Monday, December 5, 2011

The Marx Brothers Collection (A Night at The Opera/A Day at The Races/A Night in Casablanca/Room Service/At the Circus/Go West/The Big Store)

  • Condition: New
  • Format: DVD
  • Box set; Black & White; DVD; NTSC
Studio: Uni Dist Corp. (summit) Release Date: 01/12/2010 Run time: 110 minutes Rating: RThe remarkable documentary Brothers at War begins with a simple premise: Jake Rademacher wants to understand the experience of his younger brothers Isaac and Joe, both serving in the American military in Iraq. What unfolds proves amazingly complex, fusing a troubled family history (another Rademacher brother died at home), wrenching interviews with wives and girlfriends left behind, and a startlingly unfiltered portrait of on-the-ground soldiers in the middle of a combat zone. Because the filmmaker is already part of these people's lives, he's able to capture a kind of emotional nakedness you don't often see; when Joe's girlfriend talks about how Joe's military service has changed him, a window opens into her life that's! almost uncomfortably intimate. Because of his relationship to one of their comrades, the soldiers in Iraq accept Jake in a completely different way than they'd respond to a typical journalist. They don't present a manicured image; Jake films them talking about why they're there, how they treat girls, shooting people (one soldier describes nearly shooting a child who was carrying a toy gun), and watching The O.C. Driven by sibling rivalry, Jake even puts himself in harm's way by going out on combat missions. Brothers at War doesn't have an ideology. Soldiers in the field defend each other out of personal solidarity, not abstract ideas; the same impulse drives this movie forward. It's unlike any other war documentary and can't be recommended strongly enough. --Bret FetzerBROTHERS AT WAR is Jerold S. Auerbach's probing and poignant exploration of the tragedy of the Altalena, the doomed ship whose arrival in Israel ignited Jewish fratricidal conflict only ! weeks after its declaration of statehood in 1948. The destruct! ion of t he Altalena, with sixteen of its fighters killed by Israeli soldiers in a bitter two-day battle, threatened the new nation with civil war. This is the first history of the Altalena by a historian and the first to locate it within the context of ancient Jewish and contemporary Israeli history. The Altalena remains embedded in Israeli memory, Auerbach suggests, still framing unresolved issues of political legitimacy and will in the Jewish state. This new book tells the story, and the present profound implications, of a moment in the birth of modern Israel that has angles and repercussions relevant to many issues today, in Israel and beyond.Captain Sam Cahill (Maguire) is embarking on his fourth tour of duty, leaving behind his beloved wife (Portman) and two daughters. When Sam’s Blackhawk helicopter is shot down in the mountains of Afghanistan, the worst is presumed, leaving an enormous void in the family. Despite a dark history, Sam’s charismatic younger brother T! ommy (Gyllenhaal) steps in to fill the family void.Screenwriter David Benioff (The 25th Hour) didn't have to do much to relocate Brothers from Denmark to America. The story remains the same: Captain Sam Cahill (Tobey Maguire) loves his family, but he's equally devoted to his career. Just as his ne'er-do-well brother, Tommy (Jake Gyllenhaal), exits prison, where he did time for robbery, the Marines deploy Sam to Afghanistan. Tommy starts looking in on his wary sister-in-law, Grace (Natalie Portman), but then Sam's helicopter crashes in the mountains, and the military informs Grace that her husband has died. Unbeknownst to the Cahill clan, the Taliban has taken Sam hostage and tortures him to elicit information. Sam resists, but his colleague caves, leading to an unthinkable act. Back in New Mexico, Grace and Tommy grow closer, stopping just short of a full-blown affair (in Susanne Bier's original, they take the plunge). Even Tommy's disapproving Vietnam vet! father, Hank (Sam Shepard), sees his son in a new light after! Tommy r enovates Grace's kitchen. But when Sam is rescued by his company, he returns a broken man and is convinced that his wife has fallen in love with his brother. Even his daughters are afraid of him (Bailee Madison impresses as the eldest). As in Bier's film, Jim Sheridan (In America) elevates redemption and forgiveness over tragedy and loss, and his well-meaning remake gets off to a solid start, but it loses steam by the end. Brothers offers a compelling scenario, but the telling is too overstated to capture the full heartbreak of the situation. --Kathleen C. Fennessy

Stills from Brothers (Click for larger image)



BUYSOUNDTRAX Records presents the original soundtrack to BROTHERS AT WAR, featuring music composed and conducted by Lee Holdridge for the 2009 documentary directed by Jake Rademacher and produced by Norman S. Powell and Jake Rademacher. Executive Produced by Gary Sinise and David Scantling.
For BROTHERS AT WAR, the producers were looking for a composer who could provide music that would compliment this exciting and! terrifying journey to the edges of a modern battlefield but c! ould als o switch gears and navigate through the terrain of intimate family relationships. They chose Lee Holdridge, a composer with a history of delicately highlighting the emotional moments of his subjects in a subtle manner. For the film, the composer has written a intimate acoustic score, augmented by strings, guitar and piano, including a song written and performed by John Ondrasik of Five For Fighting, inspired by the characters in the film, and based on the main theme.
Lee Holdridge was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti in 1944. He spent his early years in Costa Rica, beginning music studies on the violin at the age of ten with Hugo Mariani, then the conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra of Costa Rica. Later, Holdridge moved to New York to continue his music studies and begin his professional career as a composer. Holdridge s successes in New York came to the attention of Neil Diamond who brought Holdridge to Los Angeles to write arrangements for his forthcoming albu! ms. A string of Gold and Platinum hits followed, which led to Diamond and Holdridge collaborating on the film score for Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Since that time, Holdridge has scored numerous film such as Splash, Big Business, Mr. Mom, Micki & Maude, 16 Days Of Glory, The Beastmaster, Sylvester, A Tigers Tale, El Pueblo Del Sol, Old Gringo and Pastime. His television work includes Moonlighting, Beauty and the Beast, the complete eight hour remake of East of Eden, The Tenth Man, Dreamer of Oz, Hallmark Hall Of Fame s One Against the Wind and The Story Lady. Lee also began a very successful collaboration with Moriah Films, the film division of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, with the Academy Award winning documentary feature film The Long Way Home. In addition to his film career, Mr. Holdridge has had an extensive repertoire of concert works performed and recorded. He has also worked with many major recording artists having written, arranged and conducted for Placido Domingo! , Barbra Streisand, Brian May of Queen, Stevie Wonder, Neil Di! amond, J ohn Denver, Neil Sedaka, Daniel Rodriguez, Al Jarreau, Dionne Warwick, Diana Ross, Natalie Cole, Jane Oliver and many others.BROTHERS AT WAR, a new book [May 2011] from Quid Pro Books, is Jerold S. Auerbach's probing and poignant exploration of the tragedy of the Altalena, the doomed ship whose arrival in Israel ignited Jewish fratricidal conflict only weeks after its declaration of statehood in 1948. The destruction of the Altalena, with sixteen of its fighters killed by Israeli soldiers in a bitter two-day battle, threatened the new nation with civil war.

