The Quarter-Life Reviews

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Quickly approaching 40, Claire Doolittle is worried that her life has fallen into a serious rut. She can barely look at her husband Jack without picturing Ward Cleaver, the father from Leave it to Beaver. While at one time she radiated love for her husband, now she radiates resentment for the turn her marriage has taken.

While this book is enjoyable and fun to read, to someone who has never experienced marriage or motherhood-it was kind of hard to relate and to truly understand what Claire was dealing with.

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Before Norman Mailer’s death earlier this year, he had a vision to write a trilogy exploring (fictionally) the life of one of history’s most fascinating and terrifying figures-Adolf Hitler.  Unfortunately Mailer was only able to complete the first book in the trilogy.

“The Castle in the Forest” follows the Hitler family from before his parents meeting until Hitler’s graduation from school.  According to this fictionalized account of Hitler’s childhood-narrated by one of Satan’s workers-Hitler was a product of incest.

This book has quite a sexual tone, much of this leaning towards the Hitler’s family’s (fictionalized) penchant for incestuous and homosexual relationships.  Not that this is a bad thing, per say-it’s just a warning to those who might take offense.  However, there is nothing too overly graphic about this book-at least that I can recall.

Although the narrator is supposedly an underling to Satan himself, the book can be interpreted as psychological look at Hitler’s childhood, and some of his behaviors and his family members behaviors give an insight to his later behavior while dictator of Germany.

It would have been interesting to see the following two books in the series, however, just this brief glimpse into Adolf HItler’s psyche is enough.

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It seems fairly ironic that M. Night Shymalan’s latest scare fest is entitled “The Happening“…as nothing really seems to happen at all during the movie-except people committing mass suicide.  A brief synapses of the movie might look something like this:  A bit of frightened sounding dialog then cut to someone blowing their brains out…and this scene repeating itself over and over again.

Sure, the movie is good for a few gasps…a jump or two out of your seat…perhaps even a scream from the especially squimish…but that’s all the movie is.  The trailers-which have been tantalizing us for months now could definitely be classified as false advertisement.

Shymalan’s movies have definitely lost their charm, where “The Sixth Sense” could be classified as a classic “horror” flick, we’ll be lucky if we can pick up the rest of his fare in the discount bin at Walmart.  Hopefully he will rethink his methods long and hard before the next nightmare he attempts to produce.

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