My opinions on recently read or viewed media

The Will Be Blood: This is a great movie, which is what I would expect from the director of Magnolia and Boogie Nights. It is about oil and the rush for enrichment in the olden days of California. Those were rough times.

A book by Max Hastings on the war in the Pacific. This is a good book, full of little details that grab you. What a major war that was. No kidding.

Sacred Games. This is a murder mystery set in Bombay, India. It is written in English, but a kind of Indian English dialogue with so many unusual words that it needs a glossary. It kind of makes you think of all the places and environments that you don't know too much about. Other than that, it is more or less a standard detective-policework, kind of deal.

Street Kings: Keanu Reeves looking old, playing an alcoholic cop widower fighting his demons, and fighting just about all the mobsters and drug dealers and corrupt cops in L.A. Highly recommended.

The Looming Tower, by Lawrence Wright: A detailed background on the lives of Bin Laden and Zawahiri. You get a real sense of who they were and how nasty, horrible, and generally psychotic and mean these guys are. Quite depressing. Zawahiri especially. Most of the Bin Ladens are just average businessmen, highly successful builders in Saudi Arabia. Osama is the crazy lunatic exception.

I have also really been getting into Richard Price.

Samaritan: This is a great book by Price about a do-gooder inner-city teacher who gets assaulted by somebody. The whole book slowly takes you into the lives and environment of the projects in New Jersey.

Lush Life: The new book by Price. I haven't managed to read it yet because I'm 29th on the hold list, but it his escalated to a new level, with his dialogue crossing into literary territory, even though it is basically another police procedural regarding the solving of a murder.

He also wrote Clockers and Freedomland, which have both been made into movies.