![]() ![]() ![]() In April 1912, six notable people were among those privileged to experience the height of luxury - first-class passage on “the ship of dreams”, the RMS Titanic: Lucy Leslie, countess of Rothes son of the British Empire Tommy Andrews American captain of industry John Thayer and his son, Jack Jewish American immigrant Ida Straus and American model and movie star Dorothy Gibson. ![]() “While there are many Titanic books, this is one readers will consider a favorite” ( Voyage). This original and “meticulously researched retelling of history’s most infamous voyage” (Denise Kiernan, New York Times best-selling author) uses the sinking of the Titanic as a prism through which to examine the end of the Edwardian era and the seismic shift modernity brought to the Western world. ![]()
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![]() ![]() Other topics he covers include politics, advertising, and social movements. Each chapter deals with much broader topics, not tossing quite as many pop culture references into each sentence. ![]() ![]() Fox's importance to the decade of the '80s. ![]() He tackles one topic at a time, starting with Michael J. Sirota explores that "why" throughout the rest of the book. The '80s have suddenly become relevant again today. Our interest in things from that decade has resurged and we're sharing them with our kids. Sirota does make a good point, though, that many things from the '80s are coming back. It is playful, but in the introduction it seems forced and not terribly informative. The introduction especially seems to be a long list of various '80s things with a few other words in between to stitch them together. Full of pop culture references and examples, the book explains how the '80s have informed policies, politics, new pop culture, and society today, and how history and pop culture of times long past affected the '80s as well.įlip to any page in the book and some reference to pop culture in the 1980s will jump out at you. What lingering effect did the 1980s have on our society and culture today? David Sirota tries to answer that question in his new book, Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live in Now – Our Culture, Our Politics, Our Everything. ![]() ![]() Heartwarming and heartbreaking, this absorbing tale of grief and hope is told with Klune’s characteristic gentle touch. With Hugo’s help, Wallace finally learns about all the things he missed in life – including love. ![]() There he meets Hugo, the ferryman for souls who need to cross over. Instead of leading him directly to the afterlife, the reaper takes him to a tea shop in a small village. When a reaper comes to collect cold-as-ice lawyer Wallace Price from his own funeral, Wallace suspects he might be dead. Under The Whispering Door goes down another route entirely. ![]() The latter was inspired by the so called Sixties Scoop, which saw the Canadian government remove Indigenous children from their homes and place them with white, middle-class families. He earned a reputation for penning tales of queer romance, with a tender eye for detail, There were accolades aplenty for Into The River I Drown (2013) and New York Times bestseller House In The Cerulean Sea (2020). Now based in North Virginia, TJ Klune first rose to prominence in 2011 with his debut, Bear, Otter And The Kid. It’s filled with Klune’s signature warmth and empathy. Everything about this work of fantasy fiction takes the reader by surprise, somehow mingling grief with feel-good humour. The Oregon native is refreshingly eager to discuss his new novel, Under The Whispering Door. This interview is the only thing holding TJ Klune back from his vacation, he doesn’t mind. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Most undergraduates buy or borrow a gown in their first week at Cambridge for the purpose of matriculation, which is the formal ceremony of enrolment in the university. The university's officials also have ancient forms of academic dress, unique to the university. Black gowns (undress) are worn at less formal events, while on special days (such as the days of General Admission to Degrees) full academical dress is worn, consisting of gown, hood and headdress with Doctors in festal dress. Academic dress is worn quite often in Cambridge on formal, and sometimes informal, occasions, and there are a number of rules and customs governing when and how it is worn. Undergraduates wear college gowns which have subtle differences enabling the wearer's college to be determined. Almost every degree which is awarded by the university has its own distinct gown in addition to having its own hood. ![]() The University of Cambridge has a long tradition of academic dress, which it traditionally refers to as academical dress. A BA hood being worn with an undergraduate gown ![]() ![]() Early reviewers struggling to describe the plot complications and formal excesses of the novel paid little attention to the warning element of the book. The Jacob of Tokarczuk’s title is Jacob Frank, an historical character born in 1726-a Polish Jewish mystic who became a Muslim, then a Catholic, then a monster like more recent “sacred” leaders who became self-serving tyrants. “Monstrous” because of its size, its deformation of narrative conventions, and its relation to the etymology of “monster”: warning. Set in 18th century middle Europe and clocking in at well over 900 pages with a cast of hundreds, The Books of Jacob is a monsterpiece and, perhaps, a masterpiece. A few days ago the NBA left Tokarczuk off its short list, prompting this belated notice and small remedy. When published in English, the novel received many rave reviews in both England and America, and The Books of Jacob was on the National Book Awards long list this year for translated literature. ![]() Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob was published in Polish in 2014 and was cited by the Nobel Prize committee in her award in 2018. Yes, it’s late to be reviewing a novel published nine months ago but maybe not too late to identify a literary injustice. