![]() ![]() ![]() This is the territory of Jane Jacobs, whose 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities praised the inherent sociability of a traditional street. He describes an initiative in Brooklyn where older people can play in virtual bowling leagues as a way of meeting people It seems they encouraged the cooperation and support that helped people survive. Places with similar demographics but more cohesive fabric fared better. ![]() ![]() There, he discovered that the likelihood of death or illness from the heat related not only to deprivation and social position, as might be expected, but also to the physical form and condition of the neighbourhood – “bombed-out” areas, with vacant lots and ragged streets, made their residents’ chances worse. Its theme is important and timely, but it leaves you wanting more.Įric Klinenberg is a sociologist based at New York University, who made his name with a study of a lethal 1995 heatwave in his native Chicago. It doesn’t like Trump, racial segregation or climate change denial. It champions “social infrastructure”, meaning libraries, urban farms, playgrounds, sports grounds and all the other shared spaces that allow people to make connections, form networks and find ways to know and help one another. T his is a book with which few Observer readers will disagree. ![]()
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![]() ![]() The primary issues she faces over the course of the film - outside of getting over her ex - are figuring out how to fix her villa with the help of a motley crew of builders (all of whom are a little bit in love with her), getting over writers’ block, and getting laid. While in Italy, the depressed and slightly manic Frances stumbles upon a crumbling estate and spontaneously buys it. Her loyal and sardonic best friend, Patti (Sandra Oh), who’s in possession of a spare Gay Tour of Tuscany thanks to a new pregnancy, ships Frances off to the idyllic Italian countryside. When we meet Frances, a renowned writer, she’s about to find out that her husband is cheating on her and that his mistress wants to purchase their shared house. It helps, too, that the central crises faced by Frances Mayes (Diane Lane), the protagonist of the late Audrey Wells’s 2003 rom-com drama, are relatively benign and occasionally delightful in nature. Under the Tuscan Sun is the rare film that hits all four quadrants of escapist cinema: romance, real estate, Italian food, and female friendship. ![]() Photo-Illustration: Vulture and Buena Vista Pictures ![]() “The where she’s like, ‘I’m still considered a viable sexual entity!’ - I’m like, ‘You can still have 12 babies, what are you talking about?’” ![]() ![]() ![]() Pain stabs my heart which beats, beats, beats in time with the second hand of the locket watch around my neck. Only someone as mad as a hatter-as the saying goes-would risk her life to win a game.Īny Wonder who’s entered my life has managed to turn everything topsy-turvy, upside down, and backwards. Will she and her team solve the clues and find the missing players? Or will betrayal and distrust win, leaving Alice alone in a world of her own? Follow the White Rabbit into this topsy-turvy fantasy where players become prey, a sip of the wrong tea might as well be poison, and a queen's ways do not always lead one where they ought to go. The stakes are raised when she discovers players go missing during the Trials each year. Now she has less than twenty-four hours to find her way into Wonderland where nothing is impossible. Soon, Alice receives a rather cryptic invitation to play for Team Heart in this year's annual-and often deadly-Wonderland Trials. But she gets more than she bargained for when her older sister Charlotte is arrested for having the infamous Wonder Gene-the key to unlocking the curious Wonderland Reality. Survive the Trials.Īll Alice Liddell wants is to escape her Normal life in Oxford and find the parents who abandoned her ten years ago. ![]() ![]() ![]() Next, when Cee tells Frank that she has a right to cry. First, the opening poem, it brings chills down the spine. I listened first, then went and read it in order to study it and learn from a master.Ĭee, she learns to stand tall and believe in herself regardless of her childhood and the wrong done to her. ![]() Would you consider the audio edition of Home to be better than the print version?īoth are excellent. Home - For Your BookClub or Classroom, or Brain! Her language is just spectacular and I don't regret spending a credit on such a short book. If you like short stories (I'm not a big fan) and you have enjoyed Morrison's books in the past, then you may like this one. But, some people don't like that and have complained. She just reads).but the feeling is so intimate that I feel like a sweet fairy godmother is reading to me. if you love Morrison's way of putting words together (and that's what I'm letting myself concentrate on as I listen for the second time) and her reading voice (she doesn't "act". ![]() Nowhere in the description does it say it is short stories. However, I am reviewing _Home_ and while it is a lovely collection of short, unrelated stories, I was expecting a novel. Morrison would write such a disjointed book. I read A Mercy (her last book) when it came out in hard cover and it was just a mess. Not a novel, but a collection of short stories ![]() ![]() It’s my belief that this struggle between radical Islam and Western civilization is actually about the extremists trying to destroy our way of life and they will settle for nothing less. Ned Ryun: It still staggers me that some still think, quite naively, that Western values are universal. My greatest fear is that Use of Force may be too prophetic. I’m constantly taking in new information and making little adjustments here and there. ![]() I conduct the same analysis before writing each book and refine it as I go. Ned Ryun: How has the current media and political environment affected your ability to “beat the headlines”? I feel that in some ways the mainstream media and the political elites have actually allowed you to look even more intelligent, if I can be so blunt.