frankenheimer's seconds
350857
People today, if they know who he is, berate or underappreciate the work of John Frankenheimer.  The director should have been catapulted to fame with The Manchurian Candidate, but instead the film tread too close upon the actual assassinations and subsequent paranoia of the 60's.  It was pulled from release for decades.  His masterpiece having never had existed, Frankenheimer, who always oscillated between being a premier action director and an iconoclastic arthouse director, was forced to take jobs when he could get the funding.  Under these circumstances, his productivity remains remarkable.
Seconds is key to proving his unrecognized excellence.  More or less relegated to a cult film, the film has stayed in print most likely because Rock Hudson is the star power in the film.  Those watching this film expecting Pillow Talk or Giant must have been unwittingly traumatized.  The film deals with a businessman given another identity to live out for the rest of his years.  The cinematography by the master James Wong Howe (check out Hud for proof)  never allows the viewer to settle passively into the film.  The viewer is always too close or too far, his/her vision is blurred and myopic.  And when we share Hudson's point of view, we are pulled along through his life as we share his groggy paranoia.  Hudson is excellent although one wonders if this excellence is due to the fact that his uncomfortable departure from his established "softy" roles mirrors the uncomfortable transition from one troubled life to another.  Hudson being a closeted homosexual must have understood what living a lie truly meant for he plays it astonishingly well (Doris Day surprisingly could also do thriller roles so convincingly that she avoided them in order to not become them). The rest of the cast is filled with solid B actors' performances and unknowns.  But the true kudos goes for Frankenheimer making a paranoid shocker years before it was laudable to do so.
In short, Frankenheimer may join ranks with Robert Aldrich and Bud Boetticher of being the best of the underappreciated and before-their-time directors.  But there are many true underground gems that move beneath the day-glo veneer of  1955 to 1968.  Seconds is one of those gems--unsettling at first, but worthy of seconds.
533558
Monk has done a superb job of explaining the complexities of the man and the scientist -- Oppenheimer. The reader should pay attention to the science, because even the non-scientific among us, should know enough of the technical to understand what the US faced in WWII and the destructive force of Hoover, the FBI , and Sen. McCarthy towards, not only Oppenheimer, but also many others during the 1950's. It is a terrible national tragedy that one of the greatest scientists of the world was treated so harmfully and forced to take a back seat when he was at the top of his field. We will never know what further greatness he could have accomplished. I think it is important to realize the factual and objective perspective that Mr. Monk has taken to his subject and how well documented his research has been. The younger generations will learn a great deal reading this book. Thank you, Mr. Monk.
73336
At first I thought I had wasted all this money on a broken watch because the seconds hand was glitchy.  BUT THEN I realized the seconds hand was actually sending me Morse code messages - from the future.  How many watches do that?!  One.  This one.  $72K is a small price to pay for never before seen data on black holes if you ask me.
1185245
It looks like some of them are "seconds." However, for the price, my wife can live with these.
3191724
Charles Coryell was my professor for my Ph. D. at MIT in '57. This book is a transcript of an oral interview conducted a few years later by Joan Bainbridge and edited some 50 years later still by his daughter Julie Coryell. It mainly describes his WWII work in the Manhattan Project at Oak Ridge.

I really enjoyed this fascinating book. It mentions many key people from the early days of atomic energy. There is particular detail about his interactions with Glenn Seaborg. Frank insights are given to many people including George Boyd, the Compton brothers, James Conant, Dick Dodson, Norman Elliott, James Frank, Gerhart Friedlander, Larry Glendenin, Leslie Groves, Martin Kamen, E.O. Lawrence, J.R. Oppenheimer, Linus Pauling, Isadore Perlman, Buck Rubinson, Miles Sherrill, Frank Spedding, Lewis Strauss, Nate Sugarman, Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, Tony Turkevich, and Art Wahl. I could not put it down. The book is a real contribution to history of science.
2602055
I haven't read this book yet, and can't afford to buy it, so will have to get it from the library!
I lived in south-central Wisconsin while Frank was mayor, and as I was then a teen, I knew nothing about him.  I do remember my uncle Larry Eide mentioning that he voted for Frank.
In 1963 I left Wisconsin to attend the University of North Carolina, but when I returned in 1976, I learned that he was running for President on the Socialist ticket.  I had learned enough about "sewer socialism" by that time that I resolved to meet him, and I did--in his office.  What a fine man he was.  If all politicians were, and had been, like him, the U.S. would now be utopia--instead of a cesspool (to make a "sewer" reference).
380183
Fantastic movie from 1936 showing what they envisioned could happen in the future.
The film correctly predicts World War II, however they thought the war would last for 40 years.

