The book thief - Markus Zusak

The book thief - Zusak, Markus

Summary: Trying to make sense of the horrors of World War II, Death relates the story of Liesel--a young German girl whose book-stealing and story-telling talents help sustain her family and the Jewish man they are hiding, as well as their neighbors.



Kirkus Reviews
When Death tells a story, you pay attention. Liesel Meminger is a young girl growing up outside of Munich in Nazi Germany, and Death tells her story as "an attempt—a flying jump of an attempt—to prove to me that you, and your human existence, are worth it." When her foster father helps her learn to read and she discovers the power of words, Liesel begins stealing books from Nazi book burnings and the mayor's wife's library. As she becomes a better reader, she becomes a writer, writing a book about her life in such a miserable time. Liesel's experiences move Death to say, "I am haunted by humans." How could the human race be "so ugly and so glorious" at the same time? This big, expansive novel is a leisurely working out of fate, of seemingly chance encounters and events that ultimately touch, like dominoes as they collide. The writing is elegant, philosophical and moving. Even at its length, it's a work to read slowly and savor. Beautiful and important. (Fiction. 12+) Copyright Kirkus 2006 Kirkus/BPI Communications. All rights reserved.

Check Availability

Patient Zero - Jonathan Maberry

Patient Zero - Maberry, Jonathan

Summary: Recruited by the Department of Military Sciences, detective Joe Ledger finds himself in the battle of his life when he discovers that his mission is to stop a group of terrorist who possess a bio-weapon that can turn people into zombies upon its release.




Kirkus Reviews
A dark, chilling and funny thriller about zombies from Maberry (Zombie CSU: The Forensics of the Living Dead, 2008, etc.). Joe Ledger, a Baltimore cop on leave after killing a suspected terrorist during a raid on a warehouse, just wanted to spend a day girl-watching at the beach. So when four FBI agents corner him as he's getting into his car and take him on a mandatory ride in their black SUV, he's a little miffed, especially since he's about to leave the department and join their ranks at Quantico. But any negative emotion he feels about being snatched up is soon dwarfed by what goes through his head when Mr. Church, head of the top secret Department of Military Sciences, locks him in a room a short time later and forces him to kill the very same terrorist he shot to death less than a week before. The whole thing is a recruiting test, and after Joe, an Army veteran and martial-arts expert, dispatches the terrorist—again—without hesitation, Church invites him to join the DMS, a government organization created to battle threats that fall outside the purview of other government organizations. Threats from zombie terrorists, for instance. Soon, Joe is leading a tactical team, as he and the rest of the DMS try to stop terrorist El Mujahid, his mad-scientist bride Amirah and Sebastian Gualt, their wealthy Western backer, from unleashing a plague that turns regular people, soldiers and terrorists alike into bloodthirsty, infectious zombies. The book is as fun and funny as it is chilling and thrill-packed. Joe is a fantastic character, full of compassion, real vulnerabilities and a deliciously dark sense of humor. An immensely entertaining package.

Check Availability

To Sail a Darkling Sea - John Ringo

To Sail a Darkling Sea - Ringo, John

Summary: With human civilization annihilated by a biological zombie plague, a rag tag fleet of yachts and freighters known as Wolf Squadron scours the Atlantic, searching for survivors. Within every abandoned liner and carrier lurks a potential horde of zombies but also holds the flickering hope of survivors. Now Wolf Squadron must clear the assault carrier USS Iwo Jima of infected before the trapped Marines and sailors succumb to starvation.


Booklist Reviews
In Under a Graveyard Sky (2013), Ringo introduced Steve Smith, an Australian ex-paratrooper; his wife, Stacey; and their teenage daughters, Sophia and Faith. After the zombie apocalypse, the family fled New York in a boat loaded with supplies and weaponry. Their initial plan was to find a place to hole up until the man-made plague died out, but soon they sought other vessels and set about rescuing their survivors (after first "clearing" the boats of the infected). Now the makeshift flotilla, operating with the cooperation of what remains of the U.S. government, has become a sort of oceangoing city. And the mission has grown in scope: along with clearing any vessels the flotilla encounters, Smith and his fellow sailors will attempt to clear small towns, making their way to Guantanamo Bay, where they will use the medical facilities to begin manufacturing a vaccine. Not only has Ringo found a mostly unexplored corner of the zombie landscape, he's using the zombie frame to tackle a broader theme: the collapse and rebirth of civilization. The zombie scenes are exciting, sure, but it's the human story that keeps us involved. A fine series.

