Author: rrn69

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Tale of legacy and super rich

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New York Times bestselling author Ellery Lloyd’s “Time to Burn” is a gripping mystery about time travel tourism and the dangerous consequences which ensue when the privileged make the past their playground. Mercurial Tech entrepreneur Inigo Frank who has perfected commercial time travel, it is tightly regulated and and so expensive that it’s open only to the very wealthiest, has enlisted award-wining filmmaker Phoebe Hunt to create a fly-on-the-wall documentary. His company, Tempus Tours, has so far been approved for just one route: a journey back to London in 1941, to the days of the Blitz, allowing the super-rich to … Continue reading Tale of legacy and super rich

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Energy and wonder of a bygone era

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Samuel Thomas, a man of uncertain parentage, is a young magician who is convinced that he is destined for greatness in a far-off land. He travels across the world from India to London to the fog-shrouded streets of Boston in 1816, seeking honour, fame and fortune all the while hiding a secret. In this notorious year without a summer, with a season of unrelenting cold, Samuel arrive in a city alive with ambition, contradiction, and tension. Enter Walter Mepham, in many ways a world away from Samuel, hailing from the upper echelons of Boston society, nursing a problem of his … Continue reading Energy and wonder of a bygone era

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Devastating secret

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New York Times bestselling author Jessica Knoll’s latest novel Helpless, is a psychological thriller. Knoll is the bestselling author of Luckiest Girl Alive and Bright Young women. Helpless is about a successful Hollywood producer who is kidnapped by the man who once knew her best- and the devastating secret that could destroy them both. It’s been twelve years since Faye Heron broke Henry Spalding’s heart. Henry was her college boyfriend, her first intense love, but Faye was in danger of being subsumed by him. Now, Faye is one half of a power-producing duo with her Hollywood husband. Henry is a … Continue reading Devastating secret

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Legacy of a Mughal ruler

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Controversial Aurangzeb “Alamgir, last of the “Great Mughals”, whose empire touched Kabul on one side and Arakan on the other, was described by British Imperialists as “Crooked and Cruel, Dark and Devious”. The Raj-era historian Jadunath Sarkar described him as a bigotd despot who precipitated the “decay of Indian civilization”.  Aurangzeb’s death in 1707 left a divided legacy. India’s current Hindu nationalist government wants to send a bulldozer and raze his grave. His dynasty survived, in one form or another, until the British laid waste to its capital at Delhi in 1857, which lives on the political consciousness of over billion … Continue reading Legacy of a Mughal ruler

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Jackal and gatekeepers to the world of American literature

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Laura McGrath, assistant professor of English at Temple University and a National Endowment for the Humanities fellow, in Middlemen reveals the critical role in the making of American literature, from the famed three-martini lunch to the Frankfurt Book Fair,  and shows how agents influence what we read and explains why many debut novelists never publish another book, why agents champion short story collections even though they sell poorly, and how agents advocate for writers of colour in a system that values whiteness, and why there are so many New York novels. Middlemen demonstrates that agents-eighty percent of whom are in fact … Continue reading Jackal and gatekeepers to the world of American literature

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Simply dazzling: Peru’s Prince of provocateurs

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Essayist and novelist, Mario Vargas Llosa, Polemicist and politician (a Spanish citizen from 1993),  born in the Peruvian city of Arequipa in 1936, the Nobel Prize-winning literary colossus and debonair provocateur whose contradictory life is considered to be perhaps the greatest contemporary writer and most influential intellectual in the Spanish-speaking world. He was also indisputably the most controversial: He was never out of the headlines in more than six decades of literary and political activity, from the moment he exploded onto the cultural scene in the early 1960s with his first novel, The Time of the Hero, until his last, I … Continue reading Simply dazzling: Peru’s Prince of provocateurs

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Inequality linking of concentrated wealth, inherited hierarchy to the ideology of tech titans

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Kim Phillips-Fein, historian teaching 20th century American history at the Gallatin School of individualized Study at New York University, in Country of Lords, chronicles a “Shadow Tradition” who fought against America’s founding ideals, offers a critical re-examination of American history by focusing on inequality.  She challenges the belief that America has always moved greater equality, a persistent “Shadow tradition of anti-egalitarian thought published amid sharp anxiety over extreme wealth concentration. 250 years after the Declaration of Independence, the book argues that doubts about equality run from John Adams through social Darwinists, slavery theorists and scientific racist to today’s tech elite Elon Musk’s … Continue reading Inequality linking of concentrated wealth, inherited hierarchy to the ideology of tech titans

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Don’t start losing yourself in the embroidery of your memories in the world of deficits

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Joanna Elmy’s debut novel, Born to Guilt is a very powerful and heartrending novel about the intense bond between mother and child and the consequence of freedom. “I am calm only when alone. That’s what my mother used to say. As a child I hated her for this because it meant I should not have existed. Now I’m frightened by how much I understand her.”  Twenty-year-old Yana spends her days in a series of dead-end service jobs and her nights meeting other immigrants after moving from post-communist Bulgaria to the US failing to ease her hardship.  Newly arrived in America she breathes easier … Continue reading Don’t start losing yourself in the embroidery of your memories in the world of deficits

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Decline of public etiquette

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David Sedaris investigates in The Land and Its People, what it means to be a traveller, a brother, a lifelong friend. Trying on the role of caretaker after his boyfriend Hugh’s hip-replacement surgery. It is a familiar Sedaris set-up: domestic discomfort turned into comic material, with a swipe of competitiveness. “I Know all about kidney stones and gum surgery. I know about broken ribs and urinary tract infections. When it came to hip pain, though, he had me,” he writes. Sedaris approaches with his usual cool composure and flashes of humour. In one essay, he lists the friends he has … Continue reading Decline of public etiquette

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How justice plays out

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UK’s leading forensic anthropologist and pro-vice chancellor of Engagement at Lancaster University, president of St John’s College, Oxford, Professor Dame Sue Black solves the mysteries of harrowing and shocking criminal cases by assessing its triumphs, failures and future. For over forty years, Black has analysed criminal evidence at the highest level. She stood in court as an expert witness, repeatedly putting her research and reputation on the line, all in the name of justice. True crime cases from historic poisonings to modern sexual offences, Sue Black traces the evolution of forensic science from early identification methods to more recent breakthroughs … Continue reading How justice plays out