Tuesday, October 2, 2007

Brainiac's British book picks

I couldn't wait for two books recently published in England to appear in American bookstores, so I ordered them online. Amazon.co.uk, friends -- I use it all the time. Brainiac readers might also enjoy these books. Take a look.

"The Red Men" (Snowbooks), by Matthew De Abaitua, is a dystopian science fiction novel that takes place in Redtown, "a virtual city, inhabited by copies of real people going about their daily business, in which new policies, diseases and disasters can be studied in perfect simulation." It's a first novel for De Abaitua, who is a journalist, a former literary editor of (British) Esquire, a former BBC science fiction series presenter, and currently editor of a BBC film review website, where he launched the Internet-only film review TV show, Movie Rush. (I know De Abaitua from his days as deputy editor of The Idler; he has written for Hermenaut, too.)

"Movies: Over a Century of the Greatest Films, Stars, Scenes, Speeches and Events That Rocked the Movie World (Little Black Book)" (Cassell Illustrated), edited by Chris Fujiwara, is a magnificently attractive, 800-page paperback in which 62 film aficionados -- many of whom are well-known film critics and scholars -- celebrate 1,000 defining "moments" of cinema. These moments include: Orson Welles's "cuckoo clock" speech in "The Third Man," Twentieth Century Fox's adoption of the anamorphic widescreen format (CinemaScope) in 1953, Peter O'Toole disappearing behind a jeep's dirty windshield at the end of "Lawrence of Arabia," the publication of the politically engaged essay "Cinema/Ideology/Criticism" in Cahiers du cinema in October 1969, the downbeat but somehow uplifting musical number at the end of Cassavetes' "The Killing of a Chinese Bookie," the appearance of DVD players in Japan in 1996, the Bush-in-the-schoolroom scene in Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11, and the scene in which Olive touches an inconsolable Dwayne on the shoulder in "Little Miss Sunshine." This book is just what the doctor ordered to get us through the coming winter. NB: Fujiwara is a long-time Boston resident (currently living in Japan), and sometime Ideas contributor. Other locals and ex-locals who contribute include Scott Hamrah, former Ideas columnist James Parker, and yours truly.

Posted by Joshua Glenn at 10:19 AM

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