All the surfaces of this movie are magnificent: the photography, the colors, the costumes, and the casting. I think the casting should receive some sort of award for genetic perspicacity: Father and son (and even gradchildren) look terribly alike, a most difficult casting accomplishment. And the acting is extraordinary, not only by the main characters, but by all the extras, and by the insects and by the moths and butterflies. How amazing to see manorial servants turn their backs and hide their faces when encountering a lady or gentleman in the hall; did not Hillary attempt to institute such a custom in the White House?

But when the substance of this movie is disected, the corpus is very slim indeed; and it all hinges on brother-sister incest. This aberration is not handled in a particularly enlightened way, but it does provide a sense of "depth" and importance to the action. The actual resolution of the incest, once discovered, would have led to an impressive movie, but there is no resolution. Instead we see the innocent protagonist, once more in love, heading for the Amazon river with his new honey. That action, too, could have provided a more substantial story line than the present skinny one.

In the end the movie is good entertainment. It does not make it as anthropology, of sociology, or sexology despite flirting briefly with each. It gets four stars for having kept me fixed on the screen without eliciting a single yawn.

There is a basic rule of cooking which states that if you use very good and very fresh ingredients and you neither over cook nor over spice them, the resulting dish will invariably be delicious. That simple formula does not apply to what Hollywood serves up, and this is an unfortunate example of how to take excellent actors (Streep, Cage, and Cooper), a good book ("The Orchid Thief"), use superb photography, enjoy a large budget, and produce what at best could be considered a mild emetic.

There is no excuse to waste Meryl Streep's acting genius on this idiotic, solipsistic, attempt at cleverness. It will be a long time before I manage to erase from memory the image of Streep in a Florida swamp holding (Pieta-like) the body of Chris Cooper, who has just been killed by a (rubber?) alligator and screaming at Nicolas Cage (who is trying to escape the situation, as they probably all were} ...Oh, my! The pain in her expression must have come from the realization of how her art was being iolated.

The movie tries to exploit the terrain of self-deprecation, self-doubt, and a paralyzing sense of inferiority which Woody Allen has profitably cultivated over the years. Allen is funny precisely because he is not incompetent or inferior; but here the script renders Cage as incompetent. And inferior. There is nothing funny about that.

The worst of this horrible mixture is the artsy-craftsy pretensions with which it is riddled. Discontinuities in time and narration might be here to give the movie a certain "avant-garde" flavor, but they don't, they just irritate. Cage plays himself and his twin brother (a technical virtuosity); together they are twice as painful to see as a single Cage would have been. Streep's part is so undemanding that it could have been played (equally well) by any one of a thousand aging actresses. There is nothing in the script that allows her to shine, and therefore the Academy awarded her an Oscar for best supporting performance. Chris Cooper does shine in his role as a Florida hick with graduate school knowledge of everything. He too received an Oscar for his work, proving the inscrutability of the Academy. This aberration was directed by Spike Jonze, who should be charged with malpractice and kept out of the kitchen.

This book should never have been made into a movie; the narration of the horros experienced by Wladyslaw Szpilman during the Nazi occupation of Poland was published soon after the war ended, and it constituted a powerful and frequently introspective story; I have not read the book, but the critique it has received from Amazon readers is uniformly good (nothing less than four or five star ratings). The truth is that some books simply cannot be transformed into successful motion pictures, and this apparently is one of them. It is an account of how events descended upon a man who remained a passive receiver of uncountable pain and horror; and how, in the end, he prevailed.

The ingredients that went into making this movie are all superb and beyond negative criticisms: the script is masterful and Roman Polanski directs with precision and meticulous concern for detail and nuance. Adrian Brody's performance reflecting his physical decay over time, and his increasing anguish, is certainly a tour de force of extraordinary acting. The film's theme of hope and of survival cannot be faulted. And so, why does the final product miss its goal, and become (dare I say it?) tedious? The clue, in Roman Polanski's own words, is this: "The events [Szpilman] describes are not written like a novel, they are written like a journal, and are therefore unfilmable." Exactly. This film consciously attempts to resemble the newsreels of the day; and like newsreels (in general) it provides the visuals and the immediacy of action without furnishing the transformations that lead to truly great art. When my mind started wondering about what kind of lighting was it that made Mr. Brody's ample nose become translucent, and was this being done on purpose, the movie had obviously lost my attention.

