Well worth another read. The relevance of the material changes in curious ways over time. I felt especially surprised at this diatribe from Beatty, the fire chief: “Picture it. Nineteenth-century man with his horses, dogs, carts, slow motion. Then, in the twentieth century, speed up your camera. Books cut shorter. Condensations. Digests. Tabloids. Everything boils…

I’m just relieved that it’s over. It’s a testament to the power of this story that it worked its way into my psyche as a child and made me willing to endure any number of sterile battle scenes and stiffly-delivered, groan-extracting dialogues just to see it continue. Now at last, with Yoda to Degobah escaping…

A happy Italian tale of a failed marriage and broken family. A housewife loses her family on a tour bus and winds up in Vienna, where she falls in love and finds a new life for herself, but can’t let go of her family obligations. The characters are eccentric and charming, and the film slowly…

It’s hard for me to come up with anything that makes this movie special. Ben Kingsley won an Oscar for his performance, but I have to suspect it’s at least partly due to the contrast between the crass, swearing character of Don Logan and other Kingsley roles such as Ghandi. All the acting is good,…

This book was given to me by a man who’d been touring the world by bicycle for 10 years while I was on my own little ride around the country. I expected a book about adventurous explorers, and there is some of that, but I quickly learned that most of the exploration of the shorter…

Having done some desert hiking last summer, we really related to the three half-caste aboriginal girls who escape a white reculturation camp to walk home through hundreds of miles of desert while being pursued by trackers and police. Based on a true story, it doesn’t seem to be over-dramatized. It’s definitely critical of the whites…