Epinions Recent Reviews for a_r_egerton

Life in New Plymouth

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 22:00:40 GMT

rating: 3/5 by: Epinions Author a_r_egerton - How to Live on Mars: A Trusty Guide to Surviving and Thriving on the Red Planet is a hoot. This science fiction satire takes a swipe at just about everything: NASA, science fiction, travel guides, etc. The central conceit and joke is that...

The Making of a Superhero

Thu, 3 Sep 2009 21:40:52 GMT

rating: 2/5 by: Epinions Author a_r_egerton - Becoming Batman: The Possibility of a Superhero has a fun premise. It asks the question, could Batman, or somebody like him, really exist? Most superheroes, of course, could not exist in the real world. Humanoid aliens like...

Spencer's Famous Library Cat

Wed, 29 Jul 2009 17:56:50 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author a_r_egerton - Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World is a charming story about a cat that did just that. As a tiny, eight-week old kitten, he was dropped into the book return slot of the Spencer Public Library on a bitterly cold...

Science in the Movies

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 18:13:19 GMT

rating: 3/5 by: Epinions Author a_r_egerton - Hollywood Science is about just that: the portrayal of science and scientists in the movies. The author, Sidney Perkowitz, is a physicist and film buff. He devotes the bulk of his book to discussing common movie plots: alien invasions, natural disasters,...

A Quiet Getaway

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 16:38:53 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author a_r_egerton - Cape May is a resort town in the southernmost part of New Jersey, where the Delaware Bay meets the Atlantic Ocean. It has a year-round population of roughly 4,000-- and can have as many as ten times that during the peak of the summer. It was named after...

The Greatest Superhero Story Ever Told

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 20:21:58 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author a_r_egerton - Once upon a time, superheroes were infallible. They always defeated the villain, always did the right thing, and everybody trusted them. Then, in the early 1960's, Stan Lee of Marvel Comics decided that he wanted to write about superheroes that he (and...

Not Your Father's Star Trek

Sun, 24 May 2009 19:19:26 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author a_r_egerton - Star Trek starts off with a bang: A Federation starship is being brutally attacked by a vengeful, time-traveling Romulan warlord called Nero (Eric Bana). Among the survivors are the infant James T. Kirk and his mother. The film then jumps about a...

Murder Most Foul in Medieval Cambridge

Tue, 27 Jan 2009 23:07:57 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author a_r_egerton - Mistress of the Art of Death is the first in what looks like a promising mystery series. (The second book, A Serpent's Tale, came out in January, 2008.) The title refers to the book's protagonist, Adelia, who is a "doctor of the dead,"...

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button: The Fascinating Tale of the Man Who Grew Young

Fri, 16 Jan 2009 18:28:20 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author a_r_egerton - The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which is loosely based on a 1920's short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, tells of a man who ages in reverse. He is born in the body of a decrepit old man and dies an infant roughly eighty years later. Amongst...

The Spirit: One from Film Noir, Two from Comicbooks

Tue, 6 Jan 2009 23:33:53 GMT

rating: 2/5 by: Epinions Author a_r_egerton - The Spirit is based on the 1940's comic by Will Eisner. It tells of a policeman, Denny Cole, (Gabriel Macht) who was killed in the line of duty and has returned from the dead to continue protecting the citizens of "Central City." The...

The Olympics of Death

Sat, 6 Dec 2008 12:40:36 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author a_r_egerton - The Hunger Games is the first book in a science fiction series by Suzanne Collins. It is set in a grim future in which the United States has been devestated by a series of disasters, and a new country, Panem, has emerged from the wreckage...

At Sea with Girl Pirates

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 00:59:16 GMT

rating: 1/5 by: Epinions Author a_r_egerton - First off, a confession: I'm a sucker for adventure stories with strong female protagonists. I loved the movie Aliens, with its tough-as-nails Ripley, who duked it out with the queen bug at the film's end. So a book about female pirates...

