A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

 Hi, everyone!  Well, as the header for this post points out, I was fortunate this week because Reunion: A Story now has a book trailer on YouTube!  This two-minute-long video was created by my friend Juan Carlos Hernandez and Popcorn Sky Productions, with some input from me (I provided the excerpt in the narration, and I got to pick the musical cue), and an awesome voice performance by Juan's son, Anthony James Hernandez. Everyone who's watched it and given me feedback on it has said they like the video because the mix of images, music, and narration pulls them into the story.  Whether the video will help boost sales of Reunion, I haven't a clue. I hope it does...cos it's really a brilliantly done promo! Ah, but wait! There's more! This morning, my friend and fellow former Epinions reviewer, Patti Aliventi, posted a review of Reunion on her WordPress blog Thoughts from the Mountaintop. It wasn't her first go-round at reviewing my novella; when I published the s

Book jacket design: Greg Kulick. © 2019 Little, Brown and Company (Hachette Group) On July 20, 2019, the National Air and Space Administration (NASA), historians, and millions of space enthusiasts around the world commemorated the Jubilee of Apollo 11's landing on the Moon. To observe the 50th anniversary of astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin's historic moonwalk - and the fulfillment of the late President John F. Kennedy's challenge to land a man on Earth's nearest celestial neighbor and return him to Earth before 1970, a wave of new movies ( First Man ), documentaries ( Apollo 11 ) and books preceded the commemoration of the greatest adventure in human history: the Space Race and the triumph of the Apollo Program. Shoot for the Moon: The Space Race and the Extraordinary Voyage of Apollo 11, historian James Donovan's 464-page account of the Apollo Program, its Cold War roots, and America's bid to land men on the Moon before the Soviet Union, is

Dust jacket design: Eric White. © 2013 Alfred A. Knopf On September 24, 2013, 99 years and one day after Japan – in an ironic historical twist – declared war on her future Axis partner Germany, Alfred A. Knopf published Sir Max Hastings' Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War, the U.S. edition of the esteemed British historian's account of World War One's first five months. Published in Britain as Catastrophe, the book examines the diplomatic, military, and human errors in judgment that led to the outbreak of Europe in the summer of 1914 and set in motion the chain of events that caused future horrors in the 20th Century and beyond. In this nearly 700-page volume, Hastings focuses exclusively on the conflict – known then by most people as "the Great War," although some prescient German writers called it der Weltkrieg: "the World War" – in the Eastern and Western Fronts in Europe. (In his introduction, Hastings writes, "Hew Strachan, in the first

© 2005 Picador Books. Book cover photo credit: © Benjamin Lowy When the U.S. 101st Airborne (Air Assault) Division crossed the border between Kuwait and Iraq on the morning of March 20, 2003 as part of the Army's V Corps at the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom, Washington Post reporter Rick Atkinson was one of the media pool members "embedded" with Maj. Gen. David Petraeus' headquarters. At the time, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author ( An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa 1942-1943 )  was still a senior editor at the Post and was chosen to observe the legendary division that had participated in many famous campaigns since its creation as a parachute unit during the Second World War. Now, having traded in their airplanes for helicopters as far back as the Vietnam War, the Screaming Eagles were on their way north to Baghdad, 12 years after the end of the first Persian Gulf War. Atkinson was no stranger to either the Army or reporting about the military. His fa

© 2012 University of Illinois Press In February of 2012, the University of Illinois Press published Donald R. Hickey's The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict, Bicentennial Edition, an expanded and updated version of a 1992 work about the United States' second and last war with Great Britain. Based on Hickey's 15 years of studying and writing about specific topics related to this long-neglected conflict in American history, The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict, Bicentennial Edition is considered by many historians and literary critics to be the definitive account of "the Second War of Independence," as the three-year clash of arms was dubbed by many of its contemporary supporters. Hickey, who teaches history at Wayne State College in Nebraska, goes beyond the usual "military history" approach of other authors who focus almost exclusively on the battles on land and sea. In The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict, the respected author of such books as D

© 1977 Simon and Schuster On September 7, 1977, U.S. President Jimmy Carter and Panamanian General Omar Torrijos signed two treaties,  The Treaty Concerning the Permanent Neutrality and Operation of the Panama Canal and The Panama Canal Treaty, in Washington, D.C. Known as the Carter-Torrijos Treaties, these documents guaranteed Panamanian sovereignty over what had been the U.S.-controlled Panama Canal Zone as of 1979 and sole ownership of the Panama Canal as of December 31, 1999. In essence, these agreements - which were highly controversial in American conservative circles before, during, and even after they were negotiated, signed, and ratified by both countries, replaced the 1903 Hay– Bunau-Varilla Treaty, a document which, in essence, ceded the canal and the land adjacent to it (including islands within the canal itself) to the United States.  Earlier in the year, Simon and Schuster of New York published The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama

