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JerseySmarts.com

Book Review: The Last Kingdom

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Last August, my Mother told some of her friends in Pennsylvania that I was hired as an Adjunct Professor at Monmouth University. These lovely folks were glad to hear it and gave me one of the best gifts that one can receive – a book! This book, The Last Kingdom by Bernard Cornwell, is a historical fiction…and it was an amazing read!

For some perspective – I haven’t really had a chance to read too many books since I started teaching part-time. It’s just tough to read the material for the course, prepare the PowerPoints and handouts for the course, and keep-up with some of my freelance reading choices. However, since class officially ended, I returned from my Miami trip, and the Christmas season came to an end I’ve had some free time to begin reading my own choices again. It took me less than a week to rip through The Last Kingdom – it’s a hard book to put down!

This historical fiction is a story about Uhtred, son of Uhtred, who was also son of Uhtred, etc. His land is usurped from him by his uncle and he is taken captive by the marauding Danes at the tender age of 10. This story is set during the late 800’s AD when England was being ransacked by what we would call “Vikings” today. Cornwell sticks to historical facts when he calls them Danes instead of Vikings since during the time of the story “to vike” was a verb and not a noun. Anyway, Uhtred is taken captive as a young boy as his father dies in battle defending their family’s land.

The Danes raise him and one Dane in particular, Ragnar, essentially adopts Uhtred as his own. This affords Uhtred a great deal of protection and a great source of knowledge on many topics – the most important of which is combat. As he grows up, he begins raiding English territories with the Danish fighters. Remember, now, Uhtred is an Englishman…yet he still goes ahead and raids his homeland’s territories.

Cornwell moves the story along at the perfect pace and the reader is shown Uhtred’s thoughts as he moves through the various stages of becoming a man in a war-torn land. His inner conflict is very well written; Uhtred’s inner discussions regarding with whether or not he should be fighting with the Danes or with the English is particularly well done. Ultimately, he goes back to his people though there are various reasons that lead him to that end. Uhtred, though, begins to believe that he ends up fighting for the English because of fate.

The concept of fate and whether or not a man has free will is explored at different points of the story. Uhtred is first a young by being taught the ways of Catholicism through the local priests (in spite of his family’s history being intertwined with the pagan gods). The Danes worship Thor and his set of gods and Uhtred begins to follow and believe in that religion. The compelling argument that changes his mind is the usefulness of one God versus many gods. In other words, Ragnar and the Danes ask how the Catholic God could be worth worshiping if he does not bring victory to his followers. For the young Uhtred, he sees the simplistic logic in this argument and agrees.

One of the best parts of the religious overtones in this book is how, later in the book, Uhtred is forced to wonder about some of the basic teachings of his pagan faith. Once the English begin to fight back and win battles against the Danish warriors, Uhtred wonders if the pagan religion is really the better of the two? Are the three spinners – who the Danes believe write the story of the world and thus assign everyone their fate – really spinning their webs? Or is the one God of Catholicism really mightier than the aggregated power of the pagan gods? Personally, I enjoyed this little bit of give and take that was more subliminal than written.

The novel has a great climatic scene where a great Danish warrior is defeated by the hand of Uhtred. This is one of the best written battle scenes that I’ve ever read. It seems as though describing the motions and situations of the shield walls and various battles are second nature to Cornwell. This is a testament to his comfort level when writing this historical fiction.

If it’s not obvious by this point, I highly recommend grabbing a copy of The Last Kingdom. This is the first in “The Saxon Novels” series by Cornwell. I’ve already gone out and purchased two more Cornwell books – the next in the Saxon Novels and the first in a different series. Go out and grab a copy if you can; Christmas may be over, but this book still makes a great gift!

Photos Up On Facebook

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Hello everyone. Over the last few weeks I’ve uploaded some 3400+ photos from 1995 – 2007 on Facebook.com. If any of you are interested in seeing this portion of my photo collection (I have a few thousand more pictures, but I probably won’t up load them) then go ahead and sign-up for a Facebook account and look me up when you get there!

This was a pretty fulfilling project as it gave me the opportunity to scan the vast majority of my photo collection – which has just been sitting in a plastic container for the last 12 years. It was also fun to do because I’ve now categorized my personal, electronic family photo albums ranging back to the mid-1990’s and covering Christmases, Thanksgivings, Graduations, High School Football Games, and so much more. Also, I’ve catalogued my electronic college and graduate school photo albums covering my time in Sigma Pi Fraternity, Greek Weeks, House Parties, Graduations, National Conferences, and more. I shouldn’t forget the high school photo galleries, though – there are prom pictures up there!

