The Core Dump

Joe McNally is a shiny golden god of photography, and in The Moment It Clicks: Photography secrets from one of the world’s top shooters he shows off his work and tells you how he got there. The result is a book that is gorgeous, informative, and sometimes touching. McNally’s voice is friendly, and the behind-the-scenes stories he tells reveals how he approaches photography and the choices he makes to get his amazing images.

The Moment It Clicks is not a very technical book—McNally doesn’t talk much about f-stops and pixels, but that is by design: the book is really about how to see like one of the greatest photographers working today.

The format is basically that McNally talks about a situation and how he approached it, then shows an image that illustrates his point. It’s very effective.

If you’re at all interested in photography, The Moment It Clicks belongs on your bookshelf or your coffee table.

Highly recommended.

Thirteen is a splendid near-future thriller with shades of noir and cyberpunk. Richard K. Morgan has created a complex and unfortunately believable dystopia in which humans are being genetically engineered to function better in certain roles, such as the title’s variant thirteen, engineered to be better soldiers.

The plot is well constructed and fast, with plenty of mayhem amid the question of what makes somebody more or less human, and Morgan’s world creation is first-rate.

Thirteen is about as good as it gets. Highly recommended.

Note that this is a very graphical novel both when it comes to violence and sex.

Resident Evil: Extinction: The world is overrun with flesh-eating zombies and the Evil Corporation is lurking in underground bunkers working on a way to exploit the zombies. And on the surface Milla Jovovich runs around helping human survivors by chopping zombies to bits.

It’s well made and has some interesting scenes, but in general there’s not much of a “there” there. Still, not too painful to watch.

Gaaaarrrr!

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull: Spielberg does to Indiana Jones what Lucas did to Star Wars.

The movie has some nice chase sequences, but the plot is infernally dumb and the cast is phoning it in.

Sad, really.

I am Legend: Will Smith puts in a solid performance, and the CGI is well done, but apart from that it’s one of those frustrating movies that could have been great if they had taken the concept all the way instead of punking out.

Am I the only one who thinks the Darkseekers moved exactly like the robots in I, Robot?

Battlestar Galactica: Razor: It’s a bit mystifying why this was created as a film instead of being two episodes in the regular run of the show. That being said, it’s solid and provides an interesting look at the Cylons as they used to be. Getting more of the back story of the Battlestar Pegasus makes the movie a given for fans of the series.

The Kingdom: Intense thriller about a terrorist hunt in Saudi Arabia. Even dares touch on some of the, ahem, “issues” regarding the Saudis and global terrorism. Well worth watching.

Revolver: Extremely frustrating film that likes to think of itself as very, very clever indeed while it has its finger up its nose to the knuckle.

Take MTV-style editing, some very interesting camera work, add in the kind of metaphysical musings that go on in freshman dorm rooms late at night, and a plot that’s … well … infantile, and what you end up with is the kind of movie that gives you a headache.

Subtitled The Secret Lives of Driven Kids, Alexandra Robbins’s The Overachievers follows a selection of students at Whitman, a high school in Maryland, during a year of their lives.

It’s a deeply disconcerting book about children and young adults under intense pressure from their parents, themselves, and their schools, all with the goal of getting into the “right” college and thus collect a golden key to success in life.

Robbins writes with verve and does a great job of bringing the children to life on the page. It’s a very easy book to read.

The tales of children whose parents pressure psychologists to falsely diagnose their children with learning disabilities so they can get more time on exams, rampant cheating, suicides, and above all the sleep deprived lives of the students as they build up their resumes for their college applications are like something out of a nightmare.

If you’re a parent, you should read this book. If you’re at all interested in the state of young people today, you should read this book.

Granted, focusing exclusively on the overachievers leaves out a lot of other high school experiences, but it is chilling.

Related Core Dump reviews:

The Price of Privilege

Woken Furies is the third installment in Richard Morgan’s Takeshi Kovacs saga, and according to Richard Morgan it will be last. If this is so, the series goes out with a bang, bringing together a lot of the world building hints Morgan has strewn around in the first two novels, Altered Carbon, and Broken Angels.

A brilliant mesh of cyberpunk and noir, this is one of the best novels I’ve read this year—smart, ferocious, and with a tight plot, it is one intense ride.

While Woken Furies can be read as a stand-alone, it is much more fulfilling if you’ve read the previous two installments.

Get on board the Kovacs train. You won’t be disappointed.

Read more Core Dump Richard Morgan reviews.

The Dragon Never Sleeps is prime Glen Cook—a huge, literally galaxy-spanning plot, gritty realism, and hastily sketched but interesting characters.

As with his Dread Empire series, Cook throws the reader right into the mess of things without much explanation, leaving it up to you to figure out what’s really going on, and introduces an army of characters and motivations without ado. The Dragon Never Sleeps is one of those novels you absolutely can not skim; it requires attention if it’s going to make any kind of sense.

It’s always great to see an author working in the genre resist the urge to stretch things out—in the hands of pretty much any other author, The Dragon Never Sleeps would have been at minimum three 800-page bricks, but Cook keeps it under 300 dense but rewarding pages.

Granted, Cook is a bit of an acquired taste, and anybody new to him should start out with the brilliant Black Company series, but for the fan this novel delivers.

Recommended.

Glasshouse takes place in the post-singularity far future where people have the ability to change their bodies any way they like, back themselves up at will, and all the other post-singularity goodies.

The novel takes a while to get going, and at first it’s a bit hard to figure out what kind of drama Charles Stross can mine from an environment where, by definition, nothing bad can really happen.

Once the characters find themselves in the “Glasshouse” of the title, though, the action and the suspense become fast and furious, and Glasshouse settles in to become a creepy meditation on the psychology of memory and gender roles.

Once you have the ability to edit your memories, can you really trust yourself?

The ending feels a little bit abrupt and neat, but apart from that, Glasshouse features strong and interesting characters, impressive world-building, and tense action sequences.

Highly recommended.

Cruel Zinc Melodies continues Glen Cook’s often wonderful Garrett, P.I. series, a heady mash-up of old-school hard-boiled private investigator fiction and swords-and-sorcery magic.

Unfortunately, Cook phoned this one in. The plot is all over the place with way too many subplots that never gel, and the laconic “P.I. voice” comes dangerously close to a parody of the genre rather than a homage.

Only for the hard-core fan of the series.

One in 25 Americans is a sociopath. This means, essentially, that they are incapable of feeling love or connectedness and exist in an emotional vacuum where the only thing that matters is to “win” over other people. The damage they cause the other 96% of the population is incalculable.

Martha Stout’s The Sociopath Next Door provides a chilling look into the minds of sociopaths as well as ways to recognize them and above all how to deal with them.

Stout uses exceptionally well written composites of case files from her years of experience as a practicing psychologist to drive home the damage sociopaths cause and how their victims have learned to cope.

The Sociopath Next Door is an important work, and one that deserves to be widely read.

Highly recommended.

David Simon is one of the creators of the fantastic HBO show The Wire. He wrote Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets after spending 1988 observing three squads of Baltimore homicide detectives. Simon’s unprecedented access to the detectives as they go about their jobs resulted in a book so tight and well-written it’s sometimes hard to believe it’s not fiction.

Not only does Simon capture the lingo and banter of the detectives, but he also finds empathy and raw emotion in the most unlikely places.

As a bonus for fans of The Wire, one of the many classic scenes from that show, where the detectives use a photocopier as a fake polygraph machine, is straight from Homicide.

Even though now 20 years old, Homicide is a gripping read. It is hard to imagine that the business of murder has changed all that much in the intervening years.