© 1989 Putnam Reviewer's Note: I originally wrote this in August of 1989 for the Miami-Dade Community College - South Campus student newspaper, Catalyst.  Summer, that prime time for readers, may be over, but Tom Clancy's The Cardinal of the Kremlin, the third entry in the Jack Ryan series, is a spy novel for all seasons. Ryan, a CIA analyst introduced in Clancy's first novel, The Hunt for Red October, finds himself in a web of intrigue involving a highly placed "mole" - code-named Cardinal - in the Kremlin, a husband-and-wife CIA team stationed in Moscow, KGB surveillance teams, Afghan rebels and a race between American and Soviet scientists to develop a Strategic Defense Initiative ("Star Wars" system. Although this sounds complex, Cardinal is fast-paced and engrossing. And although there's a lot of gadgetry involved, don't expect Ryan to give you James Bond-style heroics. As in his previous novels ( Red October, Red Storm Rising an

Photo Credit: Pixabay Well, hello there! It's been a while since I've written a non-review post. There are several reasons for this, the biggest being that I no longer write as much about my personal life as I used to. Not that there isn't anything new or interesting going on; au contraire, my friends. My life has changed radically in the eight years since I started A Certain Point of View, and maybe someday I'll revisit those changes here or in another venue. Right now, though, I'll just focus on creating the kind of content you've been seeing here for the past few years - namely, reviews and reflections about movies, books, music, TV shows, and the occasional computer game, as well as a soupcon of political commentary should the mood strike me. I was going to write a review of The Capital of Baseball (1950-1960), the seventh episode of Baseball: A Film by Ken Burns, but my heart is not in it. It would entail rewatching the episode, which I ordin

The term “greatest generation” used to smack of journalistic hyperbole or nationalistic jingoism, but the more I read the works of Stephen E. Ambrose ( D-Day June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II, Band of Brothers ) or watch such classic documentaries as The War: A Film by Ken Burns and The World at War , the more I am inclined to agree with Tom Brokaw's use of that term to describe the men and women who came of age in the 1930s and '40s and created modern America. Brokaw, one of America's best television journalists and the former anchor of NBC's Nightly News, not only coined the phrase when he wrote The Greatest Generation; he backs it up in   his fascinating and inspiring collection of personality profiles of men and women, some famous (Bob Dole, Julia Child, George H.W. Bush), some not-so-famous but prominent (Norman Mineta, Daniel Inouye), and some neither prominent nor famous yet vitally essential (Leonard Lomell, Jeanette Gagne Norton) who e

(C) 1981 St. Martin's Press. Book cover photo: Goodreads In the early 1980s, back when I was in high school, I developed an interest in the Vietnam War, a conflict that took place when I was too young to understand but was a shadowy presence in everyone's lives in the 1960s and 1970s.  Around the same time that I was navigating the hallways of my senior high school's campus as a wide-eyed sophomore, Canadian writer-producer Michael Maclear's 13-part documentary series, Vietnam: The Ten Thousand Day War , was aired in syndication in the U.S. Written by Peter Arnett and narrated by actor Richard Basehart ( Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea ), this series - which originally aired on Canadian television in 26 half-hour episodes but was presented in 13 one-hour installments in U.S. television markets - was the first in-depth examination of what was, until the post-September 11, 2001 war in Afghanistan, America's longest war.  Like many documentaries of this genre

(C) 1994 Workman Publishing Company James Dean as a boxer's corner man in a Martin-and-Lewis comedy film? Gregory Peck as a Soviet partisan fighting Nazi invaders? Sally Field as a Lolita-like teenager on a Westward bound wagon train? Kevin Costner in a soft-core "T&A" film? Michael Douglas as an antiwar activist who joins the Army? Every career has to have a beginning, and acting in films isn't any different, as readers of Damien Bona's Opening Shots: The Unusual, Unexpected, Potentially Career-Threatening First Roles That Launched the Careers of 70 Hollywood Stars will discover when they explore this witty, informative, and even a bit biting tome by the author of Starring John Wayne as Genghis Khan and Inside Oscar: The Unofficial History of the Academy Awards. Starting with Woody Allen's appearance in 1964's What's New, Pussycat? and concluding with Pia Zadora's debut in that same year's epic Santa Clau

(C) 2000    Carol Publishing Group  R oman soldiers, as we all know, didn't wear watches at the height of the Caesars' power. Not because they couldn't afford even an inexpensive digital watch, mind you, but simply because the watch -- heck, even the mechanical clock -- hadn't yet been invented. Yet, as Bill Givens will cheerfully point out in his extremely amusing (and for some film producers, dismaying) collection of film flubs, some ancients were way ahead of themselves. Modern watches, wedding rings and other anachronisms make their little unexpected cameos in such set-in-ancient-times epics as The Ten Commandments, The Viking Queen, and Spartacus. Givens' Roman Soldiers Don't Wear Watches: 333 Film Flubs -- Memorable Movie Mistakes is a compilation of continuity errors, slips of dialogue, film-flipping flaws, and other unexpected mistakes that often pop up during production. Some of them have been published in other volumes of his successful