3908888; http://www.librarything.com/topic/147245#3909759; http://www.librarything.com/topic/147245#3914973; http://www.librarything.com/topic/147245#3931241; http://www.librarything.com/topic/147245#3948245; http://www.librarything.com/topic/147245#3960272; http://www.librarything.com/topic/147245#3960296

In the waning hours of 2013 I managed to think clearly enough to compile a list of my favorites:
MY BEST FICTION PICKS OF 2013
The Neverending Story by Michael Ende
Unclay by T.S. Powys
The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton

Picking out the best non-fiction books is a bit harder. They were all good. These are the ones that I would recommend without reservation and/or re-read in a heartbeat.

BEST NONFICTION PICKS OF 2013
No Ordinary Time by Doris Kearns Goodwin; Team of Rivals was also an excellent book but I found Goodwin's No Ordinary Time infinitely more readable and enjoyable.
Chocolate Wars by Deborah Cadbury
A Life of Jesus by Shusaku Endo
The Diary of Emma LeConte
Inside Scientology by Janet Reitman
One Doctor, Cold Cases, Close Calls and the Mysteries of Medicine by Dr. Brendan Reilly

Books this year that actually made me laugh (or in the case of the Zombie book, sing) out loud while reading them:
Every Zombie Eats Somebody Sometime & No, I Don't Want to Join a Book Club: Diary of a Sixtieth Year by Virginia Ironside

Cool montage!

Thanks rebecca.

Goals and Plans for 2014
Last year I made definite reading goals for myself. Most of them were met;a few weren't. I wanted to read through the entire NT (I know I've already read it, but in bits and pieces over the years). I'm just going to carry that goal over to this year. The other goal was to read popular authors, experience other genres like graphic novels and audio books. I met those goals. The only one I didn't quite get to was reading Sci-Fi. My large H.G. Wells collection will help me with that.

These are my reading goals for this year. The first two are carry-overs from last year and the last two goals are rattling around in my head all the time, especially the classic lit. part!

Goal 1: New Testament
Goal 2: Science Fiction
Goal 3: Music
One of my favorite things to read is autobiographies of musicians. More on that later ...
Goal 4: Classic Literature
This is kind of an ongoing goal for me. This is the first time I've actually written it down, so maybe I'll actually read some!

I'm taking it easy on myself this year :)

BOOKS ADDED TO TBR/WISHLIST THROUGH LT/CLUB READ/ETC. IN 2013
Hitty (The Hibernator)
When I Don't Desire God: How to Fight for Joy (LT)
The Human Comedy by William Saroyan. Recommended by EnriqueFreeque (in posts #24)
Faith and Treason: The Gunpowder Plot by Antonia Fraser (Nielsen GW)
Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War by Tony Horwitz (LT)
The Favored Daughter by Fawzia Koofi (interview on The Daily Show)
The Black Rose by Tananarive Due(radio)
Seven Days: The Emergence of Robert E. Lee (wildbill)
The Key to Rebecca, The Eye of the Needle by Ken Folet; Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry (Ms. Mathews)
Batman and Psychology: A Dark and Stormy Knight by Travis Langley (Murphy-Jacobs)
Economix by Michael Goodwin (bragan)
600 Days of Edward/Edward Adrift by Craig Lancaster (detail-muse)
Surrender on Demand by Varian Fry (rebeccanyc)
How to Like Paul Again (NielsenGW)
Mrs. Kennedy and Me by Clint Hill (SassyLassy)
Resistance : a woman's journal of struggle and Defiance. by Agnes Humbert (mkboylan)
The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng (Rachbxl/kidzdoc)
The Girls of Atomic City by Denise Kiernan (mkboylan)
The Man Who Walked Through Walls by Marcel Ayme
Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth by Reza Aslan (The Daily Show 7/17/13)
The Last of the Just (labfs39)
Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution by Simon Schama (rebeccanyc)
Citizens of London by Lynne Olson
One Doctor: Close Calls, Cold Cases, and the Mysteries of Medicine by Brendan Reilly (NielsenGW)
Christian Nation: A Novel by Frederic Rich (richardderus)
The Reason I Jump (The Daily Show)
Girls
When the News Went Live: Dallas 1963 (kidzdoc)

Books about people in music I've already read.

This year I really want to read about other musicians whose music I really love. On the more contemporary side: Carlos Santana, Billy Joel, Bob Dylan, Queen, Paul Simon. On the classical side: Chopin (the "poet of the piano" - he's my favorite) and George Gershwin. Who knows who else will show up here. Stay tuned. ;)

Carlos Santana and Billy Joel are first on my list. They both received, IMO, well deserved Kennedy Honors this year (along with some other well-deserved talent: jazz great Herbie Hancock, opera singer Martina Arroyo and Shirley McClaine). Herbie Hancock is a great talent but I didn't spend hours listening to his music. My mother played Santana's "Abraxas" LP all the time while I was growing up & now his "Supernatural (Legacy Edition)" is one of my favorite albums. Billy Joel was arriving on the scene as the "Piano Man" when I was just learning how to play. I remember going to visit my uncle at his house and he pulled out this new record (a vinyl one, remember those?) and playing Joel's "Turnstiles" and listening to the first few bars of "Angry Young Man." That was it for me. You can't imagine how thrilled I was to see not one, but two, of my musical heroes getting such big accolades! And then, if that wasn't enough, Buddy Guy also shows up and performs! Way too cool. But as I sit here writing and planning this, I don't even know if there are any books, or any good books written about these two but I'm bound and determined to find them! Any help would be appreciated. :)

My favorite song is a Santana song! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LALAhQEhN6E
Billy Joel's Angry Young Man: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJf7_5vH1WE

"Songs in the Attic" is also, after all these years, one of my favorite albums and this is probably my favorite song off of it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWBMvcSb4K0

Music Book Suggestions:
Comfortably Numb, Brian Eno and the Vertical Color of Sound
Just Kids

Wondering where you may push me this year. :) Team of Rivals moved to the top of my TBR last year because of your wonderful review, and then you did it again with No Ordinary Time. They were both terrific!

Thanks Nana! Weren't they, though? Goodwin is such a terrific writer/teacher.

I am impressed by your plans! Especially with musicians. The only book I read last year on the arts was Comfortably Numb, a book about Pink Floyd. One of the categories I created this year is artists and schools of art, a category I hope to keep in future years with revolving topics.

How do you read the New Testament?

I will be following those musical biographies avid.

I'm glad to see Unclay on your list of favorites. T.F. Powys is an author I've wanted to read for years, but his books are hard to come by. I also really enjoyed No Ordinary Time, which I read when it was first published. I might want to reread it now that I've done quite a bit more reading about WW II.

I'm looking forward to your music reading. I've just purchased a copy of the first volume (of a projected three volumes) of a history of the Beatles (who were my idols), Tune In. I also have unread a biography of Beethoven, my favorite classical composer. Two other interesting books I'm looking forward to reading are Practicing: A Musician's Return to Music and Play It Again: An Amateur Against the Impossible. I'm interested in those because I majored in music in college and played classical guitar. I gave it all up to become a lawyer though, and now in my retirement I'm thinking of picking up the guitar again. Have you read any of these?

Thanks Jonathan. I remember reading your review of Comfortably Numb. It's going on the list!

How do you read the New Testament?
In fits and starts mostly! I went through a period where I tried (and failed miserably) to read the entire Bible in a year, but somehow managed to get through the NT then. Right now I have a two-in-one Bible. It's "The Message" translation (which is fun to read, but probably not the best for a real in-depth study) & the New International Version side by side. (The whole two-in-one thing makes the book a bit heavy, though.) There are plenty of other translations around here too, but this one is my favorite. Last year I tried to get through the NT by reading objectively. What really made it a bit of a chore for me was that I was taking notes while I was reading - not a bad idea, but time consuming. Not sure if I'll continue taking all those notes, or journal here, or just read through and call it good!

> Thanks baswood! Not sure who'll show up. My favorite bookstore is going out of business (again, and supposedly for real this time!). Hopefully I can get over there in the next few days and grab as much stuff as I can from their small music section - if there's anything left. Other than that, I'll have to rely on our library system. I really would like to own the bios/autobios of the musicians I like. (There are only two books from that small list above that I actually own.)

Books Acquired in 2014

Thanks to my very nice family, I received mostly movies for Christmas this last year but the few books they gave me were ones I really wanted:

So Long Insecurity: You've Been a Bad Friend to Us by Beth Moore
The True History of Chocolate by Sophie D. Coe
The Minor Adjustment Beauty Salon by Alexander McCall Smith
When I cleaned & organized my bookshelves, I realized I was missing The Double Comfort Safari Club, otherwise I have the whole collection of "The #1 Ladies Detective Agency."

I don't know if you've seen the Bible readthrough that dchaikin has been leading over at Le Salon. It might not be your cup of tea, as it's more historical and literary than devotional. But you're invited.

http://www.librarything.com/topic/159435
http://www.librarything.com/topic/154880

The only music book I have on my shelf is Brian Eno: His Music and the Vertical Color of Sound. It's dated but I've read parts of it and it is completely enthralling. If you don't know who Eno is, think of either a) Roxy Music, a '70s glam band, or b) the start-up sound from Windows 95, which is typical of most of what he's done the last 20 years.

I'm interested to see what musician bios you read too - my Dad loves to read about his favourite artists, and I'm always on the hunt for new books to buy him. Have you read Patti Smith's memoir, Just Kids? It is amazing.

>16 JDHomrighausen: Thanks for that Jonathan. I'll have to look at a little closer at both those threads in the days ahead. Oooh.... I love Roxy Music but he wasn't somebody I would have thought even to look for! That's 2 on the list because of you Jonathan. Thanks!

>17 Cait86: No, I haven't read Just Kids but have read quite a few positive reviews on that particular one.

So, that's 3 on the list!! :)

By and large I don't read musician bios, but I loved loved loved Just Kids. It is less about the music and more about the drive to be an artist no matter what.

I just wanted to echo the praise for Just Kids--it was one of my favorite books in the year I read it.

For the nostalgic:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUbjTapNImM

I still love the Win 95 sound.

>13 arubabookwoman: I'm so sorry, arubabookwoman. Somehow I missed your post! You're right, those T.S. Powys books are hard to come by. Fortunately, I had an out-of-state friend find it on e-bay and send it in the mail. Someone here did come through after I read Unclay with a link to the website for a bookstore that sells a lot of Powys' books. If I find the link, I'll let you know.

I haven't read any of those music books you suggested, but will definitely be adding them to the list - especially that Beatles one!

I would re-read any one of the two Goodwin books I read in a heartbeat (well, maybe if I had the time!).

*****

>19 rebeccanyc: & 20 Just Kids might have to move up the list ..... So many people seem to have loved it!

>21 JDHomrighausen: Thanks for the link Jonathan!

My tiny but mighty Christmas haul of movies:

"Charlie Bartlett" - Charlie Bartlett starts his own covert private psychiatry practice in the boys' bathroom of his new high school and quickly becomes the most popular guy on campus - except with the principal. Quirky story, so, of course, I love it.

"The Brave Little Toaster" - An award winning little kids' movie. Absolutely delightful sweet story. I was absolutely delighted that my boys (the college kid and the soon-to-be high school senior) gave it to me. (They must have been feeling nostalgic.) It certainly was a surprise!

"Evita" ???? I have no idea what they were thinking. (For those of you new here, that's a joke. ;)

"Northern Exposure: Seasons 1 & 2" Yes! Finally! I love this off-the-wall show about the folks in Cicely, Alaska and have been wanting the DVDs for a long time.

So that's my stack of movies.

Not all the movies were for me though. My oldest was happy to finally get this movie:

More power to him, I guess. One time was enough for me!

My youngest received this one. You're never too old for Disney movies! This was a really good one.

Aww Brave Little Toaster! No such thing as being too old for a good movie! I love the Disney Pixar movies, but MU was kinda disappointing compared to Monsters, Inc. :|

Don't mind me, I'll just settle down, over in this corner, waiting to enjoy another year reading your thread.

I'm here too, just enjoying the buzz.

Way behind here already. Not sure what it is with music this year, but a lot of people seem to be returning to it. I'll be following your music journey with interest as I used to listen to hours of it everyday and have gotten away from it completely, so one of my resolutions was to get back to the music. Of course that means dancing around too!.

>25 .Monkey.: Monsters, Inc. is one of my favorite Disney movies. Ha! Another "Brave Little Toaster" fan! :)

>26 RidgewayGirl: Thanks Ridgeway & labfs!

>28 SassyLassy: Yes. I've noticed that too SassyLassy. More than one of us here on CR are making reading about music one of our goals for the year. Interesting coincidence or psychic power of Club Read???? What kind of music do you like Sassy?

My favorite bookstore is closing. They were on their way out the door before, but things worked out and they said they would stay at our "S-Mall" for another year. This time, though, no miracles. I had a chat with the owner who said the only reason they were able to stay afloat was because he had dipped into his own savings and certainly couldn't do that again. While I was there, people from the library were discussing with him the logistics of how & when to get the fixtures in the bookstore (bookcases, etc.) - so am pretty sure the party's over. :( *sigh*


You never know what you're going to find in this particular store, it's a warehouse store. But that was part of the fun! Thankfully, it is very well organized & has a fairly big selection. I was hoping to find one or two books on musicians and/or music and was pleasantly surprised to come up with much more than I bargained for. The emphasis is on the word bargain. Everything in the store was 50% off. So for a little over $30, I came home with:

From bottom to top:
Carole King: A Natural Woman by Carole King (The book is big because it's a large print edition.)
Mandela: A Biography by Martin Meredith
Elton John: Love is the Cure: On Life, Loss, and the End of AIDS by Elton John
Paul Simon: A Life by Marc Eliot
David Bowie: Starman by Paul Trynka
Steven Tyler: Does the Noise In My Head Bother You? by Steven Tyler
Life Itself by Roger Ebert
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

If finding books about music wasn't good enough already, once I got to the counter (because I had to wait for the owner & the library people to finish making their arrangements) I spotted Paul McCartney's 2 CD deluxe edition of "Memory Almost Full." For a whopping $5, I couldn't pass it up.

Well, that was fun. Back to reality!

Wow! Great haul!

Sorry about your bookstore, but glad you were able to make some good purchases. Lots of memoirs.

Thanks Vivienne & labfs, it was a lot of fun. And now I try and figure out where to put them!

Nice haul, but so sad about the bookstore.

>23 avidmom: I love Brave Little Toaster! As much as I really liked Toy Story 3, I think they borrowed pretty heavily from Toaster.

>34 rebeccanyc: If you don't count all the used bookstores around here, we'll only have one small independent bookstore left.

