Showing posts with label fathers and sons. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fathers and sons. Show all posts
May 21, 2018
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Nov 1, 2016
Jun 1, 2016
Mar 1, 2016
Sep 23, 2015
The judge (DVD)
Summary: Big city lawyer Hank Palmer returns to his childhood home where his estranged father, the town's judge, is suspected of murder. He sets out to discover the truth and along the way reconnects with the family he walked away from years before.
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Jun 1, 2015
The harder they come - T.C. Boyle
Summary: Set in contemporary Northern California, The Harder They Come explores the volatile connections between three damaged people -- an aging ex-Marine and Vietnam veteran, his psychologically unstable son, and the son's paranoid, much older lover -- as they careen towards an explosive confrontation.
Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* T. C. Boyle's love and mastery of language are matched by a vehement imagination and a profound fascination with the glory and ruthlessness of nature and the paradoxes of humankind. How can a species be at once so brainy and so destructive? Boyle's virtuoso short stories fill 10 volumes, and he now has 15 novels to his name, some linked to controversial historical figures, such as Alfred Kinsey in The Inner Circle (2004) and Frank Lloyd Wright in The Women (2009). Boyle is equally inspired by the struggles of less-well-known individuals, such as the hardy few who attempted to settle California's Northern Channel Islands, the inspiration for When the Killing's Done (2011) and San Miguel (2012). The Harder They Come, Boyle's latest high-adrenaline tale of American individualism gone psychopathic, is pegged to the jaw-dropping story of the original mountain man, John Colter. Recruited by Lewis and Clark, Colter was an exceptional hunter, trapper, and scout. Believed to be the first white man to have seen the wonders of Yellowstone, he became legendary for his escape from a group of riled Blackfeet in Montana, who stripped him naked, let him go, then gave chase, intending to hunt him down. But Colter ran for his life through severe cold for some 300 miles and survived. In today's abused and pillaged wilds of California's Mendocino County, Adam, 25, worships Colter, and even takes his name. Prone to aberrant and violent behavior, Adam is in the grip of militant survivalist mania and raging, untreated schizophrenia. Camped out in the hills, he is growing his own medication, opium poppy. His parents are on a cruise. When they join a group onshore in Costa Rica, three armed men surround them and demand their valuables. While the others cower, his father, Sten, a Vietnam vet and retired high-school principal, becomes so enraged, he kills one of the bandits with his bare hands. Back in Mendocino, we meet another outlaw, one who does more harm to herself than to others. Sara is 40 or so, devoted to her dog, and supporting herself as a substitute teacher and a farrier, tending to the hoofs of the region's horses and, in a private nature preserve for endangered African wildlife, zebras and antelopes. Sara is also a fine gardener, a darn good cook, and a rabid member of the so-called sovereign citizen movement, which considers the U.S. government illegitimate. Recklessly rebellious, Sara picks up Adam when he's hitchhiking and seduces him. There is no doubt that renegades Adam, Sara, and Sten are racing toward a conflagration. As the body count and public hysteria rise, an enormous manhunt is launched. Riffing on actual events, Boyle intensifies both suspense and provocation as he delves into the question of violence as an inherited malady not only within a family but throughout American society. He further widens the frame to take in the terror and environmental havoc wrought by illegal drug operations on state and federal land, the hate and hysteria aimed at undocumented immigrants, and the collision between mental instability and violent anti-government extremism. Boyle's illumination of minds in the grip and whirl of overwhelming fear, fury, and madness as well as stubborn and courageous love blazes in its specificity and empathy. Then there's this seizing view of nature channeled through Adam's poisoned senses: "So what he did was wait while everything alive spoke to him from the deep grass and the bushes and the hollows in the dirt. . . . They were saying Make War, Not Love. Because they were at war down there, too, war that began the minute they hatched from their eggs . . . eat or be eaten and then go ahead and sing about it." And what might they sing? Boyle's title leads us to reggae star Jimmy Cliff's indelible lyrics: Well, the oppressors are trying to keep me down Trying to drive me underground And they think that they have got the battle won I say forgive them Lord, they know not what they've done 'Cause, as sure as the sun will shine I'm gonna get my share now, what's mine And then the harder they come The harder they fall, one and all. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Boyle taps into urgent national questions in a novel primed to make literary headlines as he tours the country in sync with a substantial publicity campaign. Copyright 2014 Booklist Reviews.
