” Curious? The posters for “Fifty Shades of Grey” coyly ask.
Whether or not you’re one of the 100 million who bought, and presumably read, E L James‘ kinky book, the buzz alone surrounding this “Twilight” fan fiction turned international phenomenon is enough to pique the interest of a rock. “Fifty Shades of Grey” is inherently spectacle.
With all that irresistible anticipation, how could a movie about BDSM be so run of the mill? The short answer: fear and money. It’s one thing to read about the bondage-enabled sexual awakening of a virgin. It’s quite another to see it depicted on screen.
Director Sam Taylor-Johnson had an impossible mission on her hands to meld the tawdry with the conventional. It’s like trying to mash up the sensibilities of Lars von Trier with Nancy Meyers to create an end product that will be appealing on a mass scale. In trying to please everyone, though, “Fifty Shades of Grey” has stripped away the fun and settled on palatable. There have been perfume commercials with more depth and story arc.”
The Times Union has more as does The Daily Mail which also graciously provides links to many more reviews . See below:
” Harper Lee, author of the classic novel To Kill a Mockingbird, is to publish a second book 55 years after her debut.
Her publisher, Harper, announced that the second book, Go Set a Watchman, will be released on 14 July.
The book is described as essentially a sequel for To Kill a Mockingbird, and was completed just a few years after the seminal novel – but the manuscript lay forgotten until recently.
Harper said they will print an initial run of two million copies as they expect huge demand for the book, which they described as a “remarkable literary event”.
” In the mid-1950s, I completed a novel called Go Set a Watchman,” the 88-year-old Lee said. “It features the character known as Scout as an adult woman, and I thought it a pretty decent effort.
” My editor, who was taken by the flashbacks to Scout’s childhood, persuaded me to write a novel (what became To Kill a Mockingbird) from the point of view of the young Scout.
” I was a first-time writer, so I did as I was told. I hadn’t realised it (the original book) had survived, so was surprised and delighted when my dear friend and lawyer Tonja Carter discovered it.”
” Il Foglio is my favorite Italian newspaper, and I especially like the way this editorial starts:
Diceva il polemista canadese Mark Steyn che la nostra visione della globalizzazione si fonda su un equivoco. Non si tratta di essere contenti perché i monaci tibetani finalmente usano internet, piuttosto: “L’esempio di maggior successo della globalizzazione non sono Starbucks o McDonald’s, ma il wahabismo, un’oscura variante dell’islam praticata da pochi estremisti beduini che adesso la petrolricchezza saudita ha esportato in ogni angolo della terra – Waziristan, Indonesia, Caucaso, i Balcani, Amsterdam, Stoccolma, Toronto, Portland, Dearborn e Falls Church”.
That’s something I said in an interview with them many years ago, paraphrasing a line from America Alone:
When you look at it that way, the biggest globalization success story of recent years is not McDonald’s or Microsoft but Islamism: the Saudis took what was not so long ago a severe but peripheral strain of Islam practiced by Bedouins in the middle of a desert miles from anywhere and successfully exported it to Jakarta and Singapore and Alma Ata and Grozny and Sarajevo and Lyons and Bergen and Manchester and Ottawa and Dearborn and Falls Church…
It’s some years now since America Alone came out (although, if you’re in need of a belated Christmas gift, personally autographed copies are exclusively available from the SteynOnline bookstore). But its thesis is more timely with every passing day. And in yet another holiday season where, from Australia to France to Canada, families who’d never given a thought to Islam have had to come to terms with empty seats round the Christmas table, it is a poor consolation to a dimestore Cassandra to find my supposedly “alarmist” book cited with reference to recent events. Here is Vincent Cooper, in The Commentator, on the ability of the Sydney sheikh and his ilk to wage war against the west from within:
On the first anniversary of the July 7th London Tube bombings, the Times of London commissioned a poll of British Muslims. Here are the findings:
* 16 percent say that while the Tube bombings may have been wrong, the cause was right.
