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HOW SIX GREAT ARTISTS MADE OLD AGE A TIME OF TRIUMPH

by Richard Lacayo ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 11, 2022

A fascinating book written with the authority that comes with a great depth of knowledge.

A leading art critic examines the lives of artists who started down a new path in their later years.

In these six illuminating portraits—of Titian, Goya, Monet, Matisse, Edward Hopper, and Louise Nevelson—Lacayo, the former longtime art and architecture critic for Time , pays particular attention to the influences that their later work exerted. “Old age can be no less liberating, if it brings with it the confidence to try new things,” writes the author. “Young artists may experiment because they have nothing to lose. More established ones can do the same because they have nothing to fear.” Titian abandoned the polished surfaces of his classic style and adopted a free-flowing method, with heavy pigment used to inject texture and dynamism. Goya’s series of late works, known as the Black Paintings because of their psychological, nightmarish intensity, opened the way for the imaginary to be used as subject matter. Monet’s massive panels of water lilies emphasized color and tone over structure and perspective, influencing a generation of abstractionists. Matisse, who struggled with mobility issues caused by complications from surgery for abdominal cancer, embarked on a new style of drawing and created a remarkable series of works using cut-out colored paper, showing how simple forms could yield complex meanings. In his final decade, Hopper created surreal paintings, moving decidedly away from his earlier emphasis on realism. His landscapes became simplified and dislocated, and one of his most interesting late works depicts only columns of sunlight in an empty room. Nevelson had built her reputation on complex pieces for gallery spaces before making a radical shift toward large-scale works for urban landscapes. Lacayo provides a biography of each artist and reproductions of crucial works, showing how they arrived at their late-life transition. Through these vivid minibios, the author shows that it is never too late to find a different way of looking at the world.

Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2022

ISBN: 978-1-5011-4658-9

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: July 31, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022

BODY, MIND & SPIRIT | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | ART & PHOTOGRAPHY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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Our Verdict

New York Times Bestseller

by Stephanie Johnson & Brandon Stanton illustrated by Henry Sene Yee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 12, 2022

A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.

A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.

Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.

Pub Date: July 12, 2022

ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2

Page Count: 192

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | ENTERTAINMENT, SPORTS & CELEBRITY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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by Brandon Stanton

by Brandon Stanton photographed by Brandon Stanton

by Brandon Stanton ; photographed by Brandon Stanton

LOVE, PAMELA

by Pamela Anderson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 31, 2023

A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.

The iconic model tells the story of her eventful life.

According to the acknowledgments, this memoir started as "a fifty-page poem and then grew into hundreds of pages of…more poetry." Readers will be glad that Anderson eventually turned to writing prose, since the well-told anecdotes and memorable character sketches are what make it a page-turner. The poetry (more accurately described as italicized notes-to-self with line breaks) remains strewn liberally through the pages, often summarizing the takeaway or the emotional impact of the events described: "I was / and still am / an exceptionally / easy target. / And, / I'm proud of that ." This way of expressing herself is part of who she is, formed partly by her passion for Anaïs Nin and other writers; she is a serious maven of literature and the arts. The narrative gets off to a good start with Anderson’s nostalgic memories of her childhood in coastal Vancouver, raised by very young, very wild, and not very competent parents. Here and throughout the book, the author displays a remarkable lack of anger. She has faced abuse and mistreatment of many kinds over the decades, but she touches on the most appalling passages lightly—though not so lightly you don't feel the torment of the media attention on the events leading up to her divorce from Tommy Lee. Her trip to the pages of Playboy , which involved an escape from a violent fiance and sneaking across the border, is one of many jaw-dropping stories. In one interesting passage, Julian Assange's mother counsels Anderson to desexualize her image in order to be taken more seriously as an activist. She decided that “it was too late to turn back now”—that sexy is an inalienable part of who she is. Throughout her account of this kooky, messed-up, enviable, and often thrilling life, her humility (her sons "are true miracles, considering the gene pool") never fails her.

Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2023

ISBN: 9780063226562

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023

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Guest Review: Last Light by Alex Scarrow

It begins on a very normal Monday morning. But in the space of only a few days, the world's oil supplies have been severed and at a horrifying pace things begin to unravel everywhere. This is no natural disaster; someone is behind this. Oil engineer Andy Sutherland is stranded in Iraq with a company of British soldiers, desperate to find a way home, trapped as the very infrastructure of daily life begins to collapse around him. Back in Britain, his wife Jenny is stuck in Manchester, fighting desperately against the rising chaos to get back to their children; London as events begin to spiral out of control -- riots, raging fires, looting, rape, and murder. In the space of a week, London is transformed into an anarchic vision of hell. Meanwhile, a mysterious man is tracking Andy's family. He'll silence anyone who can reveal the identities of those behind this global disaster. The people with a stranglehold on the future of civilization have flexed their muscles at other significant tipping points in history, and they are prepared to do anything to keep their secret -- and their power -- safe.

Guest Review by Amy:

What would happen to our lives if the flow of oil suddenly got chopped off? Alex Scarrow gives us one possible answer: chaos. One family, Andy and Jennifer Sutherland and their children, college-age Leona and young Jacob, is separated by their circumstances when things go to pieces: Andy is in Iraq with his consulting work as an engineer, Jennifer is in Manchester applying for a job, Leona is at college, and Jake is at his boarding school. As the family struggles to reunite safely at their London home while their world collapses around them, it becomes clear that there’s more going on than meets the eye.

Escape Rating: A-:  I’ll be honest here; I don’t read a lot of “thrillers,” really, but this one seemed interesting after its title appeared in a discussion I was reading about theories around the end of our oil-dependent civilization. The premise here is that things would get crazy in a big, big hurry, if oil production were disrupted at a few key places; the “Peak Oil” theory, as opposed to one of many “depletion” theories. The story was written in 2007, and the situation has changed since then – for one thing, the largest oil-producing country in the world is no longer Saudi Arabia, but the United States. So, the story feels a little dated in that respect.

