Overall, Engagement From Scratch is a powerful, thought-provoking book, easy to read and full of powerful and immediately applicable information. It’s relevant to anyone who wants to use the Internet to market their work. Though the book isn’t specifically geared to writers, all bloggers are writers of one sort or another and most of the contributors have written books, so the ideas are very relevant to authors of any genre.
A review of For Keeps by Aaron Paul Lazar
Sam Moore is an exceptionally well drawn character. Existing fans of this series will enjoy the progressive story of Sam, as For Keeps goes deep into his psyche, revealing his long suppressed pain and a surprising number of secrets. For new fans, For Keeps provides enough back story to enable this book to be read as a standalone novel.
War Becomes A Man: A Modern Interpretation of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, starring Ralph Fiennes and Gerard Butler
This is a world of economic strife, hunger, mass protests, militant policing, automatic weaponry, great tanks, constant television reportage, rumor and suspicion. Coriolanus stands out in a competitive, hostile world; and whereas others—activists, politicians, and soldiers—come together to converse and conspire in order to achieve goals, Coriolanus is able to act alone.
Abraham Lincoln and Southern Reaction: Robert Redford’s The Conspirator
The Conspirator is a film of surprisingly fresh beauty. Its locations are impressive. Whether scenes were set in a private home or a large but bare prison, they had a visual richness that fed the senses, the imagination.
The Wisdom to Know the Difference: Halle Berry’s Performance of Truthful Depth in Things We Lost in the Fire
Audrey, a homemaker who likes cooking and woodworking, is a woman who expects a certain logic of her life, and, though she knows instinctively and intellectually what decent behavior is, her pain, judgements, and selfishness sometimes make her punishing. Halle Berry’s performance is shaded with anger, dismay, and grief in various combinations and intensities; and it is a deep, truthful, impressive performance.
The Most Beautiful Man in the World: Montgomery Clift in Alfred Hitchcock’s I Confess and Fred Zinnemann’s From Here to Eternity
Clift’s performance is austere and sensitive, and he is so deep inside his character that one cannot see a false moment or move. Michael Logan seems like a man who has found a way of being himself by being a priest: he is alert, direct, frank, moral, and sensitive, contemplative, sacrificing, and of service.
American Monsters in Francis Ford Coppola’s masterpiece The Godfather
In light of the fact that little could be said to be at stake—the son of a major criminal becomes a criminal, and he and other criminals try to kill each other, one would think that the story would have less grasp of the imagination of the viewer, but its grasp is secure thanks to the attitude, atmosphere, and tone of The Godfather.
Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard, a great film focused on Sicilian aristocracy and cultural change
Burt Lancaster is the patriarch, Don Fabrizio Corbera, the prince of Salina, and his way of life is threatened by revolutionary change: the struggle to unify Italy, and the rising commercial middle class, are at his door. There are predictions that the aristocracy will lose its status, the prominence of its values, and possibly its lands, and that the church may lose as much too.
A review of Curiosity Killed the Sphinx, and Other Stories by Katherine L. Holmes
Holmes likes to use language vividly and originally. Cars “crept to the curb on tire tiptoe”; a woman walks in a “toothache of time”. Holmes also uses patterns of imagery to convey her themes. In one of my favourite stories, “Nuts and Bolts”, a childfree couple choose not to spend a holiday with friends – the “same old bunch” with a third baby among them, but to stay in the city together.
A review of Fit, Fifty, and Fired Up by Nigel Marsh
That so many men (and some women) live lives of servitude and never stop to think about who they are or what they might want to really achieve in the short space that we have is a modern tragedy. Marsh gently and humorously makes this obvious, and in the changes he’s created in his own life, sets a trend that others can easily follow.