1990 Books

If you are, or you enjoy getting a glimpse of how Hollywood really works, then this little gem is a must read. Bart's straighforward style and insider's viewpoint keeps this book going, and your interest level up. While it may be a little dated, the realities in the book continue to ring true today in what is going on in the film industry.

For anyone interested in the business machinations of the Hollywood film studios, this is a must. The absorbing story of how the film studio that once boasted 'more stars than there are in heaven' ended up a 1980's corporate wreck. Starts out in 1969 when billionaire Kirk Kerkorian bought MGM, chronicles the few ups (and many downs), finishing up with the studio's sale to Giancarlo Paretti and Mr. Bart's assertion that 'an era ends when its dreams are exhausted. MGM's era has clearly ended'. I quite agree with this but MGM seems determined to cling to life,feeding on the fading memories of its glorious past. Excellent stuff! If you read this, Mr. Bart, it's a great book but how about an updated version, to take account of the new period of Kerkorian's ownership?

This is an engrossing account of the occupation of the Falklands by an invading Argentine force and the subsequent liberation by the British military. There are numerous POV's featured in the book, including those of Falkland Islanders, Argentine officers and British soldiers. The book recounts the daily threats the Islanders endured from the occupying Argentines. In 1982 Argentina was controlled by a Junta responsible for the deaths of its own citizens, and some of the Argentine officers threatened to quash the Islander's resistance by using the same tactics employed in Argentina's Dirty War. The book details the heroic efforts of one Argentine officer who stepped in to protect the Islanders and diffused tense situations that could have devolved into serious loss of civilian lives. Still, several Islanders died during the war along with hundreds of Argentine and British soldiers. Twenty years on the wounds are still fresh, but this book offers reflection, solace and even laughter to those who lived through the conflict. But more importantly it gives a voice to the Falkland Islanders, their history and their community at long last.

For me what was so deep about this book was that it not only reaccounted the miltary aspect of what occured during the Falkland war but it also shared the expereince of the people of the Falkland islands. Some parts were sad and brought tears other were funny and brought gasps of laughter. The style of writing enabled you to gain a window to what the war was like. For me, as a woman I found this approach of writing about the war, including the human aspect of how people thought and felt was what enabled me to read it. From my expereince most war stories are written just from the battle prospective without any reference to the individuals experience, emothions.

I think the writer was able to bring to life the horrows of war, the horrows of what it must have been liked to be occupied, espcially by the regime that was then in power in Argentine and the silent pains that war leaves.

I look forward to reading many more books by this writer. A writer that has recognised that when writing about a war you need to also remember to think and write about the expereince of all that were there.

Patricia Proudfoot-Omeresten

Bob Patterson's review really captured a lot of what I was feeling. As a former member of the Canadian Army, I was not only able to see in my mind's eye the scenes that Christie was describing, I was able to see many of the soldiers, often because I actually knew those men. The Canadian Army is not big - and the Army of West is probably about 6,000 Regulars and a few more thousand reservists - that's not a very big town, and all of the larger than life characters tend to become known by all - men like Mars Janek, whom I had the honor to serve with back in 1995, and who features prominently in this book as the extraordinary soldier that he is. Canadians really have no idea how lucky they are that these bright young men and women are willing to put their lives on the line in the service of their country.

Christie did a great job with this book, and clearly she wrote it her own way. My only real citicism is that I would have liked her to spend a bit more time of the achievements and field operations, and a little bit less on deaths, but I understand why she went the route that she did.

The Canadian army is very small - many organizations claim to be like a "family" but the Canadian Army is a family. In the larger world there may be 6 degrees of separation but in the Canadian Army there may be only two. So every loss is a wound for all. Every loss is indeed the death of a brother.

This remarkable book is a revelation of what it may mean to be part of a true Band of Brothers - a world where the most senior general lends a master corporal his own wedding ring so that he can ask his girl to marry him - a world where the entire platoon comes to the home of a fallen comrade and spends a week in the community celebrating his life - a world where a 40 plus year old widow enlists so that she can continue to be part of the family - a world where Colonels weep for their men.

