What I liked best about this audio book was that actual recordings of his famous speeches were included. I also got the message that his actions were more statesman than politician which makes me extremely happy. He had good grades and good manners and worked as a bank teller until he was called home by his father to work the family farm. That warms my heart as I did too although, I did skip all the math and business books. Another Midwestern trait was to be a reader, he and his friend read a whole public library. His world opened up for him when he first got his glasses, he share that experience with Teddy Roosevelt. I tended to be the same way until I had to learn not to be for job interviews. Coming from the Midwest, I was impressed that he was so humble and actually self-deprecating. I picked this one because I really did not know very much about Truman except for his morning constitutionals and seeing the picture of him holding up the newspaper that said that Dewey had won. Truman is the best audio book by David McCullough that I have listened to so far.
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He has also had the opportunity to write for the New York Times op-ed page. In addition, his works have earned titles such as “ingenious” (New York Times) and “superb” (Chicago Tribune). One of the most decorated authors of all time, Harlan was the first writer to win all the three awards: Edgar Award, Shamus Award and Anthony Award. Harlan has over 50 million books printed to his name and published in 40 languages worldwide. Harlan is married to Anne Armstrong-Coben, a pediatrician, and has four children. After graduating, he worked for his father in a company in the travel industry. Harlan attended Amherst College and majored in political science. Harlan Coben is an American bestselling thriller author born to a Jewish family in Newark, New Jersey, on January 4, 1962. Both possibilities remain open until you take choices (or suffer accidents) that begin to foreclose one possibility or the other, or, in the case of Roland Baines, both. By analogy, youth persists in a state of potentiality you can be a scientist or a firefighter, or, in the case of Roland Baines, a concert pianist or a tennis pro. The problem only resolves itself into an either/or proposition when we bring the state of potentiality to an end by looking inside the box. Is the cat in the box dead? Or is it not dead? As long as it remains in a state of potentiality, so Schrödinger tells us, then we can safely presume that it is both dead and not dead. While not of a particularly scientific cast of mind, Baines has over the years read the occasional book by popularizers of quantum physics and cosmology and finds in the paradox of Schrödinger’s Cat a useful way of thinking about how his life has played out. In this, Ian McEwan’s umpteenth novel, we trace the life of Roland Baines, exact contemporary of Ian McEwan himself. I don’t know much about Romania, and I certainly did not know about this part of their history. There are so many things that I can’t believe that we don’t learn about in school here in the US.Īnyway, I Must Betray You follows a 17-year-old boy, Cristian, living under Romania’s communist dictatorship in 1989. I believe history is one of the most important subjects to study, because, as they say “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” Humanity really never seems to get over its classic pitfalls, and it’s vital that we are aware of history so that we are able to learn from past mistakes and, you know, not make them again. I love how she writes about “hidden history,” how her books appeal to both teens and adults, and how every time I read one, I come away feeling like there are so many gaps in my knowledge of history that it’s pretty much unfathomable. Ruta Sepetys has been one of my favorite authors since I began reading her books in 2020. In her introduction to the anthology, editor Alex Dally MacFarlane states that she wanted to take a snapshot of where science fiction – and by implication, science fiction written by women – is at at the present moment, the multiplicity and variety of worlds it seeks to inhabit. The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women does all these things. The individual pieces should be strong in themselves, but they should also add up to something. For me, an anthology should say something – about the theme or title of the book, about the writers who’ve been gathered together. What you get is a kind of grab-bag of odds and ends, with no real sense that the stories belong together, or make a coherent statement as a group. My own pet peeve with anthologies is that they often lack cohesion. You get a couple of truly standout stories, a turkey or two maybe, and a whole bunch of what you might call so-so stories, enjoyable enough at the time of reading but not all that memorable. One of the problems with many anthologies – and the reason, I guess, why people often admit to only dipping into them rather than reading them through from cover to cover as unified texts – is that of unevenness. Yet neither metaphysical nor psychological readings proved able to contain this story, whose details stubbornly refuse to be explained away. She, in turn, was a “neurotic case of sex repression”, possibly acting out of a sublimated desire for her employer, the children’s uncle. Metaphysical readers chose to “ believe the governess ” and believe in the ghosts, while psychological readers – most famously American writer Edmund Wilson in his 1934 essay – maintained that “the ghosts are not real ghosts … but merely the hallucinations of the governess”. This influence is not only spectral but quite possibly sexual in nature.