Taken purely as an adventure-thriller, though, it’s got a lot of solid points. There is a deep conspiracy which has been orchestrating a lot of the chaos, and they’re certain that young Leona knows who at least one of the conspirators is, thanks to a random occurrence ten years before, so an assassin is dispatched to “clean up.” Meanwhile, Andy is struggling, with the help of another foreign contractor and some British troops, to escape Iraq and get home, and Jenny finds herself far to the north of her home, aided by a stranger.

All four members of the Sutherland family are quickly exposed to the fact that we humans turn into savages very, very quickly when things get weird. There’s much made of the fact that “We British are better than this,” and even the Prime Minister, in his press conference, tries to appeal to the Churchillian spirit of his people, to buck up and be strong, we’re Brits, we can handle this. (Pro-tip for Prime Ministers: That was then, this is now, and that appeal probably won’t work today. It sure didn’t for this poor man.)

The action is fast, and lots of people don’t make it, so as readers, we must be careful which characters we get interested in, lest they leave us too soon. The book is stark and shocking, and certainly thought-provoking in light of more-recent events. As I say, thrillers aren’t necessarily my everyday read, but this one had a lot of interesting things going on, plenty of suspense, and enough thought-provoking commentary on the situation to get me thinking and reading more about those matters elsewhere. It’s a quick read, so if you like high-speed thrillers, give this one a look.

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Last Light (miniseries review)

By Frank Kaminski , originally published by Mud City Press

October 24, 2022

A Peacock Original miniseries directed by Dennie Gordon; adapted by Patrick Massett and John Zinman from the novel by Alex Scarrow; cinematographed by Patrick Murguia; edited by Sven Budelmann, Paul Knight and Marty Schenk; production design by Martin Vackár; produced by Veronika Lencova for MGM International Television Productions. Released in Sept. 2022. Running time: about 42 minutes per episode. Rated TV-MA

Starring: Matthew Fox as Andy Yeats, Joanne Froggatt as Elena Yeats, Alyth Ross as Laura Yeats, Taylor Fay as Sam Yeats, Amber Rose Revah as Mika Bakhash, Jim High as Agent Thompson, Victor Alli as Owen Jones, Felix Sandman as Ash Wiles and Tom Wlaschiha as Karl Bergmann

Back in the mid-2000s, there was a growing wave of concern among the general public about the state of the world’s energy reserves. More and more people were becoming aware of the term “peak oil,” which refers to the point at which the rate of global petroleum production peaks and begins to irreversibly decline. UK author Alex Scarrow was among these people. He grew so worried about the issue that he decided to make it the basis for a 2007 cautionary thriller novel titled Last Light . It wasn’t a great novel, but it did play a big role in raising public awareness about peak oil—and its sequel, Afterlight , was markedly better.

Peacock’s five-part miniseries adaptation of Last Light is a few cuts below the book. The latter had a promising premise and was just a bit too contrived and clichéd in its execution of that premise. The miniseries twists the original premise almost beyond recognition, and the twists offer little of interest. The characters and themes have been dramatically altered, seemingly in deference to a modern-day audience that has ceased caring about peak oil. It hardly feels as though the series’ makers were inspired by Scarrow’s book; it’s more like they sampled a random grab bag of elements from it and gave little thought or care to what they surrounded them with. On top of all that, the show fails as a thriller. Seldom does a miniseries so quickly bring to mind the question “Why did they bother?”

Our hero in both the book and the show is Andy. In the book he’s Andy Sutherland, an engineer who is obsessed with peak oil to the point of having driven away his family. In the show he’s petrochemist Andy Yeats (Matthew Fox), who never so much as mentions peak oil. The source of this latter Andy’s familial strife is the immeasurably less interesting TV cliché of the father who doesn’t have time for his family because of work. The beginning of the first episode sees him abruptly leave his family to attend to some mysterious emergency in the oilfields of a fictitious Middle Eastern country. His wife Elena (Joanne Froggatt) resents him for leaving right before a major operation to restore the eyesight of their son Sam (Taylor Fay). His activist daughter Laura (Alyth Ross) resents him for contributing to climate change by working for the oil industry.

The Yeats live in London. Elena is about to leave for Paris with Sam for his operation. Andy promises to finish his work quickly so he can make it to Paris in time for the procedure. Meanwhile, Laura is planning to be in Edinburgh for a climate march. This is all setup for the suspense scenario at the heart of the show, which has the Yeats separated during a global oil crisis in which modern technology grinds to a halt across the industrial world. They’re desperate to reunite, but before they can do so, they must figure out how to stay alive amidst the mayhem quickly engulfing their respective parts of the world.

It all starts when internal combustion engines around the world mysteriously begin sputtering to a halt and then bursting into flames. That’s because the miniseries version of Last Light decides to needlessly complicate the oil shortage scenario by introducing an oil-eating microbe into the mix. (The book, in contrast, sensibly stuck with a straightforward 1970s-style oil shock in which the pumps simply run dry.) People are left to travel by foot, bicycle and other non-motorized means. Blackouts begin sweeping across the Western world. Cities are overtaken by rioting, pillaging and martial law.

We eventually learn that the oil-eating microbe is the work of a villain who aims to bring humanity back into harmony with nature by crashing industrial civilization. Andy ends up working with the British intelligence agency MI-6 to get to the bottom of the villain’s plot and find a way to keep it from coming to fruition. Meanwhile, the situations in which the remaining Yeats family members find themselves prove to be anything but suspenseful or thrilling. Along the way we’re treated to such stunningly original and gracefully executed plot devices as a hooded assassin lurking in the shadows, a literal ticking clock, deus-ex-machina rescues and characters telegraphing the themes of the show through dialogue.