The book also causes the reader to think more deeply about war and soldiers. It is politically correct to feel that all war and everything about it is bad. But we discover, that for all its terror and for all the losses, for a soldier war is what he lives for. It is when he also discovers whether he is any good at his life's work. We discover how good our soldiers are. Surprisingly, for we always think the less of ourselves, in Afghanistan, we are considered the heavy weights who punch well above our weight.

We discover that while war exhausts a person more than any other activity, it also makes him more alive.

We discover that PTSD is much more prevalent in peacekeeping than in the kind of situation that we find in Afghanistan. In peacekeeping the kit was awful and the impotence high - imagine simply witnessing atrocity? But in Afghanistan our soldiers can take the initiative and they are very well equipped and have rules of engagement that make sense.

We discover a new kind of woman soldier - who are at home in this strange world, as is of course the "Blatch", and who are no longer seen as odd.

We discover how the families of our soldiers have been integrated into the mission and we see how the worst of all news is given and how the families are supported when what they all fear the most occurs.

This is not the civil service in green that was the sadness of our forces for many years. Implicit throughout the book is that someone really knows that he is doing. I think that someone might be called Rick Hillier.

We discover how great our local field leadership is too which also says something more about General Hillier -

Brig- Genl Dave Fraser to LTC Ian Hope, in radio orders given at 11.30pm on July 17 "You need to recapture Nawa and Garmser by 1600 hours.

Hope to Fraser: "Roger that. Recapture Nawa and Garmser by 1600 hours."

Fraser: "Any questions?"

Hope: "Just one: Where are Nawa and Garmser?'

Not only do we routinely pull off tough missions, but the Cols take all the risks that their men do - they lead by example. They also tend to do the really terrible things like personally extract the burnt and mutilated bodies of their dead so that the buddies in the platoon would not have to remember their friend like that. There is all this bull in the public service about "Servant Leadership". Here you see it for real at all levels from the LTC down to the Master Corporal.

We discover the central frustration of the mission. That we have to go back again and again and take the same ground because the ANP, the police, cannot hold it - we learn how complex this work is.

But most of all, we learn how fortunate we are to have those wonderful people wearing our uniform.

It is a mystery to me how, in a nation, so cut off from the reality of war, that we can once again have the kind of army that we had in 1917. A pathfinder Army.

A small army that can think and adapt. A small army that is lead by men and women of an integrity and skill that put our business and public organizations to shame. A small army largely made up from men and women from small town Canada who have that can do attitude that used to be the hallmark of Canadians.

Who else could tell this story but "Blatch"? A woman who acknowledges that she knows of only two soldiers who swear more than she. A woman who shares the hardships, the joys, the terrors, the losses and the fun. A woman who loves her boys and who is loved back.

She writes with such a love and a passion - I could not put the book down except when my eyes were so full of tears that I could no longer see.

It is exciting, it's very funny, it's very sad. But in the end it is heroic. Not in a little boy's view of heroic but in the most mythic sense of people who live for each other in undertaking a very hard task.

At the end of the book, "Blatch" goes back to see everyone to see how they are.

"Eight months later, Hope (LTC Ian Hope) answers my email form an airport lounge somewhere. I wrote back to tell him of one of the stories - bawdy and funny, loving and sad, always brutally honest - I'd heard from the troops.

You must miss them so xxxxxx much," I said. " I can hardly bear to write about them sometimes. I find them so beautiful."

"You understand what I miss," he wrote back. "I am Odysseus."

This is a wonderful book about wonderful people written by a wonderful person - who has by the way a wonderful dog but that is another story.

Nothing disturbs the ethereal stillness of the house portraits in "Fifty Houses." Sorlein creates a ghostly reality, where the buildings are bathed in a silvery wash resembling moonlight and her photos seem to glow from within. And though it's easy to become absorbed in the stylized, sublime beauty of the photography, her writing also demands attention.