The WIFE surely contains some of the most delectable prose to be seen in print in recent years; but it is not because of the wonderful writing that this novel demands a second reading. No, it is that the surprise ending of the book needs to spend its awesome power in order to set us free to thoroughly enjoy the subtext and underlying structures of the book; for these can only be seen and felt once we know how the novel ends. A second reading is just as delightful, and perhaps more rewarding, than the first one.

The book's layering of thought and emotion is so deftly rendered that on its surface it appears to be another in the genre that deals with the tensions between an older, prestigious, male and the younger pretty female dilettante, who in time becomes an acolyte to the man's talent; but all along we sense that under the surface there is much more than that, as, indeed, there certainly is. The author is an irrepressible humorist of the type that is funny especially when she is trying not to be. It is a book about the sweet and deadly revenge of the weak against an oppressor; it is a sociology about how a human relationship can evolve from symbiosis to parasitic exploitation, from sharing to taking to grabbing; and if Meg Wolitzer borrows some of the techniques of police novels, she rewards the reader by serving up the Holy Grail of detective books: a truly perfect crime. An extraordinary book that is likely to become a minor classic.

This is a classic illustration of a failed work. The book should be mandatory reading at writer's wrokshops, for it teaches that a facility for writing pretty sentences does not imply an equal facility in creating a readable (never mind great) novel; just as a superb skill in laying bricks does not endow the bricklayer with the capacity to design and build a house.

The first couple of chapters of THE LOVELY BONES are not only readable, but exciting and fine; but soon the reader is dragged through a shapeless, pretentious, and silly meandering that leads to a bland and pointless finale; all along, however, encountering gracious and often gorgeous sentences. Central to the book is the image of a large sinkhole that swallows cars and refrigerators and a safe that contains the bones of the title. Well, not all the bones of the title but most of them. In a way the book itself becomes a sinkhole into which hours of our time and attention are sucked up in a muck of decaying cliches, simplemindedness, and pretentiousness.

Perhaps a strong editor (was any kind of an editor involved in this production?) could have cut through the self-indulgence and imposed on the writer the discipline needed to produce a fine novel. As it stands, THE LOVELY BONES is a most unsatisfactory reading experience.

This is the type of book that shows up occasionally in the literature, a true oddity that stands alone, unclassifiable in terms of known genres, not quite what it appears to be, but not entirely different from it, either. I am thinking of St. Exupery's LITTLE PRINCE, or Pauline Reage's THE STORY OF O: the first not a children's story, the second not a sadomasochistic tract. Each a single, luminous object that cannot be imitated, that will never be the foundation of its own genre, each destined for eternal life, yes, but a lonely and isolated existence.

Catherine Millet's SEXUAL LIFE has not plot, no time line, no sequencing; it is an ongoing sketch (cartoon like) of a female body being used for sexual purposes by various men at once, with the glad cooperation of the body's owner; it is a female body taking full advantage of a variety of more or less annonymous male bodies at once, with each male organ, once spent, being replaced mechanically by another of a different size, or shape, or color, or texture, or agility, to be fitted into a hand, or a mouth, or any of the other pockets available for penetration, and there to be coddled and rubbed and teased to extinction; and once extinct to be replaced by another and another, and another.

The narrative is a mystery because is seems purposeless. This challenges the reader to create a reason, if not for the book, at least for the reading of the book to the end; and that, sooner or later, is the real challenge of this work.

....

This extraordinary book can be read at many levels: humor, sexology, general science, evolutionary biology, and it is amazingly successful in all its various layers; some of the information it imparts is so fantastic that it will strain one's sense of reality. Can a mammal be born through the clitoris of the mother? UH?? Well, YES, it can. The spotted hyena delivers its pups through her clitoris (leading to the frequent mortality of the pups or the hyena moms). Read all about it.

