Posted on 01/18/2008 8:52:39 AM PST by Tanniker Smith
The Kite Runner.
We need them now as much as then...
I solved the problem of the movie - in the film they repaired society and I spent pleasurable snoozing time engineering it, over a week.
bttt
Yes. That’s near the top of my list! ~S
I've always felt like there was something wrong with me because I couldn't find much worthwhile in Hemingway. In my opinion, Scott Fitzgerald was a better writer, but neither could compare to William Faulkner. I doubt that I would have wanted to know any of them personally, but at least Faulkner was a literary genius.
I think Hemingway appealed to a provincial society that didn't know much about life in sophisticated Europe or exotic far away places, but in today's Information Age, when everyone is sophisticated and rubs shoulders with exotic places every day, the lack of substance becomes obvious.
We're not impressed with skiing in the Alps or sipping martinis in a European bar. We've been there and done that (or things comparable) and moved on to even more interesting adventures.
And what we see is a pretentious, self-interested man, who isn't intrinsically very interesting.
In A Farewell to Arms--okay, some of his adventures were of interest--but he didn't describe the woman very well-- One wonders what he saw in her other than that she gratified his desires. It was all about him. I had the feeling that any woman would have done just as well--they were pretty much interchangeable--as long as she was focused on him and let him have whatever he wanted... And he showed no interest in the child. And the macho bluster was irritating.
All of this coincides with what I know about Hemingway himself--an uninteresting, self-centered slob.
I required “Lone Survivor” for my university class, “Technology and the Culture of War.”
Also consider "The Looming Tower," by Lawrence Wright. It's a history of Wahhabism and al-Qaeda, and it makes absolutely clear that these guys hated us and were trying to kill us even before Israel existed and long before we ever had troops in the mid-east.
Dr. Flew really clobbers Atheists with his book.
Most Americans have at best a very two-dimensional, caricature impression of Sherman as something of a mix between the Tasmanian Devil and a rabid dog. Of course, the truth is substantially more complex than that, and unlike a lot of his contemporaries, I found that his Memoirs were not so much an apologetic defense of his actions, but more so an effort to provide as objective an account as possible of the history he made and witnessed.
Of course he was a hard-nosed warrior, but unfortunately, most people now view his entire life through the lens of Gone With The Wind. Few know or acknowledge the efforts he took to prevent mayhem by his forces in North Carolina when news broke of Lincoln's assassination...and perhaps the most humanizing vignette I've found (which is not mentioned in his memoirs) is this little piece of one Georgia family's history:
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