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix: This Phoenix Flies

Wed, 1 Aug 2007 11:43:26 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author a_r_egerton - The makers of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Director David Yates and screenwriter Michael Goldberg, gave themselves a novel challenge: turning the longest Harry Potter book (870 pages) into the shortest (so far) movie (2 hours, 18...

Love and Death in the Middle Ages

Tue, 24 Jul 2007 23:45:11 GMT

rating: 1/5 by: Epinions Author a_r_egerton - The Illuminator has a fascinating setting: England during the time of John Wycliffe and the Peasants' Revolt in the late 14th Century. Wycliffe was a reform-minded priest who wanted to curb the more extreme abuses of the powerful and corrupt...

Endless Production

Sun, 29 Jan 2006 19:55:24 GMT

rating: 3/5 by: Epinions Author a_r_egerton - The Producers has an odd pedigree: it's a film based on a musical comedy that in turn was based on another film. The original film was one of Mel Brooks' earlier comedies, 1968's The Producers. In all three, the plot remains the same:...

This Goblet is Half-Full

Thu, 24 Nov 2005 14:26:50 GMT

rating: 3/5 by: Epinions Author a_r_egerton - Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire tells of Harry Potter's fourth year at Hogwarts. During that year, Hogwarts is slated to host the Triwizard Tournament, which pits wizards and witches from three different schools against each other. The...

Magical Forces Unleashed in the Modern World

Tue, 18 Jan 2005 02:07:35 GMT

rating: 3/5 by: Epinions Author a_r_egerton - Magic Time will seem quite familiar to anybody who has played RPG's like Shadowrun or Rifts. As in those games, a mysterious force causes global catastrophe and alarming transformations in some of the survivors, who come to resemble...

Return to Bilalistan

Tue, 28 Sep 2004 22:39:56 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author a_r_egerton - Zulu Heart, the sequel to Lion's Blood, begins about three years after the end of Lion's Blood. By now, Kai and Aidan are in their mid-twenties and have families. Aidan is the leader of a village of freed slaves living in the...

Raising Your Dinosaur

Fri, 20 Aug 2004 21:37:48 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author a_r_egerton - How to Keep Dinosaurs is a delightful parody of pet books by Robert Mash, an English zoologist. The central conceit, of course, is that dinosaurs are still alive and can be domesticated. The smaller ones can be kept as pets, while the larger...

An Entertaining Look at the Future

Thu, 1 Jan 2004 20:07:24 GMT

rating: 3/5 by: Epinions Author a_r_egerton - The Future is Wild is a companion volume to the miniseries of the same name that has appeared on both the Discovery Channel and Animal Planet. Like the show, it is based on the speculations of scientists from many different disciplines, including...

The Grim Reality of a Romantic Image

Tue, 8 Jul 2003 19:45:01 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author a_r_egerton - In Savage Girls and Wild Boys: A History of Feral Children, Michael Newton describes the fe...

Come With Me to Bilalistan....

Mon, 10 Jun 2002 01:08:28 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author a_r_egerton - Steven Barnes' Lion's Blood tells of an alternate Earth in which the dominant world power is Africa, rather than Europe or North America. Africa's rise to power had begun when Socrates and other Greek philosophers left Athens for Egypt, while...

"The Wounded"

Sat, 16 Feb 2002 00:09:28 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author a_r_egerton - "The Wounded" introduces viewers to the Cardassians, those smarmy, unctuous bullies who had been at war with the Federation until recently. They are jerks with an extremely legitimate grievance, however: a Federation starship captain has gone rogue and...

A Tale of London

Fri, 30 Nov 2001 20:48:43 GMT

rating: 3/5 by: Epinions Author a_r_egerton - This is a repost of my very first review. I've reworked it and improved it--I hope.

The historical novel London tells the story of the titular city from the time of Julius Caesar up to the 1990's, and also follows the fortunes...

"Heart of Glory"

Thu, 8 Nov 2001 19:03:52 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author a_r_egerton - "Heart of Glory" is the first of many episodes that would focus on Worf and/or Klingons. In it, the Enterprise encounters a ship that has been severely damaged in battle. When a rescue team beams over to investigate, they find that the only...