A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

Love Unspoken, Love Unbroken Dedicated to everyone I've loved, past...and present No Absolution: February 1998 It’s quiet here. But then again, it’s supposed to be quiet. Cemeteries, even those in the heart of a city, tend to be full of silence. The sounds of the neighborhood – barking dogs, laughing children, even the traffic on the adjacent streets – are swallowed up by the silence of the graveyard. The walls around the perimeter of the cemetery – imposing redbrick walls six feet high and adorned with a black iron fence – have something to do with it, I suppose. I’m a historian, not an acoustical engineer. I’ve been here some fifteen minutes, but it seems as if I have been here for hours. It has been twenty minutes since I drove into the parking lot, walked into the main office, and asked one of the dark-suited employees where Marty’s grave is. The employee – or Service Representative, as her desktop nameplate so eloquently states her job title – quietly tapped a few

(C) 2005 Ballantine/Del Rey Books In 1979, almost a year before the release of Star Wars - Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back, I purchased my first copy of Carol Titleman's The Art of Star Wars. The trade paperback edition of a hard-to-find Limited Edition hardcover published by Ballantine Books, Titleman's book not only had the stuff you might expect from a book titled The Art of Star Wars - sketches, production paintings, storyboards, costume and set designs, and pictures of the various models used in the movie - but it also contained the complete fourth revised draft of George Lucas' screenplay for the movie. Titleman's book - which was later reissued in 1997 as The Art of Star Wars - Episode IV: A New Hope - was only the first in a series of Art of Star Wars tomes; each of the live-action Episodes plus the new Lucasfilm Animated series Star Wars: The Clone Wars has had an "Art of" volume dedicated to it. J.W. (Jonathan) Rinzler's The Art

Schindler's List , Thomas Keneally's 1980 non-fiction "novel" about Oskar Schindler's transformation from a bon vivant German (actually, Sudeten German, born in what is now part of the Czech Republic) war profiteer to savior of over 1,000 Jews during World War II, is one of the most fascinating accounts about the darkest chapter of that global conflict, the Holocaust. It vividly portrays the horrors of the Nazi effort to exterminate the Jewish inhabitants in German-occupied Europe while at the same time proving that one person, no matter how flawed and contradictory in nature he or she is, can rise to the occasion and make a difference. In his Author's Note, Keneally explains that he uses the oft-used technique of telling a true story in the format of a fictional account, partly because he is primarily a novelist (Confederates, Gossip From the Forest) and "because the novel's techniques seem suited for a character of such ambiguity and magnitud

(C) 2009 Pocket Books/Paramount Pictures If you have been a regular visitor to your favorite bookstore's (be it brick-and-mortar or online) science-fiction/fantasy section, chances are that you've bought - or at least browsed through - a few books written by Alan Dean Foster. Since 1972, Foster has written over 100 books - way more than Tom Clancy, Stephen King and Danielle Steel - and many short stories, most (but not all) of them delving into worlds and characters that exist in the realms of the possible (sci-fi) and the impossible-yet-entertaining (fantasy). One of the subgenres Foster is best known for is the movie tie-in novelization; after adapting Star Trek: The Animated Series' episodes into the popular Star Trek Logs series, Foster ghost wrote the best-selling novelization of the movie originally known as Star Wars for writer-director George Lucas. Since then, the author has written many other tie-in novels based on scripts for the first three Alien fil

When President Barack Obama’s administration announced in early 2010 that it was canceling Project Constellation, the next manned-spaceflight program which was supposed to take American astronauts back to the Moon and – eventually – on to Mars, I couldn’t help but think that John F. Kennedy – to whom Obama had often been compared during the 2008 Presidential race – would be extremely disappointed with America’s lack of determination and “can-do” spirit as far as space exploration is concerned. Though Obama is a Democratic President as was the late JFK, he and his advisers are – depending on one’s point of view – pragmatic realists who are dealing with two wars overseas, the Great Recession, the oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico and a lack of bipartisan support in Washington, or bleeding heart liberals who are willing to tax and spend billions of taxpayer dollars on a wrong-headed mission to create a “socialist” welfare state along the lines of those in Western Europe and Scandina