>35 cabegley: Ha! Another Brave Little Toaster fan. :)

It's always so sad when a bookstore closes its doors :(

Yes, Monsters, Inc is one of my top favorites, too! :D Nemo is also another great one. One thing I adore about the Pixar films is John Ratzenberger, and waiting to see what role he will play! :D

My son picked this book out of the YA section of our library a few months ago on one of those rare occasions when he opted to come with me. He is a picky reader and doesn’t bother wasting any time reading anything he doesn’t like (except for the stuff he has to read for school!) He ended up really liking this one – so much so that he would read certain funny passages out loud to me (rare) and insisted that I read it too (even rarer). I bought the book and gave it to him for his birthday a few weeks ago and picked it up and read it. For a young adult novel, it is pretty good.
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Two Parties, One Tux, And A Very Short Film About The Grapes of Wrath by Steven Goldman

Mitch is a 17-year-old junior in high school. Lately, life has become complicated. In short, Mitch has problems:

Problem # 1: David and Mitch have become best friends during their junior year because they are the only two juniors in the film class, which means they are the only two juniors who have the same lunch period together. Also, film class means seeing a movie once a week – which they do together. And, on occasion, they do go and try to be social at a party or two. David is quiet and intellectual with not much to say. When he announces to Mitch, very matter-of-factly over lunch one day, that he is gay, Mitch plays it off cool. No big deal. Inwardly though, things aren’t so cool. Their friendship seems strained now and he’s wondering if maybe he’s gay too – and just doesn’t know it yet. To top it all off, Mitch is the only one who knows David’s secret and this causes some awkward moments on the high school social scene.

Problem #2: There’s a book report due soon in English on Steinbeck’s The Grape of Wrath. Mitch is a good student but Steinbeck’s book is a problem. “In the last eleven years I have swallowed more books like this than I can count. I can’t get this one down.” He and David have made a Claymation movie in their film class. The film has very little to do about The Grapes of Wrath but maybe he can twist things around a bit so that it does. He decides to turn in his film project in lieu of the paper (therefore, getting to skip all that dry, dusty reading). His English teacher agrees:

“I’m not quite prepared for this reaction. “ ‘Do you want to preview it first?’ ”
“ ‘No, I trust you.’ ”
I have made a seven-minute cartoon with naked clay figures being tortured in various ways and I am about to turn it in as an essay on Steinbeck. I don’t feel particularly trustworthy. Maybe I could change schools. Maybe I could convince my parents to move. We could go to a new state. Oklahoma. We could move to Oklahoma.”

The little Claymation film is shown in class, but there are consequences. Mitch finds himself in hot water. Some parents, when they hear of its contents, declare the film, sight unseen, "offensive." When his English teacher has an apparent nervous breakdown in the middle of class and takes off, he thinks it is all his fault.

Problem 3: The Prom The problem with the Prom is the prom and all the tangled-up prom stuff that comes with it. Let’s just leave it at that. There’s a reason “Tux” is in the title.

At the end of the story, we are left where most novels written for YAs leave us: everybody getting a grip on who they are in the world. The journey we take to get there is unique because from beginning to end, this book is funny - and real. I had to laugh at the “six conversations” in high school (I won’t list all 6):

Most frequent:
“How did you do on the (test, paper, project, lab report, SATs)?”
“Okay, I guess.” (Vague, never say, “Really good!”)

Rare, more from adults:
“How’s it going?”
“It’s going.” (Usually follow with a shrug to show that it is, but not too well.)

If standing with a group:
“Did you see (some movie TV show, concert, Ryan and Danielle making out in the hall)?”
No response required if answer is no. Answer is always no if the question concerns Ryan and Danielle. If answer is yes, then a short, noncommittal “yeah” until the group preference is established, and then agree. Usually things suck.”

The stuff written in the chapters is funny, but the chapter titles are even funnier. There’s a short one at the beginning “The Masturbation Chapter” where Mitch finds some deeper meaning below the surface of Steinbeck’s description of the cornfields of Okalahoma (I think Steinbeck would be pleased actually); “Godless, Homosexual, Vegetarian Communists” and a chapter entitled “Almost Poetry – A Party in Five Haiku”:

A stifling, noisy
box of poorly packed people;
there is no order.

…. Which I think describes those high school years pretty well.

An entertaining, funny and, at times, moving, read.

:D Nemo is also another great one. One thing I adore about the Pixar films is John Ratzenberger, and waiting to see what role he will play! :D

Yep. I like that one too. Dory teaches us such a great life lesson: "Just keep swimming."
Haha! Me too!

Hah, that sounds like quite the book!

Sounds very fun. Great title and chapter titles.

>38 avidmom: - Sounds like a great YA novel - I am going to see if our school library will buy it. There is not a ton of YA novels for boys that aren't sci-fi/dystopian/fantasy. Your son might like The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie. It is also very, very funny, in that wonderful teenage boy way.

Believe it or not, a woman I know just brought this book to the library to donate to the Friends book sale TODAY! I had never seen it before, and now twice in one day. Weird.

>40 .Monkey.:-42 Thanks for stopping by Polymathic, Dan, and Cait! It was a fun read. Originally I gave it a 3.5 star rating, but then remembered it did keep me up past my bed time to finish it - so upped it to 4. (I think my son's favorable view of it may have worked in its favor too.) I'll have to see if our library has that one, Cait.

>43 labfs39: Ha! That's too funny! Maybe the Universe is trying to tell you something. ;)

>38 avidmom: Great review, avidmom!

>38 avidmom: Great review, Avid. The book sounds like a lot of fun.

Thanks kidzdoc & Nana. It was a lot of fun.

The first movie I watched this year!


Here's a few interesting facts about this movie: it was the first movie to be filmed in CinemaScope, it was nominated for 5 Academy Awards, including Best Actor for Richard Burton & Best Picture. And, in an indirect way, almost killed my mother!*

The Robe has been sitting on my bookshelf for quite a while now, a hand-me-down book from my aunt. It's not in the greatest of shape now and it is a bit of a doorstopper. I had no idea that it had been turned into a film. I came across the movie quite by accident. While out Christmas shopping for his dad, my son found a collection of Biblical-themed movies and this was one of the movies included. My ex was nice enough to let me borrow it. Having never read the book, I can't make a book-to-film comparison. All I can say is that I understand why the movie was given a Best Picture nod back in the day.

Burton plays Marcus Galilo, a Roman centurian who, as one of his assigned duties, leads the crucifixion of Jesus. A serious gambler, he wins Christ's Robe at the foot of the cross. Through some minor twists and turns in the story Marcus loses the robe and with it, his sanity. He is told that the way to reclaim his senses he needs to find the "bewitched" robe. This leads to encounters with the Christian community and changes Marcus's life forever.

This movie is a bit over-the-top and overly theatrical and melodramatic in spots. "I'm Judas." *cue thunder* I forgave it it's over-the-top cliched theatrics because the story and the acting (even if over-the-top at times) is very good. The scenery and the costumes are beautiful too. Also, I could listen to Richard Burton talk all day long. :)

***********
*This movie was released in 1953. My mother would have been around 9 or 10 at the time. She and my grandmother went to St. Louis to one of the big lavish movie theatres to see it. In the middle of the movie she asked for permission to go to the restroom. She thought she had found it on the second floor of the theatre - but when she opened the door there was nothing there!!! Just air and a straight two story fall. !!! Always pays to look where you're going!

****************
Academy Award Nominations (1954)
Best Picture
Best Actor in a Leading Role
Best Cinematography
Best Art Direction, Set Decoration, Color*
Best Costume Design, Color*

Academy Award Wins:
Best Art Direction, Set Decoration, Color
Best Costume Design, Color

Academy Awards for Best Picture that year (1954) went to "From Here to Eternity"
and Best Actor went to William Holden for "Stalag 17."

Other nominees for Best Actor that year were: Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift and Burt Lancaster

http://www.imdb.com/event/ev0000003/1954?ref_=ttawd_ev_1

"Just air and a straight two story fall. !!"

Yikes!

It sounds like the kind of trouble my mother would get herself into too!

It's along time since I saw The Robe, but am sure I enjoyed it way back when. A good Sunday afternoon film

Burton, Brando, Clift and Lancaster were the losing nominees! Wow! THAT'S a quality field! Was it Clift for From Here to Eternity and Brando for....has to be On The Waterfront? I should look it up, but was about to hit the hay....

I could listen to Burton's voice all day as well.

Your 'spoiler' made me laugh out loud when I clicked (for real)!!

Polaris, if you click on the link on the bottom of my review it'll take you to the whole list of Academy Award nominees/winners for that year.

I found the actual clip here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUwjl_1JctU
It made me laugh when I saw it; but I don't think that's the reaction they were aiming for!

Cool link. I could spend a while going through those! Interesting that that year's 'best screenplay' category included Eric Ambler's adaptation of 'The Cruel Sea'. So Brando was nominated for 'Julius Caesar' that year, not 'On The Waterfront'.

I don't think "On the Waterfront" came out until the following year (?). That was before my time ;)

There's a lot of history to be learned about our culture from what was considered great at the movies I think.

The bad news is is that my favorite bookstore is really closing. They announced yesterday on their FB page that they were selling every book in the store for $1. (Last day is Monday, fixtures should be out by Tuesday). Some books were even being sold for fifty cents. The good news is that we (meaning my boys and I), after actually going out for lunch ('cause the youngest got out of school early today due to finals), brought home 12 books for $12.96. Which was a lot cheaper than lunch! (But, in all fairness, I don't think these books would be quite as tasty.)

With a few exceptions, these may not have been books I would have bought otherwise, but, hey, for $1, why not, right?

The Bible Salesman by Clyde Edgerton
I Am A Pole (And So Can You) by Stephen Colbert
Pox: An American History by Michael Willrich
America Again: Re-Becoming the Greatness We Never Weren't by Stephen Colbert
Eleanor vs. Ike by Robin Gerber
Thoughts Without Cigarettes by Oscar Hijuelos
George Lucas's Blockbusting: A Decade-by-Decade Survey of Timeless Movies Including Untold Secrets of Their Financial and Cultural Success
An Easy Burden by Andrew Young

I'm most interested in the Andrew Young book & Pox. The Colbert books I grabbed for my oldest who is a big fan of "The Colbert Show." He didn't grab any books for himself, but his younger brother did:

They Eat Puppies, Don't They by Christopher Buckley
Freddie & Me by Mike Dawson (I almost bought this one last time I was there by myself, but talked myself out of it. My youngest immediately snatched it up! It definitely made me smile inwardly. :)
Misterioso by Arnie Dahl
My Favorite Band Does Not Exist by Robert T. Jeschonek This one looks really interesting and gets my vote for coolest back cover and book description: "School of Rock meets Alice in Wonderland"

School of Rock meets Alice in Wonderland. Curioser and curioser!

Stephen Colbert wrote I Am a Pole after interviewing Maurice Sendak. When MS passed away recently, I watched the interview on YouTube and it was quite funny. Colbert talks about starting the book. He was making a joke that every celebrity out there writes a children's book these days and makes loads of money, so he (Colbert) would too. Then of course he did make tons of money off it, even though it was a complete satire.

Nice book haul, although it's surely a bittersweet one.

That Colbert/Sendak video was very amusing!

What Daryl says ^.

I have Clyde Edgerton's The Floatplane Notebooks on my TBR, so I'll be interested to hear what you make of The Bible Salesman. I think Thoughts Without Cigarettes looks really good too.

The Bible Salesman was pretty good. I'll look forward to reading what you think about it.

>57 labfs39: labs, I remember that interview. It was funny! I like the MS quote on the cover: "The sad thing is, I like it!" :)

>58 kidzdoc: kidzdoc, It certainly is! And it's not the only bookstore in our area packing up either. There's a mountain community of artists about a 20 minute drive from here & there's an indie bookstore closing up there too. Sad.

>59 Polaris-: & 60 Polaris & Ridgeway, Glad to hear that you thought The Bible Salesman was good. I just liked the idea for the story! I kept seeing it there but kept passing it by. But, like I say, for $1, why not? It looks like a fun escape book. I don't know why I picked up Thoughts Without Cigarettes, except that I have this vague memory of learning somewhere somehow that it was pretty good. I don't even know who Oscar Hijuelos is! (And now feel really stupid because obviously he's a Pulitzer Prize winning author.) HA! Maybe it's the title that got me hooked. (And again, $1!)

An inspirational and patriotic tale of one pole's search for self-realization. Destined to become a classic. I will never look at a pole the same way again. The two minutes it took to read this book changed my life forever!

If you don't want to take the time to read it, you can wait for the movie to be released "summer-ish later this decade" granted that someone picks up the movie rights.

LOL! Love the review of I Am a Pole. Stephen should quote you on the cover.

I laughed so hard at your review. It really should be on the cover. Please post it in the reviews so I can thumb it!

Thanks bragan & fanny. :)

Ok, so I did add my review to the book's page. I felt it my patriotic duty as a member of the Colbert Nation (and fanny asked me to). ;)

And I was the first to run a flag up that pole!

LOL! Thanks Ridgeway :)

This movie came on TCM a few weeks ago (which I DVRd) and I finally got around to watching it yesterday. The plot is pretty simple. Danny McGuire (Gene Kelly) has a little dinner/theatre joint in Brooklyn. Rusty Parker (Hayworth) is his fiancee and a dancer in the show. She wins a Vanity Fair magazine contest and becomes their cover girl (hence the title). It leads to almost overnight success for her and romantic attention from a successful Broadway producer. Danny feels like he's been left out in the cold (because, well, he has been!)

It's a typical Hollywood love story/musical with all the innocent and over-the-top hokey-ness you'd expect. I watched this one because Gene Kelly is in it and I absolutely love and adore him. This particular movie just didn't impress me, though. I found the over-the-top stuff musical & comedic scenes irritating, not endearing. (Maybe I was just grumpy yesterday.)

The things that did stand out for me was how stunningly drop-dead gorgeous Rita Hayworth was and the absolutely perfect comedic timing and charm of Phil Silvers, who plays Kelly's sidekick "Genius." I also loved Eve Arden as "Jackson."

Most of the dancing is left to the other stars of the film, but there is a wonderful dance scene of Kelly dancing with himself (his altar ego). Hayworth's and Kelly's duet of the Kern's/Gershwin tune "Long Ago and Far Away" is also a great moment.

Gene Kelly's "alter ego" dance: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hokb0Mz5R5U

"Long Ago and Far Away" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35VqIqdy5C4

************************************
Academy Awards 1945 (bolded category = "Winner")

Nominated for 5 Academy Awards:
Best Cinematography, Color
Best Art Direction - Interior Direction, Color
Best Sound, Recording
Best Music, Original Song (for "Long Ago and Far Away")
Best Music, Scoring of a Musical Picture
http://www.imdb.com/event/ev0000003/1945

When I was in high school I found myself in this wonderful class called "Musical Comedies" (seriously!). The class lived up to its name. We, for the most part, watched "musical comedies," (although the teacher did manage to sneak in some un-musical/un-funny movies too). Our job, as students, was very difficult. Watch the movie (back then, a VHS tape) & then take a quiz. We watched a lot of old classics and this was one of them. It also came on cable the other day, and once again, I DVRd it.

