Blindness is also this, to live in a world where all hope is gone. (188)
Jose Saramago's Blindness describes what happens when, for no clear reason, everyone goes blind. This blindness reaches all but one character in the novel and is apparently spread through contact. In response to the spreading blindness, the government quarantines those who ( Read more... )

Sleuth (1972): starring Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine, this is a well-acted and fascinating movie. I watched it several years ago and loved it. I wish it were available from Netflix so I could watch it again. It was one of the first movies I watched that highlighted to me how good an actor Michael Caine is. I can't say much else about it ( Read more... )

When we understand each other's stories, we understand everything a little better--even ourselves. (66)
Someplace To Be Flying by Charles de Lint was a mixed bag for me. I liked some of the characters quite a bit (particularly Jack, Katy, and Kerry), I liked the premise, and there are several passages where I particularly liked the writing and the ( Read more... )

This is not nearly as good as everyone seems to think it is. As usual with Danny Boyle's movies, it looks and sounds great. And the early parts of the movie, featuring Jamal and Salim as children in Mumbai, are fascinating and emotionally resonant. But in the final half to third, the movie shifts into an entirely different mode, one that ( Read more... )

I read Stephenie Meyer's Twilight and Breaking Dawn a few weeks ago (I wrote about Twilight here) but haven't been able to bring myself to actually write a review of Breaking Dawn until now. It has taken me some time to overcome my dread of re-visiting the book enough to write about it, come to grips with the awfulness of the book, and begin to ( Read more... )

R. C. Lewontin's Biology As Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA is a short book, written for a general audience. This has its advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, it is very clearly written and organized, with lots of concrete examples. This makes it an ideal introduction for a reader who is not familiar with science studies. Lewontin presents ( Read more... )

According to Ben Stein, "Evil can sometimes be rationalized as science." Expelled reveals the ways that evil can be rationalized and disguised as argument and intellectual inquiry, too. That may seem extreme, but the ideas presented, the sorts of sloppy arguments made, and the twisted rhetoric used in this movie are dangerous and have the ( Read more... )

Robert Charles Wilson's Spin ( which I wrote about a while ago) is a wonderful book, one I recommend regularly; Axis, the follow-up to Spin, is not so wonderful.

Axis is far from a bad book. It is entertaining and includes some well-crafted scenes, some focusing on the characters and some on the scenery of a new world or on the results of the ( Read more... )

Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora, edited by Sheree R.Thomas, is a useful collection and contains some wonderful fiction. However, its subtitle, "A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora," led me to expect a collection of texts that really does attempt to represent the last century. Instead ( Read more... )

Dan Simmons' Hyperion drew me in slowly but completely. Once I was drawn in to the world Simmons creates--through the combination of the stories of several pilgrims to the planet of Hyperion and the Time Tombs there (a mysterious and dangerous site)--I didn't want the book to end ( Read more... )