Category: Books and Writers

Sabahata Nala On Relating Humanity is fundamentally a social species but with the confusing ability to act both socially in accordance with instinct and also independently and against instinctual behavior. This juxtaposition of opposite tendencies has kept humankind from evolving into a hive species with all of the dangers...

WORK! For it is that for which you have been created. The divine work is your reason for being and awaits your energy and effort. That for which you have been made is not a mystery! You are not an ornament to adorn the garden of creation. You are...

Film on Film as Life on Life Watching a great film can give a person insights into the existence they lead. That may be the key to why human beings are willing to spend as much time as we do sitting in darkened theatres or immobilized on couches during...

Five Seasons of Fellini   If you are no longer a teenager, think back to the time when you were. If you were to pick one significant year from that time and make it into a movie, who are the people, what are the images, and what are the...

Welcome to the Liberators   “Welcome to the Liberators!” It is painted on a brick wall as Antonia and her daughter walk into a Dutch village that Antonia grew up in in the movie Anotonia’s Line, directed by Marleen Gorris. While the message is clearly meant for Allied troops...

Looking for Richard and Looking for Relevance by Vago Damitio It would seem that one of the major tasks facing filmmakers and story tellers of all stripes today is to find relevance between the story being told and the lives we lead. This search for relevance is not simply...

Slaughterhouse Five (the film)- A Review by Vago Damitio This wasn’t a terrible film. It seemed to stay fairly true to the book, however, they did a fairly bad job of making Billy Pilgrim age effectively. This was distracting. Pilgrim was perhaps a bad job of casting, though the...

Manhattan A Review By Vago Damitio Again, a movie I thought I knew something about but was completely off on. Manhattan is a sort of cynical and sort of sweet exploration of what love is in the adult world. Woody Allen is a sort of anti-hero who judges the...

Yesterday, I finished reading (for the 3rd time) Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. It’s a worthy book and recommended for anyone and everyone – even if it sometimes goes pretty far afield. I read this book in my teens and then in my late 20s and recently...

Good Night and Good Luck a review by Vago Damitio It’s funny how I have so many preconceived notions about films I haven’t seen. Now that I’ve seen it, I remember being excited about Good Night and Good Luck. It’s the story of television journalism without fear. The story...

Here is a link to some excerpts from the Geertz essay Summary of the Main Points of “The Impact of the Concept of Culture on the Concept of Man” – Clifford Geertz (summary by Vago Damitio) In this essay, Clifford Geertz goes to great efforts to make the point...

Waking Life – A Review by Vago Damitio I remember an incident that happened when I was about five years old. My father was lying on his back in a grassy park and I had been trying to bury him in handfuls of grass that I ripped off of the...

I’m a fan of R. Buckminster Fuller and his work. One of the greatest things I’ve ever read was his admission in Nine Chains to the Moon (which is how many continuous chains of people we could make to the moon by standing arm in arm circa 1971 or...

I don’t read as much as I used to, but I still usually have about a dozen books going at a time – they just don’t turn as frequently as they used to. It occurred to me that not only might it be useful to my readers to share...

The 4-Hour Chef: The Simple Path to Cooking Like a Pro, Learning Anything, and Living the Good Life by Timothy Ferriss Review by Vago Damitio I hate Tim Ferriss.*** I hate him because he is so god-damn good at what I’d like to be good at. He’s a genius...

My quest to understand the world we live in continues to focus on capital and finance with The Ascent of Money by Niall Ferguson, like another book I recently read and reviewed, Money – this was written on the eve of a major financial catastrophe – though Ferguson, to...

Number 44: The Mysterious Stranger by Mark Twain Ah, yes. Finally a bit of light reading – Mark Twain…warning, there be spoilers directly ahead…stop now or don’t blame me. I picked this book up because this winter has been particularly gloomy and grey and rainy and wet and moldy...

I’ve always had an intellectual fascination with money and when I saw an old book on a shelf called “Money by D.H. Robertson“, my hope was that it would be a book about the origins and social dynamics of money through the ages – I have not yet found...