Author: Amanda Knox
In 2007, Amanda Knox was accused of murdering her British roommate, Meredith Kercher, while studying abroad in Perugia, Italy. She was convicted, serving four years in prison until her conviction was overturned in 2011. While several books have been written about the trial and conviction of Amanda Knox, this is the first to be told in Amanda’s own words. In this memoir, she recounts the day she found her friend brutally murdered in their apartment, her unsettling experience with the Italian police during the investigation, and the details of her trial and time spent as a prisoner in a foreign country.
Although at times the details of the investigation and trial can be a bit redundant, this is still a very intriguing read, as it shines new light on things that may have been previously overlooked. With the retrial of the case going on now, this book will give quite a bit of insight to those interested in the outcome. The book can be found at Acorn and can also be requested through SWAN.
Author: David Finkel
Thank You For Your Service is a compilation of the true stories of several American soldiers after they have returned home from the war in Iraq. It is a sequel of sorts to The Good Soldiers, a work that tells the stories of these same soldiers while they were on the front lines. This book grabs your attention from the second you open it until you read the very last word. It is full of heartbreaking moments as well as a few happy ones. Not only does Finkel show us how the men were affected, but how their wives, doctors, friends, and children were affected as well. Finkel writes in such a powerful way that your heart will inevitably be touched by these stories. It is an absolute must-read.
Author: Nicole Holofcener
Starring actors such as Julia Louis-Dreyfus (Seinfeld), Catherine Keener (Where the Wild Things Are), and the late James Gandolfini (The Sopranos), this romantic comedy tells the story of single mom and masseuse Eva (Louis-Dreyfus) as she attempts to cope with her only child’s departure to college. Along the way, she encounters Albert (Gandolfini), also a single parent with a daughter on her way to college. Eva and Albert hit it off, but Eva soon realizes that her new client is Albert’s ex-wife, Marianne (Keener). Not wanting Albert to know Marianne is her client and trying to keep Marianne from realizing she is dating Albert, Eva soon begins going to questionable lengths in hopes of maintaining her new-found friendship with Marianne, only to begin damaging her romantic relationship with Albert. Can she find a way to achieve balance? The chemistry between Gandolfini and Louis-Dreyfus is effortless and real. An absolute must-see.
Author: Gary Kamiya
Gary Kamiya riffs on San Francisco’s beauty, eccentricities, and cyclical cataclysms in this new book. First, the specs: this seven-by-seven mile square sits on a craggy peninsula on the edge of the continent and hosts seven unpredictable microclimates. It was built by the feverish Gold Rush of 1849, then survived earthquakes in 1906 and 1989, the sudden emptying of Japantown due to Executive Order 9066, the AIDS epidemic, and the silly exuberance of the dot-com boom and its acrid bust. Kamiya, a former cab driver, is a masterful guide who combines a fluid, encyclopedic knowledge with his own madcap experiences. Cool Gray City of Love is wonderful, and it’s available from SWAN.
Author: Terrence Malick
This 1978 movie is a singular tale of struggle and love, American style. Richard Gere plays Bill, a volatile steelworker who flees 1916 Chicago for the Texas Panhandle after a violent encounter with his boss. He brings his sister, Linda, (the excellent Linda Manz), as well as Abby (Brooke Adams), his girlfriend who poses as his other sister for the sake of propriety.
They begin working for a young farmer (Sam Shepard), a man in possession of a great fortune and a gloriously madcap Queen Anne mansion. He’s also in want of a wife, and quickly falls in love with Abby. Tension, deception, and tragedy mythically unfold.
Though it was panned upon its release, it is now regarded as a masterpiece, as well as one of the most beautiful films ever made. Indeed, director Terrence Malick and his cinematographers turn everything they observe—trains, blast furnaces, horses, storms, artificial light, oceanic wheatfields, human frailty—into resolute poetry. Acorn owns Days of Heaven, and it can be requested from SWAN.
Author: Lauren DeStefano
While dystopian novels are one of young adult literature’s most popular genres, Wither by Lauren DeStefano is a novel marketed as a utopian novel. Wither takes place hundreds of years in the future after a cure for ailments has gone awry. While scientists were able to cure children of any and all diseases, healthy girls began dying at the age of 20 and boys at 25. While scientists are busy looking for the new cure, Rhine Ellery is separated from her twin brother and forced into marriage to bear children. Although Rhine eventually gets along with her shy, somewhat clueless husband, she is horrified to learn what lengths her father-in-law is willing to go to find the cure and begins looking for a way to escape. All the books in The Chemical Garden Trilogy are the perfect antidote to the deluge of violent dystopian books like Veronica Roth’s Divergent and Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games. DeStefano’s protagonists are realistic, while the villains are multidimensional, and the plot moves quickly making reading all three books in a sitting entirely plausible. While the book may be better suited to older young adults, the themes and questions that arise throughout concerning women, genetics, family, and responsibility are provocative and substantial.
Norm McDonald Live
Remember Norm Macdonald? I love Norm Macdonald. Some people don’t think he’s funny, but I do. If you liked him as the host of “Weekend Update” on Saturday Night Live, seen the film Dirty Work, or are interested in deadpan interviews with celebrity comedians including Gilbert Godfried, Super Dave, Larry King(?) Andy Dick, and Russell Brand, you should watch the video podcasts on YouTube. He seems like he is intentionally losing sponsors, so watch it while you can before it abruptly ends (like his two short-lived TV shows).
