A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

On September 15, 1996, the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) aired The People,  the first of eight episodes of director Stephen Ives' The West, a documentary about the United States' westward expansion and its effects on the history and culture of various peoples, including Americans, Native Americans, Spanish, French, Mexicans, and African Americans. Written by Geoffrey C. Ward and Dayton Duncan, The West  was executive produced by Ken Burns and produced under the aegis of Burns' Florentine Films and Ives' own Insignia Films production company. The West was narrated by actor Peter Coyote, who would later provide narration for later documentaries by Ken Burns, including The National Parks: America's Best Idea, Prohibition, and The Vietnam War.  Presented by Ken Burns and directed by Stephen Ives, this 12-hour film chronicles the epic saga of America's most vast and turbulent region, beginning before European settlement and continuing into the 20th Century.

(C) 2018 CBS Studios/Paramount Home Media Distribution On November 13, Paramount Home Media Distribution released Star Trek: Discovery - Season One, a four-disc Blu-ray set of the newest television series in the Star Trek franchise. Created by Bryan Fuller and Alex Kurtzman for the streaming service CBS All Access, Star Trek: Discovery is the seventh television series set in the universe created by Gene Roddenberry in the mid-1960s and the first new show to premiere since the cancellation of Star Trek: Enterprise in 2005. Although it was co-created by Kurtzman, one of the writers of 2009's Star Trek feature film, Star Trek: Discovery is not set in the Kelvin timeline in which the current feature films are set. Rather, the new show's setting is the Prime timeline seen in all the other television series. Like Enterprise, Star Trek: Discovery is a prequel to Star Trek: The Original Series, but its tale takes place a decade before the five-year mission of Capt. James T. Kirk

Jurassic World (2015) Written by: Colin Trevorrow, Derek Connolly, Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver Story by: Amanda Silver and Rick Jaffa  Based on Characters Created by  Michael Crichton Starring: Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Vincent D'Onofrio,  Ty Simpkins, Nick Robinson, Omar Sy, BD Wong, Irrfan Khan On June 12, 2015 (two weeks after its world premiere at Paris' Le Grande Rex theater), Universal Pictures' Jurassic World hit U.S. theaters in wide release. Directed by Colin Trevorrow under the aegis of executive producer Steven Spielberg, Jurassic World revived the long-dormant franchise after a protracted development that lasted over a decade. Set 22 years after the events in Spielberg's 1993 adaptation of the late Michael Crichton's science fiction novel Jurassic Park, the movie is the first installment of a planned Jurassic World trilogy. Two decades after the disaster at John Hammond's Jurassic Park theme park, a new park created by Simon Mars

Cover art by Larry Rostant (C) 2015 Del Rey Books and Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL) On March 3, 2015, Del Rey Books, the science fiction/fantasy imprint of Random House, published the hardcover edition of Kevin Hearne's Star Wars: Heir to the Jedi. Set shortly after the events of the 1977 movie Star Wars - Episode IV: A New Hope, Hearne's story focuses on the early adventures of a young Luke Skywalker in the aftermath of the Battle of Yavin and his decision to join the Rebel Alliance. Originally planned - in 2012 - as the third and final volume in an Expanded Universe (EU) trilogy titled Empire and Rebellion , it became a standalone canonical novel (one of four such works) after The Walt Disney Company-owned Lucasfilm and its Story Group declared that the EU was being relegated to "Legends" status and that all of the post-2014 novels would be part of the Star Wars canon. This means that Heir to the Jedi (the title is a tip of the hat to Timothy Zahn's Star Wars: Heir

(C) 2017 Da Capo Press I was a precocious child when I started reading books about the Second World War in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The first published work I remember reading was the condensed version of Cornelius Ryan's The Longest Day in the Colombian edition of Reader's Digest. This was around the same time that I saw The Great Escape in a Bogota theater; these two early exposures to the topic via mass media awoke in me an interest in World War II that has never abated. In many of the books I read in the 1970s, the Battle of Midway was usually heralded as the engagement that turned the tide of the Pacific War against the Japanese Empire and in favor of the United States and her allies in the region. After all, Japan's loss of four of her big fleet carriers, 248 planes, a cruiser (plus a second cruiser badly damaged) in exchange for the carrier USS Yorktown,  the destroyer Hammann, and 150 aircraft stopped the Japanese advance to the east. But as decisive as

