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Ali and Nino is a lyrically written story of love and war, honor and country, cultural blend and clash set in WWI-era Transcaucasia (ie, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia). The novel has simply *all* the elements of greatness: well-developed characters, a vivid setting, a gripping plot, and an examination of larger themes -- all crammed into this little-known, relatively compact work.
Love in the face of cultural obstacles, in the face of war and patriotic duty. Love in its innocence, its longing, its maturity. Love between people, love for a people, and the tragedy of a lost world. It's really an incredible, incredible book -- one which, despite its age, seems more capable of tackling the issues we see in our own post-cold-war world than any other book I've read.
Read this book. It will delight and reward you.
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A terrific series that transcends usual mystery genre's conventions and limitations.
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Take an independently wealthy, magnanimous old fellow and surround him with a group of close friends. Send them together on a journey of desire to explore the world about them, meet new people, and experience the fullness of life, and you essentially have the plot of Pickwick Papers. The plethora of characters Dickens introduces along the way add considerable color to the narrative, not only because they come from such a vast array of backgrounds, but because they themselves are colorful in their own right:
The first and most obvious example might be that of Mr. Alfred Jingle, the loquacious vagabond rapscallion who rescues the Pickwickians from an altercation with a feisty coach driver. One of Mr. Pickwicks cohorts, Mr. Snodgrass, receives a blow to the eye during the incident, after which Mr. Jingle is pleased to suggest the most efficacious remedies: "Glasses round-brandy and water, hot and strong, and sweet, and plenty-eye damaged, sir? Waiter! Raw beef-steak for the gentleman's eye-nothing like raw beef-steak for a bruise, sir; cold lamp-post very good, but lamp-post inconvenient-damned odd, standing in the open street half an hour with your eye against a lamp-post-eh-very good-ha! ha!" While Pickwick reads the legend of Prince Bladud by candlelight, we find this description of King Hudibras: "A great many centuries since, there flourished, in great state, the famous and renowned Lud Hudibras, king of Britain. He was a mighty monarch. The earth shook when he walked-he was so very stout. His people basked in the light of his countenance-it was so red and glowing. He was, indeed, every inch a king. And there were a good many inches of him too, for although he was not very tall, he was a remarkable size round, and the inches that he wanted in height he made up in circumference." The young surgeon, Benjamin Allen, is described as "a coarse, stout, thick-set young man, with black hair cut rather short and a white face cut rather long [...] He presented altogether, rather a mildewy appearance, and emitted a fragrant odour of full-flavoured Cubas." Dickens notes that the casual visitor to the Insolvent Court "might suppose this place to be a temple dedicated to the Genius of Seediness" and whose vapors are "like those of a fungus pit." Seated in this luxuriant ambience, we find an attorney, Mr. Solomon Pell, who "was a fat, flabby pale man, in a surtout which looked green one minute and brown the next, with a velvet collar of the same chameleon tints. His forehead was narrow, his face wide, his head large, and his nose all on one side, as if Nature, indignant with the propensities she observed in him in his birth, had given it an angry tweak which it had never recovered." A final sample from a list of worthy characters too long to mention might be Mr. Smangle, the boisterous whiskered man whom Pickwick encounters in debtors prison: "This last man was an admirable specimen of a class of gentry which never can be seen in full perfection but in such places; they may be met with, in an imperfect state, occasionally about the stable-yards and public-houses; but they never attain their full bloom except in these hot-beds, which would almost seem to be considerately provided by the legislature for the sole purpose of rearing them [...] There was a rakish vagabond smartness and a kind of boastful rascality about the whole man that was worth a mine of gold."
The book itself is a goldmine full of textures, personas, venues, and idiosyncrasies of a bygone age. These are delight to behold, as the reader is thus invited to enjoy experience and descriptive beauty for their own sakes. Plot largely takes a backseat to the development of relationships, which can be seen as a myriad of subplots contributing to a never-ending story. Numerous vignettes which are incidental to the narrative add another level of richness, and it seems clear that Dickens offers them for an enjoyment all their own. There is something of "l'art pour l'art" throughout the whole work which expresses a love of language and a love of human nature. As Dickens might have summed it up, "All this was very snug and pleasant."
Dickens' fame and popularity were forever established with the introduction of his greatest comic characrter, the immortal Sam Weller as Mr Pickwick's servant. Pickwick Papers contains some of Dickens' greatest characters: Mr Pickwick, the most interesting title character; the strolling actor Jingle and his friend Job Trotter; Sam's father Tony Weller who battles with the red-nosed Rev Stiggins; and the Fat Boy.
Memorable scenes include Christmas in the country, a Parliamentary election, and the famous court trial, which Dickens frequently recited on his reading tours.
I highly recommend this book if you've never read Dickens before. This is a must-have for Dickens fans.
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The book details the family life of these two characters that brings them to the pivotal moment in the store and takes the reader into the future when Nathan is a grown man who once again has a chance encounter with Robert.
