The Man with the Golden Touch:

They say you can’t judge a book by its cover. Well in this case you sort of can. The subtitle is How the BOND films conquered the world. It has a picture of a man with a gun and sporting a tuxedo. You cannot see his mouth or face so you are not supposed to know whom it is. I believe it is Sean Connery in Thunderball. Then again I could be mistaken. It does not really mater who it is. For six men so far have played the part of 007. They all had their strengths and weakness and all brought some thing slightly different to the part of 007. This book is about them and others who have bought 007 out of the pages of Ian Fleming’s novels and on to the big screen of 1962 and beyond. This book consists of 30 chapters and 384 pages (not including index.) it is a good read at times and slow at others. When is focusing on the Bond films themselves it is better. The dull chapters are those that are talking about the in-between times of the 007 films and the other movies affected by them and affecting them themselves. This other flaw this author has is he tends to get off the topic at times. He can go on for while and make you forget what the topic is or the main focus at hand. He does eventually come back to the main focus however and he is informative here. Another set back here is the author tends to make a lot of obscure references to other movies, characters and topics. Some of the names he used in italic were foreign to me. Perhaps Google would be a good companion with this book. You still however can keep up even if you don not know these obscure names and places. The book is good like that and stays on focus (for the most part) and keeps you reading. It took me about three weeks to read this book and now I want to se every James Bond movie in order. Since one chapter at (of this book) a time will focus on a particular Bond movie I am now curious to go back and watch these movies again and see what he is talking about. I guess it is a good thing that this book makes you want to go back and watch more movies. I watch nearly one a day and I still feel bereft after reading this book. This book gets you interested in not only the Bond flicks but also the movies that were influenced by the Bond films. You may also want to go back and review the history of the times that each 007 film was released for this book talks about that and how they influenced the plot of current or upcoming films in the series. All in all I liked this book and found it to be an informative and thought provoking read. In a few weeks I will be focusing on the aforementioned Bond films in my review(s) of the week. So be on the look out for both old and new reviews on that topic. Grade C+