The conflict of Science over superstition looms large in the movie.
The movie is both timeless and relevant today, showing the utter insanity of war and of people who advocate war.
The utopia that can be achieve by man when he forbids war and instead worships science is a theme of the movie.

My favorite quote from "Things to Come"
Raymond Passworthy: Is there never to be any rest?

Oswald Cabal: Rest enough for the individual man - too much, and too soon - and we call it death.
But for Man, no rest and no ending. He must go on, conquest beyond conquest. First this little planet with its winds and ways, and then all the laws of mind and matter that restrain him. Then the planets about him and at last out across immensity to the stars. And when he has conquered all the deeps of space and all the mysteries of time, still he will be beginning.

Raymond Passworthy: But... we're such little creatures. Poor humanity's so fragile, so weak. Little... little animals.

Oswald Cabal: Little animals. If we're no more than animals, we must snatch each little scrap of happiness and live and suffer and pass, mattering no more than all the other animals do or have done. Is it this? Or that?
All the universe? Or nothingness?
Which shall it be, Which shall it be?
849318
I loved this book. It provided great insights into the where Franken came from. As a Minnesotan, I am proud to have him as a senator and hope to see him in positions of increasing power. It is funny and occasionally insightful.
466181
I thought I'd read a chapter of "Lies" before bed, just for a chuckle, but ended up finishing the thing in the wee hours.  Franken is an entertainer of course, but he writes little that is not based on readily verifiable sources.  In some cases, he does a nice outline of individual pieces of right-media criticism that us working-family folks do not have time to compile.  For me, the book was tremendously energizing.  Living through the Clinton years gave me a great distaste for any form of mass news media.  Now I feel asleep at the switch, barn closed, cows gone, whatever.  I've been missing too many stories.  The central revelation in the book, for me, was that the Bush administration has essentially no policy-making infrastructure instead deriving all ideas from the political machinery.  This gives me a starkly different view on what another four years of President Bush would be like--and rather less relative concern about the alternative, Kerry.

In addition, Franken delivers the most powerful defense I have seen of the Clinton administration's antiterrorism record, noting prominently the resistance Clinton got from a Republican Congress determined to obstruct anything the Democrat president wanted to do.  Based not on Franken but buttressed by his summary, I am forced to conclude that having the administration change parties in 2001, with an extremely sloppy handoff of the antiterrorism agenda from an "obsessed" Clinton White House to an asleep Bush administration, was a major contributor to the 9/11 plot going off without a hitch.  Do you think a Gore administration would have ignored all those early warning signs in 2001?  Clinton had been bracing for such.

I used to believe that Clinton's use of the military in foreign policy was abusive, that our armed forces were not designed and never prepared mentally to be attempting police actions and political interventions in Somalia and Bosnia.  Typical Democrat inability to understand the military.  Franken makes a good case that Clinton's moves made more sense than Bush invading Iraq again did.  And Iraq has all the feel of a disaster much bigger than Somalia.

