![]() ![]() ![]() Magdalie's journey shows the importance of connections, of family and friends, during difficult times and the anguish that comes when those bonds are broken. This is a story of everything that comes after: from a candid depiction of the international response to a young girl's account of what a life of desperation can do to an individual and to a society. "Haiti, already one of the poorest countries in the world, was devastated by the earthquake in 2010. Katz, author of The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster Laura Wagner does just that in this brave, beautiful book, bringing us the complex life of Magdalie, and a glimpse of a people's soul." -Jonathan M. "In Haiti they say 'Kreyòl pale, Kreyòl konprann.' Speak plainly and honestly, and be understood. ![]() "Laura Wagner has managed to get a huge amount of Haiti into the pages of this book: the sun, the rain, the bottomless spiral of catastrophe, rage, despair and indomitable hope." -Madison Smartt Bell, author of All Souls' Rising: A Novel of Haiti ![]()
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![]() ![]() Johnson explores this innovative vision through a series of fascinating narratives: from the “Miracle on the Hudson” to the planning of the French railway system from the battle against malnutrition in Vietnam to a mysterious outbreak of strange smells in downtown Manhattan from underground music video artists to the invention of the Internet itself. ![]() It’s a compelling New political worldview that breaks with traditional categories of liberal or conservative thinking. Steven Johnson proposes that a New model of political change is on the rise transforming everything from local government to classrooms to health care. ![]() From the New York Times bestselling author of How We Got To Now and Farsighted Combining the deft social analysis of Where Used Ideas Come From with the optimistic arguments of Everything Bad Is Used for You, bestselling author and one of the most inspiring visionaries of contemporary culture, Steven Johnson, maps the ways a connected world will be both different and better. ![]() ![]() ![]() As Liz grows up, she witnesses her parents using cocaine and other drugs. When Daddy gets out of prison, Liz is three years old. Their fortunes took a turn for the worse when Daddy was imprisoned for impersonating a doctor and selling painkillers, leaving Ma pregnant with Liz and already taking care of Lisa. The two of them fell in love, but began using drugs (including heroin and cocaine) more and more heavily, until, by the end of the decade, they were full-fledged addicts. ![]() Both came from emotionally abusive families. Daddy was a charming, intelligent student when he met Ma in the 1970s. Her older sister’s name is Lisa Murray, and her parents are Peter Finnerty and Jean Murray (though she refers to them as “Daddy” and “M”a throughout her memoir). Elizabeth Murray grows up in the Bronx in New York City in the 1980s. ![]() ![]() ![]() There are loads of books I devoured over and over, so I think it’s more a case of a lot of smaller impressions rather than one book in particular. What book made the strongest impression on you as a child? ![]() That, along with the castle on a hill from that earlier seed, began to shape Jemma’s story. Years later, teen angst and rebellion made me imagine what I think a lot of kids that age imagine: What if this isn’t really my family? What if I was dropped here by mistake? Though family resemblance made it obvious that in my case the stork had got it right, the idea of displacement stayed with me. I conceptualized that as a child living in a castle on a remote crag, dreaming of a wider world beyond its walls. My childhood home felt fairly remote, and until I went to school at age 5, life was pretty isolated. The idea came to me years ago at a workshop where participants were asked to imagine their lives as a fairy tale. What inspired you to write The Flame in the Mist? It features Jemma, a fiery-headed heroine held captive in Agromond Castle, yet destined to save mist-shrouded Anglavia. Set in an imagined past, The Flame in the Mist is a dark fantasy-adventure sure to please fans of Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass. ![]() ![]() We’re joined today by debut author Kit Grindstaff to talk about her new book, The Flame in the Mist, on sale next Tuesday, April 9 th, as well as her writing process and what inspires her. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Virginia Beach, located at the southern tip of a southern state, has never felt like the South to me, while the river town of Cairo, Illinois, located in a midwestern, historically free state, definitely does. Occasionally, Perry asks the people she interviews, What does this place feel like to you? To one person DC feels like the South, to another it does not. We can’t define it, but we know it when we see it. ![]() At our nation’s crossroads, struggling as we are with new forms of old hate, the South signifies a way forward for us all.