This is a story of how one man attempts to regain the family he has neglected while another family comes to terms with losing their wife and mother. It is a story to remind us all to be appreciative of the life we have, the small joys, and shared memories. It is a story of hope and faith and, most of all, the love that transcends the deepest heartaches.
The book contains two stories. The first is of Nathan, a young boy who's mother is dying of cancer. This will be her last Christmas as death is just around the corner. Nathan wants to make this Christmas the "best ever" for his mother. The second story is about Robert, a man who has just realized that he has put his business life in front of his family for way too long. When his wife tells him that she wants to leave him, Robert realizes that he has been a bad father and husband all these years and sets out to make things right again.
Both stories are wonderfully written and very entertaining. They also both offer great 'visuals' of Christmas as both famlies try to make this Christmas the best of their lives. Both stories are filled with hope, desire and love.
This is the perfect holiday book, the best of its kind since The Chirstmas Box. Its everything that you'd look for in a Christmas story. This is one book that I waill faithfully come back to every December from now on, in order to prepare myself to the wonders and joys of Christmas.
Needless to say, she had gotten my attention and my interest in the book was high. I took it on a business trip with plans to read it in my off time, but when I started it on the plane I found it just as captivating and hard to put down. I am a father of two children and I was challenged and inspired by the story Donna VanLiere wrote. Whoever said that fiction can't impact your life has never read this book. It's a beautifully written novel and an inspiring story of hope. I hope you read it today!
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Content aside, this book's winning feature is its style. The Guide approaches sex the way we all should (and usually don't): with intelligence and a healthy sense of humor and play. The language is familiar rather than cold or condescending, and reading the book is like talking to a close friend. It's a fun read, either by yourself or with a loved one, and it's best read all the way through.
And you're probably not going to find cooler pictures anywhere.
One drawback is the book's organization: although it has numerous chapters that appear well, something you'd expect to find in one chapter may turn up in another, and on some points the book gets unneccessarily repetitive. It's a very small price to pay, but it can be an annoyance from time to time.
This book is open, clever, honest, and funny. Whether you're a neophyte or an expert, you'll learn something new, and hopefully, your perspective on sex and sexuality will change a little. And you'll enjoy every page of it.
The chapter about explaining sex to children is fabulous, too, and I'd highly recommend it to parents.
She was also as good at writing cloak and dagger books as well as convention detective mysteries, though these books are not generally as well known.
"Cat Among the Pigeons" should be one of her cloak and dagger books. It veers into John Buchan territory with revolutions in foreign coutries and smuggled jewels. It is not, on the face of it, a Poirot novel. When he makes his appearance near the last third of the book, he is a welcome addition to a plot that's beginning to collapse under its own weight. Instead of being a novel of espionage or a novel of detection, it tries to be both. The result is a novel with three murders, but all of them coming late in the narrative and therefore bunched together. Because the set-up is so long, Poirot is forced to make some quantum leaps beyond his normal logic, that seem more like inspired guesses than deduction. One wonders why he was necessary at all.
The book is set at a girl's school and there are many extraneous characters. Christie helps us with her usual page of character descriptions at the start, but many of the names remain little more than names.
Christie was a good writer. She normally got to the point and didn't string plot threads together until her books got oppressive. And the two genres she tried to mix in this book could have been combined in a longer, more complex novel. An earlier introduction to Poirot might also have helped. He is anticipated, but, curiously, is never mentioned prior to his introduction and comes out of the blue.
It looks almost like two books that have run together. Christie normally didn't waste more than one good plot on a book, but here she has the jewel story, which would've made a crackerjack espionage novel along the lines of _The Secret of Chimneys_; and the murder mystery, in the last half, that would've made a fine, typical Poirot novel. A young detective who goes undercover in the book would've made a fine solver of the jewel story.
Too, many of the elements of this novel seem borrowed. The young detective's superior comes off as a lethargic version of Carr's H.M., for instance.
However, one warning: there is an element of the jewel plot that you will guess almost immediately, and wonder why Christie was so obvious with it. Further reading shows that to become more complex, and the reason she wants us to guess it early seems to be so she can take a sudden left-turn with it. But the element itself is not, it turns out, very important to the plot and she can allow us a few pages to think we're clever.
If you are a long-time Christie fan and want to read all her books, _Cat Among the Pigeons_ is a must; if you're just starting Christie, you might want to read a dozen or so others before getting to this one.
I Definitely Reccomend This Book!!!!
(I'm a 12 year old girl from Alaska. If there are any other Christie fans out there my age please contact me!!! mercat@angelfire.com)
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Zelinsky's retelling of the story is traditional yet satisfying, but the illustrations really steal the show. Children will get caught up in the fairytale landscapes and the magical locales. Readers will also appreciate the additional information provided by Zelinsky about his retelling of the story and his study of Italian Renaissance art. It's always nice to know why artists choose to illustrate stories in a certain way.
