Viola Davis plays the long-suffering wife of Troy Maxson (Denzel Washington) in August Wilson’s Fences. Set in 1950s Pittsburgh, Troy Maxson and his friend, Bono (played by Buffalo actor Stephen McKinley Henderson) are garbage men trying to make it in a racist society. Troy is challenging the policy that only white men can drive garbage trucks while blacks have to life the garbage cans. Troy has issues with the son of his first marriage, Lyons. Lyons (played by Russell Hornsby) rejects Troy’s offers of getting him a job picking up garbage. Lyons opts for playing guitar. Troy’s other son, Cory (played by Jovan Adepo) finds himself blocked by his father when a College Recruiter wants to offer him an athletic scholarship. Troy is against it. As in most August Wilson plays, the character clash over decisions they make. The movie version is a tad longer than the play version because of the addition of a couple of scenes. Viola Davis should win an Oscar for her role in Fences. GRADE: B+

I’ve always been a fan of George Salter’s artwork on magazine covers and paperback covers. Just by chance, I discovered a copy of Classic Book Jackets: The Deign Legacy of George Salter and I had to have it. This volume was published by the Princeton Architectural Press in 2005 but it complete evaded my Book Radar. Milton Glaser’s informative FOREWORD provides a fascinating history of Salter’s career from his work in Germany and his later work in the United States. Thomas S. Hansen made some great choices in the artwork he includes in this book. Obviously not all of Salter’s work could be included in this book, but there are plenty of great color reproductions of his artwork here. If you’re a fan of magazine and paperback artwork, you’ll want to check out a copy of Classic Book Jackets. Marvelous collection of great George Salter artwork! GRADE: A
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Foreword by Milton Glaser
Introduction
Salter’s Berlin Years
From Berlin to New York: The 1930s and 1940s
Designs of the 1950s and 1960s
Appendix A: George Salter’s German Designs for the German Book Market, 1922-1934
Appendix B: George Salter’s Designs for the American Book Market, 1934-1967
Notes
Bibliography
Index

After last Sunday’s exciting Playoff games (the Green Bay Packers vs. Dallas Cowboys scored the highest ratings in NFL Playoff history!) we’re down to the Final Four. Aaron Rodgers and the Packers are 4-point underdogs at Atlanta. Everyone is predicting this will be a high-scoring game (the Vegas OVER/UNDER on this game is 60 points, a NFL postseason record!). The second game of the day will be a slugfest. Steeler’s coach, Mike Tomlin, called the Patriots “assholes.” One of Tomlin’s players streamed his coach’s comments live on FACEBOOK. Although the Patriots are favored by 6 1/2 points, I’m sure that Tomlin’s poor word choice and exposure will fire up Tom Brady and the Patriots to win by more. Who do you think will win today?

The Founder is the story of the early success of McDonalds, the fast-food company. Ray Kroc, a struggling salesman, discovers the original McDonalds in San Bernadino, California. Two brothers, Mac and Dick McDonald, developed a revolutionary method of making food fast. Really fast. Kroc saw the potential of the McDonalds’s brothers discovery and convinced them to let him run a franchising operation. So far, so good. But Kroc wants more. He dumps his first wife, marries his second wife (who was the wife of a McDonalds franchisee), and goes into the real estate business under the guise of selling fast-food franchises. Needless to say, Kroc makes hundreds of millions of dollars. Michael Keaton plays the complex Ray Kroc, Laura Dern plays Kroc’s first, supportive wife. I really liked Nick Offerman as Dick McDonald and John Carroll Lynch as Mac McDonald. If this is really how things went down, Ray Kroc was a snake. GRADE: B+

The way Alastair Reyonlds tells it, he wrote the final story of the Merlin series first. Back in 2000, Reynolds wrote “Merlin’s Gun.” Humanity was being exterminated by evil alien cyborgs called the Huskers (think the Cylons of Battlestar Galactica or Fred Saberhagen’s Berskerers). Merlin, a survivor of a planet the Huskers destroyed, embarks on a quest for a super-weapon that will defeat the Huskers and save Humanity. Later in 2000, Alastair Reynolds wrote the beginning story to the Merlin series: “Hideaway.” Five years later, Reynolds wrote Minla’s Flowers which brings Merlin into conflict with more primitive humans who are warring while the Huskers are about to exterminate them. Then, in 2016, Reynolds published The Iron Tactician (with a cool Chris Foss cover!) where Merlin has to solve a mystery in a Royal Family while once again humans war among themselves despite the Husker threat. If you enjoy Space Opera, you’ll enjoy the Merlin series. Big ideas, stories that span thousands of years, and Super Science concepts are all part of the fun! Three of the Merlin stories can be found in the Orion Books version of Zima Blue (2009) (Table of Contents below). The Iron Tactician was just published by NewCon Books.
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Introduction by Paul J. McAuley
“The Real Story” (Originally published in Mars Probes, edited by Peter Crowther, 2002)
“Beyond the Aquila Rift” (Originally published in Constellations, edited by Peter Crowther, 2005)
“Enola” (Originally published in Interzone 54, December 1991; unavailable since then in English)
“Signal to Noise” (Originally published in Zima and Other Stories Nightshade Books 2006)
“Cardiff Afterlife” (Originally published in The Big Issue Cymru, August 2008)
“Hideaway” (Originally published in Interzone 157, July 2000; unavailable since then)
“Minla’s Flowers” (Originally published in The New Space Opera 2005)
“Merlin’s Gun” (Originally published in Asimov’s SF, May 2000; unavailable since then)
“Angels of Ashes” (Originally published in Asimov’s SF, July 1999; unavailable since then)
“Spirey and the Queen” (Originally published in Interzone 108, June 1996)
“Understanding Space and Time” (Originally published in a limited edition of 400 copies for the Novacon 35 Sci Fi convention)
“Digital to Analog” (Originally published in In Dreams edited by Paul J. McAuley and Kim Newman, Victor Gollancz, 1992)
“Everlasting” (Originally published in Interzone, Spring 2004)
“Zima Blue” (Originally published in Postscripts magazine, issue 4, edited by Peter Crowther)