Īs James’s opening line predicted, “ the story … held us ”, and its readers quickly fell into two main camps. It is the story of a young governess who comes to suspect that her deceased predecessor, Miss Jessel, and the late valet Peter Quint, are exerting a continued influence over her orphaned charges, Miles and Flora. Adaptors’ enduring fascination with James’s “ irresponsible little fiction ” can be summed up in a word: ambiguity. Since then, there have been more than 25 others. New on Netflix, The Haunting of Bly Manor is the latest in a long line of adaptations of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898) that began in 1954 with Benjamin Britten’s opera. This is a witty and endearing account of low budget travel (something which does not appeal to me but which I do enjoy hearing about other people doing) in Asia.My only minor quibble is that the otherwise excellent narrator appears to have a limited vocabulary and whenever he encounters an unfamiliar word (not a foreign one, an English one) he makes a total hash of the pronunciation. So, I very much loved Eastern Horizons and standing in the shoes, metaphorically speaking, of another as they did just that. I am particularly fascinated by Afghanistan and would love to visit the country if it weren't highly likely that they would shoot me on sight. And yet, it still gives me a thrill to read (listen to) travel literature. I've lived in a dozen or more countries and visited many more. I love to travel, I've been on the road for over 20 years now on my very slow crawl to nowhere from nowhere special. He was dependent on whatever they had given him. Whatever the military had done to make him like this, it seemed to be irreversible. He started shivering and groaning when his next one was nearing, when whatever was in those injections had begun wearing off. He screamed in pain when he’d just had a dose. I was positive that he wasn’t a mindless beast, but constant agony made him seem like one. I could tell that sometimes he did actually listen to Gloam. I’d seen moments of keen awareness in his eyes. I knew he wasn’t human, but that didn’t mean he was an animal. Part of me didn’t think he’d ever get better while he was in there. This was no life for him-for anyone-but he was uncontrollable. When we turned the corner and his cage came into view, tucked just within the forest’s edge beside Mary’s old RV, he let out a weak bellow and smacked a hand against the glass.Ī kernel of sympathy flared as we approached. Seraph had gone quiet again as we made our way along the base of the wall. She followed her first novel, The Loving Spirit (1931), with successful stories usually set on the wild coast of Cornwall, where she lived. The adaptations include a 1939 play by du Maurier herself, a 1940 film directed by Alfred Hitchcock (It won the Academy Award for Best Picture that year), and a 2020 remake for Netflix directed by Ben Wheatley.īut Rebecca isn’t du Maurier’s only claim to fame. Rebecca sold 2.8 million copies between its publication in 19, and went on to be adapted numerous times for stage and screen. In April 1938, when du Maurier delivered the manuscript to her publisher, Victor Gollancz, he predicted a “rollicking success” her editor, Norman Collins, believed it had “everything that the public could want”.īooks by Daphne du Maurier (Shutterstock) The book, despite facing plagiarism allegations initially, was released to a rousing response. Written by Daphne du Maurier and set in the wilds of Cornwall, Rebecca is a psychological thriller about a young woman who impetuously marries a wealthy widower and soon discovers that he and his household are haunted by the memory of his late, apparently perfect first wife. Rebecca’s melancholic opening line establishes the setting, locale, and atmosphere of the gothic classic, which was published in 1938 and has never been out of print. Flora Eldershaw became a teacher, and eventually Head of PLC in Sydney. Both born in 1897 into middle-class professional families, they met at Sydney University but established themselves as independent of their families before turning to writing. There are two reasons why I persisted with it: I wanted to contribute to Bill’s AWW Gen 3 Week at The Australian Legend and the book is very rare now and hard to get hold of, and it’s part of Australia’s literary history.Īlas, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow has a history more interesting than the story within its pages…įirstly, it is a work of collaborative writing, by Marjorie Barnard and Flora Eldershaw. I’m not surprised that the censored (1947) edition wasn’t popular with the reading public, and now, having read the uncensored (1983) version, I’m inclined to think that the rejection of this novel had little to do with the censor’s scissors. Oh, dear, it feels disloyal to The Sisterhood and the feminist Virago publishing project to say this, but Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow is a really dreary book. |