The miniseries deals with peak oil on only the most superficial level. It does an okay job of showing how modern life screeches to a halt when oil supplies are disrupted, but that’s only one piece of the peak oil story. Two other vital pieces are that oil is finite and steadily depleting, and alternative energy sources don’t have anywhere near the energy density needed for them to fill the breach. The show not only fails to hit on these last two points, but implies they aren’t true. To quote one character, “There is still too much coal in the ground, too much oil and rare earth metals waiting to be mined…As long as there are billions to be made, the problem will remain unsolved.” Nature, the show seems to be telling us, has no say in the matter of our continued resource consumption; it’s we humans who are in charge, for better or worse, as if yeast in a sugar solution could somehow magically replenish the sugar.

The one aspect of peak oil that the show does choose to acknowledge—i.e., the profound inconvenience of interruptions to the oil supply—could have been explored much more fully. Consider a scene in which three of our main characters are forced to abandon their car on the freeway and set off on foot. The next time we see them, they’ve arrived at their destination. Where’s the montage of their arduous trek across the interminable countryside? Their brushes with marauders and other threats along the way? When you lose access to your car, a brief jaunt to a neighboring town suddenly becomes a day trip. Such is the incomparable advantage of power derived from concentrated liquid fuels over human muscle power.

The series does have its bright spots. The actors do admirably well with what they’re given, and there are some isolated moments of excitement and tension. But overall this is a mess of a show with little discernible connection to the novel on which it’s supposedly based, and nothing substantive to say about the current world energy situation. Indeed, it could have swapped out the oil crisis scenario for an entirely different type of disaster (a nuclear fallout, say) and remained mostly unchanged.

Photo by Polina Skaia on Unsplash

Frank Kaminski

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Last Light: Season 1 Reviews

It’s clearly got a lot of grand ideas, but they’re presented in a paint-by-numbers fashion.

Full Review | Sep 27, 2022

The anticipated return of Matthew Fox to acting is a little underwhelming. Neither he nor Janne Froggatt can generate much excitement in this run of the mill action movie.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/10 | Sep 24, 2022

From the generic techno-thriller music to the by-the-numbers plotting, Last Light is an underwhelming waste of time that fails to work as a limited series or the first season of a longer story.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/10 | Sep 23, 2022

It's got more than enough action and intrigue, a family that's trying to reunite during a worldwide crisis and Matthew Fox being his usual charming, gritty self (eventually).

Full Review | Sep 21, 2022

Tepid thriller based on a global oil crisis fails to excite.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Sep 19, 2022

This slow-burn eco-thriller adapted from the book by Alex Scarrow, marks a return to screens for Lost alumni Matthew Fox. Last Light is a taut action piece with ecological overtones, which tap into contemporary concerns around the global energy crisis.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Sep 14, 2022

Last Light’s urgency and subject matter fit well with the current dramatic global instability and escalating climate crisis, but topicality can’t make up for weak execution.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/10 | Sep 8, 2022

The series never finds its gear, existing as a ripped-from-future-headlines thriller that’s neither particularly credible nor especially thrilling.

Full Review | Sep 8, 2022

Unfortunately, the chaos here is depicted in such sloppy broad strokes, with such lazy characterization and stilted dialogue, that it becomes clear almost immediately that it won’t move you. It won’t even work as a guilty pleasure.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.2/10 | Sep 8, 2022

A consistently inert environmental thriller that fails to deliver even the most minor thrills.

Full Review | Sep 7, 2022

Last Light is hardly able to justify its own existence, failing at being entertaining or incisive and cementing its place as one of the most misguided shows of the year thus far.

Full Review | Original Score: F | Sep 6, 2022

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8 Things To Know About Last Light , According to Stars Matthew Fox and Joanne Froggatt

Fox, froggatt, their costar amber rose revah, and director dennie gordon discuss traveling the world, portraying a new pandemic, and mixing action with family obligation..

TAGGED AS: Peacock

There’s a global pandemic and an environmental crisis sending cities into chaos. No, this is not the 6 o’clock news. It’s the new Peacock drama Last Light , based on the book by Alex Scarrow.

Andy ( Matthew Fox ) and Elena Yeats ( Joanne Froggatt ) get separated one night when Andy is called in to work. Since Andy is a petrochemist, that overtime sees him embroiled in a pandemic and energy crisis where the world’s oil becomes useless. Elena is left alone to get their blind son, Sam ( Taylor Fay ), to safety while visiting Paris for a life-changing eye surgery. Meanwhile, Andy is stuck in the Middle East with Mika ( Amber Rose Revah ) who is working for British intelligence.

Fox, Froggatt, Revah, and director Dennie Gordon spoke with Rotten Tomatoes about their new show. Here are eight things we learned from the cast and director of Last Light .

1. JUST WHEN MATTHEW FOX WAS OUT, THEY PULLED HIM BACK IN

(Photo by MGM Television/NBCU/Peacock)

Fox retired in 2014 after wrapping production on Bone Tomahawk and said the film allowed him to complete his bucket list by starring in a Western. He admitted, however, that he started considering a comeback by 2018.

“For the first three or four years of that, I really did think that I was completely done,” Fox said. “Then I started thinking maybe not. I kind of want to try executive producing, and I would like to be more involved in other aspects of the story rather than just the role that I’m portraying. I’d love the opportunity to be involved in post and music, just giving input and thoughts and trying to have some bigger effect on the story. That was a part of it for sure.”

2. MATTHEW FOX EARNED HIS EP CREDIT

Fox was an executive producer on Last Light , and Gordon confirmed the depth of his behind-the-scenes involvement, especially during post-production.

“All through post-production, I was sending him cuts,” Gordon said. “We would talk really until the episodes were done. We were still collaborating and still talking. That was just great to have him. He was always available to me, and it was just great to have his perspective because you can get a little blindsided, especially when you’re cutting and you’re in the room for so many hours. He was always a fresh set of eyes.”

3. ANNA BATES KICKS BUTT

Last Light puts Elena and Sam through an adventure, too, and Froggatt noted this is not her first action-heroine role, even if you know her best as Downton Abbey ’s Anna Bates.

“I did a series of Robin Hood before Downton , and I was one of Robin Hood’s gang,” Froggatt said. “I was the girl in the gang. It wasn’t historically correct. That was pretty action-packed. That was a lot of fight scenes. I was the fighty girl in the gang, which was quite fun. That definitely drew me to the project.”

