A sinking ship of a drama that managed to be neither monstrous nor deep"Thar she blows!" said one of the crew as a whale came to the surface. The cetacean wasn't the only thing blowing heavily in The Whale (BBC1), a 90-minute dramatisation of the sinking of the Essex, a Nantucket whaler, by a sperm whale in the Pacific. This was the shipwreck that inspired Herman Melville to write Moby Dick; the BBC film was so laboured it only served to unintentionally remind me of Melville's genius.The Whale felt like a big-screen movie epic trapped inside a relatively small-budget TV programme; the vastness of the ocean, skies and the whales got hopelessly lost. Worse still, it was structurally flawed, unable to make up its mind whether it was a rite-of-passage story for the young Tom Nickerson on his first voyage, a clash of wills between the two leads – the smouldering First Mate Chase and the even more smouldering Captain Pollard – talking in pirate-speak or Orca Strikes Back. Inevitably, it fell between every stool.The biggest disappointment was the whale itself. The whale scenes had been filmed by the BBC's natural history unit and they looked like it. They were beautiful, precise and graceful and wouldn't have been out of place in a David Attenborough film. What there wasn't was any sense of the menace or personality that had captured Melville's imagination and was supposed to be present here.When the whale attacked the boat, it came from out of the blue rather than from the... Continue reading at 'The Guardian'
[ The Guardian | 2013-12-23 00:00:00 UTC ]
News tagged with:
#falklands war
Written By: Lisa Campbell Publication Date: Tue, 10/05/2011 - 16:38 W H Smith has signed an exclusive deal to extend the Richard and Judy Book Club until 2015. The high street retailer has signed a contract with the celebrity couple to personally read and recommend eight fiction titles to WHS... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2011-05-10 00:00:00 UTC ]
More news stories like this | All news stories tagged with:
#fiction titles
#celebrity couple
#exclusive deal
Written By: Lisa Campbell Publication Date: Mon, 09/05/2011 - 15:19 BBC Radio 5 Live has launched a Blokey Book Club to encourage men to read more fiction. The Mens Hour show formed the club, which will ask listeners to recommend and comment on their favourite fiction through the... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2011-05-09 00:00:00 UTC ]
More news stories like this | All news stories tagged with:
#good read
And the winner of this years Tony Honors for Excellence in the Theatre is... the Drama Book Shop, an independent New York City bookstore dating to 1917, 30 years older than the Tony Awards. Continue reading at Publishers Weekly
[ Publishers Weekly | 2011-05-09 00:00:00 UTC ]
More news stories like this | All news stories tagged with:
#tony awards
The editor Robert Loomis, who is retiring from Random House after 54 years, is known for nurturing writers including Maya Angelou, William Styron, Shelby Foote and Calvin Trillin. Continue reading at The New York Times
[ The New York Times | 2011-05-09 00:00:00 UTC ]
More news stories like this | All news stories tagged with:
#random house
In starting Bookish.com, Simon & Schuster, Penguin Group USA and Hachette Book Group hope to provide one-stop shopping for books and information about authors. Continue reading at The New York Times
[ The New York Times | 2011-05-07 00:00:00 UTC ]
More news stories like this | All news stories tagged with:
#simon schuster
#publishers make
A $5 million lawsuit against Simon & Schuster over a book by former President Jimmy Carter was dropped by the plaintiffs on Thursday, three months after it was filed. The plaintiffs in the class-action suit had argued that Mr. Carter's "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid," about the Arab-Israeli... Continue reading at The New York Times
[ The New York Times | 2011-05-06 00:00:00 UTC ]
More news stories like this | All news stories tagged with:
#class-action suit
#simon schuster
#media decoder
Barnes & Noble Inc. will unveil a new electronic book reader later this month, the bookseller told analysts and investors on Wednesday, according to a federal filing released after the close of trading. Continue reading at AllThingsD
[ AllThingsD | 2011-05-05 00:00:00 UTC ]
More news stories like this | All news stories tagged with:
#barnes noble
Written By: Lisa Campbell Publication Date: Wed, 04/05/2011 - 09:15 Somerset and Gloucestershire county councils have been landed with a judicial review in the High Court over their plans to close over 20 libraries. Somerset County Council plans to withdraw funding for 11 libraries while... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2011-05-04 00:00:00 UTC ]
More news stories like this | All news stories tagged with:
#withdraw funding
#high court
#judicial review
#library closures
All of those Amazon Kindle sales -- and, presumably, sales of competitive ebook readers from Barnes & Noble and Apple -- have made an impact at publisher Simon & Schuster. The CBS unit says Q1 digital sales doubled over the previous year, and now represent 18 percent of the company's the... Continue reading at AllThingsD
