It Came From the '70s: From The Godfather to Apocalypse Now Review

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(More customer reviews)Reviewed by Joy H. for ReadersFavorite.com
A movie buff's must have, It Came From the `70s is a book you have been waiting for. With over 45 movies produced in the 1970's, this book is one you will cherish for years to come. The `70s era brought such films as Rocky, Superman, Dracula, Freaky Friday, The Godfather Parts I and II, Star Wars, The Black Hole, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and so many more masterpiece films.

The film reviews in this book were written in the Quad City Times between 1970 and 1979. Each film has its own chapter in this book. Each chapter includes a few pages about the movie, pictures of movie scenes, the movie rating, the cast, release date, director, writer and the actors. At the end of each chapter you will also find Trivia questions (and answers) about the movie actors, etc.
At the end of the book, you will find the Best and Worst films of 1976, 1977, 1978 and 1979. Did you know that Animal House was the #1 best film of 1978, while Grease was the #1 worst, and that Apocalypse Now was the #1 best film of 1979? You just can't go wrong with these 256 pages of classic information!
I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book about the classic movies of the `70s. It brought back a lot of memories and reminded me of things I'd forgotten about the movies. The author did an extremely good job of researching this information and compiling it into this awesome tribute to the`70s era.

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It Came From the '70s is the book movie lovers old and new have been searching for. The 1970s represented a fertile decade that producedsuch films as:Alien, Dirty Harry, Apocalypse Now,The Exorcist, Chinatown, The French Connection, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Godfather (Parts I and II), Star Wars, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and many, many more.Featured in these pages are over 75 photos, major casts, a multitude of reviews, "Best of/Worst of" lists, and trivia for both the film buff and the uninitiated.It Came From the '70s is a slice of film history, painstakingly documented by noted author and journalist Connie Corcoran Wilson. The original reviews found here could not be replicated today. Consider them tiny time capsules capturing the zeitgeist of a decade.

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Profit Over People: Neoliberalism & Global Order Review

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(More customer reviews)Edit of 20 Jun 09 to add links (feature not available back then)
This book begins with a very fine introduction by Robert McChesney, who defines neoliberalism as an economic paradigm that leaves a small number of private parties in control and able to maximize their profit (at the expense of the people). He goes on to note that a distracted or apathetic or depoliticized public essentially "goes along" with this, resulting in the loss of community and the rise of consumerism.
Chomsky himself, over the course of 167 pages, points out the damages of neo-liberalism (public abdicating power to corporations), not just to underdeveloped nations and their peoples, but to the American people themselves, who are suffering, today, from a fifteen year decline in education, health, and increased inequality between the richest and the poorest.
Over the course of several chapters, he discusses various U.S. policies, including the U.S. policy of using "security" as a pretext for subsidizing the transfer of taxpayer funds to major arms dealers. The declaration of Cuba as a threat to U.S. national security is one that Mexico could not support--as one of their diplomats explained at the time: "if we publicly declare that Cuba is a threat to our security, forty million Mexicans will die laughing."
At the end of it all, Chomsky comes down to the simple matter of protecting both civilization and the civilians from their own governments in cahoots with corporations. His observations on the deaths by disease, starvation, and so on, at the same time that billions are being spent on arms which perpetuate the cycles of violence, are relevant. So also are his observations on the dramatic increase in both the extent and the damages caused by increasingly unregulated financial markets. He singles out the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) as an especially pernicious organization whose machinations are invisible to the public and harmful as well.
I note with interest a review of this book that seeks to call Chomsky a liar, uninformed, and a laughingstock among "serious" scholars. I wish to address that point of view kindly. I can understand, when scholarship consists largely of going through the motions, reading a limited number of works, and answering by rote with the prescribed thought, how so many of our allegedly educated people in business and government are simply socially tuned in. I have myself come to the conclusion that Washington runs on 2% of the available international information (and is largely witless about the 75% or so that is in foreign languages), and I also agree with Howard Bloom's observation in Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, to wit, that half one's brain cells are killed off by the time one is an adult, due to normal biological adjustments to accommodate the prescribed social, cultural, and intellectual parameters that are demanded if one is to "get along." In that light, I view Chomsky as one of our more important vaccinations against premature stupidity among our loosely-educated adult policymakers. For myself, with considerable reading and a 25-year national security career behind me, I find that while Chomsky is repetitious, he is generally meticulous about foot-noting (something that cannot be said for the lazy authors residing in most think tanks, all of them being paid to think along very specifically prescribed directions).
The bottom line for me is clear: citizens must read and think, or perish from the earth as slaves to those who control money. There is only one thing that matters more than money in this world, and that is the vote. In a representative democracy, the vote can be bought with ease *until* the moment comes when citizens realize that they can combine the use of public sources to reach conclusions (open source intelligence) with self-organization via the Internet, with civil action (cyber-advocacy, street-advocacy, communication and voting) to *take back the power.* It is not terrorism that scares the corporate carpetbaggers, it is something much more powerful: thinking citizens willing to spend the time keeping their corporate servants in line.
Chomsky has labored for over fifty years to keep that part of our brain alive that our schools, seeking to train obedient factory workers, have worked so hard to kill. It can be disheartening, to see citizens so freely give up their rights and their powers, but I do believe, that with the The Radical Center: The Future of American Politics (Halstead and Lind), The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World (Rya and Anderson) and other books I have reviewed, there is, without question, a tipping point. The Internet has changed everything-now we need for the people to notice, and act. Chomsky sheds light in a way that no prostituted scholar or preppy business acolyte will respect-but if the workers wish to begin reading for the future salvation of their children's rights, Chomsky is as good a place as any from which to step off into true democracy.
See also:
The Manufacture Of Evil: Ethics, Evolution, and the Industrial System
The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class - And What We Can Do about It (BK Currents (Paperback))
The Working Poor: Invisible in America
The Global Class War: How America's Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future - and What It Will Take to Win It Back
The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power
The People's Business: Controlling Corporations and Restoring Democracy

