tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-69684850391868454682024-03-13T08:48:46.087-07:00The Book BagReviews and analysis of books, movies, TV, and news from the world of publishing.Cynthia C. Scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11014756261523875605noreply@blogger.comBlogger67125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6968485039186845468.post-50665214975133276082013-10-21T13:56:00.000-07:002013-10-21T13:56:51.247-07:00SuspendedThis blog will be suspended for the time being. Follow me at my new blog at http://mstie68.wordpress.com/.
See ya' there!
CynthiaCynthia C. Scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11014756261523875605noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6968485039186845468.post-47203378507831255672013-10-12T15:54:00.002-07:002013-10-12T15:55:51.671-07:00The History of Horror: 1970s and 1980s: The Auteur Movement and When Horror Gets Graphic
The late 1960s saw a rise in horror films that became stylized and realistic, taking on the auteur movement of such filmmakers as Jean Luc Godard and Francois Truffault. Polish filmmaker Roman Polanski had made a name for himself as a director in his native country with such psychological suspense thrillers as Knife in the Water (1962) and Repulsion (1965), starring French actress Catherine Cynthia C. Scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11014756261523875605noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6968485039186845468.post-37142852667074673072013-10-11T10:49:00.000-07:002013-10-11T11:00:25.497-07:00The History of Horror: 1940s WWII and the Cold War; 1950s and 1960s: Repression and Revolution
1940s: World War II and the Cold War
During World War II, real life horror was playing across the silver screen in newsreels delivering word back to Americans from the home front. The holocaust, whose extent of true horror was not revealed until after the war ended, made cinematic versions pale in comparison. Yet during this period, Hollywood continued to churn out horror films to audiences'Cynthia C. Scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11014756261523875605noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6968485039186845468.post-79316183347097826332013-10-10T10:14:00.000-07:002013-10-10T10:14:21.079-07:00The History of Horror: The Cinema, Part I
The Beginning: Early Cinema and 1930s Talkies
Dracula, 1932
Since its birth, the cinema has been the perfect venue to showcase our deepest fears and terrors. The very fact that one must sit in a darkened theater in order to watch the fantasy sequences played out on a blank screen poses psychological suggestions of the way our own imaginations play out in our minds. While symbolism and Cynthia C. Scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11014756261523875605noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6968485039186845468.post-81582997998058444712013-09-27T14:16:00.000-07:002013-09-27T14:18:14.575-07:009 TV Shows That Aren’t on DVD But Should Be
DVDs and online streaming are a godsend to TV fans. Binge viewing has practically become a new phenomenon now that fans can watch and re-watch their favorite TV shows at their own leisure. But while a wide selection of TV programs have been released on DVD or made available on streaming formats like Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon, others have either been given a single season release or haven’t been Cynthia C. Scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11014756261523875605noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6968485039186845468.post-27966776746784831402013-09-25T12:43:00.000-07:002013-09-26T16:02:50.229-07:00Banned Book Week: Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man
Earlier this month, North Carolina’s Randolph County Board of Education banned Ralph Ellison’s classic 1952 novel Invisible Man. Heralded as one of the best novels written during the post WWII era, Invisible Man explores racism and the complex web of racial identity in 1950s America. It has since become required reading for high school and college students.
The fact that North Cynthia C. Scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11014756261523875605noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6968485039186845468.post-67516104824229236852013-09-15T09:44:00.001-07:002013-09-15T09:46:41.991-07:00Why Soaps Deserve More Respect
Time Magazine
Naturally if anyone wants to be taken seriously today the last thing she’d claim is a love of soap operas. Even in this day and age, when TV critics and fans are praising their favorite cable drama as Dickensian (an adjective based around that most melodramatic of English writers), soaps, which are arguably the missing link between Dickens and cable TV, continue to be the Cynthia C. Scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11014756261523875605noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6968485039186845468.post-32777991254954597632013-09-08T13:55:00.000-07:002013-09-08T13:58:49.832-07:00Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel Garcia Marquez begins his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude with this line: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” What a marvelous way to begin a story, so alive with the world in its very clauses, just as William Blake suggests exist within a grain of sand. So much Cynthia C. Scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11014756261523875605noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6968485039186845468.post-70409360217035512472012-04-16T13:02:00.000-07:002012-04-16T13:02:46.546-07:00Pulitzers Awarded: Manning Marable Wins Recognition for Bio of Malcolm XThe late Manning Marable's nonfiction book on Malcolm X, A Life of Reinvention: Malcolm X was awarded a Pulitzer prize today. A well deserved honor. But what's up with the Pulitzers not awarding anything in the fiction category? That's a question that's on everybody's mind today.
