Critically Acclaimed Quotes

And I'm going to tell the truth: I didn't like that Sean Penn movie Into the Wild so much. Yes! I know it was critically acclaimed. I know it won all these awards! It's very sad that a boy is dead and all. But I thought the movie Enchanted, with the singing princess and the chipmunk and the people dancing in Central Park, was cuter. So there!

Law enforcement would rather we remember a dull man as brilliant than take a good hard look at the role they played in this absolute sideshow, and I am sick to death of watching them in their pressed shirts and cowboy boots, in their comfortable leather interview chairs, in hugely successful and critically acclaimed crime documentaries, talking about the intelligence and charm and wiliness of an ordinary misogynist. This story is not that. The story is not that.

...What I have denied and what my reason compels me to deny, is the existence of a Being throned above us as a god, directing our mundane affairs in detail, regarding us as individuals, punishing us, rewarding us as human judges might. When the churches learn to take this rational view of things, when they become true schools of ethics and stop teaching fables, they will be more effective than they are to-day... If they would turn all that ability to teaching this one thing – the fact that honesty is best, that selfishness and lies of any sort must surely fail to produce happiness – they would accomplish actual things. Religious faiths and creeds have greatly hampered our development. They have absorbed and wasted some fine intellects. That creeds are getting to be less and less important to the average mind with every passing year is a good sign, I think, although I do not wish to talk about what is commonly called theology. The criticisms which have been hurled at me have not worried me. A man cannot control his beliefs. If he is honest in his frank expression of them, that is all that can in justice be required of him. Professor Thomson and a thousand others do not in the least agree with me. His criticism of me, as I read it, charged that because I doubted the soul’s immortality, or ‘personality,’ as he called it, my mind must be abnormal, ‘pathological,’ in other, words, diseased... I try to say exactly what I honestly believe to be the truth, and more than that no man can do. I honestly believe that creedists have built up a mighty structure of inaccuracy, based, curiously, on those fundamental truths which I, with every honest man, must not alone admit but earnestly acclaim. I have been working on the same lines for many years. I have tried to go as far as possible toward the bottom of each subject I have studied. I have not reached my conclusions through study of traditions; I have reached them through the study of hard fact. I cannot see that unproved theories or sentiment should be permitted to have influence in the building of conviction upon matters so important. Science proves its theories or it rejects them. I have never seen the slightest scientific proof of the religious theories of heaven and hell, of future life for individuals, or of a personal God. I earnestly believe that I am right; I cannot help believing as I do... I cannot accept as final any theory which is not provable. The theories of the theologians cannot be proved. Proof, proof! That is what I always have been after; that is what my mind requires before it can accept a theory as fact. Some things are provable, some things disprovable, some things are doubtful. All the problems which perplex us, now, will, soon or late, be solved, and solved beyond a question through scientific investigation. The thing which most impresses me about theology is that it does not seem to be investigating. It seems to be asserting, merely, without actual study. ...Moral teaching is the thing we need most in this world, and many of these men could be great moral teachers if they would but give their whole time to it, and to scientific search for the rock-bottom truth, instead of wasting it upon expounding theories of theology which are not in the first place firmly based. What we need is search for fundamentals, not reiteration of traditions born in days when men knew even less than we do now. [Columbian Magazine interview]

The novels of James Clavell’s world-famous Asian Saga (Shōgun, Tai-Pan, Gai-Jin, King Rat, Noble House, and Whirlwind) were each critically acclaimed major

The literary establishment continues to privilege work that’s just a touch removed, “refined” they would call it. Writers who tone down their anguish, their rage, their nontraditional, “deviant” choices are perceived as more skilled, more worthy of critical acclaim. This often has a lot to do with racism and sexism, and the stories we are “allowed” to tell as people of color.

Every author believes, when his first book is published, that those that acclaim it are his personal friends or impersonal peers, while its revilers can only be envious rogues and nonentities.

This is the critical point of this book: if you are that zebra running for your life, or that lion sprinting for your meal, your body’s physiological response mechanisms are superbly adapted for dealing with such short-term physical emergencies. For the vast majority of beasts on this planet, stress is about a short-term crisis, after which it’s either over with or you’re over with. When we sit around and worry about stressful things, we turn on the same physiological responses—but they are potentially a disaster when provoked chronically. A large body of evidence suggests that stress-related disease emerges, predominantly, out of the fact that we so often activate a physiological system that has evolved for responding to acute physical emergencies, but we turn it on for months on end, worrying about mortgages, relationships, and promotions.

After you have done your work—challenging as it may have been to complete—and released it in the marketplace, be not concerned with sales, reviews, critical acclaim, or anything else of the like... After you've written and published a book, you're now an AUTHOR. And that great honor can NEVER be taken away from you, no matter what. ("My Book Place," 2018)

We fight still to be recognised in the Australian Constitution; that same constitution that has allowed laws to take away children; invade our homes and violate our privacy. In

Law enforcement would rather we remember a dull man as brilliant than take a good hard look at the role they played in this absolute sideshow, and I am sick to death of watching them in their pressed shirts and cowboy boots, in their comfortable leather interview chairs, in hugely successful and critically acclaimed crime documentaries, talking about the intelligence and charm and wiliness of an ordinary misogynist.

I am a professional humorist, and objectively the third most critically acclaimed British stand-up comedian of the twenty-first century. If I write a stupid thing, on some level I invite you to assume it was deliberate, and that I have, to some extent, created a secondary "columnist" persona, in which I take on the role of the sort of person who would write the absurd things that I am writing, such as this sentence for example.

One modern oratorio adaptation, The Gospel at Colonus (by Lee Breuer and Bob Telson, 1989), based on Robert Fitzgerald’s translation in our series, has been acclaimed by critics and audiences as a high point of twentieth-century adaptation of Greek tragedy.

STEPHANIE THORNTON has been obsessed with history’s forgotten women since she was twelve. She is the critically acclaimed author of four novels about infamous women from the ancient world: The Secret History, Daughter of the Gods, The Tiger Queens, and The Conqueror’s Wife.

Colm Herron’s The Wake (And What Jeremiah Did Next) — a nod to the nickname for James Joyce’s final bewildering novel Finnegans Wake — is yet another exciting Irish comic work, packed with psychosexual and historicocritical detail, by the critically acclaimed, constantly inventive and forward thinking Derry author.

