The James Logan Courier

By Tish Wells
McClatchy Newspapers (MCT)

In time for the holiday season, the 1977 autobiography of mystery writer Agatha Christie has been reissued with an introduction by her grandson, Matthew Prichard.

"An Autobiography" is the history of a unique upbringing in a time long gone. It's a portrait of a childhood and young womanhood that vanished with World War I.

What makes this edition special is a CD of Christie dictating parts of the autobiography. The recordings were made from tapes found by Prichard after her death, and painstakingly restored.
Agatha Christie was born in September 1890 during the last years of Queen Victoria's reign. Her happy childhood dominates the first part of the book with rich evocative detail.

By Billy O'Keefe
McClatchy-Tribune (MCT)

Though "Halo: Combat Evolved's" impact has been exhaustively documented, there may be no finer point than the realization that the 2011 holiday season's best new first-person shooter may very well be a 10-year-old game with a fresh coat of paint.

At least on the solo (or two-player co-op) side, that's what "Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary" is — a pretty carbon copy of the game that launched with the original Xbox in 2001 and subsequently formed the foundation of a video game juggernaut.

By Zohal Sharif, Courier Staff Writer

Toddlers and Tiaras is a popular show on TLC about little girls and boys who enter in pageants and are judged on their beauty, personality, and costumes. Aside the sparkly outfits, spray-on tans, and poofy hair, are these children victims of child abuse?

Here is a video of a mother bribing her child with a bag of candy when getting her eyebrows waxed. Not only was the little girl crying and begging not to have the cloth strip ripped of, but then her mother commented that normally she would have held her down while the waxer ripped it off.

By Kayleen Garingan, Courier Staff Writer

Leftovers written by Laura Weiss is a novel about two teenage best friends named Ardith and Blair. Ardith is the more motivated character because her parents are alcoholics. She tries desperately not to fall into their footsteps and works extremely hard in school with a perfect record under her belt. On the other hand, Blair is the rich one with her mother being a workaholic and super strict. She and Ardith are not allowed to be friends because of their family backgrounds, but in the end they always find their way back to one another.

This book is very family orientated. It shows how girls get over hardships, like heartache and sexual abuse, drugs, alcohol, and drama. Leftovers prove how valuable friendship is in a person’s life and how family can influence you in either a good or bad way. It shows how broken families bounce back from the worst and how determination can really change ones life.

By Yari Nieves-Rivera, Courier Staff Writer

Looking for Alaska by John Green is a wonderful debut novel for this promising author’s writing career. The story follows a boy named Miles “Pudge” Halter as he tries to find himself and his independence by leaving home and going to a boarding school.

The novel is split into two parts, before and after. It follows his first year at Culver Creek Preparatory School. There he meets Alaska Young, and Pudge’s life changes drastically as she soon begins to take over his whole world.

Pudge, who was born in Florida, finds himself bored with his little hometown. With almost no friends to socialize with, he spends most of his time memorizing famous people’s last words. When his parents throw him a going away party, he’s not shocked when only two people show up and quickly leave. Looking for a way to leave his boring lifestyle, he asks his dad if he can go to the same Preparatory school as him, and his Dad quickly agrees. His Mother pressed on as to why he wanted to leave, he simply told them François Rabelais’s last words—“I look for the Great Perhaps.”

By Adam Phillips, VOA News

Award-winning American poet Jane Hirshfield has just published a new collection of poems. "Come, Thief" features themes of love, compassion, contemplation and the poignancy of a human life fully lived.

Hirshfield sits in an anteroom at Poets House in New York about an hour before she appears before a large crowd to read from her seventh collection of poem.

“The title is a signal of welcoming what is inevitable into our lives,” says Hirshfied, who adds that the “‘thief” could have many meanings. “But what it primarily means in this book is time; time which brings us everything that we will ever experience and takes from us from us everything that we will ever experience, and one of the main threads of this book is simply saying ‘yes’ to that process. Yes to whatever comes, the difficult, the ecstatic, and yes to whatever goes – everything we will ever love and finally ourselves.”