A list of all the award winners can be found at the pulitzer site, http://www.pulitzer.org/. Congrats to all the Cynthia C. Scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11014756261523875605noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6968485039186845468.post-38816783124173310442012-03-28T13:28:00.002-07:002012-03-31T11:56:37.070-07:00A Review: The Flame Alphabet by Ben MarcusTitle: The Flame Alphabet
Author: Ben Marcus
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
Year: 2012
Length: 289 pgs
Viruses run rampant in literature. There’s something appealing about setting a virus loose in a story and letting it do its damage. It makes writing a lot easier. After all you don’t have to fret over killing off your babies. You can just let the virus take its course.
In Ben Marcus’s latest Cynthia C. Scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11014756261523875605noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6968485039186845468.post-55779845185288631102012-02-24T11:07:00.006-08:002012-07-15T13:03:55.102-07:00"Crosetti" - Homicide: Life on the Street"Crosetti," Teleplay by James Yoshimura, Story by Tom Fontana & James Yoshimura, Directed by Whitney Ransick. Air date: 12/2/94. NBC Home Entertainment. 1994-1995.
Jon Polito and Clark Johnson
Steve Crosetti (Jon Polito) from Homicide: Life on the Street was as far removed as possible from anything seen on primetime TV, certainly not in most police procedurals. He wasn’t a hunk. He was Cynthia C. Scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11014756261523875605noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6968485039186845468.post-52905151787864154932012-02-19T11:43:00.000-08:002012-02-19T11:43:46.416-08:00Passing Love by Jacqueline E. Luckett: A ReviewPassing Love, Jacqueline E. Luckett. New York: Grand Central Publishing; Pg. 297; 2012.
Ah, Paris. The City of Love, the City of Lights. Paris looms large in the literary imagination. Writers from Charles Dickens to James Baldwin has written about this romantic city and now Jacqueline E. Luckett (Searching for Tina Turner) joins their ranks with her 2012 novel Passing Love. Paris takes center Cynthia C. Scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11014756261523875605noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6968485039186845468.post-44727952195746896852012-02-13T23:30:00.001-08:002012-03-06T22:51:03.406-08:00Their Eyes Were Watching God - 75th AnniversaryTheir Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston, New York: Harper & Row. 1937
This year is the 75th anniversary of Zora Neale Hurston’s classic novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. When it was first published in 1937, it won both critical praise and criticism within the black community for its perceived stereotypical portrayals of black southern life. Over the years it fell out of favor Cynthia C. Scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11014756261523875605noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6968485039186845468.post-7433720885444827612012-02-11T15:50:00.002-08:002012-02-24T11:10:30.954-08:00Bop Gun - Homicide: Life on the StreetThis review is a series of reviews of the ten best episodes of the 1990s TV drama Homicide: Life on the Streets.
Bop Gun, Story by Tom Fontana, Teleplay by David Mills and David Simon, Directed by Stephen Gyllenhaal. Aired 1/6/1994. NBC Home Entertainment. 1994.
"(Endangered species) Shoot them with the bop gun" -- Parliament/Funkadelic.
NBC ordered 9 episodes of the series Homicide: Life on Cynthia C. Scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11014756261523875605noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6968485039186845468.post-40557414546605236902012-02-06T14:05:00.000-08:002012-02-07T12:08:13.692-08:00America in Primetime: A Review
Last November, PBS aired a series called America in Primetime, which looked at television over the years and how it reflected the changing times. Broken down into four categories---Independent Woman, Man of the House, the Misfit, and The Crusader---the series, in which a number of TV stars, writers, and producers were interviewed, offered some unique perspectives about the power of television Cynthia C. Scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11014756261523875605noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6968485039186845468.post-44157198428981280402012-01-31T13:41:00.001-08:002012-02-24T11:13:08.096-08:00Homicide: Life on the Street Premiered Nineteen years Ago TodayNineteen years ago today, Homicide: Life on the Street premiered on NBC after the Superbowl. Executive produced by Oscar-winning director Barry Levinson, Homicide aired nine episodes that season and another four the following year. Shot in grainy, desaturated footage on hand-held cameras, the NBC drama quietly revolutionized television by offering a more realistic approach to police procedurals. Cynthia C. Scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11014756261523875605noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6968485039186845468.post-43546982661436561442012-01-26T15:01:00.000-08:002012-01-26T15:01:22.988-08:00Half Of A Yellow Sun - A ReviewYesterday I found out that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's second novel Half Of A Yellow Sun is being adapted into a film. Yesterday it was announced that Thandie Newton has joined the production, which will begin shooting this March. This is all great news because I loved reading Half Of A Yellow Sun and look forward to the film. I wrote a review of the novel several years ago for another site, so Cynthia C. Scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11014756261523875605noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6968485039186845468.post-45393483940152423432012-01-23T13:39:00.000-08:002012-01-24T11:14:01.900-08:00Black Power Mix Tapes 1967-1975: A Review