Cary Grant plays drama critic/author Mortimer Brewster who writes about the joys of bachelorhood and the evils of marriage. On the day ( Halloween) that he gets hitched to his next-door neighbor, he finds out his delightfully sweet and generous aunts have been luring elderly gentlemen into their house. When they find out that these men are lonely, they "help" them by spiking their elderberry wine with arsenic. Aunt Abby and Aunt Martha aren't the only insane members of the Brewster family. There's the other live-in nephew who thinks he's Teddy Roosevelt, and the younger brother, Jonathan, who we learn in the first half of the movie was a bad seed from the start "... he used to cut the worms in half with his teeth." Things really heat up when Jonathan shows up, after a 20 year absence, with his sidekick and plastic surgeon played by Peter Lorre.



Murder and insane relatives don't sound like the plot for a comedy, but the movie is funny.

>68 avidmom:, 69 - Your pictures aren't showing up for me - don't know if it's a mistake on my end, or yours. Can anyone else see them?

Nevertheless, I am enjoying reading about these classic movies. I love Cary Grant!

#68-70, I can't see them either (Firefox on a Mac laptop).

Thanks Cait & Rebecca. I tried to fix the picture issue. I hate it when that happens!

I found some "Arsenic and Old Lace" pictures I liked better anyway. :)

Thanks, Avid. Now they show up (but I'm on a different computer, anyway).

Hi Avid! I'm getting caught up slowly. My daughter and I loved Evita SO SO much: the movie, the cd, but most of all, the musical put on by a little theater production near us. We went two weekends in a row and sat transformed.

AND Northern Exposure? What fun! Did you watch his latest tv series (not new tho) Numbers? I really enjoyed that. I liked all of the characters and seeing math explained and used was just awesome.

Glad to be reading your great thread and loving the movies.

Nice to see you here, Merrikay! Seeing "Evita" live would be awesome. Eva Peron was something else!

I've always loved "Northern Exposure" which I started watching in reruns after some friends told me about it. There is a book that I want called Chris-In-The-Morning, Love, LIfe and the Whole Karmic Enchilada. Doesn't that sound like a neat book? I really liked "Numbers" too, but never became a big fan of the show. I liked seeing two of Judd Hirsch (big Taxi fan here) & Rob Morrow together! :)

I seem to be going on some classic movie tangent these days. I have a few good ones on the DVR waiting for me... and, since I am homebound with the flu (or the plague or something similar), maybe I will actually sit down and watch them. (Lay down, more likely, if I can maintain consciousness!) HA! :)

My library posted this brain teaser on their FB page today.

"Behind doors open to all, treasures await.
Free for the taking, but remember the date"

Get well soon Avid! But try to enjoy some reading in the meantime while you're unwell.

I loved Northern Exposure back about 20 odd years ago. My brother sent me a link to the 'Yom Kippur' episode recently when Fleischman makes amends for being a meanie to everyone...really great episode. It reminded me of how great a series it was. I wish it would get a full re-run on one of these channels one of these days!

Thanks Polaris. I did manage to finish a book and start another one.

I remember that episode! Northern Exposure is classic. Hard to imagine that "they" (whoever "they" are) made it as a filler show for the off-season. It used to be shown here pretty regularly in syndication on different channels and then it seemed to vanish altogether. I'm very happy to have my little package of DVDs. :)

Here's a movie I've never heard of before. It was a rather odd, slow-going little movie and I'm not sure what to say about it, except to say, a few days later, I'm still thinking about it. I guess that's a good thing. Or maybe I'm still just confused. ?????

The story starts with Morris Minchkin's (Mostel) memories of the day's events. There was the encounter at the deli where he spotted someone trying to steal someone's fur coat. The would-be-thief was chased straight into traffic and came to a very bad end. And then there was the trip to the welfare office and to he and his wife's doctor/friend. Nothing is going right for Morris. His back is out; he can't work. His taylor shop has been destroyed; his daughter has married outside the faith so she is therefore "dead" to him & his wife is at home dying. Morris is just trying to find the strength to go on; he doesn't want to live any more.

Help, or some form of it, comes in the form of an unusual angel, Harry Belafonte, who shows up in Morris's kitchen, introduces himself as Alexander Levine, and claims to be an angel. Apparently, he has died but instead of skating past the pearly gates, he has been put on probation. (The Angel Levine is a little miffed about this). To get off probation, he needs to perform a miracle for Morris. Morris is not sure he believes that Mr. Levine is Jewish or an angel. At first, he thinks Levine is a criminal, then thinks the guy is just crazy, and then, more than anything, comes to believe that The Angel Levine is just a guy who needs some help. The Angel Levine just wants Morris to believe in him. The problem is is that The Angel Levine, (supposedly the would-be fur thief from the deli) doesn't behave in very angelic ways.

Can skeptical Morris believe? Is the Angel Levine an angel, or something else? Where - and what - is the miracle Morris needs? Who needs the miracle the most? Morris or the Angel? Who's helping who here, anyway?

These are the questions that kept me watching. Also, watching Zero Mostel and Harry Belafonte, both classics in their own right, was a lot of fun. I don't think I've seen any movies of theirs. The one thing that drove me the most crazy about the film, besides its slowness, was the very, very annoying disembodied voices soundtrack. The dialogue here is a bit dated and both the characters are incredibly stereotypical but, maybe that's what they (whoever they are) felt needed to be done to get their point vibe across.

I think this had the potential to be a really far out groovy movie, but it fell short somewhere.
You dig?

I'd give it three stars.

Movie trailer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2VZlGp7r9c

“Even after they recorded the song, there was some question as to whether it would make its way onto the album, or get buried on the B-side of another single, or perhaps not even get released at all They were playing the song back in the control room at Ramone’s A&R Studioes when one of the background singers on the album and a previous production client of Ramone’s, Phoebe Snow – who had had a Top 10 hit with the Ramone production of her debut album and its hit, “Poetry Man” – walked in. She was accompanied by Linda Ronstadt, herself possessed of three Top 10 singles at the time.
They said, “You’ve got to put that on the album!”
Billy replied, “Yeah? You think so? We didn’t like it that much.”
They pleaded with Billy to put it on the album. “I’m going to listen to what women say!” he laughed in retrospect.


Billy Joel: The Life and Times of An Angry Young Man by Hank Bordowitz

It’s a good thing Billy Joel listened to the women that day. If he hadn’t recorded “Just the Way You Are” – the song that would go on to “grow his fan base exponentially” and win him the 1978 Grammy Award for Song of the Year and Record of the Year, I wonder if we’d be talking about him now. Would he have been the pop star he is (or was) if not for that song? Billy Joel never wanted to be a rock-n-roll star or a pop star or a star at all. All he really wanted was to write the songs and have someone else record them.

Joel’s is no overnight success story. His love of the piano started when he was a little boy in Hicksville listening to his father master pieces of Chopin or Mozart. This impressed young Billy, but his father never considered himself much of a piano player. When Billy’s father abandoned the family, leaving Billy, his mother, and his older sister, to fend for themselves, Billy’s mother still found money for Billy’s piano lessons. Billy decided early on he didn’t want to be a classical pianist. Classical pianist have to practice for hours every day and Billy wanted to go have fun. Even when he did practice at home, many times, instead of playing the notes on the pages of the classical pieces, he would improvise. His mother would be none the wiser.

As Billy grew up he found he wanted more macho ways of passing the time than he could get at home with his mom and sister and began hanging out with a “gang” – which was more “Our Gang” a la “The Little Rascals” - than what we normally associate that word with now. A neighbor/friend of Joel’s asked a young Billy to join his rock-n-roll cover band as the keyboardist and Billy did. By the time Billy was a junior in high school, the band he was in was doing well and booking gigs; he was also a pretty good boxer and was pursuing that as well. Teachers thought William Martin Joel was showing up to class high but the truth was, his successful night-gig was cutting in to his more traditional day gig. “I started playing with my friends at night,” Billy quips. “School never got in the way.” Always an avid reader (“Billy reads books the way other people eat M&Ms.”), Billy managed to keep his grades at at least a passing level, but the school wouldn’t forgive his truancy. “I told them, ‘The hell with it, …. If I’m not going to Columbia University, I’m going to Columbia Records and you don’t need a high school diploma over there.”

Eventually, one band turned into another band turned into another. There was some local success – sprinkled with episodes of absolute failure. Finally, his first manager, Irwin Mazur convinced Billy he needed to go solo. Nothing happened for the longest time, and coupled with his guilt over having an affair with his best friend’s wife (who would later become his first wife) and an empty wallet, he made a rather unusual attempt at suicide. He was ready to throw in the towel when Mazur asked for just a little more time to get him a record deal: 30 days to be exact. “…I’ll give you thirty days to get a record deal. Otherwise, I’m going to the Midwest. I’ll be a bartender, I’ll be happy. I don’t need this shit anymore.”

His demo tape made its zig-zaggy rounds and ended up in the hands of someone who bought into Billy Joel heart, soul and wallet. After being passed around and passed on by just about everybody who was anybody in the record biz, Artie Ripp heard Joel’s demo and got very excited about Joel’s potential: “I really find this is a guy with some extraordinary talent, as a musician on the piano and vocally. He writes great lyrics and melodies and sings his ass off. …” Ripp really liked Joel’s poetic writing: “He wrote a unique kind of lyric. His poetry and his reflection upon life and the life experience – he wasn’t just writing ‘I love you, you love me, let’s go play on the corner.’ He was really writing like a painter, a poet, a playwright. He engaged me. That was enough.”

As Billy Joel’s story progresses, his successes as well as his flaws are spotlighted. Having been a Billy Joel fan for a while, I found myself surprised at not knowing how many awards he has won over his career. His car accidents, struggles with alcohol, and failed relationships are all covered here along with his absolute devotion to his daughter. At one point in the early 90s Joel had authorized a biography, but just at that turning point, the bottom fell out of his camp and he found himself suing and being sued. Having been burned so badly by someone he thought he could trust, he drew more into his private world (and that authorized biography never happened) which explains Bordowitz's focus for much of the latter half of the book on the business side of Joel's career.

Joel is not an innocent man, he definitely has his flaws. Some things he did to people, basically dropping them after years of loyalty like a bad habit with no warning, seems very cruel. (Then again, we're only getting one side of the story here.) It seems that Joel's biggest flaw is an unwillingness to confront whatever is uncomfortable to him. Maybe it was just a symptom of his immaturity at the time. Even so, those people he’s left on the side of the road, still have not much bad to say and more nice to say about Billy Joel and still support him wholeheartedly. At the end of the day, Billy Joel comes off more like the average guy next door than pop superstar.

“I don’t feel like a rock star today,” he mused. “Rock stars to me are still Paul McCartney and Mick Jagger. I’m supposed to be a rock star, but I just feel like a guy from Hicksville.”
********************************************************************

Funny how things work out. Billy Joel, the reluctant rock star who wanted to write songs for others to perform, now writes classical music that other people play.

Billy Joel as Classy Guy:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZmSSm_RKbI

Billy Joel as Nice Guy:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QX1bMlu9EVE
I used to play "New York State of Mind" on the piano too. It never sounded like that!

The True History of Chocolate by Sophie D. Coe

What can I say about this book except WOW!

Who knew that inside the little, strange little cacao bean was the history of the whole world, just about. To study the history of chocolate is to study the history of, oh, I don't know, everything.

Maybe not everything but let's see. Here's a list of the subjects that are touched upon (in no particular order) while studying the humble travels of the cacao bean and its magical product, chocolate:

Archeology, etymology, geography, economics, Olmecs, Aztecs, Mayas, human sacrifice, religion, trade, the Amazon, Portugal, Africa, France, Italy, England, Massachusetts, (obviously) Mexico, (to name a few countries), the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, the Catholic Church, Jesuits, missions, Quakers, political/royal marriages (some that work, some that don't), kings and queens, Spanish Conquistadores, Christopher Columbus, tea, coffee, sugar, political upheavals, slavery, medicine, horticulture, agriculture, literature, class warfare, murder(s), money, Mozart, the culinary arts, culinary history, philosophy, art, fair trade, and pirates.

Surely I'm forgetting something but I certainly can't forget the pirates - or the murders ...

Reading this book was a bit of a slog for me. Not that it wasn't a good book; it's a brilliant book dense in detail. It was kind of like eating a dense, rich chocolate dessert. Try as I might, and as delicious as the whole thing was, I could only handle a few spoonfuls at a time. For any world-history loving chocoholics out there, this book is a must. It is painstakingly researched and there are numerous illustrations, some in vivid color, throughout the whole book.

I'm grateful to my cousin for sending it to me. Most of all, I'm grateful I own it because there's no way I can remember all that!

Chocolate, yum.

I'm glad the chocolate book was so delicious, especially because now maybe I'll get my copy down off the shelves where it's languished for nearly 20 years!

>82 avidmom:, Oddly, I don't really care about chocolate in the specific, but I am always interested in engrossing commodity histories. Thanks for your thoughts on The True History of Chocolate.

Haha, I told you there was lots of interesting stuff about chocolate, enough to make museums on! ;D

That Billy Joel book sounds interesting, too. I love a lot of his music. :)

>83 JDHomrighausen: Jonathan, there's a poem about cocoa by G.K. Chesterston in the book XD.

>84 rebeccanyc: Rebecca, I hope you do! And then write one of your terriffic reviews .... I'm certain you could do the book more justice than I ever could.

>85 fannyprice: Fanny, then I think this book is right up your alley.

>86 .Monkey.: Now I see why! Ha! The Billy Joel book was really well written. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

I love a lot of his music. :)
Me too, but I think I like his more "unknown" stuff better than what made him popular. One thing I found out by reading the book was that there was a lot more Billy Joel music out there that I've never heard.

Chocolate seems to be a strangely emotional subject, at least in my family. You're assumed either to want nothing but chocolate, or hate it with a passion--nothing in between. Once you have a reputation for liking chocolate, no one will serve you anything else. The last time my wife picked up cupcakes for a birthday celebration I specifically asked for spice cake or carrot cake, but she bought chocolate for me instead, saying "I know you like it better."

>82 avidmom: Now, where did I put that chocolate that I bought yesterday?... :)

Wonderful review -- I like "history of something" books - they tend to end up being a history of the world or a place from a weird perspective and with weird details... The more common the thing is, the better.

The other day I was in the local downtown (mind you, Nanning is a fourth-tier city in China, usually characterized as "a backwater") Häagen-Dazs and ordered their theme-inspired Belgium chocolate "ball": 8 (small) scoops of ice-cream enclosed within an orb of chocolate on a nest of chocoloate. I broke out sweating of shame and worry about such a huge amount of chocolate (I decided not to finish it all, and did not pour the warm chocolate sauce.)



This 'orb" had a diameter of no less than five inches!

It did make me wonder, though, why Belgium is so particularly associated with chocolate?

>88 StevenTX: Steven, Hmmm ..... I think I know who really wanted the chocolate in that scenario.

>89 AnnieMod: Annie, I really didn't know what I was getting myself into! It was fun though.

>90 edwinbcn: *gasp* Edwin, that doesn't even look real - it looks more like art! It's gorgeous and I have a sudden craving for chocolate.

why Belgium is so particularly associated with chocolate?
According to Coe:
"...the chocolatiers of the European continent, especially in France and Belgium, had been far more concerned with the taste quality of their products than their colleagues in Great Britain or the United States."