Author: Joshua Oppenheimer
I had the chance to see a screening of Joshua Oppenheimer’s 2012 documentary The Act of Killing at the Music Box Theatre in Chicago and I recommend it. The film follows a few leaders of a pro-government paramilitary force that killed between 500,000 and 1 million alleged Communists and ethnic Chinese in Indonesia in 1965. Oppenheimer offers the unapologetic murderers a chance to make a celebratory film about their deeds and the proud “gangsters” (as they call themselves) take him up on the offer. The result is a documentary of interviews and behind-the-scenes looks at the disturbing filming process of the gangsters/death squads reenactments. The documentary is a bit disturbing, but well worth the uncomfortable experience. Plus its executive producers include Werner Herzog and Errol Morris, so you know it’s a decent documentary.
Author: Lucy Hughes-Hallett
Gabriele D’Annunzio was, as the subtitle suggests, a multi-dimensional figure. Hughes-Hallett can easily have added “psychopath”, “monster”, or “fascist” to her title. That fact that she does not do so is impressive and it benefits her storytelling. D’Annunzio, for those who are unfamiliar, was an Italian poet, playwright, and novelist who almost single-handedly led the Italians to war on the side of the Allies. The proto-fascist did it for glory, not for any noble reason. As a fervent nationalist, he was a precursor to Mussolini and actually made himself dictator (Duce) of Fiume (in Yugoslavia) for 15 months.
Hughes-Hallet chose to write on a series of non-chronological themes and events that shaped D’Annunzio. It is a puzzling look into the creation of a monster in a society that was rapidly going mad itself. If you’re interested in 20th century European politics, art, or the Great War you need to read this book. It can be found at Acorn.
Reviewer: Danielle
Do you have any smart masses in your life? Is your home overrun with smart masses? Is your office mate a secret smart mass? Does your best friend exhibit latent smart mass tendencies? Perhaps, when you look in a mirror, there’s even a smart mass staring right back at you?! Well, fret not! We, er, I mean they (yeah, they, uh huh, them…those ones, over there) aren’t dangerous. Smart masses are just shy, misunderstood creatures yearning for connection and meaning and any number of the most craptacularly stupendous oddities ever created or collected by humankind.
I’m here to tell you that today is your lucky day. They made a place for you to find everything you need to calm, distract and befriend any and all smart masses you may find wandering through your life. ThinkGeek.com has everything (yes, EVERYTHING!) you could ever imagine imagining. But, I must warn you, once you enter the emporium of geek, you may lose all concept of linear time. You didn’t realize it but up there, right around the time I typed ‘EVERYTHING’, you lost me for a good thirty minutes as I was sucked into the vortex of awesome oddness. But, I fought my way back to you even though resistance is, indeed, futile. I can feel the pull right now…it’s waiting for us. So, take the quantum leap into a world filled with things you never knew you wanted to want, needed to need or loved to love…join me in Nerdvana.
Reviewer: Danielle
Mortgages. Car repairs. Root canals. Taxes. Wrinkles. New aches and pains. Retirement planning. Sweaters when it hits 68 degrees. Is that a gray hair? Where’d I put my stupid keys? Wait, where’d I park the car? All of this either has or will happen to you. Why? Because you’re an adult and you’re getting older by the second! You are being stalked by old man time himself. Rip Van Winkle was make-believe, Peter Pan was a fairy tale, the fountain of youth is bull-hockey, time stops for no one and that just plain sucks. But, wait…what’s this? Is it magic? Why, yes, yes it is.
Do you want to feel the vigor of youth again shoot through your brain without thought of needing a nap? Do you want to giggle like a gap-toothed school girl? Do you want to have the aged curmudgeons in your life look at you like you’ve lost your mind? Well, then, Pixar Short Films Collection, Volumes 1 and 2, are here to save you from becoming your parents! In fact, if you can watch these without a single moment of childlike glee coursing through your oh-so-grown-up self, then it’s just too late for you. Don’t let it be too late! Go now. Save yourself. Just don’t trip on your way…you might break a hip.
Reviewer: Danielle
Everyone, at one time or another, has wished for the world to disappear, if only for a moment. We’ve wished for space to breathe, for a clarity only available when the harsh glare of the everyday disappears, for a silence so clarion in its call that time slows as we try to discern the meaning in an absence. The experience of these moments is fleeting in our modern world of cacophonous resonances that echo everywhere, endlessly.
But, perhaps, it isn’t as endless as it seems. The unironically entitled documentary, Happy People (available at Acorn), is about a group of people happily living the most basic of existences in the Siberian Taiga. The main focus is on a trapper and the life he ekes out for himself and his family in one of the harshest biomes in the world. The unforgiving nature, and the unrelenting beauty, of the area act as touchstones by which to measure the true nature of human existence, peace and true happiness.
For me, however, the ultimate definition of true solitude, peace, happiness and beauty comes by the way of a man named Dick Proenneke. He left the world behind and never looked back. He spent decades living alone in the Alaskan wilderness and he captured it all in a series of diaries and on film. Alone in the Wilderness and its sequel, Alaska, Silence and Solitude, capture the heart of humanity laid bare. What truths the human heart and mind and body hold are all here: the meaning of living versus existing; the power of true beauty to blur the human eye and touch the human heart in unimaginable ways; the triumph of the spirit when survival is at stake; and the ingenuity and resourcefulness inherent to the unbroken, billion-year line of human heritage that connects us all.
So, join me in a celebration of spirit, solitude, beauty and peace, if you will…oh, wait, you already have.
