Latest books and movies

The Stars My Destination . This older science fiction book was one in a list reviewed by Stainless Steel Droppings, who has provided me with several interesting books and movies.
here . I had to track it down through an intercity library loan and it was well worth the wait.

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I've been bringing home more non-fiction lately. This one caught me eye and even with the odd spot of boring..please move on sections I found it really interesting. The Verneys

Synopsis
The remarkable story of one English family during the tumultuous seventeenth century, as revealed through their original letters and documents, which paint an extraordinarily accurate and detailed picture of life in England, Europe, and even the American colonies.
"To know the Verneys is to know the seventeenth century," Adrian Tinniswood writes in this brilliant new book. The Verney family's centuries-long practice of saving every piece of paper that came into their possession-amassing some 100,000 pages of family and estate letters and documents-resulted in the largest and most complete private collection of seventeenth-century correspondence in the Western world to date.
Given exclusive access to these documents, Tinniswood draws a sweeping portrait of the Verneys and the world among Buckinghamshire gentry in which they lived. In vivid detail Tinniswood introduces us to generations of the family: We meet Edmund Verney, King Charles I's standard bearer, who died in battle during the English Civil War in 1642 (his hand still clutching the king's standard). Edmund's son and heir, Ralph, struggled to hold the family together after his father's death, but lost the respect of his brothers and sisters because he alone of the family supported the Parliamentarian cause. Parliament, however, suspicious of his royalist connections, hounded him and his family into exile. Ralph's sons fared both better and worse than their father: Jack went to Syria and made a fortune, while Edmund married a girl who was rich, beautiful, and deeply in love with him-but within months of the marriage she succumbed to insanity.
Rigorously researched, intensely insightful, and alive with drama, TheVerneys is narrative history at its very best: fascinating, surprising, and enthralling.

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Recent movies

Superman Returns I'd have turned it off but Paul wanted to see the ending.

The Prize Winner Of Defiance, Ohio A movie I'd never heard about until it I saw it on the shelf at the library and liking Julianne Moore decided to it bring home. Not great but not bad family story of a woman in the late 50's who entered contests as a means of providing for her family. info