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() After she repairs it, the cat-shaped baku she calls Jinx opens its eyes and somehow gets her into her dream school. One night, Lacey comes across the broken form of a highly advanced baku. But when Lacey is rejected by the elite academy that promises that future, she's crushed. She has always dreamed of working as an engineer for MONCHA, the biggest tech firm in the world and the company behind the "baku"-a customizable "pet" with all the capabilities of a smartphone. The Golden Compass meets the digital age! When a coding star enters an elite technology academy, she discovers a world of competition, intrigue, and family secrets-plus a robotic companion that isn't what it seems. ![]() ![]() ![]() He is horrified and recognizes the nose as belonging to one of his customers, Collegiate Assessor Kovalyov. On 25 March, the barber Ivan Yakovlevich cuts a loaf while having breakfast and finds a nose. As he confronts his terrible fate, Kovalyov struggles with self-esteem in his status-obsessed society. The loss greatly disturbs him, for how could a gentleman go about in society without a nose? In the frantic search for his nose, Kovalyov discovers it has taken on a life of its own and even surpassed him in rank. ![]() One morning, he wakes up, looks in the mirror, and finds his nose missing. Kovalyov is a Collegiate Assessor who dreams of being promoted and enjoys flirting with respectable ladies. However, this system also led to bloated and inefficient bureaucracies in which many of Gogol’s characters work. Commoners could move up in society because of the Table of Ranks, a system that awarded titles based on government or military service. “The Nose” satirizes the obsession with rank, which was pervasive in Imperial Russia. The motif of a nose was inspired by Gogol’s own oddly shaped nose, which he made self-deprecating jokes about in his letters. ![]() His nose takes on a life of its own and surpasses him by attaining the rank of State Councillor. The story revolves around Kovalyov, a Collegiate Assessor who wakes up one morning to find that his nose has vanished. It was first published in 1836 in The Contemporary, a literary journal owned by Alexander Pushkin. ![]() ![]() Although West’s general philosophic perspective was consistently described as that of an absolute mechanistic materialist, this was still a major shift in his scientific endeavors. When the salesman was revived, it was obvious from his reaction that West murdered him. West killed and the preserved the salesman with an embalming fluid and waited for his friend to return to inject his reanimation serum. West’s obsession with conquering death and need for a fresh body eventually led to him actually murdering someone – a salesman traveling to Bolton Worsted Mills. Each experiment with a human corpse revealed that the body must be very fresh with little or no decay. West started his experiments with animals and then moves to human cadavers. ![]() However, as the story proceeds, West’s fanatical pursuit of knowledge is only exacerbated and pushed to the extreme. Lovecraft’s story “Herbert West – Reanimator.” Initially West is your typically cold scientist, closely following the rigors of the Scientific Method. ![]() As the protagonist suggested in “From Beyond,” a scientist should be a “frigid and impersonal investigator…” While Crawford Tillinghast did not exhibit these traits as a scientist, this certainly described Herbert West, at least in the initial chapters of H.P. ![]() ![]() ![]() This book got me from the very first page. The Billionaire’s Wake Up Call Girl is my very first book by Annika Martin and let me just say that I am in love. How much longer can I keep up this charade? ![]() He’s an overachieving billionaire bent on a mission. ![]() ![]() Now he wants to take me out on a date and he’s scouring Manhattan to find me. Snuggled under the covers with the moonlight streaming in the windows, we divulge our secrets to each other, but the one thing that he can never find out is that the sexy vixen who wakes him up every morning is just the lowly assistant who wears frumpy dresses. Hello! Who wakes up before the roosters are even crowing? Luckily he doesn’t seem to mind my get-your-ass-out-of-bed attitude.ĭay by day we’re becoming closer, and the calls start turning hot, like pay-by-the-minute hot and oh-so-wild. OMG yes you read that right-four freaking thirty in the morning.Ĭonfession: I’m not the nicest wake-up-call girl at that hour. So in an effort not to lose my job, I secretly start making the calls myself, every day at 4:30 am sharp. They’ve all had enough of his surly personality. It turns out that no wake-up call company in the world will take him on as a client. When my manager assigns me the task of finding a new wake up call service for our CEO, I think, how hard can this be?Īnswer: practically impossible. ![]() ![]() ![]() Their suffering was a moral posture, a condemnation of a world gone insane through Cold War division, and rife with hypocrisy and injustice. ![]() Ginsberg chronicled the insanity, death and degradation of his Beat friends – incarcerated, murdered, exiled, starving, drug-addicted, driven beyond endurance into states of wretchedness – and presented them as holy beings made divine and transcendent through an unjust world. In the audience were Ferlinghetti and Jack Kerouac. On the evening of 7 October 1955, Gary Snyder, Philip Lamantia, Michael McClure, Philip Whalen and Allen Ginsberg gathered at a gallery in San Francisco to read poetry at an event called ‘6 Poets at 6 Gallery’ (the sixth poet was either compere Kenneth Rexroth or the spirit of the late John Hoffman, whose work was read by Lamantia). San Francisco was the West Coast centre for the Beat Generation, a counterbalance to its other centre in New York. ![]() His idiosyncratic blend of environmentalism, anarchism, socialism and artistic freedom has provided generations with inspiration his poetry, prose and polemic has impressed writers and given them the courage to follow their convictions his publications have introduced millions of people worldwide to advanced writers. ![]() He is considered its poet laureate and a great contributor to its cultural life, as a publisher, artist, activist and political renegade. Ferlinghetti, now aged 100 and still proprietor of City Lights Bookstore and publishing house, is a seminal figure in San Francisco. ![]() |