Can a work of art so closely tied to a particular tragedy transcend its era to speak to future generations? This beautiful and moving documentary resoundingly says, “Yes.”
My review of filmmakers Rosalynde LeBlanc and Tom Hurwitz’s Can You Bring It: Bill T. Jones and D-Man in the Waters, one of the best films of the year.
(Photo courtesy of Rosalynde LeBlanc.)
He takes L'Homme Machine out of the bag and sits with it at the kitchen table. He has not read the book. La Mettrie is not remembered fondly. A provincial, like himself, a clever rogue, a man who died from eating an excess of pâté. –Andrew Miller, Pure
She left the building, heading south to the greatest library in the free world
Well, not anymore. Probably not ever. But the central branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library was still a place of wonders to Tess, even if the book budget had been slashed and the hours cut. Her parents had made a lot of mistakes…but she gave them credit for doing one thing right: Starting when she was eight, they gave her a library card and dropped her at the downtown Pratt every Saturday while they shopped. –Laura Lippman, Baltimore Blues
My mother used to do the same thing. Drop me off at the public library in downtown Montgomery, Alabama, where I spent long hot summer afternoons in air-conditioned comfort browsing the shelves and exploring the museum upstairs with its moldy Native American relics and dusty Civil War artifacts. By the time she picked me up, I would have accumulated a stack of ten or more books to take home. What bliss!
I’d read on the internet that it was okay to cite personal reasons for a whole host of circumstances. Even when submitting a full-blown resignation, the article had informed, good old “personal reasons” would see you through in the majority of cases. Whether you’d had a boss who’d made barbed comments about you at a half-hourly rate, or you’d been blamed for the disappearance of a document mentioned on the job sheet that had never existed in the first place, or your colleagues had spread horrible rumours about you, or you’d been responsible for ruining a business deal that had fallen through after you’d refused to go drinking with some guy at the client company–whatever your particular situation might be, “personal reasons” was your man. –Kikuko Tsumura, There’s No Such Thing As An Easy Job
Can’t wait to watch this documentary about Dolly Parton’s literacy project, the Imagination Library. Since she began the book-gifting project in 1995, Parton and local community partners have donated over 160 million books to almost two million children (from birth to age five) in the United States, Canada Britain, Ireland, and Australia. It’s streaming July 9 on Apple TV, Amazon Prime, and Google Play.
She raised her hand and waved her hand, and then left the room at a clip. It was really hard to work out if she was a kind person or a brusque one. I guessed that at heart she was kind, but when she sensed a potential obstacle in her way, she became brusque. Which, when I really thought about it, just made her a normal member of the human race.
Kikuko Tsumura, There’s No Such Thing As Easy Job
Ragoût, remembering perhaps their old intimacy in the room, those winter nights he lay by the man’s feet, sometimes joins the engineer, makes himself comfortable on the dresses, has the habit of climbing half inside them–a cat becoming a girl, a girl a cat.
Andrew Miller, Pure
Jane Austen fans, Turner Classic Movies has a great triple-header lineup tonight: Sense and Sensibility (1995), Persuasion (1955), and Pride and Prejudice (1940).
My latest review for Film-Forward. Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa immerses viewers fully in the personality cult—abetted by an efficient propaganda machine—that marked Soviet dictator Stalin’s 30-year reign. If you’re a fan of 2017’s black comedy The Death of Stalin, you may find the banal reality of Stalin’s massive state funeral both hypnotically fascinating and incredibly dull.
Do you count any books as guilty pleasures?
Despite being a card-carrying convent girl, I don’t feel guilt about pleasure.