“News of the World”–A Gift for the Heart
News of the World is based on the Paulette Jiles’s bestseller by the same name. The story follows a sixty-something curmudgeonly widower, Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd (Tom Hanks), a traveling newspaper reader. Captain Kidd entertains and informs townspeople–some of whom are illiterate– in small communities all over Texas: for the price of a silver dime. The year is 1870, five years after Reconstruction, and Texans still are disgruntled by their defeat after the end of the Civil War.
In the opening scene a Black man has been lynched and a ten-year-old...