Or consider the well known fate of the male praying mantis, whose head keeps his sexual urges in check until this organ is devoured by the amorous female: the the male's sexual inhibitory mechanisms (residing in the head) are removed, and he becomes a veritable sexual athlete while in the throes of death. Adds Dr. Judson: "Something analogous even happens in humans: Throttle a man and like as not he'll get an erection, not from erotic pleasure in dying, but because 'Down, boy' signals from the brain stop coming."

The variety of sexual behavior among the critters that populate planet earth is so extraordinary that after reading this book it will be unlikely that the extremely narrow band of sexual "deviance" among humans will have much of an impact on the reader. Sexual bondage? Pschaw! Consider the sagebrush cricket(Cyphoderis strepitans), who carries a gin trap with open jaws on his back. Those teeth clamp on the female's belly when she approaches the male (the female preference is to be on top) and immobilizes her so that the male can have his way, whether she wants to or not. Incest, cannibalism, rape, masturbation, homosexuality, they all flower in incredible variety among the users of this planet.

The book is written with scientific seriousness and literary humor. Its author has the steady hand of those who dominate their field, and at the same time she displays the joy and impudence of someone who loves the theme of sexual behavior. A good index and plenty of citations round out the excellence of this work. This is a book to keep as a reference for those protracted arguments about sexuality in which humans so often engage.

I wish I could have laughed when reading this book, but I did not, for the simple reason that it is not a funny book. It is a sad book. Daisey wants to be humorous and witty and he certainly tries very hard. Trouble is people who try to be funny usually are not, and this no exception Even the title of the book reeks of inflation: three years become twenty one by making them "dog" years. Inflation is everywhere, though, because somehow the scant substance in this tract must be stretched into a book length, whether it deserves it or not; and so we hear, over and over, how the author has a useless degree in esthetics, and how the author is a lazy slacker, and after about the twelfth time of this silly self-deprecation we can no longer even smile, just frown.

The book lacks a clear point of view or even a purpose. It is a rambling description of a few years of having worked at Amazon's customer service department. It lacks a deep enough understanding of the Amazon operation to be able to present a good criticism of it, or even to laugh at it as an insider (which the author never was) and thus the book is reduced to describing the bumbling efforts of a highly narcissistic incompetent. Nothing is learned from the author's experience, and that is one of the reasons why the book is so unsatisfactory.

Apparently some of the material of this book forms the basis for a sort of one-man show that the author, Mr. Daisey, performed in tiny venues in the Seattle area. Surely a live verbal attack on Amazon, and Jeff Bezos, and the Dot Com fading culture must have been capable of gathering small audiences of disaffected adults willing to fork over some cash for the privilege of listening. At first I thought the book's failure must have derived from attempting to transpose such monologue material into a readable book, which is a difficult task. And then I though about David Sedaris and his work ("Me Talk Pretty One Day," for example) in which he managed brilliantly to produce both a one man show and a hilarious book Perhaps it is an odious comparison to make, but a most valid one: in this book Daisey lacks the wit, humor, timing and grace that Sedaris has in overabundance in his work.

...

This is a delightful book that takes one cultural artifact (a mechanical chess playing machine that looks like a human being and is dressed in oriental opulence, "The Turk") and follows its entire life, from its conceptualization and manufacture to its final demise in a fire in Philadelphia. The period of the Turk's life lasted 85 years, and the people who somehow met and interacted with it were such luminaries Napoleon, and Charles Babbage (inventor of the first computer, sort of), and P. T. Barnum. Edgar Allan Poe started an entire genre (the short detective story) by writing "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," in part inspired by the mental exercise of trying to figure out how The Turk worked. Silas Wier Mitchell, the famous American Civil War physician and neurologist, actually owned The Turk before donating it to the Chinese museum in which it finally perished. Literally hundreds of Europe's intellectuals, and crowned heads, and glitterati of one sort or another played chess against the famous automaton, and usually (but not always) lost the game. And nobody except the operators knew the secret of the machine.

The Turk was the work of Wolfgang Kempelen, an engineer and an aid to the Austro-Hungarian Empress Maria Theresa, who called him to court so that he could explain to her the magic and the related magnetic games that were being demonstrated by a Frenchman by the name of Pelletier in the various courts of Europe. Maria Theresa, being of a scientific mind herself, wanted a respected official to uncover the trickery (if any) involved in Pelletier's performance. Mr. Kempelen explained each act as it was being performed, and was so unimpressed by the whole show that he boasted that if he had six months of free time he would be able to construct a really impressive automaton that would outclass anything then being shown in Europe. Maria Therese took him up on the challenge, and ordered him to go home, build his marvel in six months, and forget his duties to the state during that period.