This is the first history of the Altalena by a historian and the first to locate it within the context of ancient Jewish and contemporary Israeli history. The Altalena remains embedded in Israeli memory, Auerbach suggests, still framing unresolved issues of political legitimacy in the Jewish state.

Identified as "America's foremost intellectual exponent of right-wing Zionism," Jerold Auerbach is the! author of nine books including HEBRON JEWS: MEMORY AND CONFLICT IN THE LAND OF ISRAEL (2009), a history of the world's oldest continuing Jewish community. His essays have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Commentary, The New York Times, The Jewish Press, Jerusalem Post, Midstream, and American Thinker.

Auerbach has been a Guggenheim Fellow, Fulbright Lecturer at Tel Aviv University, Visiting Scholar at the Harvard Law School, and recipient of two College Teachers Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is Professor Emeritus of History at Wellesley College.

Also available by Quid Pro Books are republications of two of Jerold Auerbach's previous acclaimed books: RABBIS AND LAWYERS and JACOB'S VOICES. As with these previous books, the digital edition of BROTHERS AT WAR contains true ebook formatting, active Table of Contents, all photographs from the print edition, bibliographical notes, and a full subject-matter Index. The cove! r photo to BROTHERS AT WAR, recording the actual event, is by ! the fame d war photographer Robert Capa and is licensed from Magnum Photos. The book features eight other fascinating photographs.BROTHERS AT WAR, a new book [May 2011] from Quid Pro Books, is Jerold S. Auerbach's probing and poignant exploration of the tragedy of the Altalena, the doomed ship whose arrival in Israel ignited Jewish fratricidal conflict only weeks after its declaration of statehood in 1948. The destruction of the Altalena, with sixteen of its fighters killed by Israeli soldiers in a bitter two-day battle, threatened the new nation with civil war.

This is the first history of the Altalena by a historian and the first to locate it within the context of ancient Jewish and contemporary Israeli history. The Altalena remains embedded in Israeli memory, Auerbach suggests, still framing unresolved issues of political legitimacy in the Jewish state.

Identified as "America's foremost intellectual exponent of right-wing Zionism," Jerold Auerbach is the author of n! ine books including HEBRON JEWS: MEMORY AND CONFLICT IN THE LAND OF ISRAEL (2009), a history of the world's oldest continuing Jewish community. His essays have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Commentary, The New York Times, The Jewish Press, Jerusalem Post, Midstream, and American Thinker.

Auerbach has been a Guggenheim Fellow, Fulbright Lecturer at Tel Aviv University, Visiting Scholar at the Harvard Law School, and recipient of two College Teachers Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is Professor Emeritus of History at Wellesley College.