"Lies" tries to be an entertaining book but cannot help verging on being an important book.  It's the closest we can get to powerful political criticism these days, what with the Washington media emasculated by Rove and Fleischer.  Makes me wonder how many years it will be before conservative voters will realize how badly they have been hoodwinked.  Franken does a chuckle-inducing job of laying out the conservative-media (and GOP campaign) strategy of demonizing the opposition regardless of truth.  But if conservative voters have so bought into this that they can't tolerate even discussion of other views, change will be very slow.
3775565
Split Second Solution is prescient beyond belief.  It is chilling in its before-the-fact allegorical presentation of the current political situation in the U.S.
369284
I once had a conversation with Gert Ehrlich regarding the genesis of his research work.  He joked that his career began with research on the tungsten filaments that supported the development of electronic vacuum tube technology at General Electric's flagship research lab in Schenectady NY.  He went on to observe that this research program collapsed into apocalyptic obsolescence with the advent of semiconductor electronics.  This tragic turn of events forced all those whose careers were supported by tungsten-based technology to find another line of work--and thus surface science was born--especially surface science of refractory metal surfaces!  As so Ehrlich and his colleagues streamed out of the sinking ship of Tungsten-bound electronics, manned with the modern techniques of ultra-high vacuum (UHV) learned at the feet of GE luminary Irving Langmuir!  For Ehrlich, his sanctuary was that of the isolated prairie enclave of the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana--where he assumed the position of full professor in 1968.  And so, 40-odd years later, we see what Gert Ehrlich and his colleague Grazyna Antczak have wrought!

Although the field ion microscope (FIM) images of atomic configurations are seductively beautiful, the UHV environment necessary for such experiments is a harsh mistress!  Think of the generations of graduate students and post-docs laboring to bake and outgas their UHV FIM systems (a process taking about a week) only to burn out the filament on the first attempt at depositing adatoms on the FIM sample!  Think of the thousands upon thousands of FIM images recorded--and each one just to determine the position of a single diffusing adatom.  Think of all of the patient waiting while the adatom diffuses a few atomic steps while the tip is annealed!  It is intimidating to contemplate the degree of tedious observation, equipment repair, and troubleshooting required for these experiments!

Nevertheless, and in spite of the tragedy of wasted youth laboring in Midwestern oblivion, this book is wonderfully beguiling!  The pioneering FIM surface diffusion measurements of Ehrlich and Hudda for the W(211) plane in 1966 were refined over the course of later investigations (p. 211-212, ref. 82), first by Graham and Ehrlich in 1975 (ref. 84) and later by Flahive and Graham in 1980 (ref. 85)--with the latter revealing a slight dependence of the activation energy on the width of the plane.  Senft and Ehrlich (pp. 124-127, refs. 169-171) were even able to show that diffusing adatoms were able to execute acrobatic jumps that actually soared over adjacent surface bonding sites!  John Wrigley (p. 29, refs. 28,29; p. 90, ref. 47) even used Rob Chamber's specially-designed atom probe (p. 28, ref. 27) to discover that diffusing adatoms could exchange with those (of different elemental composition) constituting the surface.

The technique of scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) invented by Nobel laureates Rohr and Binnig in the the early 1980's were later joined with the FIM techniques developed by Erwin Muller in the mid 1950's to complete this magnum opus.  The authors review of atomic imaging techniques is very comprehensive--they even see fit to observe that an early version of STM was developed by Russ Young in 1972 (pp. 31,60, ref. 45), a fact that seems generally known to only Young's contemporary fellow scientists at the National Bureau of Standards (now NIST) in Gaithersburg MD.

One final and ironic observation is that even the semiconductor world eventually looked to the work of Ehrlich and Schwoebel on metallic diffusion near a surface step in order to better understand the growth of electronic device layers.  I feel certain that this book, and the hundred and hundreds of works sited at the end each chapter, will be aggressively mined for the rest of this century and beyond!
2163801
Rock Hudson is exceptional in his role in "Seconds".  Disillusioned with his lot in life, a 51-year-old bank employee seeks a change via "the company", a mysterious organization that can completely alter a person's physical exterior, right down to brand-new fingerprints.  This 51-year-old businessman is transformed into the youthful Tony Wilson (Hudson).  Mr. Wilson very soon discovers that his new life is not at all better than the one he just left behind.

This picture plays very, very much like an episode of Rod Serling's Twilight Zone TV series.  In fact, there IS a "Zone" program that is nearly identical as far as content [entitled "The Trade-ins", where an elderly couple grapple with the mighty life-changing decision of whether to trade in their bodies for younger models].

