Blogcritics Author: James O'Neil

DVD Review: The Oozing Skull

James O'Neil — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 18:29:26 EST

This heady stroke of genius packs more zingers than the Hostess brand.
It is a mystery that only a MSTie could know. For the fans of the revolutionary science fiction comedy show Mystery Science Theater 3000: how long has it been since the Peabody Award, or the Emmy Award nominations, or the Siskel and Ebert-approved motion picture release? How long has it been since the culmination of the show's momentous ten...

Book Review: Giving - How Each of Us Can Change the World by Bill Clinton

James O'Neil — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 17:51:22 EST

With little to no resources or millions of dollars to their discretion, people are doing extraordinary things.
Numerically, 1961 was the “first upside-up year,” as MAD Magazine put it. An upside-up year is a year where the numbers in the first two places are the same if they turned upside down. The digits in the year date weren’t the only things that could be turned upside down in 1961. During John F. Kennedy’s encouraging inaugural...

Book Review: Due Considerations - Essays and Criticism by John Updike

James O'Neil — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 01:26:10 EST

John Updike is not prolific. John Updike is prodigious.
Often book reviewers will call an author “prolific.” But what does that really tell you? It tells you: “my, he’s written a lot of words!” John Updike is not prolific. John Updike is prodigious. And every now and then John Updike kicks down a piece of worthwhile literary commentary like he has done with Due...

Book Review: Applebee's America - How Successful Political, Business, and Religious Leaders Connect with the New American Community by Ron Fournier, Douglas B. Sosnik, and Matthew J. Dowd

James O'Neil — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 23:48:42 EDT

What do you get when you mix an Applebee's� restaurant with base polling?
What do you get when you mix an Applebee's® restaurant with base polling? You get a book about "competing good" in the neighborhood. Competing good was the very theme Ron Fournier (political author), Douglas Sosnik (advisor to Bill Clinton), and Matthew Dowd (advisor to G.W. Bush) had when they started to write their new blueprint...

Announcement: Short-content feeds

Phillip Winn — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:00:00 EDT

Sunday, August 26, 2007, marks the switch of all Blogcritics.org article feeds from full-content to short-content. This is the result of several converging factors, and is unfortunately a permanent decision (as permanent as any decision can be on the web, that is). We are aware of all of the reasons that this is a Bad Idea, and we are aware that some of you will be quite upset about having to click on something to read the free content, and we're sorry. Unfortunately, despite great effort, full-content feeds are not currently economically viable. Two other factors are involved: full-content feeds have resulted in an unprecedented level of content theft, with BC content appearing on many websites, usually spam sites, without attribution or permission. This duplicate content causes a cascading set of problems, not the least of which is that search engines generally aren't favorable to duplicate content, and don't always guess correctly. Finally, our RSS advertising partner is strongly in favor of short-content feeds. We hope that you'll continue to subscribe to BC via RSS, and when an article grabs your eye, it's only a click away, still free on the BC website. Thank you for your understanding.

Book Review: Service Included: Four-Star Secrets of an Eavesdropping Waiter by Phoebe Damrosch

James O'Neil — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 17:44:35 EDT

First came the television cooking personalities, then the Food Channel, then the "chef" reality shows; now finally Webster itself has succumbed to popular opinion by putting an entry in the dictionary recognizing the "foodie." Undeniably, food culture has leftovers in contemporary society. In some fine restaurants food is not only a staple, it is a sacrament, and if you burn the steaks you might as well have burned a flag.If you've ever been perplexed about the four-star restaurant experience, or are a beauty of a foodie, then grab a table d'haute couture and get served by Phoebe Damrosch in her waitress tell-all, Service Included: Four-Star Secrets of an Eavesdropping Waiter. With regard to the "Eavesdropping" part of the title, is the book fiction or nonfiction? The author admits the names and places might have been changed, but the recipes are all real; so I guess that makes it 2% fiction. Here she goes: "As to the slippery subject of nonfiction, all I can say is that the book contains the truth according to my memory, with the following exceptions: consolidation of conversations, time, and two characters."Everything else is gravy. And by gravy I mean a deliciously fattening sauce chock full of foodie culture, restaurant culture, and numerous dinners with André - André being Phoebe's sweetie-pie. Phoebe is the narrator/protagonist of the story, who phases into serving tables because the arrival of her writing career was (at first) playing out more like Waiting for Godot than Happy Days. Necessity gives birth to invention, and Phoebe reinvents herself into a backserver at one of the snazziest restaurants in all of New York city.Along with the epicurean epic, Ms. Damrosch cuts the crêpe and infuses some "tips" about café etiquette. "When you don't like something, don't get mad at your waiter. He didn't make it."Service Included is a smart à la carte that comes with more heart than haggis and a hip garnish. If that weren't enough, she has a website, which will have to do, as the wait time for the book is another month.

James O'Neil is a freelance writer/ book reviewer. He has been a Blogcritics contributor since 2005.

