Almost a comical headline, no? John Wayne and Frodo Baggins, in the same sentence? How silly. The man’s man of 20th century American film … and the furry-footed hobbit invented by the English author J.R.R. Tolkien. But in a new biography of The Duke, author Scott Eyman writes that Wayne was more than just a […]

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I saw Demetrius Walker play three or four times when he was a freshman and/or a sophomore at Fontana High School, about 50 miles east of Los Angeles. I remember thinking “he’s OK, but not great”. He was good around the basket, he could leap, but he was only 6-foot-3 (later reduced to 6-2, in […]

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I was late to Lone Survivor, the book. It was published in 2007, and I became aware of it only after seeing a trailer for the movie, which will be released this week. I just powered through Lone Survivor, the book, and if we assume the basic outlines of it are accurate, it is an […]

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The final book by Patrick O’Brian was not completed. Actually, his last sentence was not completed. The author of the still-popular Aubrey-Matarin series was 85, and had gotten a start on the 21st edition of the series, when he stopped writing. Perhaps he fell ill. Perhaps he was distracted, and then fell ill. But his […]

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A significant percentage of the movies I have watched in the past two months has been while flying. In part, it’s because so few films I am interested in seeing have come out during that time. But a big part of it is the array of movies-on-demand available for viewing on the big and modern […]

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Moby Dick was one of the handful of items that came with my Kindle when it was purchased. (Along with the King James Bible, and Huckleberry Finn and maybe Sherlock Holmes.) Or I’m pretty sure it was. I have been avoiding the great white whale the whole of my life, and I can’t imagine I […]

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Well, this would have been on the book shelf, if I were still buying books in print, which I rarely do, over here in the UAE. It’s not like I’m going to carry them out with me, some day. So, on the the Kindle, this is where the focus has been:

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