The Six was everything that a book club book should be: short at two hundred pages, highbrow because it dealt with English history, and sexy because it focused on a man who had humped his way through half the English court. It was also critically acclaimed by the right people, meaning that the New York Times loved it but the masses did not.

Adam was told to toughen up. Get over it. We hear this a lot. History is in the past, bad things happened but it is time to move on. But history is not past for us. Adam

By way of farewell, I recited Mandelshtam’s † melancholy poem: The horses tread slowly, The lamps burn low, And where they are taking me Only strangers know.

Perhaps the best way to begin is by making a mental list of the sorts of things we find stressful. No doubt you would immediately come up with some obvious examples—traffic, deadlines, family relationships, money worries. But what if I said, “You’re thinking like a speciocentric human. Think like a zebra for a second.” Suddenly, new items might appear at the top of your list—serious physical injury, predators, starvation. The need for that prompting illustrates something critical—you and I are more likely to get an ulcer than a zebra is.

They also bring to mind what sometimes seems to be a rapt predilection of small but influential cults of intellectuals or esthetes for what is generally regarded as perverse dispirited or distastefully unintelligible. The award of a Nobel Prize in literature to Andre Gide who in his work fervently and openly insists that pederasty is the superior and preferable way of life for adolescent boys furnishes a memorable example of such judgments. Renowned critics and some professors in our best universities reverently acclaim as the superlative expression of genius James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake a 628page collection of erudite gibberish indistinguishable to most people from the familiar word salad produced by hebephrenic patients on the back wards of any state hospital.

But for white people, being poor didn’t define them in the way our blackness defined us. Poverty itself could be temporary and if by chance or effort they broke its chains, there’d be a white world waiting. But

One such individual was Amos Tutuola, who was a talented writer. His most famous novels, The Palm-Wine Drinkard, published in 1946, and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, in 1954, explore Yoruba traditions and folklore. He received a great deal of criticism from Nigerian literary critics for his use of “broken or Pidgin English.” Luckily for all of us, Dylan Thomas, the Welsh poet and writer, was enthralled by Tutuola’s “bewitching literary prose” and wrote glowing reviews that helped Tutuola’s work attain international acclaim. I still believe that Tutuola’s critics in Nigeria missed the point. The beauty of his tales was fantastical expression of a form of an indigenous Yoruba, therefore African, magical realism. It is important to note that his books came out several decades before the brilliant Gabriel García Márquez published his own masterpieces of Latin American literature, such as One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Another study that winds up in half the textbooks makes the same point, if more subtly. The subjects of the “experiment” were children reared in two different orphanages in Germany after World War II. Both orphanages were run by the government; thus there were important controls in place—the kids in both had the same general diet, the same frequency of doctors’ visits, and so on. The main identifiable difference in their care was the two women who ran the orphanages. The scientists even checked them, and their description sounds like a parable. In one orphanage was Fräulein Grun, the warm, nurturing mother figure who played with the children, comforted them, and spent all day singing and laughing. In the other was Fräulein Schwarz, a woman who was clearly in the wrong profession. She discharged her professional obligations, but minimized her contact with the children; she frequently criticized and berated them, typically among their assembled peers. The growth rates at the two orphanages were entirely different. Fräulein Schwarz’s kids grew in height and weight at a slower pace than the kids in the other orphanage. Then, in an elaboration that couldn’t have been more useful if it had been planned by a scientist, Fräulein Grun moved on to greener pastures and, for some bureaucratic reason, Fräulein Schwarz was transferred to the other orphanage. Growth rates in her former orphanage promptly increased; those in her new one decreased.

One of the most powerful things you can do as a human being in our hyperconnected, 24/7 media world is say: “I don’t know.” Or, more provocatively: “I don’t care.” Most of society seems to have taken it as a commandment that one must know about every single current event, watch every episode of every critically acclaimed television series, follow the news religiously, and present themselves to others as an informed and worldly individual. But where is the evidence that this is actually necessary? Is the obligation enforced by the police? Or is it that you’re just afraid of seeming silly at a dinner party? Yes, you owe it to your country and your family to know generally about events that may directly affect them, but that’s about all. How much more time, energy, and pure brainpower would you have available if you drastically cut your media consumption? How much more rested and present would you feel if you were no longer excited and outraged by every scandal, breaking story, and potential crisis (many of which never come to pass anyway)?

Even if you become a very fine actor, if you are inordinately attached to your act, you will notice that you feel empty much of the time, for you will realize that the critics’ acclaim and the loud applause from your audience are offered in response to your act rather than to the natural you.

A critical realization roared through the research community: the physiological stress-response can be modulated by psychological factors. Two identical stressors with the same extent of allostatic disruption can be perceived, can be appraised differently, and the whole show changes from there.

Goodreads also found that liberals and conservatives flocked to fundamentally different types of books. Obama supporters outnumbered Romney supporters by three to one in reading books written by Jonathan Franzen, the critically acclaimed fiction author. Romney voters, by contrast, read David McCullough at a rate of two to one compared with Obama voters. McCullough, too, is highly acclaimed, having been awarded two Pulitzers during his decades-long career—but he writes popular historical nonfiction, a genre more in line with a practical-minded, fixed worldview and very different from Franzen’s style.

As I've reflected back on both, I realize that my neighborhood was just like The Wire. We had the drug dealing, the police brutality, the murders. Well, it was /almost/ a perfect match. We had everything The Wire had except for universal critical acclaim and the undying love of white people who saw it.

When I first went to Rwanda, I was reading a book called Civil War, which had been receiving great critical acclaim. Writing from an immediate post-Cold War perspective, the author, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, a German, observed, “The most obvious sign of the end of the bipolar world order are the thirty or forty civil wars being waged openly around the globe,” and he set out to inquire what they were all about. This seemed promising until I realized that Enzensberger wasn’t interested in the details of those wars. He treated them all as a single phenomenon and, after a few pages, announced: “What gives today’s civil wars a new and terrifying slant is the fact that they are waged without stakes on either side, that they are wars about nothing at all.” In the old days, according to Enzensberger—in Spain in the 1930s or the United States in the 1860s—people used to kill and die for ideas, but now “violence has separated itself from ideology,” and people who wage civil wars just kill and die in an anarchic scramble for power. In these wars, he asserted, there is no notion of the future; nihilism rules; “all political thought, from Aristotle and Machiavelli to Marx and Weber, is turned upside down,” and “all that remains is the Hobbesian ur-myth of the war of everyone against everyone else.” That such a view of distant civil wars offers a convenient reason to ignore them may explain its enormous popularity in our times. It would be nice, we may say, if the natives out there settled down, but if they’re just fighting for the hell of it, it’s not my problem. But it is our problem. By denying the particularity of the peoples who are making history, and the possibility that they might have politics, Enzensberger mistakes his failure to recognize what is at stake in events for the nature of those events. So he sees chaos—what is given off, not what’s giving it off—and his analysis begs the question: when, in fact, there are ideological differences between two warring parties, how are we to judge them? In the case of Rwanda, to embrace the idea that the civil war was a free-for-all—in which everyone is at once equally legitimate and equally illegitimate—is to ally oneself with Hutu Power’s ideology of genocide as self-defense.

