Posts Tagged ‘review’
March 18th, 2013 | 
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I was a fairly big fan of the band The Who. I never bought any of their singles – I wasn’t much into 45s – and the first album I picked up wasn’t until Tommy (1969), but I purchased every studio album since, the earlier The Who Sell Out, as well as Live at Leeds and a couple compilations.
The lead guitarist of The Who, Pete Townsend, has written an extraordinary book, Who I Am. Part of the great strength of the book is based on Townsend’s fortunate habit of keeping journals.
The first part has amazing detail Read the rest of this entry »
The Wife and I decided we wanted to see a movie Sunday afternoon, which was a bit ambitious, since church tends to run long on the first Sunday. The Daughter and we fairly bolted out the door, picked up the babysitter – no, make that child watcher, per the Daughter’s instruction – dropped them at home, then got to the Spectrum at 12:47 to see the 12:55 showing of Quartet.
There is a home for retired musicians in a lovely part of rural England. Every year, there is a concert to make sure the home will be solvent for another year. The director of the production Read the rest of this entry »
My wife asked, after we saw Amour at the Spectrum Theatre in Albany Sunday, whether I thought Emmanuelle Riva was embarrassed being partially nude when she played Anne, a woman in need of being cleaned by others in the movie Amour. I quipped “Nah, she’s French!” In fact, and I did not know this at the time, she had appeared in the erotic 1959 art house film Hiroshima, Mon Amour.
Still, I was wondering how awful Anne, the character, must have felt at the indignity. Anne was a proud woman, an accomplished piano teacher. Read the rest of this entry »
Ken Levine is a blogger I’ve been following for about five years, and whose observations about the entertainment industry I enjoy a lot. He is “an Emmy winning writer/director/producer/major league baseball announcer.” So I was interested in a book by a guy who both wrote shows I’ve watched, such as MASH, Cheers and Frasier AND has done play-by-play for Seattle Mariners and other baseball teams.
I put his new book on my Amazon wish list and received it for Christmas. The premise of the book he dedicated a blog post to is that:
“They say if you can remember the’60s you didn’t live through them. Read the rest of this entry »
After making it back home from the Madison Theatre after seeing Wreck-it Ralph, I went back there with my friend Mary, while The Wife and the Daughter went ice skating. We saw Life of Pi, the fifth Best Picture nomination I’ve seen this season.
One thing is for sure – I don’t believe in God any more than I did; that’s a reference to a line in the film. If you have seen the commercial of the young man on a boat with a Bengal tiger Read the rest of this entry »
Each year, there is an event sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts called The Big Read. The idea is that whole communities, generally through the local library, pick one of (this year) 21 books for people to read. The Albany Fund for Education, a “not-for-profit charitable organization that raises funds for innovative programs in support of the Albany City School District” picked Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. Free copies were distributed through the branches of the Albany Public Library, of which I am an active and vocal supporter. I had never participated before, but this time, someone literally had a copy of the book, said, “You ought to read this, it’s good,” and put it in my hands.
It’s helpful that it reads on the title page Read the rest of this entry »
I’m someone who used to sell graphic novels in a comic book store, not a teacher. My wife IS a teacher, though, and was excited to see that I had received a review copy of Using Content-Area Graphic Texts for Learning.
Even Meryl Jaffe, co-author of this book, with Katie Monnin, mentioned in her blog that the title of this book is a bit of a mouthful. Basically, this should be called “Teaching with Graphic Novels.” Regardless of the name, this volume makes a convincing argument for using graphic novels in teaching math, language arts, social students, and science. More importantly, very early on, it makes the case, in the strongest terms, that the graphic novel is a legitimate teaching tool that broadens the educational palette for an increasingly diverse population.
Not that Meryl was always a believer. Read the rest of this entry »
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Tags: books, comic books, graphic novel, Kathy Monnin, Meryl Jaffe, review, X-Men | 
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