* 13 percent think that the four men who carried out the bombings should be regarded as martyrs.
* 7 percent agree that suicide attacks on civilians in the UK can be justified in some circumstances, rising to 16 percent for a military target.
As the Canadian journalist Mark Steyn points out: “There are, officially, one million Muslims in London, half of them under twenty-five. If 7 percent think suicide attacks on civilians are justified, that’s 70,000 potential supporters in Britain’s capital city.” (Mark Steyn, America Alone) “
” When Barack Obama introduced himself at the 2004 Democratic National Convention declaring there was only one America – “not a liberal America and a conservative America” and “not a black America and white America” – many instantly envisioned him as a future presidential candidate with a unique heritage and extraordinary rhetorical skills that would enable him to unite a nation divided over political ideology and race.
Not long into his presidency, however, it became apparent to many, including some liberals, that Obama’s leadership and policies had only exacerbated the divisions.
Most attributed his failures to simple incompetence, but Michael Savage saw something much more sinister happening, and in his new book – “Stop the Coming Civil War” – he charges Obama is deliberately dividing the country.
At the time Savage finished the manuscript, several months ago, many continued to mock the provocative notion that any president would purposefully damage the nation.
Meanwhile, an increasing number of bewildered Democrats are distancing themselves from Obama. But recent events, including the flood of Central American illegal aliens and the entry of the Ebola virus to the U.S., have made “Stop the Coming Civil War,” Savage’s 30th book, seem prophetic.
In his concluding chapter, Savage bluntly states his book, published by Center Street Books, is about “the conflict the current administration is pushing in the name of a broader worldwide liberal revolution.”
“ As I see it, the forces of the left are attempting nothing less than a socialist takeover of the world economy and global politics,” he writes. “
” Nick Adams, 29, author of “The American Boomerang,” is our modern day Alex de Tocqueville, a foreigner who shows us why we are exceptional before we fundamentally transform ourselves with policies akin to other worldviews.”
“There is a cabal of politically correct forces that seek to weaken America, because if they weaken America then their agendas and their objectives are more easily met,” Adams told The Daily Caller in an exclusive interview. “And this is the reason why they have waged this war on America, both domestically and internationally, in the court of public opinion. The saddest part is, Ginni, that they run our media, our institutions and our schools, and they chose their sides a long time ago and they only want to play unopposed. They are self-appointed shepherds that see us as their sheep. They are cultural dieticians that have created a moral monopoly, the absolute antithesis of the free marketplace of ideas. These are forces that must be stopped. These are forces that must be vanquished, because they promote and indoctrinate to the detriment of America, and therefore the world. Their doctrines of relativism and moral equivalence stunt decision-making, compromise opinion-making. They wantonly abandon the principles of Jefferson and Lincoln. They force America to float aimlessly without a rope of purpose or an anchor of conviction. They make America weak. And, for all of those reasons, those forces must be met with complete and total united opposition with any person who has an ounce of patriotic fiber in their body.”
Nick Adams is on fire for liberty, prosperity and a strong America and wants more Americans to be committed to understanding what differentiates America from the rest of the world. In a previous segment, Adams discussed what has happened to American men.”
For those viewers interested in furthering reading about Mr Adams and his take on American Exceptionalism we offer the following description of the book , along with a short bio of the author including a link to download his book in PDF format .
Is America still the world’s most celebrated and beloved superpower? Is this great nation poised for an amazing American century—or instead for a slow descent into mediocrity? In The American Boomerang, possibly one of the most important books of our time, philosopher and author Nick Adams explores America through sympathetic Australian eyes. In this fresh look, a conservative Adams reveals the turnaround nature of Americans, or their “boomerang spirit.” Optimistic while pragmatic, The American Boomerang makes the case for American exceptionalism, and continued American dominance throughout this century. It takes us from founding to the present, sharing an inspiring vision along the way, and makes the case that American values are conservative values, and to preserve its exceptionalism, America must remain a center-right nation. Despite the prophets of gloom, in the eyes of outsider Nick Adams, “America the Great” will only continue to become greater.
