Translating La Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)Are you looking to buy Translating La? Here is the right place to find the great deals. we can offer discounts of up to 90% on Translating La. Check out the link below:

>> Click Here to See Compare Prices and Get the Best Offers

Translating La ReviewLet's face it, Los Angeles gets more negative press than any other city in America. Much of this is because it's such an easy target-from police brutality, to earthquakes, to disgustingly ostentatious wealth, to smog, to gang violence, to sprawl, to racial tension, to the film industry-so much of how outsiders define LA is easy to use as fodder for contempt. And when you have a city that covers over 1,000 square miles and includes about 85 incorporated cities, one is left with a megalopolis that's hard to get one's mind around, much less defend.
That said, Boston-raised writer and translator Theroux does his best to find the good in LA. After ten years living in the Middle East, he moved to Long Beach in 1985 and set himself up as a translator. In twelve breezy chapters that mix the history of LA's different areas with his own excursions and recent history, Theroux makes the case for LA as a multicultural melting pot that remains as the overwhelming symbol for the American good life in the Third World.
It's far from a comprehensive history or in-depth analysis (Mike Davis' City of Quartz will serve one better), but it does do a nice job of taking the reader through some of the neighborhoods with the aim of trying to explain how they are different and why. There are no big lessons to be learned, but Theroux's crisp prose and storytelling are a treat, and his open-minded approach to the city make for a nice change.Translating La OverviewPeter Theroux describes Los Angeles, the City of Dreams, from a variety of angles: he encounters the diversity of citizens and immigrants, attends movie premieres, smells the incense for sale on the boardwalk in Venice and drives along a six-lane highway.

Want to learn more information about Translating La?

>> Click Here to See All Customer Reviews & Ratings Now

Read More...

Becoming Ray Bradbury Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)Are you looking to buy Becoming Ray Bradbury? Here is the right place to find the great deals. we can offer discounts of up to 90% on Becoming Ray Bradbury. Check out the link below:

>> Click Here to See Compare Prices and Get the Best Offers

Becoming Ray Bradbury ReviewThis biography is the first in three volumes. It details Ray Bradbury's early life and who influenced and mentored him, both in the science fiction and fantasy realm as well the literary, philosophical and psychological sources who shaped his thinking and aesthetics. As other reviews noted, Dr. Eller's biography bridges the scholarly insights and detailed information in one of the most readable books available. Where some scholars mire the reader down, this one does not. Dr. Eller understands that his audience is both scholars and fans and is able to address the needs and concerns of both without compromising the integrity of his work. For those interested, especially in the early shaping of Bradbury, Dr. Eller has some previously unpublished photographs of Bradbury in group shots with other early pioneers of the science fiction and fantasy, including one which Robert Heinlein.
For more on this particular work, see this review: [...]
And for more on Dr. Eller, you might want to visit the Center for Ray Bradbury studies' site:
[...]Becoming Ray Bradbury OverviewBecoming Ray Bradbury chronicles the making of an iconic American writer by exploring Ray Bradbury's childhood and early years of his long life in fiction, film, television, radio, and theater. Jonathan R. Eller measures the impact of the authors, artists, illustrators, and filmmakers who stimulated Bradbury's imagination throughout his first three decades. Unprecedented access to Bradbury's personal papers and other private collections provides insight into his emerging talent through his unpublished correspondence, his rare but often insightful notes on writing, and his interactions with those who mentored him during those early years.

Beginning with his childhood in Waukegan, Illinois, and Los Angeles, this biography follows Bradbury's development from avid reader to maturing author, making a living writing for pulp magazines. Eller illuminates the sources of Bradbury's growing interest in the human mind, the human condition, and the ambiguities of life and death--themes that became increasingly apparent in his early fiction. Bradbury's correspondence documents his frustrating encounters with the major trade publishing houses and his earliest unpublished reflections on the nature of authorship. Eller traces the sources of Bradbury's very conscious decisions, following the sudden success of The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man, to voice controversial political statements in his fiction, and he highlights the private motivations behind the burst of creative energy that transformed his novella "The Fireman" into the classic novel Fahrenheit 451.