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Feb 2, 2015
Night sky dragons - Mal Peet
Summary: Yazul loves making kites with his grandfather, but all he truly desires is the approval of his father. Yazul's father, lord of a han along the Silk Road, is a man made stern by loneliness, and Yazul's love of kite-making only seems to elicit disappointment. "Travel and trade are what matters," his father says. But when the han is attacked by bandits, Yazul has an idea. With the help of his grandfather, he might just be able to use his kite-making skills to scare the bandits away and save the han. Will Yazul's courage and cleverness make his father proud?
Booklist Reviews
Yazul lives in a han, a walled settlement that shelters travelers on the Silk Road. Though his widowed father, the lord of the han, is rather distant, the boy enjoys making and flying kites with his grandfather. After a prank goes wrong and causes his grandmother to drop a precious bowl, Yazul's father accuses him of idleness and orders him to work as a kitchen drudge. Then bandits besiege the settlement, which nearly runs out of food and water. Fortunately, Yazul comes up with an ingenious plan to drive their enemies away. Though the setting's time and place aren't precisely determined, this nicely designed and illustrated volume offers a story with broad appeal. Yazul and his grandfather are sympathetic characters, but so is his strict father, given the weight of his experiences and responsibilities. Yazul's pleasure in gaining his approval is clear. Created with pen and watercolor, Benson's detailed illustrations help readers envision Yazul's world. A well-knit story that reads aloud beautifully. Copyright 2014 Booklist Reviews.
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Jul 1, 2014
Nebraska (DVD)
Nebraska (DVD)Summary: After receiving a sweepstakes letter in the mail, a cantankerous father thinks he's struck it rich, and wrangles his estranged son into taking a road trip to claim the fortune. Getting waylaid in the father's hometown in Nebraska, the son tries to reconnect with his impenetrable father.
Video Librarian Reviews
Filmed in monochromatic black-and-white, filmmaker Alexander Payne's multiple-Oscar-nominated Nebraska subtly conveys the melancholy lives of ordinary Midwesterners. Best Actor nominee Bruce Dern stars as grizzled Woody Grant, an alcoholic, aging resident of Billings, MT, who is convinced that he won a million dollars in a Publisher Clearing House-like mega-sweepstakes lottery. Obviously struggling with senility, Woody is stubbornly determined to reach the company's headquarters in Lincoln, NE, even if he has to walk there. This is what Woody tells his younger son, David (Will Forte), who picks up his dad after he's wandered down the highway. David's older brother, Ross (Bob Odenkirk), and their exasperated mother, Kate (June Squibb), want to put Woody in a nursing home, but David, feeling empathy for the frail, confused old man, offers to drive him to Lincoln to claim his alleged prize. En route, the pair visit relatives and friends, and David learns more about his reticent, inscrutable father—from an old girlfriend (Angela McEwan) and former business partner (Stacy Keach)—while also discovering that everyone wants a cut of Woody's windfall. As the cantankerous old coot, Dern delivers a restrained-yet-convincing, career-crowning performance, while cinematographer Phedon Papamichael's austere, elegiac imagery evokes Ansel Adams, Diane Arbus, and Edward Hopper. Recommended. (S. Granger) Copyright Video Librarian Reviews 2014.
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Feb 1, 2013
Exit wounds - Rutu Modan
Summary: Set in modern-day Tel Aviv, a young man, Koby Franco, receives an urgent phone call from a female soldier. Learning that his estranged father may have been a victim of a suicide bombing in Hadera, Koby reluctantly joins the soldier in searching for clues. His death would certainly explain his empty apartment and disconnected phone line. As Koby tries to unravel the mystery of his father's death, he finds himself piecing together not only the last few months of his father's life but his entire identity.