About the Author
Nick Adams is an internationally renowned Australian speaker, lecturer, author and media commentator. He is best known for his work in the field of American exceptionalism, and is credited with a resurgence in the idea worldwide. He champions the idea that the American success, power and influence of today rest strongly with the traditional family and values of the nation yesterday. He has been at the forefront of the culture war, with his work featured across national media mediums in America. Adams has received several state awards, including honorary citizenship, in America. As a professional speaker, he has given major addresses in several countries. His work in the United States has seen him speak in more than twenty states, at conventions, corporate meetings, military bases, universities, high schools and churches.”
Here is a link to Amazon for those that would prefer either a bound copy or Kindle version of The American Boomerang.
” Elmore Leonard, the prolific crime novelist whose louche characters, deadpan dialogue and immaculate prose style in novels like “Get Shorty,” “Freaky Deaky” and “Glitz” established him as a modern master of American genre writing, died on Tuesday at his home in Bloomfield Township, Mich. He was 87.”
” Best-selling author Vince Flynn, who wrote the Mitch Rapp counterterrorism thriller series and sold more than 15 million books in the U.S. alone, died Wednesday in Minnesota after a more than two-year battle with prostate cancer, according to friends and his publisher. He was 47.
Flynn was supporting himself by bartending when he self-published his first novel, “Term Limits,” in 1997 after getting more than 60 rejection letters. After it became a local best-seller, Pocket Books, a Simon & Schuster imprint, signed him to a two-book deal — and “Term Limits” became a New York Times best-seller in paperback.
The St. Paul-based author also sold millions of books in the international market and averaged about a book a year, most of them focused on Rapp, a CIA counterterrorism operative. His 14th novel, “The Last Man,” was published last year.”
” The True Thomas Jefferson is not a formal biography, it is intended to be a series of sketches as graphic and as accurate as possible, without partisanship or prejudice, of a remarkable man.
Thomas Jefferson has been the subject of several able and distinguished biographers, friendly and unfriendly, for whom he left an abundance of material carefully arranged by his own hand. His writings, public and private, which are more voluminous than those of any other American statesman, have twice been published, and furnish direct evidence concerning his acts and opinions.
His views upon public questions have been carefully arranged in alphabetical order in an encyclopedia, to which the student of his life and times may turn with satisfaction and confidence. From these and many other original sources the information presented in this volume has been gathered and arranged in unconventional form in order that the reader may see the man as he actually was, and not as his partisans and opponents represent him.
The purpose of his life, which appears on almost every page, was to build a nation upon this continent with human freedom and equality as its foundations. In his efforts to accomplish this end he often incurred the criticisms of his friends as well as the condemnation of his enemies. His faults were as conspicuous as his abilities, and to form a correct estimate of his character both should receive equal and honest consideration.”
To download “The True Thomas Jefferson” by William E. Curtis for future reading please right mouse click, then click save to download – The-True-Thomas-Jefferson “
“As reported on Monday, the 2012 Hugo Awards for excellence in science fiction and fantasy were announced Sunday night at WorldCon in Chicago. The ceremony was MC’d by bestselling author John Scalzi, who just published his latest, Redshirts, to widespread acclaim. Jo Walton’s coming-of-age faery novel Among Others took top honors for best novel. The list of winners in all categories can be found here, but it’s worth reminding readers of the full list of novel nominees.”
” Gelernter opposes Barack Obama primarily because Obama is one of the “Airheads” produced by the U.S. educational system.
“Obama is an Airhead and no ordinary ideologue,” writes Gelernter in America-Lite, “but he is certainly a left-liberal; he repeats the doctrine he learned from left-liberal intellectuals.”
Gelernter, a professor of computer science at Yale, said his teaching experience has contributed enormously to his pessimistic assessment of American culture. “Every year I see a new class of smart kids, motivated kids, who are just ignorant,” said Gelernter.
“We educators have a responsibility,” said Gelernter, “and we’re failing.””
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