Alan Moore, author of "Watchmen," reinvented the comic book

By Christopher Borrelli and Robert K. Elder
Chicago Tribune

Over the past 30 years, author Alan Moore has almost single-handedly reinvented the comic book, transforming its language, broadening its scope and deepening its intellect. So, naturally, Hollywood has been poaching his stories for years, the most egregious being the 2003 loud and dumb adaptation of his otherwise highly literate "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen."

There also have been films based on his works, such as "Constantine," "From Hell" and a glossy but tonally faithful version of "V for Vendetta"; both last year's "The Dark Knight" and Tim Burton's original " Batman" owe a debt to Moore's "Batman: The Killing Joke."

This weekend, however, we get director Zack Snyder's sprawling adaptation of " Watchmen," Moore's most celebrated creation. Initially a 12-issue series with artist Dave Gibbons, the collected volume has become one of the most acclaimed graphic novels ever, hailed by Time magazine as one of the best 100 novels of the 20th Century. It's about aging superheroes, nuclear politics and social engineering.

That said, Moore has sworn off movie profits inspired by his books; he recently told the Los Angeles Times that he is opposed to movies based on his work. About "Watchmen" he said, "I will be spitting venom all over it for months to come." As with most of his comics, Moore has insisted "Watchmen" is "inherently unfilmable," heresy in this time of inevitable big-screen adaptation.

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"Dead Silence" By Randy Wayne White

"Dead Silence" By Randy Wayne White

Review By Randy Wayne White
Miami Herald

It's a long way, literally and figuratively, from the funky fictional marina at Dinkin's Bay on Florida's southwest coast to the Hamptons of Long Island, but these two disparate settings form the backdrop for the latest -- and extremely engaging -- thriller from Randy Wayne White.

The book, of course, features the complex and enigmatic Doc Ford. For the uninitiated, the un-hip and the uninformed, Dr. Marion Ford is a marine biologist with a dark and secret past. Essentially he was a black-ops assassin, and that past -- as it has done in each of White's 15 previous Doc Ford novels -- threatens to come back to bite him in Dead Silence.

The story opens with Ford dispatching an ex-NFL player who has murdered a friend of Ford's. Doc swims out to the man's anchored boat, then bodily tows him out into the Gulf and dumps him. Cut to the Explorer's Club, where Ford is meeting up with another ex-clandestine agent with the aim of getting back into the business and -- not coincidentally -- to meet Sen. Barbara Hayes-Sorrento. While waiting, Ford witnesses her attempted kidnapping from a taxi out on the street. He intervenes, saving her with an axe he plucks from the hallowed club's walls (once used by Edmund Hillary) but the kidnappers escape with the senator's passenger, a teenage Native American who won a trip to New York in an essay contest.

Complicated enough already, but of course, the plot thickens quickly. The senator, a friend and potential paramour, heads a committee looking into an extraordinary cache of memorabilia, documents and treasure compiled by the recently expired Fidel Castro, and the early conjecture is that the kidnappers are Castro loyalists intent on ransoming for the warehouse full of Castro's stuff.

The hitch is they may have gotten more than they bargained for by taking the kid, Will Chaser, who not only seduced, then blackmailed his Minnesota teacher into writing the winning essay, but is one resourceful, bad-ass little dude.

Ford gets the go-ahead from the senator, the FBI, and his old black-ops boss, and after a trip back to Florida to arm himself and pick up his old friend Tomlinson, a clairvoyant, hippy, Zen-master doper, he tracks the bad guys to a horse farm in the Hamptons, which just happens to be right in Tomlinson's old neighborhood.

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Bonnie and Clyde: The legend of the bank robbers returns

By Craig Wilson
USA TODAY

Writer Jeff Guinn is standing in the middle of Route 154, eight miles south of this hardscrabble village in Louisiana's Bienville Parish.

The only sound is the wind whispering through the pine forest that seems to go on for miles around.

"Just look at this," he says. "It's perfect."

He gestures toward a slight curve in the lonely stretch of highway a quarter-mile to the north. It's around this bend that a cordoba gray Ford V-8 sedan came barreling along on a warm spring morning in 1934. A six-man posse, standing on a red clay knoll and hidden by the brush and pines that hugged the then-dirt road, was waiting.

May 23 will mark the 75th anniversary of the ambush that killed two of the most notorious and romanticized criminals in American history — an ambush immortalized in a famous blood-drenched scene from Bonnie and Clyde, the 1967 film that starred a glamorous Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway. The day is not passing unnoticed.

Two new books on thttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifhe couple are about to hit stores, and the movies are taking an interest again: Filming starts this spring on a 21st-century version starring Hilary Duff and Kevin Zegers.