Check Availability

Wedgies (Lenore series) - Roman Dirge

Wedgies - Dirge, Roman

Summary: A full-color collection of comics featuring Lenore, a cute little dead girl with a knack for unintentional mayhem and occasional wanton destruction, features limbless cannibals, clock monsters, cursed vampire dolls, taxidermied friends, an obsessed would-be lover and more.



Booklist Reviews
With her pale face, huge eyes, skull barrettes, lack of a pulse, and propensity for senseless violence, Lenore could be the next full-fledged, merchandise-ready goth-girl icon. This compendium collects four comics, though there's no through line anywhere. Rather, each issue is a hodgepodge of stories, poems, twisted fables, and tattoo designs. The jokes are pretty sick and swerve between genius (the taxidermied chipmunk who bemoans his missing back half until Lenore jams a pair of Barbie legs onto it) and the uncomfortably cruel ("Kittie #53" involves the relatively straightforward drowning of a cat). What keeps it afloat—for the right reader, of course—is Lenore's obliviousness to wrongdoing. When she engages in "13 hours of gnome slaughter," it's only because she was overcaffeinated. It's all a lot funnier and cuter than it sounds, which is a credit to Dirge's ability to inject personality into his morbid mix of pale colors and black humor. Interestingly, Dirge's occasional autobiographical intrusions ("Things Involving Me") steal the show.

Check Availability

A Night in the Lonesome October - Roger Zelazny

A Night in the Lonesome October - Zelazny, Roger

Summary: Snuff, a guard dog who performs thaumaturgical calculations, accompanies his master, Jack, on collecting expeditions into the Whitechapel slums of nineteenth-century London




Kirkus Reviews
After years of unprepossessing folderol--the wearisome Nine Princes in Amber retreads are depressingly typical--Zelazny bursts forth with, well, ``Victorian light supernatural fantasy'' just about covers it. Narrator Snuff, a guard dog who performs complex thaumaturgical calculations in his head, has many duties: to keep various Things firmly trapped in mirrors, wardrobes, and steamer trunks; to accompany his master, Jack--he of the magical blade--on weird collecting expeditions into the graveyards and slums of Victorian London; and--for a single hour each night--discuss the day's goings-on in human speech. Snuff's neighbors include: Jill the witch and her familiar, Graymalk the cat, with whom Snuff forms a friendly alliance; Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Frankenstein, Dracula, a werewolf, and a satanic vicar. The witches, detectives, doctors, vampires, etc., along with their equally industrious familiars, trade information and scheme for advantage as the full moon of Halloween approaches; at that time, a magical showdown to decide the fate of the Earth will occur. Some of the characters are ``openers,'' determined to open a magical doorway allowing the Old Gods to reoccupy the Earth; others are ``closers,'' equally resolved to keep the magical door nailed shut; and a few are involved yet stand outside the Game altogether. Snuff's problem is to discover who is which. Sparkling, witty, delightful: Zelazny's best for ages, perhaps his best ever.

Check Availability

Dust - Charles Pellegrino

Dust - Pellegrino, Charles

Summary: When a gigantic ecological eruption causes dust mites to rapidly reproduce and become flesh-eating insects, paleobiologist Richard Sinclair and a group of survivors must try to stop this deadly phenomenon before the world is destroyed.



Library Journal Reviews
It all starts with a massive die-off of fungus gnats. The fungus the gnats ate grows with nothing to control it. Worse, the bugs that eat the gnats have to find other food. Up the food chain the disaster moves until a horde of mites swarm ashore at a Long Island community, eating their way through every living thing. Scientist Richard Sinclair evacuates Long Beach with his daughter, Tam, leaving behind his wife, a victim of the mites' rampage. With other scientists around the world, Richard plots the course of nature out of whack as predators switch prey and entire species of insects die. As crops that depend on insect pollination perish, the commodities markets plummet, followed closely by the world's stock markets. When vampire bats start attacking humans, Richard fears the destruction of the world. Paleontologist Pellegrino has written a biological thriller that will convince readers to treat insects with more respect. His afterword discusses the events in the book and identifies which ones were based on fact.

Check Availability

Let the Old Dreams Die - John Ajvide Lindqvist

Let the Old Dreams Die - Ajvide Lindqvist, John

Summary: Called Sweden's Stephen King, the author of the internationally acclaimed Let the Right One In continues the story of Oskar and Eli in this terrifying collection that also includes "Equinox," in which a woman makes a disturbing discovery while taking care of her vacationing neighbor's house.



