Posted: 05 Dec 2009 04:06 PM PST

Ron Howard's adaptation of the Dan Brown novel "Angels & Demons" leads off this look at new-to-DVD movies.

"Angels & Demons" (Columbia, 2009, PG-13, two discs, $36.95). Tom Hanks reprises his role as American symbologist Robert Langdon in this sequel to "The Da Vinci Code" (although the "Angels & Demons" book actually came first).

It seems the four cardinals most likely to succeed the recently deceased pope have been kidnapped, allegedly by a secret society known as the Illuminati, which is threatening to kill one cardinal each hour and blow up St. Peter's Square at midnight.

It's a puzzle, of course, and Langdon is summoned by the Vatican to solve it, along with a beautiful scientist (Ayelet Zurer), to whom he explains complicated plot points in as windy a fashion as possible, all while running up and down circular stairways.

Howard does build some suspense, but it runs out of steam way too soon. And his camera also goes in circles, around and around in a variety of scenes, so that you may wonder if it was attached to a merry-go-round.

Extras: widescreen, featurettes, trailers (also available in a single-disc DVD, $28.96, and Blu-ray, $39.95)

"The River Within" (Cloud Ten, 2009, $24.98). A young law-school grad returns from Philadelphia to his small Arkansas hometown for the summer, hoping to study for the bar exam without distraction. But he soon finds himself drawn into the drama of old friends, including a former girlfriend who is now engaged to someone else. He also agrees to work with his church's youth group. This is a nice, uplifting Christian film, well acted and with a stronger script than most. It has its low-budget weaknesses and is laced with a few too many music videos, but overall it's a satisfying melodrama with a strong message about several kinds of love.

Extras: widescreen, featurette, bloopers, text biographies, trailers; six-page discussion guide

"Four Christmases" (New Line, 2008, PG-13, $28.98). Vince Vaughn and Reese Witherspoon are an unmarried couple who usually avoid family during the holidays, but this year, they are forced to visit both sides over Christmas. It's a shame to see fine veteran actors Robert Duvall, Sissy Spacek, Mary Steenburgen and Jon Voight in a raunchy, obnoxious "comedy," and Vaughn and Witherspoon have zero chemistry.

Extras: widescreen, trailers

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Participant biographies - American Enterprise Institute

Posted: 05 Dec 2009 03:35 AM PST

Participant biographies

Jeffrey Rosen is a professor of law at George Washington University and the legal affairs editor of The New Republic. He is the author of The Most Democratic Branch (Oxford University Press, 2006), The Naked Crowd (Random House, 2005), and The Unwanted Gaze (Random House, 2001). His essays and commentaries have appeared on National Public Radio and in the New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, and The New Yorker, for which he has been a staff writer. The Chicago Tribune named him one of the ten best magazine journalists in America and the Los Angeles Times called him "the nation's most widely read and influential legal commentator."

Gary J. Schmitt is a resident scholar and director of AEI's Program on Advanced Strategic Studies. Prior to coming to AEI, he helped found and served as executive director of the Project for the New American Century. In the early 1980s, Dr. Schmitt was a member of the professional staff of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and, from 1982–84, served as the committee's minority staff director. In 1984, he was appointed by President Ronald Reagan to the post of executive director of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. He served in that position until 1988. He has since held visiting fellowships at The National Interest and the Brookings Institution, served as coordinator for the Consortium for the Study of Intelligence's Working Group on Intelligence Reform, and worked as a consultant to the Department of Defense. In addition, he has been an adjunct professor at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.