Also available by Quid Pro Books are republications of two of Jerold Auerbach's previous acclaimed books: RABBIS AND LAWYERS and JACOB'S VOICES. As with these previous books, the digital edition of BROTHERS AT WAR contains true ebook formatting, active Table of Contents, all photographs from the print edition, bibliographical notes, and a full subject-matter Index. The cover photo to BROTHERS ! AT WAR, recording the actual event, is by the famed war photog! rapher R obert Capa and is licensed from Magnum Photos. The book features eight other fascinating photographs.The second enthralling installment in Alex Rutherford's Empire of the Moghul series. 1530, Agra, Northern India. Humayun, the newly-crowned second Moghul Emperor, is a fortunate man. His father, Babur, has bequeathed him wealth, glory and an empire which stretches a thousand miles south from the Khyber pass; he must now build on his legacy, and make the Moghuls worthy of their forebear, Tamburlaine. But, unbeknownst to him, Humayun is already in grave danger. His half-brothers are plotting against him; they doubt that he has the strength, the will, the brutality needed to command the Moghul armies and lead them to still-greater glories. Perhaps they are right. Soon Humayun will be locked in a terrible battle: not only for his crown, not only for his life, but for the existence of the very empire itself.This set includes seven of only thirteen Marx Brothers films ever mad! e! Collection includes: "A Night at the Opera" (1935) - The Marx Brothers turn Mrs. Claypool's opera into chaos in their efforts to help two young hopefuls get a break. It contains the famous scene where Groucho, Chico and Harpo cram a ship's stateroom with wall-to-wall people, gags, one-liners, musical riffs and two hard-boiled eggs. "A Day at the Races" (1937) - Groucho stars as Hugo Z. Hackenbush, a horse veterinarian dispensing horse pills and quips with equal glee. Chico selling racing tips, Harpo destroying a piano to turn it into a harp and favorite foil actress Margaret Dumont make this thoroughbred comedy wall-to-wall hilarity. "A Night in Casablanca" (1946) - This parody of the Bogart/Bergman 1943 classic features the Nazis vs. the "nutsies" as the Marx Brothers foil Axis criminals when they find stolen jewels and paintings Nazis have hidden in a hotel. "Room Service"/"At the Circus" - These two films are combined on one disc to provide double doses of laughter. I! n "Room Service" (1938), Lucille Ball and Ann Miller provide c! omic co- star support while the Marx Brothers play producers trying to keep their show above water and a hotel room over their head. In "At the Circus" (1939) Groucho stars as professional shyster lawyer J. Cheever Loophole in the middle of big-top bedlam as the boys try to save the circus and look to Margaret Dumont for the money to do so. Groucho sings one of his famous songs, "Lydia the Tattooed Lady." "Go West"/"The Big Store" - Another Marx Brothers twin bill makes this a hilarious comedy "two-fer." In the first, the Marxmen "Go West" (1940) to the land of outlaws and Indians where the fun never stops and where they outwit a land grabber. In "The Big Store" (1941), Groucho plays Attorney Wolf J. Flywheel who with sidekick Wacky (Harpo) and bodyguard Ravelli (Chico) are investigating the shady dealings of a crooked department store owner. Bonus extras include commentary by Leonard Maltin.When it comes to long-awaited treats like The Marx Brothers Collection, you can never ! get too much of a good thing. These seven comedies can't compare to the sheer lunacy of the five classics (The Cocoanuts, Animal Crackers, Monkey Business, Horse Feathers, and Duck Soup) that the Marx Bros. made for Paramount between 1929 and 1933 (available in The Marx Brothers Silver Screen Collection), but when uber-producer Irving Thalberg signed Groucho, Harpo, and Chico to an MGM contract in 1935 (by which time sibling costar Zeppo had become the team's off-screen manager), he knew just how to cure their box-office blues. As a result, A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races were critical and commercial hits, lavishly produced according to the "Tiffany" studio's golden-age formula of glamorous set pieces and musical numbers combined with sensible plots that smoothly integrated snappy, well-written Marxian antics. Opera is the jewel of this set, with timeless scenes (the Stateroom, the Groucho-Chico cont! ract negotiation, etc.) that rank among the greatest bits of s! ilver-sc reen comedy... not to mention Groucho's flirtatious insults at Margaret Dumont's upper-crust expense.

A Day at the Races deserves near-equal acclaim ("Get-a your tootsie-fruitsie ice cream!"), but Thalberg's death in 1937 dealt a devastating blow, and the Marxes suffered from studio indifference, resulting in a succession of comedies that are timelessly enjoyable even as they fall prey to diminishing returns. By the time they made Go West and The Big Store, the Marxes were out of their element, and a few of the musical interludes indulge racial stereotypes that were common in the studio era. Despite this, these movies remain fresh and frantic, and Warner Bros. (holder of the RKO and MGM libraries) has done a marvelous job of packaging The Marx Brothers Collection to nostalgically approximate the filmgoing experience of the 1930s and '40s, with vintage shorts (Our Gang, Robert Benchley comedies, MGM cartoons, etc.) from the time of each feature'! s original release. Archival materials are slim but worthwhile (especially Groucho's 1961 interview with TV talk-show host Hy Gardner), and while Glenn Mitchell's commentary on Races is sparse and superficial, Leonard Maltin brings his usual superfan's enthusiasm and encyclopedic knowledge to bear on a full-length Opera commentary track. The new documentaries are somewhat redundant, but essential viewing for Marx Bros. neophytes. With all seven films presented in pristine condition, this is definitely a Marx Brothers Collection worth having. --Jeff Shannon

Sunday, December 4, 2011

Finding Nemo (Two-Disc Collector's Edition)

  • 2003 - Disney / Pixar - Finding Nemo
  • Albert Brooks, Ellen DeGeneres / Animation
  • Widescreen / Standard Versions - 100 Minutes
  • THX/Dolby - Rated G - Bonus Features
  • Very Collectible
From the Academy Award(R)-winning creators of TOY STORY and MONSTERS, INC. (2001, Best Animated Short Film, FOR THE BIRDS), it's FINDING NEMO, a hilarious adventure where you'll meet colorful characters that take you into the breathtaking underwater world of Australia's Great Barrier Reef. Nemo, an adventurous young clownfish, is unexpectedly taken to a dentist's office aquarium. It's up to Marlin (Albert Brooks), his worrisome father, and Dory (Ellen DeGeneres), a friendly but forgetful regal blue tang fish, to make the epic journey to bring Nemo home. Their adventure brings them face-to-face with vegetarian sharks, surfer dude turtles, hypnotic jellyfish, hungry seagulls, and more. M! arlin discovers a bravery he never knew, but will he be able to find his son? FINDING NEMO's breakthrough computer animation takes you into a whole new world with this undersea adventure about family, courage, and challenges. Take the plunge into FINDING NEMO, a "spectacularly beautiful animated adventure for everyone" -- David Sheehan, CBS-TVA delightful undersea world unfolds in Pixar's animated adventure Finding Nemo. When his son Nemo is captured by a scuba-diver, a nervous-nellie clownfish named Marlin (voiced by Albert Brooks) sets off into the vast--and astonishingly detailed--ocean to find him. Along the way he hooks up with a scatterbrained blue tang fish named Dory (Ellen DeGeneres), who's both helpful and a hindrance, sometimes at the same time. Faced with sharks, deep-sea anglers, fields of poisonous jellyfish, sea turtles, pelicans, and much more, Marlin rises above his neuroses in this wonderfully funny and nonstop thrill ride--rarely does more than 10 ! minutes pass without a sequence destined to become a theme pa! rk attra ction. Pixar continues its run of impeccable artistic and economic success (their movies include Toy Story, A Bug's Life, Toy Story 2, and Monsters, Inc). Also featuring the voices of Willem Dafoe, Geoffrey Rush, and Allison Janney. --Bret Fetzer

