An Unlikely Union: The Love-Hate Story of New York's Irish and Italians
Book
They came from the poorest parts of Ireland and Italy and met as rivals on the sidewalks of New...
Matthew Krueger (10051 KP) rated Scars of Dracula (1970) in Movies
Nov 17, 2020
The plot: Bat's blood hits Dracula's (Christopher Lee) ashes, and he rises again to fight a couple (Dennis Waterman, Jenny Hanley) looking for trouble.
It also gives Lee more to do and say than any other Hammer Dracula film except its first, 1958's Dracula.
This film breaks the continuity maintained through the previous entries in the Hammer Dracula series: whereas at the end of the preceding film, Taste the Blood of Dracula, the Count met his end in a disused church near London, this film opens with a resurrection scene set in Dracula's castle in Transylvania, with no explanation of how his ashes got there (although, they might have been returned from England, as a contingency, by the young acolyte from the prologue of Dracula A.D. 1972). Furthermore; in Scars of Dracula, the Count has a servant named Klove, played by Patrick Troughton; in the third film of the series, Dracula: Prince of Darkness, Dracula has a servant named Klove (played by Philip Latham) who appears to be a different character, though identically named. The disruption of continuity caused by Scars of Dracula reflects the fact the film was originally tooled as a possible reboot of the series in the event Christopher Lee elected not to reprise the role of Dracula.
The British Film group EMI took over distribution of the film after Warner Bros., Universal Pictures and other American studios refused to distribute it in the U.S. It was also the first of several Hammer films to get an 'R' rating.
Its a good film.
ClareR (5721 KP) rated The Western Wind in Books
Mar 28, 2021
The book works backwards from the time that a wealthy landowner, Thomas Newman, is seen floating, assumed drowned, in the river. The rural Dean arrives and advises the village priest, John Reve, to find the murderer or find proof that Newman has passed through purgatory - all before Lent begins.
There are a lot of confessions in this book. Villagers come to church to confess before the start of Lent, but none have the necessary information to tell Reve what happened. The Dean is a pretty unpleasant character: he pushes Reve to find a murderer, when it’s not really known whether Newman has been murdered at all.
John Reve appears to know and care for all of his parishioners. When two of them try to admit to Newman’s murder, Reve will not let them stand up and say that they’ve done it - and it does seem unlikely that they have. One, Sarah, a seriously ill woman, sees her confession as a way of escaping from her life of illness and pain.
This is a gentle, moving, descriptive book. There’s no fast action or tumultuous love affairs. This is the story of a priest who is doing his best for his parishioners. He takes his job seriously - it really is his calling. And there’s no earth shattering ending either. If you like a beautifully written book, then this will be the book for you.
ClareR (5721 KP) rated Wakenhyrst in Books
Apr 5, 2021
There’s an underlying feeling of menace and claustrophobia running through this. Partly because of the restraints on Maud because of the fact that she’s female, young and upper class in the Edwardian period; partly because of the ever-present Fen and the mysterious atmosphere surrounding it; partly because we know from the first chapter what is going to happen - and we are heading to that end.
Themes of obsession, superstition and madness run throughout, and it’s not just the uneducated working class fenland men and women who are preoccupied with witchcraft and demonic possession.
Maud’s father Edmund, is translating and researching the book of Alice Pyett, a woman who lived four hundred years before the book is set. She was supposed to have heard the voice of God, but if you ask me, she longed for chastity because she had had a ridiculous amount of children and needed a break.
The deeper Edmund gets in to the translation, the stranger his diary entries become. ANd when he stumbles across a painting in the graveyard of his church, his behaviour becomes even more unhinged. To be honest, the descriptions were such that I thought I was seeing the demons along with him!
This book has been sat on my kindle for quite a while now, and I decided to use my Audible credit and listen to it - which was a cracking idea. The narrator, Juanita McMahon, really brings this story to life - and makes it all the more haunting.
This isn’t a ghost story, at least it didn’t seem like one all the way through, but it certainly gave me the chills! I loved it. If you like a chilling, gothic tale, this will suit you down to the ground.
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Carolyn Forché’s The Country Between Us bears witness to what she saw in El Salvador in the late...
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On June 21, 1964, more than twenty Klansmen murdered three civil rights workers. The killings, in...