The Gunslinger, by Stephen King, is the first novel in the Dark Tower fantasy series. It was originally published in five sections in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction from 1978 to 1981...

A Civil Tongue is an amusing book on language by former NBC News correspondent Edwin Newman, the sequel to his Strictly Speaking. Here, Newman deals with the ridiculous and irresponsible use of English...

The movies I enjoy watching the best are OLD movies - almost the older the better - but I admit to liking talkies over silents for the most part. So I subscribe to Turner Classic Movie Channel (my one demand on the cable line up) and generally hunt for whatever oldies are around anywhere else on the tube...

Things Fall Apart is Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe's first novel. It deals with Nigerian tribal life before and during white colonialism, with particular attention to how tribal culture and white colonial culture come into conflict when white people move in and attempt to convert the natives to Christianity...

The Five Love Languages is marriage guru Gary Chapman's book on expressing love and commitment to a spouse. The goal here is to get readers to be able to "fill the emotional tanks" of their spouses, which does not always come naturally because people receive love in different ways...

The Problem of Pain is C. S...

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This volume, published in 1993 as The Mammoth Book of Historical Whodunits and in 1997 as Historical Whodunits, contains 23 historical (that is, set before the author was born) mysteries. The foreword is by Ellis Peters, who discusses how she created the Cadfael character...

Hard News is former Newsweek writer Seth Mnookin's book about Howell Raines' twenty-one month tenure as executive editor at the New York Times. Mnookin begins Hard News with a brief history of the New York Times, describing the previous publishers and the paper's evolution, explaining the circumstances in which Howell Raines became a candidate for executive editor and how he was chosen...

The Adventures of Ulysses, written by Bernard Evslin and illustrated by William Hunter, is an account of Ulysses' voyages home after the Trojan War. Evslin begins with a summary of the Trojan War, then goes right to Ulysses' voyages...

The Princess Bride is William Goldman's adventure novel, even though the subtitle is "S. Morgenstern's Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure." Goldman is better known for writing the screenplays for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and All the President's Men...

I Am Legend is Richard Matheson's short novel about the only survivor of a plague that has made everyone else on earth into something like zombie vampires. It is a foundational novel in the post-apocalyptic genre of science fiction and horror, and has been made into a movie three times: The Last Man on Earth (1964), with Vincent Price, The Omega Man (1971), with Charlton Heston, and I Am Legend (2007), with Will Smith...

Outstanding book on controlling high blood sugar, or preventing it if you don't already have it.

Some people express their pain by abusing those closest to them.

Discover yourself in a 1 minute test ! Is that possible? Yeah!

Stories My Mother Never Told Me is another in the series of short story collections Dell released in the sixties and seventies. Again, Alfred Hitchcock was not involved...

Alfred Hitchcock's The Best of Fiends is part of a series of short story collections released in the sixties and seventies. Alfred Hitchcock, as I understand it, was not even peripherally involved with these books (his introductions were ghost-written)...

Mythology is classicist Edith Hamilton's book on Greek, Roman and Norse mythology, illustrated by Steele Savage (no kidding). The bulk of the work is devoted to the Greek, and the Norse is mentioned only in passing...

Trans-humanism is a global cultural movement that sees humans as something that will and must be transcended.

There was a French movie years ago with Catherine Deneuve (swoon) called Metro, I think - about the Parisian subway and WWII - and I do recall the French Metro from my student days in Paris, especially the seats reserved for the "Mutilees de guerre" (literally those mutilated by war)...The cars were dark, yes, but I don't remember them as drab. In contrast, I took the Los Angeles Metro downtown yesterday morning...