Happy Thursday, everyone! It's hot as blazes in most of the US right now so stay safe and hydrated and remember alcohol and coffee will dehydrate you, so watch it. But let's get to thrift store finds I want to highlight this week!
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I'm a geek from the United States in my 40s, so absolutely I was in the demographic for Mystery Science Theater 3000, a show that instilled in me a love of interesting trash. So I was absolutely in the can for this very fun book about, well, that it says on the tin. Michael Adams spending a year watching the worst moves he can find and rating them on his own personal grading system. Sometimes themes emerge and sometimes you also get a nice day of him watching Bob Clark movies, which means subjecting his wife and infant daughter to Rhinestone and Baby Geniuses in a row.
And seriously, if you've never seen Rhinestone (and I can't quite recommend you ever actually do it) it is....well, it's something. Taxi driver Sylvester Stallone gets recruited into a bet with Dolly Parton that she can turn him into a country star at...New York's hottest country-western bar? It's a truly bizarre movie.
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A 1952 science-fiction satire of...advertising? I'm kind of fascinated at the obsession in the '50s and '60s with the advertising business, something that has subsided since then (and why the one exception, Mad Men, almost had to be set as a period piece). But hey, Pohl is usually a good bet and had a nice long career (he only passed away in the Aughts) that is worth checking out. And I kind of love this John Berkey; Berkey, who passed away in 2008, specialized in exactly the kind of giant spaceship art that really calls to me.
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A few years ago, there was a new, updated edition of John Jay Osborn Jr.'s novel The Paper Chase, based on his experiences as a law student at Harvard in the '60s. Later turned into a very excellent movie and a Showtime/PBS series that are all very worth your time. So I read that at the time and decides to pick up this book by Chicago attorney and novelist Scott Turow, who went to Harvard Law about a decade later. And boy, I cannot recommend enough that you read these in sequence. Because it's fascinating to see the differences in their experiences, especially in who their classmates are. In Osborn's time, Harvard Law was overwhelmingly male and white. It's still a lot of that in Turow's time, but it's obviously very much changing and becoming just a bit more diverse. And also, both books are really very good in their ways and perspectives. We all can joke about the weirdness of Harvard and their ilk for how they're a very particular slice of American society, for better or for worse, but it is kind of interesting to see how they're represented.
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My recommendation this week is about as wholesome as you could possibly imagine but to hell with it, I really liked it.
Ron and Clint Howard doing a joint memoir about their experiences with their family of actors from Oklahoma, their lives as child actors and their disparate experiences as a character actor and as a quite good director? Hell yes. But then it gets better because a lot of this is them slightly disagreeing with each other about what happened or because they're about 5 years apart in age and have different memories about family stuff. It's a lot of fun, has an absolutely amazing photo of Ron and Cheryl Howard's wedding in 1975 that includes Henry Winkler with a moustache that has to be seen to be believed, and then finding out that of all poeople Dan Brown suggested the format of the book. It's a damn delight.
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