The inspiring American story is that we can put the past behind us and reinvent ourselves and our lives. It is the subtext of most American movies, and our heroes, the characters played in films by guys like Tom Cruise or George Clooney, are ones who don’t let themselves be burdened by the past. There […]
On the back cover of my Ballantine paperback edition of Dune, by Frank Herbert, is a review that sticks in my mind from my childhood: “I know nothing comparable to it except … the Lord of the Rings.” That ellipsis, I always imagined, was a dramatic pause. Is Dune comparable to Tolkien’s masterpiece? In the […]
There was, I feel quite sure, a commercial when I was a kid, on Saturday mornings, for a GI Joe helicopter that had a winch and a rope hook that could lower GI Joe down and raise him back up at the flip of a small switch. I remember a boy (in the commercial) playing […]