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The Power and the Glory – A Review

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Have you ever read a book that inspired in you a soul-crushing desire to eat fried chicken, shed undefinable tears through a mouthful of Sprite, and slap someone in the face with a tortilla? My students and I found ourselves in this conflicted state after taking the long hard journey through the jungle of Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory.  The story starts in a hot dusty village where a lethargic dentist meets an alcoholic priest who is on the run from the deadly zeal of a hostile lieutenant….

All Tracks Converge: A Review of The Lincoln Highway

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After a stint in a Nebraska prison over an accidental killing, Emmett Watson prepares to start fresh in California with his wide-eyed eight-year-old brother, Billy, for whom the world is a story. Their plans go south—or east, rather—when jail-mates Duchess and Woolly, an Artful Dodger and his simple-hearted friend, hijack the mission in more ways than one. The journey that unfolds is as hilarious as it is anxiety-inducing. The long-suffering Emmett and his earnest kid brother make for two poles of relative stability in a world that Duchess and Woolly—both…

Testosterone Tropes: A Review of F1: The Movie

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If the social media “manosphere” became incarnate as a movie, that movie would be F1. Not so much a story as a series of “manly” tropes stitched together by plot armor and neon-colored dental floss, this Jerry Bruckheimer-produced flim-flam construction seems to have as its primary targets twenty-something meatheads and middle-aged male divorcees living out their glory days (or, more likely, their could-have-would-have days) in their imaginations. The protagonist is an empty shell, the supporting characters mostly plot devices, and the plot itself is so agonizingly familiar as to make…

Manners Make (More Than) the Man

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Some books have you read them slowly. Some books have you keep turning the pages. The best books do both. Such is A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles. The gentleman is Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov. In 1922, while living in Moscow’s Hotel Metropol, he is summoned before The People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, which is inclined to have him shot for being a noble. They remember, however, that before the Revolution he wrote a poem showing some sympathy for the cause, and so his life is spared. Instead, they…

Living the Sermon: A Review of 42

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Jackie Robinson’s Story When Brooklyn Dodgers owner Branch Rickey cooks up a plan to add a black man to the roster, he knows there will be pushback. “You break a law and get away with it,” says an advisor, “and some people will think you’re smart. You break an unwritten law; you’ll be an outcast.” “So be it,” says Rickey. The year is 1945, and the man for the job is Jackie Robinson. Starring the late Chadwick Boseman (of Marvel fame) and Harrison Ford, 42 chronicles Jackie’s rise and the…

Terrible Purpose: Beauty and Contradiction at the Heart of Dune

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In Dune, Part One and Part Two, Denis Villeneuve has adapted the unadaptable. These two impressive films, though they simplify and sometimes alter their source material, manage to distill the heart and soul of Frank Herbert’s original novel (1965). Given the influence of the ideas embodied in the text and now popularized in the films, it seems a good moment to appraise these adaptations, and to reflect on the ideas they promote. Like the films, this essay is divided into two parts, the first being a traditional film review (of…

An Understated Masterpiece You’ve Probably Never Seen

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“They used to say that a child conceived in love has a greater chance of happiness. They don’t say that anymore.” So muses Vincent Freeman (Ethan Hawke), whose status as a “God child” with a one percent chance of living past thirty ought to have prevented him from pursuing greatness. Set in a believable near-future where nearly every new human life has been planned down to the genes, Gattaca chronicles the early career of a man who refused to submit to that world’s predestinarian yolk. Gattaca’s star-studded cast and incredible…

The Hollow Heart of Merlin’s God

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Mary Stewart’s Merlin Trilogy is a well-written, but ultimately troubling take on the Arthurian mythos . Stewart took great pains to give her historical fantasy a realistic, early Medieval backdrop, but her meticulous reinterpretation of the legendary source material has an agenda contrary to that material’s chivalric heart. Through the eyes and mouth of her ethically and spiritually ambiguous protagonist, the author exchanges the charming anachronism of Arthurian proto-chivalry for a far less believable Arthurian realpolitik. The result is an historically fascinating, but morally hollow series. Before delving in, let…

A Lonely Trip Through the Southern Reach

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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…