Publishers Weekly Reviews
Tel Aviv--based Modan gives American comics readers a sharp sense of Israeli life in this brilliant and moving graphic novel. The story follows Koby Franco, a young taxi driver and lost soul, as he searches for his missing father, a man who long ago left the family and may or may not have been killed in a suicide bomb attack. Assisting and prodding him is Nuni, a young soldier who was romantically involved with the missing father. Modan takes her characters across Israel and through a variety of different Israeli social strata as the search progresses. Along the way it becomes clear that Koby's father's identity is in flux-he leaves all those that he loves, but touches on everything it means to be an Israeli: family man, soldier, religious practitioner and, perhaps, victim. Modan is a deft and subtle storyteller, and her meditation on Israeli identity and the possibilities of love and trust (between father and son, woman and man) are finely wrought. Her loose, expressive drawing is both tremendously evocative and precise-always enhancing the plot. The stellar combination makes this one of the major graphic novels of 2007. (May) Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information.
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Oct 1, 2012
A separation (DVD)
Summary: A married couple are faced with a difficult decision - to improve the life of their child by moving to another country or to stay in Iran and look after a deteriorating parent who has Alzheimer's disease.
Video Librarian Reviews
An Oscar winner for Best Foreign Film, writer-director Asghar Farhadi's ambiguous, enigmatic meditation on marital conflict is set in contemporary Iran, where two couples appear before a judge to defend their legal, moral, and religious beliefs in family court. As the drama begins, Simin (Leila Hatami) has received permission for her family to emigrate from Tehran, following a year-and-a-half of bureaucratic aggravation. Simin is trying to convince her banker husband, Nader (Peyman Moadi) and adolescent daughter Termeh (played by the director's daughter, Sarina Farhadi), to opt for a better life. But middle-class, moderate Nader feels he must stay and care for his frail father (Ali-Asghar Shahbazi), who is afflicted with Alzheimer's. When frustrated Simin moves back to her parents' home, Nader hires poor, pious Razieh (Sareh Bayet) to care for his father during the day—unbeknownst to her debt-ridden, unemployed husband, Hodjat (Shahab Hosseini). When pregnant Razieh is subsequently injured in an accident, the foursome winds up before an Iranian judge. Deftly exploring ethical and cultural issues surrounding Iranian women living under the Islamic theocracy that has dominated the country since the 1979 revolution, A Separation is highly recommended. (S. Granger)Copyright Video Librarian Reviews 2011.
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Jul 1, 2012
Along the way - Martin Sheen & Emilio Estevez
Summary A dual memoir of the film legend and his actor/director son shares fifty years of family history, covering their Northern Spanish heritage, careers, and individual spiritual lives. - (Baker & Taylor)
Kirkus Reviews
The patriarch and scion of one of America's best-known acting families take turns sharing the stories of their lives, careers and relationship. The 2010 film The Way, written and directed by Estevez and starring Sheen, tells the story of a man who completes the journey along the Camino de Santiago pilgrim's path begun by his son, who died en route. The movie provides the entry point for the authors--assisted by Edelman (The Possibility of Everything, 2009, etc.)--to relate their life stories, focusing on acting, faith, family and the filming of The Way. Sheen, born Ramon Estevez, the son of a Spanish immigrant father and Irish immigrant mother, grew up in a large Catholic family in Dayton, Ohio. Emilio Estevez was raised in Malibu, Calif., and on film and TV sets around the world as his father struggled to make a career as an actor and keep his family together. On the whole, the alternating voices work well, highlighting the similarities and differences in the father and son's paths to professional and personal success and noting the failures and obstacles on the way. Estevez's description of his experiences as a 14-year-old on the Philippines set of Apocalypse Now is particularly noteworthy, adding an extra dimension to the well-documented insanity of that film's creation. The drawback to a double memoir becomes evident after a while, however, as the stories of auditions and film sets, fascinating though they may be, lessen the impact of what is intended to be the main focus: the life lessons each man draws from their father-son relationship. Shedding light on the creation of a unique family and an American acting dynasty, this book is certain to become a Father's Day gift staple for West Wing and Repo Man fans alike. Copyright Kirkus 2012 Kirkus/BPI Communications.All rights reserved.