By Billy O'Keefe
McClatchy-Tribune (MCT)

Three chapters into a series that began as a straight-faced "Grand Theft Auto" wannabe, "Saints Row: The Third" commences by almost immediately giving you a reaper drone as your first weapon upgrade and letting you call in (and control) missile airstrikes at will from that moment forward.

And with that — and following an opening sequence in which you lead a bank robbery that somehow culminates in an airborne shootout that includes skydiving into and through the windshield of a crashing airplane — we are off to the races.

Before we get carried away with how out of control this fable gets, it's worth stopping and emphasizing how solid "SR3's" underpinnings are. The game's third-person shooting controls are far more versatile than what "Grand Theft Auto IV" produced, and the driving (and, eventually, biking and flying) controls are what you expect — loose and arcade-y, but with enough weight that driving a sports car, street sweeper and tank (yes, there are tanks) are markedly different experiences. The graphics aren't always easy on the eyes, but they certainly suffice, considering how big, busy and free of load times the open world is.

By Steven Zeitchik
Los Angeles Times (MCT)

LOS ANGELES — Those who make our living following the entertainment business tend to look for rivalries because, well, it's fun and because Hollywood is enough of a copycat place that it's impossible to avoid the competition even if we wanted to.

But they didn't have to look hard to find a battle between Universal Pictures and Relativity Media over the last year as each raced to mount Snow White movies. The fight had more story lines than the Grimm Brothers could come up with: Two movies, each putting a new spin on the virginal beauty and the mirror-gazing villain, were pushing forward at the same time.

By Rae Atabay, Courier Staff Writer

The Painted Bird, by Jerzy Kosiński, gives a creepy and deeply disturbing look into the psychological impact of war and how it can make even the most innocent people do the most horrid unimaginable things.

The book starts off in the fall of 1939. A nameless black-haired, young boy is separated from his parents at the beginning of World War II. Walking around the the more rural area of the country, the boy is mistaken for a Gypsy or a Jew by fair-haired, blue-eyed farmers and is then shunned. Even those who usually gave him a home and fed him, started to treat him with cruelty.

This is not an uplifting book at all. The cruelty the boy witnesses and experiences often breaks down his imagination and takes away from him being "just a kid". Kosinski does not attempt to censor his gruesome descriptions, and he shouldn't because it would take away from the story. To simply go over the terrible events of World War II would be an injustice to those who suffered through it. Though the book is not autobiographical, events like this did actually happen during the war.

By Tish Wells
McClatchy Newspapers (MCT)


"Chinese Ghost Stories" will broaden your appreciation of the supernatural.
Lafcadio Hearn was a Victorian-era writer who, after a long colorful life, ended up in Asia, spending the last 14 years in Japan. An Irishman, he was a journalist, fiction writer and poet with a taste for the eerie.

Working off various translations from the Chinese, he wrote ghost stories that are very different from the European or American variety.

Instead of terrifying ghosts who bedevil their victims, Hearn's spirits are more aligned with Asian culture, with an emphasis on filial piety, self-sacrifice and death.

By Jack Bragg, Courier Entertainment Editor

This Veteran’s Day marked the release of one of the most highly anticipated video games in the history of the industry. The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim, from long time Elder Scrolls and Fallout developer Bethesda, takes on the staggering amounts of monumental hype leading up to the game’s release and delivers fully to its expecting fans.

The game is the fifth installment of the highly acclaimed Elder Scrolls series. The game takes place in a land called Skyrim, full of a vast array of characters, from the Viking-like Nords, to the ruthless Orcs, to feeble Wood-Elves, cat-like Kahjiit, as well as giants, mammoths, bears, and an entire world full of widely varying creature and beasts.

By Billy O'Keefe
McClatchy-Tribune (MCT)

Snowblind Studios gets kudos for telling a new "Lord of the Rings" story — set chronologically parallel to J.R.R. Tolkien's story and featuring his iconic characters, but starring a new set of characters created expressly for the game — instead of retreating to yet more recreations of the same old battles.