Great Britain and the U.S. learned how to mass produce the stuff, less quality but more of it; while France and
Belgium kept concentrating on quality. I think there is a trend here in the U.S. where smaller chocolatiers (where they actually start with the cacao bean and go from there) are opening and producing high quality/more pricey chocolate treats.

I watched some sort of count down documentary of the top 10 snack foods in the U.S. and chocolate was #1.

Honestly, I can understand that. A small amount of wonderful chocolate is just as good (and healthier) than a large dose of mediocre chocolate. But a five-inch ball of wonderful chocolate - now that's something you order with a friend.

Hi Avid - your Chocolate review has me salivating - and heading to the kitchen this lazy Sunday afternoon... Great review! I'm also drawn to a well written detailed commodity history - Mark Kurlansky's Cod and Salt both spring to mind. I think I'll have to wishlist this one too.

Enjoyed your review of the Billy Joel biog as well.

...I think Edwin's 'Orb-O-Chocolate' just pushed me over the edge...

>92 JDHomrighausen: "But a five-inch ball of wonderful chocolate - now that's something you order with a friend."

Or two or three.... friends. That's a lot of chocolate.

ok Avid so was it you or Polymath that got me started on Deborah Cadbury's Chocolate Wars? I was interested in reading about the Quaker business model - sounded so interesting. Of course when I received the book a few weeks ago, I immediately went out and bought a nice variety of chocolate so I could decide for myself which was my favorite (once again). Then I got distracted by other reading and just ate it all. Cadbury won once again, but I do like Butler's but wasn't going to be in Ireland anytime soon so couldn't include it in the comparison. So NOW? Here I am reading the book finally but all the chocolate is gone. It is driving me crazy reading about it everyday with none in the house. I need to go get enough to make me sick so I can quit fixating on it!

So how did Chocolate Wars compare with the TRUE history?

>92 JDHomrighausen: Jonathan, a 5-inch ball of chocolate .... I could probably get through that all by myself. But not in one sitting! I bought some higher "quality" chocolate (the best I could find at the local store) & found a little square of really good chocolate made me happier than downing a cheap candy bar.

>93 Polaris-: & 94 Thanks Polaris. I think I'll pass on Mark Kulansky's Cod (sounds fishy) but Salt looks interesting. My mother used to collect antique "salts." She had quite a collection for a while. That giant "orb-o-chocolate" pushed everybody over the edge. It triggered a chocolate panic attack here. Thank God I still had some left.

>95 NanaCC: Nana, It might be a perfect way to make friends too, come to think of it. :)

>96 mkboylan: Merrikay, I was lucky in that we had a light trick-or-treat crowd for Halloween so I was able to just eat my way through the book with little bite-size candy bars. (One of my son's "girl" friends said "Those aren't fun-size; they're sad size." Ha!)

Chocolate Wars and The True History of Chocolate are two totally different animals. Cadbury's book is far more readable and entertaining. Cadbury/Hershey/ and Nestle/Daniel Peter are mentioned at the end of the book, in the chapter titled "Chocolate for the Masses" but not nearly as in much detail as in the Cadbury book. Both are great books, but for different reasons.

Really enjoyed your review of Billy Joel: The life and times of an angry young man I will never get round to reading it and so your review was the next best thing

>98 baswood: Thanks baswood

Emotional Vampires: Dealing With the People Who Drain You Dry by Albert Bernstein

Bernstein divides these "Emotional Vampires" into a few groups: Anti-Socials; Histrionics; Narcissists; Obsessive-Compulsives; and Paranoids (these are the hardest and most exasperating to deal with) and then divides those groups up further into sub-types. Bernstein gives practical ways to defeat these vampires. The first step is to 1). Recognize them; 2). Not take them personally. It really isn't about you; it's them. 3). Don't let them cross over the threshold into your own psyche (remember the rule about not letting the vampire in your house) and 4). Do not try to change them, especially by holding up a mirror to their bad behavior. Vampires can't see their reflection.

The strategies he uses here are similar to psychological karate - use your opponent's momentum against him/her. Think "act assertively" - which generally works on most normal folks just fine - it's just that with emotional vampires you also have to add a level of black belt/chess expert coupled with Supernanny discipline to the mix.

I read this in the course of one day. Bernstein is funny so the book is never boring. I would have liked more examples and stories in the book. Bernstein's intent is a simple how-to deal with these people who tend to drive us nuts (literally), and I guess it does an OK job at that. Maybe not as deep as I would have liked it to be; but still useful.

Bit disappointed that the book was not about Vampires.

>100 avidmom:, Does the book sustain the vampire parallels - such as "Don't let them cross over the threshold into your own psyche (remember the rule about not letting the vampire in your house)". Because those are hilarious. I actually think that self-help books would be so much better if they took a humorous approach.

101 lol

>Merrikay & baswood, That certainly would have made it a better read.

>102 fannyprice: Fanny, Nope, not really, or at least, not as much as you'd think. He did take a humorous approach but that whole threshold thing was mine. :)

The review makes it sound as though he's quite negative about people dealing with these mental illnesses, with the "bad behaviors" and whatnot, is it really like that?

No, not at all. He even makes a very clear point that a lot of these "personality disorder" traits can actually be a good thing. Anti-socials (people who don't think the rules apply to them) can be a lot of fun to be around & we wouldn't have leaders without narcissists. It's very much a book about how to deal with people who have these specific personality traits.

In sobriety, I was constantly reminded of the good I could have been doing to help those with HIV/AIDS - my friends, people like them, people like me - but how little I had actually done. There were many potential acts of selflessness that I chose to forgo in exchange for another line or another drink. I had been lucky to emerge from the '80s without having contracted HIV myself. And I was even luckier to have emerged from treatment healthy, able to do something meaningful with my life. I owed a lot to many people - Ryan, Jeanne, Andrea, Hugh - but to that point, I simply had not delivered. It was time to do something about that."


Love Is the Cure: On Life, Loss and the End of AIDS by Elton John

When I first saw this book sitting on the shelves at the now-closed bookstore, I thought the title was "Elton John Loves The Cure." It grabbed my attention. I guess I like "The Cure;" I also like Elton John. Of course, the book is not about the band, "The Cure" but about AIDS. Specifically, it's about Elton John's Aid Foundation and how that came to be.

I remember being a high school kid when the AIDS epidemic "started." It's always a little mystifying to me now how AIDS is just a normal, but horrible, part of the medical landscape. Because back then, only a few decades ago, medical science didn't even know what this mysterious disease was. They didn't even have a name for it, let alone a cure. I certainly remember the hysteria it caused. Elton John was there too but did little to do anything about it. He was very involved in his own life and in his own addictions. When the story of Ryan White, a young hemophiliac in Indiana who contracted the disease via a blood transfusion and was ostracized in his community because of it, hit the airwaves, though, he was moved to contact Ryan and his family. It was a wake up call to get his own life together, but he ignored the call and continued on his own self-destructive path. A few years later and months after Ryan's death, John went to rehab and dealt with his addictions.

He started working in different charitable organizations that reached out to patients with AIDS. He talks about how he used to work with Project Open Hand in Atlanta, Georgia (one of his American homes). There was something about volunteering that reminded me of the strangers I had met while in treatment. To the people we were visiting, I wasn't a celebrity. Some must have recognized me, and I do remember a few startled looks as I walked through the door with a hot meal. But to most, I was just a friendly face, coming for a brief social interaction, offering a meal and what little comfort came with it. ... In volunteering for Project Open Hand, John and I were making a small difference. But I wanted to do more. I had to do more. People were dying. People like me - gay men, addicts or those in recovery, my friends, and my friends' friends. It was an atrocity, and I wasn't going to sit idle any longer."

The seeds for the Elton John Aids Foundation were planted then and he talks about the early days of the foundation, the people involved and how it still operates on, basically, a skeleton crew. The impetus of the foundation is to funnel the funds to other organizations around the globe who are making an impact in the fight against AIDS. The biggest problem in the fight is not a lack of money or medical research, or drugs, but a lack of compassion for those in communities most affected by AIDS: "Even after all these years HIV/AIDS remains a disease of the marginalized, of the poor, of the dispossessed." Programs that could help prevent the spread of AIDS, clean needle programs for IV drug users, condom distribution, etc., are often frowned upon for "moral" reasons by conservative groups. Some countries still outlaw homosexuality making it impossible for someone to come forward and get tested, let alone treated, for the disease. Manufacturers of drugs that could allow HIV/AIDS patients to live normal, healthy lives charge such an exorbitant cost that the very people who need them can't afford them. "I'm not saying that drug companies shouldn't earn a profit. They wouldn't exist if they couldn't earn a profit. They wouldn't exist if they couldn't make money, and we very much need them to exist. The question is, does their profit on lifesaving drugs have to be so high that it prevents them from saving lives as intended?" Where's the compassion?

John backs up his "love is the cure" thesis with statistics from around the world. There are incidents of governments blocking treatment and misinforming their population. He points fingers at governments and at religious organizations who do more to make the problem worse than better with their moral judgments and propaganda. At the same time, though, he does make a great point to emphasize the good work being done by those very same organizations. Help sometimes comes from the least likely of places. John considered President George W. Bush to be incredibly homophobic, but it was that very president who started PEPFAR (President's Emergency Plan for Aids Relief). He cites some pretty incredible statistics because of PEPFAR that "... without question, saved millions of lives."

The beginning of the book is a bit autobiographical, but after he gets done confirming what a selfish jerk he was then (the word he used to describe himself is a bit harsher than my own), he goes on to not only talk about his own charitable work but a lot of really great charitable organizations around the world who are doing great work for AIDS patients. So, at the end of the day, it's a mixed bag of a lot of progress mixed with a lot of backwards thinking that's hindering that progress. Certainly not a "feel good" book and not an easy read - some of the statistics are pretty appalling. Then again, a lot of the stories about the people, famous or not, and organizations who are making great strides in their communities in the fight is also pretty uplifting.

"The Elton John AIDS Foundation has funded hundreds of projects. Each one operates a bit differently. Each does different work for different populations. But every project we fund has one thing in common: it is committed to a compassionate response and to fighting the stigma that spreads HIV/AIDS. The organizations target their work to the most marginalized populations, those who most need the services but are least likely to get them. They advocate against policies that promote discrimination. They shine a light on the taboo subjects that nobody wants to talk about but that have everything to do with this horrible disease. Most of all they treat each person in a holistic way. ... So many people with the virus are also poor and vulnerable. They often need shelter, food, mental health services, employment opportunities, and people to care for and support them. They need critical help at critical moments to ensure their disease doesn't come to define, or end, their lives. ... Whether you are the richest man alive or you have absolutely nothing, you deserve to be treated with dignity and compassion. That is the insight that inspires the work of my foundation. And that, I have come to believe, is how we will end AIDS."

Excellent review of Love is the Cure I did not know about Elton John's AID's foundation and so it was good to read about it

Wonderful review!

You should post it. There's only one up.

>108 baswood: Either did I baswood.

>109 mkboylan: Thanks Merrikay.

Nice review of Love is the Cure, Avid. I was wondering if the book mentioned Liz Taylor. I know that they became friends, and I believe they did some charitable work together regarding HIV/AIDS.

Yes. Quite a bit. She's quite a hero of his. XD

Interesting review Avid. He's alright really our Reg!

Thanks Polaris. Reg?!?!
And yes, he is. :)

I spent a lot of time with his double Yellow Brick Road album when I was a kid too. We're old friends. ;)

Reg Dwight.

Wonderful review, sounds like a great book about touchy stuff. And it doesn't hurt that I love Elton John! ;)

>104 avidmom:, Perhaps he should have co-authored with you. It seems the funniest parts were those you made up in your review! :)

> 116 Aha! Why didn't I know that already?

> 117 Yep. He's very passionate about his subject - and smart.

>118 fannyprice: LOL! It is a good book, though, even if I didn't write any of it. ;)

Stolen from my son's FB page ....

Well if its on fb then omg lol and I'm sharing.

It took me a minute to figure out what the pun was there. :)

The Minor Adjustment Beauty Salon by Alexander McCall Smith

I love The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series and have for quite a while. These are my "go to" books for, what one friend of mine calls "a gentle read." Reading one of these books is, for me, like sitting somewhere very peaceful and watching the world go by.

In this latest installment, Mma Ramotswe's assistant, Mma Makutsi, is expecting her first child but for some reason refuses to talk to Mma Ramotswe about her impending maternity leave. The cases brought to the agency are the questionable identification of a late uncle's nephew, who stands to inherit his uncle's farm. The problem is the lawyer doubts that the nephew is who he says he is. A friend of Mma Ramotswe's, the owner of the Minor Adjustment Beauty Salon, is the victim of someone's vicious rumour campaign that is scaring off all her potential customers. Mma Ramotswe's husband, Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, is trying to be a more "modern" husband.

What I love about these books are the characters and McCall Smith's home spun philosophical and humorous writing so I'll just list some passages that stood out for me while reading:

On beauty:

And beauty, she reminded herself, was both an inside and an outside quality. You could be very glamorous and beautiful on the outside, but if inside you were filled with human faults - jealousy, spite, and the like - then no amount of exterior beauty would make up for that. Perhaps there was some sort of lemon juice for inside beauty .... And even as she thought of it, she realised what it was: love and kindness. Love was the lemon juice that cleansed and kindness was the aloe that healed.

On Americans:

And to think that she and Mma Makutsi ahd actually met him, had sat with him drinking tea - a man who had written a book had sat talking to them and had been so courteous in his manner. That was what Americans were really like, she reflected. Not some of the Americans you saw on the cinema screens who were always shouting at people and chasing one another in cars - not those Americans, but the Americans like Clovis Andersen, who listened politely and spoke without shouting.

On suffering:

As a child she had believed that wrongs would always be righted, that somehow the world would not let the innocent suffer, but now she realised that this was not true. Old oppressors were replaced by new ones, from another distant place or from right next door. Old lies were replaced by new ones, backed up by old threats. There had been so much suffering in Africa, and nobody ahd done a great deal to stop it. In some places the suffering continued: through wars fought by child soldiers, crying behind their guns; through famine and disease, quick to take root in the shanty towns that perched on the edge of plenty. People waited for intervention, for rescue, but it never came - or only rarely, and then too late. Contemplating this vast human suffering, you might be tempted to shrug your shoulders, but you could not. You had to try, thought Mma Ramotswe - you had to try to sort things out for others and point them in the direction of the truth that they were so anxious to find.

Between all of Mma Ramotswe's internal philosophizing on life and people, she is also very practical.

He reached out to touch her gently on the arm. "You are the greatest detective in the history of Botswana," he said. "I know that. The whole world knows that."

She thanked him. It was now time for her to go into the kitchen and prepare the meal. You could be a great detective, but you still had to cook supper.

I especially enjoyed the quotations as I have not read Smith.

I don't even like the cozy mystery genre at all and I like the series. And, coincidentally, I just finished The Minor Adjustment Beauty Salon as well.