Publishers, readers, booksellers, even critics, acclaim the novel that one can deliciously sink into, forget oneself in, the novel that returns us to the innocence of childhood or the dream of the cartoon, the novel of a thousand confections and no unwanted significance. What becomes harder to find, and lonelier to defend, is the idea of the novel as—in Ford Madox Ford’s words—a “medium of profoundly serious investigation into the human case.

In 1998 a local publisher translated Paul Fussell’s 1982 cultural satire, Class: A Guide Through the American Status System, which makes such observations as “the more violent the body contact of the sports you watch, the lower the class.” In Chinese, the satire fell away, and the book sold briskly as a field guide for the new world. “Just having money will not win you universal acclaim, respect, or appreciation,” the translator wrote in the introduction. “What your consumption reveals about you is the more critical issue.

Know about ' Main Shabana' Mein Shabana by Yusuf Rais Book Description The novel Mein Shabana will touch the hearts of many people because even though being a novel, this is a story of you, every woman. Despite being an episode of a particular environment and family, it seems very up close and personal to you. Many of the characters in this novel are familiar to even though they seem fictional to you; the actions of these characters and its repercussions are universal in nature and not restricted to just Shabana, the protagonist of this novel. ABOUT THE AUTHOR- Yusuf Rais The author was born in 1975 in a little town of Rajasthan. He pursued his education in Arts, and completed MA from Rajasthan University, Jaipur. He is currently put up at Pirawa, a town situated in the district of Jhalawar, Rajasthan. He has been an avid lover of language since the age of six and has continued his oration and writing since then. He is currently working as a reporter and has published articles in Dainik Bhaskar and Navjyoti. He has previously published two ghazal books — Ek Tanha Safar and Chehara Rishton Ka — which have been critically acclaimed by his circle of book lovers. Copied

...refusing to give in to his wretched stomach, which wanted to vomit up everything. He thought of the Excedrin in his pocket and decided to wait until his stomach had quieted a bit. No sense swallowing a painkiller if you were going to throw it right back up. Have to use your brain. The celebrated Jack Torrance brain. Aren't you the fellow who once was going to live by his wits? Jack Torrance, bestselling author. Jack Torrance, acclaimed playwright and winner of the New York Critics Circle Award. John Torrance, man of letters, esteemed thinker, winner of the Pulitzer Prize at seventy for his trenchant book of memoirs, My Life in the Twentieth Century. All any of that shit boiled down to was living by your wits. Living by your wits is always knowing where the wasps are.

He had to backtrack immediately to account for the most famous and most acclaimed poet in America, Phillis Wheatley, who was, very unfortunately for Jefferson’s argument, unquestionably black. She had been brought to Boston as an enslaved African at the age of about six, learned English and Latin as a child, and began writing poetry as a teenager. Her published works earned accolades on both sides of the Atlantic. Among her admirers were Voltaire, who praised Wheatley’s “very good English verse,” George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and even the naval hero John Paul Jones, who addressed her as “the celebrated Phillis the African favorite of the Nine [Muses] and Apollo” when he sent her some of his own verses. Dr. Rush cited her as a proof of black ability, listing her accomplishments when he wrote in 1775, “We have many well attested anecdotes of as sublime and disinterested virtue among them as ever adorned a Roman or a Christian character.”14 Franklin went to see Wheatley when she was in London, a literary celebrity on book tour. The acclaim irked Jefferson: “The compositions published under her name are below the dignity of criticism.”15

Simonton finds that on average, creative geniuses weren’t qualitatively better in their fields than their peers. They simply produced a greater volume of work, which gave them more variation and a higher chance of originality. “The odds of producing an influential or successful idea,” Simonton notes, are “a positive function of the total number of ideas generated.” Consider Shakespeare: we’re most familiar with a small number of his classics, forgetting that in the span of two decades, he produced 37 plays and 154 sonnets. Simonton tracked the popularity of Shakespeare’s plays, measuring how often they’re performed and how widely they’re praised by experts and critics. In the same five-year window that Shakespeare produced three of his five most popular works—Macbeth, King Lear, and Othello—he also churned out the comparatively average Timon of Athens and All’s Well That Ends Well, both of which rank among the worst of his plays and have been consistently slammed for unpolished prose and incomplete plot and character development. In every field, even the most eminent creators typically produce a large quantity of work that’s technically sound but considered unremarkable by experts and audiences. When the London Philharmonic Orchestra chose the 50 greatest pieces of classical music, the list included six pieces by Mozart, five by Beethoven, and three by Bach. To generate a handful of masterworks, Mozart composed more than 600 pieces before his death at thirty-five, Beethoven produced 650 in his lifetime, and Bach wrote over a thousand. In a study of over 15,000 classical music compositions, the more pieces a composer produced in a given five-year window, the greater the spike in the odds of a hit. Picasso’s oeuvre includes more than 1,800 paintings, 1,200 sculptures, 2,800 ceramics, and 12,000 drawings, not to mention prints, rugs, and tapestries—only a fraction of which have garnered acclaim. In poetry, when we recite Maya Angelou’s classic poem “Still I Rise,” we tend to forget that she wrote 165 others; we remember her moving memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and pay less attention to her other 6 autobiographies. In science, Einstein wrote papers on general and special relativity that transformed physics, but many of his 248 publications had minimal impact. If you want to be original, “the most important possible thing you could do,” says Ira Glass, the producer of This American Life and the podcast Serial, “is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work.” Across fields, Simonton reports that the most prolific people not only have the highest originality; they also generate their most original output during the periods in which they produce the largest volume.* Between the ages of thirty and thirty-five, Edison pioneered the lightbulb, the phonograph, and the carbon telephone. But during that period, he filed well over one hundred patents for other inventions as diverse as stencil pens, a fruit preservation technique, and a way of using magnets to mine iron ore—and designed a creepy talking doll. “Those periods in which the most minor products appear tend to be the same periods in which the most major works appear,” Simonton notes. Edison’s “1,093 patents notwithstanding, the number of truly superlative creative achievements can probably be counted on the fingers of one hand.

