Play like a pro with expert knowledge from a champion of the game

If you don't know the ins and outs of play, bridge can seem like an intimidating game--but it doesn't have to be! Armed with the techniques and strategies in the pages of this book, you'll be bidding and winning hands like a boss! A good book for beginners, it has lots of advanced techniques useful to experienced players, too. This is as  close to an all-in-one bridge book you can get.

 

 

About the Author

H. Anthony Medley holds the rank of Silver life Master, is an American Contract Bridge League Club Director, and has won regional and sectional titles. An attorney, he received his B.S. from UCLA, where he was sports editor of UCLA's Daily Bruin, and his J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law. He is the author of UCLA Basketball: The Real Story and Sweaty Palms: The Neglected Art of Being Interviewed and The Complete Idiots Guide to Bridge. He was a columnist for the Southern California Bridge News. He is an MPAA-certified film critic and his work has appeared nationally in Good Housekeeping, The Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Magazine, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. Click the book to order.
 

  

 

Richard Jewell (10/10)

by Tony Medley

130 minutes

R

When I checked in for the screening and was told the runtime was 2 hours 10 minutes, I said, disappointedly, “Clint usually doesn’t make movies that long.”

But Clint clearly knew what he was doing because this is the best movie I’ve seen so far this year. Clint Eastwood directs with his usually attention to pace and tension from a script by Billy Ray based on actual events and a Vanity Fair article “American Nightmare—The Ballad of Richard Jewell” by Marie Brenner. Joining Clint and a few others as co-producers are Leonardo DiCaprio and Jonah Hill.

The acting is superb. Paul Walter Hauser, who gave such a sparkling performance in a small supporting role in I, Tonya, gives another captivating one as Jewell, the security guard who discovered a bomb at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics and was then attacked by the FBI and the media as the bomber. But he’s not alone in great performances. Sam Rockwell knocks it out of the park as his attorney Watson Bryant, Kathy Bates captures the despair of Jewell’s mother and Jon Hamm is perfectly hateful as a fictional FBI agent. But maybe the most captivating performance is by Olivia Wilde as the sexy reporter Kathy Scruggs, who will do anything for a story (#Me Too be damned!). She is as sexy in this film as any actress I’ve seen and she never comes close to taking off her clothes.

This movie really stands as Eastwood v. the FBI and the Media and, although Clint clearly means it as a way to show that Richard Jewell was a hero, I can’t help but think he also means it as a metaphor for the way the FBI and the media have treated Donald Trump; rush to judgment, lie, obfuscate the facts, and frame the victim.

Politics aside, this is a terrific movie. Oscars® for everybody!

 

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