This book has been in my collection for well over a decade. Until recently, I had only flipped through it to read excerpts from the script.
Two days ago, I was inspired to pull it from my bookshelf and read the surrounding material—preface, foreword, introductions, essays, and reviews—by such notable names as Ralph J. Gleason (renown music critic and founding editor of Rolling Stone magazine), film scholar Richard Brown, Charles Champlin (retired arts editor and columnist from the LA Times), Roger Ebert (practically a household name as film critics go), TIME magazine film critic Richard Corliss, author and historian Aljean Harmetz, and Umberto Eco, professor of semiotics at University of Bologna.
Eco and Corliss provide the most in-depth analyses of Casablanca with Eco delving into the myriad symbolisms and subtexts of the film, while Corliss focuses on the characterizations, relationships, and dialogue.
All of that—in addition to the brilliant script started by Julius and Philip Epstein and finished as breakneck speed by the then untried Howard Koch—and the scattered still shots from the film, make this 50th anniversary edition a treasure for any Casablanca fan and/or film scholar.
Through a gaping hole in one of the lowest tunnels of the New York City subway system emerges a horde of bloodthirsty reptilian creatures from another realm who begin terrorizing and slaughtering everyone from the city’s homeless “Mole People” to subway passengers and finally, the transit police and even the city’s Emergency Services Unit. In addition to the attacks, strange glyphs are carved into the stone and metal walls of the subway system seemingly by incredibly sharp blades… or possibly claws.
For as long as he could remember, young Thorby had been a slave—until he lands on Jubbal, one of the Nine Worlds of the Sargon Empire, and is purchased by a beggar named Baslim. It is not long before Thorby realizes that Baslim is no simple mendicant, but a spy and one who despises the slave trade. Once Baslim educates Thorby in reading, writing, mathematics, and even a bit of espionage, he frees Thorby from slavery and adopts him as his son.
war. To prepare for this, Hugh Farnham constructed a fully stocked bomb shelter beneath his house years before. On a night when Hugh’s daughter, Karen, invites her friend Barbara to the house, the local radio station in their Midwestern town begins transmitting warnings of a possible nuclear strike. Hugh’s son, Duke, is skeptical that either side would commit such an act of suicide. He considers the bomb shelter an overreaction on the part of his father—until the radio station issues its first bomb warning during a round of bridge (a game that features prominently throughout the story).