In the EPJ results, there were two statistically distinguishable groups of experts. The first failed to do better than random guessing, and in their longer-range forecasts even managed to lose to the chimp. The second group beat the chimp, though not by a wide margin, and they still had plenty of reason to be humble. Indeed, they only barely beat simple algorithms like “always predict no change” or “predict the recent rate of change.” Still, however modest their foresight was, they had some. So why did one group do better than the other? It wasn’t whether they had PhDs or access to classified information. Nor was it what they thought—whether they were liberals or conservatives, optimists or pessimists. The critical factor was how they thought. One group tended to organize their thinking around Big Ideas, although they didn’t agree on which Big Ideas were true or false. Some were environmental doomsters (“We’re running out of everything”); others were cornucopian boomsters (“We can find cost-effective substitutes for everything”). Some were socialists (who favored state control of the commanding heights of the economy); others were free-market fundamentalists (who wanted to minimize regulation). As ideologically diverse as they were, they were united by the fact that their thinking was so ideological. They sought to squeeze complex problems into the preferred cause-effect templates and treated what did not fit as irrelevant distractions. Allergic to wishy-washy answers, they kept pushing their analyses to the limit (and then some), using terms like “furthermore” and “moreover” while piling up reasons why they were right and others wrong. As a result, they were unusually confident and likelier to declare things “impossible” or “certain.” Committed to their conclusions, they were reluctant to change their minds even when their predictions clearly failed. They would tell us, “Just wait.” The other group consisted of more pragmatic experts who drew on many analytical tools, with the choice of tool hinging on the particular problem they faced. These experts gathered as much information from as many sources as they could. When thinking, they often shifted mental gears, sprinkling their speech with transition markers such as “however,” “but,” “although,” and “on the other hand.” They talked about possibilities and probabilities, not certainties. And while no one likes to say “I was wrong,” these experts more readily admitted it and changed their minds. Decades ago, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin wrote a much-acclaimed but rarely read essay that compared the styles of thinking of great authors through the ages. To organize his observations, he drew on a scrap of 2,500-year-old Greek poetry attributed to the warrior-poet Archilochus: “The fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” No one will ever know whether Archilochus was on the side of the fox or the hedgehog but Berlin favored foxes. I felt no need to take sides. I just liked the metaphor because it captured something deep in my data. I dubbed the Big Idea experts “hedgehogs” and the more eclectic experts “foxes.” Foxes beat hedgehogs. And the foxes didn’t just win by acting like chickens, playing it safe with 60% and 70% forecasts where hedgehogs boldly went with 90% and 100%. Foxes beat hedgehogs on both calibration and resolution. Foxes had real foresight. Hedgehogs didn’t.

Deep humility. Examination: Have I looked down on anyone? Have I been too stung by criticism? Have I felt snubbed and ignored? Consider the free grace of Jesus until I sense (a) decreasing disdain, since I am a sinner too, and (b) decreasing pain over criticism, since I should not value human approval over God’s love. In light of his grace, I can let go of the need to keep up a good image—it is too great a burden and is now unnecessary. I reflect on free grace until I experience grateful, restful joy. A well-guided zeal. Examination: Have I avoided people or tasks that I know I should face? Have I been anxious and worried? Have I failed to be circumspect, or have I been rash and impulsive? Consider the free grace of Jesus until there is (a) no cowardly avoidance of hard things, since Jesus faced evil for me, and (b) no anxious or rash behavior, since Jesus’ death proves that God cares and will watch over me. It takes pride to be anxious, and I recognize I am not wise enough to know how my life should go. I reflect on free grace until I experience calm thoughtfulness and strategic boldness. A burning love. Examination: Have I spoken or thought unkindly of anyone? Am I justifying myself by caricaturing someone else in my mind? Have I been impatient and irritable? Have I been self-absorbed, indifferent, and inattentive to people? Consider the free grace of Jesus until there is (a) no coldness or unkindness, as I think of the sacrificial love of Christ for me, (b) no impatience, as I think of his patience with me, and (c) no indifference, as I think of how God is infinitely attentive to me. I reflect on free grace until I feel some warmth and affection. A “single” eye. Examination: Am I doing what I do for God’s glory and the good of others, or am I being driven by fears, need for approval, love of comfort and ease, need for control, hunger for acclaim and power, or the fear of other people? (Luke 12:4–5). Am I looking at anyone with envy? Am I giving in to even the first motions of sexual lust or gluttony? Am I spending my time on urgent things rather than important things because of these inordinate desires? Consider how the free grace of Jesus provides me with what I am looking for in these other things.

It was Joan Blondell’s good fortune—and good sense—to develop a screen character that aged well. When middle age and increasing weight took their toll, she was able to segue into playing wry, wisecracking old dames. Many of her contemporaries fell by the wayside, but Joan stayed busy. She didn’t maintain the high-profile popularity she’d had in the early 1930s, but she kept working, to critical acclaim.

We hear more about dignity and “pensive luster” from cultures where the patina of age is highly valued, from the shutaku (soil from handling) in Chinese culture or the Japanese concept of nare that garners a reverence over “shallow brilliance,” objects with too much finish. 12 In France, low radiance, the mere shine off a coin, was once enough to mark the start and end of the workday in winter, it was “the moment when there was not enough light to distinguish a denier [a small coin] of Tours from a denier of Paris.” 13 The light that begins and ends these uncommon journeys requires a similar sensitivity to their sheen. It often takes a blaze to see things anew. So age upon age has had its icons who went unsung during their lifetime. When Herman Melville died as a customs agent at the Port of New York in 1891, his widow complained that the copyright of White Jacket (1850) and Moby-Dick (1851) had no worth; they “give no income and have no market value.” 14 It took nearly seventy years for Moby-Dick to receive its critical acclaim. In the final months of writing the book, Melville suspected as much, and acrimoniously foretold his fate: “though I wrote the Gospels in this century, I should die in the gutter.” 15 Our lodestars often shine a few foot-candles below the level we are prepared to see.

all too often, critical acclaim for black films is built upon the altar of black suffering or subjugation.

