Potter's mirror of desire brings out hopes, dreams

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Potter's mirror of desire brings out hopes, dreams

I've been reading Harry Potter slowly, not because it isn't good, but because it is. Because it isn't just one great, compelling, I-can't-put-this-down story, but a series of great stories, each chapter a complete tale. It's nice not to rush through the words. It's fun just to read. Fun? It's a kid's word isn't it? Adults don't have fun. They have weekends off. They take vacations. They go to movies. They walk, run, ski, read biographies. "Was it fun?" That's not what we ask each other. We say, "How was the movie? The snow? The weekend? Did you have a good time?"

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Nephew calls and Milton mom lands in movie

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Nephew calls and Milton mom lands in movie

She is not your typical movie star. She sings in the choir at St. Elizabeth's in Milton, MA. . She works in the advertising department at The Boston Globe. When her husband died at 34, she had four children, aged 1, 5, 7 and 8. The 7-year-old suffered seizures and permanent mental impairment from an inoculation. He died two years later.

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Living 'Angela's Ashes' was more painful than book, movie

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Living 'Angela's Ashes' was more painful than book, movie

The worst thing about the movie "Angela's Ashes" isn't that it's a bad film. That it's too long and grim and plodding and depressing, and that it's an indictment of the Catholic Church in Ireland and the Irish themselves doesn't matter. It's only a movie. It'll be gone from conversation and the big screen in a few weeks and relegated to video stores a few months later.

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Women's history day by day

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Women's history day by day

If you're feeling a little overwhelmed because Christmas is four days away and you've been shopping and wrapping and writing cards forever and you still have more to do - stockings to stuff, cookies to bake, more gifts to buy, plus a dinner to plan and cook - take a break. Head to your nearest bookstore and grab a copy of Lois Edgerly's "Women's Words, Women's Stories." You won't have time to read it until after the holiday, of course, but that's OK. It's meant to be read then…

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`Life' asks us to make peace with past before it's too late

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`Life' asks us to make peace with past before it's too late

It isn't a flawless movie, but it's powerful. "My Life" is about a man, diagnosed with terminal cancer, who decides to make a video for his unborn child so the child will know his father.

The man, who has about four months to live, sets a camera on a tripod, sits in front of it and talks, hesitantly at first, uncomfortable before the mechanical eye.

After a while, the process gets easier and he begins to record everything. He reads a Dr. Seuss book to his unborn son. He teaches him to shave. He demonstrates the correct way to walk into a room, not self-consciously but with confidence.

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It's Blacks who should protest `Rising Sun,' not Japanese

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Thousands of Japanese- Americans protested outside theaters across America a few weeks ago when "Rising Sun" debuted as a movie. Having read the book, they no doubt expected the movie to portray the Japanese as author Michael Crichton had - as conniving, manipulative entrepreneurs buying up American property and American businesses as fast as they could.

But the movie is not a political polemic. It's a second rate thriller full of loud music, dumb dialogue, gratuitous violence and nothing else.

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McGinniss regales with scissors, glue

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Listen up, folks. Have I got a hot tip for you. Forget about those lottery tickets. Forget about Suffolk Downs. You want to strike it rich? Here's how.

Go to the library, borrow "Gone With the Wind" or "The Firm" - pick a book, any book you choose, but make sure it's popular - copy the words in a notebook and then move them around a little. Change a verb here, a noun there, embellish, enhance. Invert a couple sentences, but don't deviate too much. You don't want to mess with a winner.

And you don't have to. Plagiarism isn't a bad word anymore. It's a way to fame and fortune.

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Support your local library, the jewel in every community crown

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Support your local library, the jewel in every community crown

The stamp is what did it: "Duxbury Free Library" in bold print on the first page of a book I picked up in Canton.

You can do that now. Go to one library, request a book, and have it sent to another.

The word free startled me. I hadn't seen it on a book since I was a kid borrowing from the Turner Free Library in Randolph .

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Terror's not entertainment

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Imagine, if you will, a movie, embraced by critics, hailed as "brilliant," "extraordinary," and "a cause for celebration," about an SS officer, who kidnaps, tortures and kills Jews - but is portrayed as a guy with a kind heart. He kills without glee, you see. He's troubled by his actions.

If this is hard to envision, don't worry. The movie will make you see the goodness in this man. The camera will linger on the killer's sensitive eyes as he's interrogating his prisoner. The music will swell as Mr. Nice SS Guy lifts the hood off a shackled Jew so that he can more easily breathe. If you still can't see past the officer's actions to the purity of his soul, the movie's manipulative subplot and eye-for-an-eye ending will take you there.

