![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() 13)įorecast: Blurbs from Sapphire and Dorothy Allison and an eight-city author tour should help get this promising first novel off to a good start. Still, this is a moving, uplifting story of love and hope in the face of adversity. The letters are fluent, candid and colloquial, though occasionally readers may crave dialogue and a fresh point of view. This program is read by Black Panther star, Chadwick Boseman Baby, the first thing I need to know from you is do. As the years pass, of course, both of their lives alter dramatically, and their feelings for each another inevitably change as well. Kalisha Buckhanon beautifully illustrates their diverging paths with two almost simultaneous letters that show Natasha’s joy on a summer academic program in Paris and Antonio’s despair at. And all I could think while looking at you all at the same time I was looking at me was I look old, I look sad, I look used," laments Antonio in one letter. Still young, still fresh with them shiny eyes and bright faces. ![]() "I got even more down too when my peoples came to visit me. Written in the form of letters between Antonio and Natasha, Buckhanon's debut novel captures the young lovers' anger, hope and frustration. Antonio and Natasha, two Harlem teenagers, are deeply in love with each other, but their relationship is put to the test when Antonio goes to jail just before their senior year for killing his father, a crime he may or may not have committed. Like any good love story, this one's riddled with conflict from the get-go. ![]()
0 Comments
![]() ![]() Through love we imagine a new way of being. Love is at once an affirmation and a transcendence of who we are.īeginnings are always ripe with possibilities, for they hold the promise of completion. Drawing on decades of her own work with couples and a vast body of psychological literature, Perel offers an illuminating and consolatory perspective on intimate relationships and our conflicting needs for security and freedom, warmth and wildness. ![]() How to live with those paradoxes, rather than succumbing to the self-defeating urge to treat them as problems to be solved, is what Belgian psychotherapist and writer Esther Perel explores in Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence ( public library). ![]() One chief reason we flounder in this supreme human aspiration is our unwillingness to accept the paradoxes of love - paradoxes like the necessity of frustration in romantic satisfaction and the seemingly irreconcilable notion that while love longs for closeness, desire thrives on distance. “There is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started with such tremendous hopes and expectations, and yet, which fails so regularly, as love,” the great humanistic philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm wrote in his 1965 classic on mastering the art of loving. ![]() ![]() ![]() In the rough and tumble of that contested time, well-documented by now, there is little that is new or the font of an unusual conspiracy. Menon’s inevitable preference for Patel’s leadership (with whom he had great comfort in the working of the States Department), and his clear antipathy of Nehru’s leadership, anecdotes that show up Nehru’s insecurities, these other facets do come through. To read this book to simply stir up more controversy between Patel and Nehru, to learn of V. As has been pointed out by others, the uncritical dependence on these papers in this book affects the quality of the biography and the historical content. Menon wrote of this period in history (‘The Transfer of Power’ and ‘The Story of the Integration of the Indian States’). ![]() This book supplements the two more scholarly books V.P. Menon’s own story, transcribed in his own words from a series of recordings made with his superior, Harry Hodson, in the winter of his life in Bangalore in 1965. Menon cast away from his modest past, he got a lucky break: a series of accidents brought him to the highest bureaucratic office possible for an Indian in colonial India. Menon was the one lucky exception this book brings to mind. ![]() Not many people burn down their school and go onto successful careers. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() After that beautiful gesture from Kaz, if they both team up to rid Ketterdam and The Barrel of slavers, what happens to Jesper and Wylan? How is Nina getting over Mattias? There’s a ton of stuff to tell a good story, to close the circle. There are some loose ends that need to be resolved like Kanej’s relationship. So, I know how it ends and that’s why I’m sure I need a lot more. You see, I have a pretty strange hobby that consists of reading the last pages of a book when I start it, and Crooked Kingdom was no exception. ![]() Still, without finishing reading this second book of our Crows, I already want the third! So much so that, immediately after finishing it (and healing my Kanej heart a bit), I started Crooked Kingdom, and my Kanej heart suffered more, but that’s another story. While Shadow and Bone isn’t my favorite book, Six of Crows won me over from the beginning. Rules of Wolves, which is set in the same world as Shadow and Bone and Six of Crows, was just released on March 30, 2021, aka today! With the premiere of one of the best fantasy shows of the year – yes, Shadow and Bone is THAT good – so close, it’s time to catch up on Leigh Bardugo‘s books. Netflix’s new show, Shadow and Bone, is officially less than a month away from hitting Netflix! Could we see a third Six of Crows book by Leigh Bardugo in the near future? ![]() ![]() ![]() The first installment in Cole’s ( Mixed Signals, 2015, etc.) Loyal League series defies genre stereotypes at every turn. Malcolm must treat Elle as less than human in front of others while convincing her in private that he values her as highly as any white woman. Little by little Malcolm wins her over, but the painful racial dynamics around them threaten to poison their relationship. Malcolm is a skilled spy and a good person, but Elle has a hard time bringing herself to trust a glib and charming white man whose job requires him to be a gifted liar. But her careful work is thrown into disarray by the arrival of Malcolm McCall, a detective in the Pinkerton network who is posing as a Confederate soldier paying social visits to the household where Elle works. ![]() ![]() Elle’s photographic memory makes her extremely valuable to the Loyal League, a network of black spies working to undermine the Confederacy. Her “masters” are living the high life in spite of a punishing Union blockade that’s causing widespread suffering and starvation in Richmond, Virginia. She is “going to help destroy the Confederacy.” But to do that, she has to do something she never imagined possible-pose as an enslaved woman on loan to a family of spoiled whites. A spy posing as a slave in Civil War Virginia risks her own life and the outcome of the war by falling in love with a fellow spy of another race.