Last Light has Froggatt bashing in windows and climbing ladders.

“I love doing action stuff at work,” Froggatt said. “I thrive on it. It’s just so much fun to do and makes for a really exciting watch as well. I loved it. I would’ve done more if they’d let me.”

Meanwhile, Fox admits he could have prepared better for the physical demands of his role.

“I did have several moments throughout the shooting of this where I thought that I should’ve spent more time in preparation, getting more flexible and maybe spending some more time working out and becoming more prepared for what I was going to be asked to do,” Fox said. “On the page when you look at action material, oftentimes it just undersells how hard it’s going to be to actually do it.”

4. MATTHEW FOX AND AMBER ROSE REVAH WERE FIGHTING MORE THAN ASSASSINS

One of those intense fight scenes comes in episode 3. Revah said she and Fox were also fighting Covid when they were supposed to film that fight.

“We’d obviously been kind of practicing choreography continuously as we were filming,” Revah said. “In whichever breaks, I would go to the training studio and with the team we would practice it. Because we created it together, it was nice. It wasn’t just this is what will happen. There was a lot of discussion over it too. Then the day before we were going to film it, Matthew and I both got Covid. It meant that it was supposed to be maybe four or five days left of our Prague stint of our filming. It ended up that I was then in isolation for another two weeks.”

By the time they were well enough to film the fight and could reschedule it, it was a month later and Prague had fallen into winter, so they were also fighting the bitter cold.

“I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Prague but — whoo-hoo — very cold,” Revah said. “Doing a lot of kicking, punching and slamming in winter is always fun, but it was brilliant. It was great and I think it looks how we wanted it too.”

5. THIS IS NOT THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC

Last Light is essentially a modern-day thriller and there is a global pandemic in it, but it is not Covid-19. In that, at least, it is still escapism.

“We made the decision that the audiences, by the time Last Light came out, were going to be weary of seeing people in masks,” Gordon said. “There was nothing there we needed to revisit except that we know Covid showed us how fast things can fall apart. So we always thought we were just slightly in the future. We were all people who had survived that and knew what that was. That added to the tension. That added to the thriller aspect of it, knowing how bad things got. We didn’t need to have people in masks and we didn’t need to have people on stretchers in ambulances. Everybody was a survivor.”

6. BLOOD IS THICKER THAN OIL

The crisis is instigated by the end of oil. Once set in motion, all that matters to Andy and Elena is getting their family back together, including their teenage daughter, Laura (Alyth Ross), while rioting occurs across the world.

“The marriage between Andy and Elena has got some elements in it that are scratchy,” Fox said. “In the process of getting back together again, coming to the realization of what’s most important in their lives and that is their family. Andy, in particular, I think, has that stripped down to his core and the realization that he maybe has been putting his priorities in the wrong place for some time.”

Froggatt shares most of her scenes with young Fay, and Gordon said she also relied on Froggatt to be the boy’s stage mom.

“It was like ‘Jo, I don’t just need you to be Jo the brilliant actress, but I need you to be his onstage mother because he’s never done anything before,’” Gordon said. “He had no idea, so that she was always harnessing him and whispering in his ear, just keeping him safe when all these crazy things were happening all around.”

7. TAYLOR FAY CAN SEE

Fay is a sighted boy. The series’ backstory is that Sam went blind later in his young life, so Gordon wanted someone who could imagine what it might be like to lose sight.

“I’ll tell you why we went that direction,” Gordon said. “He is sighted, but we needed a child who was sighted who could act blind, because this child had seen in the past. The whole lights going out for him was somebody who did know how to see, who was losing his vision. That becomes thematically important so that’s why we cast that marvelous young boy, Taylor Fay. Kid’s a natural. He’s never done anything before.”

Froggatt and Fox also responded to playing the parents of a special-needs child.

“It always resonates with you when you’re playing a character that is experiencing love and trauma for someone they love,” Froggatt said. “To put yourself in a headspace where you are doing all you can to help your child, and then this terrible thing happens around you, it’s a sort of impossible position to be in. Really.”

Fox was as impressed with Fay as Gordon was. He and Froggatt also discussed how Sam’s blindness affected their marriage.

“It would mean different things to each one of them and how over time, Andy would start to sort of maybe put more on Elena than she wanted,” Fox said. “She wanted to share that responsibility more, and he was sort of using his work as a way to duck out of that responsibility.”

8. LAST LIGHT IS TRULY INTERNATIONAL

Last Light takes place in London, Paris, and the Middle East. While they didn’t go to every exact location to film, they did travel the world finding locations.

“One of the first things I said to Matthew is, ‘I’m not building any sets. We’re only going to use real locations,” Gordon said. “He said, ‘This is music to my ears,’ because we wanted the authenticity, we wanted that reality and also audiences demand it now. You can’t be on a soundstage all day long unless you have a massive VFX budget, and you can be doing things that dazzle the eye.”

Gordon did take some of the cast and crew to Paris. Middle East scenes were filmed in Abu Dhabi, Dubai, and the Al Ain Desert. And, of course, freezing Prague.

“We were out in the desert in an area called Al Ain, which is the filmmaker’s heaven like for Dune and Star Wars ,” Gordon said.” It’s like these beautiful untouched dunes as far as the eye can see. We were very happy to get to that location, because I needed to see Matthew completely lost and alone in the desert there, so we were very happy to have that dune location. It was very exciting.”

Visiting locations from Prague to the United Arab Emirates helped Revah capture Mina’s international experience as an intelligence agent. She speaks several lines of arabic, as well as other languages throughout the show.

“Also speaking to the people there because seeing different perspectives, especially the themes from the show with oil and with climate change,” Revah said. “It is a very international show in terms of its cast, in terms of all of us and crew. So I think having different perspectives, being in different areas, seeing how different cultures handle different things did really help with that.”

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‘last light’ review: matthew fox’s inept new peacock series.

The 'Lost' star returns to TV as an oil scientist in a five-part environmental thriller series.

