A Recent Read Number 18

" The Stranger chuckled, "My name is Applegate,but that's of no importance" he said. "What's important right now at the moment is that punk baseball team you've been rooting for all these years." "

NOTE: This review may contain SPOILERS.

Since my transition time between reading a book and finally getting around to reviewing it is super long and getting longer this will be the next to the last "A Recent Read" review. Future book reviews I will just use the book title. To date I've been reviewing the books in the order that I read them, but I need to crank out a super late review for a book I got from a giveaway and it is far from the "next" book in my recently read queue. On to this book's review.

The Year The Yankees Lost The Pennant by Douglas Wallop

The Year The Yankees Lost The Pennant was written in the mid 1950s when the New York Yankees were all but unstoppable and were the Kings of the baseball diamond. It was first published in 1954. The story is the typical "Faustian bargain" of making a deal with the devil. In this case middle-aged Joe Boyd a diehard Washington Senators fan is tired of seeing his beloved Senators in the basement during the pennant race. One summer evening he meets a Mr. Applegate (aka: the Devil) they talk baseball, The Senators. They agree the team needs a super slugger and a great fielder they end up making a deal that will get the Senators into the pennant race. Applegate turns frumpy middle-aged Joe Boyd into young studly Joe Hardy the super player that the Senators need to pull them from the division cellar and put them on top of those "Damn Yankees".

Yes this is the book that inspired the Broadway musical "Damn Yankees".  The musical keeps the basic gist of the story and leaves out a character or two. One of the characters left out of the musical that I enjoyed reading in the book was a pitcher for the Senators who begins to suspect the truth about young Joe Hardy and tries to expose Joe as a fraud of some kind but fails.

The musical also doesn't really tell you that Lola is not just one of Applegate's subordinates for the fun of it. She had also made a deal with him to get a man to truly fall in love with her.

In 1955 when the musical "Damn Yankees" opened on Broadway a special paper flyer/wrapper (with actress Gwen Verdon in a baseball jersey, stockings, high-heels and not much else) like a cigar band was placed on the book's dust jacket. I think these were only produced in May 1955 for the musical's opening (I haven't found any good specific reliable info on this rare gem). Due to the rarity of this advertisement on the dustcover, which in themselves are somewhat of a rarity now, the copies with it on the cover are very expensive. I would love to get a copy of it, but I don't think I ever will due to the price.

Some of the later printings of the book have updated the year the story takes place from 1958 to 1964.


The Year The Yankees Lost The Pennant by Douglas Wallop 1954 W.W. Norton & Company Inc 250 pages. - *****

Source Code: DVD Review

Colter Stevens: It's the same dream, but it's different!
Christina Warren: Deep. I hope it's different. I feel the same way.

Source Code (2011) PG-13

****

WARNING: This review might contain SPOILERS!

Source Code - When I first saw trailers for this film my first reaction was the plot was similar to the main plot device for the television show Seven Days, because of the time limit of how far back the "time traveler" goes, except it isn't quite the same thing. In the show it was the technology that limited the trips to only 7 days into the past, in this movie the main character goes back to earlier in the day but is limited to 8 minutes in the past due to the "source code" which is more like going into a Matrix of some kind than a time travel machine. I also saw similarities to the show Quantum Leap starring Scott Bakula who makes a vocal appearance in this film as the main character's father in a nod to Quantum Leap. The main character or at least his mind sort of "leaps" into another character via the technology of the "source code".

Bare with me here for a moment. The "technology" or science that allows for source code traveling is more sort of a biotechnology than mechanical technology. The basic gist is that after a person is clinically dead there is still some brain activity for approximately eight minutes after death. The source code technology allows someone to tap into or "leap" into that persons final memories and allows for them to "live in" that person's final moments of life. It also allows the "leaper" to go back multiple times. They don't state a specific number of leap attempts that can be made but they seem to indicate there are limits, due to the deterioration of the dead subjects brain activity.

Jake Gyllenhaal plays Colter Stevens the protagonist a US Army helicopter pilot who last recalls being stationed in Afghanistan and the source code "leaper". He wakes up on a train as someone else, who he later learns is one of the victims on the train when it is blown up by a terrorist outside of Chicago and that it was believed to be just the beginning of a bigger terrifying plan. It was determined that the train had been bombed remotely by a former passenger on the train. Colter's mission is to find out who bombed the train and stop them before more bombs go off. Along the way he learns that he is in the body of a man named Sean Frentress and the woman who is sitting across from him is a friend of Sean's named Christina Warren (Michelle Monaghan).

