Non Civil War Books and Movies

5fish

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We have Homer's : the Iliad and the Odyssey and Beowulf... will the Persians Abul-Qâsem Ferdowsi Tusi, also Firdawsi: "Book of Kings"...


We have Dante Alighieri: Divine Comedy and the Persian have:


Dante like Arab writers...


Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, considered the greatest epic of Italian literature, derived many features of and episodes about the hereafter directly or indirectly from Arabic works on Islamic eschatology: the Hadith and the Kitab al-Miraj (translated into Latin in 1264 or shortly before[19] as Liber Scale Machometi, "The Book of Muhammad's Ladder") concerning Muhammad's ascension to Heaven, and the spiritual writings of Ibn Arabi.

Here is a good read...

https://anba.com.br/en/the-arab-influence-in-the-divine-comedy/

snip...

The Brazilian researcher, who currently lives in Portugal, will launch the first translation into Portuguese of The Book of Muhammad’s Ladder. The book gathers texts in Arabic and is key to identify the similarities between its excerpts and the ones that would have been reproduced in the classic The Divine Comedy. The translation into Portuguese will be launched in February 2019 in Portugal and in Brazil. “The Divine Comedy was inspired by a great work. Nowadays, amid all this anti-Islamic bias, it is a recovery of these fruitful ties. Two literary canons, which shine a light on a historical period where coexistence was alive, with the Jewish people also,” says Mendes.
 

Matt McKeon

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Miss Meadows
I was home sick today(not covid), and watched a weird movie on Amazon. I don't know if it was "good" or that I recommend it, but it was interesting.

Cute Katie Holmes plays Miss Meadows, who dresses like a 1950s lady(white gloves) and talks like a 19th century etiquette manual. She subs at a first grade classroom and takes long afternoon walks, playing hopscotch and breaking into brief dance steps. Confronted with a crude man who pulls a gun on her, she calmly shoots him in the head and walks on without a backward glance.

As the movie progresses her weird dictation, deflection about her past, and the fact she acts like a 22 year old, but is older, not to mention her quick draw)cracks her cheerful facade. She falls into a relationship with a local cop, drawn to her old fashioned values. He starts covering up her crimes and pleads for her to stop. "I'll...I'll try," she tearfully semi promises.

Holmes is quite good, a shiny "manic pixie girl" vibe that turns dark, dark, dark. I don't think the movie really works as a whole.
 

Matt McKeon

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Went to library book sale and got a few books. One was a self published memoir of a bus driver in Rhode Island, called "All Aboard"

He recounts driving a city bus around the various towns in Rhode Island. There are a lot of nuts, and they all ride the bus, he concludes as he recalls people who undress on the bus, defecate on a bus, talk non talk, are drunk, and the vast majority of working class people or retired people trying to get around. All want his attention as he wrestles his mammoth vehicle around street patterns that weren't designed for it. He drove for 14 years, before moving to a desk job in the despatchers' office. Does he miss it? NO. "I really started hating people. All people, even the good ones."

This is the awesome find you can't get anywhere else than a library used book sale.
 

Matt McKeon

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Went to library book sale and got a few books. One was a self published memoir of a bus driver in Rhode Island, called "All Aboard"

He recounts driving a city bus around the various towns in Rhode Island. There are a lot of nuts, and they all ride the bus, he concludes as he recalls people who undress on the bus, defecate on a bus, talk non talk, are drunk, and the vast majority of working class people or retired people trying to get around. All want his attention as he wrestles his mammoth vehicle around street patterns that weren't designed for it. He drove for 14 years, before moving to a desk job in the despatchers' office. Does he miss it? NO. "I really started hating people. All people, even the good ones."

This is the awesome find you can't get anywhere else than a library used book sale.
He mentions the detours when Armistad was being filmed.
 

Wehrkraftzersetzer

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Went to library book sale and got a few books. One was a self published memoir of a bus driver in Rhode Island, called "All Aboard"

He recounts driving a city bus around the various towns in Rhode Island. There are a lot of nuts, and they all ride the bus, he concludes as he recalls people who undress on the bus, defecate on a bus, talk non talk, are drunk, and the vast majority of working class people or retired people trying to get around. All want his attention as he wrestles his mammoth vehicle around street patterns that weren't designed for it. He drove for 14 years, before moving to a desk job in the despatchers' office. Does he miss it? NO. "I really started hating people. All people, even the good ones."

This is the awesome find you can't get anywhere else than a library used book sale.
especially if he has a talent 4 writing
 

Jim Klag

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Just got my copy of Robert E. Lee - A Life by Allen C. Guelzo. I'll post a book report when I've finished reading it. I like Guelzo's writing and I think he'll be objective on Lee's life - at least I hope so.
 

diane

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I listened to his Mister Lincoln lectures on YouTube - he's a good speaker, and his viewpoint is quite honest. Bet you like the Lee book!
 

Matt McKeon

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It Will Soon Be Over
by Cecily Strong
Strong is a long time performer on Saturday Night Live(check youtube for her "Sound of Music" and "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus" parodies). She is also a standout in an AppleTV take off on classic musicals, "Scimerdonne"

This isn't a standard comedian/actress memoir, but a journal of her covid year, darkened by the agonizing death of her cousin, of cancer. She circles around his struggle with cancer, his treatment, his death and aftermath, returning to it again and again, while sketching in other aspects of her life. It starts slow, with a lot of people you don't know, but gathering power. I'm not sure its a "good" read, but very interesting.
 

Matt McKeon

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The Trial: A Murder in the Family
A British semi reality show. Two real barristers duel in a murder trial, presided by a real judge, in a real courtroom with a jury of regular folks. The murder in question, however, is fictional. Actors portray the witnesses, are examined by the barristers, and the jury discusses and decides the case. In Britain, the verdict can be ten to two. Then what actually happened is shown, and you check to see how effective the jury system is. Riveting. On Amazon Prime.
 

