Here's a problem most moviegoers don't have: scheduling conflicts. If you want to see a movie, it's probably playing at the multiplex all day and evening and you just pick a time and go. But the five people in Cinemania have every film showing anywhere in New York City to choose from, first run movies, film classics, festivals, films shown in museums and small screening rooms. Two of the men have worked out a computerized system to figure it all out. A movie they want to see might only be playing three times in the coming week, at the same time as one or more other movies they want to see. They need help from databases and decision trees. Another guy will only see a movie if it's a good print. He has the phone number of all the projection booths, and calls ahead of time to discuss the quality of the print. Then he brings his cell phone with him into the theater; if something goes wrong with the projection, he doesn't want to have to leave his seat. He calls instead. It's these kinds of details that make this movie fascinating, and fun to watch, in a head-shaking, "I can't believe this" sort of way.

It was also sad to see these people driven by an obsession that maybe even they don't understand. It was hinted that at least two of the film buffs didn't know as much about film as they thought they did, and didn't have discerning tastes. That was good stuff, and made me wonder, why do they do it, then? Ultimately, maybe the question can't be answered. There were five people, and five different, complex reasons. I think the movie gave as full a picture of what they were about as is possible in 80 minutes. So even though I wanted to know, and understand, more, I give the movie 4 stars and will watch it again.

I do wish there'd been more of sense of the mix of movies they all watched. It seemed that most of them did see a fair number of first run movies, but the documentary didn't get into that much. In one of the deleted scenes, Roberta discusses at great length her reaction to "Pearl Harbor." Suddenly she believes that the other person (another of the cinemaniacs) isn't understanding a word she's saying, and she walks away, frustrated, angry, unable to communicate. There are many small scenes like that one, that show so much just by letting the people talk.

What's so exciting about MAP is that it's easy to learn and it's free. There are no workshops to take, you can do it yourself, that means you don't have to find a practitioner who works with energy, and that means you don't have to pay a practitioner for weekly visits. Everything is right here in this book, and rarely have I found a book of this type that is so well written and clearly organized. The first few chapters give you an explanation of the process and the steps for a MAP session, so you can read about 50 pages and get started right away. After that, she goes into a deeper explanation of what happens in a session, then the rest of the book is devoted to specialized topics that you can read as you need them, such as surrogate sessions, calibration, MAP for animals, flower essences, and kinesiology, plus a few others.

Basically, MAP is a medical program where you work with energy beings (my term, not hers) and nature intelligences. In your first session you'll assemble a team that will be your specific team for as long as you use MAP. Machaelle describes it like this: "MAP is a physical program that works on your well-being from the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual perspective.....it works on strains, pressures, pain, and conflict felt on all these levels simultaneously." It takes a commitment to keep doing MAP, but it's not hard to learn. She suggests twice a week sessions at first, then once a week (each session takes under an hour) and she suggests you stick with it for five months before evaluating whether it's working for you. I could not believe my good fortune when I first learned about MAP. I am grateful to Machaelle for putting this kind of information in the hands of anyone who is interested in using it, so that we can all have the tools to improve our lives.

Whether or not you're familiar with Machaelle's other books and her work at Perelandra, you'll get a lot out of this book. This was my introduction to her work, and from here I went on to learn about her work with gardens and nature.

For the first 40 pages or so, I was laughing out loud and thinking I'd found a new favorite writer. As Bryson is planning the trip and buying equipment, he's hilarious. The book starts to sag not long after he and his hiking companion Katz hit the trail, but it still held my interest for a while. It wasn't until page 103, when he's describing the town of Gatlinburg and quoting from one of his own, earlier books, that I started to sense this book was heading for trouble.

There just isn't much going on here. They soon give up the trail and Bryson is determined to hike portions of it alone. He drives through Pennsylvania, thinking he'll do a few hikes but his heart doesn't seem to be in it. He ends up in Centralia, where coal mine fires forced everyone to abandon the town. This is an important and fascinating story, but doesn't belong in this book. Centralia is not on the AT but that didn't seem to matter. He was in his car and could go anywhere if it might fill a few pages. And fill pages is what he seemed to be trying to do. Next he goes home to New Hampshire and takes a series of day hikes that aren't even worth mentioning. I started to wonder why he bothered writing a book when he didn't have enough material to fill it. In my imagination I kept seeing two words, book contract, flashing in neon letters. I kept imagining the author facing a blank sheet of paper and going out on yet another day hike looking for a story to fill out a few more pages. When the agony of the writing process comes through on the page, reading is no longer a pleasure.