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Mar 1, 2012
East of Eden - John Steinbeck
Summary: This novel, set in the rich farmlands of California's Salinas Valley, follows the intertwined destinies of two families--the Trasks and the Hamiltons--whose generations helplessly reenact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel. The story of two brothers, Aron is a clean-cut model student, engaged to be married, the pride of his hardworking father. Cal is a rebellious loner, sternly rejected by his father.
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Oct 1, 2011
Beautiful boy - David Sheff
Summary: "From as early as grade school, the world seemed to be on Nic Sheff's string. Bright and athletic, he excelled in any setting and appeared destined for greatness. Yet as childhood exuberance faded into teenage angst, the precocious boy found himself going down a much different path. Seduced by the illicit world of drugs and alcohol, he quickly found himself caught in the clutches of addiction. Beautiful Boy is Nic's story, but from the perspective of his father, David."--www.amazon.com.
Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* Although the journey of the subtitle seems too dreadful to experience, even vicariously, Playboy contributing editor Sheff's intense memoir is hard to put down. Beyond the visceral torture of helplessly watching Nic, his adolescent son, descend deep into the rabbit hole of addiction, Sheff confesses to the ubiquitous parental habit of second-guessing every decision he has made throughout Nic's life, especially the ones he is forced to make as he tries to help the young man get and stay clean. His efforts have him turning to any and all resources, from AA to medical experts to rehab centers and finally to friends, for advice and assistance. The experience all but tears him and his family apart as Nic forges his parents' signatures on checks, steals his eight-year-old brother's savings, promises to reform, then repeatedly fails to stick with a rehabilitation program. In the end, it isn't the addiction as much as the repeated failures and relapses that are so debilitating for everyone involved. The book originated in a much-lauded New York Times Magazine article, which Sheff here expands in scope, sharing his and Nic's wisdom, missteps, and successes, and the lessons they learned. A must-read for, at the least, anyone in similar straits.
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Jul 1, 2011
Haroun and the sea of stories - Salman Rushdie
Summary: Abandoned by his wife, professional storyteller Shah of Blah suffers further insult when he loses his gift for gab, and his courageous son sets out to restore his former talents - (Baker & Taylor)
Publishers Weekly Reviews
Following the unprecedented controversy generated by The Satanic Verses , Rushdie offers as eloquent a defense of art as any Renaissance treatise. Supposedly begun as a bedtime story for Rushdie's son, Haroun concerns a supremely talented storyteller named Rashid whose wife is lured away by the same saturnine neighbor who poisons Rashid's son Haroun's thoughts. ``What's the use of stories that aren't even true?'' Haroun demands, parroting the neighbor and thus unintentionally paralyzing Rashid's imagination. The clocks freeze: time literally stops when the ability to narrate its passing is lost. Repentant, Haroun quests through a fantastic realm in order to restore his father's gift for storytelling. Saturated with the hyperreal color of such classic fantasies as the Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland , Rushdie's fabulous landscape operates by P2C2Es (Processes Too Complicated To Explain), features a court where all the attendant Pages are numbered, and unfurls a riotous display of verbal pranks (one defiant character chants ``You can chop suey, but / You can't chop me!''; elsewhere, from another character: `` `Gogogol,' he gurgled. `` `Kafkafka,' he coughed''). But although the pyrotechnics here are entertaining in and of themselves, the irresistible force of the novel rests in Rushdie's wholehearted embrace of the fable--its form as well as its significance. It's almost as if Rushdie has invented a new form, the meta-fable. Rather than retreating under the famous death threats, Rushdie reiterates the importance of literature, stressing not just the good of stories ``that aren't even true'' but persuading us that these stories convey the truth. As Haroun realizes, ``He knew what he knew: that the real world was full of magic, so magical worlds could easily be real.'' (Jan.) Copyright 1990 Cahners Business Information.