Six months passed and in the Spring of 1770 Mr. Kempelen arrived in court with the Turk in tow. It was a life-size wood carving of a man wearing Turkish garb, seated at a table, with only one movable arm (the left)with dexterous fingers, and with a fixed gaze that stared down at a chess board. On the night of the first demonstration, Kempelen wheeled the figure before the audience, opened the various doors of the table, showing an impressive set of elaborate and mysterious clockwork and allowing the audience to look through the various openings, shining a candle for behind, so that they would see they were either empty or full of wheels and cogs, but free of any human being. When he convinced everyone that there was nothing hiding inside the machine, Kempelen invited one of the courtiers to sit at the table and play against the Turk. He used a large key to wind it up, and when he released a lever the Turk moved his head as if scanning the board, and suddenly reached out his arm and moved a piece. The game had began! Every ten moves or so, Kempelen would wind up the mechanism again, giving it the additional energy to proceed with the game. The Turk, of course, won the match that launched his famous career.

The author follows this career carefully and only after the Turk's life was ended does he reveal the method used by Kempelen (and others that owned the automaton). That is fair enough, giving the book the measure of suspense it should have in order to keep the reader excited and able to create his or her theory about how the machine operated and hold it until the end of the book.

The book does not end with the demise of the Turk, but it extends into the realm of the Kasparov - Deep Blue matches of 1996 (Kasparov won) and 1997 (D B won). It is a thoroughly delightful book to get into, and a hard one to put down. Even after the secrets of the machine are revealed, one is left in utter amazement about the Turk and its rambunctious life.

I admit to being a dictionary freak, but never in my fondest fantasies did I think an English dictionary would appear containing precise, concise, euphonic, professional pronunciations of the vernacular as it is spoken (or supposed to be spoken) in this country. And then it showed up! Ah, such joy. English is my second language, but just barely (I learned it when I was about 4 from my Nanny, Miss Smith). Half my family spoke vedy vedy Oxford English, and the other half no English at all, so I was brought up in an absurd greenhouse full of strange verbal emissions; from there I was released into this country to learn my first swearwords and how to pronounce things entirely differently. The result is that I have many pronunciation lacunas: either because I had never heard a word before and so I had to boldly figure it out on my own, or because I just didn't have the phonemes to correctly enunciate words like "nurse" or "bird." As a result I have often engaged in awful arguments about how certain words should be said: my version of "scone," for example, did not rhyme with stone, and was therefore universally derided by some of my American friends as peculiar and wrong. Attempts to settle on the correct pronunciation of words by means the horrific and arcane symbols used in dictionaries was futile.

As soon as I installed this program I entered the word "scone;" and on the right side of the screen the word appeared in blue (meaning that the program would pronounce it); and when I clicked on it, the wonderful sound of a properly pronounced "scone" issued from the speakers.

Next on my list of peeves came "nuclear;" the dictionary advised me to unpeeve myself off this one, because (according to M-W) our president's "nukelar" is an accepted pronunciation "which has found widespread use among educated speakers, including scientists, layers, professors, congressmen, U.S. cabinet members, and at least one U.S. president...." Oh, my!

Words taken from French (as is usual with English speakers) are correctly pronounced: such as "hors d'oeuvre;" while those borrowed from the Spanish, (as is usual with English speakers) are generally mispronounced (including the two attempts at "rodeo"). Some words are not pronounced at all, at least in my copy of the book, (such as "umlaut"), and I suspect that there are a few bugs in the program that underlies the book. But for now it is honeymoon time and I am spending an inordinate amount of hours loving this CD-ROM and not wanting to perceive that there is anything wrong with it. In a few months I may have to amend this review.

The speakers of the words are professional actors, one male, one female, and their diction is a true joy. I highly recommend this dictionary to all residents of the US who are foreign born; and also to Southerners, Midwesterners, New Englanders, New Yorkers...well, you get the picture.