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018) Directed by: J.A. Bayona Written by: Derek Connolly & Colin Trevorrow Starring: Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Rafe Spall, Justice Smith, Daniella Pineda, James Cromwell, Ted Levine, Isabella Sermon, Geraldine Chaplin, Jeff Goldblum On June 22, 2018, Universal Pictures' Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom hit theaters in its U.S. wide release. Written by Derek Connolly and Colin Trevorrow ( Jurassic World ) and directed by Spanish director J.A. Bayona, this is the second chapter in the Jurassic World trilogy and the fifth film of the Jurassic Park franchise.   How many times do you have to see the evidence? How many times must the point be made? We're causing our own extinction. Too many red lines have been crossed. And our home has, in fundamental ways, been polluted by avarice and political megalomania. Genetic power has now been unleashed and of course, that's going to be catastrophic. This change was inevitable from t

15 Movies, 15 Minutes, 15 Friends Rules: Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen movies you've seen that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes. Tag fifteen friends, including me because I'm interested in seeing what movies my friends choose.  1. Star Wars (aka Star Wars - Episode IV: A New Hope) 2. The Hunt for Red October 3. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly 4. Raiders of the Lost Ark 5. Stand By Me 6. A Bridge Too Far 7. E.T.: The Extraterrestrial 8. Jaws 9. Alien 10. The Terminator 11. Titanic 12. Star Wars - Episode III: Revenge of the Sith 13. American Graffiti 14. Unforgiven 15. Die Hard

(C) 1997 Berkley Books and Jack Ryan Limited Partnership On November 1, 1997, Berkley Books (G.P. Putnam's Sons' paperback division) published Airborne: A Guided Tour of an Airborne Task Force. Co-written by the top-billed Tom Clancy and his researcher John D. Gresham, this was the fifth book in a series of non-fiction works devoted to specific unit types of America's armed forces.  Clancy, of course, is best known to readers as the creator and principal author of the long-running Jack Ryan series of novels. He also co-wrote (with former Navy officer and wargame designer Larry Bond) Red Storm Rising, one of the 1980s top-selling novels and his most popular work of fiction that's not set in the still-expanding "Ryanverse." In addition, he was also a respected conservative commentator and self-taught expert on military and intelligence matters, a successful entrepreneur who turned his name into one of the most recognizable names in American mass media. 

(C) 1996 Berkley Books and Jack Ryan Limited Partnership On November 1, 1996, Berkley Books (which at the time was the paperback division of G.P. Putnam's Sons but has since been folded into the larger Penguin Random House conglomerate) published Tom Clancy's Marine: A Guided Tour of a Marine Expeditionary Force. Co-written by Clancy's researcher and defense expert John D. Gresham, Marine is the fourth volume in what is now billed as The Tom Clancy Military Library but was originally known as the Guided Tour series.  Fans of the late novelist and conservative commentator know that Clancy was an unabashed admirer of the United States Marine Corps. His best known fictional character, John Patrick Ryan, Sr. started his career in government as a second lieutenant in the Marines, a fact that has been mentioned in three of the five "Jack Ryan" films and Amazon's Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan, as well as in several of Clancy's novels.  "Marine." S

(C) 1995 Berkley Books Before his untimely death on October 1, 2013, the late Tom Clancy wrote 16 best-selling novels which focus on many aspects of America's national security community. Starting with his now-classic The Hunt for Red October (1984) and continuing all the way to his final Jack Ryan novel (2013's Command Authority ), Clancy's cast of characters included soldiers, airmen, sailors, Marines, Coast Guardsmen, and special operations troops, not to mention a certain CIA analyst who eventually becomes President of the United States. All of these books - including Red Storm Rising, one of only two novels that are not set in Clancy's "Ryanverse" - are not only successful because they tell great stories, but also because they are the result of a lot of research and Clancy's ability to network with many people in the military and other branches of government. In addition to his works of fiction, Clancy wrote a seven-book series of non-fiction bo