It's almost the opposite of her formal house pictures--like prose snapshots from a point & shoot, but still with her photographer's skill in framing and shaping the raw material. A good travel writer, like a good photographer, makes us see things for ourselves--they show, they don't tell, and Sorlien is adept at showing us everything from landscapes to people to animals with a great sense of humor and sense of the significant bit of detail or dialogue.

Out west, Sorlien introduces us to a guy who shoots rattlesnakes and freezes them in their final postures. On automobile-free Mackinac Island we see a band of big, tool-belted construction workers dwarfing their bicycles which they leave piled outside the bar they hit for a "drink for the road and a six-pack for the boat." Great stuff! And in the leisurely fashion of Least Heat-Moon in "Blue Highways," the fifty vignettes accumulate until, in the end, she makes you feel you've made her journey with her.

I love the way this book works. Strange places and pictures recast us in their own images, and Sorlien's transcendental house portraits are so beautiful as to make us painfully aware of the pervasive, intensely consequential loss in our built environment. Her chipper tales from the road subtly take a different emotional route, calling our attention and thought to the problem with entertaining good humor and grace.

This is the fascinating tale, told through pictures and words, of one woman's odyssey, looking for -- and finding -- those houses that best illustrate the regional diversity that is too quickly disappearing from America. Sorlien's beautiful photographs manage to be nostalgic and contemporary at the same time, and her crisp narrative provides the perfect accompaniment. Highly recommended.

I own this book as well as its companion canon on lunar eclipses. I find them both to be convenient and valuable references whenever I need to find information about past or present eclipses (which I do a lot more often than you might imagine).

What I find most useful are the maps of individual eclipses over a 50-year span and the maps of all total and annular eclipses worldwide over the much longer period of 1901-2100.

This is the definitive book to take to eclipses. Espenak is the eclipse expert for NASA and has all the math and software to generate the tables which make up this canon.

Everything else one hears or reads about where and when the eclipse will be, is just third through twelfth hand recounting and mis-recounting of the information in this book. It is not fun reading - it is a book of tables of numbers.

But careful reading and interpolation with an accurate map (or a GPS) and an accurate watch will get you the exact local time of second and third contacts and the actual location of centerline.

That doesn't seem like such a big deal until one is actually on the ground the day before the eclipse. One had been unconsciously expecting that somebody locally would have all the information, and then you find out that they had been assuming that you, the rich, educated foreigner, would know.

The actual real information is to be found only in this book. Don't leave home for an eclipse without it.

As the first reviewer of this book has pointed out, _The Films of Barbara Stanwyck_ is one of the rarer entries in Citadel Books' notable "Films of..." series (along with Christopher Young's _The Films of Doris Day_); while the other reviewer states a softcover version is available, I've never seen one yet on Amazon or elsewhere, just the hardcover edition. As such, it commands a price well above that of most other books in the series, but it's very much well worth it, especially in combination with _Starring Miss Barbara Stanwyck_ (which I also highly recommend).

Following the format of other volumes in this series, _The Films of Barbara Stanwyck_ is comprised of a concise biography of the star followed by short overviews/commentary on all her film work, along with hundreds of black-and-white photos. Homer Dickens has plainly done his homework; I've been able to locate several Stanwyck films from the data contained in this book. If you're a serious Stanwyck fan, you need this book.

THE FILMS OF BARBARA STANWYCK (1985) is one of the rarer titles in the Citadel Press filmography series as it was published almost 20 years after the first entries in the series that went through many editions and are easily obtainable (Davis, Crawford, Hepburn, etc.) Who knows why it took the publisher so long to get around to Stanwyck, surely on everyone's list as one of the top dozen women stars in film history, but this book was published not long before the series pretty much dried up and as a result appears to have only had single printings in both hardcover and softcover format. So if you ever run across it at a reasonable price, grab it!

