Archive for August, 2009

Monthly Archive
Saturday, August 29th, 2009

The Kennedy Legacy: RIP Ted Kennedy

http://www.tedkennedy.org
RIP Ted Kennedy. May the Kennedy Legacy never be forgotten and may it continue for generations to come.
source
President Obama:
Michelle and I were heartbroken to learn this morning of the death of our dear friend, Senator Ted Kennedy.
For five decades, virtually every major piece of legislation to [...]

4 Comments » - Posted in Politics by Emma
Saturday, August 22nd, 2009

“Inglourious Basterds” directed by Quentin Tarantino

Review by Roger Ebert:

Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds” is a big, bold, audacious war movie that will annoy some, startle others and demonstrate once again that he’s the real thing, a director of quixotic delights. For starters (and at this late stage after the premiere in May at Cannes, I don’t believe I’m spoiling anything), he [...]

14 Comments » - Posted in movies by Emma
Thursday, August 20th, 2009

“Swann’s Way” by Marcel Proust, translated by Lydia Davis

Barnes and Noble Review:
Swann’s Way is the first novel of Marcel Proust’s seven-volume magnum opus À la recherche du temps perdu, or Remembrance of Things Past. Following the narrator’s opening ruminations about the nature of sleep is one of twentieth-century literature’s most famous scenes: the eating of the madeleine soaked in a “decoction of lime-flowers,” [...]

8 Comments » - Posted in books by Emma
Saturday, August 15th, 2009

Movie Review: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Roger Ebert’s Review:

The climactic scene in “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” takes place in one of those underground caverns with a lake and an ominous gondola as the means of transportation, popularized by “The Phantom of the Opera.” At first I thought — no gondola! But then, one appeared, dripping and hulking. In another [...]

10 Comments » - Posted in movies by Emma
Saturday, August 15th, 2009

Movie Review: District 9

Roger Ebert’s Review:

I suppose there’s no reason the first alien race to reach the Earth shouldn’t look like what the cat threw up. After all, they love to eat cat food. The alien beings in “District 9,” nicknamed “prawns” because they look like a cross between lobsters and grasshoppers, arrive in a space ship that [...]

8 Comments » - Posted in movies by Emma
Monday, August 10th, 2009

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer

Editor’s Review
From Publishers Weekly
Oskar Schell, hero of this brilliant follow-up to Foer’s bestselling Everything Is Illuminated, is a nine-year-old amateur inventor, jewelry designer, astrophysicist, tambourine player and pacifist. Like the second-language narrator of Illuminated, Oskar turns his naïvely precocious vocabulary to the understanding of historical tragedy, as he searches New York for the lock that [...]

No Comments » - Posted in books by Emma
Monday, August 3rd, 2009

Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer

Synopsis: With only a yellowing photograph in hand, a young man — also named Jonathan Safran Foer — sets out to find the woman who may or may not have saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Accompanied by an old man haunted by memories of the war; an amorous dog named Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior; [...]

4 Comments » - Posted in books by Emma