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Noah Cross, Norma Desmond, Norman Bates, Harry Lime--these are a few of nearly 100 names that inhabit the mind of the narrator as he starts to compose short biographies of some of the most famous characters in the history of film noir. He sketches in whole lives, lives as intense as the dreams put up on the screen. The book begins to become a novel when the characters start to meet each other outside their respective films--as if they were real people with needs and passions. The names and faces are familiar to us--Jake Gittes from Chinatown,Laura Hunt and Waldo Lydecker from Laura, Rick and Ilsa from Casablanca--but is it true that Noah Cross and Norma Desmond were lovers in the 1920s, that she and Joe Gillis had a son who grew up to be Julian Kay in American Gigolo? The narrator is not merely the author, he has a mission to carry out--a lost family link to find, a thread to pull so that nearly all these disparate characters come together to form a kind of society. Ultimately this examination on how movies affect audiences--not only shaping perceptions and memories, but in some ways coming to stand in for them--can also be read as an unsettling examination of identity and the construction of self through the medium of narratives;or simply as a fascinating take on movie fandom.
Motion pictures --- Characters and characteristics in motion pictures --- Film noir
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"The story of civilization from an entirely new vantage point--the six raw materials that have shaped and will continue to shape humanity's destiny. Sand, iron, salt, oil, copper and lithium: The struggle for these fundamental materials has created empires, razed civilizations, and fed our ingenuity and our greed for thousands of years. It is a story that is far from finished. Though we are told we now live in a weightless world of information, we dug more stuff out of the earth in 2017 than in all of human history before 1950. And it's getting exponentially worse. To make one bar of gold, we now have to dig 5,000 tons of earth. For every ton of fossil fuels, we extract six tons of other materials--from sand to stone to wood to metal. Even as we pare back our consumption of fossil fuels we continue to redouble our consumption of everything else. Why? Because these ingredients are the basis for everything. They power our phones and electric cars, build our homes and offices, enable the printing of our books, and supply our packaging. Our modern world would not exist without them, and the hidden battle to control them will shape our future. This is an epic journey across continents, cultures and epochs that captures the astonishing extent to which humanity's prosperity is intertwined with what we extract from the earth and adapt to our needs and desires. It is a story of our past and future, from the ground up"--
RAW MATERIALS --- MINES AND MINERAL RESOURCES --- BUSINESS & ECONOMICS --- HISTORY
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