Matt McKeon

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Dreams of a Life
This is a documentary about Joyce Carol Vincent, a 38 year old woman who died in her flat in London in 2003, and whose body was undiscovered for three years. Carol Morley, the film maker, traces her life, and speculates on why she wasn't missed by her family or many friends, how and why she isolated herself. Its unspeakably sad that a human being can be overlooked. Depressing, but good.
 

Joshism

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I just picked up Max Hastings' history of the Vietnam Wars (1945-1975). It's off to a good start. Hastings was a war correspondent for the BBC and left Saigon in the final days of Saigon. The book was completed after the Ken Burns miniseries.

The introduction describes the conflict as "an American nightmare overlaid on a thirty year Vietnamese tragedy."
 

Matt McKeon

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I just saw A Very Long Engagement. A young woman searches for her lost lover, not believing reports he was killed in World War One. As she investigates she discovers the stories of five soldiers, including her boyfriend, convicted of "self mutilation" shooting themselves in the hand to avoid trench service, and send into no man's land to be killed by the Germans. Its a love story, that's a mystery story, that's an antiwar story.

Its very good, French with English subtitles.
 

Matt McKeon

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I just saw A Very Long Engagement. A young woman searches for her lost lover, not believing reports he was killed in World War One. As she investigates she discovers the stories of five soldiers, including her boyfriend, convicted of "self mutilation" shooting themselves in the hand to avoid trench service, and send into no man's land to be killed by the Germans. Its a love story, that's a mystery story, that's an antiwar story.

Its very good, French with English subtitles.
Jodi Foster has a small part as a widow of one of the soldiers. She's quite good.
 

Matt McKeon

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Slow Burn
Based on a podcast, this is an examination of the Watergate scandal. Very good, I'm post an update.
 

Matt McKeon

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Apollo 13
There is no heroism without catastrophe. I'm not sure who said this, but it fits this movie. Tom Hanks plays Jim Lovell, commander of the ill fated moon mission, along with Kevin Bacon and Bill Pullman as his crew.

The movie sets up the characters: the highly competitive astronauts, their worried families, the funding anxieties around the Apollo program. Everything goes according to plan, so smoothly that the American public, less than a year after Armstrong took his giant leap, was already getting bored by lunar exploration.

Then the explosion.
 

Matt McKeon

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Apollo 13
There is no heroism without catastrophe. I'm not sure who said this, but it fits this movie. Tom Hanks plays Jim Lovell, commander of the ill fated moon mission, along with Kevin Bacon and Bill Pullman as his crew.

The movie sets up the characters: the highly competitive astronauts, their worried families, the funding anxieties around the Apollo program. Everything goes according to plan, so smoothly that the American public, less than a year after Armstrong took his giant leap, was already getting bored by lunar exploration.

Then the explosion.
Flight director Ed Harris rallies his staff of can do nerds to solve one crisis after another. "You're a steely eyed missile man," says one astronaut to a mission control engineer who jury rigged a way to keep the astronauts breathing. NASA supervisors wring their hands, but Ed Harris brings them up smartly, "This is our finest hour." My favorite scene is that Lovell has to perform some quick paper and pencil long division amid his ship's gyrations. "Check my arithmetic," he barks to mission control. I expected to see, I don't know, calculators or computers, but its 1971, so its four guys with their own scratch paper checking his work.
 

Matt McKeon

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I show this film, not in US History, but in an elective on Ancient Greece. Lovell and his crew must demonstrate the Greek virtues of "arete" excellence, bravery and skill, which can only happen in a disaster. But their freedom of action and choices are constrained, like the Greek heroes of myth. Their fates is in the hands of the gods, which in this case is the Olympus of nerds at mission control. There is even a parallel in the myth of Philocetes, an archer left behind by the heroes at Troy, who is retrieved because he is necessary to win the war. Ken Mattingly, sidelined from the mission at the last moment, is brought to mission control to help improvise a landing procedure.
"
 

Matt McKeon

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Slow Burn
Based on a podcast, this is an examination of the Watergate scandal. Very good, I'm post an update.
Finished it. The series attempts to look at the Watergate Scandal from the point of view of obscure staffers or figures who were marginalized or frozen out by Nixon's deception efforts, which in early stages, were fairly deft. Nixon had GOP congressional allies, plenty of popular support, as well as the automatic deference and respect for the occupant, any occupant of the oval office.

The conclusion is, while the course of Watergate seems inevitable, an outcome preordained by Nixon's own personal demons and sturdy constitutional guardrails, plus a vigilant press, in fact, at any of a number of points, it might have fizzled out.
 

Matt McKeon

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To Kill A Mockingbird
I saw the play with Jeff Daniels playing Atticus Finch. Very good. Aaron Sorkin's influence in some of the speed talking dialogue in one of the confrontations between Bob Elwell and Finch. Strong emphasis on the trial. Some updating of attitudes, especially by African American characters.
 

Matt McKeon

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Highcastle by Stanislaw Lem

This is a memoir of Lem's childhood in Poland in the 20s and 30s. Cautious about how memory shapes and distorts he tries to recall the physical objects and sensations without recasting them through the filter of what came after. Witty musing on art and his own compulsive tinkering and sketching of complex machines. He indulged in an elaborate fantasy of being a powerful bureaucrat, to kill time in school, where he crafted tiny forms, passports, permits, seals, and licenses.

In a few words, the destruction of that world in the war. The remembered objects, that he has so painstakingly recalled and described as "thrown onto the street, now piles of rubble. The ghetto wall goes up, then it came down."

Beautifully written, thoughtful work.
 
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