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Why is the Atlantic slowly filling with crude petroleum, threatening a millions-of-years-old ecological balance? Why did traders at prominent banks take high-risk gambles with the money entrusted to them by hundreds of thousands of clients around the world, expanding and leveraging their investments to the point that failure led to a global financial crisis that left millions of people jobless and hundreds of cities economically devastated? Why would the world's most powerful military spend ten years fighting an enemy that presents no direct threat to secure resources for corporations?The culprit in all cases is neoliberal ideology—the belief in the supremacy of "free" markets to drive and govern human affairs. And in the years since the initial publication of Noam Chomsky's Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order, the bitter vines of neoliberalism have only twisted themselves further into the world economy, obliterating the public's voice in public affairs and substituting the bottom line in place of people's basic obligation to care for one another as ends in themselves. In Profit Over People, Chomsky reveals the roots of the present crisis, tracing the history of neoliberalism through an incisive analysis of free trade agreements of the 1990s, the World Trade Organization, and the International Monetary Fund—and describes the movements of resistance to the increasing interference by the private sector in global affairs.In the years since the initial publication of Profit Over People, the stakes have only risen. Now more than ever, Profit Over People is one of the key texts explaining how the crisis facing us operates—and how, through Chomsky's analysis of resistance, we may find an escape from the closing net.

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Song and Circumstance: The Work of David Byrne from Talking Heads to the Present Review

