We went and saw Atonement last night and the adaption of Ian Mcewans novel is fantastic. It is a pretty dark novel about a the implications of an action and how they have consequences for years and decades to come.
It will be really interesting to see what the response of US audiences is to the movie and whether there is outrage over the use of the C word on a number of occasions. I thought the acting was brilliant, and that it does appear to have Oscar written all over it.
The other interesting thing was the flooding of Balham tube station as there is a plaque there although I’ve not seen it so I will now go out of my way to see whether it references the flooding of the tube in 1940.
I highly reccomend this as it is a brilliant film based on an exceptional book. The only 2 downsides were that there were clearly budgetry problems when trying to replicate the evacuation scenes from the novel and that some of the scenes did seem to go on a little longer than they might have just for the “artistic merit” but that might have shaved 2-5 minutes off the film so it is not really much of a gripe.
Freakanomics
I had the book for approximately a year and would pick it up and find something amusing and put it back down again. I just finished it cover to cover and it is brilliant. Levitt is an exceptional thinker and the book was very entertaining.
Complications - A Surgeons Notes on an Imperfect Science
Atul Gawande writes for the New Yorker and is clearly exceptionally bright and talented. He was a Rhodes Scholar, has a MD from Harvard and a Masters in Public Health from Harvard, sits on the faculty at Harvard and in whatever time he has left is a practicing surgeon.
The book is about his experiences as a Resident, the errors made in medicine, the issues around how it is taught and that in teaching doctors patients are placed at risk.
He discusses MD’s fallibility, the risks associated with medicine, how little is really understood and he writes brilliantly.
I can not reccomend his writing enough.
If you have any interest at all in medicine, how it works and how it can affect and almost certainly will affect you this book is priceless.