Thanks merrikay. I wrote those there for safekeeping. Every time I read one of his books, there's always a few passages that strike me as really funny or moving. Somehow he manages to hit on this absolute perfect balance of funny/moving/mundane and entertaining in his writing.

>125 RidgewayGirl: I don't even like the cozy mystery genre at all
Me neither, really, Ridgeway. I've read one or two in that genre, but they've never kept my attention.

Aha ... another fan! This particular book seemed focused, more than usual on Mma Ramotswe and her assistant than the cases at hand. I was a little disappointed because we usually get to read about the very end of the cases - when the bad guys are confronted & whatnot, - but here we didn't. It's a minor complaint.

Charlie Bartlett

Wealthy Charlie Bartlett has been kicked out of private school - again. His mother decides to send Charlie to public school. Public school proves to be a challenge. Charlie, with his attache case and private school blazer, is an easy mark for the school's resident bully. (Hey, at least he had the sense to take the bus and not the chauffeured limo to school!) Ever the entrepreneur, Charlie works out a business deal with Murphy, the bully. With the help of Murphy standing guard and counting the money, Charlie becomes the high school's resident counselor/pill pushing "psychiatrist" operating out of the boys' bathroom. He's incredibly good at what he does and Charlie goes from bully bait to most popular guy on campus. While Charlie is giving counseling sessions in the john, we are introduced to the unhappy, driven to drink school principal (Robert Downey Jr.), his daughter Susan (Kate Dennings) who Charlie falls for, and Charlie's kindhearted but dingy mother, beautifully played by Hope Davis. Charlie is an incredibly likeable character, as are most of the characters here, despite their flaws - or maybe even because of them.

This movie could have been nothing but another goofy teen comedy, but it's not. Or it could have been an overwrought film about teenage angst. It's not that either. Charlie Bartlett comes somewhere in the middle, a smart, dark but lighthearted "dramadey."

One of my faves.

Movie trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_DVwLq0wn0

That sounds good, I want to watch! Plus come on, Robert Downey Jr!

128 Amen

>128 .Monkey.: & 129 Yes. Robert Downey Jr. XD

I DVR'd this a few weeks ago and finally got around to watching it today. I was reluctant to watch at first; true crime stuff creeps me out and I was afraid the beginning would be all gory murder and ... yuck, yuck, yuck. I had nothing to worry about; there is a bit of violent gore but it's kept to the absolute bare minimum because that's not the story here. The story is about Capote, pure and simple. The film focuses on his decision to write the book In Cold Blood, about the absolutely senseless murders of a farm family in the middle of nowhere, Kansas, thereby creating a new genre, the "nonfiction novel." Mostly "Capote" focuses on the ambiguous relationship he forged with the two men guilty of the murders so he could get the information for the book.

I think the best word I can come up with for the movie is "spellbinding." For a movie I wasn't even sure I wanted to see at all, I sure did find myself absolutely hooked. Philip Seymour Hoffman's performance is brilliant and hypnotic.

Last year I saw "The Master" where Hoffman played a very, very macho character and here he is the absolute opposite. Such a great actor. *sniff* This role won Hoffman the Oscar and the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Leading Role. Easy to see why.

"Spellbinding", "brilliant and hypnotic" describes the movie and Phillip Seymour Hoffman's performance exactly. What a loss.

I've heard really good things about it, will have to watch sometime. And yeah, really sad what drugs wind up doing to people. :(

Thanks Vivienne. Comparing "The Master" & "Capote" really reveals his range.

Definitely watch it if you get a chance, PolymathicMonkey. Very interesting movie. The way they did things back then (a mere 50 years ago) is a little shocking too (Capote would go and just sit and talk with this guy in his prison cell!)

Sadly, we lost someone in my extended family just a few weeks ago and it was probably (no official word yet) an indirect result of drug abuse/alcohol. Very sad.

So sad. What a loss. and what a waste.

The first movie I saw with Hoffman was Owning Mahoney in which he played a bank manager who gets into trouble gambling - fabulous acting.

>136 mkboylan: :( Yep.

>137 VivienneR: I've never heard of that one, Vivienne. I'll keep my eye out for it.

A fine actor indeed - and I didn't even see 'Capote' or 'The Master' (though I wanted to see both when they came out...) - will hopefully see both those films and 'Owning Mahoney' which I also had not heard of before.

Avid have you read Capote's In Cold Blood by the way? I haven't yet, but wondered in case you had how you think it works with watching the film before it, or after it, or no matter?

No, Polaris, I haven't read In Cold Blood, but am very interested in reading it after watching the film (and reading PolymathicMonkey's review on her thread). There are some excerpts from the book read in the movie and it seems to be very well (even beautifully) written. But, I'd have to work up the courage to do so given the subject matter. I'm a big chicken and coming from that part of the country where the murders took place isn't helping any!

It's a rare thing for me to buy a movie sight unseen (usually rent them first) but this one looked really good and I had, of course, heard the buzz about it. I found it on sale at the store I was at on Saturday. I hemmed and hawed over it (we don't need any more movies around here!) so much that I called my movie-loving son and asked him what to do. He said "Oh, that's the one with Forrest Whitaker and Oprah and Lenny Kravitz!" Well, that did it. I love Lenny Kravitz (he has a small role in the movie) and everyone here seemed interested in seeing it so, hey, decision made. And, of course, I do love American history! Win. Win. :)



"The Butler" starts on a cotton plantation in 1926 Macon, Georgia, where young Cecil Gaines lives with his mother and father. After he is effectively orphaned, the plantation's old mistress takes him into the house with her and he is trained to serve. Cecil grows up and moves off the plantation to find employment. While serving in a prestigious hotel in D.C. he is spotted by the man who staffs the White House and is offered a position. Cecil starts his career as a White House butler during the Eisenhower administration. The film covers most (but by no means all) of the major moments in history, especially those important to the American Civil Rights movement, starting from the Eisenhower administration and ending with the election of Barack Obama. Cecil's oldest and very politically-minded oldest son, Louis, becomes a Freedom Rider. Cecil can't see eye-to-eye with Louis. Louis seems ashamed of his father's role as a servant, a role Louis sees as holding the cause of black equality back; a role his father is proud to have.

Two stories are being told simultaneously here: the conflicts in the Gaines' family and the huger conflict of the American Civil Rights era and how the White House and the Gaines' house are affected. There's a Forrest Gump-y feel to the flick as real-life historical events are shown in the film with the accompanying real TV footage. My oldest son was deeply angered about the things he saw: the KKK attacking Freedom Rider bus; the dogs and the firehoses turned on the marchers, etc.. I'm sure he had read about those things in his history books, but seeing them on film - happening to a character(s) you've come to care about, I suppose, obviously had more of an impact. What the film brought to my attention was the different attitudes towards the Civil Rights movement between father and son; the oldest who has come to accept the status quo as a means to survive well in the world and the youngest who refuses to accept it.

My only complaints of the film are that there were some big moments in the story that, IMO, deserved more time than what they were given. Cecil's change of heart towards Louis seems to happen almost instantly. Why didn't we get to see Louis's first conversation with Barack Obama? (Also, as a kid of the 80's, I simply could not, for the life of me, buy John Cusack as Richard Nixon. I tried but it just seemed funny to me.)

If the ending would have been stronger, I would have rated the whole movie a little higher. Still, I would not hesitate in recommending this one.

8/10 Stars

ETA: "You and I Ain't Nothin No More" (Gladys Knight & Lenny Kravitz)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnMWJ9h7UnQ

Some articles related to "The Butler"

Interview with the REAL butler the movie is based on: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/10451522/The-Butler-the-real-White-House...

"The Butler" fact check: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/08/16/the-butler-fact-check-how-true-...

That's a nice movie review, Avid. I have not yet seen it. I'll keep an eye out for it.

I always thought that In Cold Blood said far more about Capote than the actual murderers. After watching Hoffman's performance in Capote I was convinced of it.

>144 SassyLassy: How so? The movie is about him, not the murders, so I'm not really understanding the relation there...

> Thanks, Nana. Do keep your eye out for it. It's a good one.

> 144 & 145 PolymathicMonkey, I think once you watch the film (I'm assuming you haven't yet), Sassy's comment will make perfect sense to you. Made sense to me.

I have starred your thread. Your reviews are so well-written and I like all the movie suggestions as well. Looking forward to following your reading journey this year. I've read a couple "rock star" biographies in the past year so am adding the Billy Joel bio to my wish list. And the Elton John book looks interesting as well with its focus on his charity.

Thanks so much witchyrichy! XD
What rock star bios did you read last year?

I read Bruce by Peter A. Carlin and Waging Heavy Peace, Neil Young's autobiography. The latter was so honestly written that I felt as though I was in the room with Young while he was writing it.

Carlin's biography was excellent, perhaps a little heavy on musical details such as which songs went on which albums and so forth. But he also showed Springsteen to be such a kind person, almost the boy next store. At one point, he's having cereal at the kitchen table and you can imagine sitting next to him chatting about what's going on in town. His work ethic is impressive as well.

I did a bit more browsing of your thread and have added No, I Don't Want To Join A Book Club to my TBR list for when I need a fun, light read.

> Oh, I'll have to put those on the WL! The latter was so honestly written that I felt as though I was in the room with Young while he was writing it. Buddy Guy's autobiography When I Left Home felt like that. This is why I love autobiographies so much more than biographies; you come away feeling like you know that person (at least a little bit). Clapton sticks with me - not the details of is life, but his general humility.

No, I Don't Want to Join a Book Club was a lot of fun!

Well, I've just added two more autobiographies to my TBR list! I'm currently reading Dearie: The Remarkable Life of Julia Child and loving it. She's a rock star in her own right. Once I get to the early 50s, I'm going to read As Always Julia, the collection of her letters with Avis DeVoto, along with it to include her voice. But the biography is so lively, it captures Child so well.

>151 witchyrichy: Julia Child certainly was a rock star! I liked the movie "Julie and Julia" (love that scene with the onions!) & remember watching her cooking show with my grandma when I was little. IMO, whether or not a biography is good or not really comes down to the author. I've read both really good ones & some so-so ones. It's always so nice to, like you say, have that person's own voice!

Ooh I love that!! So true, and so cute!

Ditto what Monkey said about 153.

>Thanks Monkey& Rebecca. I couldn't resist the sentiment or the cuteness. XD

Putting this here for safekeeping. Jeri Westerson is a "local" author & we own the first in this series. I read the first one years ago when it first was published and remember it fondly as a fun read. Smart too. I promised myself to read the entire series soon ....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_d3x4HkagA

Catching up from way way back. Loved your reviews of the Billy Joel and Elton John autobiographies. Joel's history in your review was fascinating. I always liked his older angier stuff (Captain Jack and the like) and wonder where that fits in his development.

The list of topics covered the history of chocolate is just wonderful.

Thanks Dan!

I always liked his older angier stuff (Captain Jack and the like) and wonder where that fits in his development.
Me too. As a fan, I always felt that I had the "real" Billy Joel on my "Songs in the Attic" album with "Captain Jack" and "Miami 2017, etc." More rock-star-ish than contemporary pop star-ish stuff.

... (Captain Jack and the like) and wonder where that fits in his development.
Joel had a following in Philadelphia. A rock station there held a contest and Joel played "Captain Jack" for the contest winners which was broadcast live. The Philadelphia station started getting requests for the live version of the song and then it spread to New York and then "People began to talk about it." Walter Yetnikoff, an executive at Columbia, was invited to some big party hosted by one of Clive Davis's friends: Everyone was singing something about 'Captain Jack will get you high, Captain Jack will get you high.' Who the hell was Captain Jack?" It was "... a pivotal moment in Joel's career."

"Captain Jack" has always been one of my faves.

Between all the typical grunt work I was doing around here this weekend, I was able to catch up on some classic DVR'd movies:


This was a good court room drama with Jimmy Stewart. When Lt. Manion of the U.S. Army ends up in jail for the murder of the local bar-owner who allegedly beat and raped his flirtatious wife, he calls on semi-retired lawyer Paul Biegler to defend him. It's no secret Manion killed the man, so Biegler sets out to prove that Lt. Manion was acting on "irresistible impulse." Whether or not the court will buy a psychological defense is the question. Biegler has a tough job ahead of him, Lt. Manion's wife is a bit of a flirt so there's a question of whether she was really attacked (yep, there's a "blame the victim" mentality here); Lt. Manion does have a bit of a temper problem; and even the characters on the periphery of the case aren't 100% honest. You get the feeling here that nobody's being too truthful. By the time the movie gets to the actual courtroom drama, you feel like you have a pretty good knowledge of all the characters & you're just waiting for the twist to come (which it does). Also, there's a lot of levity throughout that makes it fun to watch. (I especially loved Eve Arden as Stewart's unpaid secretary.) Not my favorite Jimmy Stewart movie, and it probably won't make it on my list of "favorite" movies, but glad I saw it. The dramatic parts were dramatic; the fun parts were fun.

The movie earned 7 Oscar nominations (no wins there), it did win a Golden Globe for Best Picture & won Lee Remick another for Best Actress (1960)

Awards: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0052561/awards?ref_=tt_awd

**********


I had had this one on the DVR for so long I almost deleted it ... and then I remembered it was the one where Gene Kelly dances with Jerry (of Tom & Jerry fame)! Clarence (Frank Sinatra) & Joe (Gene Kelly) have been given 4 days leave from ship after being awarded the Silver Star for bravery. They both head to Hollywood. Joe saved Clarence's life & now Clarence tells Joe that he owes him: "What are you crazy?" says Joe. "Well, what's the use of having your life saved if you can't have any fun with it?" All terribly shy Clarence wants is for lady's man Joe help him get a girl. Joe agrees, as long as it will get Clarence off his back. But then they fall for the same girl. Absolutely nothing here but a hokey romantic comedy where everyone sails off into the sunset to live happily ever after at the end. It's one of those Kelly movies where the movie is just a great excuse for him to entertain us with his imaginative dance scenes. For me, nothing but a wonderful escape movie. A must for Gene Kelly fans.

Kelly earned the Oscar nomination for Best Actor & George Stoll an Oscar win for Best Music, Scoring of a Musical Picture.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0037514/awards?ref_=tt_awd

One of my favorite Kelly scenes:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CdDOBbBdYs

And here's an interesting piece of trivia, character actor Dean Stockwell had his start here: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001777/?ref_=tt_cl_t2
***************************************************

Two great movies

I hadn't seen this movie in years but it was always a favorite around here when my kids were little. It was a Christmas present from them to me last year and we finally took it out of its shrink-wrap last night and plugged it in. I had forgotten how just amazingly awesome this movie is! An old abandoned toaster, radio (Jon Lovitz), lamp, electric blanket and vacuum cleaner (played by Thurl Ravenscroft of Tony the Tiger & "You're A Mean One Mr. Grinch" fame) set out, after years of waiting, to find their Master. Watching it with my nearly-completely grown kids now was a different experience than watching it with them then.... not sure which was better. We probably had more fun watching it together now!