Every time we open our eyes in the morning is another opportunity to rewrite the rules and change the direction in which our lives are going. Each day brings a new opportunity, a new adventure and a new chance to live life to the fullest. There are seven days in a week, but someday isn’t one of them…

When people ask what I would tell my younger self, the budding writer at the beginning of her career, it is always the same: I wish I could have prepared myself for what happens to a writer when she is brutally honest, when she speaks truth to power in a raw and emotional way. The literary establishment continues to privilege work that’s just a touch removed, “refined” they would call it. Writers who tone down their anguish, their rage, their nontraditional, “deviant choices are perceived as more skilled, more worthy of critical acclaim. This often has a lot to do with racism and sexism, and the stories we are “allowed” to tell as people of color. The classification is not a new phenomenon nor is the marginalization of powerful autobiographical stories that demand engagement. I wish I had known all this, not because I would have done things differently, but because I would not have been so surprised by some of the dismissive responses to my work. I would have been more prepared.

From that moment, events rushed on with breath-taking speed. I spent the two and a half months until my arrest in tormented conflict between reason and the kind of foreboding which Lermontov called “prophetic anguish.

Fred Allen was perhaps the most admired of radio comics. His fans included the president of the United States, critically acclaimed writers, and the intelligentsia of his peers. William Faulkner was said to have liked Allen’s work; John Steinbeck, who became his friend and later wrote the foreword for Allen’s autobiography, called him “unquestionably the best humorist of our time.” As early as 1933, when he had been on the air less than six months, he got a heartening letter of support from Groucho Marx. To Jack Benny he was “the best wit, the best extemporaneous comedian I know.” Edgar Bergen, who normally shied away from gushy superlatives, told a Time reporter that Allen was the “greatest living comedian, a wise materialist who exposes and ridicules the pretensions of his times.

It’s okay to be afraid.

Any time a film scores a massive hit or gets uniform critical acclaim, it's a surprise. When a film does both, it's a miracle.

Let us give thanks to our father, leader, and creator for our happy lives!” “Stankovskaya, to hear your anti-Soviet talk, one can hardly believe that you were a member of a municipal committee!” “Yes, and to hear you people one can hardly believe that you’re not on the prison staff. Why don’t you call the guards now and report this conversation? You might get some clean underwear as a reward, and then you wouldn’t stink so much.

Then Wolff thought of Ronald Colman. He had long been Colman’s friend and agent, and he knew that Colman was a natural. But Colman had shown little interest in weekly series radio: only in recent years, with semi-regular appearances on The Jack Benny Program, had Colman shown himself to be a master of dry comedy. His Benny shows, usually in company with his wife, Benita, were critically acclaimed as high spots of the Benny seasons.

If you are a writer Whether it be professional, amateur, poems, novels, or even just interesting social media posts, let those words, that ink, bleed from your heart through the pen to the paper like the words of forgiveness did upon a cross of Calvary! Whenever you write because you “have to,” you are just putting ink in a pattern of words unable to change hearts around you. But when that pen near your heart begins to bleed the words for you to share with others, you have created art. You have put a part of your soul on display. No matter how much it may be criticized or acclaimed, that is your work, your blood, and it should be a sacrifice given for God's glory.

To be sure, most dropouts do not become geniuses or success stories. But prominent among the dropout titans of recent history are Bill Gates (Harvard), Steve Jobs (Reed College), Mark Zuckerberg (Harvard), Elon Musk (Stanford), Bob Dylan (University of Minnesota), Lady Gaga (New York University), and Oprah Winfrey (Tennessee State). Jack Ma never went to college, and neither did Richard Branson, who dropped out of high school at age fifteen. Creative force Kanye West dropped out of Chicago State University at age twenty to pursue a musical career; six years later he released his first album to great critical acclaim and commercial success: The College Dropout (2004). The point is not to encourage dropping out but rather to observe that these transformative figures were somehow able to learn what they needed to know. Here successful people and geniuses share a common trait: most are lifelong learning addicts. It’s a good habit to have.

And there was so much bad news. It ground you down, it really did. It made you wonder what had happened to the world? What had happened to people, that they’d make a world as desperate as

CAN ALWAYS wait a little longer, but freedom, directly you discover you haven’t got it, will not wait another minute. Unfinished Adventure, Evelyn Sharp

But May to Nell was more than love. She was joy, and torment, and magic, and terror, and lust, and hope, and despair, and secrets, and truth, and sin. May was a lodestone in a bewildering world. She was everything. How could you take all that and call it love?

Quakers were called Quakers because early Friends were supposed to quake with the power of the Holy Spirit.

Anything is possible now!

And I pray, if there are ever two children who come visit my home here, that you will give them the courage to say shalom, so that they will know they do not have to remain in hiding. Amen

Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine.

Emily Dickinson, the “Belle of Amherst,” wrote hundreds of poems during her lifetime that are striking in their originality of thought and their intensity of feeling. Most were not even published until after her death, and her works only very slowly gained the widespread critical acclaim and appreciation that they enjoy today. When did the act of creation occur? When she was actually writing the poems? Or only after they were discovered, published, and admired by society?

Emily Dickinson, the “Belle of Amherst,” wrote hundreds of poems during her lifetime that are striking in their originality of thought and their intensity of feeling. Most were not even published until after her death, and her works only very slowly gained the widespread critical acclaim and appreciation that they enjoy today. When did the act of creation occur? When she was actually writing the poems? Or only after they were discovered, published, and admired by society? Vincent van Gogh produced hundreds of paintings throughout his life. Yet no one, except a few friends, purchased any of his paintings, and he died an apparent failure. Only later did critical acclaim make his work widely sought after, and now his paintings sell for millions of dollars when auctioned at Sotheby’s or Christie’s. Most of John Donne’s songs and sonnets, satires, and religious and secular love poems circulated in a handwritten underground form during much of his life. For three centuries they remained largely underground and appeared infrequently in anthologies until the early twentieth century, when T. S. Eliot rediscovered the metaphysical poets and held them up as ideal models of what poetry should be like.

