Archive for the ‘History’ Category

Review: Arrival/The Story Of Your Life

Sunday, November 20th, 2016

Tell your friends about this blog entry
Tell friends about this blog entry

Following are my thoughts about the movie, Arrival.

Despite my efforts, it’s possible that reading this post will spoil the movie for you. I’m not intending to, but would hate if I did …

So, maybe, watch the movie, or read the novella The Story Of Your Life by Ted Chiang before you read further? Watching the film and especially reading the novella – well worth your while.

By the time I turned 10, I could distinguish between the dreams that were predictive and the ones of that are mere processing.

It’s not as if those early portents were of much consequence.

The structure of those early Knowings was part of their message.

Every one of those early dreams would begin with me in a place I’d never been in before.

First, I’d see every detail of my surroundings, as if the camera were panning around the place so I’d remember it when next I saw it. It was as if the Universe were announcing, “Stay turned for the following important Message.

But then what would come next would not seem to me to be an important message at all. In the dream, I’d participate in an innocuous conversation with someone, sometimes someone I already knew, sometimes not.

Sometimes, the conversation would be a disagreement, but it was not usually something I cared about very much, in the dream at least. Usually, I had very little context. These messages were not very long – maybe a minute or two of talk at most after the scene had been set.

Despite my resentment that the Universe was instructing me to store such a ridiculously uninteresting tableau, I would remember these Messages.

Then, sometime later – a day, week, month, or year later – the exact conversation that I’d dreamed would take place in my waking life in precisely the place I dreamed it would. Every word that I’d dreamed would be spoken. Every item I’d dreamed of would be on every shelf; every leaf would tremble just as it did in the dream.

Every time one of my dreams played out in my real life, I wondered, at the end of its reiteration, if I should tell the person I was talking with that I had already had the conversation we’d been having. Usually, I didn’t. Once in a while, if I were talking with someone I knew would just honor my honesty and not argue with me, I’d say something like, “You know, I dreamed this conversation a few weeks ago. I was thinking of trying to deliberately deviate from the script I dreamed, but felt bound to relive it as the dream instructed me to.” What would you do if you were talking with an 8-year old who told you something like this, or even a 20-year old? You’d move on to other topics, wouldn’t you?

Much later on, some of my dreams would predict real, consequential events in my life. These dreams would be less specific as to exact location and words spoken. After all the dreams, all the training, the Universe knew I was familiar with the drill.

In these later dreams, I’d dream the thing happening and Know it would happen and that I could not stop it. In these cases, when I’d startle awake from the dream, I’d usually tell the person I was with what I’d dreamed would happen. And we would agree, because we were grown-ups, that I could not renege on my commitment on the basis of the dream.

So, for example, on the morning I awoke to lightning flashing after a dream in which I was a passenger in a car that crashed on a wet, windy road in Princeton Junction, NJ, I got on the train that took me to Princeton Junction (should I have canceled the trip), seated myself in the passenger seat (should I have insisted upon driving), my mother driving, and the car was hit head-on by an idiot who took a curve too wide and totaled it (should I have suggested an alternate route?).

As we sat on the side of the road, I did NOT tell me mother I had known since I’d awoken that we would not be driving in that car ever again.

Needless to say, I am not good at sleeping. But now, my Messages don’t only come in dreams. Often, I just Know things that will happen. And, as even the Greeks have told us, the world does not appreciate hearing dire predictions, and resent people who say “I told you so.”

Knowing things without any basis for Knowing them is, if anything, even worse than dreaming them. In particular, with close family and friends, I often Know what will happen (sometimes very specifically) as soon as they describe some path they are considering. It is only rarely that I tell them what I Know.

There’s a movie out now. I think it will not be in theatres for long. It’s called Arrival, and it’s based on a novella called “The Story Of Your Life” by Ted Chiang that I recognized as a Message from the Universe when I first read it in around 2002.

The first time I saw Arrival, I went alone to a free Women Who Code showing. With my foot in a cast, I walk slowly and I got into the showing 15 minutes late.

Although I enjoyed the film, I felt that if I had not read the story first, I would not have been able to understand it. But I thought that maybe this was because I’d missed the beginning.

So, last week, I dragged my husband and daughter with me to see it again, beginning to end this time.

Turned out that DH, who has a terrifying ability to grok any movie plot no matter how confused, understood every single thing about Arrival.

My daughter, who is brilliant in general and a very savvy watcher of movies, was indeed confused. Also, I misunderstood when I thought she had asked me what exactly Arrival was about, and when I told her, she was extremely miffed with me.

Given its thoughtful pace and meditative mood, my feeling is that Arrival is not going to be a blockbuster. But it’s a film that adult children ought to take their parents to. The kids are unlikely to get it; the parents will on first watch.

Then, you all, read the novella. The novella avoids a lot of the silliness of the movie and gives the complete Message.