Book Review: Talking Hands - What Sign Language Reveals About the Mind by Margalit Fox

James O'Neil — Sat, 11 Aug 2007 03:43:53 EDT

The meaning of a remote organic sign language of a secret tribe in the Sinai Peninsula is the focus of Margalit Fox’s new book Talking Hands: What Sign Language Reveals About the Mind. The book tells of the detective work of linguists attempting to decipher the integrity of an isolated form of sign language, and in the process of such an endeavor to illuminate the goal of linguistics, what Noam Chomsky defined as an aim: ...to discover these systems (of language), and more deeply, to discover the fixed, invariant biological endowment that enables each child to develop a very rich and highly articulated system of knowledge on the basis of quite fragmentary and limited evidence. In Al Sayyid, Israel, the inhabiting tribe has a notable deaf population because the recessive allele of deafness is a little less recessive there. What is found in that sandy burg is unheard of - it is a newly identified sign language. It's enough to spur four academicians from Israel and the United States to travel the Desert of Pharan to observe the language and investigate the gesticulating. One startling facet of the Al Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (or ABSL) study was realized by Stony Brook University professor Doctor Mark Aronoff: What we expected going into this village was that the language would be modality-driven. What we found instead was that the language was quite dramatically driven by syntax ... That to me, is what’s most amazing about the word-order facts with the Bedouins. It’s not driven by communicative need as far as I can tell. People just have a drive for structure in their behavior. Along with the sophisticated element of syntax and word-order there was another shocker. "But instead of being built from smaller structural units," Aronoff notes, "as the words of established sign languages are, the words of ABSL appeared to be unanalyzed wholes, little lumps of language that can’t be broken down further.” Talking Hands is an adroit and dexterous gesture about a blossomed language that is not shorthanded on fascination. When it comes to unearthing the Al Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language Margalit Fox has an embargo on the argot and gets spectacular with the vernacular. More information on Margalit Fox’s new book can be obtained on the web and her reporting appears in the New York Times.

James O'Neil is a freelance writer/ book reviewer. He has been a Blogcritics contributor since 2005.

Book Review: American Connections by James Burke

James O'Neil — Wed, 4 Jul 2007 09:14:43 EDT

In the famous John Trumbull painting "Declaration of Independence in Congress" one can probably pick out the visionary gaze of Benjamin Franklin, recognize the stone-faced defiance of Thomas Jefferson, or locate the impatient body language of John Adams as he watches the Declaration being presented by the copper-topped Jefferson. Also in the room are a group of representatives and assorted patriots who also signed the document, a document that could have just as easily been a death warrant list for treason as well as radical notice to secede. What screwy person would sign on to be a Founding Father anyway? The answer to the question of who these people really were comes in true James Burke form in his new book, American Connections. What is "James Burke form"? If you missed the scores of television shows and books by the author, here is a crude impersonation of a Burkean sequitur: The Founding Fathers helped orchestrate the American Revolution: the Commander and Chief of the revolutionary naval force was Esek Hopkins: Esek Hopkins was a member of The Society of the Cincinnati: the Society was named after Quintius Cincinnatus, a Roman commander: two locations commanded by Rome were Bononia and Urbinum Mataurense: in “Bologna” and “Urbino” are universities: the universities both employed a famous science historian named James Burke who authored a book called American Connections about the Founding Fathers. In scenic fashion Burke guides us through the rogues gallery of chain reacted lives of the Declaration of Independence signatories. Here is a bit from the book about signer Samuel Chase:Back in 1783 Chase had acted for Henry Hartford in the latter’s attempt to regain the lands he had lost during the Revolution. The acreage in question was no less than the whole of Maryland...The new Maryland Assembly wasn’t about to give back the entire state, so Hartford compromised and accepted the lost rental income backdated to his inheritance in 1771. He got the then-colossal sum of one hundred thousand pounds. Talk about “manly deeds!” Burke’s style is just as revolutionary as the characters he writes about, resuscitating the all too human lives underneath the lionizing historical dust of these incidentally defined American political figures while entertaining their implications for the present.

James O'Neil is a freelance writer/ book reviewer. He has been a Blogcritics contributor since 2005.