There are also a few hundred “random” pictures that I couldn’t find a category for and I’ll likely add even more randoms in the coming weeks. Anyway, thought that I’d share and that I would suggest everyone getting their photo albums in order…and not waiting over a decade to do it like I did! 🙂

Looking for a Harmony Ball?

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Great post-Christmas gifts are still available on eBay! One of the best, cost effective gifts you could pick up for a friend or loved one is a Harmony Ball. I have three of these little Harmony Ball figurines in my room – Plato, an Owl, and Jesus Christ. They’re pretty cool.

My Mother sells these things at a great price on eBay so I highly suggest that you check out which figurines she has on sale if you’re still looking for that good post-Christmas gift. Enjoy!

Book Review: The Kite Runner

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Khaled Hosseini, the author of The Kite Runner, deserves all of the credit that he’s been getting in literary circles. This novel, his first, won at least a half dozen awards and was a #1 New York Times bestseller – very impressive. After hearing some folks on the radio talk about how excited they were for the movie coming out, I went and purchased a copy of this book to see what the big fuss was all about. I wasn’t disappointed.

The Kite Runner is a powerful story of a man named Amir. The story follows Amir from his days as a young boy to a fully grown man. Amir is born a child of privilege in Afghanistan during the 1970’s. His father, Baba, is a well known Afghani having given many of his neighbors their first “chance” whether it be a loan or a job or a hand out when it was most needed. Baba has a servant, Ali, who has a son named Hassan. Amir and Hassan grow up together and The Kite Runner is essentially the story of how their close friendship affects Amir for the rest of his life (or at least until the end of the book).

Hassan is fiercely loyal and protects Amir from some of the bad kids in the neighborhood – though he does this at the cost of his own safety. Ultimately, defending Amir puts Hassan in a situation where he is harshly abused by another boy and his two cronies. Amir witnesses the assault and his response determines the path of his mental stability for the rest of his life (or depending upon how you read the book, until the end of the story).

Amir buries his knowledge of the assault and goes on living with Baba until the Russians begin to invade Afghanistan. At that point he is rushed with his father out of the country and they eventually wind up in America. Baba – who has given Amir much of the direction in his life – passes away from cancer, but not before assisting Amir in becoming engaged to a young Afghanistan woman named Soraya. It turns out that there is a large Afghan community in the San Francisco area and Amir becomes a part of this community with his new wife and her family. Then, almost out of the blue, he is called to Pakistan at the request of one of his father’s former business associates who is now dying. Before the associate passes away, he makes a request of Amir: to make everything good again for both his father and himself. To make things good, Amir will need to find Hassan’s son, Sohrab, and bring him to a better life.

The story gets very quick and very interesting at this point and the last hundred pages or so are very good. As a child, Amir won a large kite-flying tournament and he had some assistance from Hassan to help collect the prize kite. The final scenes of this book revisit a kite race setting and gives hope to the reader that there might be hope for Hassan’s son, Sohrab.

There are times during this story when I feel like Amir tortures himself too much over his inaction as a child. Amir expects much from himself, but that is because of what his father expected of him as a young boy. I wonder if all young people have this mentality about themselves and their actions. I hope not!

I am grossly oversimplifying the last 100 pages of the book for the sake of this review, but I would suggest reading The Kite Runner if you have some free time and are looking for a good story. And if you do read it, let me know what you thought!

Movie Review: I Am Legend

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Will Smith’s latest movie, I Am Legend, will go down as a movie with some of the best previews and trailers in recent history. And, for my part, I have to say that it will go down as a major bore for all of the people who had the pleasure/displeasure of sitting through it. This one didn’t just miss the mark, it fired the gun in the opposite direction!

In truth, I hate to give this movie a bad review because there was so much potential in the concept and the original story is pretty entertaining. Yet, as a viewer I found myself wanting to care about the characters, but it just wasn’t possible. You get vague hints of the back story (though I imagine that most people know it thanks to the power of the internet) and the ending is impossible to care about (it’s too rushed, too out of line with 90% of the film, and too “easy”).

Will Smith does the best that can be expected in a role where he plays opposite a dog for most of the movie. The use of rabies-infected zombies is only marginally scary in the movie and the filmmakers missed a major opportunity to explore the zombie world during the middle of the film. Not good planning at all.

It looks like I Am Legend has grossed about $34 million to date (probably more once the Christmas numbers are added). I don’t think the movie has much drawing power left in it – almost every word-of-mouth review that I heard has been negative. Most of them go something like this, “Yeah, it was alright – not what I expected. It wasn’t that good.”

I agree. It was alright – not the worst movie ever, but not really a good movie either. My recommendation is that if you really want to see this movie, make it a Blockbuster night this spring.