7/7/2023 0 Comments Nine Lives by Dan Baum![]() In Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans, journalist Dan Baum reveals often-neglected layers of the social landscape by interweaving the real-life stories of nine citizens who either grew up in or found their way to the Big Easy during the 40 years between 1965's Hurricane Betsy and Katrina.īaum paints incredibly intimate portraits (expanded from a series of articles he wrote for The New Yorker) that attempt to show how the city's attitudes toward race, class, governance, religion and revelry have evolved, regressed or stagnated and how those attitudes were reflected in Katrina's ghastly aftermath. ![]() Well, buck up, folks: There's still a rich, complex and lesser-known back story to be explored and a refreshing and engaging way of telling it. Who hasn't solidified his views about what did and did not happen, who was responsible and irresponsible, why this strange, seductive and tragic city is so vital to American culture, and why it is taking so long to set things right? ![]() ![]() ![]() Anyone with more than a passing interest in New Orleans and its fate after Hurricane Katrina surely is fatigued today by the volume of commentary that has saturated the media since Aug. ![]()
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7/7/2023 0 Comments Sookie stackhouse book 7![]() So the mystery leaves a little to be desired. It was pratically hitting her in the face, and she didn’t get it. ![]() The minor side-mysteries are quite good, but they are meant to distract from the main event, which frankly I had figured out way way way before Sookie. I want to say the action in this entry into Sookie’s adventures is excellent, but it isn’t quite there. It’s a lot for small-town girl Sookie to handle in one week in the north. To top it all off Sookie and fellow telepath Barry have the odd sensation that something isn’t quite right at the summit. ![]() She is excited that Quinn will be there as well, but a wrench is thrown in the works of their relationship when she is forced to exchange blood for a third time with Eric. Against her fairy godmother’s better judgment, Sookie accompanies the Louisiana vampire contingency to Rhodes, Illinois for the vampire summit to work for the queen reading human minds at the various wheelings and dealings. ![]() 7/7/2023 0 Comments Dead silence book 2022![]() Truly un-put-downable in its purest sense.” - Chloe Gong, #1 New York Times bestselling author of These Violent Delights “I ate this book in one sitting because I was in the mood to be freaked out and it delivered tremendously. "Truly un-put-downable in its purest sense.” Chloe Gong, #1 New York Times bestselling author of These Violent Delights Claire must fight to hold on to her sanity and find out what really happened on the Aurora before she and her crew meet the same ghastly fate. But a quick search of the ship reveals something isn’t right. A salvage claim like this could set Claire and her crew up for life. What they find is shocking: the Aurora, a famous luxury spaceliner that vanished on its maiden tour of the solar system more than twenty years ago. With nothing to lose and no desire to return to Earth, Claire and her team decide to investigate. Titanic meets Event Horizon in this SF horror novel in which a woman and her crew board a decades-lost luxury cruiser and find the wreckage of a nightmare that hasn't yet ended.Ĭlaire Kovalik is days away from being unemployed-made obsolete-when her beacon repair crew picks up a strange distress signal. ![]() A GoodReads Choice Award finalist for Best Science Fiction!.One of the Best SF Mysteries of 2022 (CrimeReads). ![]() 7/6/2023 0 Comments Darrius garrett freedom writer![]() Gruwell as a Freedom Writer which couldn’t have come at a perfect time where he was able to transition from what he knew all his life to grow and be the man he is today. ![]() Darrius takes us on a journey in his involvement with Ms. That only promised him maybe to see the age of 16, which many including himself didn’t ![]() Timing was everything for Darrius Garrett as he was headed down a road of destruction Darrius speaking style is explained as original, charismatic, and brilliant as he feeds off of the vibe of the audience spiritually and emotionally then delivers a powerhouse speech that touches each and every member of the audience in a different way The Importance of Teachers Who Cares and Educationĭarrius shares his vivid stories of his Educational Experience and the role that education, especially writing and reading, played in helping him change the direction of his life. ![]() 7/6/2023 0 Comments Döden by Jonas Gardell![]() I feel deeply affected every time I think about it – and how pervasive the fear and scaremongering was. ![]() And also to realize how young people today understand so little of how the terror associated with this at-first completely mysterious and fatal disease rippled across society and more starkly exposed the hypocrisy and inhumanity of bureaucracy, governments and healthcare organizations (as well as average people – who didn’t care about this at all, in fact welcoming and even laughing about it on some selfish, shitty, brutal level as long as they believed it only afflicted gay men) while bringing the strength, resilience, organization and collective voice of the gay community into the light. ![]() 7/6/2023 0 Comments Zachary ying book![]() ![]() ![]() The mission takes an immediate wrong turn when the First Emperor botches his attempt to possess Zack’s body and binds to Zack’s AR gaming headset instead, leading to a battle where Zack’s mom’s soul gets taken by demons. So Zack is woefully unprepared when he discovers he was born to host the spirit of the First Emperor of China for a vital mission: sealing