Fisher Science Education Histology Microscopic Slide: Blood Smear, WR Stain; Human

  • Slides sets are prepared using quality materials and glass slides with finely-ground edges
  • Slide preparation involves several steps, which can vary according to specimen type and the stain procedure that ensures the best quality
  • Strict quality control is performed is after each step to make certain that the final product is of the finest quality
It is 1998, the year in which America is whipped into a frenzy of prurience by the impeachment of a president, and in a small New England town, an aging classics professor, Coleman Silk, is forced to retire when his colleagues decree that he is a racist. The charge is a lie, but the real truth about Silk would have astonished even his most virulent accuser.

Coleman Silk has a secret, one which has been kept for fifty years from his wife, his four children, his colleagues, and his friends, including the writer Nathan Zuckerman. ! It is Zuckerman who stumbles upon Silk's secret and sets out to reconstruct the unknown biography of this eminent, upright man, esteemed as an educator for nearly all his life, and to understand how this ingeniously contrived life came unraveled. And to understand also how Silk's astonishing private history is, in the words of The Wall Street Journal, "magnificently" interwoven with "the larger public history of modern America."Athena College was snoozing complacently in the Berkshires until Coleman Silk--formerly "Silky Silk," undefeated welterweight pro boxer--strode in and shook the place awake. This faculty dean sacked the deadwood, made lots of hot new hires, including Yale-spawned literary-theory wunderkind Delphine Roux, and pissed off so many people for so many decades that now, in 1998, they've all turned on him. Silk's character assassination is partly owing to what the novel's narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, calls "the Devil of the Little Plac! e--the gossip, the jealousy, the acrimony, the boredom, the l! ies."

But shocking, intensely dramatized events precipitate Silk's crisis. He remarks of two students who never showed up for class, "Do they exist or are they spooks?" They turn out to be black, and lodge a bogus charge of racism exploited by his enemies. Then, at 71, Viagra catapults Silk into "the perpetual state of emergency that is sexual intoxication," and he ignites an affair with an illiterate janitor, Faunia Farley, 34. She's got a sharp sensibility, "the laugh of a barmaid who keeps a baseball bat at her feet in case of trouble," and a melancholy voluptuousness. "I'm back in the tornado," Silk exults. His campus persecutors burn him for it--and his main betrayer is Delphine Roux.

In a short space, it's tough to convey the gale-force quality of Silk's rants, or the odd effect of Zuckerman's narration, alternately retrospective and torrentially in the moment. The flashbacks to Silk's youth in New Jersey are just as important as his turbulent forced r! etirement, because it turns out that for his entire adult life, Silk has been covering up the fact that he is a black man. (If this seems implausible, consider that the famous New York Times book critic Anatole Broyard did the same thing.) Young Silk rejects both the racism that bars him from Woolworth's counter and the Negro solidarity of Howard University. "Neither the they of Woolworth's nor the we of Howard" is for Coleman Silk. "Instead the raw I with all its agility. Self-discovery--that was the punch to the labonz.... Self-knowledge but concealed. What is as powerful as that?"

Silk's contradictions power a great Philip Roth novel, but he's not the only character who packs a punch. Faunia, brutally abused by her Vietnam vet husband (a sketchy guy who seems to have wandered in from a lesser Russell Banks novel), scarred by the death of her kids, is one of Roth's best female characters ever. The self-serving Delphine Roux ! is intriguingly (and convincingly) nutty, and any number of m! inor cha racters pop in, mouth off, kick ass, and vanish, leaving a vivid sense of human passion and perversity behind. You might call it a stain. --Tim Appelo

It is 1998, the year in which America is whipped into a frenzy of prurience by the impeachment of a president, and in a small New England town, an aging classics professor, Coleman Silk, is forced to retire when his colleagues decree that he is a racist. The charge is a lie, but the real truth about Silk would have astonished his most virulent accuser. Coleman Silk has a secret. But it's not the secret of his affair, at seventy-one, with Faunia Farley, a woman half his age with a savagely wrecked past - a part-time farmhand and a janitor at the college where, until recently, he was the powerful dean of faculty. And it's not the secret of Coleman's alleged racism, which provoked the college witch-hunt that cost him his job and, to his mind, killed his wife. Nor is it the secret of misogyny, despite the best efforts o! f his ambitious young colleague, Professor Delphine Roux, to expose him as a fiend. Coleman's secret has been kept for fifty years: from his wife, his four children, his colleagues, and his friends, including the writer Nathan Zuckerman, who sets out to understand how this eminent, upright man, esteemed as an educator for nearly all his life, had fabricated his identity and how that cannily controlled life came unraveled. Set in 1990s America, where conflicting moralities and ideological divisions are made manifest through public denunciation and rituals of purification, The Human Stain concludes Philip Roth's eloquent trilogy of postwar American lives that are as tragically determined by the nation's fate as by the "human stain" that so ineradicably marks human nature. This harrowing, deeply compassionate, and completely absorbing novel is a magnificent successor to his Vietnam-era novel, American Pastoral, and his McCarthy-era novel, I MARRIED A COMMUNIST.

Athena Colle! ge was snoozing complacently in the Berkshires until Coleman ! Silk--fo rmerly "Silky Silk," undefeated welterweight pro boxer--strode in and shook the place awake. This faculty dean sacked the deadwood, made lots of hot new hires, including Yale-spawned literary-theory wunderkind Delphine Roux, and pissed off so many people for so many decades that now, in 1998, they've all turned on him. Silk's character assassination is partly owing to what the novel's narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, calls "the Devil of the Little Place--the gossip, the jealousy, the acrimony, the boredom, the lies."