The flip side, of course, is that Tolkien's most ardent fans will be first in line to pick apart "War in the North's" fiction. Andriel the Elven Loremaster wields magic that's pretty out of step with Gandalf's arsenal. A giant talking eagle, while a very well-developed character who is great fun to summon in battle, will nonetheless remind some of Sean Connery voicing a dragon in "Dragonheart" more than anything from the "LOTR" universe. Finally, while the fellowship occasionally checks in with your party, the result of those check-ins often leaves you feeling like a second-string hero. "North" tells a comprehensive side story with branching quests and numerous mandatory and elective dialogue paths, but it's one that will strike some as a dungeon crawler with Tolkien trimmings instead of the other way around.

By Jack Bragg, Courier Entertainment Editor

Solo projects and bands formed from the remains of once popular acts often face a troubling dilemma. Does the new project keep the sound that got the act famous to begin with? or do they deviate and risk alienating old fans in favor of newer listeners. Former Distillers frontwoman Brody Dalle’s new project, Spinnerette, hits that long-sought-after perfect balance with their self-titled debut.

By Joseph Agharanya, Courier Staff Writer

Part of being human is that we all look for spiritual fulfillment. We are born into the control of others; as adolescents we develop into adults while others, our peers and authority figures in our lives, pervasively condition us with their systems of values and beliefs. We end up struggling with those beliefs and values when they conflict with our commitment to satisfy our own human needs. But when we finally break free of the control and influence that ties us down in our relationships and conditions us to to their way of thinking, we can begin to gain our own spiritual fulfillment.

By Billy O'Keefe
McClatchy-Tribune (MCT)

No use wasting time being cordial: "Battlefield 3's" single-player campaign is a bummer. Military first-person shooters have increasingly valued flash over substance since "Call of Duty" dumbed it down and became the market leader, and the less said about "BF3's" me-too attempt — too many restrictive corridors, quick-time events, gimmicky diversionary missions that imitate instead of innovate, and stiflingly controlled scenarios that allow the psychic enemy A.I. to absolutely brutalize you if you dare attempt to ignore the continuous interface prompts and flex some creativity — the better. It's technically polished but imaginatively bankrupt, and DICE — which proved it could construct good single-player campaigns with the "Battlefield: Bad Company" offshoots — should know better.

By John Horn
Los Angeles Times (MCT)

Eddie Murphy had a simple suggestion about six years ago: Why not make an all-black version of "Ocean's Eleven"?

Director Brett Ratner and producer Brian Grazer loved the comedian's idea, and before long, the trio were throwing around ideas about who could star opposite Murphy: Jamie Foxx, Dave Chappelle, Chris Rock, Tracy Morgan and Chris Tucker headed the list.

The resulting movie, Universal Pictures' "Tower Heist," arrives in theaters this weekend, where it will face solid competition from Warner Bros.' "A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas." But after more than five years of development, Murphy's original pitch has been transformed into a different film, with the all-black conceit replaced by an ensemble cast led by Ben Stiller and including Casey Affleck and Matthew Broderick.

By Tish Wells
McClatchy Newspapers (MCT)

Harry Potter fans, rejoice!

An oversized coffee-table behemoth of a book, "Harry Potter: Page to Screen" by Bob McCabe is a wonderful wallow. The 504 pages are rich with photographs, drawings and anecdotes from the movies. It is aimed squarely at the "Harry Potter" fan who has it all, and it hits the bull's-eye.
The film world of "Harry Potter" started in 1997 when producer David Heyman was introduced to the manuscript of "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone" _ the British title for "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone." The manuscript had been retrieved from a slush pile in the office, and while skeptical, Heyman started reading and fell in love. Twelve years later, they wrapped the eighth and final movie of a blockbuster series of films.

By Billy O'Keefe
McClatchy-Tribune (MCT)

When "Batman: Arkham Asylum" wowed us in 2009, most praised it for prioritizing quality over scope and giving us a polished Batman experience in a confined space instead of one spread thin across yet another open world.

Two years and incalculable more polish later, "Batman: Arkham City" has arrived to make us all look foolish.

As the title implies and story explains, "City" takes place in a much larger space. The prison city of Arkham is walled off from the rest of Gotham City, but it's extremely spacious as prison cities go. "Asylum" nailed the fun of gliding, rappelling and ziplining as Batman, and "City" makes it that much more fun by giving you more room to move freely. The Batmobile remains absent, but given how fast you can bound across and around rooftops, it would have felt passe anyway.