They are scary eyes, don’t get me wrong, but what frightens me, what infuriates me, is that there isn’t anything exceptionally clever going on behind them. A series of national ineptitudes and a parsimonious attitude toward crimes against women created a kind of secret tunnel through which a college dropout with severe emotional disturbances moved with impunity for the better part of the seventies. Law enforcement would rather we remember a dull man as brilliant than take a good hard look at the role they played in this absolute sideshow, and I am sick to death of watching them in their pressed shirts and cowboy boots, in their comfortable leather interview chairs, in hugely successful and critically acclaimed crime documentaries, talking about the intelligence and charm and wiliness of an ordinary misogynist.

An idol has such a controlling position in your heart that you can spend most of your passion and energy, your emotional and financial resources, on it without a second thought. It can be family and children, or career and making money, or achievement and critical acclaim, or saving “face” and social standing. It can be a romantic relationship, peer approval, competence and skill, secure and comfortable circumstances, your beauty or your brains, a great political or social cause, your morality and virtue, or even success in the Christian ministry. When your meaning in life is to fix someone else’s life, we may call it “co-dependency” but it is really idolatry. An idol is whatever you look at and say, in your heart of hearts, “If I have that, then I’ll feel my life has meaning, then I’ll know I have value, then I’ll feel significant and secure.

bands who fall in the virtuosic camp made music that was well-received at the time of its release, while the bands that always favored raw sounds tend to enjoy more critical acclaim when viewed in retrospect.

Lost to listeners on the Right and the Left was the fact that “Born in the U.S.A.” was consciously crafted as a conflicted, but ultimately indivisible, whole. Its internal conflicts gave musical form to contradictions that grew from fissures to deep chasms in the heart of working-class life during the ’70s and their aftermath. The song was first written and recorded with a single acoustic guitar during the recordings for Nebraska (1982)—a critically acclaimed collection of some of Springsteen’s starkest and most haunting explorations of blue-collar despair, faith, and betrayal during the economic trauma of the early Reagan era.

Epigraph So will my page be Colored that I write? Being me, it will not be white. But it will be a part of you . . . You are white – yet a part of me, as I am a part of you . . . Sometimes, perhaps you don’t want to be a part of me. Nor do I often want to be a part of you. But we are, that’s true! Langston Hughes: ‘Theme For English B

Hicks has admitted his film is not true, which is why his disclaimer reads: “While the characters David and Gillian Helfgott are actual persons, this film also depicts characters and events which are fictional, which do not and are not intended to refer to any real person or any actual event.” But Hicks wants it both ways. He knows that if people believe Shine to be true, it will be a more gripping film, bring in larger financial rewards, and win greater critical acclaim. Consequently he made the disclaimer so small and obscure as to render it virtually meaningless, thereby deceiving the public and the media alike. And to ensure that everything goes to plan, he has continued to feed the media his myths about “meticulous research” and so on, many months after the film’s release.

It is there in comments such as: ‘You’re too pretty to be Aboriginal’ or ‘You’re too smart to be Aboriginal’ – yes, ask any indigenous person, we have all heard these back-handed offensive ‘compliments’.

For more than forty years, Judith Martin has inspired the world with advice on etiquette excellence, proper behavior, and codes of conduct through her critically acclaimed newspaper column, “Miss Manners.” In an interview for her book, Miss Manners Minds Your Business, Mrs. Martin reminds us that “When you go to work, you want a degree of professionalism which does not involve hearing about all of the sordid details of a person’s love life. We are not necessarily all friends, but have a job that needs to be done. A work friend is not always a social friend. One requires distance while the other embraces intimacy.

reader, she is also a critically-acclaimed author of non-fiction. THE FORGOTTEN GIRLS is her debut work of fiction.

The trajectory of Parker’s critical acceptance has often been charted far below that of her popular acclaim, a curious reversal of the situation of many other mid-twentieth-century writers, who are so often pushed to the front of the group by their very own personal critics, the authors looking a great deal like reluctant children, aware of their limitations, who are shoved onto the stage by aggressively solicitous parents eager for them to perform so that their own talents can be validated.

No matter how great an achievement you had a year ago, no matter how momentous and critically acclaimed it was, it is still in the past and has no real bearing on the present moment.

In the case of Gruyère, Switzerland’s rarest grade, Le Gruyère Premier Cru, is one of the most critically acclaimed cheeses on earth: it is the only one ever to win Best Cheese at the prestigious World Cheese Awards in London four different times.

It’s embarrassing when the Clash are slavishly acclaimed by critics as the rock ’n’ roll band of the decade—and yet, what other band has so successfully absorbed the music of so many cultures, digested it, and emerged with a startling, evocative language of their own?

out of arrogance, of laziness, or the shallow notion that modern, freethinking parents ought to allow children to decide these things for themselves, we’d given our daughter none of it.

Swedish Match Corporation was just one part of Ivar’s empire. He controlled ten other businesses through his public “holding” company, Kreuger & Toll, another Swedish corporation. In addition to its stake in Swedish Match, Kreuger & Toll also invested in banking, real estate, and the film industry. Ivar formed separate real estate companies to hold his properties,14 and he used separate subsidiaries for each business, in order to avoid registration fees applicable to larger companies.15 One of his property holdings was Kvasten 6 Biblioteksgatan, where the well-known Stockholm cinema Röda Kvarn was located.16 This purchase led Ivar to become involved in the film industry, and to meet prominent directors and actors, include a leading director in Sweden, Mauritz Stiller. Ivar formed Svenska Filmindustri, a company that dominated Swedish cinema and brought him great pleasure, though little money. SF, as the company was known, was at the center of the golden age of Swedish film, and made critically acclaimed movies based on novels by the country’s leading writers.

Theo van Gogh was well known in the Netherlands, both as a descendant of the famous painter who shared his surname and as a critic of Islam even more provocative than Fortuyn.

God did not send His Son into the world to condemn it, Nicodemus. He sent him to save it through him. It’s

My grandmother told me how the police would stop her in the street as she pushed her babies in a pram. They would upturn everything searching for alcohol, accusing her of running grog to the blacks. They obviously didn’t know her well. Ivy had never touched a drop of alcohol in her life. It didn’t stop with police harassment; the local hospital refused to take her when she was giving birth to her first child. Ivy had her baby in the back of a car as she was driven to a nearby town in the hope of a better reception. Ivy

I endeavor to take the viewer through a journey of the image, using light to illuminate patterns and forms as signposts along a pathway between spaces. These paths essentially act as the observation track for the journey around the image. My interpretation and initial field visualizations are based on these visual flows. The critical aspect I look for in any canvas is the ability to provide enough space and visual context to facilitate focus on the subject in its purest shape. In essence, I try to distill the scene down to its uncluttered form and flows, to simplify the PATHWAYS. Therefore, I use only black and white and mostly minimalist imagery, believing profoundly that less is indeed more.

