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.
 

  

 

The Aeronauts (8/10)

by Tony Medley

103 minutes.

PG

When the opening titles say, “inspired by true events,” you know you are in for lots of fiction, and that’s what you get with this. Based on the true event of meteorologist James Glashier’s (Eddie Redmayne) record-breaking flight in a balloon in 1862 to a height of 35,000 feet, that’s as far as the “true events” go in this fine, entertaining film.

In the film Glashier is a young man shown great disrespect by the Royal Society (he was actually 53 years old when this event occurred, and a fellow of the Royal Society and had been for 14 years), and is accompanied by Amelia Wren (Felicity Jones), a fictional character based upon French aeronaut Sophie Blanchard, the first woman to work as a professional balloonist and widow of ballooning pioneer Jean-Pierre Blanchard. In fact, however, Glashier was accompanied by Henry Coxwell and there is no evidence that any of the dramatic events the film shows that James and Amelia endured actually happened, although James did pass out during the ascent. I wanted to get that out of the way because one should not view this film as a documentary or anything closely associated with historical fact.

That said, it’s a tense, involving film, with fine acting and directing (Tom Harper from a screenplay by Jack Thorne, loosely based on the book “Falling Upwards” by Richard Holmes, a history of 19th century ballooning.). The pace keeps up throughout; there is nothing that slows it down. Apparently Jones did lots of her own stunts in the studio, and did pull herself up from the basket onto the hoop at 2,000 feet, but her stunt double did the climbing up the outside of the balloon at 3,000 feet, which could make your heart beat a little faster as you are watching it.

A lot of the film was done in a balloon, so when you see James and Amelia talking in the balloon basket way up there in the air, they really are there. One thing that doesn’t come across unless you are really paying close attention is that all of the action takes place over a period of approximately two hours. When I mentioned that to my assistant after the film, she was astonished.

As I said, it’s an entertaining film, but most of it is pure fiction.

 

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