But shocking, intensely dramatized events precipitate Silk's crisis. He remarks of two students who never showed up for class, "Do they exist or are they spooks?" They turn out to be black, and lodge a bogus charge of racism exploited by his enemies. Then, at 71, Viagra catapults Silk into "the perpetual state of emergency that is sexual intoxication," and he ignites an affair with an illiterate janitor, Faunia Farley, 34. She's got a sharp sensibi! lity, "the laugh of a barmaid who keeps a baseball bat at her feet in case of trouble," and a melancholy voluptuousness. "I'm back in the tornado," Silk exults. His campus persecutors burn him for it--and his main betrayer is Delphine Roux.

In a short space, it's tough to convey the gale-force quality of Silk's rants, or the odd effect of Zuckerman's narration, alternately retrospective and torrentially in the moment. The flashbacks to Silk's youth in New Jersey are just as important as his turbulent forced retirement, because it turns out that for his entire adult life, Silk has been covering up the fact that he is a black man. (If this seems implausible, consider that the famous New York Times book critic Anatole Broyard did the same thing.) Young Silk rejects both the racism that bars him from Woolworth's counter and the Negro solidarity of Howard University. "Neither the they of Woolworth's nor the we of Howard" is for Coleman Silk. "Instead th! e raw I with all its agility. Self-discovery--that was the punch to the labonz.... Self-knowledge but concealed. What is as powerful as that?"

Silk's contradictions power a great Philip Roth novel, but he's not the only character who packs a punch. Faunia, brutally abused by her Vietnam vet husband (a sketchy guy who seems to have wandered in from a lesser Russell Banks novel), scarred by the death of her kids, is one of Roth's best female characters ever. The self-serving Delphine Roux is intriguingly (and convincingly) nutty, and any number of minor characters pop in, mouth off, kick ass, and vanish, leaving a vivid sense of human passion and perversity behind. You might call it a stain. --Tim Appelo

It is 1998, the year in which America is whipped into a frenzy of prurience by the impeachment of a president, and in a small New England town, an aging classics professor, Coleman Silk, is forced to retire when his colleagues decree that he is a racist. The charge is a lie, but the real truth about! Silk would have astonished his most virulent accuser. Coleman Silk has a secret. But it's not the secret of his affair, at seventy-one, with Faunia Farley, a woman half his age with a savagely wrecked past - a part-time farmhand and a janitor at the college where, until recently, he was the powerful dean of faculty. And it's not the secret of Coleman's alleged racism, which provoked the college witch-hunt that cost him his job and, to his mind, killed his wife. Nor is it the secret of misogyny, despite the best efforts of his ambitious young colleague, Professor Delphine Roux, to expose him as a fiend. Coleman's secret has been kept for fifty years: from his wife, his four children, his colleagues, and his friends, including the writer Nathan Zuckerman, who sets out to understand how this eminent, upright man, esteemed as an educator for nearly all his life, had fabricated his identity and how that cannily controlled life came unraveled. Set in 1990s America, where conflic! ting moralities and ideological divisions are made manifest th! rough pu blic denunciation and rituals of purification, The Human Stain concludes Philip Roth's eloquent trilogy of postwar American lives that are as tragically determined by the nation's fate as by the "human stain" that so ineradicably marks human nature. This harrowing, deeply compassionate, and completely absorbing novel is a magnificent successor to his Vietnam-era novel, American Pastoral, and his McCarthy-era novel, I MARRIED A COMMUNIST.


>
Nathan Zuckerman, Roth's favorite narrator, is at it again, and Bookclub-in-a-Box is right by his side. After you read this fascinating book, read the Bookclub-in-a-Box discussion guide and discover Roth's genius as a writer. If one is already a fan of Philip Roth, they will be thrilled with this discussion; if they are not yet a fan, they will become one with the help of Bookclub-in-a-Box.
Slide, Prepared Microscopic; Fisher Science Education; Lung Tuberculosis, sec. H/E stain HumanPrepared by skilled technic! ians using state-of-the-art equipment. Slides are made of highest quality materials, which provide the clearest image of the subject. On request, special slides to provide exact requirement for Biology labs are provided.

Saturday, December 3, 2011

Four Film Favorites: Final Destination Collection (Final Destination / Final Destination 2 / Final Destination 3 / The Final Destination)