...an incisive, smartly informative memoir that celebrates the power of the cohesive family unit—its outcome will offer positivity and hope to those facing similar challenges. —KIRKUS REVIEWS Deep Waters is a survival story of the highest order, navigating the complex terrain of marriage, medical crisis, and a future reimagined. After the trauma of her husband’s stroke, Mathews returns to a basic truth: through love, we discover who we are, and who we hope to become. —CAROLINE VAN HEMERT, award-winning author of The Sun is a Compass Mathews has penned a deeply personal love story with the careful rigor of the scientist she is, free of any giddy prose or rainbows. Instead, Deep Waters comes at the reader with the gloves off and goes a full twelve rounds, documenting in granular detail the fears and conflicts attending a life-altering event that can drive even a strong relationship onto the ropes, and the endurance, commitment, and deep love that can save it. —LYNN SCHOOLER, critically acclaimed author of The Blue Bear and Walking Home With love as rugged and wild as the Alaskan landscape she made home, biologist Beth Ann Mathews tells the story of another wilderness: marriage after a life-altering stroke. Deep Waters is a thoughtful and provoking read, a reminder that life and love are inexplicably fragile and resilient, full of unexpected discovery. —ABBY MASLIN, author of Love You Hard Urgent, informative, emotionally satisfying, and thought-provoking, Deep Waters opens with a harrowing medical mystery and rewards the reader with a loving account of an adventurous partnership made stronger by crisis. —ANDROMEDA ROMANO-LAX, author of Annie and the Wolves We felt like we were there with Beth, sharing her emotions, anguish and struggles through the stroke, hospital stay, and recovery. We felt like part of the family as we read, gasped, cried and hoped for recovery and for peace in her heart.”—TBD BOOK CLUB, Seattle, WA If books were birds, this one would be an arctic tern—powerful and graceful, beset by storms and learning to survive, and more, to thrive. The writing is feather-light yet strong. —KIM HEACOX, author of Jimmy Bluefeather Mathews writes with poignant honesty about the challenges of marriage, family, and community in a moving story that highlights the strengths of human relationships. Deep Waters starts with a bang and just keeps going—lively, vivid, and personal. — ROMAN DIAL, author of The Adventurer’s Son: A Memoir

LUSITANIA TORPEDOED BY GERMAN PIRATE, the headline read. A passenger ship. Not even a British passenger ship; a neutral American liner. Shot at without warning by an enemy submarine.

HEIR TO AUSTRIAN THRONE MURDERED IN SARAJEVO the headline said. She wondered vaguely why any English person was supposed to care what happened to Austria.

She and her mother were suffragists rather than Suffragettes; they wanted the vote, but they didn’t use violence to get it.

We will watch Him and watch and watch and watch... forever, I think.

Quakers believed there was that of God in everyone. Mrs Barber thought there might be exceptions.

In 1963, Choh Hao Li, chairman and lone tenured faculty member in the Institute of Experimental Biology at Berkeley, announced that he had isolated and purified his sixth pituitary hormone, lipotropin. The magnitude of such a feat is clear considering that only one other person had ever purified a hormone, and that person was not coincidentally a student of Li's. The purification of lipotropin should have been a reason to celebrate; however, Li's colleagues at Berkeley acknowledged but did not rejoice in his success. As they perceived it, endocrinology was a scientific field that came out of the clinical sciences, which meant that Li's research was completely unsound, and they put enormous pressure on him to change his scientific topic. When that did not work, Wendell Stanley tried to 'promote [Li] out of the Virus Laboratory,' then later University Chancellor Clark Kerr threatened to discontinue the Institute for Experimental Biology because it did not fit with Berkeley's commitment to pure research. Things got infinitely worse for Li, of course, because he became perceived as less qualified with each professional achievement. [...] C. H. Li's travails at Berkeley are only half the story. In 1969, five years after transferring from Berkeley to UCSF, Li and his laboratory assistants assembled a highly complex synthetic version of human growth hormone (HGH) that was biologically active and could promote the growth of bones and muscle tissue. Rather than ignore or criticize the work, however, journalists waxed eloquently [sic] about Li's creation of HGH. One described it as no less than a panacea for most of the world's problems. Others clearly saw specific applications: 'it might now be . . . possible to tailor-make hormones that can inhibit breast cancer.' Li's discovery of synthetic HGH 'constituted a truly . . . great research breakthrough [that had] obvious applications,' ranging from 'human growth and development to . . . treatment of cancer and coronary artery disease.' Desperate letters poured in too; athletes wanted to know if HGH would help them become faster, bigger, stronger, and dwarfs from all over the world begged for samples of HGH or to volunteer as experimental subjects. Unlike at Berkeley, Li's discovery made him a hero at UCSF. None other than UCSF Chancellor Phillip Lee described Li's discovery as 'meticulous, painstaking, and brilliant research' and then tried to capitalize on the moment by asking the public and their political representatives to increase federal support of bioscience research. 'Research money is dwindling fast,' repeated Lee to anyone who cared to listen. 'We've proven than synthesis can be done, now all we need is the money and time to prove its tremendous value.' It is not surprising that federal and state money began to pour into Li's lab. What is shocking, however, is how quickly Li achieved scientific acclaim, not because he changed, but because the rest of the world around him changed so much.

January 30th YOU DON’T HAVE TO STAY ON TOP OF EVERYTHING “If you wish to improve, be content to appear clueless or stupid in extraneous matters—don’t wish to seem knowledgeable. And if some regard you as important, distrust yourself.” —EPICTETUS, ENCHIRIDION, 13a One of the most powerful things you can do as a human being in our hyperconnected, 24/7 media world is say: “I don’t know.” Or, more provocatively: “I don’t care.” Most of society seems to have taken it as a commandment that one must know about every single current event, watch every episode of every critically acclaimed television series, follow the news religiously, and present themselves to others as an informed and worldly individual. But where is the evidence that this is actually necessary? Is the obligation enforced by the police? Or is it that you’re just afraid of seeming silly at a dinner party? Yes, you owe it to your country and your family to know generally about events that may directly affect them, but that’s about all. How much more time, energy, and pure brainpower would you have available if you drastically cut your media consumption? How much more rested and present would you feel if you were no longer excited and outraged by every scandal, breaking story, and potential crisis (many of which never come to pass anyway)?