This is all the sadder because it's clear that he is a talented and funny writer, and this could have been a great book. The sections where he gives background information such as the history of the Appalachian Trail, and how the original vision was not fulfilled are quite good. And the last part of the book, when he and Katz hike the end of the AT in Maine (when something finally happens) actually makes the middle part of the book worth slogging through. It is both funny and poignant. If only more of the book could have been like this.

As the documentary begins, we hear Werner Herzog's voice telling us that there are events in some people's lives that haunt them forever, but that if we pass these people on the street or in their car, we would never know it, for they appear normal. That in part is what this movie is about. It's also about how a dream might come to us and take hold of us, and how if we are determined to make the dream come true we can never know where it will lead, just as we can never fully understand why the dream came to us in the first place.

We first see Dieter in his house atop a hill outside of San Francisco (he has lived in America for 40 years; the film is in English, there are no subtitles). He talks about how important doors are to him, that he can never take them for granted because when he was in the prison camp he was not able to open or close any doors. He talks about always having plenty of food in the house, even storing extra in the basement, because he never wants to go hungry again.

Then we are in Germany, in the small town where he grew up. He watched planes flying over his town as a boy during World War II. One flew very close to his upstairs window and from that moment he knew he needed to fly. He says he didn't want to go to war, he only wanted to fly. Yet the airplanes he saw as a child, the ones that created the dream in him, were war planes. This is not a simple story. Dieter came to America when he was 18 years old, with no money, speaking only a few words of English, and almost immediately joined the Air Force. But he never got near an airplane. Over time as he learned how things work, he figured out what he needed to do. He moved to California and went to college, living out of a VW van. Then he joined the Navy where at last he learned to fly. He was sent to Vietnam and soon thereafter was shot down over Laos.

To give you some idea of the structure of the film, it is essentially the story of where Dieter's desire to fly led him, told more or less chronologically beginning in his childhood up to the present. We don't learn anything else about Dieter or his life. The story is completely focussed on this one aspect of his life. And Werner Herzog mostly lets Dieter tell his own story. When he talks about his childhood, he is in Germany, talking and showing us around the town. When he talks about his time in the prison camp, the filming takes place in an unnamed Asian country (the production notes at the end say it was indeed Laos). There is some reenactment, such as Dieter having his hands tied behind his back and walking through jungle. This is the sort of thing that could go very wrong in a movie, but in Werner Herzog's hands it works beautifully. It's not clear whether the villagers taking part in the reenactments know what is going on, or what they think. It's not clear whether being there and reexperiencing these events is helping Dieter chase away his demons or making matters worse. All this adds to the dreamlike and mythic quality of the movie. This is a very big story. And what makes the movie so successful, is Dieter himself. He is a master storyteller. At home in San Francisco he is sad and haunted. But in the jungle he is filled with energy and there is a sense of urgency to his speaking, as if he realizes how much he needs to tell his story. I could not take my eyes from the screen and could have listened to him talk for hours.

And talk he does. About the three week walk to the prison camp, about conditions in the camp, about their plans to escape. There is great attention to detail, such as showing how they got out of their handcuffs, and showing a map of the camp to describe how their plan was to work. As harrowing as the details of the camp were, even more difficult to hear was the long walk barefoot through the jungle after the escape. Dieter sits cross-legged on the dock of the Mekong River, recounting this journey, quietly but forcefully telling his story. I promise that this will make your heart ache.

Don't look for any reflection on the events. Never does Werner Herzog ask Dieter whether he is sorry he pursued his dream with such single-minded determination. We are left to draw our own conclusions. Some of the timing of events is unclear. We're not sure how long he was in Vietnam before he got shot down, nor how long he was held prisoner, but it seems to be less than six months. We're told that he took early retirement from the Navy but we're not told when he retired or whether he continued to serve in Vietnam after he was rescued. But these are not criticisms. This movie is made up of complex levels of dreams within dreams and these slight omissions add to that mood. Herzog has done a brilliant job of putting together an amazing story. This is one of the finest movies I've seen in a long, long time.