Kenneth W. Starr is dean and professor of law at Pepperdine University School of Law in Malibu, California. He is also of counsel to the law firm of Kirkland & Ellis, P.C., where he was a partner from 1993–2004, specializing in appellate work, antitrust, federal courts, federal jurisdiction, and constitutional law. Dean Starr formerly taught constitutional law as an adjunct professor at New York University School of Law and at Chapman Law School in Orange, California. He was also a distinguished visiting professor at George Mason University School of Law. He published his first book, First Among Equals: The Supreme Court in American Life (Warner Books), in 2002. As solicitor general of the United States from 1989 to 1993, Judge Starr argued twenty-five cases before the Supreme Court and represented the U.S. government on legal issues involving regulatory and constitutional statutes. He served as United States circuit judge for the District of Columbia circuit from 1983–89, as counselor to U.S. Attorney General William French Smith from 1981–83, and as law clerk to Chief Justice Warren E. Burger from 1975–77 and Fifth Circuit judge David W. Dyer from 1973–74. Judge Starr was appointed to serve as independent counsel for five investigations, including Whitewater, from August 1994 to October 1999. Judge Starr has numerous professional affiliations, including having served as president of the Institute of Judicial Administration as well as the Council on Court Excellence. Other boards on which he serves or has served include Advocates International, American Law Institute, American Judicature Society, Supreme Court Historical Society, American Inns of Court Foundation, Institute for United States Studies, American University, Shenandoah University, and American Bar Association Journal Board of Editors. He has received numerous honors and awards, including the Jefferson Cup from the FBI, the Edmund Randolph Award for Outstanding Service in the Department of Justice, and the Attorney General's Award for Distinguished Service.

John Yoo is a visiting scholar at AEI and a professor of law at the University of California at Berkeley School of Law (Boalt Hall), where he has taught since 1993. From 2001–03, Mr. Yoo served as a deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel of the U.S. Department of Justice, where he worked on issues involving foreign affairs, national security, and the separation of powers. He served as general counsel of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee from 1995–96, where he advised on constitutional issues and judicial nominations. Mr. Yoo was an articles editor of the Yale Law Journal and also clerked for Judge Laurence H. Silberman of the U.S. Court of Appeals of the District of Columbia Circuit. He joined the Boalt faculty in 1993, and then clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas of the U.S. Supreme Court. Professor Yoo has published articles on foreign affairs, national security, and constitutional law in a number of the nation's leading law journals, and is the author of The Powers of War and Peace: The Constitution and Foreign Affairs after 9/11 (University of Chicago Press, 2005) and War by Other Means (Grove/Atlantic Press, 2006).

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Biographies of the year - Daily Telegraph

Posted: 26 Nov 2009 10:29 PM PST

By Nicholas Shakespeare
Published: 6:30AM GMT 27 Nov 2009

Biography was the subject of one of this year's best novels. J M Coetzee's Summertime follows a young English biographer and his struggle to pin down the life of a seemingly unexceptional and silent person – namely J M Coetzee. "Who can say what goes on in people's inner lives?" bristles one of five remarkably unforthcoming acquaintances. The result, aside from making Coetzee paradoxically a warmer person through his incineration by others, is a virtuoso exploration of the pitfalls and limits of biography.

That's without considering other obstacles. A widow's chastening shadow, for instance, which falls across Ion Trewin's capable but amazingly considerate Alan Clark: the Biography (Weidenfeld, £25); or the whiff of discretion that creeps in when you have known/been in love with your subject, discernible in Michael Bloch's otherwise admirable James Lees-Milne: the Life (John Murray, £25). As Bernard Malamud put it in his novel Dubin's Lives: "There's no life that can be captured as it was."

Still, nothing will keep us from trying – even if publishers feel obliged to sex-up their titles by inserting words like "secret" or "double" or "hidden" before "Life of ....".

A taciturn, emotionally crippled scientist is at the heart of Graham Farmelo's fascinating biography, The Strangest Man: the Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Quantum Genius (Faber, £22.50). Dirac, an "Edwardian geek" who won a Nobel Prize aged 31 and who predicted the existence of antimatter, is regarded by Stephen Hawking as "the greatest British theoretical physicist since Newton". Farmelo masters a formidable range of complex material to rehabilitate Dirac – essentially a "wordless presence" and a possible sufferer from Asperger's syndrome – from his miserable upbringing in Bristol, bullied by a tyrannical father, to his monastic life at Cambridge.

While Dirac, a teetotaller, sat at High Table at Cambridge sipping milky tea, the Brideshead generation were entering their final year of debauchery at Oxford. Aged 17, I met one of their ringleaders, the last Earl Beauchamp, in his library at Madresfield. He asked what I was reading at the moment and I said Brideshead Revisited. He didn't exactly swallow his pipe, but there was an "atmosphere". He looked away: "Ah."

