I ate a lot more cheese than usual while reading this book, which is testament to Finnerty’s passion for the subject and his ability to sell it on the page and verbally in the market. While reading through New Year’s, I realized I still had half a dozen leftover bits of different cheeses I found before Christmas in a supermarket in Metro East St. Louis.
‘Phasers on Stun!’ may not make future efforts at assembling a franchise-spanning overview of Star Trek obsolete, but Britt’s comprehensive approach makes such labor redundant, at least for now. He analyzes, anatomizes, celebrates, and criticizes every extant Trek television series and film in sometimes granular detail, making ‘Phasers on Stun!,’ despite its sloganeering subtitle, too accomplished to ignore.
Years ago, thrilled to be wandering through Oxford, I heard strains of classical guitar and peeked into a gorgeous old stone church. The music lifted me; we soared together, joining the apostles on the vaulted ceiling. No wonder Sir Neville Marriner conducted in St. Martin-in-the-Fields church rather than a concert…
Taken together, “American Notes” and “Martin Chuzzlewit” reveal not only the fun of laughing at ourselves as Americans, but also the folly of how painfully ridiculous we look when we fail to acknowledge our faults and the collective injustices of our history that we would rather walk past. There is no virtue in unyielding, unquestioned “patriotism,” much less iron-clad nationalism. There is only material for ridicule, waiting for the next outsider with literary acumen to describe and document in cold-eyed prose.
What are we to make of this smackdown, all of us who thought AI would never sound profound or witty? Will the writing of books cease to be a human endeavor?
“A Dream Deferred” is a thoughtful book, especially for those who lived through and remember Jesse Jackson’s presidential runs. Abby Phillip gives us Jackson warts and all, the maddening egotism and opportunism, and the rumors of infidelity. Informed, highly readable, and even exciting at times as she recounts the thrills of the 1984 and 1988 presidential campaigns.
Former Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell is famously terse and inscrutable and likes it that way. But the senior senator from Kentucky is a more complicated figure, and his successes as a legislator and leader are just part of what makes him an intriguing subject. Michael Tackett captures McConnell in all his complexity.
This long strange year yielded some gems....
“Why,” I asked my husband, “would anyone want to waste time watching a bad movie?” “Because it’s fun,” he replied, as though this should be obvious. “No. A good movie is fun, even if it is wrenching. A bad movie is just sad. Pathetic, even. An insult to filmmaking. It…
Few of us as Americans believe honestly that we are equal in democracy. We only believe that it is better to believe so, rather than do so through policy and programs that will result in strife and arguments. Equality, or as de Tocqueville expressed it, the quality of being “almost the same,” exists mostly in our collective imagination. But if it does not reside, there it might not live anywhere at all.