Category: Reviews

Reviews of books, movies, tv shows and other items

21 Great Stories – A Book Review

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When I was a kid in high school back in Brooklyn in the early 1970s every school either public or private had an English class that used this book as a source of classic short stories.  Now at the time it never occurred to me to look at the bio on the editors who selected these “great” stories.  Many years later I did and discovered that these two editors were actually educators who worked at two local high schools (Abraham Lincoln H.S. and Sheepshead Bay H.S.) that were both within a mile of my home.  In fact, Camera Girl went to one of these schools (although as I learned, she wasn’t really putting in the effort she should have and it took all my help to get her over the finish line her senior year).  So, there is my link to this revered literary treasury.  And back then I really wasn’t particularly interested in the kind of stories represented.  There was one Ray Bradbury story but it wasn’t really science fiction so it wouldn’t have been on my radar.

But many years later I saw the familiar cover of the paperback on the shelf of a discount book store while we were on vacation in Old Orchard Beach, Maine and since I hadn’t packed enough reading material, I bought the book for (I think) two dollars.

And over the course of the week we were there, I read the whole thing for the first time in my life.  And damned if most of the stories weren’t excellent in their own separate ways.  Sure, I liked some of them much better than others but I had to admit that almost without exception they were well-crafted stories that could stand the test of time and quite a few of them could be re-read over the years without becoming tiresome.

Here’s the table of contents:

  • War by Luigi Pirandello
  • Eve in Darkness by Kaatje Hurlbut
  • There Will Come Soft Rains by Ray Bradbury
  • Tobermory by Saki
  • The Two Bottles of Relish by Lord Dunsany
  • Footfalls by Wilbur Daniel Steele
  • Hook by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
  • Wine on the Desert by Max Brand
  • The Lady or the Tiger? by Frank Stockton
  • An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce
  • The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allan Poe
  • The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe
  • So Much Unfairness of Things by C. D. B. Bryan
  • The Necklace by Guy de Maupassant
  • The Adventure of the Speckled Band by Arthur Conan Doyle
  • To Build a Fire by Jack London
  • Leiningen Versus the Ants by Carl Stephenson
  • Eveline by James Joyce
  • The Secret Life of Walter Mitty by James Thurber
  • What Stumped the Bluejays by Mark Twain
  • The Pearl by John Steinbeck

If you asked me which was my favorite once a year it’s likely that I’d give you a different answer every time.  It seems to change based on what mood I’m in that day.  If I’m in a light mood it might be “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.”  If I’m feeling cynical, I might enjoy “The Cask of Amontillado” or “To Build a Fire.”  But I can usually find a story to reread if I’m waiting for an oil change or a dental appointment.

Now, let me be clear.  These are not all the short stories I like.  In fact, these are not even my favorite short stories.  I can find funnier sections in P.G. Wodehouse and I can find more engaging science fiction short stories by several other authors.  Specifically, “There Will Come Soft Rains” isn’t even in my top twenty Ray Bradbury short stories.  But this is a good book for tasting a cross section of classic short story styles.  Not a bad book to own.

Huzzah! The Sniper Will Be Included in The Based Book Sale

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Based Book Sale

 

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Some might wonder what took me so long to get “The Sniper” onto the Based Book Sale roster.  Well, as with every deficiency in my biography it comes down to laziness and poor planning.  But at long last the stars have aligned and it’s full speed ahead.

The Based Book Sale starts Wednesday, September 9, 2026, 12:00 AM PDT and runs through Wednesday, September 16, 2026, 12:00 AM PDT.  “The Sniper” will be a linked free promotion on Amazon from September 9th to September 13th.  Afterwards it will be available as a $0.99 e-book purchase there until the end of the Based Book Sale.  After that it will revert to the $4.99 e-book price.  The paperback will maintain its current $9.99 price throughout.

Even for folks who already have “The Sniper” there will be lots of other quality non-woke stories to get free or at a really good price.

The High and the Mighty (1954) – Not a Movie Review

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So, this can’t be a real movie review.  I really haven’t seen the whole movie so it would be false advertising to claim I was a fair reviewer.  But even viewing the part of the movie I watched I felt moved to talk about this “gem.”

There’s something about movies about airliners in danger that seems to liberate the cast and producers from trying to produce a good film.  Whether it’s Dean Martin in “Airport” in the 1970s or Bill Shatner in “Terror at 20,000 Feet” on the Twilight Zone, these airline flights always seem to degenerate into a race to the bottom between the awful plot and the staggeringly bad dialog and wooden acting.

Well, I’m proud to add “The High and Mighty” to this Olympus of aero-schlock.  And it has some amazing features.  Heading up the cast is John Wayne as Dan Roman the first officer on a commercial airliner flying from Honolulu to San Francisco.  The captain is John Sullivan played laconically by Robert Stack whom I only remember as Elliot Ness on tv’s “The Untouchables.”  The only other familiar names in the cast are Robert Newton and Claire Trevor as random passengers and Carl “Alfalfa” Switzer in a very minor part as a Coast Guard junior officer.  But it really doesn’t matter whether the actors are well-known or unknowns because no actual acting is committed anywhere in the movie that I witnessed.