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(More customer reviews)Sytze Steenstra (an arts and social science professor from the Netherlands) has written an impressive book covering the art (mostly music, but by no means exclusively) of David Byrne. The book follows a roughly chronological path, but connects each section/part/era to conceptual themes. You need to be willing to put up with a little bit of academic theory and structure with those themes, but do realize that Byrne doesn't seem to shy from those theory labels, so there's some level of tacit approval. (In fact, the review of the book by Byrne himself shows up above on the amazon description of the book.) This is a look primarily at Byrne through the works of the Talking Heads, his films, solo music, visual art, and collaborations, so it is not strictly a biographer, least of all a "rock-n-roll" biography with smashed televisions, pregnant groupies, and piranhas being kept on the tour bus.
Parts four and six, the ethnography and Tropicalismo sections, were the strongest to me, at least in part because I was less familiar with that work. There are strong connections made throughout the book, and you definitely finish reading with a long list of music to track down. I'd highly recommend it to fans of Byrne from any era (Talking Heads on) and to readers of Wire Magazine (the British new music magazine which also has a willingness to use, and lack of fear of, critical theory).
Table of contents for "Song and Circumstance: The Work of David Byrne from Talking Heads to the Present" :
INTRODUCTION
A song and a face
Singer and conceptual artist
Mythology and methodology
Romantic conceptualism
The method of this book
Part One: STRIPPING DOWN ROCK SONGS
The tentative rejection of mimesis
Cybernetics as inspiration
The first years of Talking Heads
Ethological and neurological aspects of music
Experiments with rhythm, texture and persona
Part Two: A WIDER MUSICAL COMMUNITY
Music and dance as social exchange
Isolated voices embedded in rhythm
At the crossroads: "Remain In Light"
Comparative studies of myth, archetypes and ritual
Archetypal conflicts: "goin' boom boom boom"
Part Three: MOVIES, TV AND THEATER: THE RITUAL IN DAILY LIFE
Introducing performance theater
A concert in the cinema: "Stop Making Sense"
Music in context: "Talking Heads vs. The Television"
"The Knee Plays", music for Robert Wilson
"Little Creatures": television's naiveté
"True Stories", a generic Gesamtkunstwerk
A soundtrack for Mabou Mines' "Dead End Kids"
"The Forest", a Byrne-Wilson piece
"The Forest" as film script
Part Four: ROCK STAR AND ETHNOGRAPHER
Rock star and ethnographer
"Naked", Talking Heads' most `African' record
"Ilé Aiyé": a musical ethnographic documentary
"Rei Momo": incorporating Latin sensibility
Soundtracks for ethnographic art documentaries
Luaka Bop
In the mirror: Sex `n' drugs `n' electronic music
Critical responses
Part Five: IN THE VISUAL ARENA
The arena of visual communication
Photographic repertoires
"Strange Ritual": documents of sacralization
The voodoo of the business world
"The New Sins": a new mythology of chaos
Dressed objects and other furniture
Part Six: TROPICALISMO IN NEW YORK
The singer as imaginary landscape
"Between The Teeth"
New York Tropicalismo
TV presenter
"Live at Union Chapel"
Songs and choreography: coming full circle
Part Seven: AN EMOTIONAL EPISTEMOLOGY
Cloud diagrams
"Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information"
Arboretum: the garden of correspondences
The representation of politics
Who owns our eyes and ears?
Philosophy in installments
Conclusion
Appendices
Index

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The Art Spirit: Notes, Articles, Fragments of Letters and Talks to Students, Bearing on the Concept and Technique of Picture Making, the Study of Art Generally, and on Appreciation (Icon Editions) Review

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(More customer reviews)My friend who was an artist gave me this book to read. Now it is one of the few that I carry around at all times. Robert Henri saw that there is no division between art and life. To be an artist, or trully alive for that matter, one has to experience life to his fullest. This means finding yourself and the people/things/and way of living that inspire you. When beauty strikes you so, and your full of love and joy it is hard not to do things beautifully. Henri tells us to find that beauty within us and the rest will follow. And one of the most enjoying things I found about this book was that the authors personality is very bright in every sentence. It made the book a great read. To enjoy this book, you need not to know art but to know life.

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Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live, as Told By Its Stars, Writers and Guests Review

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(More customer reviews)This book feels like a reunion of old friends, telling their stories at a dinner party that you are fortunate ewnough to overhear.
There is so much history in the years of SNL that there is an anecdote for every fan, but this book recognizes Loren Michaels as being the true genius behind the creation and development of the show. He's not universally loved by the cast (but also not nearly as despised as Chevy Chase, who seems to beeveryone's favorite whipping boy), but his genius is acknowledged by one and all.
A lot of favorite skits and characters are discussed, as well as some legendary battles with censors, advertisers and network executives. The mix of radical comedy with revenue concious TV executives makes for fascinating reading.
The chapters dealing with the deaths of cast members and behind the scene staff members are incredibly poignant, especially Belushi's and Chris Farley's, bit of whom were known to be dancing with trouble.
This book also goes a long way to humanizing Chris Rock, who emerges as one of the most thoughtful and career minded members of all SNL casts. His intelligence shines through in his tales of making it by way of the show.
There is a great story on almost every page of this book, and having grown up with this show, it made the memories all the more pleasant.
This is a great Christmas present for any 30-50 year old who has spent their Saturday night in front of a TV.

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