Search results for ""Author Zachary Michael Jack""

Special Effects: Short Takes on Stylish Prose tackles the dilemma dedicated writers have faced for generations: how to make words on the page as compelling as images on the screen. Perfect for film buffs and TV enthusiasts who want to improve their writing, this innovative handbook reveals how cinematics can transform syntactics. Packed with 40 proven strategies designed to make serious and scholarly texts "read" as seamlessly and enjoyably as great movies, and accompanied by nearly 100 writing prompts perfect for use in college courses, writers' workshops, and workplace conference rooms, this one-of-a-kind guide shows how to make the daring leaps action heroes and dauntless authors make routine.What do James Bond flicks and Dante's Divine Comedy say about the art of attention-getting beginnings? What does a thorough credit roll have in common with effective scholarly citation? How can film set gaffers and film noir writers show us how to "light" our prose? How are passive verbs like guys on the lam in old black-and-white spy thrillers? How do Black Panther films and Wonder Woman comics inspire us to flip our scripts, diversifying the characters, real and imagined, about whom we write? Special Effects addresses writing's most persistent craft questions by boldly going where no prose style guide has gone before: to a front row seat at the movie theater.

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It was “scary,” Jack Nicklaus said of Pebble Beach, and gave him nightmares so acute he famously woke his wife on the eve of his 1972 U.S. Open victory totally spooked. “It’s not a golf course,” sportswriter Jim Murray wrote, “it’s a hellship.” Golf writer Dan Jenkins once joked that the famed venue of the Bing Crosby National Pro-Am should be dubbed “Double Bogey-by-the-Sea.” A one-time failed Division One golf walk-on, Zachary Michael Jack opts to stare down an early midlife crisis by chronicling a U.S. Open year spent at Pebble Beach, object of his ailing father’s fantasies and site of the nation’s number one public course and its fairy-tale host town, Carmel-by-the-Sea, California. There, along the blue Pacific, he traces the colorful, capricious, and comical world of golf on the Monterey Peninsula as never before via interviews with legends of the game Johnny Miller, Gary Player, and Tom Watson; with today’s brightest stars—Padraig Harrington, Phil Mickelson, and Bubba Watson; and with some of its most famous celebrity linksters—actor Bill Murray, Olympic soccer star Brandi Chastain, and billionaire entrepreneur Charles Schwab. Conducting more than one hundred interviews, Jack ranges far and wide to get the scoop, talking golfing haunts with bestselling golf novelist Michael Murphy; teeing up with members of a Carmel-based worldwide golfing society devoted to mystical play; learning to play Pebble at the knee of one of the Top 50 Golf Teachers in America and with a Carmel-based journeyman pro described as “a golf savant”; and raising a cup with a lifelong Pebble Beach resident and caddy who, unbeknownst to the hackers he shepherds, is a Hall of Fame golfer. By turns hilarious, haunting, and historic, Let There Be Pebble reveals the utter uniqueness—the people, the rich history, the unforgettable setting and sporting culture—of this one-of-a-kind golfing cathedral.

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What does it mean to deeply love a home place that haunts us still? From Mark Twain to Grant Wood to Garrison Keillor, regionalists from the Gilded Age to the Digital Age have explored the American Gothic and the homegrown fatalism that flourish in many of the nation's most far-flung and forgotten places. The Haunt of Home introduces us to a cast of real-life Midwestern characters grappling with the Gothic in their own lives, from promising young professionals debating the perennial "Should I stay or should I go" dilemma, to recent émigrés and entrepreneurs seeking personal reinvention, to faithful boosters determined to keep their communities alive despite the odds. In The Haunt of Home Zachary Michael Jack considers the many ways a region's abiding spirit shapes the ethos of a land and its people, offering portraits of others who, like himself, are determined to live out the unique promise and predicament of the Gothic.

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