When I saw this book at the bookstore, my first thought was Oh no, is this a book reacting to the events of September 11th? I picked it up and sure enough, it was published after September 11, but after reading the introduction I decided to buy the book. The editor has always loved poetry and for years has saved poems that were important to her in a binder labeled "Poems to Live By." She includes, at the end of the introduction, a poem she wrote a few days after the attack on the World Trade Center. She says "It was clearly an occasional poem, admittedly not a great poem." Besides this poem, there is only one other that might have been written in recent months, and this is "Try to Praise the Mutilated World" by Adam Zagajewski, which appeared in the New Yorker's first issue after September 11, and which alone is worth buying this book for.

These are not feel-good poems that give easy comfort. Instead, you will find here companionship in another person's way of seeing the mixture of suffering and happiness that is always around us. The book is nicely divided into sections, each title giving a hint of how the poems in that section look at uncertainty: Death and Remembrance, Fear and Suffering, Affirmations and Rejoicings, Warnings and Instructions, War and Rumors of War, and Meditations and Conversations. Mostly these are 20th century poets, many of them contemporary poets writing today (such as Billy Collins, Sharon Olds, Gerald Stern, Yusef Komunyakaa, Jane Hirschfield, and Seamus Heaney).

Sit and read these poems to feel what it means to be in this world. There is such a wide range of subject matter in this book, that there is probably a poem here to help you through any dark night you might find yourself in. But these 60 poems are one person's choice and any collection like this is only a beginning. The editor suggests that if you find any of these poems useful, you copy them out by hand and put them in a binder. I would take that suggestion a step further. Start your own binder, of poems you discover yourself.

Breathwalk is a simple and powerful idea but this book makes it needlessly complicated which is why I can only give it four stars. However, the book IS well researched and well written, and so I do recommend it as long as you know in advance that you'll have to do some work to dig all the bits of information from many different chapters.

With this type of book the reader will often want to get started quickly and can usually expect to find one chapter that helps them do that by presenting the basics. That's what this book lacks. Basically, the Breathwalk technique consists of coordinating breathing with the movement of walking. But there's more to it than that and each part of the technique is presented in a different chapter, with no clear explanation of how to put it all together.

For example, there are different Breathwalk patterns to use, depending on what effect you would like to see in your body and mood. These have names like Eagle and Tiger and are basically different ratios of inhalation to exhalation, which are documented with nice graphs. Then there are awakener exercises, sort of like warmups, which are done before the walk. These too are chosen based on the effect you are looking for. Each walk ends with an integration, or innerwalk, step and here again there are different types to choose from. Then there are optional primal sound scales that you can add once you're comfortable with the basics.

After getting through all this information I was overwhelmed and would have liked to see a chapter that presented the complete walks with all their components all in one place. There is a Program Guide at the end of the book but this just adds to the confusion. It lists the individual programs based on the effect achieved, such as "Rejuvenate your energy reserves" or to go from "Simple anxiety to inner calm". But to get the details of each program you need to jump around to several chapters. Many of the programs use more than one breathing pattern, and to find those patterns you go to one chapter; for the awakener exercises, you go to another chapter; and for the innerwalk yet another chapter.

If you want to find a basic breathwalk and get outside for a sample walk in short order, then I must say good luck. But if you're willing to hang in there, read the entire book, and figure out where all the pieces of the technique are explained, then I think you'll find that the book does ultimately deliver and Breathwalk does work. If only it had a more user-friendly structure this would be a five-star book.

This is storytelling at its best. I first read one of the essays in this book in the New Yorker and right away I knew I'd be looking to read everything that Burkhard Bilger writes. This book contains eight essays but I think of them more as real-life stories. In the table of contents each essay title has a subtitle. Even they are a pleasure to read, each one beginning with the words "In which". To give you an idea of what I mean, here's the subtitle for the essay on moonshining: "In which the age of the microbrewery meets the modern police state, with intoxicating results".

In the introduction the author tells us how he started writing these tales about the South. He was living in Massachusetts and decided he wanted to get a coonhound which he knew, and missed, from growing up in Oklahoma. But finding a coonhound in New England wasn't easy. He says "A few people had heard rumors of such dogs, but none had actually seen one in the flesh." He ended up at the home of a breeder who handed him a magazine "American Cooner". The author said "It was the strangest publication I had ever seen." And so began his journey in search of life outside the popular culture which is all most of us know, beyond the "range of most antennas".