Becoming Ray Bradbury reveals Bradbury's emotional world as it matured through his explorations of cinema and art, his interactions with agents and editors, his reading discoveries, and the invaluable reading suggestions of older writers. These largely unexplored elements of his life pave the way to a deeper understanding of his more public achievements, providing a biography of the mind, the story of Bradbury's self-education and the emerging sense of authorship at the heart of his boundless creativity.




Want to learn more information about Becoming Ray Bradbury?

>> Click Here to See All Customer Reviews & Ratings Now

Read More...

Superstud: Or How I Became a 24-Year-Old Virgin Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)Are you looking to buy Superstud: Or How I Became a 24-Year-Old Virgin? Here is the right place to find the great deals. we can offer discounts of up to 90% on Superstud: Or How I Became a 24-Year-Old Virgin. Check out the link below:

>> Click Here to See Compare Prices and Get the Best Offers

Superstud: Or How I Became a 24-Year-Old Virgin Review"Superstud", the sequel to "Freaks & Geeks" creator Paul Feig's childhood memoir "Kick Me", bills itself as a humorous recollection of the author's struggles dating the opposite sex. For those of us who know about being a casualty of love, there's undeniable appeal to such a project, and Feig delivers with comedy and surprising poignancy on occasion.
But I've always been suspicious of people whose claims of geekdom lead to the golden lights of Hollywood, and that suspicion builds reading this book. Feig claims to suffer the shame of being a geek, but it reads more like he wasn't a jock. He not only goes out on dates with attractive girls, but takes the initiative in breaking up with a couple of them. His lack of sex is something he blames as much on a strict religious upbringing as a lack of opportunity, and his parting thought saying people should just be happy doing what they feel like doing doesn't sound like someone who really knows about suffering over love.
The real story of Feig's frustrations boils down to what he calls "dating math": "She wants me = I don't want her/She doesn't want me = I want her."
So real geeks and recovering geeks should be forewarned. Take it from me: I asked 19 girls to my junior prom before getting a yes. A woman I once declared my love for wound up bilking me out of $265 for an imaginary trip to Rhode Island. I once managed to score tickets to the Letterman show for a girl I liked, only to have her announce in the middle of it: "By the way, this is not a date."
Reading this book, I felt like a 'Nam vet listening to some ex-Coast Guarder tell me about his weekend in Grenada. Feig actually was a fairly attractive young man, as the book cover shows, blessed with a quick wit, Han Solo hair, and access to pretty females who often found him entertaining.
The funniest section of the book is an early date with a high school girl that worked much like my Letterman non-date, except the show was an REO Speedwagon concert (Feig gets a lot of early 80s references in, which entertained me) and there is much vomit. Vomit is a recurring theme in this book, along with some other bodily fluids we won't mention.
Feig's description of some auto-erotic moments are both bold and funny, getting intimate with fashion magazines much like George Costanza once did, dealing with sudden public "equipment issues" while perusing photography books, and the like. All this is funny, but a bit forced, like the self-conscious footnotes he inserts in a series of late 1981 journal entries describing one of his courtships, replete with lines like "Let the downfall begin!" and such like.
The part I was most moved by didn't have to do with love or sex at all, but rather a strange burst of homesickness Feig suffers while leaving for college, after he itemizes all the tiny things of his parents' house he has come to identify with. "It felt like the minute I left the house for California, everything was going to be incinerated or ransacked by looters who would leave these sentimental items broken and scattered all over the street in front of our house."
There's one authentic-feeling moment of geekhood I recognized all too well. And truthfully, it's probably a more readable book with Feig not being so much of a geek. If he was, this would read like a 300-page version of Janis Ian's "At Seventeen", and how much fun would that be?
But I would have felt more at home with it than this.Superstud: Or How I Became a 24-Year-Old Virgin Overview

Want to learn more information about Superstud: Or How I Became a 24-Year-Old Virgin?

>> Click Here to See All Customer Reviews & Ratings Now

Read More...