Ol' Man River - Paul Robeson

Advantages: Interesting
Disadvantages: Leaves some important facts out

...The book by Paul Britton The Jigsaw Man is An interesting book. It tells how an underachiever from a state secondary modern eventually became the best criminal forensic psychological profiler in the UK. In fact from reading Britton's glowing paean of praise for himself, one would be led to the conclusion that Britton was the only forensic psychological profiler in the UK. The book details in somewhat gruesome detail all of the cases that Britton has been involved in. By reading the book one obtain the impression that Britton single-handedly (aided or sometimes stymied by the police) solved a variety of high-profile cases from the Fred and Rosemary West murders, the murder of Caroline Osborne in Leicestershire, the vicious double sex-assault murder of Samantha Bissett and her 4-year-old daughter Jazmine to name only a few... Read review

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Advantages: Marilyn Monroe looking beautiful and singing well, good cast, beautiful views
Disadvantages: Some dull bits, it's a Western!

...In the year following the filming of Niagara, Marilyn Monroe only made two films - the star-studded There's No Business Like Showbusiness and River of No Return. The latter is a 1954 Western filmed in Canada and co-starring Robert Mitchum. Marilyn plays a saloon singer called Kay Weston, while Rory Calhoun is her partner Harry. They seem happy together, but it soon becomes obvious that they have different priorities in life. Harry is obsessed with making money. He is a gambler who is selfish, greedy and not very likeable. Kay, however, is sweet, maternal, caring and warm-hearted. She isn't a passive woman though; she is feisty and determined and not afraid to have a go at anything. Matt Calder (Robert Mitchum) is a cowboy who ends up at the saloon where Kay works. He has just been reunited with his son Mark (played well by... Read review

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Advantages: Mildly interesting plot, faintly evocative descriptions.
Disadvantages: Clumsy dialogue, implausible events, horrible writing of characters.

...the story is set; in his descriptions of farmland and river, you get an evocative sense of personal attachment, and he conveys well enough what an area of land means to a person or family. However, he really struggles to write characters. His physical descriptions are, for want of a better word, horrible. You get the impression that he?s attended a distinctly second-rate creative writing class that?s convinced him that the more adjectives he can throw into a paragraph, the better. As a consequence, he describes everything and everyone, and overdoes it painfully. It?s not enough that a man is tall, he has to be ?tall and strong and muscular? with a hunched back and flakes of skin on his glasses. Everyone ends up sounding like a monster, and you wish he?d had his thesaurus taken off him when he starts piling up the adjectives for the next minor... Read review

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