By Daniel Fienberg

Daniel Fienberg

Chief Television Critic

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Peacock ‘s Last Ligh t is a consistently inert environmental thriller that fails to deliver even the most minor thrills. But in reaching its bizarrely anticlimactic conclusion in only five episodes, none more than 44 minutes, it’s far too brisk to be mad at.

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Last Light begins with Fox’s Andy Yeats — a weirdass reference to “The Second Coming”? — standing on a sand dune. He’s disoriented, or “lost,” if you will. After a burst of high-drama snippets from later in the series, we go back to two days earlier; it’s an in medias res opening in which everything teased will, like everything else in Last Light , prove to be a bit anticlimactic.

Andy is a petro-chemist. His wife Elena ( Joanne Froggatt ) did something before, but now she mostly takes care of their son Sam (Taylor Fay), who has a degenerative eye condition that has caused blindness and will cause perpetual narrative convolutions. The family is about to go to Paris for Sam to have experimental surgery, but then Andy gets pulled away to an oil catastrophe in Generic Middle Eastern Composite, which pisses Elena off because HE PROMISED HE’D PUT HIS FAMILY FIRST. It also pisses his daughter Laura (Alyth Ross) off, because she’s a radical environmentalist and Andy works for oil companies and THAT’S BAD.

But, like I said, there’s an oil catastrophe, specifically that the oil isn’t working anymore. That’s bad, too. In almost no time, tankers start flipping in the ocean, airplanes start falling from the sky and the Yeats family is separated in three different countries — Generic Middle Eastern Composite, France and England, because Laura doesn’t accompany her mother and brother to the surgery for reasons that make no real sense.

Or entertained. After introducing the environmental trappings in the first episode, Last Light almost completely forgets that side of the story for the three subsequent episodes, in which all of our characters are slowly making their way toward a family reunion against the backdrop of crumbling dystopia presented without any sense of scale or logic by director Dennie Gordon. There are some protests in the street; a couple of scenes of long lines at a gas station; some limply staged car crashes; and one or two completely ridiculous fights and shootouts that seem to come from a different show but, like everything else here, don’t last long enough to either be fully ludicrous or exciting.

Despite the number of times Andy barks, “I have to be in Paris by Friday!” in the premiere, Last Light fails to establish any urgency or causality, and the causality ought to be important since the series hinges on a domino run of cultural collapse. If that isn’t believable, nothing is — and if nothing is believable, it’s hard to give Last Light much credit for having its finger on the pulse of much of anything.

That’s it for the Yeats family, and everybody else is worse. Stranger Things and Game of Thrones favorite Tom Wlaschiha plays a science expert who’s smart because he keeps adjusting his glasses — nearsightedness is the real villain here — and then the show forgets he exists and brings him back for a twist that will not surprise a single viewer. Amber Rose Revah plays a government something-or-other with a secret that won’t surprise anybody who looks like she might be important and then vanishes. There’s an annoying French doctor, a guy with no personality traits who Laura spends time with, some hippy with dreadlocks who periodically shoots people, a French woman who helps Laura for no reason, and a few other people who appear in multiple scenes but may not even have character names.

The result of a five-episode series in which there isn’t a single character with a strong personality or a distinctive voice is that any time any characters converse for more than 30 seconds, it’s excruciating. So when the fifth episode becomes all about the bad guy explaining his motivations and how they relate to Andy and his research, it’s halfway between wildly coincidental and just plain dull. The actual resolution must have felt really profound on the page and really made me giggle on-screen, no matter how much I probably agree with its core ideological points.

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What did Monet, Goya and Matisse have in common? Their late work was among their best

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Last Light: How Six Great Artists Made Old Age a Time of Triumph

By Richard Lacayo Simon & Schuster: 384 pages, $35 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org , whose fees support independent bookstores.

Plug the phrase “rising young art star” into Google and you will turn up a mountain of results. Rising young art stars are showing at museums, rising young art stars are moving merch at Art Basel , rising young art stars are sitting for studiously casual photos in fashion magazines. We live in a society that prizes youth, and the art world is no different. The conventional wisdom being that an artist’s most innovative years are in the first half of life.

Richard Lacayo might beg to differ. The former Time magazine art critic’s latest book, “ Last Light : How Six Great Artists Made Old Age a Time of Triumph,” which was published last fall, tracks the works of artists who continued to push themselves — and the boundaries of art-making — right up to the end. And in some cases, the importance of this late-in-life work wouldn’t be understood until a generation or more had passed.

Take Claude Monet , one of the artists featured in the book — who lived to the ripe old age of 86 (he died in 1926) and continued to work until the very end of his life.

The French Impressionist’s late canvases came at a fraught time. He was fighting cataracts and racked with grief over the loss of his wife, Alice. Impressionism had slipped out of fashion, and a younger generation of brash upstarts, including Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso , was making noise with Cubism and other fresh concepts. Monet had come to represent the institution, inspiring yawns in the avant-garde.

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It might not have seemed so at the time, but Monet was still in possession of “a young man’s audacity,” writes Lacayo. And, “in his last decades it was wedded to an old man’s achieved mastery of his art, the fruit of Monet’s lifelong ‘researches’ into light, color, and the most potent ways to represent nature.”

Many of his late canvases — among them, a suite of eight large-scale water lilies paintings that for nearly a century have occupied their own galleries at the Musée de L’Orangerie in Paris — broke with conventions of how landscape was presented. Some do away with perspective and vanishing points, instead showing the artist turning his gaze exclusively to the surface of his pond at Giverny — a view that shows water without any land to put it in context. As a result, some of these canvases can feel disorienting and wildly abstract.

“Monet was entering — was inventing — an entirely new kind of pictorial space,” writes Lacayo. “The pond is simultaneously a mirror that shows us the sky and the trees above it, a membrane that the water lilies ride upon and a window into the depths below, dimly alive with long filaments of moss and wavering grass. Every brushstroke had to imply one or more of those interlocking dimensions.”

