Tag: Books

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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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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

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Tribulations of gig-going, romantic fumblings…

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Homework is a portrait of a young boy, who keeps passing exams and  if a changing England in the 1960s and 1970s. Geoff Dyer famous for his stylish sentences and diverse subject matters, has written fiction, nonfiction and essays, with an interest in film, art, photography, jazz and takes a keen interest in writers and their writing. Geoff’s novel included Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, a novel Out of Sheer Rage, about not being able to write a biography of D.H. Lawrence; Yoga for People Who Can’t be Bothered to Do It, (2003), a collection of travel essays is the … Continue reading Tribulations of gig-going, romantic fumblings…

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Americans in the City of Light to find their happiness

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Love actually meets The Notebook in a tale of love, loss, and finding your way home, all set over the course of one life-changing week in Paris.International bestselling author and sportswriter, Massachusetts-born Kristin Harmel’s Meet Me in Paris, follows nine Americans in Paris, whose stories intertwining as they are soul searching for the meaning of true happiness and love. Julia Glover has brought her twenty-three-year-old daughter, Piper, to Paris for the first time- but they know it will also be their last trip together. Julia is dying, and as the mother and daughter desperately try to make memories together as … Continue reading Americans in the City of Light to find their happiness

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Life of Outcasts with tainted nobility who scrub and clean the stains of our consumer society

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Canadian writer, social worker, and sociologist, Simon Paré-Poupar who did his first round as garbageman in Montreal as a teenager in “Trash” writes “The Garbageman is the Sisyphus of our consumer society. My fellow garbagemen and I scrub clean the stains of our consumer society.” He says he has personally shifted nearly 70, 000 tonnes of junk, but he and his peers are given a wide berth by the households they serve, “people thank the courier… the mover, and the small carrier. But they barely see the garbageman. They wish we could be invisible, just as they hope their garbage … Continue reading Life of Outcasts with tainted nobility who scrub and clean the stains of our consumer society

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Reganomics effects on Harlem

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Colin Whitehead, two-time Pulitzer winner and #1 New York times bestselling author’s Cool Machine is an entertaining novel that brings to life 1980s New York in his Harlen Trilogy.  1918 New York City is beginning to emerge from financial ruin and decline, energized by rampant real estate development and a Wall Street unchained by Regan-era predatory capitalism. Up in Harlem, however, successful business owner/master fence  for stolen goods which keeps dragging Ray Carney violently into the criminal underworld which requires delicate balancing act, but this concept of “constant turbulent change”, has kept him moving. Just as Carney moves between different worlds, Whitehead … Continue reading Reganomics effects on Harlem

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Empress Matilda: Female Lord of the English

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Henry I of England, King from 1100 to 1135, towards the end of his reign, had notoriously  at least 20 illegitimate offspring,  and found himself in a predicament related to the succession. His marriage had been unfortunately less fruitful. His first wife, the pious Anglo-Saxon princess Edith Matilda, produced only two babies before she “ceased to either have offspring or desire them”.  And his second, the much younger Adeliza of Louvain, failed to produce a replacement for his heir presumptive, William who drowned in the White Ship disaster of 1120.  Consequently, Henry’s only legitimate  child was a daughter Matilda,  who in 1127 was formally recognised as … Continue reading Empress Matilda: Female Lord of the English

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Struggle for acceptance, greatness, capacity for self-destruction, guilt and freedom.

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East of Eden is a 1952 family saga novel by American author and Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck. Exploring themes of depravity, beneficence, love , the struggle for acceptance, greatness, capacity for self-destruction, guilt and freedom. Featuring the lives of two families, the Trasks and the Hamilton, and their interwoven stories. The Hamilton family in the novel is said to be based on the real-life family of Samuel Hamilton, Steinbeck’s maternal grandfather. Steinbeck carefully establishes the setting with the description of the Salinas Valley in Central California. The story between the beginning of the twentieth century and the end of … Continue reading Struggle for acceptance, greatness, capacity for self-destruction, guilt and freedom.

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New body sexualising it for the very first time

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New York Times bestselling author Sigrid Nunez has become one of the contemporary fiction’s most distinctive voices producing nine penetrating, profound novels celebrated by fans and critics alike. Ordinary and middle-aged women, living in cramped New York apartments feature in “It Will Come Back to You”. Elderly women, living in memory care facilities, somewhere upstate. Teenage girls, spending their summers in Connecticut, alienated by their parents. Divorcees, single mothers, daughters and grand-daughters. Women of the American middle class, women of the American proletariat. Women of the 1970s; women of the Covid-19 pandemic, Nunez who has always been a New York … Continue reading New body sexualising it for the very first time