Booklist Reviews
Lindqvist's short stories pack the same emotional punch as his novels. This collection includes sequels to two of his best-known works, Let the Right One In and Handling the Undead. Both are pleasing, if frightening, epilogues to their respective stories. Aside from those, there are atmospheric tales of people with strange origins and things to hide in The Border, urban monsters in A Village in the Sky, and the terrible thing a woman finds while house-sitting in Equinox. There's also Eternal/Love, which explores the true horror of immortal love. Suffice it to say—this is only a small sampling of the stories presented here—that Lindqvist's short pieces are terribly effective horror fiction, both in the sense of being deeply unnerving and rarely safe to read any night, and also in the sense of exploring the hidden, shadowy facets of human emotional lives. These are excellent examples of the form, and well worth reading—just not alone in a cold, dark house.

Check Availability

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.

Check Availability

Shōgun - James Clavell

Shōgun: A Novel of Japan - Clavell, James

Summary: After John Blackthorne shipwrecks in Japan, he makes himself useful to a feudal lord in a power struggle with another and becomes a samurai.




New York Times Review
It's almost impossible not to continue to read "Shōgun" once having opened it. Yet it's not only something that you read--you live it....Clavell wants everything in "Shōgun," and he nearly gets it: living characters, tumultuous events, stories that shine, a culture assembled like a jigsaw puzzle....He writes in the oldest and grandest tradition that fiction knows.

Check Availability

Insomnia - Stephen King

Insomnia - King, Stephen

Summary: Ralph Roberts can't sleep. A recent widower, dismayed at life, he cannot seem to close his eyes and rest. After a number of sleepless nights, he begins seeing things that are imperceptible to most people. He can see auras of light surrounding individuals which shift and change depending on their well-being, and terminate in a long balloon-like string. Most creepily, he can sometimes see three little bald men dressed like surgeons going around and cutting off these strings.

Kirkus Reviews
A small town in Maine again serves as King's setting in this deft, steady tale, in which two lovable geezers travel through hyper-reality to balance the books of human existence, or something to that effect. King throws in a tender romance, sensitive and often funny portrayals of the ravages of age, and the somewhat loopy presence of Rite-Aid drugstores, Cup-A-Soup, and Port-O-Sans smack-dab in the middle of hyper-reality. This commingling of the supernatural and the commonplace is what makes this hefty read so enjoyable.

Check Availability

Warm bodies - Isaac Marion

Warm bodies - Marion, Isaac

Summary: Alienated from his fellow zombies because of his dislike of having to kill humans and his enjoyment of Sinatra music, "R" meets a living girl who sharply contrasts with his cold and dreary world and whom he resolves to protect in spite of her delicious appearance.


Kirkus Reviews

A jubilant story about two star-crossed lovers, one of them dead and hungry for more than love.

Debut novelist Marion hits the pulse of the Twilight crowd with this morbidly romantic look at how affection really feels when your heart beats no more. "I am dead, but it's not so bad," says our zombie narrator, by way of introduction. "I've learned to live with it. This is "R," so named because it's all he can remember. But this is no Team Edward sob story. R really is a zombie, carrying the pink brains of his victims back to his communal lair for a snack. But one day, R chomps down on Perry Kelvin, a teenager whose sole affection is for his girlfriend, Julie. R begins absorbing Perry's memories, which in turn inspire him not to treat Julie like a bucket of KFC. And so the weirdest courting in the history of literature begins, as R and Julie spend time together prowling food courts and half-destroyed 747s. Julie, who could have been a simplistic mechanism to drive the book's plot, turns out to be its most inspired character, inhabiting that odd space between fear and curiosity. "Maybe you're not such a monster, Mr. Zombie," she admits at one point. "I mean, anyone who appreciates a good beer is halfway okay in my book." R begins to change, redeveloping his ability to communicate, and noticing a physical transformation to accompany his emotional awakening. But the path of true love never runs smooth, and the unlikely duo soon find themselves caught between R's ravenous companions and Julie's soldier father.

Originally self-published, this DIY success story is already slated for a film adaptation, making these quixotic lovers the grateful dead indeed.