  • FINAL DESTINATIONAfter an eerie premonition leads a handful of passengers to disembark an ill-fated flight, Death with all its ingenious contraptions of doom at the ready stalks those survivors (Devon Sawa, Ali Larter, Kerr Smith and more) one by one in the gory, gleeful shocker that launched the fright-filled film series. Final Destination: the start of it all! INCLUDES: Widescreen Version [16x9
Death is just as omnipresent as ever, and in Final Destination 5 it strikes again. During the bus ride to a corporate retreat, Sam (Nicholas D’Agosto) has a premonition in which he and most of his friends â€" as well as numerous others â€" die in a horrific bridge collapse. When his vision ends, events begin to mirror what he had seen, and he frantically ushers as many of his colleagues â€" including his friend, Peter (Miles Fisher), and girlfriend, Molly (Emma Bell) â€" away from the disast! er before Death can claim them. But these unsuspecting souls were never supposed to survive, and in a terrifying race against time, the ill-fated group tries to discover a way to escape Death’s sinister agenda. Moviedom's most fatalistic franchise returns in efficient form in Final Destination 5, an installment that goes for broke in its big opening set piece. This time the initial disaster happens on a suspension bridge that turns out to be all too vulnerable to high winds and an over-aggressive repair project. The employees of Presage Plus (ha ha) are in a bus crossing the span when Sam (Nicholas D'Agosto) pre-envisions the bloody disaster to come; panicked, he urges his friends to scamper off the bridge just in time to avoid the collapse. You know what comes next: the survivors face certain death as Fate demands its deferred payment, and a coroner (Tony Todd, thankfully returning to the series) intones dark wisdom about the price that must be paid. Director Stev! en Quale understands that the audience expects the horrifyingl! y convol uted deaths of the previous pictures; each new demise is like the result of a crowd at an improv theater shouting out different ideas to weave together (hmm, what can we do with a leaky air conditioner, a loose screw, and a set of uneven parallel bars?). The results--shot for 3-D release, no less--will not disappoint die-hard fans, and even the actors are bearable this time around: D'Agosto, from the underrated Fired Up!, pairs nicely with Emma Bell, P.J. Byrne gets off a few unctuous one-liners, and David Koechner does his clueless jerk routine as the Presage Plus boss from hell. The final sequence, while not making any sense according to the rules we've been watching, does tie up the entire series in a neat bow. Until the next sequel, anyway. --Robert HortonDeath is just as omnipresent as ever, and in Final Destination 5 it strikes again. During the bus ride to a corporate retreat, Sam (Nicholas D’Agosto) has a premonition in which he and most of his! friends â€" as well as numerous others â€" die in a horrific bridge collapse. When his vision ends, events begin to mirror what he had seen, and he frantically ushers as many of his colleagues â€" including his friend, Peter (Miles Fisher), and girlfriend, Molly (Emma Bell) â€" away from the disaster before Death can claim them. But these unsuspecting souls were never supposed to survive, and in a terrifying race against time, the ill-fated group tries to discover a way to escape Death’s sinister agenda. Moviedom's most fatalistic franchise returns in efficient form in Final Destination 5, an installment that goes for broke in its big opening set piece. This time the initial disaster happens on a suspension bridge that turns out to be all too vulnerable to high winds and an over-aggressive repair project. The employees of Presage Plus (ha ha) are in a bus crossing the span when Sam (Nicholas D'Agosto) pre-envisions the bloody disaster to come; panicked, he urges h! is friends to scamper off the bridge just in time to avoid the! collaps e. You know what comes next: the survivors face certain death as Fate demands its deferred payment, and a coroner (Tony Todd, thankfully returning to the series) intones dark wisdom about the price that must be paid. Director Steven Quale understands that the audience expects the horrifyingly convoluted deaths of the previous pictures; each new demise is like the result of a crowd at an improv theater shouting out different ideas to weave together (hmm, what can we do with a leaky air conditioner, a loose screw, and a set of uneven parallel bars?). The results--shot for 3-D release, no less--will not disappoint die-hard fans, and even the actors are bearable this time around: D'Agosto, from the underrated Fired Up!, pairs nicely with Emma Bell, P.J. Byrne gets off a few unctuous one-liners, and David Koechner does his clueless jerk routine as the Presage Plus boss from hell. The final sequence, while not making any sense according to the rules we've been watching, doe! s tie up the entire series in a neat bow. Until the next sequel, anyway. --Robert HortonDeath is just as omnipresent as ever, and in Final Destination 5 it strikes again. During the bus ride to a corporate retreat, Sam (Nicholas D’Agosto) has a premonition in which he and most of his friends â€" as well as numerous others â€" die in a horrific bridge collapse. When his vision ends, events begin to mirror what he had seen, and he frantically ushers as many of his colleagues â€" including his friend, Peter (Miles Fisher), and girlfriend, Molly (Emma Bell) â€" away from the disaster before Death can claim them. But these unsuspecting souls were never supposed to survive, and in a terrifying race against time, the ill-fated group tries to discover a way to escape Death’s sinister agenda. Moviedom's most fatalistic franchise returns in efficient form in Final Destination 5, an installment that goes for broke in its big opening set piece. This time the in! itial disaster happens on a suspension bridge that turns out t! o be all too vulnerable to high winds and an over-aggressive repair project. The employees of Presage Plus (ha ha) are in a bus crossing the span when Sam (Nicholas D'Agosto) pre-envisions the bloody disaster to come; panicked, he urges his friends to scamper off the bridge just in time to avoid the collapse. You know what comes next: the survivors face certain death as Fate demands its deferred payment, and a coroner (Tony Todd, thankfully returning to the series) intones dark wisdom about the price that must be paid. Director Steven Quale understands that the audience expects the horrifyingly convoluted deaths of the previous pictures; each new demise is like the result of a crowd at an improv theater shouting out different ideas to weave together (hmm, what can we do with a leaky air conditioner, a loose screw, and a set of uneven parallel bars?). The results--shot for 3-D release, no less--will not disappoint die-hard fans, and even the actors are bearable this time around: D'Ag! osto, from the underrated Fired Up!, pairs nicely with Emma Bell, P.J. Byrne gets off a few unctuous one-liners, and David Koechner does his clueless jerk routine as the Presage Plus boss from hell. The final sequence, while not making any sense according to the rules we've been watching, does tie up the entire series in a neat bow. Until the next sequel, anyway. --Robert HortonFinal Destination, Final Destination 2, Final Destination 3, and The Final Destination (2009) FINAL DESTINATION INCLUDES: • Widescreen Version [16x9 1.85:1] • Director/Writers/Editor Commentary • Cast Commentary • 5.1 Isolated Score Audio Track with Commentary by Composer Shirley Walker • Additional Scenes and Alternate Endings • 2 Featurettes: Test Screenings and Premonitions • 2 Games: Death Clock and Psychic Test • Theatrical Trailer • Subtitles: English (Main Feature.Bonus Material/Trailer May Not Be Subtitled.). FINAL DESTINATION 2 INCLUDES: • Widescreen Version! [16x9 1.85:1] • Director/Producer/Screenwriters Commentary ! • Dele ted/Alternate Scenes • Selectable Fact Track with Intriguing Making-of Factoids â€" All As You Watch the Movie • 3 Featurettes The Terror Gauge, Cheating Death: Beyond and Back and Bits & Pieces: Bringing Death to Life • Theatrical Trailer • Subtitles: English (Main Feature.Bonus Material/Trailer May Not Be Subtitled.). FINAL DESTINATION 3 INCLUDES: • Widescreen Version [16x9 2.4:1] • Enjoy 2 Editions of the Film: Original Theatrical Movie and the Choose Their Fate! Version Where You Control the Characters’ Outcomes • Director/Writers/Cinematographer Commentary • Subtitles: English & Español (Main Feature.Bonus Material/Trailer May Not Be Subtitled.). THE FINAL DESTINATION INCLUDES: • Widescreen Version [16x9 2.4:1] • Additional Scenes • Subtitles: English & Español (Main Feature. Bonus Material/Trailer May Not Be Subtitled).