Book Review: Throw Like A Girl - Stories by Jean Thompson

James O'Neil — Sun, 3 Jun 2007 22:06:18 EDT

In the United States, when somebody claims a person “throws like a girl,” the insinuation is derogatory because it asserts that the person cannot play effectively. According to the internet, the fastest woman softball pitch was 73.3 miles per hour using a technique that utilized an underarm windmill motion. The 73.3 mph clock speed pales in comparison to the top speeds using the “manly” overarm technique that enables a properly whipped ball to travel well over 100 miles per hour. However, if we are talking U.S. Olympic gold medals, “throwing like a girl” loses its derogatoriness because the U.S. women's’ softball team (using the girly underarm technique) has currently more gold winning success than the U.S. men's’ baseball team. I am sorry to say that this has nothing to do with National Book Award Finalist Jean Thompson’s new book Throw Like a Girl, which is not a inter-sport pitching discourse but rather a collection of unsweetened and endowing rumors. The modes of women traversing the skeins of Thompson’s lore assort from lovers to fighters with fearful vulnerabilities that chorus the bargain trysts and traumas of modern living. In the tale “Lost,” a nameless college girl sharing a man with another woman contemplates her lesser station: I decided I didn’t want to make a scene. Scenes were not acceptable. None of us back then liked to think of ourselves as hung up on jealousy and possessiveness, which were equated with materialism and bourgeois values and all the things bad about the old order ... The ideal was to be free and honest and open and careless. It worked about as well as you’d expect. From an old family recipe, Thompson serves up her own “just” desserts in “Pie of the Month.” For whole days at a time you could almost forget there was a War going on; there was too much else to crowd it out. But the War was like a pie you’d left in the oven, something nagging at you, a task left unfinished. Throw Like a Girl has twelve stories but is a baker’s dozen altogether. Give it a whirl. Jean Thompson’s other works include Who Do You Love: Stories, Wide Blue Yonder: A Novel, and City Boy: A Novel.

James O'Neil is a freelance writer/ book reviewer. He has been a Blogcritics contributor since 2005.

Book Review: The Best Place to Be - A Novel in Stories by Lesley Dormen

James O'Neil — Fri, 11 May 2007 02:41:28 EDT

In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Ceyx was a Greek warrior who died tragically (as opposed to the other ways a character could perish in a Greek-inspired poem) and romantically called out his wife’s name as he sank alongside his boat during a violent storm.And ev'n when plung'd beneath, on her he raves, Murm'ring Alcyone below the waves…Underwater her name probably sounded a lot more like “ASSIBBLOBBON!” than “ALCYONE!” but that isn’t the point. Mythology doesn’t wrap up its yarns without some abstract form of justice, so after Ceyx’s grief-stricken wife Alcyone plummets into the Mediterranean to die, the couple is reunited by being transformed by guilty Greek gods into Halcyon birds, which are a symbol of tranquility. An abstract form of justice also comes to a bird in The Best Place to Be by Lesley Dormen. Grace Hanford at 50 has finally arrived at her tranquil halcyon days, not the benzodiazepine variety mind you, although she was a child of the sixties. The Best Place to Be is an eight-story novel constructed from the scrapbook memories of Grace, a loveable yet emotionally klutzy Ohio transplant in New York with separated parents and a distant (almost e[strange]d) father. Her laundry list lengthens with an exemplary bad dating record, a taciturn therapist, and a penchant to try to make sense of “Manhappenstance:” Like when you see a stranger on a Midtown bus first thing in the morning and then later the same day you notice the same stranger, but in some other part of the city entirely… The book is filled with familial surface tension, existential riddles, booty calls, and a grip of pop cultural references from the generation that gave this great nation a facelift. Dormen’s high-performance writing style shifts gears more than a formula one racer, time travels like Vonnegut, and is as memorable as nonreturnable merchandise. The Best Place to Be is one boomer’s epic poem of the concentric themes of life and how she finds love in the fray.

James O'Neil is a freelance writer/ book reviewer. He has been a Blogcritics contributor since 2005.

Book Review: Secrets of the Model Dorm by Amanda Kerlin and Phil Oh

James O'Neil — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 05:08:38 EST

Sir Walter Scott introduced the word "glamour" to many people in the world in his poem "The Lay of the Last Minstrel": Sae soon as they saw her weel-far'd face,They cast the glamour o'er her.In Scott's poem "glamour" is a spell. In Secrets of the Model Dorm, Amanda Kerlin and Phil Oh unravel the spell of glamour in the model industry, an industry with more secrets than Vegas. Behind the strobe lights of photography, the paint, and the seasonal plumage of high fashion hides a salacious reality that most people, including the 18-year-old Pollyanna protaganist Heather Johnson, never knew existed. The book takes place in modern-day New York City A.T. (anno Twiggy Lawson), and follows the education of the starry-eyed young model from Florida in the emulous brat race of the model reality. Johnson joins a hot new model agency and has to share a modest but well-located dorm with a group of passionate and rollicking young international models who are all trying to land the dream shoot amidst an atmosphere of sex, drugs, and outlandish parties while being lost in a haze of cigarette smoke and Metamucil martini breath. What sounds like a look into the life of Tom Wolfe's Charlotte Simmons is multiplied by the fickleness of an industry searching through a flock of achingly beautiful girls for the one with that certain je ne sais quoi, with an added requirement that once found she must immediately lose 20 pounds. In the frenzy of trying to remain in the eye of the fashion storm, Heather Johnson covets the romance of Robert du Croix, a rich fashionista shot-caller who just fell off the dreamboat. Feeling like so much merchandise Heather starts to question her place in the fashion world as a jet set mannequin and has to choose between being a sculptress or a sculpture. Secrets of the Model Dorm is a sweet and sour tale of a dream questioned and an unlikely required textbook for those with the stomach to stroll the catwalk.

James O'Neil is a freelance writer/ book reviewer. He has been a Blogcritics contributor since 2005.