![]() ![]() I only really saw him when I went to London. “He was a marvellous artist and I saw him in some of his Shakespeare plays. “He and Peggy Ashcroft were great friends of hers,” says Phipps. She also wrote several plays, including the West End hit Spring Meeting, which was directed by the legendary actor John Gielgud, who was later to become Phipps’ godfather. She had an early promising career as a writer, and published novels under the pseudonym MJ Farrell. It was a world she was well-qualified to write about, having been born into an Anglo-Irish family, the Skrines, in Co Kildare, in 1904. Keane became known in later life for her sharply-observed books chronicling the declining fortunes of the Anglo-Irish. It took me so long, far too long you can see a person as a whole when you are writing about them,” says Phipps, who lives in Cloyne, Co Cork. ![]() “I have found that it has been a very good thing writing about her - it has made me understand her in a way I wish I had in life. ![]() It has been 21 years since Keane’s death and her wish was finally brought to fruition earlier this year, with the publication of Phipps’ biography, Molly Keane: A Life. ![]()
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![]() To be honest, read enough of him, some stories blur together. That’s a footnote in the life of Gary Paulsen. “Once, in the middle of the night in bad weather where the Columbia River comes slashing out to the sea, I had been caught up in dodging half-sunken logs pushed out of the river into open water - many boats have been sunk by them over the years - and I accidentally moved between what I found to be a large male orca and his family pod.” ![]() In an author’s note, Paulsen describes this setting as a “mythical frontier, inspired by the North American coast I traveled as well as the Norwegian coast of my ancestors.” Though it reads quite close to a fable or ancient Nordic legend, Paulsen then mentions that, oh, most of what happens to the boy in this, it also happened to him. It is about a Nordic boy who escapes a cholera outbreak in a wooden canoe, setting off for the Pacific Northwest. “Northwind” reads in an elemental, back-to-basics register. But he finished one last book, which plays like the culminating words of a life stuffed with incident. ![]() He died of cardiac arrest last fall at his home in New Mexico. ![]() ![]() ![]() One one star, one two stars, one three stars, one four stars. I ended up giving this two out of five stars.Īs you can tell, my ratings were all over the place with Danielle Steel’s books. I would understand if this was a first draft, but not a final, published work. ![]() It was like Steel had a great idea for a story and just regurgitated it as a summarized outline. I wanted to get into the characters and the spy missions, but everything is brushed over with shallow summaries. I liked the plot, but since the story covers like sixty years and is only 288 pages, the entire story feels summed up and is about 80% telling not showing (and I’m also person who complains about too much flowery language usually, so this is saying a lot). It follows a young English woman who works as a spy for over thirty years, during WWII and after. I mostly read this book because of the gorgeous cover. At this point I went back and finished Remembrance, spurred on because of my mostly enjoyment of the two previous books and then I read the most recent release of these four, Spy, published in 2019. ![]() ![]() You will meet heroic truth detectives, such as Florence Nightingale who started a revolution with a pie chart. Within these pages, you will transform into a Truth Detective, and be able to hunt down the truth about the world around you. And in a world of rising living costs, climate change, fake news and dodgy data, it’s hard to get your head around it all.īut don’t panic. ![]() The world is often full of bamboozling headlines and numbers that don’t add up. And that even the greatest detectives have been fooled by fake news and dancing fairies?.Or that a pooping cow can show you how to invest your pocket money?. ![]() ![]() ![]() After a near-fatal car accident in rural Colorado leaves his body broken, Paul finds himself at the mercy of the terrifying rescuer who’s nursing him back to health - his self-proclaimed number one fan, Annie Wilkes.Īnnie is very upset over what Paul did to Misery and demands that he find a way to bring her back by writing a new novel - his best yet, and one that’s all for her. ![]() But such a change doesn’t come without consequences. In a controversial career move, he’s just killed off the popular protagonist of his beloved romance series in favor of expanding his creative horizons. The number one New York Times best seller about a famous novelist held hostage in a remote location by his “number one fan.” One of “Stephen King’s best…genuinely scary” ( USA Today ).īest-selling novelist Paul Sheldon thinks he’s finally free of Misery Chastain. ![]() ![]() ![]() This last passage is from an essay dated 2012, before Barack Obama’s re-election Le Guin called out his “false figures and false promises in the first debate.” When asked about President Donald Trump’s dubious relationship with the truth, she replies, “I’d say it isn’t merely continuing a trend, it’s fanatically carrying out the consistent direction of Republican politics ever since Eisenhower. ![]() democracy: “Can America go on living on spin and illusion, hot air and hogwash, and still be my country? I don’t know.” On aging, she writes: “With all good intentions, people say to me, ‘Oh you’re not old!’ And the Pope isn’t Catholic.” On the United States military: “We dress up our soldiers in clothes suitable to jail or the loony bin, setting them apart not by looking good, looking sharp, but by looking like clowns from a broken-down circus.” On U.S. Her new book, No Time to Spare, collects essays she wrote for her website, and it’s defiantly not a heartwarming case of “senior citizen discovers Internet, starts nostalgic blog.”Īt 88, the Oregonian author of The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed approaches a range of subjects in a typically blunt way. It is a surprising admission from a well-known writer of science fiction-especially one who, in the 1960s, dreamed up the “ansible,” a faster-than-light communication transmitter, though she’s making up for that. ![]() “I never met a computer screen till I was getting on towards decrepit,” says Ursula K. ![]() Le Guin attends 2014 National Book Awards on Novemin New York City. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() They expose ways we react that are harmful and dangerous (physically and ideologically) and they trace six threads in an attempt to solve the mystery of how we got to where we are now. Greg and Jon discuss three underlying ‘Untruths’ found woven into the ways we think that influence how we interpret and react when faced with uncomfortable situations or opposing viewpoints. Greg, a First Amendment lawyer & fighter for academic freedom and freedom of speech on campus, and Jon, social psychologist, have teamed up together to develop and explore this statement: “Many university students are learning to think in distorted ways, and this increases their likelihood of becoming fragile, anxious, and easily hurt.” The premise is even more relevant now than it was then. This book, written in 2018, was an expansive follow-up to their 2015 article in The Atlantic. “Prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child.” The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation For Failure ![]() ![]() To make matters worse, the Chandravanshis appear to have allied with the Nagas, an ostracized and sinister race of deformed humans with astonishing martial skills. The Suryavanshi rulers are challenged with devastating terrorist attacks from the east, the land of the Chandravanshis. Amish Tripathi devoted years to the research of Hindu mythological stories and history, and discussions with his family about the destiny of the human body, mind and soul to create this sweeping and fascinating adaptation of ancient Hindu mythology for modern fantasy readers.ġ900 BC in what modern Indians call the Indus Valley Civilization and the inhabitants called the land of Meluha: a near-perfect empire created many centuries earlier by Lord Ram-one of the greatest monarchs that ever lived-faces peril as its primary river, the Saraswati, is slowly drying to exctinction. ![]() ![]() Russell: Photographing The Legend by Larry Len Peterson (Univ. Lynn (Texas Tech University Press)Ģnd Place: Death Of A Texas Ranger by Cynthia Leal Massey (Globe Pequot Press)ģrd Place: Necessary Evil by Joe Johnson (Missouri History Museum)Ĥth Place: The Death Row All-Stars by Chris Enss & Howard Kazanjian (Rowman & Littlefield)ĥth Place: Old 300: Gone To Texas by Paul N. Alan Day (University of Nebraska Press)ģrd Place: Western Women Who Dared To Be Different by Gail Woerner (Wild Horse Media Group)ġst Place: Kit Carson and the First Battle of Adobe Walls by Alvin R. Hadley (RANGE Magazine)Ģnd Place: The Horse Lover by H. Estleman (Forge Books)ġst Place: The M Bar by Harry Webb & C.J. Moore (self)ģrd Place: The Big Drift by Patrick Dearen (TCU Press)Ĥth Place: Buffalo Grass Rider: Rough River Gold by Allen Russell (Rough River Press)ĥth Place: Ragtime Cowboys by Loren D. ![]() ![]() ![]() The winners, by category, include (publisher in parenthesis):ġst Place: Rhyming The Range by Yvonne Holenbeck (self)Ģnd Place: The Cowgirl Brand by Dawn Nelson (Gray Dog Press)ģrd Place: Homegrown and Other Poems by Bryce Burnett (DriverWorks Ink)ġst Place: Spirit Of Steamboat Waiting For Signs A Serpent's Tooth and Any Other Name by Craig Johnson (Viking Penguin Random House)Ģnd Place: Looking For Lynne by John L. ![]() ![]() ![]() Shortly before finishing his studies, Murakami opened the coffeehouse 'Peter Cat' which was a jazz bar in the evening in Kokubunji, Tokyo with his wife. His first job was at a record store, which is where one of his main characters, Toru Watanabe in Norwegian Wood, works. Murakami studied drama at Waseda University in Tokyo, where he met his wife, Yoko. He grew up reading a range of works by American writers, such as Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Brautigan, and he is often distinguished from other Japanese writers by his Western influences. Since childhood, Murakami has been heavily influenced by Western culture, particularly Western music and literature. His work has been described as 'easily accessible, yet profoundly complex'. ![]() ![]() Murakami Haruki (Japanese: 村上 春樹) is a popular contemporary Japanese writer and translator. ![]() |