Between the late 1960s and the 1970s, Black America had undergone huge transformations. This was due largely to the Civil Rights Movement, but the Black Power Movement not only heightened the social and political consciousness of black people in America, but also set trends in the look and attitude of young black people across the country. Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture), former leader of the Cynthia C. Scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11014756261523875605noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6968485039186845468.post-83459398404802878162012-01-16T13:32:00.000-08:002012-01-17T14:59:51.300-08:00Schooling On MLK and the Civil Rights Movement
Today is the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday and as we honor this day I thought I’d make up a short list of works, both creative and scholarly, that are about Dr. King and the Civil Rights movement. One thing is for certain, there are very few people who know about Dr. King and the Civil Rights movement, outside of the famous “I Have a Dream” speech. These works, I think, offer a broader Cynthia C. Scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11014756261523875605noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6968485039186845468.post-61000189617972931822012-01-13T16:03:00.000-08:002012-01-15T12:14:56.076-08:00A Thousand Lives, a new nonfiction account of the Jonestown Massacre by Julia Scheeres
A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Hope, Deception, and Survival at Jonestown, by Julia Scheeres. New York: Free Press. 2011
909 people lost their lives in Jonestown on November 18, 1978, the majority of whom were children. Brought to the remote jungle compound in Guyana by Peoples Temple pastor, Rev. Jim Jones, many of the followers were people genuinely committed to building a Cynthia C. Scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11014756261523875605noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6968485039186845468.post-78933722128668436992012-01-09T18:18:00.001-08:002012-03-01T00:55:07.059-08:00The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfiction, etc. by Jonathan LethemSince his debut novel As She Climbed Across the Table, Jonathan Lethem has become one of the more noted contemporary writers of the past twenty years, listed alongside such names as David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, Michael Chabon, Jeffrey Eugenides, and Rick Moody as voices of their generation. In the recently published collection of his nonfiction work over the past ten years, The EcstasyCynthia C. Scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11014756261523875605noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6968485039186845468.post-22747063644479438812011-12-29T11:54:00.000-08:002011-12-29T11:59:03.672-08:00Year in Review 2There were a number of books in the past year that, for whatever reason, just didn’t hit the sweet spot for me. Some of these books were overhyped. Most weren’t reviewed for this blog---I can’t write about a book when I don’t have much enthusiasm for it one way or another. I didn’t finish the others (my tolerance for books that don’t work for me has gotten pretty low in recent years. I can read Cynthia C. Scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11014756261523875605noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6968485039186845468.post-69050281279691361172011-12-26T13:06:00.000-08:002012-01-10T18:41:36.673-08:00A Year in ReviewLast year, I wanted to write a “year in reading” review for my new blog. I never got around to it and, since I had only started blogging a few months earlier, I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to review anyway. Now that I’ve got a whole year under my belt, I thought I’d take the time out this final week of 2011 to look back on the books that impressed me, made me think, or didn’t have any Cynthia C. Scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11014756261523875605noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6968485039186845468.post-66313330161368443642011-12-18T15:05:00.000-08:002012-01-18T13:13:46.447-08:00Forgotten Holiday SpecialsChristmas is a week away and the networks have been airing their usual holiday chestnuts like A Charlie Brown Christmas, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Santa Claus Is Coming to Town, and Frosty the Snowman. When I was growing up in the 1970s, I couldn’t wait for these holiday specials to air on TV because then I knew Christmas really was on the way. I remember lying on the white shag rug in the Cynthia C. Scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11014756261523875605noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6968485039186845468.post-11509010569724350472011-12-13T13:02:00.000-08:002012-01-22T15:27:10.795-08:00Fontana and Levinson Team Up Again for New A&E SeriesLast week, A&E announced a development deal with producers Tom Fontana and Barry Levinson to produce a new half-hour cop drama called The Box. According to Digital Spy, episodes of the series, if picked up, “will focus on a small ensemble of detectives and their interactions with a key suspect or witness.”
This is great news for fans of the 1990s series Homicide: Life on the Street, which Cynthia C. Scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11014756261523875605noreply@blogger.com0