Check Availability

The Bachman books - Stephen King

The Bachman books - King, Stephen

Summary: For years, readers wrote asking if Richard Bachman was really world-bestselling Stephen King writing under another name. Now the secret is out - and so, brought together in one volume, are these three spellbinding stories of future shock and suspense. The Long Walk: A chilling look at the ultra-conservative America of the future where a grueling 450-mile marathon is the ultimate sports competition. Roadwork: An immovable man refuses to surrender to the irresistible force of progress. The Running Man: TV's future-favorite game show, where contestants are hunted to death in the attempt to win a $1 billion jackpot.

Check Availability

Shogun - James Clavell

Shogun - Clavell, James

Summary: A narrative of conflicting cultures, loyalties, motivations, and traditions in early-seventeenth-century Japan, involving the powerful and power-hungry Lord Toranaga, the ambitious Englishman, Blackthorne, and the Lady Mariko, a Catholic convert in love with the barbarian Englishman - (Baker & Taylor)



Kirkus Review
In Clavell's last whopper, Tai-pan, the hero became tai-pan (supreme ruler) of Hong Kong following England's victory in the first Opium War. Clavell's new hero, John Blackthorne, a giant Englishman, arrives in 17th century Japan in search of riches and becomes the right arm of the warlord Toranaga who is even more powerful than the Emperor. Superhumanly self-confident (and so sexually overendowed that the ladies who bathe him can die content at having seen the world's most sublime member), Blackthorne attempts to break Portugal's hold on Japan and encourage trade with Elizabeth I's merchants. He is a barbarian not only to the Japanese but also to Portuguese Catholics, who want him dispatched to a non-papist hell. The novel begins on a note of maelstrom-and-tempest ("'Piss on you, storm!' Blackthorne raged. 'Get your dung-eating hands off my ship!'") and teems for about 900 pages of relentless lopped heads, severed torsos, assassins, intrigue, war, tragic love, over-refined sex, excrement, torture, high honor, ritual suicide, hot baths and breathless haikus. As in Tai-pan, the carefully researched material on feudal Oriental money matters seems to he Clavell's real interest, along with the megalomania of personal and political power. After Blackthorne has saved Toranaga's life three times, he is elevated to samurai status, given a fief and made a chief defender of the empire. Meanwhile, his highborn Japanese love (a Catholic convert and adulteress) teaches him "inner harmony" as he grows ever more Eastern. With Toranaga as shogun (military dictator), the book ends with the open possibility of a forthcoming sequel. Engrossing, predictable and surely sellable. (Kirkus Reviews, June 1, 1975)

Check Availability

Call the Midwife - Jennifer Worth

Call the Midwife - Worth, Jennifer

Summary: Jennifer Worth was just 22 years old when she volunteered to spend her early years of midwifery training in London's East End in the 1950s. These stories encompass the whole spectrum of human emotions, and candidly reveal the shocking truth of childbirth conditions just 50 years ago.


Kirkus Reviews
Emulating James Herriot—except with fewer cows and more cockneys—Worth sketches a warm, amiable portrait of hands-on medical practice.The author became a midwife at age 22, learning her trade in the 1950s from the nun midwives at the convent of St. Raymund Nonnatus and working among impoverished women in the slums of the London Docklands. Her frank, sometimes graphic memoir describes scores of births, from near-catastrophes to Christmas miracles, and details her burgeoning understanding of the world and the people in it. It's stocked with charming characters: loopy Sister Monica Joan, the convent's near-mystic cake-gobbler and mischief-maker; Father Joseph Williamson, focused on delivering prostitutes rather than babies; handyman/poultry salesman/drain cleaner/toffee-apple pusher Frank; and posh Camilla Fortescue-Cholmeley-Browne ("Chummy"), an outrageously warm-hearted debutante who devoted her life to midwifery and missionary work. Worth depicts the rich variety of life in the slums, where loving, doting mothers of nine rubbed elbows with neglectful, broken young women turning tricks to support their husbands' night life. She draws back the veil usually placed over the process of birth, described here as both tribulation and triumph. In birth after birth, as women and midwives labored to bring babies into the world through hours of pain and occasional danger, Worth marveled at the mothers' almost-uniform embrace of their babies. "There must be an inbuilt system of total forgetfulness in a woman," she writes. "Some chemical or hormone that immediately enters the memory part of the brain after delivery, so that there is absolutely no recall of the agony that has gone before. If this were not so, no woman would ever have a second baby."A charming tale of deliveries and deliverance.Agent: Eugenie Furniss/William Morris Agency Copyright Kirkus 2009 Kirkus/BPI Communications.All rights reserved.