"Seconds" offers many good performances.  In addition to Rock's stellar outing, look for veteran actors Will Geer (as the head man of the nameless "company") and Murray Hamilton (as a fellow "reborn").

I had never quite been able to accept Rock Hudson in any roles other than the lighter, fluffier stuff .... until I saw this movie!  He was commanding in every scene, especially the very emotional final reel, during which he nearly bursts a blood vessel or two in a struggle with "company" doctors.  This surely must be Rock's finest dramatic performance.

Watch for some unique camera angles and unusual trick shots here as well.  It's an unsettling hour & three-quarters, but worth the trip.

The next time you wish you could have "seconds" in life .... you may want to think twice, and watch this picture!

Some Facts & Figures..............

"Seconds", filmed in 1966 (premiered in theaters on October 5th, '66).
Black and White.
107 minutes.
Directed by:  John Frankenheimer.
A Paramount Release.
Rated:  R  (some nudity).
392726
This short book is neither scholarly nor a definitive biography of Bill Buckley, the father of modern conservatism in America. Nonetheless, it is the first of what I hope are several books about this wonderful man who died at his desk at the age of 82 in 2008.

Buckley left a voluminous oeuvre: 50 books of both fiction and non-fiction, 5,600 newspaper columns, and 1,500 episodes of 'Firing Line' (his hour-long weekly TV show that ran for 33 years, 1966-1999). He was an editor (and founder of National Review, a fortnightly magazine that survives him), author, columnist, sailor, raconteur, politician (he ran unsuccessfully for mayor in New York City in 1965), and, above all, a thinker who changed the course of history. Without Buckley, there would not have been Goldwater. And without Goldwater, there would not have been Reagan.

He brought together under one roof the three major strands of contemporary American conservatism: economic conservatives, social conservatives, and anti-communists. Early on (1962), Buckley read the John Birch Society out the conservative movement; had he not done so, this reviewer believes that conservatism would have never attained the intellectual respectability that it has.

Central to his persona was his unwavering devotion to Catholicism. The author of this biography argues persuasively that Buckley's faith had a leavening effect on his personality. He was a fierce and menacing combatant in the marketplace of ideas, but he didn't have a mean bone in his body. Liberals--except for the lunatic, Gore Vidal--mostly loved him. He had a towering intellect. His mastery of English rivaled H.L. Mencken's.

He was the master of the pithy phrase. The night before the 1965 election for mayor in New York, he was asked what he would do if he awakened the morning after and found out he had won; said Buckley: "Demand a recount." In the spring of 1966, I attended a talk he gave in Glendale, California. Afterward, I elbowed my way up to him and asked him to sign my program. As he did so, I asked, "Mr. Buckley, do you expect to seek elective office again?" He froze in mid-signature, looked up as if to the heavens, then gazed down at me, and said: "Not unless my Cre-a-TOR deems it necessary!"

Even those who are familiar with Buckley, as I was, will find this book accessible, informative, and entertaining. It is a well-written chronicle of Buckley's life. I recommend it to those who enjoy political biographies, to right-of-center conservatives, and to those who seek to understand how the Republican Party became the party of ideas. As Reagan proved, ideas change the world. America would be a different and not nearly so great a place had Buckley not graced us with his elegant presence.
1457254
Subtitled "Frank Oppenheimer and the World He Made Up", this is a biography of the brother of the more famous Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who help develop the atomic bomb and was later stripped of his security clearing during the witchhunts of the McCarthy era.  Frank was also a physicist and played a smaller role in developing the atomic bomb, but he was also persecuted in the 1950s and lost his professorship at a leading university.  His story, however, is a much more positive one than his famous brother.

The author of this book, K.D. Cole obviously adored this man.  She met him when she was a young writer in the early 1970s and he was just developing his world-renowned Exploratorium museum in San Francisco.  He inspired her to learn more about science and physics and, through the years, she has written seven books and numerous articles on scientific topics.

