Category Archives: Reviews

Reviews of books, movies, what have you.

BOOK REVIEW: The Strange Case of Dr. Doyle

THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. DOYLE: A Journey into Madness and Mayhem
By Daniel Friedman, MD and Eugene Friedman, MD
Square One Publishers, 2015

Sometimes it’s not easy being an amateur reviewer, especially with today’s obsession with “spoilers”. You really, really don’t want to give anything away about your subject. But sometimes, it’s almost impossible.

So in this case, if you don’t want to know too much, don’t go reading past the “More” link. Just take my word that this book is a very good recounting of the five “canonical” Jack the Ripper killings, intermingled with an equally good biography of Arthur Conan Doyle in his early years (before he became a famous writer). It’s worth reading for either of those.
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MOVIE REVIEW: Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka (USSR, 1961)

When most people think of Soviet Cinema, they picture ponderous and didactic propaganda pieces. Or badly hacked / edited redubbings of SF films only suitable for Mystery Science Theater 3000. But just like Russian literature, there’s a lot more to it than that.

Nikolai Gogol was born in 1809 in what is now Ukraine. Self-conscious and withdrawn (probably something to do with his height; schoolmates called him their “mysterious dwarf”), he developed a talent for mimicry and storytelling. In 1831, he met the writer Alexander Pushkin. Inspired, he wrote and published a collection of stories from his youth entitled Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka. This movie is an adaptation of one of those tales – “Noch pered Rozhdestvom,” or “Christmas Eve.”

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Movie Review: Santa’s Slay (2005, Canada)

The “evil Santa” trope has been around for ages…. or it least it seems that way. Krampus doesn’t count (no matter what the contrarians trying to revive his legend might think), nor does Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. For some reason, the idea of the traditional holiday bringer of cheer becoming the holiday bringer of death is popular with the producers of cheap horror films. The producers of Santa’s Slay decided to take that idea, toss what must have been some decent cash at it, and turn it into a comedy.

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Book Review: Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension

Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension
Matt Parker
Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2014)

Physicist Stanislaw Ulam was bored. Stuck in the middle of an interminable lecture, he started doodling on a piece of graph paper. Starting with “1” and going outwards, he made a spiral pattern of all the positive integers. Then, he marked off all the prime numbers in the spiral. Something odd popped out. Prime numbers weren’t distributed randomly, as one might think. They tended to lie in clusters along diagonal lines. It turns out that this is NOT random, but why it is so is still a puzzle.

Self-described “stand-up mathematician” Matt Parker has turned his videos at Numberphile into book form (and added a few more fascinating topics). Like those videos, the book covers the entire world of mathematics. From counting in different base systems to packing coins into squares to untangling knots to the many different types of numbers, it’s all presented in a delightful and easy-to-follow manner.

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Book Review: Ready Player One

Ready Player One
Ernest Cline
Random House, 2011

This highly regarded (and being made into a movie) novel left me, well, a little flat. It’s like a slice of chocolate cake prepared by a master baker. Sure, it’s lovely to look at and tastes magnificent, but in the end, it’s not really satisfying as a full meal.

The creator of a truly massive online world died a few years prior to the action of the story, and has left both his multibillion fortune and control of the company that manages this super-MMORPG to the first person who successfully solves a set of puzzles hidden in that world. Our hero, Wade Watts, manages to discover the location of the first puzzle – and solves it. Naturally, he attracts the attention of an EEEvil megacorporation, whose owner wants to win just to extend the power of his business empire.

Turns out all the puzzles have to do in some way with 1980s computer culture – games, movies, and music. This makes it a rather decent nostalgic romp through that era, which is what all the critics and reviewers seem to love.

I liked the ride, too, having been a young adult at the time, and having actually played the games and seen the movies referenced. But after I put the book down, disillusion set in.