Each of the essays is about a tradition, or sport, or way of life that is in danger of dying out, some of them illegal, some not. He visits a woman in Oklahoma who breeds coonhounds and hunts racoons more than 340 nights a year, a man in Kentucky who hunts and eats squirrels, and a man in Georgia who owns a fish hatchery, frog farm, and wild hog preserve. Each of these stories is, in the end, about people and this is where Bilger's writing really shines. He knows how to write about people better than almost anyone else I've read. I read alot of non-fiction and profiles of people and I know it's not easy to write about people in a way that gives the reader the sense that they now know that person, at least a little. The writer spends a few days with someone, hangs out with them, talks to them for hours. Then he has to sit down and from all those hours pick just the right details, just the right quotes, just the right observations, to make that person seem real on the page. And Bilger has mastered that art.

Beyond the people, he also puts the stories into a larger, sometimes historical, context. In the story on cockfighting he goes to Louisiana where some people are reluctant to talk to him even though it's one of the few states where the sport is still legal. He tells about the popularity of the sport in different parts of the world and in the early history of America, when it was not only legal but a "fashionable amusement". In fact it didn't begin to be banned until the 19th century, and New York in 1867 "became the first city to ban all blood sports." The author talks about the efforts to outlaw the sport in the few states that still allow it, and he does mention animal rights activists but he doesn't interview any. He doesn't seem to be trying to write an unbiased account, and if there's any doubt about where the author's sympathies lie, that doubt will be dispelled by the time you get to the last paragraph of this essay which gives us his view (brilliantly written, I think) of modern civilized America.

The final story is about marbles. Yes, marbles. A specific game called rolley hole, which he tells us "is to other marble games as chess is to checkers". It's about the near extinction of the game and how it was revived by a folklorist, and how the revival led to, among other things, an international competition in England. Even if you know nothing about marbles, even if you've never heard of rolley hole, this story will have you on the edge of your seat wanting to know what this is all about. But in a larger sense this story is also about how and why life is changing in our country and whether anything can be done about that, even by a well-meaning folklorist. The last few pages are reflective and philosophical and I was left not quite sure whether to feel sad or hopeful.

Make no mistake about it, the author likes the people whose stories he tells. He writes about each of them with great warmth and affection. And reading this book made me feel happy to be in this world with all its strangeness.

There's a great story here but the author can't quite decide how he wants to tell it. He is both a reporter and a participant in the race and the book is split between these two points of view. The books tells the story of how the author went from novice runner to running the Badwater ultramarathon in a mere two years. He first heard about Badwater while doing an article for the NY Times, and soon found himself in the grip of the idea of doing the race himself. But he also believed he was crazy for trying something so difficult so soon and he reminds us of this over and over.

His lack of experience and insecurities take up too much of the book. He goes over the same territory many times, with lines like "And I almost immediately lost my ability to even be a reporter in researching the race. I was overwhelmed, so frightened and insecure by what I'd embarked upon that I couldn't even pretend to be an objective observer." Because of these insecurities, the books fails as an objective account by a reporter. He has the names and phone numbers of all the entrants and he knows he should call all of them. But he's afraid to call most of them, especially the ones that are legends in the ultramarathoning world. He thinks he has no business entering the race, and is afraid the other racers will refuse to talk to him, maybe even laugh at him. It was hard to understand how someone who has been a reporter for 17 years would not be able to make these phone calls, and the constant agonizing over it was excruciating to read. When he does finally call some of them and flies out to visit two of them, he doesn't seem real interested in them and doesn't have much to say about them. This chapter was so flat I wondered why he even bothered to include it.

When he writes about his personal story, the book is only slightly more successful. On the one hand, he seems to be a serious person searching for something, trying to get through grief, wanting to find some big answers, he has chapter titles like "The Paradoxical Heart." But on the other hand, his writing style is light and breezy. The book ultimately felt like alot of fluff to me. He doesn't quite have the writing skills to convey things like why he needed to do this race, what it was like preparing for it with so little time, what he discovered about himself in the process. I felt him struggling to explain things in this book that he just wasn't able to explain. He clearly wanted to understand, and communicate, things like the mystery of endurance, and the mystery of his own motivation, but he was never able to communicate any of those things to me.

