In short, the book is excellent — funny and charming, with occasional flashes of big-league beauty that are way more than its junior high school audience deserves, but let's give it to them anyway.
"If you don't discount, you won't get that flash of big sales during the final week," says Britt Beemer, president of America's Research Group, a retail market research firm.
He said that even though it is a collaboration, the book is still recognisably Clarke, "with the same humour, the same enthusiasm, the great flashes of inspiration, the big ideas and the same curious positivism that underlines most of Sir Arthur's work.
They'd come up, spray water into the air, and then, with a flash of their big black tails, dive down again.
Sirens blaring and lights flashing, his motorcade of big black cars, Jeeps filled with armed men and an ambulance arrived at Manara Square shortly after 5 p.m. to a hero's welcome.
You'll also think about it when it's over, which is saying a lot in the flash paper world of big movie entertainment where stories are made to go in one eye out the other.
With flashes of Sharon Van Etten and Big Star, her lyrics home in on the tiny details – the way he smelt ("the stale smell of cigarettes"), or the flicker of uncertainty in his eyes.
He can afford to rumple and fatten his character, turning Vince into a slob and a patsy, driving the picture beyond the regulation hipness of "Reservoir Dogs" into a shabbier territory, where a man is known not just by his suit or his ruthlessness but by his hits of bliss and his flashes of panic, the big mistakes he can make as he tries to correct the little ones.
So the rush of clicking cameras — a glorious whirr — appears poised to go the way of the flash, another nostalgic marker of big news events that's been obviated by technological advance.
"Technology is allowing families to worship together again," said Andre Barnes, the technology director at Impact Church in Atlanta, Ga., which has developed its own iPhone app and where Twitter hashtags are routinely flashed on a pair of big screens during services.