the leaking portal to the Chinese underworld before the upcoming Ghost Month blows it wide open. His single mom was busy enough making sure they got by, and his schools never taught anything except Western history and myths. Zachary Ying never had many opportunities to learn about his Chinese heritage. ![]() 7/6/2023 0 Comments Carpentaria alexis![]() ![]() Nature, too-the sea, the sky, the land, the weather, the bloody spinifex grass-is a major “character” in the work, as are local history and “the dreaming.” Everything comes together and makes brilliant sense. And, yes, to my mind, this is Nobel-level writing: most every sentence is an artistic expression of the first order! The characters live and breath as individual persons in this world (at least in the particular moment in which they exist), and yet they are buffeted by social and natural forces beyond their control. This is a brilliant one-off thing, like James Joyce’s Ulysses, or William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, where the tale can’t be separated from the telling. ![]() ![]() The writing, too, I would say, is an intimate part of the story-not in terms of "how the tale got written" (as with some modern stories that dwell on that) but rather how it is BEING TOLD, by Wright. The “plot” in Carpentaria is less the story than are the key characters and unpredictable happenings and personal interactions that make it up. Complicating the situation is an international mining operation that seeks to exploit the region’s resources. A fabulous tale, set in the small town of Desperance, on the Gulf of Carpentaria (northwest Queensland), which makes good use of Indigenous people’s perspectives and everyday conversations-in English-as they navigate life and events in and around the white/mixed settlement there. ![]() ![]() The main character of the novel is named after a character in an ancient Egyptian text commonly known as the Story of Sinuhe. Apart from incidents in Egypt, the novel charts Sinuhe's travels in then Egyptian-dominated Syria ( Levant), in Mitanni, Babylon, Minoan Crete, and among the Hittites. The protagonist of the novel is the fictional character Sinuhe, the royal physician, who tells the story in exile after Akhenaten's fall and death. At the same time, it also carries a pessimistic message of the essential sameness of flawed human nature throughout the ages. ![]() The novel is known for its high-level historical accuracy regarding the life and culture of the period depicted. It is set in Ancient Egypt, mostly during the reign of Pharaoh Akhenaten of the 18th Dynasty, whom some have claimed to be the first monotheistic ruler in the world. The Egyptian is the first and the most successful of Waltari's great historical novels, and that which gained him international fame. Regarded as "one of the greatest books in Finnish literary history", it is, so far, the only Finnish novel to be adapted into a Hollywood film, which happened in 1954. It was first published in Finnish in 1945, and in an abridged English translation by Naomi Walford in 1949, from Swedish rather than Finnish. ![]() ![]() The Egyptian ( Sinuhe egyptiläinen, Sinuhe the Egyptian) is a historical novel by Mika Waltari. ![]() ![]() ![]() It wasn’t until these images were displayed in galleries-whether elegantly framed or simply tacked to the wall-that the full extent of Turbeville’s idiosyncrasy was revealed. “I wanted to take photographs that were outside time, of people in today’s world with the atmosphere of the past reflected in their faces, of palaces and gardens abandoned and overgrown,” she wrote. ![]() ![]() Petersburg, and in the estates at Newport, channelling their histories, imagining their dramas. In between fashion assignments, she photographed at Versailles, in St. Published alongside the glossy provocations of Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin, Turbeville’s haunted, hazy pictures looked like they’d been discovered in an attic and barely dusted off. She cast wan, soulful young women who looked more like bookworms or ballet dancers than models, and photographed them in grand but ruined spaces: a shuttered bathhouse, a formal garden going to seed, mansions falling into disrepair. Her work, almost always in black and white, was atmospheric, theatrical, and more than a little dark. When she turned to photography, at Vogue in the nineteen-seventies, that couldn’t have been more evident. “Mantova, Italy,” 1978, from the series “L'heure Entre Chien et Loup.”Īlthough she began her career in the editorial departments at Mademoiselle and Harper’s Bazaar, Deborah Turbeville (1932-2013) always saw herself as a fashion outsider, a maverick. ![]() 7/5/2023 0 Comments Kate Kelly by Rebecca Wilson![]() ![]() Huge crowds came to see her talk and ride, and she helped to popularise the Ned Kelly story as a celebrity in her own right. After Ned's execution, she appeared at public gatherings around Australia. While only a teenager, Kate rode as a messenger and decoy for the Kelly Gang and was present at the gruesome Glenrowan siege. Was it suicide, accident or murder, and why had she changed her name to Ada? However, a friend and neighbour testified that she had only known Kate to drink since the recent birth of her baby and that she never spoke of suicide. ![]() Kate Kelly, the daring sister of legendary bushranger Ned Kelly, was mysteriously found dead in a lagoon outside the town of Forbes in 1898.Īt the inquest, Kate's husband, Bricky Foster, claimed that she was addicted to drink and frequently spoke of suicide. This moving biography tells her astonishing story in full for the first time. ![]() Kate Kelly has always been overshadowed by her famous brother Ned, but the talented young woman was a popular public figure in her own right. ![]() |