After the bomb goes off Colter finds himself in a dark chamber that slightly resembles a larger version of his copter's cockpit. He learns that the isolation chamber he is in is part of some military operation. He is told he is in a place called "belegerd castle" a part of some experiment called "The Source Code" by a female Captain Goodwin (Vera Farmiga). Goodwin briefs him on his mission to locate the bomb and try to determin who put it there. Just when he thinks he knows what is going on he is sent back onboard the train to relive "his" or rather Sean's last 8 minutes. Along the way Colter meets the creator of The Source Code Project a Dr. Rutledge (Jeffrey Wright).

Colter falls in love with Christina and then his main goal is to figure out how he can save her and the other passengers. Rutledge and Goodwin inform him that stopping the bombing is NOT his mission and that he needs to concentrate on finding the bomber. Of course he does manage to find a way to save the day and change the future a bit.

I really enjoyed this film. The time limit of the traveling reminded me as I said of Seven Days. Colter's waking in the body of someone else reminded me of Quantum Leap. There is even a slight nod to the show both in the casting of Scott Bakula as Colter's father and a scene with a mirror when Colter first learns he is in another body.
Both of the main actresses Monaghan and Farmiga are beautiful and give great performances. The interaction between Monaghan and Gyllenhaal was also very good. They have a great chemistry which shows and in the extras on the DVD is talked about by the actors and the director.

Starring: Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Monaghan, Vera Farmiga

Directed by: Duncan Jones

Summit Entertainment

DVD Release Date: 26 July 2011

Region 1

1 Disc - 93 Minutes

A Recent Read Number 17

"Again Langdon forced himself to consider the implausible. If the Illuminati were still alive, and if they stole the anti-matter, what would be their intention? What would be their target?"

NOTE: This review may contain SPOILERS.

Angels & Demons by Dan Brown. I'm getting to this review very late. I read this book around December '09 to January '10. After reading it I re-watched the movie adaption of The Da Vinci Code and watched the movie of this book (I will probably point out the differences as I go along). Chronologically this book was written before The Da Vinci Code but the movies were released in reverse order and the Da Vinci Code movie claims that adventure as the main character Robert Langdon's first mystery case. That forced the producers of the movie to act as if this adventure came later.

The mystery begins with the murder of a physicist working with anti-matter experiments at the CERN (Conseil Europeen pour la Recherche Nucleaire AKA: European Organization for Nuclear Research) in Switzerland home of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Left by the body is an ambigram (an artistic depiction of a word to make it read the same way from another angle usually upside down) depicting the word Illuminati. The main character Robert Langdon is brought in because he is an expert in symbology. An odd and grisly fact about the murder is one of the scientists eyes was removed. The reason is soon discovered a container holding a piece of anti-matter was stolen from a lab that had a sophisticated retina reading security system. The big problem is the anti-matter has to be contained in a certain way, without this containment it becomes a bomb with a set time to explode, unless it is returned to it's containment system. Only two people had access from the secure lab the murdered scientist and his partner/daughter. Of course Langdon falls in love with Vittoria Vetra.The movie version changes the murder victim to being an assistant of Vittoria The movie also changed some of the other character's personalities around, making one of the characters I didn't like in the book likable in the movie.

The main goal of this adventure is to get back the anti-matter before is explodes In the meantime the Pope has recently passed away and the Vatican is in the process of electing a new Pope. One big problem the main candidates for the Papacy turn up missing. It is made known that the Illuminati are indeed alive and are responsible for the disappearance of the main candidates. Soon they start showing up dead. Langdon now has to not only race against the clock to keep the bomb from exploding but he has to help find the missing cardinals before all of them end up dead.

Like The Da Vinci Code this book digs deep into Catholic traditions and culture. It also gives some very vivid descriptions of areas of Rome and the Vatican. As part of his investigation Langdon has to gain access to the Vatican's Library vaults to research the Illuminati and follow all the clues to finding the cardinals in time. As with the other book it has a nice fast pace to it and was difficult to put down. 

As I said I read this book before seeing the film version I am glad I did because it helped to understand somethings about the movie, but as I said they did make changes to some things. It is always interesting to see a film adaptation of a book you have read. There were a few scenes in the movie that were completely different from what I had envisioned while reading the book. I think a few of them could have been done the way I imagined, but one or two of them couldn't. The ones that I thought could have been done I was a little disappointed with how the movie handled them. Oh Well.

My review of The Da Vinci Code.

Angels & Demons by Dan Brown 2000 (2006) Pocket Books 710 pages. - ****