Abandoned Books and/or Movies #3

Sometimes when you are reading a book, you realize that you want to stop. Sometimes that happens with movies, too. Here are some recent examples:

Peeling the Onion by Gunter Grass. Famous German author admits that he voluntarily signed up for the Waffen-SS as a youth during World War II.

The Black Arrow by Robert Lewis Stevenson. Adventure story set in England during the War of the Roses. I read it once as a kid. I have tried (and failed) twice as an adult.

Rebels Without Borders by Marc Vachon. True story of a Canadian hoodlum who becomes a logistics expert for an international medical relief organization. Not as interesting as it might sound.

Becoming Manny: Inside the Life of Baseball's Most Enigmatic Slugger by Jean Rhodes and Shawn Boburg. Discussed elsewhere.

The Italian Job. Boring movie from 1969 that was remade into another boring movie in 2003. I actually have watched the 2003 version twice but could not quite make it through the 1969 one.

Escape from New York. Way back when, movie director John Carpenter needed to find a place that looked like Manhattan would look if they turned it into an island prison colony run by the prisoners and then the prisoners went wild. He chose downtown St. Louis, which is the only reason I would ever watch this movie. I fell asleep on the couch about halfway through.

Below- downtown St. Louis

The Sixth Man: A Season Inside the NBA Playground by Chris Palmer. Do you know those little, tiny square candy bars that are about two centimeters across? This book has the same relationship to a real basketball book that a little, tiny square candy bar has to a real, full-size candy bar. (The "season" in question is 2004-2005.)

Times Beach, Missouri

In the early 1980s, the town of Times Beach, MO (southwest of St. Louis) had to be evacuated due to dioxin contamination and also the flooding of the Meramec River. For years the town had contracted with a businessman named Russell Bliss to spray waste oil on the town's dirt roads to keep the dust down. Unfortunately, Bliss sprayed oil that was contaminated with very high levels of dioxin, the chemical used in the military defoliant Agent Orange. Around the time the chemical contamination was discovered, the town was almost completely flooded, so it was decided to permanently evacuate. Today the area is a state park.

What I have been reading lately #17

I just finished reading Piers Paul Read's Ablaze: The Story of the Heroes and Victims of Chernobyl.  (Pictured above: the ruins of reactor number 4 before it was encased in a concrete sarcophagus) 

Above: Author Piers Paul Read

Above: The abandoned city of Pripyat.

Pripyat was designed and built in the early 1970s to provide a home town for the workers at the power plant.  Apparently, Pripyat was a rather nice place to live - a brand-new, planned city with roses everywhere and surrounded by beautiful countryside.  It also had very clean air because there were no coal-burning power plants near by.  After the explosion and fire in 1986, Pripyat had to be permanently evacuated. For more information: http://www.chornobyl.in.ua/pripyat.htm