A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

Photo Credit: Pixabay Hi, there, Constant Reader, and welcome to another edition of Bloggin' On, my "random thoughts" corner of A Certain Point of View. It's Monday, October 28, 2019, and my morning is about to make the transition into noon here in my little bit of the Sunshine State. Currently, the weather here is still summery. Outside, it's hot; the temperature is 85℉ (29℃), but a limp easterly breeze and humidity levels at 80% makes it feel like it's 96℉ (35℃). With Halloween only three days away, these high temperatures certainly do not feel seasonal at all, not even for Florida. So, last night Donald Trump and his entourage, including his trophy wife Melania, attended Game 5 of the World Series at Nationals Park in Washington, DC. Ordinarily, this would not be newsworthy since most modern Presidents often attend pro sports games if they take place in Washington or adjacent cities. What makes it worth mentioning here, folks, is that Trump rece...

Art for the audiobook edition. (C) 1994 Greenhill Books (UK) and Stackpole Books (USA) Golden anniversaries of historical events are often a gold mine for publishers and writers alike, and 1994 - the 50th Anniversary of various famous World War II battles - was no exception. A small library's worth of new books about such engagements as the Battle for Normandy, Operation Market-Garden, and the Ardennes Counteroffensive (aka "The Battle of the Bulge") hit bookstores that year, along with re-issue editions of classics such as John Toland's The Last 100 Days, Cornelius Ryan's The Longest Day, and Charles B. MacDonald's A Time for Trumpets: The Untold Story of the Battle of the Bulge.  Among the many D-Day books that were published in 1994 was the first edition of Peter G. Tsouras' Disaster at D-Day: The Germans Defeat the Allies, June 1944. Published in Great Britain by Greenhill Books and in the U.S. by Stackpole books, Disaster at D-Day is an alte...

Cover for the 1993 paperback edition. (C) 1993 HarTorch Books On May 26, 1992, Random House published the U.S. edition of Fatherland, the debut of novelist Robert Harris, formerly a writer and editor for the BBC and the newspaper The Observer. Previously known for his non-fiction works ( Gotcha! The Government, the Media, and the Falklands Crisis and Selling Hitler ), Harris went on to become aa author of novels, most of them which have historical themes. An "alternate history" work along the lines of Alfred Coppel's The Burning Mountain: A Novel of the Invasion of Japan, Fatherland depicts a dystopian version of Germany in 1964 as the victor of World War II in Europe. Set between April 14-20 in 1964, Fatherland begins with a murder investigation. Berlin Kriminalpolizei (Kripo) detective Xavier March is called to the shores of the Havel River on the outskirts of Hitler's redesigned (by his favorite architect, Albert Speer) capital of Berlin. A corpse of an elder...

It is  July, 1945: As the scientists and military men who have built the atomic bomb prepare to test the ultimate weapon, an unexpected thunderstorm arrives at the Trinity test site near Los Alamos, N.M. Lightning strikes the tower where the first bomb -- code named "Fat Man" -- is tethered, and in a literal flash, history is changed.  There are still two nuclear weapons left, but until the more complex plutonium bomb can be tested, their use is postponed until 1946. In the meantime, the conventional operation of the Japanese home islands, code named DOWNFALL, is launched as scheduled on Nov. 1, 1945. With this almost Shakespearean touch, novelist and World War II veteran Alfred Coppel ( Thirty Four East, The Dragon ) begins his "what-if" account of the invasion of Japan in 1945 and 1946. Instead of covering the entire two-part campaign (OLYMPIC, the landing on Kyushu, and CORONET, the final landing on Honshu) in the main body of The Burning Mountain , C...