I can't give it a review to do it justice, so I'll just quote my youngest who took to his FB page and wrote:

"We watched The Brave Little Toaster last night. That sh** is my jam, it made me feel warm inside. I was glowing afterwards.
Toast."

>161 baswood: They certainly are, baswood! There is no such thing as a "bad" Gene Kelly or Jimmy Stewart movie. XD

All good movie choices, Avid. I am enjoying your reviews.

Thanks Nana! I find my mental capacity for movies is exceeding my mental capacity for books these days.

Nice movies! I've been shirking on my classics recently, Hubs hasn't been on his game, must remedy soon! :P

>Thanks Monkey! I understand now what you said about Toy Story borrowing heavily from "Brave Little Toaster." My problem with movie watching 'round here is finding quality time with the TV. Thank God for DVR's and the "Stop" & "Resume Play" button.

Identity crisis over.

>168 avidmom: Ha! I know more than a few mombies...

Just wanted to send you a delayed thanks for post #159. Great story.

Kidzdoc, I would think in your line of work you come in contact with way more than your fair share of "Mombies." Nothin' makes you more "zombie-like" than a sick kid!

Your welcome Dan. I had no idea that particular song was so important.

"The Slender Thread."

The beauty of this quiet, slow-moving movie is its powerful simplicity. Suicidal Inga (Anne Bancroft) calls a Crisis Hotline where college student Alan Newell (Sidney Poitier) answers the phone. Alan, having been left alone in the normally quiet Crisis Center by the psychiatrist in charge (Telly Savalas), feels shaky and unprepared to handle such a crisis. Sure, he's been trained for such a time as this, but training is one thing, reality is another. The focus on Alan and Inga's conversation, the precarious connection that may save Inga, makes for tense drama. There's a suspense element here as well as we're fed pieces of the puzzle of events in Inga's life that lead her to her fateful decision.

My only complaint is Pollack's incongruent addition of some "artsy" film moments in that seemed totally out of place.

Definitely a classic, but I wonder why I'd never heard of it till now.

*******************
The movie was based on a Life Magazine article of the same name written by Shana Alexander that appeared in the May 29, 1964 issue.

Enjoying your film reviews Avid. "The Slender Thread" is one that I've not heard of either, but it does sound good. Love Sidney Poitier and Anne Bancroft too. Just watched that Gene Kelly clip with the missus - she's a big Gene Kelly fan - which is a great scene. Thanks for sharing!

Thanks Polaris! I would highly recommend "The Slender Thread." The "Mexican Hat Dance" scene is just one of my favorites from the movie. I read Kelly's biography and remember reading something about how Sharon McManus (the little girl) got to do the scene with him, but I can't remember now what the story was ..... :(
I think she was one of his dance students.

Today is John Steinbeck's birthday!

http://www.biography.com/people/john-steinbeck-9493358

Oh think I'll look for the movie The Slender Thread. I love movies.

>177 mkboylan: Me too, Merrikay! I've coined a new phrase around here: "Movie Therapy."

Stolen from "Doctor Who and the T.A.R.D.I.S." FB page ... (shhhh!!!)

>178 avidmom: - Like Rent Two Films and Let's Talk in the Morning? I used a lot of films when I still had a psychotherapy practice as well as for teaching. My abnormal psych teacher also used them lots - she had a list by diagnosis. It was great fun, lights up the whole brain and easy to remember.

Wow! A list (of films) by diagnosis? Which films did she/you use? And why?

First up this weekend:


Once upon a time, I liked this movie enough to buy it and add it to my collection. I watched it over the weekend. And while I still like Elizabethtown, I found I did not like it as much as I did previously. The movie is still the same, but I have changed. Stuff that didn't bother me before bothers me now.

Drew Baylor is having the worse day of his life. He's been fired from his job as a shoe designer; Drew's latest shoe design has lost the company a billion dollars. Drew tells everyone there that he's "fine" but he's not really. Drew goes home to kill himself. But, during his innovative death-by-exercise-bike arranged suicide his sister calls informing him that their dad has died in Kentucky. Drew needs to go back and take care of things. So he does. On the plane ride from Oregon to Kentucky (where he is the only passenger, I've been on flights like that too!) to Louisville, he meets Claire, the airline stewardess. Once in Elizabethtown Drew meets his dad's side of the family, people he hardly knows but who seem to know him pretty well and who think he's the epitome of success. So, while Drew comes to terms with small-town life and his close knit Southern family, he also has to come to grips with the loss of his father - and the possible loss or gain of Claire. The romance between Drew and Claire is one of those "will they/won't they?" kind of deals.

I like this movie for much of the same reasons I did before. I completely related to Drew on many levels. He dealt with the loss of his father much the same way I did mine at that age at first and his dad's small town loving and close-knit family reminded me of my own family (on both sides really). Even the small-town-ness of Elizabethtown was very familiar to me having come from a very similar place. Most of the movie is light-hearted fun and it deals with a pretty dark time in someone's life with a lot of humour. Probably my favorite thing about Elizabethtown is the incredible soundtrack. Elizabethtown has a lot going for it. This time around though, after having not watched this one for a few years, was that I found the character of Claire too cloying. There are also some issues with timing - as in how in the world does Claire find the time to do some of the stuff she does.

Still, I like Elizabethtown. It reminds me of home, I guess. And I still love the humour and the music.

I wonder if Chuck and Cindy are still together. ;)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75TKB0299b0

>183 avidmom: and isn't that more frustrating?? What a great cartoon.

I'm sure someone has asked you this before, but how do you find all those great cartoons, etd?

>184 mkboylan: I had to snag that one! It goes along with the book I'm nearly done reading An Easy Burden by Andrew Young ......

>185 rebeccanyc: *looks over shoulder* I, um, borrow them from FB - that particular one was from "Archaeology Rocks" FB page that a relative of mine shared.

Quite a few weeks ago my son and I watched this classic starring Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. The movie pits Tracy & Hepburn against each other in court. A mistreated & cheated on housewife attempts to murder her husband. Tracy, as assistant D.A., ends up prosecuting the woman in court and Hepburn passionately defends her. As the two battle it out in the courtroom as defender and prosecutor, they battle it out at home over equality of the sexes. Definitely classic Hepburn & Tracy on the top of their game with some funny scenes. An interesting enough movie worth checking out, but, with the exception of Tracy & Hepburn, I find nothing really to rave about.

*********************************



On a happy note, though, after watching "Adam's Rib," my son did become fans of Hepburn & Tracy. So, last Sunday night instead of watching the Academy Awards (we have not yet seen any of the nominated movies), my son and I watched this. When he found out the movie starred Tracy & Hepburn he was in. I had already seen this one a few years ago and liked it well enough but I appreciated it more this time around for its historical context, which I really wasn't aware of the first time I saw it. The plot is simple enough: a young girl brings her intended home (Poitier) to meet her liberal parents (Tracy & Hepburn). It may seem a bit dated now, but at the time this film was released (1967) interracial marriages were illegal in 14 states and it was a pretty tumultuous time in the country with, according to Andrew Young in An Easy Burden, there were, in the urban areas of the U.S. "... twenty-one major riots in 1966 and another seventy-five riots in 1967." People were taking their frustrations over discrimination, poverty and the Vietnam war to the streets, but you couldn't tell that from this movie; everyone here is so pleasant and classy. Of course, when you have Tracy/Hepburn and Sidney Poitier what else would you get but excellence and class all around?

The trivia of this movie is just as interesting as the movie itself. Theatres were asked to cut a scene after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.; Katharine Hepburn's on-screen daughter was played by her real-life niece; and the last scene in the movie where Spencer Tracy gives a somewhat lengthy and impassioned speech marked his last time on screen. He died 17 days after the movie was completed. It was nominated for Best Picture and earned both Spencer Tracy (posthumously) and Katharine Hepburn nominations for Best Actor/Actress awards. Even though Hepburn won the Best Actress award, she never could bring herself to watch the completed film.

Awards: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0061735/awards?ref_=tt_awd

Trivia: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0061735/trivia?ref_=tt_trv_trv

Interesting to compare the movie >187 avidmom: with the historical events at the time.

>187 avidmom: two great movies.. Enjoyed your reviews.

Thanks baswood & Nana. I'm beginning to love these old classic movies more and more!

April 3, 1968
From left to right: Andrew Young, Ralph David Abernathy, Martin Luther King, Jr. & Bernard Lee arrive in Memphis, Tennessee.

>191 avidmom: Nice photo; I haven't seen that one before. 4/3/68 was the last full day of MLK's life, I believe, as he was assassinated in Memphis the following afternoon.

>192 kidzdoc: Thanks. And yes, you're right, King was shot and killed the next day. Young's book has quite a few pictures in it, but this one is not included in the collection. There are also none of those iconic pics. taken right after MLK's assassination at the Lorraine Motel either. I think those memories are still too painful for Young. Incredibly sad.

Great photo. By pure coincidence I happened only yesterday to buy a copy of Hampton Sides' Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King Jr. and The International Hunt for his Assassin.

Great photo, and the date gave me pause until I read Darryl's post. 1968 was quite a year.

>194 Polaris-: Sounds like an interesting book.

>195 rebeccanyc: 1968 was quite a year; but not in a good way :(

>196 avidmom: That's what I meant. But I guess you knew that.

>197 rebeccanyc: Yep! In all fairness to 1968, I'm sure the year was not all bad!

>198 avidmom: it wasn't all bad for me. My son was born that year. But most of the rest of it was terribly upsetting.

>191 avidmom: - what a photo. I'm looking forward to your comments on An Easy Burden. Also interesting trivia on Guess Who's Coming to Dinner.

>199 NanaCC: My mother said it was the death of Robert Kennedy that summer that did her in.

>200 dchaikin: Thanks Dan! I'll have to work up a review soon ..... pesky RL keeps getting in the way.

>201 avidmom: I can understand your mother's feelings. Voting age back then was 21, and it was the first election in which I was eligible to vote. I was so excited by Robert Kennedy's campaign, and then so disheartened by his assassination that I didn't vote.

>202 NanaCC: My mother, once really enthusiastic about politics, seemed to give up entirely then too.

"I want young men and young women who are not alive today but who will come into this world, with new privileges and new opportunities, I want them to know and see that these new privileges and opportunities did not come without somebody suffering and sacrificing for them.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.
************************************************************************************

“In the profoundest of terms, my work with Martin gave my life a purpose and sustenance I could have hardly dreamed of when Jean and I left New York to return to the South in 1961. He left his mark on me, both in indelible memories and in the spiritual and practical lessons of our trials and triumphs. It is by the quality of those days that I have come to measure my own continuing journey.”


An Easy Burden: The Civil Rights Movement and the Transformation of America by Andrew Young

This book starts out simply as Andrew Young’s autobiography. As the book goes on, Young’s personal story takes a back seat to the autobiography of the Civil Rights Movement. The usual autobiographical stuff is here in the first half of the book: what home was like (his father ran his dental practice from home; his mother was a school teacher); what the neighborhood in New Orleans was like; what grade school and high school was like. Young writes in such minute detail about these experiences, especially the high behavioral and academic expectations, that I found it, at first, a little too self-absorbed – even for an autobiography! Why, I thought, do I need to know all of this? It's here he describes W.E. DuBois’ philosophy of “the talented tenth”* that his schools adopted and why learning how to behave “properly” in the white man’s world (especially in the South) was so important: “Very early I learned to handle police with caution and self-control. … the least little dispute could instantly explode into a police matter if a black person was assertive. Such explosions often ended in tragedy, for blacks were completely helpless before the whims and unlimited authority of the police….” Young’s middle class upbringing really turned out to serve him well when he found himself involved with the Civil Rights Movement: “Had I failed to come to terms with my identity as a middle-class black person, I would never have accomplished very much in the civil rights movement or won elective office. We could not have persuaded the white establishment to accept social change if we hadn’t first worked on persuading the black establishment. Middle-class blacks achieved within the system of segregation and were legitimately concerned about any changes that integration could bring.”

Young , having rebelled against his parents’ plans for him to become a dentist like his father, followed his calling into the ministry and became an ordained minister in the Congregationalist Church. Andrew’s eyes would be opened when he was sent to minister at a church in Thomasville, Georgia. While there, he saw what a negative impact segregation had. The system of segregation and racial oppression left many of the most educated and talented men in the small Southern towns with no choice but to do “… menial work when he might have been an outstanding scientist, mathematician, researcher, or poet. …. It was as if the most gifted young blacks were the ones who suffered the most. They were the ones who felt most keenly the denials of equal opportunity. The valedictorians who could not escape northward were the ones who committed suicide, either in one tragic moment, or slowly throughout their despairing years.” After a few very effective years in Thomasville as a minister/community organizer, Young was offered the position of associate director for the Youth Department in the National Council of Churches in New York. He reluctantly left his congregation in Thomasville and settled in New York. He liked his life in New York but when Young, his family, and a few friends watched “The Nashville Sit-In Story,” the story of how four students “… decided to simply to sit at a Woolworth’s lunch counter” and sit-ins had snowballed from there, Young and his wife knew the time had come for them to go home to the South and work in the movement. One of his connections at the National Council of Churches in Christ asked Young to support the Highlander Folks School in Tennessee. Young was very enthusiastic about the Highlander School and, after a visit there, wrote a letter to Martin Luther King “… to tell him I wished to work in the South with the movement, and ask his advice as to where I might best fit in….. “ Young found himself fielding two job offers soon after: one to join the Highlander staff full time, and another from Martin Luther King “… to come to Atlanta and work for his newly created Southern Christian Leadership Conference.” For quite a few reasons Young declined King’s offer. He didn’t feel qualified; he wanted to work with young people; he knew SCLC would take up all of his time and he wanted to write about the movement: “to … have the opportunity to record it as it was unfolding. I knew that working directly with SCLC would demand all of my time and energy, leaving none left for writing.” So, Young decided to move to Tennessee and work at the Highlander Folk School. Everything seemed to be going according to plan. And then the school, due to some legal problems, was closed. “My proposal that the UCC board sponsor the citizenship programs* was approved: the Field Foundation agreed to the new arrangement, and it was also decided that the program would relocate itself administratively to the offices of Martin King’s SCLC in Atlanta. So, despite my best efforts to avoid it, I found myself led by the Spirit to Atlanta to work with the famous civil rights leader. …”

It’s here that Young’s own life story seems to dissolve into the pages and the book becomes less Young’s autobiography and more a unique eye-witness account of the Movement as a whole. He does a great job of painting the big picture by putting the Civil Rights Movement in its historical and political context while at the same time creating a great fly-on-the-wall perspective at what was going on in at Atlanta at the SCLC offices. SCLC did not work alone; there were a lot of organizations working across the country in the fight for Civil Rights. As Martin Luther King’s charisma attracted more and more national attention, these organizations were clamoring for MLK to come and help them. Having Martin Luther King speak at your rally, march, etc., was one sure way to lend credibility and draw national media attention. A tremendous amount of work was going on behind the scenes everywhere. The non-violent style of protest, modeled on Gandhi’s non-violent movement in India, was something that required painstaking planning and training. Demonstrations and demonstrators did not just happen: people needed to be trained, logistics needed to be worked out and people needed to be informed of and prepared for the consequences. “The non-violent approach is not emotional, although it is deeply spiritual. It is a rational process that seeks to transform, rather than defeat, the oppressor and the oppressive situation. Any kind of emotional outburst – violence, arrogance, intentional martyrdom – endangers the process of transformation. Emotionalism confirms the prejudices of those that nonviolence aims to transform.” If even one of the demonstrators would react violently when provoked, it could lead to disastrous consequences for the group – and the Movement.