Close to Home

  • Inia divided city, friendship isitheir last line of defense. In the nation of Israel, military service is compulsory for all citizens. Now an award-winning drama offers an in-depth look at young women's lives in the service. Dutiful Mirit (Naama Schender) is assigned to a street patrol with the rebellious Smadar (Smadar Sayar). Plunged into the simmering tensions of Jerusalem, they find the

Bizarre, deranged, clever, and outrageously amusing--that's Close to Home. From the guy who keeps a Just Married sign on the back of his car to prevent getting speeding tickets, to the mom who installs a food court in the kitchen to keep the kids from whining about what's being served for dinner, to the students who are shrink-wrapped due to overcrowding at schools, John McPherson's quirky characters combined with his warped sense of humor help make the cartoon and the Close to Home 2012 Day-t! o-Day Calendar one of a kind. As an added bonus, each weekend page will feature an extra Close to Home cartoon on the back.

Bizarre, deranged, clever, and outrageously amusing--that's Close to Home. From the guy who keeps a Just Married sign on the back of his car to prevent getting speeding tickets, to the mom who installs a food court in the kitchen to keep the kids from whining about what's being served for dinner, to the students who are shrink-wrapped due to overcrowding at schools, John McPherson's quirky characters combined with his warped sense of humor help make the cartoon and the Close to Home 2012 Day-to-Day Calendar one of a kind. As an added bonus, each weekend page will feature an extra Close to Home cartoon on the back.

By the New York Times bestselling author of the Do It Yourself home renovation mysteries...

4th book in the Savannah Martin romantic mystery series, following A Cutthroat Business, Hot Prope! rty, and Contract Pending, by bestselling author Jenna Bennett! AKA Jen nie Bentley.

SYNOPSIS:

Sometimes, trouble hits too close to home.

Savannah's late. The kind of late that comes with midnight feedings and the pitter-patter of little feet. And while it's a circumstance that should make everyone happy - now she can finally settle down and marry Todd Satterfield, the way everyone's been hoping and praying! - it isn't Todd's baby. And Rafe Collier, whose baby it is, didn't sign on for fatherhood.

Add in the murder of Savannah's sister-in-law Sheila, the trial of Sheila's friend Marley, and the disappearance of Rafe's twelve year old son David - the kid he never knew he had - and things get complicated fast. And there is worse to come: When Rafe comes back to Nashville to help look for David, and learns that Savannah's pregnant, things do not work out the way Savannah hopes. In the end, she's left with nothing she wanted and a whole lot of trouble she didn't, and when she gets in over her head, Rafe's! not there to save the day.

ALSO IN THIS SERIES:

A Cutthroat Business (May 2011)
Hot Property (June 2011)
Contract Pending (July 2011)
Close to Home (September 2011)
A Done Deal (December 2011)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Jenna Bennett is the New York Times bestselling author of the Do It Yourself home renovation mysteries from Berkley Prime Crime - written as Jennie Bentley - as well as the Savannah Martin/Cutthroat Business mysteries written as Jenna Bennett. A former Realtor® and home renovator, she makes her home in Nashville, Tennessee, with a husband, two boys, and a house full of pets.

ALSO BY THIS AUTHOR:

Fatal Fixer Upper, DIY-1 (November 2008) written as Jennie Bentley
Spackled and Spooked (August 2009) written as Jennie Bentley
Plaster and Poison (March 2010) written as Jennie Bentley
Mortar and Murder (January 2011) written as Jennie Bentley
Flipped Out (October 20! 11) written as Jennie Bentley


By the New York! Times b estselling author of the Do It Yourself home renovation mysteries...

4th book in the Savannah Martin romantic mystery series, following A Cutthroat Business, Hot Property, and Contract Pending, by bestselling author Jenna Bennett AKA Jennie Bentley.

SYNOPSIS:

Sometimes, trouble hits too close to home.

Savannah's late. The kind of late that comes with midnight feedings and the pitter-patter of little feet. And while it's a circumstance that should make everyone happy - now she can finally settle down and marry Todd Satterfield, the way everyone's been hoping and praying! - it isn't Todd's baby. And Rafe Collier, whose baby it is, didn't sign on for fatherhood.

Add in the murder of Savannah's sister-in-law Sheila, the trial of Sheila's friend Marley, and the disappearance of Rafe's twelve year old son David - the kid he never knew he had - and things get complicated fast. And there is worse to come: When Rafe comes back to Nashville to help ! look for David, and learns that Savannah's pregnant, things do not work out the way Savannah hopes. In the end, she's left with nothing she wanted and a whole lot of trouble she didn't, and when she gets in over her head, Rafe's not there to save the day.