Too bad Bonnie and Clyde aren't still around. They'd love the attention. Bonnie dreamed of being in the movies.

Guinn, whose Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde (Simon & Schuster, 366 pp., $27) goes on sale Tuesday, put 16,000 miles on his car researching his book over two years. He traveled the same roads the deadly duo did on their two-year, multi-state rampage that took them as far west as Arizona and as far north as Minnesota. They killed at least 11 people along the way.

Guinn's travels also took him to this desolate ambush site an hour east of Shreveport. He even slept in his car and ate sausages and beans from a can, just like Bonnie and Clyde.

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'Beyond Uncertainty' by David C. Cassidy

'Beyond Uncertainty' by David C. Cassidy

Reviewed By Sara Lippincott
LA Times

In June 1925, while recuperating from hay fever on the pollen-free island of Helgoland in the North Sea, Werner Heisenberg conceived of the first mechanics for quantum theory -- a way to actually do it. He was 23 years old. Physicists are said to do their best work when they are barely out of their teens; this is a signal example. Until Heisenberg's breakthrough -- which soon came to be called matrix mechanics, because it manipulated matrices, or lattices, of numbers, with weird but satisfying results -- there was no real connection between Niels Bohr's semiclassical picture of quantum physics and the ground.

Two years later, Heisenberg came up with his now-famous (and widely co-opted by philosophers and playwrights) uncertainty principle, which in essence says you can't simultaneously pin down the location and momentum of a subatomic particle. It is one of the pillars of the so-called Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory, which upended classical Newtonian physics and revealed matter and energy as fundamentally discontinuous and unpredictable. End of physics lecture.

I have a photograph of Heisenberg on the wall of my office, taken shortly before his Helgoland epiphany. It's up there because for some reason it makes me feel good. Wearing a sweater that his mom might have knitted, he's smiling radiantly at the camera. The same photo is reproduced in "Beyond Uncertainty," David C. Cassidy's new biography of this controversial 20th century giant, in which he observes that in "snapshots of Heisenberg as a young man, he always appears radiant, confident, alert, and pleasant."

References to his subject's radiance and good nature even in the darker days of his later life occur throughout the book. It is also an excellent piece of science writing; in a chapter titled "Determining Uncertainty," Cassidy gives the clearest explanation I have ever come across of the mind-boggling arcana of quantum physics.

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"The Cradle" By Patrick Somerville

"The Cradle" By Patrick Somerville

Reviewed By Janet Maslin

At the start of Patrick Somerville’s magical debut novel, a very pregnant woman named Marissa Bishop makes a request. In the short time before her first baby is due, Marissa would like her husband, Matt, to go find the cradle in which her mother, Caroline, once rocked her.

Caroline walked out on her husband and daughter when Marissa was a teenager. Ten days afterward and not coincidentally, a burglar emptied the house of everything Caroline wanted to take with her. Out came the good stuff, cradle and all.

“You can find anything,” Marissa tells her husband encouragingly. “You’re Matt. Where are my keys?” Yes, Matt has the persistence for this odd assignment. But it will send him roaming through unexpected regions of the Midwest, and of the heart.

Mr. Somerville has the chops to keep this story from softening into the generic mush suggested by his premise. As the jacket copy for “The Cradle” puts it, during the search “Matt makes a discovery that will forever change Marissa’s life, and faces a decision that will challenge everything he has ever known.” How often have you read this kind of synopsis? How wearyingly do track-down-a-secret novels conform to this pattern?

And how reflexively do authors crosscut, as Mr. Somerville does here, between two seemingly unrelated stories that turn out to be closely linked? Mr. Somerville uses even that creaky tactic to poignantly good effect. In a streamlined 200-page book that works as a fully conceived novel, he tells an endearing story full of genuinely surprising turns. And while Matt is quietly and whimsically buffeted by fortune, there’s no Gump or Garp in him. Though it takes a while for Mr. Somerville to reveal this, Matt is deeply serious about what first sounded like a purely capricious mission.

The primary focus of “The Cradle” is clear: this is a book about family ties, some ruptured, some restored. And Matt understands what his wife is really seeking. She does not want her new family to fall apart the way her old one did. The cradle will be her talisman. So what if that cradle is barely an heirloom? So what if it came into Marissa’s family when her grandmother bought it at a yard sale? “There’s another link,” Marissa insists to Matt. “Her hauling it home that day.” Matt loves his wife too much to do anything but agree.

So off he goes, away from Milwaukee and toward anyone who may cast light on Caroline’s whereabouts. His first stop, on the trail of Caroline’s half-sister: a house where “the yard gave off few signs of interested human control” and a cat sits staring out the window. “From time to time, Matt stared straight back at it and tried to send it mental signals: I am not your enemy, I am not your enemy” he thinks. Mr. Somerville adds, “Then, later: meow.”