Check Availability

The complete tales & poems of Edgar Allen Poe - Edgar Allen Poe

The complete tales & poems of Edgar Allen Poe - Poe, Edgar Allen

Summary: Features a comprehensive collection of the author's works, including such classics as "The Fall of the House of Usher" and "The Raven" and lesser-known works such as "Loss of Breath" and "Spirits of the Dead." - (Baker & Taylor)

Check Availability

The stand - Stephen King

The stand - King, Stephen

Summary: After a virus kills most of the people in the world, a handful of survivors choose sides-- a world of good led by 108-year-old Mother Abigail-- or evil led by a man with a lethal smile and unspeakable powers: Randall Flagg, the dark man.



Kirkus Review
/* Starred Review */ King's fifth novel returns, 12 years after its first publication, with 230 of its original pages restored. There is also some new writing in the present 1,153 pages of what is now King's longest creation--all has been updated ten years to include references to AIDS, Roger Rabbit, and more recent happenings. But the plot is almost utterly the same, only with more incidents and details deepening the characters. Essentially, if you've read the novel in its shorter form, you've read the novel and don't need to read the new version--unless you're a King fanatic, of course. But what do the new pages do? They give a creamy expansiveness to the flow--but then also delay the book's getting into its big stride: the heat between the story's rival forces doesn't begin until about page 700. And, strangely enough, the long version is a faster, smoother read, less difficult to take in than the short version. Sadly, though, the story's most powerful pages--a very long description of N.Y.C. emptied of human life by a super-flu plague, and a trek through the darkness of a Lincoln Tunnel crammed with dead vehicles and dead people--comes around page 400 and is such a strong, intense passage that nothing that follows equals it. What one gets is King's proletariat cast enacting a story that takes itself seriously, but seems to spring from an imagination fed on comic books, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Bruce Springsteen. The story: a plague virus escapes from a California germ-warfare lab and knocks out nearly all human life. A small group of Americans, drawn from the East and West, gathers at Boulder, Colorado, and finds itself in psychic battle with the forces of evil--forces that are entrenched in Las Vegas and led by Satan in the guise of one Randall Flagg. A team of good guys infiltrates the bad guys, but it is the bad guys who bring about their own destruction with an atomic explosion--which is also seen as the hand of God engineering the Apocalypse. A last new touch has Flagg survive the bomb and start his campaign all over by perverting a primitive jungle tribe with civilization. For many, a haunting experience given its greatest life by scenes of devastation, although The Shining is artistically more complex and satisfying. And what can be said about the prole values King celebrates in book after book? Tiresome, man. (Kirkus Reviews, April 15, 1990)

Check Availability

House of leaves - Mark Z. Danielewski

House of leaves - Danielewski, Mark Z.

Summary: A family relocates to a small house on Ash Tree Lane and discovers that the inside of their new home seems to be without boundaries - (Baker & Taylor)


Library Journal
When Johnny Truant attempts to organize the many fragments of a strange manuscript by a dead blind man, it gains possession of his very soul. The manuscript is a complex commentary on a documentary film (The Navidson Record) about a house that defies all the laws of physics. Navidson's exploration of a seemingly endless, totally dark, and constantly changing labyrinth in the house becomes an examination of truth, perception, and darkness itself. The book interweaves the manuscript with over 400 footnotes to works real and imagined, thus illuminating both the text and Truant's mental disintegration. First novelist Danielewski employs avant-garde page layouts that are occasionally a bit too clever but are generally highly effective. Although it may be consigned to the "horror" genre, this novel is also a psychological thriller, a quest, a literary hoax, a dark comedy, and a work of cultural criticism. It is simultaneously a highly literary work and an absolute hoot. This powerful and extremely original novel is strongly recommended for all public and academic libraries.--Jim Dwyer, California State Univ. Lib., Chico Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Check Availability

The silence of the lambs - Thomas Harris

The silence of the lambs - Harris, Thomas

Summary: FBI Academy trainee Clarice Starling hopes that Dr. Hannibal Lecter, a criminally insane psychiatrist imprisoned in a Boston hospital, can lead her to the serial killer known only as Buffalo Bill - (Baker & Taylor)


Library Journal Reviews
In this intelligent, fast-paced thrillerwhich is also brutal and gruesomeagent Clarice Starling of the FBI's behavioral science section is assigned to conduct a psychological profile of Hannibal Lecter, a psychiatrist imprisoned for serial murder. Uncooperative at first, Lecter then says he can help identify a serial killer who has eluded authorities for months. Lecter's aid proves invaluable, and Starling soon finds herself using one madman to catch another. Harris ( Black Sunday, 1975; Red Dragon , 1981) has written a story, although not for the squeamish, that is hard to put down. Lonnie Beene, West Texas State Univ. Lib., Caynon Copyright 1988 Cahners Business Information.