[ AllThingsD | 2011-05-04 00:00:00 UTC ]
More news stories like this | All news stories tagged with:
#$7 million
#higher margin
#apple --
#barnes noble
Monday nights Sandra Boynton book event at the Barnes & Noble on Manhattans Upper East Side looked like a pretty normal book signing--normal for Boynton, the bestselling childrens book author, anyway. Toddlers and slightly older kids, some dressed in pajamas, crammed into the event space,... Continue reading at Publishers Weekly
[ Publishers Weekly | 2011-05-03 00:00:00 UTC ]
More news stories like this | All news stories tagged with:
#barnes noble
Written By: Philip Jones Publication Date: Tue, 03/05/2011 - 11:42 E-book sales at Hachette UK quadrupled in the first quarter of 2011 and are more than 5% of HUKs trade sales, the company revealed today (3rd May), adding that it was beginning to catch up with the US, where ebooks now account... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2011-05-03 00:00:00 UTC ]
More news stories like this | All news stories tagged with:
#hachette uk
#e-book sales
Written By: Lisa Campbell Publication Date: Tue, 03/05/2011 - 08:30 High street retailer Argos intends to increase its online book range from 500 to 5,000 titles over the next month. The chain store, known for stocking a large range of non-food products, launched its books category on its... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2011-05-03 00:00:00 UTC ]
More news stories like this | All news stories tagged with:
#previously sold
#online store
#books category
#large range
The Publishers Association have released new figures which explain how much damage ebooks are doing to their paper based alternatives. Continue reading at BBC News
[ BBC News | 2011-05-03 00:00:00 UTC ]
More news stories like this | All news stories tagged with:
#publishers association
#paper books
Three weeks shy of a year ago, St. Martin's Press signed up a book by a Navy SEAL Team Six sniper, chronicling how he became an elite warrior and the battle that nearly cost him his life. Today, with news of Osama Bin Laden's death reverberating around the world, SMP is getting ready for a rush... Continue reading at Publishers Weekly
[ Publishers Weekly | 2011-05-02 00:00:00 UTC ]
More news stories like this | All news stories tagged with:
#death reverberating
#elite warrior
#press signed
#weeks shy
#seal team
Three weeks shy of a year ago, St. Martin's Press signed up a book by a Navy SEAL Team Six sniper, chronicling how he became an elite warrior and the battle that nearly cost him his life. Today, with news of Osama Bin Laden's death reverberating around the world, SMP is getting ready for a rush... Continue reading at Publishers Weekly
[ Publishers Weekly | 2011-05-02 00:00:00 UTC ]
More news stories like this | All news stories tagged with:
#death reverberating
#elite warrior
#press signed
#weeks shy
#bin laden
#seal team
Push Pop Press, the brainchild of two former Apple engineers, just got a boost from an innovative former U.S. vice president. After having invented the Internet, Al Gore is back to reinvent the book. Push Pop Press is a digital tool taking books to the next level, making them even more... Continue reading at AdWeek
[ AdWeek | 2011-04-30 00:00:00 UTC ]
More news stories like this | All news stories tagged with:
#online publication
#watch videos
Push Pop Press, a digital book publishing platform, went live with its first title this week, Al Gore's "Our Choice," available as an iOS app for $4.99. Continue reading at AllThingsD
[ AllThingsD | 2011-04-29 00:00:00 UTC ]
More news stories like this | All news stories tagged with:
#ios app
#al gore
The first time former U.S. vice president Al Gore issued his warning about the dire state of our environment, he used the traditional format of bound paper. To... Continue reading at PC World
[ PC World | 2011-04-29 00:00:00 UTC ]
More news stories like this | All news stories tagged with:
#bound paper
#traditional format
#dire state
The author of a forthcoming book about the ever-private Harper Lee, author of "To Kill a Mockingbird," insisted on Friday that she had the cooperation of Ms. Lee, two days after Ms. Lee released a statement through her lawyer denying that she had cooperated. Continue reading at The New York Times
[ The New York Times | 2011-04-29 00:00:00 UTC ]
More news stories like this | All news stories tagged with:
#media decoder
#harper lee
Written By: Charlotte Williams Publication Date: Thu, 28/04/2011 - 08:00 A large proportion of iPad owners in the US have not used the device to read an ebook, a survey from media and publishing forecast firm Simba Information reveals. A report on the firm's "Trade E-Book Publishing 2011"... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2011-04-28 00:00:00 UTC ]
More news stories like this | All news stories tagged with:
#ipad owners
#large proportion
#survey respondents
#report finds
#book readers
#read ebooks