The paintings in the Orangerie, bequeathed by the artist to the nation of France in the wake of World War I, are epic in scale — with vast swathes of canvas turned over to gently pulsing color that echo only the vaguest notion of form.

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The reviews were mixed when they were unveiled in the 1920s, with some critics dismissive of Monet’s preoccupation with color and light. But the water lily paintings, as Lacayo notes, gained renewed traction with the advent of New York’s Abstract Expressionists, artists intrigued by the concept of “all over” painting, in which canvases were entirely covered in gestural brushstrokes.

In Monet’s work, there was precedent for Jackson Pollock’s drips and Helen Frankenthaler’s pours — something that became evident when New York’s Museum of Modern Art staged a major exhibition of Monet’s work in 1960. His late canvases made the rowdy New York School seem just a little less radical. As Andy Warhol once stated on the matter: “It was as if somebody said, ‘Why look at Monet, that sweet old man. He was doing all these wild things before you were born.’”

“Last Light” also devotes chapters to Titian, Francisco Goya, Henri Matisse, Edward Hopper and Louise Nevelson . The list is lamentably all Western canon. (Lacayo drew on existing biographies, which is limiting.) But it provides a fresh way of looking at artists you might think you know well, since it inverts the narrative typical of a lot of biographical writing, with its focus on the creative energies of youth followed by the inevitable march toward mannerism and death.

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Lacayo instead uses youth as context for what would come later — and in some cases, that late exuberance is inspiring. “Must I stop work even if the quality deteriorates?” asks Matisse, exasperated that anyone might challenge his devotion to his studio. “Each age has its own beauty.”

The book devotes about 50 pages to each artist, and each of these chapters reads like a compelling mini-biography (you don’t have to know anything about the painters to appreciate them). In addition, they can be read front to back or dipped into at random; a generous helping of images, along with some lovely endpapers, help illustrate Lacayo’s points.

What ultimately makes this worth reading is the writing: Lacayo avoids the artspeak in favor of a tone that is erudite but personable. Goya , a Spanish artist of the late 18th and early 19th centuries whose early years were marked by a lightness of subject, grew darker and more mystical as he aged, reflecting on the barbarities of war — inspired by the Peninsular War, whose purges he survived. “Goya’s late work was an incendiary device that didn’t explode until it landed in the lap of the 20th century,” Lacayo writes of the painter, “an era terrible enough to understand it.”

In many ways, longevity — in life and in the studio — enhanced the posterity of these artists. Some of Goya’s most masterful works, and his most remembered — the grotesque Black Paintings , his horror-filled etchings series “ The Disasters of War” — were created in the last two decades of life.

“If he had died in his early sixties,” writes Lacayo, “he would still be remembered as an artist of charming genre scenes in his youth, a superb portraitist and printmaker in his maturity and a gifted satirist, but not as one of the most influential artists of all time.”

The art industry fetishizes the young, but “Last Light” makes the case that it is unwise to write off the olds. Because life can be long, the afterlife even longer.

Among the drawings Goya made in his last couple years of life is an image of a frail old man walking with the aid of two canes. It is captioned, “Aun aprendo” (I’m Still Learning).

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Carolina A. Miranda is a former Los Angeles Times columnist who focused on art and design, with regular forays into other areas of culture, including performance, books and digital life.

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Last Light Ending, Explained: Who Is Behind the Oil Crisis?

Based on the 2007 namesake novel by Alex Scarrow, ‘Last Light’ Is a Peacock action thriller series. The story follows the Yeats family. Andy Yeats (Matthew Fox) is a renowned Petro-chemist who works for a major energy and oil company. In the days leading up to the experimental surgery for his son’s degenerative eye condition in Paris, he is pulled away to the Middle East because of a developing emergency, though he promises he will be there on the day of the surgery. Andy’s wife, Elena (Joanne Froggatt), subsequently leaves for Paris with their son, Sam (Taylor Fay), while their daughter Laura (Alyth Ross) stays back in London. As the world starts to break down around them, Andy and his family desperately try to reunite with each other. If you are wondering what happens at the end of ‘Last Light,’ we got you covered. SPOILERS AHEAD.

Last Light Season 1 Recap

The five-episode miniseries begins with a flashforward in which Andy is stuck in the middle of a desert during a storm. The narrative then shifts two days back, and we see the Yeats family celebrating Sam’s birthday at a restaurant. As they reach home, Andy is approached by people from his work, Luzrah Oil & Energy, telling him about a developing catastrophe. With Sam’s surgery only days away, his decision to leave predictably causes friction between him and Elena. It is also heavily implied that Andy and Elena are having marital trouble for a while. Elena was previously employed, but she has devoted herself to caring for her son for the last few years. Meanwhile, ironically, Laura is an environmental activist, so her relationship with her Petro-Chemist father isn’t ideal either.

Once Andy is in the Middle East, he is introduced to Mika Bakhash (Amber Rose Revah), a British government representative. Andy wonders aloud why she is there as they head toward the oil fields as a storm starts to brew. After collecting samples, Andy, Mika, and their security detail drive toward the laboratory. This is when they are attacked while a storm rages around them, and Andy finds out that Mika is British Intelligence.

After depositing samples, Andy goes to the hotel and continues to try calling his family, but none of those calls goes through. When he returns to the laboratory, he discovers that most employees there have been gunned down. He goes on the run and is found by Mika. It is revealed that she now suspects him. He convinces her to give him her satellite phone, so he can speak to his family. He once more fails to contact Elena but does get through to Laura and tells her to find a file in his office, take photos of its content, and then e-mail them. What Laura doesn’t tell him is that she is in considerable danger herself.

In London , Laura grows close to Owen Jones (Victor Alli), a self-proclaimed computer nerd with questionable social skills. She discovers that a man with dreadlocks is after her. While they try to escape, the man shoots Owen, prompting Laura to take him to the hospital. It is there that she receives the call from her father.