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Even today, HIStory silences the accomplishments of women

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Even today, HIStory silences the accomplishments of women

Since 1987, March has been designated National Women's History Month by the U.S. Congress. That's what Thomas Mann, a sixth grader at the Davis School in Brockton, wrote and told me. "It is a time set aside to honor women, both past and present, for their accomplishments," he said. I'd read a blurb a few days before I received his letter, which mentioned National Women's History Month, but that's been it. There have been no in-depth feature stories; no "women of the day" highlighted every day throughout the month. No widespread recognition at all…

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1,001 small acts of kindness necessary for love to survive

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When it arrived in the mail, I dismissed it as another of those self-help books that promises more than it delivers. Nice cover, eye-grabbing title - "1001 Ways To Be Romantic" - but inevitably just a rehash of those tacky, smarmy suggestions that appear in Cosmo once a year.

My 21-year-old daughter set me straight.

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Anne Frank's Dutch protector fed hungry mouths and minds

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His obituary was short, just a few paragraphs in Thursday's paper: "AMSTERDAM, Netherlands - Jan Gies, who risked his life to smuggle food to Anne Frank and members of the Dutch underground during World War II, has died at age 87."

"Risked his life." The words are too pat. They imply a one-time thing: A man dashes into a burning building and risks his life to rescue a person trapped on the third floor. A woman races into the street and risks her life to save a child from being run down by a car. Adrenaline and instinct fuel these actions. There is no time to think of the consequences.

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Look what she found in a little shop of wonders

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NEW ORLEANS - This time I walk to Decatur Street to find it. It used to be on another street, in the middle of the French Quarter, just around the corner from the Place D'Armes, where we have stayed every other time we've been in New Orleans.

This time we are lodged at the Prince Conti and when I ask how to get to Beckham's Bookshop, I am told the small store I remember is closed, but that there is a bigger shop not too far away.

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Victims always pay the price in system that mocks justice

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Anger is self-destructive. You have to let go of it. You have to get past it. That's what psychiatrists say.

Priests say it, too. And ministers and rabbis. Turn the other cheek. Hate the sin but love the sinner. Forgive.

Ten years ago, I read "Victim" by Gary Kinder. It told the story of Cortney Naisbitt, 16, the youngest son of Carol and Byron Naisbitt, a sophomore at Utah's Ogden High School. On the afternoon of April 22, 1974, Cortney flew solo for the first time. Flying was his passion. Soloing had been the culmination of a dream.

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13-year-old's book brings ghetto life into focus

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"Life in the Ghetto" is a non-fiction children's book, written and illustrated by 13-year-old Anika D. Thomas. You read it and you think it's horror fiction. It can't be true. You don't want it to be true.

On the front cover against a background of coloring-book red bricks, is a child's drawing of a girl's face. The girl in the drawing is crying.

On the back cover is a photograph of the author standing in front of her red-brick home. The windows behind her are boarded up. Trash litters the ground. But the steps to her apartment are clean.

Anika is smiling in the picture, but it is fake, a smile-for-the-camera pose. Her arms are folded and her eyes avoid the camera's lens.

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Once, getting-to-know-you came first

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They told me I wouldn't like the movie. Too corny, the 21-year-old said. Too predictable, the 15-year-old added.

They had been disappointed so I assumed I would be, too. But I wasn't. I loved "Forever Young." It was a trip into yesterday, a love story, not a sex story, corny and predictable, yes, but who cares? It was tender instead of lewd. Imagine that in the 1990s!

Prior to the movie, I'd overheard a conversation. A girl, no more than 20, home from college for Christmas, was telling some friends about a guy she'd picked up at a New Year's Eve party. They were strangers who met around 11 p.m. and were bed partners a few hours later.

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`Garbage' movie

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My fault. I chose to go to the movie. No one forced me. My 14-year-old had seen it the night before.

"It was so scary," she said.

She hated it. I assumed I'd love it because I like scary movies - "Psycho" scary, "Fatal Attraction" scary, bloodless, I'm-gonna-get-you, bogeyman in the closet, scary.

"Cape Fear" I thought was that kind of movie. I knew it was about a guy, just out of prison, who stalks and terrorizes the lawyer he blames for his long prison term. I anticipated revenge in terms of psychological horror - footsteps on the stairs, creaking doors, shadows in the dark, spine-tingling menace. What I didn't expect was unrelenting violence, Freddy Krueger style.

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