(Based on my recent Knowings, the endings of both the movie and the story feel inappropriately optimistic, but then Chiang was writing just after 9/11 and before the Iraq Invasion, when the world was a very different place.)

In this very cool piece, a linguist reality-checks the process Amy Adams’ character used to learn the alien’s language.

Humor Abuse

Sunday, August 19th, 2012

Tell your friends about this blog entry
Tell friends about this blog entry

Lorenzo Pisoni was just two years old when he created and presented his first act during into intermission in his family’s Pickle Circus. His performance was so compelling it cut significantly into concession sales. Lorenzo Pisoni was drafted into the performance itself.

Humor Abuse, Pisoni’s one-man show about his life in the circus and out, is a brilliant meditation on how a severely gifted person can be accidentally abused by his parents as they nurture a child’s gifts. The problem a gifted child with gifted parents faces is that when he gets into the family business, he sometimes finds himself also taking on his parents’ burdens.

Humor Abuse is a hilarious and sad and impressive tribute to hard work, circus, clowning, and family. The pratfalls scripted into the show echo the slips and trips that occur in life as parents and child learn to nurture their talents.

Today is the closing day of this run. Go!

Book review: Song of the Lark

Wednesday, June 27th, 2012

Tell your friends about this blog entry
Tell friends about this blog entry
Author:Willa Cather
Reading Level (Conceptual):Children 12 and up
Reading Level (Vocabulary):Children 12 and up
Genre:Fiction
Year of publication:1915

I am always blown away when a novel that is nearly 100 years old speaks to me as compellingly as Song of the Lark did. The story of Thea Kronborg, one of many children in a family

Recommended.

If you found this review helpful and/or interesting, consider supporting our book habit: Buy this book!: Song of the Lark

Book review: The Monkey Bible

Sunday, July 24th, 2011

Tell your friends about this blog entry
Tell friends about this blog entry
Author:Mark Laxer
Reading Level (Conceptual):For grown-ups
Reading Level (Vocabulary):For grown-ups
Genre:science fiction
Year of publication:2010

I am frankly very disappointed in this book. It had so much potential, and I really enjoyed the first maybe two-thirds of it. Up to that point, Laxer posed questions that I personally thought were fascinating: What is the relationship between humans and the "non-human" world? Do we have any right to separate them at all [I don't think we do]? What does religion mean? How does the mental process of religion relate to the physical world? I was also impressed that there were no direct answers to these questions, because the answers are different for any individual... And Laxer effectively communicated that flexibility with a mix of narrators who all found different answers for themselves.

BUT. After a couple of hundred pages, the answers started being drilled into me, which I didn't appreciate, because all of a sudden the open-ness I had felt disappeared. I was also unhappy that the story took a lot of turns towards the impractical, so that by the end I didn't believe in the world presented to me anymore. All in all, The Monkey Bible represents a great idea, started off very well, but ended all-too-mush-ily for me.


I forgot to mention the "Companion Music CD" included with the book. I haven't been able to force myself to actually listen to it, because the lyrics are written out of the back of the book, and my reaction to them perfectly matches my feeling that they tried too hard: to "get a message across," to be super new-agey, to "enlighten" the audience in a way I didn't want to be enlightened. I think the book would have been able to speak for itself.

-- Fizzy

If you found this review helpful and/or interesting, consider supporting our book habit: Buy this book!: Monkey Bible, The

Musical Review: Rent

Friday, August 20th, 2010

Tell your friends about this blog entry
Tell friends about this blog entry

Some musicals strike us as perfect, or at least nearly perfect. We’ve seen Into the Woods nearly fifty times and would be willing to watch it weekly or more if we could afford to. The book is interesting to us, most of the lyrics are clearly intentional and speak to us, the music is complex and beautiful. Sure there are songs that we think could go, or be improved, but still.

Rent seems terrifically unfinished to us. My teenage daughter who did not experience the 1980’s when AIDS first began to wreak havoc with so many lives and who had never heard the acronym AZT was utterly confused by the initial half hour. (We paused the DVD to explain what was happening and why.)

We admired Rent as an impassioned, furious, context-free snapshot of that awful time. The performers on the DVD are gorgeous, with voices to match. But the music and lyrics don’t rise to the cause they represent. The perfect song that Roger runs away to Santa Fe to write is not.

Wonder if perhaps, if the creator, Jonathan Larson, had lived to see the show on Broadway, he would have refined it further.

Support our reviews.

Book review: The Children’s Book

Thursday, February 4th, 2010

Tell your friends about this blog entry
Tell friends about this blog entry
Author:A.S. Byatt
Reading Level (Conceptual):For grown-ups
Reading Level (Vocabulary):For grown-ups
Genre:fiction
Year of publication:2009

There are so many intertwining, involving stories in The Children's Book that it was sometimes hard to slow down and remember that great novels are not entirely about what they are about.