Meanwhile, as electricity starts to shut down across Europe, cars stop working, and planes drop off the sky, people begin to realize that something is definitely wrong with the fuel. Sam’s surgery is postponed indefinitely, so Elena decides to return to London with her son. However, she soon discovers that all flights have been canceled. With the help of her son’s doctor, she reaches the border, but the doctor is killed after a car hits him. An immigrant woman subsequently helps Laura and Sam to reach England, where they are detained despite being British citizens.

Meanwhile, after Andy lands in England, Mika and her superiors have him arrested, suspecting his involvement in the global catastrophe. In the season finale, following the revelation of the real mastermind, his reunion with Elena and Sam, and the presumption that his daughter has been kidnapped, Andy races against time to save Laura and human civilization as we know it.

Last Light Season 1 Ending: Who Is Behind the Oil Crisis? What Is Causing the Oil Crisis?

After returning to the UK, Andy is taken into custody by British Intelligence. It is revealed that the file he earlier told Laura to take photos of and e-mail is directly connected to what is happening in the world. Twenty-five years ago, Andy and his friend, Tobias Heller, wrote a thesis on how to deal with the environmental crisis and climate change. They developed a bacteria that can eat oil. But then, Andy met Elena, got married, and started to raise a family. This made him brutally pragmatic about the world around him, and he subsequently became part of the machinery that he had desperately loathed. In the ensuing years, he worked as a Petro-chemist for some of the biggest oil and energy companies in the world, with Luzrah being the latest.

Tobias, who is now part of the British government under the alias Karl Bergmann (Tom Wlaschiha), is the mastermind behind Apocalypse Watch, the eco-terrorist group that spreads the virus across nations, causing the oil disaster and deaths of thousands. ‘Last Light’ tries to deconstruct the radical approach to environmentalism. While it accepts that something must be done to course-correct humanity’s current march towards doom, it also earnestly depicts the possible tragic ramifications of such actions.

Why Does Tobias/Karl Kidnap Laura?

Although it seems by the end of episode four that Tobias has kidnapped Laura to lure Andy into his trap, it is soon revealed that she is a willing participant. Laura’s environmentalism directly contradicts her father’s work, and they both are aware of it. She is surprised — and to a degree, horrified — that her father used to be a radical environmentalist in his youth. During their confrontation, Tobias forces Andy to remember who he used to be. When Andy tries to admit that he indeed betrayed Tobias, the latter corrects him by saying he betrayed himself.

However, despite their ideological differences, Laura realizes her father is right about the deaths of thousands and helps him with Tobias. She and Andy try to escape just as Tobias tells his people to find them. Fortunately for Andy and Laura, the government forces arrive right then.

Why Does Tobias/Karl Die by Suicide?

In the climactic scene of ‘Last Light,’ Tobias and Andy fight. When the British special forces arrive, Tobias kills himself, but not before reminding Andy to do his part. Although Andy has developed a virus that can kill the bacteria, it is not delivered in time to save oil because Tobias knowingly kept him engaged. The clock runs out, and the apocalypse begins.

However, humanity perseveres. With his death, Tobias paints himself as the villain and Andy as the hero. And the world looks to the latter for the answers. And just as Tobias hoped, Andy and the rest of humanity rise up together. Humanity becomes more social, with people helping each other through trying times. Innovations that haven’t even been thought of before take place because there is suddenly a need for them. In the absence of oil, the world has no other choice but to look for alternative sources of energy, and nature starts to heal.

In the personal life of the Yeats family, healing happens as well. The relationship between Andy and Elena improves in the post-apocalyptic utopian world, as does the one between Laura and Andy. Sam’s surgery finally takes place, and he can see now. The world is greener, healthier, and happier.

Read More: Is Last Light Based on a True Story?

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audiobook (Unabridged) ∣ Restoration

By terri blackstock.

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Restoration

Terri Blackstock

Susie Breck

16 October 2005

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The first installment in a thrilling series in which a global catastrophe puts a family's survival at risk—and both reveals the darkness in human hearts and lights the way to restoration.

Birmingham, Alabama, has lost all power. Its streets are jammed with cars that won't start and its airport is engulfed in flames from burning planes. All communications—cell phones, computers, even radios—are silent. Every home and business is dark. Is it a natural disaster, a terrorist attack, or something far worse?

In the face of a crisis that sweeps an entire high-tech planet back to a time before electricity, the Branning family faces a choice. Will they hoard their possessions in order to survive—or trust God to provide as they share their resources with those around them? Yesterday's world is gone. Family and community are all that remain. And the outage is revealing the worst in some.

Desperation can be dangerous—especially when a killer lives among them.

• Full-length suspense novel
• Book 1: Last Light
• Book 2: Night Light
• Book 3: True Light
• Book 4: Dawn's Light

Last Light Book Review

Are you prepared for emergencies? How would you and your family survive if the world as we know it suddenly changed? This is the situation that Doug and his family were thrust into with no warning. Doug and his daughter landed at the airport and suddenly the world went dark; the electricity was out, cars stalled on the interstates, generators quit working, watches stopped and the world quickly went into panic mode.

Last Light is not a typical disaster book where the characters are working to save the world or fix the problem. Instead, the characters in this novel spend many of the pages in the book trying to figure out how they are going to respond to the situations in their neighborhood.

A murderer on the loose, robbery, teenage rebellion, hoarding , fights between friends….  Life without electricity or any of the comforts of civilization takes a toll on the lives of the characters in this book.

There is a strong Christian message in this book that helps determine the choices of each of the characters.  Last Light definitely makes you think about how you would respond if the world suddenly changed.

About the Book

After an unexplained catastrophic event in the atmosphere knocks out all electronics in the world, these well-to-do families who’ve accumulated so many things are suddenly left helpless. Their Mercedes and BMWs sit in their driveways, useless. Their expensive, well-appointed homes have no electricity, no refrigeration, no phones. Even their battery-operated electronics don’t work. No one is certain whether the country is under attack. Without communication, there is no way to find out. One family of Christians–the Brannings–realizes the needs of those around them.

Learn about the other books in the Restoration Series .