The first part of the book deals with the Oppenheimer brothers and the Atomic bomb.  This was familiar to me especially since I had recently read "American Prometheus" which is the story of Robert.  This book puts more focus on Frank however and it is especially interesting that after Frank could no longer teach anymore, he and his wife and two children bought a cattle ranch in Colorado.  This was a whole new lifestyle for them and they all worked hard physically to keep the ranch going.  But Frank had a great need to teach the love of science to young people.  At first he taught children in a one-room school house.  Later, he became a high-school science teacher in his little town.  He was wonderful at inspiring his students, many of whom went on to become scientists in later life.

In the 1970s Frank and his family moved to San Francisco, where he was the impetus for a new kind of groundbreaking museum, the Exploratorium.  This was a place where science came to life and museum goers were encouraged to touch, feel and experiment.  It took a while but the museum is a now a tremendous success and, even though Frank passed away more than 20 years, ago, it stands as a testimony to the greatness and the vision of the man.

At 327 pages, this book is packed full of the essence of who Frank Oppenheimer was. Not only did I enjoy it as a good read, I also learned a lot about science, and physics in particular.  One doesn't have to be a scientist to enjoy this book.  Having an open and inquiring mind is enough.
3452613
This graphic novel, subtitled "J. Robert Oppenheimer, Leo Szilard, and the Political Science of the Atomic Bomb", is a good quick read. It's hard for my generation, raised with the fall of the Soviet Union, to appreciate how stupendous the atomic bomb really was. But this book does a great job of making the history of that period accessible. The book is not that short-around 200 pages-but, due to its graphic nature, is very easy to read.

Fallout is really divided into two major sections. The first is concerned with the idea and creation of the atomic bomb, starting from Szilard's ideas in the 1930s and ending with the Trinity test in 1945. The second is concerned with the inquiry into Oppenheimer's advisory position to the Atomic Energy Commission, which occured in the political climate of the 1950s. Both these are worth reading, but the second one, which has much more text-portions of letters are printed along with the graphics-is a chilling reminder of the craziness of that time.

With 6 different authors listed on the cover (and more in the back pages), the illustrations change often enough that you do have to pay attention to know who is speaking. Additional difficulties arise because there are so many characters. I think the book would be stronger if one author had been responsible for all of the graphic content because the characters would be easier to keep track of.

One very nice aspect of this book is the end notes. At the back of the book, extensive text outlines what parts are true and what parts are surmise. As the front of the book saysm "many of the quotes and incidents that you'll think most likely to be made up are the best documented facts." For example, Teller, one of the scientists, denies his similarity to Dr Strangelove, and another, Szilard, devises his own cancer treatment using radiation.

All in all, if you're in for a light introduction to the history of one of the heaviest subjects, Fallout is a good choice.
2030250
Read "One Second After," same Author, first.  Very detailed and well researched.
609959
I rented this movie merely because I was in the mood for an action movie.  "Year Of The Gun" is one of the more passable films that Frankenheimer has made in recent years.
In 1978, Italy is politically divided over the terrorist group The Red Brigades.  An American journalist(Andrew McCarthy) is writing a fictional novel about The Red Brigades and the storyline coincidentally presages the actual terrorist plans of the group.  The Brigades steal a manuscript of the novel and consider McCarthy to be a threat.  As a result, McCarthy is on the run for his own life.
"Year Of The Gun" is a modest and unmemorable but decent Frankenheimer thriller.  The acting is mostly wooden and the story has some logic problems.  The film also features a very poorly executed bank robbery-sequence.  As a Frankenheimer picture, "YOTG" doesn't come close to matching such great films as "Seven Days In May," "The Manchurian Candidate," and "Black Sunday."  Nevertheless, "YOTG" actually manages to be one of the more decent thrillers that Frankenheimer has made in recent years.  "YOTG" is only slightly inferior to "Ronin."  The movie generates a reasonable amount of suspense.  The picture also has none of the blatant ludicrousness that has plagued many of Frankenheimer's post-1960s films.
"YOTG" is a forgettable but decent time killer.