Young also writes about the dynamics of the staff at the SCLC offices in Atlanta. King surrounded himself with men who he knew would have polarizing points of view and Young, with his incredible capacity for tact, diplomacy and negotiation skills, seemed to naturally fall into the role of mediator. While everyone shared the same common goal, there were staunch disagreements on how to achieve those goals. King’s approach was to simply listen to both sides of the argument and make his decision from there. It was Andrew Young who usually facilitated and refereed these debates. Young may not have always been happy about it, but King needed him to fill that role and he did. Despite the ego clashes, arguments, etc., King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference proved to be a united front. They all had two things in common: the love and respect for MLK himself and the goals of the Movement.

By the mid-60s, the Civil Rights Movement achieved some of its major goals: President Johnson signed into law the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Act. Near the end of the decade, SCLC started waging its own war on “War and Poverty.” While things were getting “better” in the South in regards to segregation, people in the ostensibly desegregated North were still facing issues of poverty and racial oppression. The Vietnam War was dividing the country and Martin Luther King took a bold stance against the war. President Johnson was dismayed (to say the least) that MLK would somehow turn on him after he had signed the sweeping Civil Rights Act and Voting Act. It was no secret to the staff of SCLC that J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI was watching their every move, but the activity seemed to ramp up once King came out against the unpopular war. Young asserts his chillingly plausible theory that King wasn’t assassinated because of his fight for racial equality but for his stance against poverty and the Vietnam War. King asserted that money spent on the war could be spent at home on domestic programs to alleviate the plight of the poor. At the time of his murder, King and his SCLC staff were planning the “Poor People’s Campaign,” “… demonstrators would live in Washington in temporary housing we would construct and begin the petitioning of government agencies and Congress for what was, in effect, an economic Bill of Rights.” There was some debate, after the loss of their leader, whether or not to go on with the Campaign but the group felt “… compelled to go ahead with the Poor People’s Campaign in the late spring of 1968, though what we really needed was a long break ….. This was not the time to rest …. We believed that the ulterior motive behind Martin’s murder was the cancellation of the campaign.” Before King’s death, there seemed to be little support for the PPC, but after King’s death, the “Campaign got completely out of hand…. We were deluged with more volunteers than we could handle…. People were pledging to come to Washington, people we hadn’t trained, didn’t really know, and couldn’t necessarily control.” The Campaign was not the success the SCLC was hoping for. “We had to salvage an end to the Poor People’s Campaign and get out of Washington with some degree of dignity.” Only two months after Martin Luther King’s assassination, Robert Kennedy, who, along with his staff, supported the Poor People’s Campaign “… when most national politicians were denouncing us and some black leaders avoided us as if we were a contagious disease” was assassinated. Robert Kennedy’s death proved to be just too much to deal with. “We were all trying to pretend that Martin’s death had not devastated us, but it had. And with the compounding shock and grief of Robert Kennedy’s murder, I couldn’t even pretend anymore.”

Young, of course, bounced back and he ends his memoir with the election of Nixon and his own runs for Congress in the early 70s. Nixon’s election was a devastating blow. “… Humphrey’s razor-thin loss to Richard Nixon meant that we would have to struggle just to hold on to the gains that had been achieved.” Young was asked to run for Congress in the early 70s. His first run was unsuccessful but the second time he won making him “… the first black person to be elected to Congress from Georgia since Reconstruction.” Young went on to be named U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations by Pres. Jimmy Carter ; was elected as mayor of Atlanta twice and co-chaired the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games in the 90’s.

“I am considerably older than I was in 1961, and I hope I’m wiser and certainly much more experienced after having moved through the Congress, the United Nations, the city of Atlanta, and the private sector. I have yet to find a reason to question or doubt the faith that we had in America then. Everything I know now convinces me that the struggle to eliminate racism, war, and poverty is a burden, but in America, with all the freedom and opportunity afforded us under our Constitution, in the most productive society in human history, it is an easy burden if we undertake it together.”

****************************************************************************************

*DuBois "talented tenth" " The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men." from his 1903 essay "The Talented Tenth" http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/the-talented-tenth/

Citizenship Program: "... trained local leaders to return to their communities armed with knowledge of their rights as citizens of the United States." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highlander_Research_and_Education_Center

Nashville Sit-Ins: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OT9gILdTaWo

Sounds like a great and informative read!

(Also, you know you can do half-stars in the image itself, right? Use this gif URL, you just change the number at the end, from 1-10 representing .5-5 stars.)

Excellent review of Andrew Young's book.

>205 .Monkey.: It certainly was - it was like "Civil Rights Movement 101." I didn't realize until now how little I really knew about it.

>206 NanaCC: Thanks Nana. Doris Kearns Goodwin endorses the book on the back cover. ;)

ETA: >205 .Monkey.: Thanks for the tip; I fixed it! XD

By the way, I paid a whole $1 for this book. Best buck I ever spent!

Sounds like a great book!

Great review Avid.

>205 .Monkey.: - so how do you do the stars thing?

Thank you for that comprehensive review of An Easy Burden, absolutely fascinating.

>208 rebeccanyc: Thanks. It was; I'd highly recommend it. Also, there were some parts of the book that were pretty relevant to today's politic climate. I found some answers here I was not expecting to find.

>209 Polaris-: Thanks Polaris!

>210 baswood: Thanks. What an interesting (and stressful!) times the 60s were!

>211 avidmom: What an interesting (and stressful!) times the 60s were!

But a great time to be growing up -- there was a lot of hope that we could make the world better.

>213 rebeccanyc: But a great time to be growing up -- there was a lot of hope that we could make the world better.

I was born too late in the decade. Looking back, it seemed like a "best of times/worst of times" scenario. In Young's book he says that the Civil Right's Movement really took place because of the teenagers (and even younger children - who they couldn't keep away).

>204 avidmom: Fabulous and entertaining review of An Easy Burden, avidmom! I'm not sure how I missed it, having lived in Atlanta since 1997, but it's on my wish list now.

>212 avidmom: I love that quote by James Baldwin.

>215 kidzdoc: Thanks kidzdoc! It seems to have been one of those books that flew in under the radar. There's only 1 other review of it here on LT and 5 reviews on Amazon. Years ago I read Ralph David Abernathy's And The Walls Came Tumbling Down: An Autobiography but I don't remember it giving me the "big picture" perspective as well as Young's did.

>212 avidmom: Me too! I've put him on my "authors to read" list.

>213 rebeccanyc: But a great time to be growing up -- there was a lot of hope that we could make the world better. Totally in agreement with you Rebecca.

>217 baswood:
>213 rebeccanyc:

But a great time to be growing up -- there was a lot of hope that we could make the world better.

Groovy. XD
A lot of really great things came out of the 60s.

Classic Movie Time!


We watched this last Friday night for "movie/pizza" night. Everybody was hooked till the end. Sam Spade is trapped in the middle of a bizarre game of "keep away/scavenger hunt" when a woman comes asking for his gumshoe help in finding her sister. But it's not really her sister she's looking for .... Soon an unsavory cast of characters looking for the same thing invades Spade's office, asking for his help but never giving him the real story. They're all after the same thing, The Maltese Falcon, but what is it? where is it? and who has it? It takes a while for Spade to put it all together. While he's putting the pieces together, Spade is bribed, threatened and double-crossed and he still somehow manages to outsmart 'em all. This is a fun one (some funny moments here, like when Bogart defends himself against Peter Lorre) and a classic, but Casablanca it is not.

Nominated for 3 Oscars in 1942: Best Picture, Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Sydney Greenstreet) and Best Writing Screenplay for John Huston.

Awards: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0033870/awards?ref_=tt_awd

Trailer: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0033870/?ref_=nv_sr_1

***********************************************


Here's the interesting story of why we watched this. There is a commercial for Dove Chocolate going 'round featuring an Audrey Hepburn look-alike that my college kid saw and immediately he said "Who is that?" (not the look-alike but the original version). Well, child of mine, that is IMO, the most gorgeous lady to grace a Hollywood screen, Ms. Audrey Hepburn. And then said kid basically asked "what movies and where can I see more of her?" (He also seemed to really like "Moon River") so, it was a no-brainer to watch this one on Netflix.

I had seen this one before when I was much younger and probably didn't really understand what was going on. I guess you'd classify this as romantic comedy/drama. "Holly Golightly" is a phony, but a" true phony". Holly is out to better herself by not fitting into high society; she IS high society, dawling, and isn't Tiffany's truly marvelous? She lives in a crummy apartment and has next to nothing but she looks and talks the part so well she attracts attention from other high society players. Good thing too since Holly's out to find herself a nice rich husband (for obviously selfish and not-so-obvious unselfish reasons). And then Fred Baby moves in (whose name is really Paul) upstairs. Writer Paul (a.k.a. "Fred Baby") is in similar straits as Holly and the two become friends. Complications arise. Holly's past comes back to haunt her and Paul's presence causes problems. Neither of these things fit into her plans. You see, darling, Holly's a free spirit who doesn't belong to anybody. Even nameless Cat.

I only had two gripes here: Mickey Rooney has a role here as the landlord, which by today's standards, I think, would be considered politically incorrect and offensive. And, truly, darling, if I ever hear the word darling again I think I will loose my Cracker Jacks, darling.

This one earned Audrey Hepburn a nomination of Best Actress in 1962; and a win for "Moon River" as Best Original Song for Henry Mancini.

Awards: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0054698/awards?ref_=tt_awd

Trailer: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0054698/?ref_=nv_sr_1

Movie magic: Audrey Hepburn singing "Moon River" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uirBWk-qd9A

Alright, alright, alriiiiiiight!!!*

My friend came over and we watched this one this afternoon. It is a really fascinating story about one man's quest to literally survive. As he does so he has to overcome his own homophobia and wrangle with a medical/government/legal system that doesn't always work in the best interest of the people it's there to serve. He is compelled to do unethical/illegal things and in doing so does more to help than the very systems set up to help. Those systems do more harm to patients than good and Woodroof is very adamant about pointing it out. You have to admire Woodroof's unmitigated gall and absolute chutzpah.

Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto deserved all those accolades. Jennifer Garner too. Great performances all around. Only one gripe about this one: it is rated R for very, very good reason. Like my friend said "Boy, they don't hold anything back!" Definitely not for the kids. Too bad, really, as I think the younger kids coming up these days should know about the blatant homophobia/AIDS panic of the 80s.

McConaughey & Jared Leto won Oscars for their performances:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0790636/awards?ref_=tt_awd

Trailer: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0790636/?ref_=nv_sr_1

*****************************************************************

Jared Leto is lead singer for "30 Seconds to Mars." Played this song with my kids on Guitar Hero.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yvGCAvOAfM

Love "The Shining" allusions in the video.

* McConaughey never says that in the movie. ;)

>204 avidmom: - excellent reivew!

Thanks Dan!

I needed fiction, something short & sweet - just a little distraction from my non-fiction reads, and a little stress relief (I spent a big chunk of my weekend at a car dealership car shopping). I needed to spend some time with Mr. Steinbeck, my old friend.



The Pearl by John Steinbeck

I had read every story in this book but The Pearl, so I read it. Given my mood, I probably would have been better off re-visiting Mack and the boys on Cannery Row or Danny and the boys living on Tortilla Flat. The Pearl is not what you call a light-hearted story. If I had a word to describe this one I would call it jarring. Everything is all right with the world; then it's worse than ever; then it's better than ever, then it's not. All the beauty of the area and contentment of the characters in their simple lives clash against greed, violence, oppression and discontentment.

When Kino and Juana's baby needs medical attention, they call on the doctor - the one in "town." Knowing there's no profit in it, he refuses to see the baby. In anger and desperation, Kino goes off pearl-hunting (a common practice) and finds not just any pearl, but the Pearl of the World. The Pearl of the World gives birth to hoping and dreaming. With all its potential of a better world for Kino, Juana and Coyotito, the beautiful Pearl proves a treacherous talisman.

Steinbeck's writing is excellent, IMO, as usual. He can really paint a picture with words: The dawn came quickly now, a wash, a glow, a lightness, and then an explosion of fire as the sun arose out of the Gulf. Kino looked down to cover his eyes from the glare. He could hear the pat of the corncakes in the house and the rich smell of them on the cooking plate. The ants were busy on the ground, big black ones with shiny bodies, and little dusty quick ants. Kino watched with the detachment of God while a dusty little ant frantically tried to escape the sand trap an ant lion had dug for him. A thin, timid dog came close and, at a soft word from Kino, curled up, arranged its tail neatly over its feet, and laid its chin delicately on the pile. It was a black dog with yellow-gold spots where its eyebrows should have been. It was a morning like other mornings and yet perfect among mornings." And, typical Steinbeck, he also packs a lot of commentary on society and human nature in this tiny parable.

So, would I recommend this one? Yes. Definitely. But only if you're willing to go on an emotional roller coaster ride.


"John Alan Maxwell's painting for "The Pearl of the World.""


sunrise on the Gulf of Mexico

Love the picture of the sunrise on the Gulf of Mexico.

Hope you have recovered from the rollercoaster. The Pearl sounds great, although maybe not as stress relief.

>223 avidmom: It is beautiful, isn't it? Have never been there myself, although I feel that I have. De ja vu.

>224 dchaikin: No roller coaster relief yet, still making car buying decision.

I think I found my dream car! Here it is:


Yabbadabba doo!!!!!!!!

:)

>227 NanaCC: I settled for something a little more high tech than that ....
The main point is that I finally picked something out! And drove it home.
YAY!

And now I have to pay for it.
Just goes to show you, it's always something!

Whadja buy? Whadja buy?

Robert

>229 Mr.Durick: A new Chevy Sonic Sedan. Loving it so far!

I just googled it. It looks like it could be both fun and sensible. I like small cars; I have a Ford Fiesta.

Robert

>231 Mr.Durick: What really sold me on it was its really high crash-test safety rating since I have fairly new driver here & one coming up behind him. I am a little taken aback by all the high-techiness in it (which someone told me is not that much high-techiness compared to other more $$$$ modern cars) so I have a little bit of homework to do.

I like small cars too; they're easier to park. ;)

Catching up, but really enjoying your readings of Young and Steinbeck. :)

>233 JDHomrighausen: Thanks! So nice to see you back. :)

Not really a review, I love both the book version and the movie version of this story. These are just some of my thoughts on the book vs. the movie version


The Book Thief DVD

A few years ago The Book Thief was my RL book club selection; it was the only book we read that got big thumbs up reviews from everybody. I reviewed the book on my inaugural CR thread in 2012 where I wrote: "I am happy that The Book Thief will be translated to the big screen, but I sincerely think folks will be missing something if they merely see the movie and not read the book. " The other day my friend came over and we watched my DVD copy. (I'd already seen it at the theatre.) And I wondered to myself what does the book have that movie doesn't? What is that "something" missing I was talking about? Because I felt like my friend, who hadn't read the book, had missed something.