There is a cradle in this house, he tells himself. There are spider webs on its porch, says the woman who lives there. So Matt winds up doing household chores before he can ask if she knows anything about Caroline. “I do,” says the woman. “But do you know anything about plumbing?”

This part of “The Cradle” takes place in 1997. Other, interspersed sections involve a woman named Renee and take place a decade later. Renee and her husband, Bill, have a 19-year-old son who is leaving for Iraq. “Their son was going to war,” Mr. Somerville writes. “This was the week he would disappear and become an idea.” When Renee turns on a television, she is spooked by the apocalyptic sight of a fire at a chemical plant in Milwaukee. By not-quite-coincidence, it’s the plant where Matt worked in 1997.

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'A Mind at Peace' by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar

'A Mind at Peace' by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar

Reviewed By Richard Eder
LA Times

Istanbul's inhabitants have called it "the city of two continents," part of it lying in Europe and part in Asia, with the waters of the Bosphorus joining them. Or separating them.

Which, though? The question is about national identity, not geography. Turkey has struggled with the question, certainly since Kemal Atatürk overthrew the Ottoman sultans in the early 1900s and imposed a Westernizing rule over an Eastern culture that remains part resistant and unassimilated to this day.

The theme has been famously treated by the novelist Orhan Pamuk. His "Snow" displays an indisputably Westernized writer's painful doubts about a century of forced transformation; one that not only remains stuck halfway but also, along with its benefits, has supressed some of the richness of the older heritage.

It is also the theme of Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar's honeyed, searching and melancholy epic, written in the 1940s and only now translated into English. "A Mind at Peace" is far more elusive and diffuse than Pamuk's work. Much of it is difficult to gain access to for a non-Turkish reader, with its reams of talk about varieties of traditional music, and involved weighings of Turkish writers from the 19th and early 20th centuries.

The translation suggests English spoken with a foreign accent, and it lurches with oddity. This of course is a difficulty; at the same time, it has the transporting quality of such an accent, imparting in the reader the heartbeat of an unfamiliar world.(Would we even remember Marlene Dietrich if she'd spoken Oxbridge English?)

In any case, Tanpinar (1901-1962) has produced a work that, despite its long and (to us) obscure side trips, creates a portrait of a city and a culture -- Istanbul on the eve of World War II -- that seems like the land of Cockaigne, magical and lost. His novel is as much about its setting and colors (the green of an Emerald City) as about the stories and wonderfully eccentric and varied panoply of characters.

The play of sun on water, the Bosphorus ferries that ply back and forth to villa-studded islands, the lights that star its shores, the glint of bluefish netted at night, are also characters. At one point, the lovers at the center of the book reflect that these things, quite as much as each other, are the heart of their aching, doomed summer affair.

Doomed because Mumtaz, a young intellectual besotted with Baudelaire and weightless cogitating; and Nuran, an older woman from an established family and divorced, perhaps temporarily, from a faithless husband, come to represent Turkey's East-West divide. The life and artistry that Tanpinar gives to the ardor and fragility of their affair occupy his book's middle section, which stands as one of the 20th century's notable literary love stories and cultural watersheds.

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“The Believers” By Zoe Heller

“The Believers” By Zoe Heller

Reviewed By Michiko Kakutani
New York Times

Nearly all the characters in Zoë Heller’s ambitious new novel, “The Believers,” are true believers. Though each chooses a different vehicle of worship — socialism, liberal humanism, orthodox Judaism or the New Age gospel of self-improvement — they are all in thrall to their own certainty, self-righteous about their own beliefs and contemptuous of anyone dimwitted enough to disagree. They are also believers in their own mythologies: the roles in which they have been cast by their parents or children or followers, the personas they have had thrust upon them and have, over the years, internalized as their own. Zeal is their default setting; sanctimony, their favorite defense.

Whereas Ms. Heller’s two previous novels — “Everything You Know” and “What Was She Thinking? Notes on a Scandal” — were slender tour de forces that used distasteful narrators to explore the related theme of self-delusion and the gap between private feelings and public perceptions, “The Believers” is a considerably larger and messier undertaking. It attempts to give us a group portrait of a wildly dysfunctional family, even as it tackles the big theme of certainty and its discontents.

Ms. Heller, who has worked as a journalist for publications like Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, is an extraordinarily entertaining writer, and this novel showcases her copious gifts, including a scathing, Waugh-like wit; an unerring ear for the absurdities of contemporary speech; and a native-born Brit’s radar for class and status distinctions. But “The Believers” is also a somewhat scattershot production: brilliant at times; at others, oddly unfocused.

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