Check Availability

The silence of the lambs (DVD)

The silence of the lambs - Harris, Thomas

Summary: FBI agent Clarice Starling is assigned to help find a missing woman to save her from a psychopathic serial killer who skins his victims. Clarice attempts to gain a better insight into the twisted mind of the killer by talking to another psychopath Hannibal Lecter, who used to be a respected psychiatrist.


Review
Based on Thomas Harris's novel, this terrifying film by Jonathan Demme really only contains a couple of genuinely shocking moments (one involving an autopsy, the other a prison break). The rest of the film is a splatter-free visual and psychological descent into the hell of madness, redeemed astonishingly by an unlikely connection between a monster and a haunted young woman. Anthony Hopkins is extraordinary as the cannibalistic psychiatrist Dr. Hannibal Lecter, virtually entombed in a subterranean prison for the criminally insane. At the behest of the FBI, agent-in-training Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) approaches Lecter, requesting his insights into the identity and methods of a serial killer named Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine). In exchange, Lecter demands the right to penetrate Starling's most painful memories, creating a bizarre but palpable intimacy that liberates them both under separate but equally horrific circumstances. Demme, a filmmaker with a uniquely populist vision (Melvin and Howard, Something Wild), also spent his early years making pulp for Roger Corman (Caged Heat), and he hasn't forgotten the significance of tone, atmosphere, and the unsettling nature of a crudely effective close-up. Much of the film, in fact, consists of actors staring straight into the camera (usually from Clarice's point of view), making every bridge between one set of eyes to another seem terribly dangerous. --Tom Keogh amazon.com

Check Availability

Crime and punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Crime and punishment - Dostoyevsky, Fyodor

Summary: Raskolnikov commits murder. He then must deal both with the police, and his own guilty conscience. Determined to overreach his humanity and assert his untrammelled individual will, Raskolnikov, an impoverished student living in the St. Petersburg of the Tsars, commits an act of murder and theft and sets into motion a story which, for its excrutiating suspense, its atmospheric vividness, and its profundity of characterization and vision, is almost unequaled in the literatures of the world. The best known of Dostoevsky's masterpieces, Crime and Punishment can bear any amount of rereading without losing a drop of its power over our imagination.

Magill Book Review
Raskolnikov, an impoverished law student, plans to commit the perfect crime by murdering an old female pawnbroker. He hopes to gain money for himself and others and to demonstrate that he belongs to the portion of mankind not subject to conventional morality. Having studied the careers of men such as Napoleon Bonaparte, he embraces the theory that an elitist few are justified in pursuing their objectives through any means.No sooner is the murder committed than events begin to call his theory into question. When the pawnbroker's half sister arrives unexpectedly, Raskolnikov kills her also. In his haste and confusion, he overlooks most of the money and is unable to use the small amount he does take. Following the crime, he rapidly sinks into physical and mental illness.As the hero experiences intense guilt, other characters influence the course of his expiation. The cunning detective Porfiry discovers the truth early but waits until Raskolnikov is ready to accuse himself. Raskolnikov eventually realizes that he must choose one of two alternatives--confession or suicide.Characters such as Luzhin and the sensual Svidrigailov defeat themselves by exploiting others for their own selfish ends. Svidrigailov's suicide demonstrates to Raskolnikov the futility of egoism. Other characters--Raskolnikov's sister, Dounia, his friend Razumihin, and Sonia, a young prostitute--willingly sacrifice themselves and suffer for others. Aided by Sonia, who grows to love him, Raskolnikov chooses life, confession, and punishment, without, however, achieving true repentance.An intense psychological account, the narrative presents thoughts and emotions from each character's point of view. When the character is confused, the reader is also, for no authorial voice intrudes to clarify the situation. Unable to understand his own motives for the crime, the protagonist recognizes that one risks psychic disintegration by sweeping aside traditional morality.

Check Availability