Lehane in top form

Shutter Island 
by Dennis Lehane

With Mystic River Lehane catapulted himself to the top of the thriller psychological and mind-games genre. It must have been a very hard act to follow. With Shutter Island, Lehane almost pulls off the ultimate writer’s coup of going one better. Almost, but not quite; but it is still an extraordinary thriller, well above the median in the genre.  more 

permalink | July 23, 2004 | book reviews

The trials and tribulations of a literary lion.

The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde: The First Uncensored Transcript of The Trial of Oscar Wilde vs. John Douglas (Marquess of Queensberry), 1895 
by Merlin Holland

Holland is Oscar Wilde’s grandson and, with John Mortimer, in this astonishing book he shows us the enfant terrible (or perhaps by then the eminence grise) of London’s literary circle battling, albeit unwittingly, for his very life. The book contains the entire, unexpurgated tanscript — previous versions were heavily censored.  more 

permalink | July 15, 2004 | book reviews

The weird and the bizarre

Gods, Mongrels, and Demons: 101 Brief But Essential Lives 
by Angus Calder

Angus Calder’s thesis, summarized on the dust jacket flap, is that the weird deserve centre-stage because these creatures are the zeitgeist of our world and, quite independently, are inherently interesting. He argues that they may even be more telling than better-known entities.  more 

permalink | May 19, 2004 | book reviews

Books on books, some good, some bad

Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation 
by Lynne Truss

Lynn Truss’s “Eats, Shoots and Leaves” turned out to be an utterly delightful discovery. It was a journey into a land I love — punctuation. The lady is endearingly nutty: she once picketed the movie Two Weeks Notice with an apostrophe on a stick, wanting to bring the apostrophe back into the title, after Weeks. But it is full of deep insights and Truss moves with unerring instinct through treacherous territory. Her comments on why we need punctuation at all; how the Internet has damaged language (“it’s not writing, or even typing; it’s just sending”) and how punctuation is actually critical not just to reading and writing but to basic communication are sharp and accurate. She takes a good, hard swipe at the modern trend of self-publishing, so easy with the Internet (bloggers, beware!) and she’s actually right. Some of the comments and customer reviews at Amazon, for instance, are truly hideous, full of typos, badly punctuated and not proofed at all.  more 

permalink | May 5, 2004 | book reviews

Mark Haddon’s book is over-rated and unfair

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (Today Show Book Club #13) 
by Mark Haddon

When Jay McInerney wrote a rave review in the New York Times of Mark Haddon’s “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time”, I rushed out for a hardback. This has got to be good, I thought.  more 

permalink | April 30, 2004 | book reviews

Low on content and even lower on style

The Best Awful 
by Carrie Fisher

Carrie Fisher’s The Best Awful is an elliptical work. That’s not a compliment. I mean it literally. She uses ellipses with something bordering on a pathological condition … and it does … nothing … for an already doomed book. That’s not as bad as her use of the em dash. Now that’s really something. Everywhere you go, the em dash lurks, ready to — pounce.  more 

permalink | April 11, 2004 | book reviews

A master’s film, sadly ignored

Path to War 
Directed by John Frankenheimer

The peculiar thing about John Frankenheimer’s work is that it is consistently good. That’s not something one can say about most directors working today. I hope this isn’t a completely odious comparison, but take John Woo. He made the astonishing The Killer in Hong Kong, his last before he migrated to what is now Schwarzennegeria where he made Hard Target and then the breathtakingly conceived and brilliantly executed Face Off. Everything else has been disappointing, including especially Broken Arrow and, I’m sorry to say, Mission Impossible:II, though I must admit to having found something of quality in the very heavily flawed Windtalkers.  more 

permalink | March 30, 2004 | movies

Jakob Nielsen and web usability

Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed (VOICES) 
by Jakob Nielsen, Marie Tahir

A great blog entry:Blogcritics.org: Homepage Useability: 50 Websites Deconstructed - by Jacob Nielsen. The blogcritics.org site, said to be a “sinister cabal of superior bloggers on music, books, film, popular culture and technology”, is becoming a favourite haunt. One of its more prolific contributors is bookofjoe, who authored the terrific blog review of Jacob Nielsen’s “Homepage Usability”.  more 

permalink | March 14, 2004 | book reviews

Dan Brown’s dreadful thrillers

Digital Fortress: A Thriller 
by Dan Brown

Perhaps I ought to have paid more attention to The Da Vinci Code. It was such an irresistibly delightful lark that I didn’t look very closely at the language. Certainly, nothing dreadful jumped out and whacked you in the face. This isn’t true, however, of “Deception Point” or “Digital Fortress”. Like “Da Vinci Code”, they’re silly and slight, the kind of thing you carry on a long plane journey, but at least “The Da Vinci Code” was clever, even though it’s theories are nothing but a well-known con, as an excellent article in the New York Times shows.  more 

permalink | March 9, 2004 | book reviews

Tarantino rules

Kill Bill, Volume 1 
Directed by Quentin Tarantino

Evidently there are degrees of violence. There is the sleep-wrecking, mind-numbing, stomach-churning, vomit-inducing violence of In Hell (Van Damme and other specimens) or Con Air. And there is the Tarantino brand of violence. Tarantino does extreme violence, but he does it with unparalleled élan and a singularity of beyond-the-box-office purpose. The result is magnificent: at one level, a beast under the hood with enormous raw power and wildly exaggerated style — a Bugatti. But there’s a whole lot more if you only care to look. The CCs (“carping critics”) who find the film ‘hollow’ and ‘shallow’ have of course totally missed the point. They also say much the same about Robert Rodriguez, and they’re wrong there too.  more 

permalink | February 20, 2004 | movies