Posts tagged "reviews"
Rule #1: if critics love it, it sucks.
WE HAVE A SOFT SPOT FOR FAMILY ENTERTAINMENT LIKE SCARFACE AND GOODFELLAS, but when it comes to pure shmaltz, American Gangster takes the cake.
The “true” story chronicles Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington). a heroin dealer who adopts the financial wizardry of his Italian mafia peers to run the Harlemites working under him, and Richie Roberts (Russell Crowe, his arm still aching from throwing telephones at concierges), a cop whose honesty makes him a pariah within the corrupt police community. Even with [...]
Posted in Books/Films/Media, The City on November 15th, 2007 | 
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Motherless Brooklyn
Here’s the thing: you are Jonathan Lethem, bookish writer, raised by bohemian parents in the Boerum Hill section of Brooklyn, as a kid read a lot — books, magazines, the newspaper — graduated high school and went to college. Now, you write a novel called Motherless Brooklyn about a street tough you kind of knew in the Brooklyn neighborhood where you grew up, but didn’t really hang with. Your main character, an oversized orphan with Tourette’s Syndrome who works [...]
Posted in Books/Films/Media, The City on March 10th, 2007 | 1 Comment »
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Best book about 9/11
THOUGH EVERY TV SET IN THE WORLD WAS TUNED TO THE WORLD TRADE CENTER ON SEPT 11, those trapped in the North Tower had no idea that the South Tower had collapsed. And we who watched from our rooftops (see the Recharger banner) had no idea what was happening to them. Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn’s 102 Minutes – a detailed account of what went on inside the towers from the first crash to the final implosion – clears some [...]
Posted in Books/Films/Media, The City on February 10th, 2007 | No Comments »
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Why not just stab us?
Before we picked it up, Atonement fit all our don’t-read-this-suck-ass-thing criteria:
a) it is a Big Important Book
b) it is a bestseller and
c) it came highly recommended by a lot of people.
Think The Kite Runner. And for the first 150 pages or so, we asked ourselves, Why, Recharger, do you read Big Important Books? They all suck. None of these Big Important Writers — Arundhati Roy or Khaled Hosseini or their ilkhood who write semi-historical novels about childhood tragedy — [...]
Posted in Books/Films/Media, The City on January 21st, 2007 | No Comments »
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Raymond Chandler: flawed master.
Pick-up on Noon Street, by Raymond Chandler.
Chandler is about style. Fashion, interiors, language–spare, readable, cynical language. The language of people wounded by life, clinging to particles of self-respect. Those are Chandler’s strengths.
Plot is not his strength. After reading all four stories in the collection, I couldn’t distinguish one from the other. I could admire the hell out of the writing, but the writing was so much stronger than plot it ended up distracting me; don’t ask me to tell you [...]
Posted in Books/Films/Media, The City on December 28th, 2006 | No Comments »
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The Worst Book Ever
Dear Mr. Coelho:
Here at Recharger The Dog, we have a rule: never read a bestseller recommended by more than one person.
Ignoring our own advice, we started The Alchemist with trepidation. It began with a cliché that we’ve come to detest—the uneducated working class lad who secretly reads Big Books. This sappy device was used by James Jones in From Here to Eternity (Pruitt, the reluctant boxer or trumpeter—can’t remember which—has a list of Big Books stashed in his pocket), nearly [...]
Posted in Books/Films/Media, The City on December 20th, 2006 | 2 Comments »
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Island at the Center of the World: by Russell Shorto
Dear Mr. Shorto:
Trademark your name; I will drink any chocolate milk called Shorto.
As for your enlightening, lugubrious history of New Amsterdam—Manhattan–I was disturbed for the following reasons:
It gave me a creepy case of the academics. I did not like slogging through a book. I wanted to feel as if I were in Mr. Peabody’s Way-Back machine; the thrill I got from Jack Finney’s Time And Again (yes, a novel, and the setting was 200 years after yours). I wanted [...]
Posted in Books/Films/Media, The City on December 14th, 2006 | No Comments »
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How To Lose Friends and Alienate People
Dear Mr. Young,
I too was a New York loser-journalist guiltily-smitten with celebrity, though I worked at the Village Voice, and my celebrities were not as Brad Pittish as yours.
The Voice is not Vanity Fair, but the high-school cliques were the same. Most everyone at the Voice was younger than me (I was around 40 at the time), so I didn’t get invited out to lunch much (ever, in fact). Also, I was married and had a kid; that was a [...]
Posted in The City on June 25th, 2006 | 1 Comment »
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Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
To: Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, authors, Freakonomics.
Dear Steven and Stephen,
Having read Malcolm Gladwell’s rave, having understood and loved the book’s premise—that hidden statistics we don’t want to look at tell the real story—we expected a lot from your bestseller, Freakonomics.
We were not completely disappointed. Freakanomics is always thought-provoking, and scores a number of bull eyes. For example, your attack on the theories of why crime plunged in the 90s (and, indirectly, the Giuliani myth) is pure fun [...]
Posted in Books/Films/Media on June 6th, 2006 | 1 Comment »
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freakonomics non-fiction reviews Stephen J. Dubner Steven D. Levitt
Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bronx is Burning
Son of Sam.
The Blackout
Reggie’s 3 for 3
Bella, Mario, Ed, Abe
Arguably the freakiest summer in New York history.
Yet…the book is oddly, frustratingly flat.
Posted in Books/Films/Media, The City on May 23rd, 2006 | 1 Comment »
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