Posts in Books/Movies

The cover of Ralph's Secret Weapon by Steven Kellogg, featuring a small young boy playing bassoon with a large green sea dragon behind him with its mouth open
May 21, 2012

Ralph’s Secret Weapon

As I dig out from the end-of-the-semes­ter crunch, I see that I have start­ed quite a few blog posts in the last cou­ple of months with­out fin­ish­ing any of them. So while I get my act back togeth­er, here’s a repost from a pre­vi­ous incar­na­tion of my site: I don’t nor­mal­ly read chil­dren’s books, but Ralph’s Secret Weapon mer­it­ed an excep­tion. The book’s main char­ac­ter is unique (as far as I can tell) amongst char­ac­ters in chil­dren’s books: Ralph plays the bassoon. I don’t recall exact­ly how I became aware of the exis­tence of this book. I think that it may […]
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October 14, 2011

Never Cry Wolf

Nev­er Cry Wolf is a 1983 film adap­ta­tion of Far­ley Mowat’s 1963 book of the same name. The film fea­tures Charles Mar­tin Smith as Tyler (a fic­tion­al­ized ver­sion of Mowat), a young biol­o­gist sent to study the impact of wolves on the cari­bou pop­u­la­tion in north­ern Cana­da. Tyler dis­cov­ers that the wolves sub­sist main­ly on small mam­mals, and that their rep­u­ta­tion as ruth­less killers of larg­er ani­mals is com­plete­ly unfounded. A while ago some­one (I can’t remem­ber who now — tell me if it was you) sug­gest­ed that I watch Nev­er Cry Wolf because it promi­nent­ly fea­tures a bas­soon. This […]
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