The book is written by one of the better Citadel authors, Homer Dickens, and is loaded of course with photos of the great lady throughout her film and television career (although it was published before her final work on the TV series THE COLBYS). The "foreward" by Frank Capra is actually a excerpt from his autobiography, however. Ella Smith's STARRING MISS BARBARA STANWYCK still remains "the" book on Stanwyck but THE FILMS OF BARBARA STANWYCK is most definately a very honorable second place.

FROM THE PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION:

Is it possible to offer a single comprehensive view of modern economic life and of the changes that are shaping its future? Mr. Galbraith in this volume proves that it is. He begins with the world of advanced technology highly specialized manpower, and the five or six hundred giant corporations which bring these into use. He shows how these firms supply themselves with capital, how the men who comprise them are motivated, how organized intelligence has replaced ownership as the source of power in the modern enterprise. He shows how the market has declined as a guiding influence in economic life, to be replaced in substantial measure by planned decision as to what will be produced, at what prices and for whom.

Government in the industrial state, Mr. Galbraith makes clear can be understood only in light of the needs and goals of modern large-scale organization. And this profoundly shapes the prospect for trade unions, political parties, education and the larger culture itself. Only as we see the goals of the industrial system in a clear light will we avoid the danger of subordinating too much of life to their service. Only then will we exploit the opportunities inherent in well-being.

...

The publisher's description goes on to herald The New Industrial State as Galbraith's "most important book." The implicit comparison is with his earlier and immensely popular work, The Affluent Society. But the two books are quite closely related, as Galbraith mentions in the foreword: "I must again remind the reader that this book had its origins alongside The Affluent Society. It stands in relation to that book as a house to a window. This is the structure; the earlier book allowed the first glimpse inside."

And indeed, that is largely the truth. This book provides a framework for understanding Corporate America; its real and public purposes, its organization, history, strengths, and weaknesses. Surprisingly little of the book seems aged (of course the book exludes all mention of the last forty years, and the Soviet references seem a bit antiquated), and much of it, with minimal substitution (e.g. "War on Terror" for "Cold War" as the bogeyman for justifying the massive military outlays which feed the industrial system) is eerily applicable to the early 21st century.

All of that said, this book is not for everyone. It is quite dense (especially the first third), and most of us will need a dictionary close at hand. This is a book which requires hard thinking and more than one reading. But if your purpose is to understand the type of economy we really live in, your efforts will be richly rewarded.

John Kenneth Galbraith didn't respect the literary conventions of economics. He didn't express himself in math, he made sweeping generalizations about society (not always backed by strong evidence), and he freely drew on the insights of history, sociology, and politics, paying little heed to interdisciplinary boundaries. For that reason, many economists looked down their noses at him. And for that reason, his books are still in print and enjoyed by readers decades after they first appeared. Galbraith was more than an economist. He was a great social critic, a great debunker of cant, and a superb prose stylist. He was the Veblen of post-World War II America.

He was at the top of his powers when he wrote "The New Industrial State" in the 1960s. The book came as close as anything did to summarizing the Galbraithian "system." Parts of it are outdated, such as the assertion that financial markets have little influence on big corporations, or the strained argument that the American and Soviet economic systems were "converging." Other parts, however, are as relevant today as they were 40 years ago, such as the critique of advertising and consumerism, or the analysis of how our gigantic defense industry shapes policy and influences the Pentagon. In a time when the Federal Reserve is bailing out banks and scrambling to protect the economy from the miscalculations of the financial sector, it's good to be reminded that the private sector looks to government to keep the economy on a even keel, no matter what the official ideology of the private sector may be.

Most of all, "The New Industrial State" displayed Galbraith's genius for stepping back and asking big questions. These continue to haunt economics, even though textbook writers bury them in footnotes. Why DO we treat GDP is an adequate measure of social welfare? Why DO we choose to consume higher productivity in the form of goods rather than leisure? Why DOES our pedagogy emphasize "perfect competition" when the economy is dominated by big firms? Why DO we assume that workers and managers are motivated solely by pecuniary considerations? And on and on.