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Feb 1, 2011
Moon palace - Paul Auster
Summary: The story of Marco Stanley Fogg's search for love, his unknown father, and the key to the elusive riddle of his beginnings and his future spans three generations, moving from Manhattan to the untamed West - (Baker & Taylor)
Publishers Weekly Reviews
The moon as a poetic and planetary influence over earthly affairs runs as a theme, wittily ransacked, throughout this elegant fiction by award-winning novelist and poet Auster ( The New York Trilogy ; The Invention of Solitude ). Marco Fogg is a loner and a dreamer, whose ``mind is on the moon,'' and who in a state of elation unfolds moonlore to his friends. The year of the moon landing finds Fogg living in spartan reclusivity until forced from his New York apartment to roam as a Central Park vagrant. His rescue by Kitty Wu, a gentle Chinese girl, leads to their poignant and tenuous love. Like some of Auster's earlier protagonists, Fogg senses he has a kindred, submerged or vanished other self. Here, it is Fogg's father, who went into eclipse before his birth; the quest for the parent forms a narrative thread. When Fogg serves as reader/companion to the elderly cripple Barber, aka ``Effing,'' who recounts his adventures in a Western wilderness where he buried a cache of paintings, Fogg's fate takes an unexpected turn. Auster's highly literate tale teases the boundaries between fiction and actuality while exploring the process of writing itself. (Mar.) Copyright 1988 Cahners Business Information.
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Dec 1, 2010
Believing it all: what my children taught me about trout fishing, jelly toast, and life - Marc Parent
Summary: Assuming that life's most difficult questions may in fact be answerable, the author offers an inspirational look at fatherhood, playfulness, and spirituality. - (Baker & Taylor)
Publishers Weekly Reviews
Having in Turning Stones chronicled his years as a social worker in New York City, when he witnessed the tragic abuse and neglect that so many children endure, Parent now shares a more positive, almost idyllic vision of family life in rural Pennsylvania. In vignettes from his tenure as the stay-at-home father of two small boys, he offers insights and ruminations on the lessons of parenthood that are "hidden beneath the roar of everyday living." Because it is still exceptional when men take on the role of primary caregiver for their preschool children while their wives go off to work, this author's thoughts may be taken much more seriously than similar musings by women. Parent is a fine writer, who deftly reveals the profound truths and important insights that spring from the intense intimacy of raising a child. A newborn who briefly stops breathing immediately after arriving home from the hospital, a three-year-old entranced by a dead squirrel in the road, a first somersault and an endless round of preschool interviews all bear Parent's close scrutiny. As his children grow, Parent expresses a range of responses from "some days I'd really just like to have a dinner where I don't have to jump up to help someone use the toilet" to appreciating the "overwhelming and absolute power" of having children who look up to you and believe all that you tell them. (May 24) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
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Oct 1, 2010
Extremely loud & incredibly close - Jonathan Safran Foer
Summary: Oskar Schell, the nine-year-old son of a man killed in the World Trade Center attacks, searches the five boroughs of New York City for a lock that fits a black key his father left behind.
Booklist Reviews
This follow-up to Foer's extremely good and incredibly successful Everything Is Illuminated (2002) stars one Oskar Schell, a nine-year-old amateur inventor and Shakespearean actor. But Oskar's boots, as he likes to say, are very heavy--his father, whom he worshiped, perished in the World Trade Center on 9/11. In his dad's closet a year later, Oskar finds a key in a vase mysteriously labeled "Black." So he goes searching after the lock it opens, visiting (alphabetically) everyone listed in the phone book with the surname Black. Oskar, who's a cross between The Tin Drum's Oskar Matzerath and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time's Christopher Boone, doesn't always sound like he's nine, but his first-person narration of his journey is arrestingly beautiful, and readers won't soon forget him. A subplot about Oskar's mute grandfather, who survived the bombing of Dresden, isn't as compelling as Oskar's quest for the lock, but when the stories finally come together, the result is an emotionally devastating climax. No spoilers here, but we will say that the book--which includes a number of photographs and some eccentric typography--ends with what is undoubtedly the most beautiful and heartbreaking flip book in all of literature. ((Reviewed February 1, 2005)) Copyright 2005 Booklist Reviews.
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