One thing the book has over the movie, because it's a movie, is the luxury of time. "While unavoidably melancholy and tragic in spots, The Book Thief has a lot of joy to offer. The deep loving relationships that develop over time between Liesel and her foster family (especially her Papa), her best friend Rudy, her neighbors, and Max, are simply beautiful. " The unbreakable bond that develops between Liesl and her beloved Papa is something that's made; it's not automatically there, as suggested by the movie. The movie simply can't give us all the little day to day occurrences that endear Papa, Mama and Rudy and other characters to Liesl. That's another thing that's missing from the film: characters. There are some characters that show up in the book that don't even make an appearance in the movie and there are some characters (like bully Franz) who get more time and interaction in the story that they don't get in the film version. Even the narrator Death doesn't get to talk to us as much as he does in the book so we don't get the benefit of his philosophies on these strange creatures called humans. There are also characters and war-related events that happen on Himmel Street that give a much more three-dimensional view of the story and the people in it.

Of course, we all know that the book is always better than the film. It just seems to me that the book The Book Thief has so much more depth to offer than most other books made to film. There's Zusak's unique poetic writing style and his use of Death to tell us Liesl's story. The movie does what it sets out to do incredibly well: capture the spirit, characters and essence of the book and it does remain (mostly) faithful to the print version but I don't think it captures the inherent joy in the story as well as the joy that's in the book.

The Book Thief book review 2012: https://www.librarything.com/topic/130501#3372790

"The Book Thief" movie (the first one): https://www.librarything.com/topic/161111#4428309

>235 avidmom: Great comparison of the book vs the movie of {the Book Thief. I haven't seen the movie, but the book is one of my favorites, and I just don't see how a movie could hope to do it justice.

>181 avidmom: I used to have lists by diagnosis but finally through out my papers after five years of retirement. Much to my regret. I do remember she used Brother Sun Sister Moon, about St. Francis return from war, to illustrate Post Traumatic Stress. I found that pretty interesting. One of the best i thought was Jessica Lange in Blue Sky playing a woman with bipolar disorder. What I loved about it was it showed both the pain and the brilliance and how she was so incredibly wonderful and lovable. Seems like Benny and Joon was used for schizophrenia although I could be mistaken. The Fisher King was one also. Our professor's goal was for us to see people who were struggling with these problems in context of a life and a family. Very effective. Diagnosis and treatment plans were then written based on viewing movies and the papers were written. That was all way more fun that the part where we had to diagnosis ourselves and present that to the class including our symptoms and treatment plan, for sure!.

>186 avidmom: I have a wonderful photo of my wonderful aunt receiving a commendation from Andrew Young for her community work in Atlanta. Some day I will learn how to post pics on here so I can show her off.

>192 kidzdoc: Anyone who has the opportunity, I highly recommend the Civil Rights Museum in Memphis that is actually in the Lorraine Motel. It is - well I went in thinking I'd be there half an hour and came out three hours later. I was mesmerized. Clearly I need to read Young's book. Thanks for the excellent review. I have certainly enjoyed catching up on your thread.

>229 Mr.Durick: my thought exactly Robert - whadja buy? I just didn't know how to spell it! By the way I know several people who have the Fiesta who think it's the best thing since sliced bread. I also have a friend who just got a new Chevy Volt and loves it.

>236 NanaCC: It's a beautiful movie and well-worth watching. My best comparison is that the movie version of the book is like a Reader's Digest Condensed Book version. Same good stuff; it's just there's more "stuff" in the book! And it's such good stuff. :)

>237 mkboylan: So nice to see you back! we had to diagnosis ourselves and present that to the class including our symptoms and treatment plan, for sure!. Oh no! How long was this class? 'Cause it'd take me a while. I remember the Fisher King, it upset me greatly what happened to Robin Williams' character. Love "Benny and Joon." I'll have to see if I can find a copy of the book you mentioned. If movies are therapy, that may explain why I watch the ones I love over and over.

I have a wonderful photo of my wonderful aunt receiving a commendation from Andrew Young for her community work in Atlanta.
OH, I would love to see that!!! This is what I love about LT; you never know what connections are going to be made. (Also, if I can figure how to post pics here, so can you! Hint hint, nudge nudge ;)

I think Young's book is something everyone should read. If I was a history teacher, I would put this one as required reading.

Now that I have a car (I've been wheel-less for a while) again I find myself noticing every car on the road! So I've gone from an apathetic "Cars, whatever" to "ooooh, what is that?" HA! (Little cars get my vote.) Still learning stuff about my car too. Very important things like if I put my fancy coffee travel mug with the handle in the front cup holder, it pushes the little "open the trunk" button without my knowing and the open trunk causes the little "door ajar" light on the dash to come on. Which is why I was a little late to work yesterday because I was making circles around the car trying to find out which door was open. LOL!

This one was nothing but pure fun and laugh out loud funny. Loved the minions in both their yellow and purple forms, Gru's four adopted girls, the incredibly resourceful Lucy, and Gru, the best kind-hearted bad guy in the world. This week has been stressful around here, and it was just what I needed. A silly movie that made me Happy! ;)

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I bought this video for my son when he was in grade school. He loved "Batman: The Animated Series." So did I. It's mentioned in the book I've been reading, Batman and Psychology where quite a few pages are devoted to the question of what version of Batman is the real Batman? There are so many different versions of Batman. But, it seems that "Many .... consider Batman's definitive screen depiction to have been that of one particular cartoon, "Batman, the Animated Series." And, from that series we get "Batman and Mr. Freeze: Subzero." It's like a miniaturized full-length Batman movie complete with all the ingredients needed for a Dark Knight adventure.

Mr. Freeze is living in the Arctic Circle with his cryogenically frozen wife, his guardian-pet polar bears (!) and a little orphaned boy. One day a Navy expedition inadvertently destroys Freeze's base and his beloved Nora's frozen chamber. Freeze shows up in Gotham City a few weeks later to do whatever it takes to save Nora. The Dynamic Duo have to save the day! Typical Batman. There are some funny lines here too like "A guy in a weird suit and two polar bears shouldn't be too hard to find." Batman shines through as the true good guy and it's hard not to feel compassion for Mr. Freeze who simply is trying to save his cryogenically frozen wife. Television turned Mr. Zero {his original name in the comic books}, one nearly forgotten gimmick villain among many, into the most tragically sympathetic member of Batman's best-known foes, Mr. Freeze, this cold-bodied man wit hthe cold-hearted personality who'll stop at nothing for the sake of the one person who ever armed up his life." *sniff*

This was on TBN the other day (I very rarely watch TBN). Someone DVR'd it for me. So glad they did. It is an "autobiography" of C.S. Lewis uniquely done as a "one-man" show. Very, very interesting little movie and very well done.

The elder Lewis begins his story at the beginning with his idyllic childhood and how the death of his much beloved mother caused him to loose faith. Over the years Lewis struggled not with being a man of faith but being a man of no faith. It seems that he was in a dilemma: he was an atheist surrounded by Christians. His favorite authors were Christians; his intellectual friends turned out to be "... card-carrying Christians." He was in a quandary. He didn't want to believe God existed but he was "... angry at God for not existing." Then he had his very subtle moment of conversion back to faith. As the years go by, and life delivers it's mix of good with the bad, he has times of struggle with his faith. His fight seems not so much to have been a struggle to believe, but a struggle to overcome his anger and disappointment with God. The movie also covers the informal Oxford writing club, "The Inklings,"; his friendship with J.R. Tolkien and his unusual marriage late in life. And, of course, where and how the Chronicles of Narnia came about is also featured. Lewis calls it not an allegory, but a "...supposal." The movie is not very long (an hour) so nothing can be gone over in great depth but for what it tries to do, introduce us to C.S. Lewis and his philosophy, it does very well.

The little I've read by C.S. Lewis I've liked, but I wouldn't consider myself a fan (not yet anyway). This little biopic has me more interested in grabbing those books off my bookshelves now. I'm sure fans of his will definitely appreciate this one.

"Beyond Narnia" trailer: www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rk6b7ykOw4

Currently reading the Gospel of Luke

Goal #2: Bible Reading (New Testament)
Matthew ✔
Mark ✔
Luke
John ✔
Acts
Romans
1 Corinthians
2 Corinthians
Galatians
Ephesians
Philippians
Colossians
1 Thessalonians
2 Thessalonians
1 Timothy
2 Timothy
Philemon
Hebrews
James
1 Peter
2 Peter
1 John
2 John
3 John
Jude
Revelation

Batman's 75th DC Comic anniversary is today. :)

"Best movie moments" http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1725042/batman-anniversary-best-moments.jhtml

>241 avidmom: - Jesus's last words in Luke come from a Psalm I just read last week. (Haven't not read Luke, I'm guessing it was his last words while on the cross)

>240 avidmom: - I seem to be conflicted with Lewis, but love that quote.

Adding to my comment, it is psalm 31 and quoted in Luke 23:46.

>243 dchaikin:, 244 Thanks for the clarification. Yes. Last words on the cross. Interesting because according to Endo in his A Life of Jesus he also quoted Psalms 22.

Borrowing from my review last year:

The really captivating part of the book for me is Endo's writing on the crucifixion. “At the hour of three, Jesus suddenly raised his sunken head, …. Then he shouted aloud: … ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ ... the Jews of that time, who knew the prayer by heart, could easily supply the rest. Psalm 22 begins with a cry of sadness … but as the psalmist speaks … he turns more then to singing the homage of God … In brief, Psalm 22 is not at all a song of despair; it is actually a song of praise to the Lord.”

It's cool to see how these psalms take on other lives. It's quite a line to quote - from ps 22.

Just saying "Hi" after catching up again Avid! Congratulations on your new car - hope you enjoy it!

I'm one of those weirdos who has The Book Thief sat unread on my shelf...my missus read it and really enjoyed it, but I haven't gotten to it yet. Appreciate your comparison of the book versus film though, and will definitely avoid the latter until I've read the book!

>247 Polaris-: Thanks! Loving the little car so far. :)

I definitely think reading the book first is the way to go here.

ETA: By the way, what's wrong with being a weirdo? I've always rather enjoyed it myself. :)

I am reading things; too many things at once, which means I'm not really reading anything. And so, since I can't figure out what I'm really reading at the moment I did my best trick: watch movies and go out and collect more books!

Yesterday we watched two movies here. Unusual for us, but we had to have them back at the video store today.

So, my friend came over and we watched


I liked this movie; it kept my attention. It is an interesting story about con men & women conning and being conned. They're so good at it they even con themselves ("People believe what they want to believe.") It gets my vote for its "Oh, I didn't see THAT one coming!" moments and its wicked sense of humour. Set in the 70s, the movie features some pretty 70s spectacular tunes and there's even a scene in a disco (complete with disco ball and strobe light). I had a hard time keeping up with what was going on, though, which I think had much more to do with my level of tiredness at the time we watched it than the movie. My friend loved it, my son wants to buy it, and I want to watch it again. Neat movie.


My youngest, because he'd heard so many great things about this, wanted to watch it. At first I was a little nauseated by the unmitigated cheesiness of it, but then things changed and it turned out to be more than a sappy story. Frozen has all the ingredients that make a great Disney flick: great animation, some music, some laugh-out-loud funny scenes, a quest, a heroe, a heroine, a damsel (make that two) in distress, and a love story. why do the Disney folks always kill off the parents though? why? What I absolutely loved about this movie was the breathtakingly gorgeous animation. This film, with its pristine scenes of a magical winter wonderland which includes the aurora borealis and magic ice, is beautiful to watch. The story, based on Han Christian Andersen's The Snow Queen according to the credits, is a good one too. Frozen didn't capture my heart quite the way that Beauty and the Beast did but, maybe if Beauty and the Beast hadn't gotten there first ......

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My youngest and I went to the library and came back with a shortstack of books:

Slash and Burn by Colin Cotterill. Cool kid wants to be a "forensic pathologist" when he grows up (and he's almost all grown up!) so I thought a series where the heroe is a coroner would be right up his alley. Unfortunately, this is the only Cotterill book our library had on the shelf.

Steinbeck: Travels with Charley & Later Novels 1947-1962 Travels with Charley has been on my wishlist for quite a while. Recently Elaineday read and wrote a review on her thread, which just made me want to read it that much more. I've read most of the stories in this collection of his "later novels" except for Burning Bright. I'm a happy camper. :)

Serpent in the Thorns by Jeri Westerson. Before I read this one, I'll probably go back and re-read Veil of Lies, the first in the "Crispin Guest" series, since it's been a while. The blurb on the front cover by the Boston Globe calls Crispin Guest "a medieval Sam Spade."

The Power of Right Believing by Joseph Prince. Joseph Prince is the only TV evangelist I actually really like. Generally, I tend to stay away from what I term "Christian-ese," but I definitely make an exception here.

>249 avidmom: I haven't seen either movie, but they both sound good. I know I'll eventually see Frozen, as the younger grandchildren will watch it umpteen times.

Slash and Burn is eighth in the Dr Siri series. I am not that far into the series yet, but I hope starting in the middle doesn't take away from the understanding of the Dr and his shaman abilities.

>250 NanaCC: I didn't realize Slash and Burn was so far into the series. It always puzzles me how a library here will have one title in a series and so often that title is one from the middle. ????? My county library card (we were at the city library yesterday) gives me access to quite a few libraries; so I'll probably request the first book there.

Just catching up. I have American Hustle on the mental To Be Watched list -- I take it it's on Netlix now if you watched it.

>252 rebeccanyc: Not sure if it's on Netflix yet; we took a trip to our one & only brick & mortar video store and found it there. We make a point to go there - so it'll have a chance of staying in business!

>253 avidmom: Good for you! In our neighborhood, three independent video stores went out of business more than five years ago now, including one that had the most fabulous backlist (or whatever you call old movies) plus popcorn. Even the Blockbuster in our neighborhood went out of business. Thus, we are dependent on Netflix even though it's much more fun to go to a video store and pick out what you feel like watching that night.

One of the video stores that went out of business had this gorgeous mural painted on the outside of some big Hollywood stars: Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, etc. It's been a landmark here for a while and to see it close is just so sad. :(

I'd also like to see American Hustle when I get the chance. Interesting conversation of the decline and fall of local video stores.... same thing happening here in UK. I also prefer the simplicity of picking out a film from shelves in an actual shop, rather than having everything come through the computer or dependent on which TV package you happen to have.

All this talk of video stores reminded me of a little off-the-wall flick with Jack Black called Be Kind, Rewind. Certainly nothing Oscar-worthy there, but quirky and funny. A little homage to video rental stores (when VHS ruled the planet) and small towns. OH, and Fats Waller. :)

Be Kind Rewind trailer

>249 avidmom: - Good plan! I find myself switching to movies occasionally. Although, I didn't like Hustle.