īrad Thor: My process hasn’t changed. It is packed from cover-to-cover with real life details. The smuggling background, the secret Spec Ops training base that was overrun and looted, and the tradecraft throughout Use of Force are also real. The ISIS/Mafia nexus is real, as is the attack methodology in the book. The laptop discovered in a terrorist safe house is real, as were all the plots hidden on it. ![]() I call what I do “faction,” which is where you don’t know where the facts end and the fiction begins in my thrillers. ![]() ![]() Ned Ryun: Were there any real-life events that inspired the writing of this book?īrad Thor: A bunch. I recently caught up with New York Times’ bestseller Brad Thor to discuss his new book, Use of Force, which comes out June 27. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Just over 40 pages in, we've already learned that this paradigm of German engineering did its lethal work because it was driven by a psychopath: the seemingly innocuous and 30ish Brady Hartsfield, who'd stolen the car before embarking on his joy ride from hell. Shortly after King's novel begins in the predawn hours of a foggy April day, this 12-cylinder beast mows through a crowd of unemployed workers lining up in the dark for a job fair.īut unlike its predecessors, this King car isn't a supernatural creature with a mind of its own, any more than this novel is a classic whodunit. Cain and Raymond Chandler - the killing machine is a Mercedes-Benz SL500. Mercedes " - an homage to hard-boiled crime fiction that expressly invokes James M. In the terrific "From a Buick 8" (2002), something resembling a Roadmaster tempts highway patrol officers - and readers - to take a one-way journey into King's sprawling "Dark Tower" series. ![]() In "Christine" (1983), a Plymouth Fury becomes a jealous and murderous lover. Stephen King has always had a thing with cars. ![]() ![]() The Thing About Jellyfish meets The Stars Beneath Our Feet in this story about loss, grief, and finding the courage to discover one's identity, from the author of Hurricane Child. As King's friendship with Sandy is reignited, he's forced to confront questions about himself and the reality of his brother's death. "You don't want anyone to think you're gay too, do you?"īut when Sandy goes missing, sparking a town-wide search, and King finds his former best friend hiding in a tent in his backyard, he agrees to help Sandy escape from his abusive father, and the two begin an adventure as they build their own private paradise down by the bayou and among the dragonflies. ![]() But just days before he died, Khalid told King to end their friendship, after overhearing a secret about Sandy-that he thinks he might be gay. It would be easier if King could talk with his best friend, Sandy Sanders. ![]() ![]() Khalid still visits in dreams, and King must keep these secrets to himself as he watches grief transform his family. When Khalid unexpectedly passed away, he shed what was his first skin for another to live down by the bayou in their small Louisiana town. Twelve-year-old Kingston James is sure his brother Khalid has turned into a dragonfly. ![]() ![]() The Long Loneliness is the late Dorothy Day’s compelling autobiographical testament to her life of social activism and her spiritual pilgrimage. 1) The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of the Legendary Catholic Social Activist We’ve included excerpts of most the books via Google Books. We’ve ordered this list in the order that we think the books should be read, and we offer a brief explanation of why each book was included. ![]() In honor of the occasion, we offer this introductory reading guide on Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement. ![]() ![]() Today (November 8th) marks the 120th birthday of Dorothy Day, co-founder (with Peter Maurin) of the Catholic Worker Movement. ![]() ![]() USA Today wrote, "It could be a frustrating book for readers who require propulsive plots and clean resolutions, as it offers neither. The purpose of these stories is not to unite a community around a tragedy as a less daring and more conventional narrative would have it, but to expose the ways in which the women of Kamchatka are fragmented personally, culturally and emotionally not only by the crime that jump-starts the novel, but by place, identity and the people who try, and often fail, to understand them." The New York Times Book Review described the book as a "superb debut.a novel in the form of overlapping short stories about the women who are affected both directly and indirectly by the kidnapping. The literary review aggregator Book Marks reported that 75% of critics gave the novel a "rave" review and 25% gave it a "positive" review, based on a sample of 20 book reviews. In an isolated town in Far Eastern part of Russia two young girls go missing. ![]() Disappearing Earth is the 2019 debut novel by Julia Phillips. ![]() ![]() ![]() In the 1970s novels, it is not some post-apocalyptic future but instead the here-and-now that is transformed into dystopia: Crash focuses on the link between sexual fetish and car accidents, High-Rise on the psychopathology of life in an urban tower block, and Concrete Island on what happens when a man, an architect named Robert Maitland, becomes ‘marooned’ on an island – a traffic island, that is, in London, on a busy motorway junction, after he crashes his car through a temporary barrier one afternoon. In Ballard’s first four novels, published in the 1960s, the world is destroyed by catastrophe: by a freak wind ( The Wind from Nowhere), by water ( The Drowned World), by heat ( The Drought), and by crystal ( The Crystal World). Certainly, his novels and stories frequently have the clarity and simplicity of concept that we see in Wells’s fiction, just as the narratives driven by these concepts proceed to undo that simplicity by showing the complications that inevitably ensue. Wells and William Burroughs, in so far as he can be likened to anybody. ![]() ![]() Ballard has always struck me as a curious mixture of H. ![]() |