īeyond its historical and geographical markers, the American South is also an intuition. The fabric of the South has been torn and bled out, yet it survives as a witness to something more than survival. ![]() She grieves the thefts that can never be returned: neighborhood schools short on books and computers, endowment-starved historically Black colleges and universities, traditional communities either gentrified and yuppified or cut in two by freeways, professions largely closed to Black people, land promised but never given. As the journey proceeds, Perry reveals the South’s formative role in shaping the essence, or soul, of all that America has become. The chapters explore the distinctive qualities of each place, but together they stand for something larger and more original than themselves. Read our latest issue or browse back issues. ![]() ![]() This starts out simple: You just journal what you're eating for the week. Then, and only then, will I be able to rest. ![]() I'm at least going to get to the point of Britney Spears's 2008 VMAs performance. I go twice more and think this could become a regular thing. Duh.) Through journaling, Lea has created a "safe space to dream" for us muggles - and I have to tell you, I'm into it. (Lea's first book, Brunette Ambition, is a New York Times best seller. "By committing your goals to paper - which can admittedly be very intimidating, and sometimes even embarrassing thing to do - you are taking a big step toward making them a reality and not just a passing dream," she writes in her second book, You First: Journal Your Way to Your Best Life. How does she do it?! And how do we (me and you and everyone else) fail to?! Meh, better just go back to sleep and try again tomorrow.Īccording to lore/a press release I received, Lea does it all by journaling. Like, girlfriend has already run 10 miles, gotten a blowout, and made vegan banana bread pudding from scratch before you've even opened your lazy, useless eyes. ![]() ![]() ![]() Lea Michele is one of those women who is so put together, she makes you feel like a pile of rotten bologna. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Lexi doesn’t learn that the two are related until later that day, and this realization makes the later events all the more tangled and complex. On her first day, two events occur that eventually chart the course of the rest of Lexi’s life-she meets Mia Farraday, a shy, lonely girl who isn’t winning any popularity contests, and runs into Zach Farraday, the school’s popular, beloved golden boy who happens to be Mia’s twin brother. After the death of her troubled mother, Lexi is taken in by her distant relative, Aunt Eva, and settles into her new life, starting with a new school and all the pains that go along with making friends and fitting in. The book covers the years 2000-2010, beginning with Mia (and her family)’s introduction to Lexi Baill, a girl from the wrong side of the tracks who firmly believes in doing what’s right. Jude’s husband, Miles, is a faint but steadying presence throughout the book. ![]() ![]() In this case, the mother in question is Jude Farraday, an admittedly (with some hesitation) over-protective, hyper-involved mother of twins Zach and Mia. Like many of her previous books, Night Road focuses on the complicated relationship between mothers and their children. And yet her work is compulsively readable. Her main characters usually shine, yet her supporting cast often falls a bit flat. What is it about Kristin Hannah’s novels? The plots are a bit predictable. ![]() ![]() ![]() Lydia must work hard, and all the while she worries about her headstrong brother, who has run away. Thrust into the Shaker's unfamiliar way of life, Lydia, a fiercely independent girl, must grapple with a new world that is nothing like the one she used to know. Suddenly, eleven-year-old Lydia Pierce and her older brother, Daniel, find themselves orphans of the flu, and are taken by their grieving uncle to be raised in the Shaker community at Sabbathday Lake. Ordinary life is turned upside down as schools are closed, and all spheres of public life are shut down. In 1918, as the Great War rages in Europe, the Spanish influenza tears a brutal path across the United States, leaving devastation in its wake. The heartfelt and moving story of a young girl living through the Spanish Influenza pandemic of 1918, now with a brand new introduction from Lois Lowry. ![]() ![]() She looks for the characters who have traditionally been objectified in translation, specifically female characters such as Circe and Odysseus’ wife, Penelope, who plays a major role in the novel. When it comes to historical retellings, Miller knows what she’s doing. ![]() The book provided an escape from the pandemic, transporting me from lockdown to the isle of Aiaia in the far distant past. Two years later, while in quarantine back in my high school bedroom, I finally read Circe. I first was introduced to Miller’s Circe in March 2018, a month before its publication, at a promotional reading by Miller at my high school. In a new retelling of this familiar story from antiquity, Madeline Miller expands the witch’s short role in the Odyssey into a full novel, Circe, which illuminates her story in a feminist light while harkening back to Homer’s epic. While the legendary epic doesn’t tell us much about her background, we know she’s wily like Odysseus she has magical powers and turns men to pigs, seemingly for fun. If you’ve read the Odyssey, you remember the enchantress Circe. ![]() ![]() Credit: Madeline Miller Circe : A Human Witch? Reviewing Madeline Miller’s “Epic” ![]() ![]() ![]() It was only three years ago that Ellyson had joined a group of archeologists excavating a site southwest of Istanbul. Certainly, the punishment shouldn’t be death. Sure, he was known to gamble, and yes, he often stole artifacts from archeological digs to sell on the black market, but so did a lot of other people. And for what? Did his benefactors actually think he was going to stiff them? But the moment of his greatest triumph had suddenly become the last moment he would ever know. ![]() This was supposed to be the discovery of his life, the one that would legitimize him and land him at the top of the academic heap. He had done a lot of reprehensible things in his fifty-five years, but this was not how he had expected to die-his throat sliced and hot blood running down the front of his parka. Donald Ellyson tried to scream, but nothing happened. ![]() |