This movie is fascinating, and also utterly disturbing… in short, Herzog at his finest.

The mild, blonde, seemingly-gay Timothy Treadwell escapes to the wilds of Alaska in order to save the integrity of his soul by communing with bears. He does so successfully and with passion for something like 11 years. On his final trip, he and his female companion are mauled to death by a grizzly bear, an event of which survives an audio recording.

Treadwell (and the friends of his whom Herzog interviews) all seemed like stereotypical prescription-drugged-out California coast space-cases. Treadwell himself seems to have been dangling precariously on some border between reality and a fantasy-drama in which he was the king of the bears. The only genuine people in this movie were Treadwell’s parents—his mother clutching a small stuffed teddy bear and talking about Timothy’s childhood love of animals, his father talking about failed auditions that broke Timothy’s spirit. They’re an interesting contrast to the more plastic world that Timothy moved away to, and make clear how ill-fitting Timothy may have been in his new life, dreaming of acting and becoming a star in the cruel wilds of California.

Hanging over the entire movie, in a throbbingly macabre way, is the fact that Timothy was mauled, bitten, eaten and dismembered by bears. Herzog is shown on camera listening to the audio track of Timothy’s last horrifying moments, but chooses not to share the soundtrack with his viewers. Herzog is fascinated by the enigma of Treadwell—his eco-bravado, the shallow failed-actor life he escaped, the drama and utter finality of his death—which ultimately, for me at least, is even more disturbing than Treadwell’s story to start with.

Herzog obviously sees some sort of poetry in Treadwell’s story; a small benign man ravaged by the evils of a world which he refused to see. Personally, Treadwell seemed to me kind of like an idiot; a kind-hearted fool who couldn’t find fulfillment in his life among humans and turned to nature to fancy himself larger-than-life, kindred to the spirits of wild animals. But what happened to him, and to his companion, seems pretty inevitable when you talk about someone who not only swelled his own sense of invincibility with tales of his own power, but refused to recognize and respect the power of an animal like a brown bear, who surely deserves to have distance and deference accorded him. To not do so is insanity.

So there we have it. A Werner Herzog movie where the hero is insane, and seems unable to find a place in the universe in which he can find peace. Herzog thematics 101? Perhaps. But worth watching all the same.

Fantastic. I want to marry Leo Tolstoy when I grow up.

I approached this book from an economy angle… in that I am totally oblivious to nutrition number crunching (I judge my diet intake by color variety and crunchiness factors), but I am appalled at how much baby food costs these days. As I like to say, a new parent sees a jar of baby food and thinks “75 cents! How cheap!” A reasonably weathered parent says “75 cents per jar of baby food! Dear god!” then goes and makes use of their ice cube trays and a buttload of roasted organic squash.

As far as this book goes, it is a solid read with an absolute bazillion number of ideas in it, most of which thrust toward the economical DIY angle. Is Ruth Yaron crazy because she insists on not wasting fruit scraps and wanted to tell you how to home-blend fire retardant clothing? Perhaps. Or maybe she’s just crazy brilliant.

I’ve read other reviews from people who know better than I that her nutritional information is either dated or misinformed, but again… I’m a money-mom on this one, and from that angle, her ideas and information is invaluable, because babies are some majorly hungry little beings, and when you have one, Gerber becomes THE MAN, man… and anything you can do to escape their hungry little corporate maw makes you feel much better about yourself. THE END.

It’s a soap opera set to classical music. Not the best movie in the world, but good for when your emotions need an outlet.

Which is good. Because it could have. It was kind of like a real long mediocre episode of The Simpsons. You will laugh a few times, watch it in its entirety, then promptly forget it. But you will always remember that it didn’t totally suck.

The first three and last two chapters of this book are amazing. The rest of it I enjoyed about as much as I enjoyed sitting through my college cog sci class, with the exception that Pinker is much more witty than the grad student who basically taught my course.

It’s worth the slog through the bulk of this book, though, in order to follow Pinker’s postulate and proof and come to a greater understanding of the fundamentals of the human capacity for language.

Suggested read, for when you have alot of mental energy to burn.

As the presence of this novel on the various “Well Educated Adult” lists suggests, The Three Musketeers has a sort of cultural presence which transcends the fact that many people, nay, most people, have not actually read the book.

It’s a fine novel, not exactly earth-shattering in a postmodernist world, as the straight-forwardness of the story seems automatically suspect to readers accustomed to questioning the veracity of their narrators or teasing out the subtleties of allegories or symbolisms.

As it is the official seal-bearer of the swashbuckler genre, it must be respected. The story is brimming with effete men, snarlingly vicious women, and occasionally delightful humor on the part of Dumas. A great read for a long dark winter, or on a vacation, when carrying threads of a more complex or profound novel would be tiring or out of place.

Great read to pick up in the thrift store, but don’t go out of your way.

I enjoyed reading Pompeii, one of Harris’ other novels, in the way that one enjoys somewhat fluffy summertime novels. I purchased Imperium thinking it would be more of the same, but it was quite different, and markedly better.

Imperium tracks the rise of Cicero’s political star, but more than just fostering interest in Cicero himself (for me, someone badly battered in my interest-zone by eons of Victorian deification), the novel also probes the deeper theme of the dynamics and machineries of power. Read against the backdrop of the 2008 US presidential elections, this theme becomes fascinating and eerily accessible.

I can’t help but think that Harris also saw the parallels between the Rome of Cicero’s time and the United States of today, both republics straining to contain themselves and their ideals in times of degraded public virtue and burdened world power. (His scene where the Roman statesman utters the “if you’re not with us, you’re against us” line comes to mind). As such, Imperium takes on a much deeper tone than Pompeii, and is consequently more rewarding.

Suggested read.

I liked this book alot because it was really more about practical ways to quell a baby’s fussiness than it was about preaching a doctrine of any sort. It’s just simple techniques that most definitely help quiet down a screaming newborn/infant. If you’ve been on an airplane/metro/train etc. with a baby who wouldn’t shut up, you can imagine the early hell of the 6-week colic peak for most new parents. This book is invaluable advice for coping and getting through it… until teething sets in, then all hell breaks loose for good.

Great for someone looking to get acquainted with the charming ever-so-agricultural-turned-suburban history of the CoCoCo. The writing is often redundant, and not particularly shining, but it’s definitely consumable, and the lady clearly has a love of the area and its history, which warms up the lackluster prose.