There is no more hazardous task in Hollywood than trying to make a popular or critically acclaimed book into a television series or feature film. Hollywood Boulevard is lined with the skulls and bleached bones of all those who have tried and failed … and for every known failure, there are a hundred you have never heard of, because the adaptations were abandoned somewhere along the way, often after years of development and dozens of scripts.

Chase became a critically acclaimed portrait painter and the most highly paid Asian artist of his generation. Jenny Shimizu became a model and one of the planet’s best-known lesbians (“a homo-household name,” as The Pink Paper declared) for her affairs with Madonna and Angelina Jolie (a career trajectory that, despite the tattoo on Jenny’s right biceps of a hot babe straddling a Snap-on tool, Ted never saw coming).

If you have faith, absolutely everything is possible.

We must always have two things in life. Faith and hope.

As long as I have hope, faith, a bed beneath me and the stars above me, all will be right with the world.

Perhaps perfect is overrated, because we weren’t born to be perfect, we were born to be real…

It must be a great feeling to know you are in control of something that once knocked you down. The tables have turned. You’re in charge now.

Anxiety can seem impossible to understand if you’ve never experienced it, but if you make the effort to educate yourself, even just a little bit, it will help your relationship

Ignoring the problem is just intensifying the problem. The longer you leave it, the worse it will become.

Then, “Mankind is very superficial and dastardly,” as Franklin said. “They begin upon a thing, but meeting with a difficulty, they fly from it discouraged”; and why not, asks the Unconscious, when you can try, stop, and feel for the rest of your life that if you had tried just once more you would have made the grade? You can thereupon become a dilettante or amateur, frightfully hard to please by those who go on working, severest of all critics either professional or unprofessional, possessor of some inner knowledge, and able to hint at standards of excellence untouched by those who are still out trying to run the dusty race; standards so marvellous, so unattainable, that failure to reach them is more honorable, you may imply, than another man’s easy success. With not one thing completed, the acclaim you might have received, the enormous financial coup you might have brought off, the masterpiece you might have accomplished, can assume in your revery, and in the eyes of those who will accept your version of things, almost more importance than the real success would have had.

there is a category of people in life who find comfort in the close company of those with unusual, independent and directing voices that assure and reassure, that soothe and urge, that criticize and support, that acclaim and denounce, that advise and suggest, and that demand and threaten. I call these seekers of a direction in life “The Listeners” or “The Heeders”. Deep within the listeners or the heeders is a conviction that those with directing voices make their fellow human beings understand that we need to heed our inner voices while taking into consideration the rationale outside voices that make us a part of the broader world that we cannot alienate ourselves from.

Some stories are buried deep within while some shine up in the open getting critically acclaimed while some being called bestsellers.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Photo © 2014 Catherine Dugoni Robert Dugoni is the author of the bestselling Tracy Crosswhite series (My Sister’s Grave, Her Final Breath, and In the Clearing) as well as the critically acclaimed David Sloane series (The Jury Master, Wrongful Death, Bodily Harm, Murder One, and The Conviction). He’s been ranked number one on Amazon’s list of most popular authors in the United States, Great Britain, Germany, France, and Italy, and he has been a New York Times, Wall

I read his rather prosaic-sounding name for the first time in that moment, but some years ago I vowed to stop using it. This is no symbolic abstinence on my part- his name has been said enough and ours forgotten, yada yada. I mean, sure, fine, that can be part of it, but who I want you to remember, every time I say The Defendant, not him but the twenty-two-year-old court reporter dressed for success in a pussy-bow blouse. She was the one who recorded him in the official transcripts not by his government name, like the licensed attorney on the case, but by the two most honest letter combinations her sensitive ear and flying fingers could produce: The Defendant. What people forget, or rather what the media decided muddied the narrative, is that although The Defendant would go on to represent himself at is murder trial, he was never a lawyer. Any Joe off the stree can fly pro se, litigate their own case, without graduating from law school or passing the bar. But it made for a more salable story if he was portrayed as someone who did not have to kill to get his kicks, who had prospects in his romantic life and his career. To this day, I revere that scrubbed-face court reporter, younger than me by only a year, because she is one of the sacred few who did her job without so much as a sliver of an agenda. The truth of what happened lies in those transcripts, where he is The Defendant and he is full of bullshit. On the Wanted poster I held in my hands that ding afternoon in Tina’s rental car, The Defendant peered back at me with black vacant eyes. They are scary eyes, don’t get me wrong, but what frightens me, what infuriates me, is that there isn’t anything exceptionally clever going on behind them. A series of national ineptitudes and a parsimonious attitude toward crimes against women created a kind of secret tunnel through which a college dropout with severe emotional disturbances moved with impunity for the better part of the seventies. Law enforcement would rather we remember a dull man as brilliant than take a good hard look at the role they played in this absolute sideshow, and I am sick to death of watching them in their pressed shirts, and cowboy boots, in their comfortable leather interview chairs, in hugely successful and critically acclaimed crime documentaries, talking about the intelligence and charm and wiliness of an ordinary misogynist. This story is not that. The story is not that.

Although B.V. Karanth made a brilliant film based on Tata's famous novel Chomana Dudiu Tata had not liked the film. B.V. Karanth, a warm, good-hearted man and a true genius of Kannada theatre, in contrast to Tata, was somewhat undisciplined and often unpunctual. I suspect Tata's dislike of that outstanding movie had more to do with B.V. Karanth's disorganised persona. B.V. Karanth had once confessed to me that he was 'scared of' Tata. Because Tata was a jack of all trades who dabbled in anything that took his fancy, some of his prolific intellectual output tended to be mediocre. Since Tata did not like B.V. Karanth's film, he set out to make a better movie based on another acclaimed novel of his, Kudiyara Koosu. Prathibha and I spent a couple of days on the sets when this movie, titled Maleya Makkalu, was filmed in a very scenic forested landscape in the Western Ghats. Although the scenery was grand and the movie starred the popular Kannada actress Kalpana, the movie was a rather amateurish effort compared to Chomana Dudi. Tata's flm failed the test of critical appreciation, and at the box office.