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Content by Robert J. Crawford
Commentateur n° : 2,283
Votes Utiles:
50
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Reviews Written by
Robert J. Crawford (Balmette Talloires, France)
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he gets away with it!!!!, Jun 25 2004
This has got to be the most unbearably crude, politically incorrect comedy routine ever - and he pulls it off, with real style!!! OK, it is somewhat dated, coming from the 80s, but this man has got to be one of the funniest comedians since Bill Cosby. They are both geniuses. But Murphy takes being black head on (head first?), as well as men-women, gays, you name. If you can stop laughing, there is something to offend EVERYONE. He is also a first rate actor/impersonator. Best I've seen in a long time = I am getting ready to return to the states, and this is the PERFECT preparation in the age of Bush II.
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Scoundrel Time
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de Lillian Hellman
Édition : Paperback |
| Price: CDN$ 17.63 |
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| Availability: Usually ships in 3 to 5 weeks |
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a very personal view of a difficult time, Jun 22 2004
Lillian Hellman was a decent person who was caught in a terrible cross wind and ruined. From a charmed life as a screenwriter, she fell to the bottom more quickly than she could have imagined possible. I found this to be the least successful of her series of memoires, in which she re-made herself and re-entered the spotlight as a good if not truly distingusihed writer. However, the topic is more focused than the other volumes, in particular focusing on the travials of her friend, Dashell Hammett. This is very moving. In fact, I found the best part of the book was the introduction by Garry WIlls, who is a truly first-rate political writer. His depiction of the time, made more vivid by his self-identification as a conservation, is chilling and comic at the same time - he recalls how Ayn RAND said that any film with Russians even smiling was propaganda and hence punishable by law!Recommended, but there are better and far more comprehensive histories of the period.
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OK mysteries, Jun 16 2004
These are pretty run of the mill, but then, virtually all mysteries are structured in similar ways. What sets Durrenmatt apart are his characters, who are quite nuanced and full of surprises. The language is also good, and as I read it in German, not too difficult if undistinguished.Recommended if you like the mystery genre, which appeals to me only in film.
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acid polemic, charming memoire, and EVER provocative, Jun 16 2004
Fallaci has the reputation of an irascible moral purist, a radical democrat, and she certainly lives up to that here. This book, written in response immediately following the 9/11 attacks, demonstrates that she has lost none of her political passion. It is as if she vomitted it all out in a single sitting, which is not too far off the mark as she says she lived on coffee and didn't sleep for weeks while she wrote. On the one hand, there is her outrage at what occured, not only with the Muslim world that spawned such dangerous fundamentalists, but also at the reactions of the politicians in the West and in particular in Europe. All I can say is that her condemnations are not terribly nuanced: there is no acknowledgment of moderate moslems and no patience with the all-too-human hypocracy of the "critics" of the US. While this is rather tiresome after a while, it should not overshadow the fact that her perspective and experience as a celebrated journalist are indeed unique and penetrating. But her rhetoric all too easily soars to excess. In a diatribe against colored immigrants in Italy, for example, she flatly charges that they don't work much, that they routinely indulge in sexual assault, and that they cannot be absorbed into Italian civilization but will instead destroy it. That is certainly not racist, but there is real bile there. On the other hand, she gives some wonderful glimpses into her mind and its development, from the moral integrity of her parents to her meetings with such world leaders as the Dalai Lama (he gets an A+) or Yassar Arafat (D-). In a way, I wish that she would write a memoir. Also, she lets on that she has terminal cancer, that she loves New York, that America is the guarantor of the West's freedom. It is a good performance and highly interesting. I read this in Italian and really enjoyed the language: vivid and full of bite, very useful for the development of vocabulary. Recommended.
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ok, but lacks the fun of his other sci-fi novels, Jun 3 2004
There is much less humor in this Vonnegut novel than in many of his others. The characters are also less interesting than those that apppear in his other novels and plays, though there are some that reappear such as the God-guru Bokonon. I just found this novel kind of wierd, and then the apocalypse was sudden, etc. There are many of Vonnegut's typical themes: socially inept people ("losers" in the glitzy American sense) who gain positions of influence/power in obscure places and try to do good, banal science that started out inadvertantly and became very deadly, and speculations about how people should treat eachother. It is an odd conglomeration.Tepidly recommended.
