On a typical day, I very much enjoy being a homeowner. Rent becomes a mortgage payment, I have a yard the kids can play in, and I don’t need to worry about people above me getting rowdy. But inevitably things break, and then there’s no maintenance staff like in my old apartment building who will …
Author Archives: Peter Martuneac
Review: ‘The Return of the King’
Yes, it’s finally time to review the third and final installment of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings film trilogy! I keep saying it in each of the previous parts of this review series, but there’s really almost nothing bad about these movies. I’ll take it one step further: there is almost nothing about …
Review: ‘The Two Towers’
Welcome to the second part of my review of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy! As I mentioned in Part 1, these reviews are specifically about the films, not the books. So please don’t be upset if I talk about something that’s not in the books or neglect something that is in the …
Happy 200th Birthday – Ulysses S. Grant
On this day 200 years ago, one of America’s greatest heroes was born in a cabin in Ohio: Ulysses S. Grant. If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, then you know that Grant is one of my favorite Americans in its history. He’s on my personal Mount Rushmore, along with George Washington, Lewis …
“The Last Kingdom”: Review
After a hiatus from this show, due mostly to uncertainty about whether I even wanted to finish it, I finally watched the final season of The Last Kingdom on Netflix. Based on the books by Bernard Cornwell, the show is a historical fiction that follows Lord Uhtred of Bebbanburg through the reigns of King Alfred …
Weekend Update
It’s been a pretty crazy week here, one for the family record books! For one thing, we all came down with Covid. Yes, after two years it finally got us. The kids are both fine, showing almost no symptoms, and I’ve only dealt with a slight cough and congestion. The wife got it the worst, …
Review: The Fellowship of the Ring
Two things have inspired this new series of blog posts: one was fellow blogger and author Berthold Gambrel’s series of reviews of 90’s action movies, and the other was a post on Twitter asking users to name four movies that they find to be flawless masterpieces. And so, I intend to do a review of …
New Blog Posts to Come
Inspired by fellow author/blogger Berthold Gambrel, I’m going to try something new with my blog. He recently finished a series in which he breaks down some of the most memorable 90’s action films (you can read the last in the series here, posted just this morning), and that was fun to read. Therefore, in a …
Weekend Update: Some Progress
For a while now, my current work-in-progress Creed: Solomon’s Fortune has been giving me headaches. I think this was the toughest book I’ve written yet, and it took a long time for the full story to truly reveal itself to me. I took a couple breaks, jumped around in the timeline a bit, and just …
Book Review: The Memoirs of US Grant
I’d been meaning to read Ulysses Grant’s memoirs for quite some time. After reading two large biographies and a few analyses of his generalship in the Civil War, I had a pretty good portrait of Grant painted for me. However, I wanted to get inside the mind of the man himself. I wanted to see …