Īfter being freed from slavery as a child, Ellen “Elle” Burns has one purpose. ![]() ![]() ![]() The follow up to their incredibly imaginative and important 2018 novel Freshwater-which set such a high bar I didn’t think possible to clear-and the wonderful 2019 YA novel Pet, Emezi returns with a bittersweet and powerfully moving story set in their home of Nigeria and follows the lives of characters who, for a variety of reasons, don’t quite fit in. ![]() Have you ever wondered what it felt like finishing a novel before it was dubbed a “Classic?” Upon turning the final page in Akwaeke Emezi’s The Death of Vivek Oji I had the feeling I was finishing something that deserves to be important for a long time and could likely be a modern Classic. ‘ It was the clearest terror and pleasure I had ever known.’ ![]() ![]() ![]() The conveyer-belt pacing therefore feels intentional: Our murderous wrongs are repeated, and repeated, and to look away is to refuse, deliberately, to bear witness. Her new world order isn’t so much woven into story as it is planted in front of us like a gravestone. Of course, Bazterrica isn’t writing a pamphlet. If Bazterrica had stopped here, she’d still have crafted one of the most potent indictments since Blood of the Beasts, Georges Franju’s palate-killing 1949 documentary about Paris slaughterhouses. There really is no debate here our process of mechanizing meat production is morally appalling. ![]() It’s surprising, though it shouldn’t be, how easy it is to critique our real-life factory-farm processes by mentally swapping a human for a pig or cow. Because of its banal and miserable tone, given a muscular translation by Sarah Moses, Tender Is the Flesh - which won Argentina’s Premio Clarin de Novela - is, at least in spates, more powerful than either forebear. The setup sounds like the Charlton Heston teeth-gnasher Soylent Green mated to Anthony Burgess’s satirical novel The Wanting Seed, yet the prose feels like neither. ![]() Bazterrica’s interest is less in near-future world-building than in reflecting our grisly present. ![]() ![]() Since the same actor did Shogun (and I do remember thinking that Blackthorne shouted a lot - but that was more in character), it is surprising that this was such a disappointing return. ![]() Ian Dunross (Pierce Brosnan) is named Tai-Pan (supreme leader) of a powerful. Any attempt at a Scottish accent was pitiful - which is ridiculous since the Scottish characters in the Struans/Dunross storylines are central to the storyline. Watch Noble House Season 1 Episode 1 Noble House (Pt. Mr Lister seemed to convey emotions by shouting a lot, and some of the regional accents were just shocking. To the Chinese, that also makes him Tai-Pan. Overextended by the previous management, new tai-pan Ian Dunross has had to issue public stock to. Wanted to know what happened to all the characters! Sad to say, the narration was nowhere near as good as for the others in the series. Ian Struan Dunross is chairman of Struan & Co, the oldest and largest of the British-East Asia trading companies. I remember wanting the whole story to continue, at its breakneck speed, and had the same sense at completing the audio-book. However, more than compensated for by the masterful weaving of all the storylines into a satisfying tapestry. I noticed the 60s standards much more this time, with a few wince moments at the sexism of characterisations. ![]() And glad to say, the story itself lived up to expectations - almost 100%. Working my way through the Asian Saga, my memories of Noble House were of a cracking good read. ![]() ![]() ![]() Named by Modern Library as one of the 100 greatest novels of the twentieth century.įirst edition of Caldwell's classic work. It was the basis for the Broadway show which ran from 1933 to 1941 (then the longest-running play on record), and adapted into the 1941 film directed by John Ford starring Charley Grapewin, Marjorie Rambeau, Gene Tierney, William Tracy, Dana Andrews and Ward Bond. ![]() The family's antics, while at times vile and perverse, depict the racism and moral ambiguity that existed among some impoverished Southerners at that time and represent Erskine Caldwell's critique of the failed economic system and its consequences. Jeeter and Ada Lester have 17 children, two of whom still live at home: Ellie May, their only unmarried daughter who has a cleft lip, and Dude, their youngest son who is mentally handicapped. It focuses on the Lester family, former cotton farmers who continue to live on their ancestors' plantation even though it has long ceased to be prosperous. Unsentimentally realistic, this classic novel is a reflection of the effects of poverty on tenant farmers in the South during the Great Depression. ![]() Presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper, "For with the best wishes of Erskine Caldwell July 13th 1935." Near fine in a very good dust jacket with light rubbing to the spine extremities. ![]() First edition of Caldwell's classic work. ![]() ![]() ![]() So you've got to read everything to get to it. So she gives her the advice in the book and it's advice that I think everyone should hear.Īnd of course of course she put the you know this amazing part of this book is at the very end. ![]() And she wishes that she could have given her better better advice. And she talks about in the book about how much she regrets that moment. She told this great story about this little girl who asked her at an event, "Mindy, where do you get your confidence?"Īnd Kaling admitted that she gave the girl a really bad answer because she was tired and that was the end of the day or something like that. The thing I love about Mindy Kaling is that she is so confident and it's something that she addresses in this book. Personally, it sums up a mantra that I've had my entire life. ![]() You know "why not me." It's such a powerful statement. Honestly when I decided to read this book, I was expecting something different. Because here's something that you might not know about Mindy Kaling. And if you're like OK this girl is not going to review a book by a TV comedy writer and an actress. And today I'm going to surprise you and do, "Why Not Me" by Mindy Kaling. ![]() |