A cheerful, functional reference work that will appeal to film and television fans.
Kanbar (The Tragedy of Moses, 2016, etc.), a film-industry consultant, offers a short guide to the ever expanding world of online streaming.
Streaming platforms have transformed the way that people watch movies, causing theater attendance to dip, ticket prices to rise, and Hollywood to generally panic, according to the author. The upside? It’s never been easier to watch movies from the comfort of one’s own home. For cinephiles who want to take advantage of the new abundance but don’t know where to start, Kanbar offers this slim book on all things streaming. He begins with a comprehensive breakdown of the necessary hardware—televisions, sound bars, media streamers, routers, and modems—complete with rundowns of options in each category and recommendations of the best products. The author also introduces the various streaming—aka video on demand—formats. These include transactional (specifically, rental) VOD, such as iTunes, Fandango Now, or Redbox On Demand; subscription services such as Netflix, Hulu Plus, and HBO Now; and advertising-supported VOD, such as Crackle, Roku Channel, and, in part, Vudu. Kanbar makes special mention of services catering to specific genre tastes, providing lists of those that stream public-domain films, documentaries, classics, horror, noir, and Bollywood movies. There are helpful hints, including tech troubleshooting tips (“An Ethernet connector will often produce better results than a wireless connector”) and a glossary of streaming-specific terms: “HFR (high frame rate). Refers to a frame rate higher than the usual 24-frames-per-second rate, resulting in a smoother playback.” It’s all accompanied by numerous interstitial photographs from classic Hollywood movies. Kanbar’s guide is compact and practical, fitting a large amount of information into just over 100 pages. The prose often takes the form of lists or boilerplate descriptions, but it occasionally gets across the warmth of the author’s personality, as when he describes public-domain films: “Most were released prior to 1960 and some may even go back to the days before sound. But they are free, so what the heck!” There’s also a list of Kanbar’s personal streaming-series recommendations, including Netflix’s Ozark and HBO’s The Night Of. The book appears to be aimed at older readers, who may be just taking their first steps into the world of streaming, but there’s relevant information here for viewers at every experience level. In addition to explaining the basics of how streaming works, the author goes far beyond the obvious options of Netflix and Amazon Prime, alerting readers to boutique services, such as BritBox (which focuses on TV shows of the United Kingdom) or Uncle Earl’s Classic Television (for public-domain films). The book is specific to 2019, and some of the details regarding subscription rates and streaming technology will no doubt continue to change as time goes by; hopefully, the author will provide updated editions in the future. With so much available out there to watch, any bit of direction is welcome, and Kanbar is thankfully willing to be an enthusiastic tour guide.
A cheerful, functional reference work that will appeal to film and television fans.Pub Date: Dec. 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-578-41933-6
Page Count: 108
Publisher: ELBAR Associates, LLC
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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