Set in the time leading up to World War I and before women's sufferage, the plot tells of a group of families and their associates and friends. There is a destitute young boy who is nurtured to become the artist he deserves to be. There are the young women who, lacking the vote and receiving conflicting messages about how to behave socially and politically, pay terrible prices. The subplots about how various characters resolve their needs to express themselves politically, even when expressing their opinions may adversely affect those they love should be required reading for anyone thinking of a career in politics.


This is not an easy book to read, but it is also not an easy book to put down.

It's as if Byatt is leading us through a magical party. She continually blows up the most beautiful balloons and then, once you've become entranced by one, she wanders back to burst it.

-- Emily

If you found this review helpful and/or interesting, consider supporting our book habit: Buy this book!: Children's Book, The

Book review: A Step From Heaven

Saturday, January 2nd, 2010

Tell your friends about this blog entry
Tell friends about this blog entry
Author:An Na
Reading Level (Conceptual):Sophisticated readers
Reading Level (Vocabulary):Children 12 and up
Genre:fiction
Year of publication:2003

I'm not sure how to rate this book, because the narration ranges from a five-year-old's perspective to that of an 18-year-old one. This is really interesting, but leaves most of the book as a very easy, lower-level read. However, this story about abuse and immigration is intense and scary.

Yung and her family emigrated from Korea when she was five to find a better life. But her dad ended up drinking and life got very hard trying to keep their heritage while living in America...

--Fizzy


If you found this review helpful and/or interesting, consider supporting our book habit: Buy this book!: Step From Heaven, A

Book review: The Jewel Box

Tuesday, October 13th, 2009

Tell your friends about this blog entry
Tell friends about this blog entry
Author:Anna Davis
Reading Level (Conceptual):For grown-ups
Reading Level (Vocabulary):For grown-ups
Genre:fiction
Year of publication:2009

Wars have consequences, even when they don't impact those at home directly.

Not that horrors bear comparison, but the shock to the folks at home when, eventually they heard of the carnage of World War I seems to me as if it should have been mind-altering. Hard to believe they went right back to killing each other even more horribly in World War II.

The Jewel Box
describes one woman's response to the events that affected her personally during the Great War -- she adopts the persona of a flapper.

I admire Anna Davis' ability to show that the faces women show to the world, and also the faces of men, often do not actually reflect their true experience, their sufferings. Maybe if they did, there would be much less slaughter.

Chic lit alert!

Every time my 14 yr. old saw this book lying around, she took the opportunity to make fun of me about it again. Yes, well, maybe it IS chic lit, and the cover is -- garish is probably not too strong a word -- but I found it much deeper than most. This is a story that gives rise to much thought, if not much hope, although it is not in and of itself unremittingly depressing.

-- Emily Berk

If you found this review helpful and/or interesting, consider supporting our book habit: Buy this book!: Jewel Box, The

Book review: The Kite Runner

Friday, September 18th, 2009

Tell your friends about this blog entry
Tell friends about this blog entry
Author:Khaled Hosseini
Reading Level (Conceptual):Sophisticated readers
Reading Level (Vocabulary):Sophisticated readers
Genre:fiction
Year of publication:2008

An amazing book, but sooooo sad... I wish Hosseini could have given it a slightly happier ending. I think it is cool that we were able to see an up close and personal view of Afghanistan, even if it was not really a joyful thing to see. It shows how ignorant, I at least, am about the rest of the world.

I like how we get to see Amir's understanding of his life change as he grows up and figures out his needs and how to solve them (his need for forgiveness, of freedom of choice, and ideas, revenge...)

--Fizzy, age 14


If you found this review helpful and/or interesting, consider supporting our book habit: Buy this book!: Kite Runner, The

Book review: The Book Thief

Sunday, September 13th, 2009

Tell your friends about this blog entry
Tell friends about this blog entry
Author:Markus Zusak
Reading Level (Conceptual):Sophisticated readers
Reading Level (Vocabulary):Children 12 and up
Genre:Fiction
Year of publication:2007

Good book. About a girl during the Holocaust, but on the side we don't usually hear: She is German, but suffering as well. In the very beginning of the book Liesel's brother dies, and she is shipped off to live with "scary" foster parents. And by the middle her family is trying to keep a Jew hidden, and still "Heil Hitler" everyone they see.

The story is told by Death, which is a little bit spooky sounding, but Zusak makes Death surprisingly compassionate. As Liesel has to face the terrors of WW2, Death adds his two cents every once in a while, giving the story an interesting edge, especially because he tells us the climax of the book in the beginning, and makes us read all the way through for an explanation.

-- Fiz, age 14

Similar books

If you found this review helpful and/or interesting, consider supporting our book habit: Buy this book!: Book Thief, The