If you love soul music as much as I do, you will really enjoy William Bell’s latest CD, This Is Where I Live. This CD was the top recommendation of Best Music of 2016 by Music Critic Ken Tucker on NPR’s Fresh Air. I confess: I hadn’t heard of William Bell. But as soon as I heard the first few notes of “The Three of Me,” I knew William Bell made the kind of music I love. Bell’s songs run the gauntlet of emotions and strife. This sounds like the classic soul music I grew up with. Check out the sample below. GRADE: A
TRACK LIST:
The Three of Me
The House Always Wins
Poison in the Well
I Will Take Care of You
Born Under a Bad Sign
All Your Stories
Walking on a Tightrope
This Is Where I Live
More Rooms
All the Things You Can’t Remember
Mississippi-Arkansas Bridge
People Want to Go Home

Michael Lewis wrote a best selling book on baseball analytics called Moneyball. It was the story of how the Oakland Athletics with their executive Billy Beane managed to use data on players to improve their team. The book became a movie starring Brad Pitt as Billy Beane. However, Michael Lewis discovered that data analysis had another dimension. What was the decision making process people used to analyze the data once they had it. And, why did they so often make the Wrong Decision? Lewis tells an extraordinary story of the two men whose ideas changed the world. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky met in war-torn 1960s Israel. Both were gifted young psychology professors. Kahneman was a rootless son of holocaust survivors who saw the world as a problem to be solved. Tversky was a voluble, instinctual with incredible mathematical abilities. Together over the years they forged a relationship that became a shared mind. These two men created the field of behavioral economics, revolutionizing everything from Big Data to medicine, from how we are governed to how we spend, from high finance to football. If you want to make better decisions, The Undoing Project will help you with that. GRADE: A
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Introduction: The Problem That Never Goes Away 15
1 Man Boobs 21
2 The Outsider 52
3 The Insider 85
4 Errors 116
5 The Collision 142
6 The Mind’s Rules 165
7 The Rules Of Prediction 196
8 Going Viral 212
9 Birth Of The Warrior Psychologist 238
10 The Isolation Effect 268
11 The Rules Of Undoing 291
12 This Cloud Of Possibility 313
Coda: Bora-Bora 339
A Note on Sources 353
Acknowledgments 361

Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling play frustrated artists who are chasing their dreams in Los Angeles. Emma Stone works at a coffee bar but dreams of being an actress. Ryan Gosling plays Christmas songs on a piano in a crowded restaurant but wants to open his own jazz bar and play Real Jazz. Both characters make compromises that both bring them together but later drive them apart. If you like singing and dancing, LA LA Land provides plenty of that. But, my only quibble is that I wish the music in the movie was more memorable. It’s pleasant music, but very forgettable once you walk out the theater. Hopefully, the success of LA LA Land at the box office and at the Golden Globes will cause more good, original musicals to be produced. GRADE: A-

“The purpose of this book is to present the case against sugar…as the principal cause of the chronic diseases that are most likely to kill us, or at least accelerate our demise, in the 21st Century.” These are author Gary Taubes first words in The Case Against Sugar and he goes on to blame sugar for the fact that a third of all adults are obese, two-thirds of adults are overweight, almost one in seven adults are diabetic, and one in four adults will die of cancer. Taubes believes, and shows through voluminous research studies, that sugar is the culprit behind all these diseases. “If sugar didn’t exist, diabetes would be a rare disease,” Taubes maintains. Taubes shows how the Food Industry has masked sugar’s dangers and toxicity while blaming “fat” for many of these health conditions. Taubes puts the blame squarely on the aggressive use of sucrose and high-fructose corn syrup for most of our health problems. I confess, I was shaken by the end of this book. Am I going to eat less sugar? You better believe it. The Case Against Sugar is a powerful indictment of our diets. I highly recommend you all read this powerful book! And, eat less sugar! GRADE: A
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Author’s Note
INTRODUCTION: Why Diabetes?
Chapter 1: Drug or Food?
Chapter 2: The First Ten Thousand Years
Chapter 3: The Marriage of Tobacco and Sugar
Chapter 4: A Peculiar Evil
Chapter 5: The Early (Bad) Science
Chapter 6: The Gift That Keeps On Giving
Chapter 7: Big Sugar
Chapter 8: Defending Sugar
Chapter 9: What They Don’t Know
Chapter 10: The If/Then Problem: I
Chapter 11: The If/Then Problme: II
EPILOGUE: How Little Is Still Too Much?
Acknowledgements
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Today’s games look like the pick of the litter! The Kansas City Chiefs are just 1 1/2-point favorites over the surging Pittsburgh Steelers. Obviously, this could be a really close game. Because of the Ice Storm, this game was rescheduled from 1 P.M. to this evening time slot. The game Bill Crider has been waiting for, Green Bay Packers vs. Dallas Cowboys, has the Cowboys favored by 5 points. That seems like a lot. This game could go to Overtime! Who do you think will win today?