"The New Industrial State" is a trove of intellectual riches, expressed in masterful and witty prose. Every undergraduate economics student should read it. So should every educated citizen. It's a 20th century classic.

This is the most intellectually compelling wine guide written in the modern era. I continually find myself turning to it and reading it again and again. There are few pallets that match the constellation of Stephen Tanzer, David Schildknecht, and Joshua Raynolds, and they are all available within these pages. An invaluable tool that will save you costly mistakes and pay for itself in the selection of a single mixed case.

Wine geeks frequently cite that this guide is for more easily obtainable bottles, implying a criticism of Robert Parker's phenomenal access to and reviews of obscure releases. In addition, the median price and price range of those wines considered here is less lofty than the Parker world. My own view is that there is a place for both, and that world wine offerings are so bountiful and complex that there is more than enough reason for the serious wine drinker, or the casual fan who wishes to maximize their budget, to read this guide and other leading critics' guides as well.

A particular strength is Schildknect's appreciation for German and Austrian wines, and particularly in the case of the latter, the last true wine bargains on the planet. The complexity, fineness, and excellence of both terroire and grape are unmatched in Austrian whites. Couple that with excellent winemakers, then add the coup de graces: fewer corked bottles than white burgundy, and you have no contest. This guide is essential.

The Guide takes the falutin topic of wine and maeks it easy and fun. For the beginner to the expert, the Guide provides ratings, availabiltt, pairings and price and value charts that are clear, concise, and fun.

Chariots of Fire was a very inspirational work in my life. Ian Charleson as the role of Eric Liddel was especially so. I just viewed the movie again on a video iPod while I was flying from Tucson to DC. What a wonderful movie. Even more so was Charleson's portrayal of Eric Liddel -- God fearing, disciplined, and when he ran you could see the light of God in him...

I am crushed by the fact that Ian Charleson passed away almost 16 years ago. I had no idea. I was hoping to find him.

Long live Ian.

I regret never meeting Ian Charleson but have a feeling I knew him from his work. It's too bad he didn't live longer for more to be aware of his outstanding talents and the almost effortless ability to portray just about any emotion he wished on command whether on stage or behind the camera.

I'm glad this tribute has been created so he can be remembered by those who miss him.


-----------------------------------------
Foods for your electrical body.

http://www.electricalbody.com
http://www.electricalbody.net
http://www.electricalbody.org
http://www.electricalbody.ws
http://www.electricalbody.info
http://www.electricalbody.biz
http://www.electricalbody.name

One of the very best works of contemporary fiction set in the Maghrib. Raises the issues you would want for class discussion without the aggressive "eradicatory" anti-Islamism of most Algerian writers.

This book claims to take on, for the most part, the position of women in contemporary Algeria. But you can see many people's lives and how they're affected in this book. The narrative switches back and forth between Sultana, an Algerian woman doctor who lives in France, and a Frenchman in Algeria, Vincent. From the first few pages to the very end, it captivated me. It is hard to understand the FIS (Front Islamique du Salut, a radical Islamist Algerian political group) and their way of living. Sultana is an extremely dignified with much credibility and worthy of anyone's respect, yet she is called a [...] by her fellow Algerians when she walks on the street or goes to a bar or does anything really. The very end is the most surprising act of repression of all.

But there are so many glimpses of hope in this book as well, the little girl character of Delilah, the nurse Khaled (even though he said some distasteful things to Sultana in the beginning, he emerged as a better character toward the end). It seems that Algeria is torn between the strong, fundamental Islam, and the changing world and people not wanting to be oppressed (who would?). Most of the Algerians I met were not very religious, but I was in the city of Alger and Bejaia. Maybe fundamentalism is always a negative thing when it comes to faith and sprituality. Nobody has the right to force their ideas on others, isn't that why we have rhetoric? (trying to be ironic).

I'm sure this book was much better in its original French language text, although the translation is very good as well. Highly recommended. Algeria is facinating.