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consistently excellent, but a bit too much shooting here, Jun 3 2004
This is a worthy ending to this series. While I tired somewhat of the cowboy stuff that naturally accompanies a climax, the dark vision and ambiguous ending of the film mark it as truly outstanding sci-fi. Sure, the ending was happy, but troubles for the future are very clearly in the making. The greatest surprize of all is the maintenance of the cryptic - and logically consistent - references that were so much fun in the 2nd part. Moreover, it is never fully explained, but left to the imaginative to puzzle out, if they so wish. Indeed, there are added delicious mysteries, like the little Indian girl and the transforamtion of the oracle. REcommended for serious fans of sci-fi.
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superb, subtle, elegant, Jun 2 2004
This is an excellent book on a master politician, Francois Mitterrand. Duhamel follows his career from his origins as a center-right politician under the 4th Republic to the Presidency as a leftist in the 5th. Along the way, the reader gets to know him in his full ambiguity and complexity. FOr example, though a conservative, once political institutions changed fundamentally in the 5th Republic - ending his career as a rising minister in the legislative regime of the 4th - Mitterrand read left-wong political philosophy and concluded, "there are ideas and everything here. I can win this." He then did, nearly 20 years later.But his political strategy is not all that is here. I learned innumerable things that I didn't know: he was a connoisseur of Romanesque church details, which he surveyed when he got the chance during political junkets. Or take the existence of his second family, which he housed at taxpayer expense in a public chateau. But his political legacy is also covered well, in the ways in which Mitterrand expanded certain freedoms and encouraged the development of alternate centers of power to the presidency, which is a uniquely powerful office in the Western democracies. The book is beautifully written and avoids excessive detail. Warmly recommended.
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0 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
eccentric, naive, and often rather dull, May 26 2004
After greatly enjoying some Vonnegut sci-fi, I was perhaps looking for the wrong thing with this book. It is a weird story about a nutty millionaire, who is in danger of losing his money to an assembly of the sleaziest twits you could possibly imagine. While there are many very funny asides, such as his love of Kilgore Troustian conceptions or the characterizations of the evil guys (one's posterior is "luminous when wet"), the plot is weak and far-fetched. For example, Rosewater's grandfather built his massive fortune by buying companies in accordance with their acronyms from the Bible's text! That is too silly to be satire. Moreover, Vonnegut's laments about the coldness and brutality of American capitalism are sentimental and even ignorent.Not recommended.
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The Eye
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de Vladimir Nabokov
Édition : Paperback |
| Price: CDN$ 13.83 |
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| Availability: Usually ships in 3 to 5 weeks |
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fair to middling, May 25 2004
This is not a great novella in my reading, but it has some of the Nab's typical themes: deception, living in the imagination that merges disturbingly with reality, and the simple bizarre. Sometimes I get tired of how many pathetic characters there are in Nabokov's novels and that was the case with this one; it is set among the emigre set perpetually mourning the loss of tzarist Russia, which is of limited interest. Moreover, for sticklers (and lovers) of Nabokov's inimitable style, this is a translated work and as with virtually all of the others, something is lost - I found it very flat, almost two dimensional. Recommended tepidly, but true Nabokov devotees will probably like it.
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Transparent Things
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de Vladimir Nabokov
Édition : Paperback |
| Price: CDN$ 11.68 |
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| Availability: Usually ships in 3 to 5 weeks |
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powerful and full of texture, yet deliciously brief, May 25 2004
This is typical brilliant Nabokov, with plenty of detail and mysterious threads laid down throughout that the imaginative can choose to follow or ignore. Because it was written in English rather than translated, Nabokov's prose is at its most powerful and organic - by far. The stories in this are extremely haunting, at least for me, musing on the nature of life after death, among many other themes. It is true genius and you can read it in a single sitting. Get it. You won't be disappointed.
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