There is plot and it involves various passengers describing their mental problems or trying to shoot each other over a supposed marital affair but the main event is one of the engines exploding and the plane losing enough fuel to make a forced landing in the Pacific Ocean the aviation peril that every good disaster movie needs.  And so, for about three quarters of the movie the flight engineer, the first officer and the captain bicker about whether they should drop the plane in the ocean or try to make it to San Francisco.  Eventually after the flight engineer realizes that he has been mixing up knots with miles per hour, he delivers the bad news; they will run out of fuel, eleven minutes short of the airport and Robert Stack makes the executive decision that they will ditch.  But John Wayne keeps stalling him because he’s hoping that a tail wind will appear and save them the extra fuel.  But a half hour before the end of the 147-minute movie Stack shouts that he’s going to ditch the plane.  At which point John Wayne slaps him across the face and calls him a pansy (or something) and takes over the controls.  And a few minutes later Stack thanks Wayne for straightening him out and at long last the plane lands without any loss of life or cinematic interest.  When measured by the ground crew there is only thirty gallons of fuel left.

So, do I recommend this movie?  Absolutely.  It’s amazingly bad and without redeeming qualities.  Except one.  John Wayne gets to play John Wayne without any pretense to art.  It’s the Duke slapping around wimps and generating jet fuel out of thin air.  For any real fan of John Wayne that’s enough for an amusing visit.

First Impressions of the Film “Project Hail Mary”

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So, we went over to see the grandkids and watch “Project Hail Mary.”  I read the book a few months ago and I’d been waiting to see it with them but everyone has been so busy this summer we just never had a chance.  But with school starting in Dunwich next week, I made a point of setting up the visit.

So, we sat down surrounded by all the kids and all the dogs and up went the curtain (metaphorically speaking).  Well, it was pretty good.  Of course, a movie couldn’t spend the time that the author Andy Weir lavished on the technical details of the astro-phage biology or the star ship that it fueled.  And neither could it explain the project to selectively breed taumoeba to survive in Venus’s atmosphere and several other technical details that fill out the story.  But the movie does a good job of fleshing out Ryland Grace and detail the friendship that develops between him and the Eridian alien that he names Rocky.  And in fact, it more than matches the book’s description.  It adds a good amount of comical interplay between the human and the alien.

I intend to do a full review of the movie soon but I just wanted to give a few impressions tonight.  And since it’s so late I’ll leave it here.  It’s a good movie.

Spidey Gets It Done, Mission Accomplished

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I went with my three youngest grandsons to see the new Spiderman movie; “Spider-Man: Brand New Day.”  And shockingly, I actually enjoyed it.  We got there early enough to pick out good seats and let the kids buy mass quantities of popcorn and sugary drinks.  So reinforced by these provisions we took our seats and watched the half hour of advertisements and coming attractions for all kinds of useless products and awful movies.  Now it’s been a few years since we went to this theater and in the meantime, it went out of business and been refurbished by its new owners.  And they installed luxury pleather powered recliners instead of the usual crappy movie seats of yesteryear.  So far, so good!

So, I missed the previous Spiderman installment but I was told that in it another MCU character (Doctor Strange) performed some kind of magic-adjacent activity which eliminated knowledge of Peter Parker’s existence completely from the human race including all his friends and the girl (MJ) that he loves.  Now this seems particularly stupid but that is the situation.  So, one of the plots of this movie is Parker getting up the courage to tell MJ that she has forgotten that they were once in love.  Okay, that’s an even stupider plot element but let’s give the writers some slack to try and make that work.  Then there’s a plot element where Peter is having major problems with his spider powers.  His ability to shoot webs and other skills seems to come and go.  Okay, this is more of a standard superhero plot element so full speed ahead.

And finally, some telepath is able to take control of human minds and force them to attack a shadowy government agency called the Department of Damage Control (DODC) for some unknown reason.  I won’t give away any spoilers by saying that DODC isn’t a benign organization and the telepath controlling minds isn’t completely unjustified in these actions.

Well, before the end we have a whole sequence where Bruce Banner is telepathically controlled and forced to turn into the Hulk with predictable cataclysmic results and we find out that Spiderman has a quasi-working relationship with the comic book character “The Punisher” an Italian American New Yorker whose real name is Frank Castle.  Castle is a vigilante who doesn’t have as many scruples as Spiderman when it comes to using firearms to thwart criminals.  As an Italian American native New Yorker myself, I especially relished Castle’s extremely accurate Bensonhurst accent and vocabulary.  It felt like coming home.

Well, anyway, the plot moves along in a reasonably superhero-ish manner and naturally our hero comes out the other side with some progress in his personal problems but no permanent solutions so he can be just as conflicted in the next Spiderman movie sometime in 2028.  And that is all that can ever be said for a Spiderman movie.  Also, the special effects were especially deft and fun to watch.  So, the movie was quite entertaining and the boys enjoyed it thoroughly.  Or maybe it was the snacks.

Anyway, mission accomplished.  We returned home and Camera Girl loaded down a table with spaghetti and meatballs along with some biscuits that these grandsons especially love to dunk in a meat sauce.  What more could I ask for?