About the Author

Terri Blackstock is a New York Times best-seller, with over six million copies sold worldwide. She has had over twenty-five years of success as a novelist. Terri spent the first twelve years of her life traveling in an Air Force family. She lived in nine states and attended the first four years of school in The Netherlands. Because she was a perpetual “new kid,” her imagination became her closest friend. That, she believes, was the biggest factor in her becoming a novelist. She sold her first novel at the age of twenty-five, and has had a successful career ever since.

Read the first chapter here .

I received a copy of this book from Tommy Nelson Book Sneeze. I was not required to write a positive review.

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Justin Bell specializes in high octane novels that grab the reader by the collar and drag them twisting and turning through a harrowing tale of suspense and excitement! Cutting his teeth on the Kindle Worlds G.I. Joe platform, Justin specializes in military oriented action novels with just the right hint of science fiction, "fifteen minutes in the future" perspective from popular universes like Metal Gear Solid and Tom Clancy.

Intense, well choreographed action, genetically enhanced paranormal super heroes, sinister villains and hard-hitting events surround each and every character.

*** Check out his blog: http://www.justinbellauthor.com

*** Check out his Publishing Company: http://www.wolfsheadpublishing.com

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Justin Bell was born in San Diego, California, but has lived most of his life in the sleepy Upper Valley area on the New Hampshire and Vermont border. He first realized his love of writing at a young age, and had grand visions to go to school for English. Somehow he got sidetracked into the world of Information Technology as a career, but throughout it all, he has continued to write and write often.

The world of self publishing has opened up his eyes, and in recent years he has embraced writing much more thoroughly, polishing some work from past decades and working on new material as well.

With an interest in military adventure, science-fiction, and action, the focus of most of his work is with those genres.

He currently still resides in the Upper Valley area, and lives with his two beautiful little girls, his wife, and his affectionate Bichon puppy Tyson.

Mike Kraus arrived on the fiction scene in 2012 with the surprise smash hit Final Dawn, a post-apocalyptic series that sold over 250,000 copies in just a year. A few years later he formed Muonic Press, the 5+ year top indie publisher of post-apocalyptic fiction on Amazon (according to book analytics firm K-lytics) and a truly unique indie press in how it operates collaboratively with authors to form connections with readers that last beyond a single book or series. Muonic Press and Mike collectively have over 3.25 million sales as of 2023, and that number continues to grow as they produce amazingly unputdownable entertainment.

In his youth, Mike Kraus devoured the works of Crichton, King and Preston & Child like there was no tomorrow, along with a healthy dose of technothrillers from the likes of James Rollins. These influences clearly ring true to this day, as readers have described Mike "like if Crichton and King had a love child" and he still loves imbibing in a pulpy technothriller whenever he has the chance.

You can follow Mike's books by signing up for his newsletter on his website (MikeKra.us) or visiting him on Facebook (facebook.com/MikeKrausBooks) and you can visit Muonic Press and www.muonic.com.

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Last Light: Matthew Fox slipping into new Peacock event series tackling a global oil meltdown

A worldwide collapse that unfolds in real time, a desperate dad trying to unravel its secrets while finding his way back home, and a shadowy cabal that may be behind it all — that’s the book-based setup for Last Light , a new event series headed to Peacock that lends a barrel of crude, real-world gravity to the idea of global apocalypse.

Matthew Fox ( Lost ) will make his return to TV in the new limited drama thriller series, alongside Golden Globe-winning co-star Joanne Froggatt  ( Liar ,  Downton Abbey ), Peacock announced today. Based on Alex Scarrow’s 2007 international best-selling  novel  of the same name, Last Light  follows the global chaos that ensues when the world’s oil infrastructure is suddenly interrupted — and tracks a sinister mystery that suggests it was much more than a mere accident.

Last Light is set to run as a 5-episode event series, with Fox executive producing along with William Choi and Entertainment 360. Also serving as an executive producer is Dennie Gordon ( Jack Ryan ), who will direct the full series. Patrick Massett and John Zinman ( Friday Night Lights ,  The Blacklist ) will serve as showrunners as well as executive producers. The series hails from MGM International TV Productions in association with Nordic Entertainment Group’s Viaplay.    

While earth-shattering apocalyptic themes often rely on zombies , plagues , aliens , and other sci-fi staples, Scarrow’s novel wrests a more reality-based brand of tension from a scenario that feels far more plausible. What happens when the energy that makes the world go ‘round suddenly runs out?

“This is a timely thriller about society’s dependency on oil and its devastating effects on our planet,” said Rola Bauer, President of MGM International TV Productions, in Peacock’s announcement.

Fox will star as Andy Neilson. an American ex-pat living in London. As one of the world’s most sought-after petrochemical engineers, Andy is “brilliant and very in demand, but his drive and ambition have sometimes been to the detriment of his family life,” Peacock teases. Stuck on a business trip to the Middle East when chaos erupts, “Andy realizes that his worst fears are coming true and his family is separated at this crucial moment. His teenage daughter, Laura, is alone at home in London while his wife, Elena, and young son, Sam, are in Paris.”

Froggatt, meanwhile, will try to hold the family together as Elena Neilson, a “smart, caring, and beautiful” mom devoted to reversing the degenerative eye disease that afflicts Sam, their youngest child. Elena surrenders a “thriving professional career [to] put all of her considerable energy and ability toward finding a cure,” though her dedication is “tempered by the state of her marriage, which has been strained to the breaking point.”

“ Last Light  is the perfect combination of an action-packed limited series with a compelling family drama at its heart,” said Lisa Katz, president of scripted content at NBCUniversal Television and Streaming. “…[T]his sweeping international saga spans several continents that provide a stunning global backdrop, yet is grounded in a relatable and topical story. We can’t wait to share this with Peacock audiences.”

There’s no early word on when Last Light will flicker to life, though Peacock said that Gordon, as director, is “currently on the ground in Prague,” where location filming for Last Light is set to get underway.

SYFY WIRE and Peacock are properties of NBCUniversal, a subsidiary of Comcast Corporation.

• Matthew Fox

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