The late Anthony Sampson, whose engrossing autobiography The Anatomist (Politico's, £19.99) has come out posthumously, believed the name Brideshead came from Bridzor, close to the Catholic chapel at Wardour where Evelyn Waugh sometimes worshipped; certainly, the house in his novel is based on Madresfield or "Mad" – the subject of an entertaining narrative by Paula Byrne, Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead (Harper Press, £25). Byrne reheats much old cabbage that she serves up as borscht; and her book is sloppy with acknowledgements, errors (Noël Coward a Catholic!) and omissions (Pansy Lamb's contentious role in securing Waugh's annulment), but the central theme is a shrewd one: weaving together the Lancing boy from Golders Green and the "orphaned" Lygons from Madresfield, which became, briefly, Waugh's substitute home as well as the inspiration for his most famous book.

By a nice twist, Byrne's two principle sources, Martin Stannard and Selina Hastings, have produced fresh biographies. Upon reading his magisterial Life of Waugh, Muriel Spark contrived to appoint Stannard keeper of her flame. The result, Muriel Spark: the Biography (Weidenfeld, £25), confirms one's impression of a nun crossed with a tigress. I once invited Spark back from Italy to appear on a television programme about Catholic novelists, and can attest to Stannard's depiction of a comic genius with a tidy mind and messy heart, for whom something was always going wrong. As Ved Mehta remarked: "She went through people like pieces of Kleenex."

As did, indeed, the subject of Hastings's The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham (John Murray, £25), a canny, pitch-perfect account of a ruthless loner who for much of his long career – he died in 1965, aged 91 – was the world's most celebrated and best-paid author, his work adapted for film and television more times (98) than any other British writer.

Maugham's abiding theme was the perishability – and absurdity – of fame. From his days as a medical student he knew the slums of Lambeth, where Charlie Chaplin grew up in poverty and whose tramp persona is well anatomised in Simon Louvish's Chaplin: the Tramp's Odyssey (Faber, £25). In a memorable meeting in Hollywood at the pinnacle of their celebrity, Maugham and Chaplin took a stroll into the poorest quarters of Los Angeles, where Chaplin exclaimed, suddenly cheerful: "Say, this is the real life, isn't it? All the rest is just sham."

Like Brideshead Revisited, Swallows and Amazons and Lord of the Flies are novels in which a group of children are left to their own devices in a paradisiacal setting. Roland Chambers's first-rate portrait, The Last Englishman: the Double Life of Arthur Ransome (Faber, £20), concentrates on Ransome's life before he wrote Swallows and Amazons – when he was a journalist during the Russian Revolution; working for MI6 and at the same time offering information to the Cheka, while falling in love with Trotsky's secretary, a tall jolly girl with a passion for shoes and taxis, whom eventually he married.

Of the bluff bundle of contradictions that was Ransome, William Golding wrote: "What right have we to ask more about him than he chooses to tell us?" John Carey is equally respectful in his evocative biography William Golding: the Man Who Wrote 'Lord of the Flies' (Faber, £25), which he casts as the story of how a sensitive, frightened child grew into a sensitive, frightened man – "private, secretive and irritated by years of harassment by critics and academics". Carey, a critic normally excited to locate an all-explaining psychological flaw, is oddly reticent about applying this approach to Golding. "No matter how deep they dig," Golding warned, "they won't reach the root that has made me a monster in deed, word and thought." In his novel The Paper Men he recast himself, interestingly, as a writer stalked by a professor/biographer with a rifle. Unwilling to assassinate a man he himself met – or simply not vulgar enough – Carey leaves Golding for the most part unbloodied.

Lastly, two biographies about a brace of conventional women who lived for a long time: one "almost totally forgotten" (1819-1918), the other indisputably not (1900-2002). David Waller's The Magnificent Mrs Tennant (Yale, £20) is an absorbing account of a relatively ordinary society hostess, Gertrude Tennant, who acted as a lightning rod into the lives of extraordinary people – from Gustave Flaubert, whom she met emerging half-naked from the waves and who considered marrying her sister, to the explorer Henry Stanley, who married her daughter; Gertrude herself married a tantalisingly dull lawyer.

William Shawcross, in his courtly Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother: the Official Biography (Macmillan, £25), captures the vivid and open personality of "one of the most amazing queens since Cleopatra", in Harold Nicolson's phrase. Her ability to smile her way "into the hearts of the people" could transform active communist agitators into royalists. It has worked its magic on Shawcross. "I am not so nice as I seem," she told her friends, but she comes across so in these 1,096 pages.

To order these books, many at discounted prices, phone 0844 871 1515 or visit Telegraph Books

My books of the year

History books of the year

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