Even with all these reservations, I'm glad I read the book. It's a fast read, and there is a great story at the core in spite of the shortcomings. He does a good job of describing the race itself (the last third of the book), especially the second night when things become surreal. I read almost every book I can that has anything to do with adventure, endurance, and exploration and I'm glad to have this book in my collection.

This anthology is an excellent selection of sports poems, somewhere around 140 or so. The table of contents is alphabetic by poet's name and there is an index arranged by sport. There are poems about the big sports, baseball, football, boxing. Also poems on running, surfing, race car driving, hunting, fishing. One poem each on rodeo, skiing, wrestling, scuba diving. Even a poem on bowling.

There's a long (more than 3 page) poem by B.H. Fairchild about baseball called "Body and Soul" which I loved and I'm not much of a baseball fan. It's a rich and complex narrative, tells a story I can sit and read over and over again. There's a football poem by Adrian Louis, "At the House of Ghosts" that's about a man looking back on his football days 20 years past. I liked this one even though I've never watched a football game in my life.

There's much to like here even with the sports you may not be a fan of or be familiar with, because the editor has chosen the poems well. They range from poems that get into the specifics of an activity like weight lifting or running, to poems that take a step back and look at the place of a sport in our culture or just tell a good story.

The book opens with the narrator accidentally opening his mother's email account and discovering that she has just begun having an affair. And so the stage is set for a story about what happens in a family when one person has a secret and another person not only knows the secret but knows all the details of how the affair progresses (because he continues to read all the back and forth, almost daily, emails between his mother and her lover, plus the mother's emails confiding to her best friend). This story, for all its potential, is uninteresting and at times even dreary reading.

The book is written in the first person, narrated by the son Henry who at the time was 17. From the start I felt that the voice didn't sound quite right. A few pages into the book the reader learns that the story is being told "less than a decade later", which would make Henry in his mid-twenties. This made the voice a little more believable, but I still had trouble with it, I had the constant nagging sense that his writing style and observations just did not ring true. Then I wondered if in the end there would be a reason for the story being told ten years later, would we learn how these events affected Henry as an adult, or would it turn out that his printing of the emails would trigger some event years later?

There is so much that could have happened in this book, so much that I kept expecting to happen, but there just isn't enough here in the way of plot, and very little dialogue. Yes, there is some dialogue, but more often conversations are described. Much in the book is described, observed, thought about. It has a slow pace. In spite of all this, I started out enjoying this book and for the first 100 pages or so I had a hard time putting it down. The writing is beautifully crafted without getting bogged down and I liked the way the narrator saw the family's life, even though I never bought the idea that the narrator was a 17 year old boy or even a 27 year old man. When talking about the family moving from rural Vermont to Chicago he says "Outside we would be in danger from both the careless ways of the rich and the careless ways of the poor." And "I was taken from Vermont before I could think to want to leave it myself, and so for me Wellington is the ideal, my old backyard there my deepest sense of home."

It's lines like these that kept me turning the pages, up to a point. But then I got tired of not knowing who these people were. The father is a cheerful near-saint and not much more complex than that. The sister is passionate about Civil War reenactment. A good part of the book deals with that, but her character is not developed beyond that one aspect. And not enough happens in this book, although I kept thinking something would happen soon. Henry considers deleting some of the emails from his mother's lover before she can read them, or better yet, replying to the emails himself, posing as his mother. Will he do that? Will that lead to something else happening? His mother talks openly to the family about her lover, a fellow musician she has just met. She wants everyone to think this is just another friend, she wants to not appear secretive, but talking about him is risky. Will this lead to something? The mother goes to a psychic for some relief from her inner conflict and the son reads about it in an email and visits the same psychic. Will this lead to something?

Curiosity and good writing kept me reading the book but in the end I was disappointed. There were so many possiblities in this story, but none of them, for me, was realized. There was a weekend when Henry was distracted and unable to concentrate. He was reading a novel by a contemporary author whose name he has now forgotten. He says "A book I read from beginning to end that weekend without registering much action or dialogue." Maybe that line has to do with his lack of concentration. Or maybe it has to do with the book itself. That pretty much sums up my feelings towards this book. I read it, but I didn't register much action or dialogue.