ALSO IN THIS SERIES:

A Cutthroat Business (May 2011)
Hot Property (June 2011)
Contract Pending (July 2011)
Close to Home (September 2011)
A Done Deal (December 2011)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Jenna Bennett is the New York Times bestselling author of the Do It Yourself home renovation mysteries from Berkley Prime Crime - written as Jennie Bentley - as well as the Savannah Martin/Cutthroat Business mysteries written as Jenna Bennett. A former Realtor® and home renovator, she makes her home in Nashville, Tennessee, with a husband, two boys, and a house full of pets.

ALSO BY THIS AUTHOR:

Fatal Fixer Upper, DIY-1 (November 2008) written as Jennie Bentley
Spackled and Spooked (! August 2009) written as Jennie Bentley
Plaster and Poison (! March 20 10) written as Jennie Bentley
Mortar and Murder (January 2011) written as Jennie Bentley
Flipped Out (October 2011) written as Jennie Bentley


2011 debut full length from the Cincinnati, OH band. Despite a few struggles at the start, lately things have been constantly looking up for Close to Home, thanks to their mantra that is now the album name. Heading into recording, the band hooked up with Tom Denney (formerly of A Day To Remember) to record demos, and the group instantly clicked. Denney signed on to produce. Andrew Wade (A Day To Remember, The Word Alive) was brought in to mix the album, and shortly after Close to Home signed to Artery Recordings. "Having this team together was literally a dream come true for us," said guitarist Josh Wells. It also helped the band create and develop their vision for the album, with Wells adding "It's basically the summary of our lives and who we are in pursuit of our dreams."Ferociously Close to Home delivers McP! herson's trademark take on the absurdities of everyday life. To say that his solutions to these perplexing situations is 'out there' is an understatement. Consider Gina, who decides a branding iron will be the ideal memory aid for her birthday date-challenged husband. And poor Lanny, whose treadmill session is interrupted when he inadvertently triggers the health club's offensive odor alarm.

McPherson has long walked the line between grotesque and goofy. But somehow, his figures with big noses and bulging eyes connect with readers with a surefire magnetic precision. Whether it's health care or parenting, dating or car repairs, Close to Home delivers McPherson's warped world without fail.

There are human bones buried in an open field, the remains of a lost teenaged boy whose disappearance devastated a community more than thirty-five years ago ... and scarred a guilt-ridden friend forever.

A long-hidden horror has been unearthed, dragging a tormented policem! an back into a past he could never truly forget no matter how ! desperat ely he tried. A heinous crime that occurred too close to home still has its grip on Chief Inspector Alan Banks -- and it's leading him into a dark place where evil still dwells. Because the secrets that doomed young Graham Marshall back in 1965 remain alive and lethal -- and disturbing them could cost Banks much more than he ever imagined.

Having already shown, in 1999's In a Dry Season, that he can plumb historical homicide for gripping modern drama, Peter Robinson goes further in Close to Home, telling parallel stories about teenage boys lost in a grownup world, decades apart. The first is Graham Marshall, a childhood pal of Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks, who vanished mysteriously in 1965, the supposed victim of a pedophile. Hearing that Graham's bones have finally been unearthed, Banks quits his vacation in Greece and heads to his hometown of Petersborough, England, hoping to assist the investigation--and, perhaps, assuage his guilt over his friend! ’s fate. Meanwhile, Banks's colleague and ex-lover, Annie Cabbot, is busy probing the recent disappearance of 15-year-old Luke Armitage, the sensitive, brainy son of a rock star who committed suicide during Luke's infancy. After Cabbot catches hell for interrupting what may or may not have been a legitimate ransom payment for Luke's return, she seeks Banks's advice, drawing these two plot lines neatly together.

As this intense and intricately crafted puzzler develops, blending fiction with a bit of fact (the Kray brothers, who ran a criminal ring in London's East End during the mid-20th century, play off-camera roles here), Robinson explores Banks's troubled relationship with his parents, especially his working-class father, who "had never approved of his choice of career." He also raises doubts about a famed copper who’d originally tackled the Marshall case, involves Banks romantically with a damaged detective whose investigative diligence threatens her safety,! and shows Cabbot as someone better and stronger than merely B! anks's p rotégé. Working with themes of lost youth and the dark secrets hidden in small towns, Robinson delivers in this 13th Banks novel a police procedural of remarkable human depth. --J. Kingston Pierce(Drama) Two young, different female soldiers patrol the anxious streets of Jerusalem, questioning Palestinians and looking for suicide bombers. The rebellious one finds the army demeaning; the controlled one is obedient. Under intense pressure, against a backdrop of any-minute-now terrorist attacks, a friendship takes hold and roles reverse.

Ghoulies IV

  • While in pursuit of cop Johnathan Graves, his demonic nemesis, Faust, sends his disciple Alexandria (Barbara Alyn Woods, TV's One Tree Hill) to hunt down the amulet that will set him free. Meanwhile, the Ghoulies find their way through an open porthole and onto the streets of L.A., creating madness and mayhem as they search for a way to get back home. As the body count rises, it becomes an ultimat
GHOULIES GHOULIES 2Everybody's Favorite Troublemakers are on the Loose Again! In pursuit of the amulet that will set him free, a demon sends his disciple to hunt down the cop who possesses it. Meanwhile, the Ghoulies escape through an open porthole, creating madness and mayhem on the streets of L.A. As the body count rises, it becomes an ultimate battle between a demonic killer, a rule-breaking cop, and our favorite creatures from the netherworld!

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Sure, he looks good when he buttons up the short-sleeve Volcom Boys' Ex Factor Solid Shirt, but when at the seafood shack he has to be careful not to eat any shellfish or he'll swell up and pop all the buttons off this fancy shirt.

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  • Manufacturer Warranty: 30 days
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