Skip to content

Content Badge: Language

Planning a Kingdom – A Review of King Richard

by

“Don’t worry about what other people are thinking,” says Richard Williams to his daughters, future tennis phenoms Venus and Serena. “We are here getting great.” King Richard (2021) looks at the Williams sisters’ early years and makes a powerful argument that fathers shape the world, for good or for evil. While the entire cast turns in capable performances, Will Smith embodies the tenacious fatherhood of its titular character, a man whose passion, planning, and principles, as portrayed in the film, wrestled a dream into waking life. King Richard portrays Richard…

Ford vs. Ferrari: Manhood at the Crossroads

by

“I had no idea!” says Henry Ford II, the calculating man, the money-general, weeping as he encounters—for the first time up-close—the sheer power of a metal wonder made by human hands. It’s a pivotal moment, yet James Mangold’s Ford v Ferrari pulls a dozen of these maneuvers with all the cool madness of a Ken Miles or a Carroll Shelby. Mangold delivers a tightly-written and multi-layered study of two kinds of men: those who master metal monsters and those under the mastery of a different sort of beast. When the…

It’s Not the Plane; It’s the Pilot: A Review of “Top Gun: Maverick”

by

Standing before a handful of elite F/A 18E/F pilots, Captain Pete “Maverick” Mitchell tells them the hard truth: pulling off this mission will take a miracle. More than one. Looking only at the plot of Top Gun: Maverick,  a moviegoer would be forgiven for assuming the same about this film. And he would be dead wrong, because Top Gun: Maverick is the only movie you have to see this year. On paper, it sounds like a hundred nostalgia-fueled Hollywood cash grabs: an aging Maverick is called into NAS North Island…

Miss Peregrine’s World-Weary Children

by

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children is a story that grew out of old photographs. When author Ransom Riggs approached Quirk Books with his collection of found photos, many of them in sepia tones and featuring odd or surreal subject matter, the publisher suggested he develop a fictional narrative to explain the pictures. The resulting quirky novel was a New York Times bestseller, which has subsequently been translated to film. The book is absorbing, but is also marred by content that doesn’t seem right for its Young Adult audience. Jacob Portman is…

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

by

A Great Treat in the Mystery Genre: The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie In The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley you will find a new classic in the mystery genre. From the opening paragraph (no small feat!), Bradley brilliantly weaves a web of murder, privilege, and PTSD around the protagonist and sleuth, eleven-year-old Flavia de Luce. “So,” you may ask, “is she the titular ‘sweetness’ in the story?” Absolutely not. Flavia is not your typical post-war pre-teen Briton. She has a passion for…

Compelling History: Bomb Book Review

by

Bomb by Steve Sheinkin In Bomb: The Race to Build —And Steal—The World’s Most Dangerous Weapon, Steve Sheinkin introduces young readers to the many plots and subplots involved in the creation of the world’s first nuclear bomb. Extensively researched, Bomb employs primary sources from declassified FBI files to simultaneously tell of Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project, Soviet espionage, and Allied efforts to sabotage Nazi Germany’s ability to develop the bomb first. Sheinkin weaves together the stories of some of the 20th century’s most famous and notorious figures—the ingenious, courageous,…

A Lonely Trip Through the Southern Reach

by

My very first impression, from the first page of Annihilation, book one of The Southern Reach Trilogy by Jeff Vandermeer, was not far from my last thoughts on the series. What insanity have I just stumbled into? Every reveal seems to bring along numerous other mind-bending doubts or questions about the world Vandermeer has created. The story opens with a group of nameless female explorers beginning their expedition into “Area X”, a mysterious portion of the ordinary world that has somehow, inexplicably become subject to laws all its own. Its…

MacGyver on Mars

by

The Martian, by Andy Weir, is an entertaining page-turner with an inherently interesting premise and a well-executed plot. Aside from entertainment, the novel’s chief value lies in its celebration of cheerful resourcefulness, and its appreciation of the worth of a single human life. Good in several important ways, the book also lacked some of the depth that its premise might have supported. In a near-future mission to Mars, an accident forces the astronaut crew of the Hermes to leave behind an apparently dead colleague, Mark Watney. As it happens, Mark…