Wade comes upon the solutions to the puzzles just a little too easily. There’s never any sense that he is being challenged, or even in any danger. It is a problem for anything set in a virtual world, admittedly, but even in the one occasion where he is actually physically threatened, it turns out that Wade set up the entire situation.

There’s a heck of a lot that’s unsaid in Cline’s world building. The novel is set in a world of scarce resources, to the point that it takes on a post-apocalyptic vibe. But the idea that the U.S. is in such a crappy state precisely because everyone is spending so much time in the online world (Wade even attends school there) that the real world has been allowed to go to rot is unexplored. Even the fact that indentured servitude has become legal again (you can be outright kidnapped by a private corporation and forced to work for them to pay off a debt) is tossed off without comment or elaboration.

Cline has some good ideas, but I think he should have spent a little more time with actual world-building than playing games in some 1980s fantasyland.

Movie Review: Attack the Block (UK, 2011)

It’s Guy Fawkes Night in South London, and a young woman (Jodie Whittaker) is walking home from work. As she approaches her home in a public housing complex, a gang of teenaged thugs surround and proceed to mug her. Before they can complete their task, something crashes down into a parked car at the side of the street. Moses (John Boyega), the gang’s leader, goes to investigate, and is slashed in the face for his trouble. This assault cannot go unpunished, so their mugging victim forgotten, the gang tracks down the wild animal responsible.

The thing is tracked down to a shed in a playground, and is quickly beaten to death. Moses carries the body back home as a trophy, but it takes him and the rest of the gang a while to realize that the thing is no earthly creature. And when a number of flaming objects start landing in the neighborhood in the same way that their victim arrived, they are in for a whole heck of a lot of trouble….
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Movie Review: The Great Yokai War (2005, Japan)

Movie buffs tired of seeing the same old rehashes or sequels really should give a look at what other countries are doing. Sure, you’ll have to deal with subtitles and a lot of little cultural differences, but you don’t have to be Joseph Campbell to realize that certain stories are universal. Priests are always going to be going into battle with the devil over the souls of the departed, romance is romance no matter what language the lovers speak, and young people are always going to go through rites of passage into adulthood.

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Book Review: The Last Unicorn

The Last Unicorn: A Search for One of Earth’s Rarest Creatures
by William DeBuys
Little, Brown and Company
2015

It starts right in the middle of the “action” DeBuys is on a boat in the middle of the Nakai Reservoir, the lake formed by the construction of the Nam Theun 2 Hydropower Project (NT2) in central Laos. The project is the largest hydroelectric power plant in the country, producing so much electricity that there’s a surplus available for export to Thailand. The reservoir is so new that trees in the flooded area are still standing, an eerie reminder of what was there.

The reservoir itself borders the Nakai–Nam Theun National Biodiversity Conservation Area. A percentage of revenue from the dam is supposed to be directed to conservation efforts there. And that area is where DeBuys is headed – to track down the elusive saola.

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Movie Review: Russian Ark (Russia, 2002)

I’m sure you’ve heard the basics of this film. One long, single take of a walk through the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, and Russian history. The techical achievement is amazing, but for me the historical element was very minor. Sure, there were scattered references to historical figures and events, but they were in no real order. Nor was the movie a guided tour of the Hermitage.  If there is a plot or a message, it’s that museums serve as repositories of civilization.

The whole thing was intended to come across as a dream – and it does that extremely well.

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BOOK REVIEW: Independence: The Tangled Roots of the American Revolution

by Thomas P. Slaughter
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014

Pity the poor high school teacher of American History. They have so much required material to cover, along with an assortment of topics mandated by various outside agencies, that they cannot possibly cover everything, much less make what they do cover interesting.

I know from my own education (way back in the Mists of Time – the 1980s, to be precise), that when it came to American history we were briefed on the colonies in Jamestown and Plymouth – and then suddenly it was a century and a half later, and the Revolutionary War was starting in Boston. Slaughter attempts to rectify this omission.

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