This book won the Caldecott Medal for its fantastic illustrations.
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Central to this is anger'a theme that pervades not only Socrates' life, but that of those around him. Throughout the book, Socrates bubbles with an undefined rage at his surroundings, and ultimately he must find some way to accommodate that rage without letting it consume him. Even so, the good side of Socrates is always plainly evident: he's a father figure to a young boy, cares for his two-legged dog, and saves the life of a drunk. That's not to say that he's a "good" person, because he has killed people, but he is a man that's trying to do good things with life despite his past and despite the turmoil within him. Through his interactions with a neighborhood discussion group (a somewhat clumsy device) and a self-styled revolutionary, Socrates comes to discover that he has a right to be angry, but it's how that anger is channeled that will decide his fate. This is played out in a rushed and melodramatic final story that fits thematically with the rest of the book, but is kind of jarring.
Ultimately, the book's message is reasonably clear. Black men need to translate their anger into productive action and free themselves of the mental shackles that keep them from fulfilling their potential. For every person, this means something different, but even those who have committed the greatest sin can live a moral life. Which is not to say their aren't evil people in the world'or in their own community'but just because one lives in a ghetto doesn't mean the only solution is to leave. Rather, stay in the community and try and make it better'even though the man is trying to keep you down.
WALKIN' THE DOG is actually an interrelated short story collection that works because Walter Mosley makes each story show growth in Socrates. Nothing is sacred especially society's major social, political, and racial issues as the star of the book lives up to his more illustrious namesake with a street corner philosophy. Readers will enjoy this anthology and want to read the first Socrates story (see ALWAYS OUTNUMBERED, ALWAYS OUTGUNNED) as well as demand from Mr. Mosley a follow-up tale that shows what happens to the lead protagonist at the crosswalk of life.
Harriet Klausner
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Davies opens by expressing his disappointment with "science" not having "wrapped up the mysteries of life's origins." He doesn't make clear why he held this opinion, claiming to have spent "a year or two researching the topic." He then summarizes the various theories offered on life's origins ranging from Darwin's "warm little pond" through Urey and Miller's laboratory generation of amino acids to Graham Cairns Smith's crystalline model of molecular replication. Each little digest of various research efforts are closed with Davies carefully dismantling each result as failing to provide the answer he seeks. Davies is not alone in his dissatisfaction. The numerous concepts offered on life's origins suggests how vital this question remains throughout the realm of science. It's not surprising that he finds a near solution in the "replicating molecule" attached to growing crystals first proposed by Graham Cairns Smith. This idea has the advantage of showing how organic life superceded simple chemical organizations. For Davies, it has the added benefit of being applicable to any place in the universe where conditions permit such organization and replication to occur.
Davies eschews mainstream expressions about divine origins for life. In its quest, even in Davies' critical eye, science has shown that simplistic metaphysical answers are no answer at all. Evolution is an accepted fact, as is the Big Bang. The mechanism of evolution by natural selection, which Davies insists on shortcutting to "Darwinism", is, in the words of Dobzhansky, "the answer to all complex questions about life." Except one: how did it start? Davies is a bit heavy-handed in scoffing at science's failure to solve this quest. Throughout the book he portrays scientists "scratching their heads" or "wringing their hands", actions scientists actually engage in only when suffering from dandruff or washing up for dinner. Scientists probe for answers, they don't throw up their hands in despair when research fails to provide explanations to their questions. They try again. In the final analysis, Davies is hugely unjust to the scientific community. He owes many colleagues in biology and related fields a humble apology. Scenarios of the early conditions of Earth's environment are still undergoing revision. He dismisses the work of Urey and Miller by showing their concept of our planet's early atmosphere has been replaced by new theses. That's how science moves along. If we don't have an answer for life's origins yet, then it may come from further work. Since we can't duplicate the conditions, we may never find that answer.
Davies' own solution, after guiding us through a litany of science's failures, boils down to the reason he's the winner of the Templeton Prize. In the Preface, he wants to fit life, particularly human life, into a 'grand scheme'. This 'grand scheme' accepts the idea that life will emerge anywhere in the universe when conditions permit. We live, therefore, in a "universe of information." Contending that the laws of physical and chemical operations are too simple and general to produce life, some information source must have brought about a new level of organization. Darwin's concluded The Origin of Species with the comment, "light will be thrown on the origin of man," a statement imbued with meaning. Davies' own concluding words, that we live in "a universe in which we are not alone" is no less meaningful. He leaves mooted what the implications of this universal information source might be. However, his vivid depictions of "baffled" scientists failing to discover the origins of life leave few options. Davies leaves us to define the "information source" for ourselves.
An important point mentioned in this book is that probably the first terrestrial organisms lived deep underground in geothermally heated rocks.
But there is more controversial material. After searching in vain for God's place in physics (The Mind of God), prof. Davies looks now for an evolutionary goal as an alternative for the 'nihilistic philosophy of the pointless universe'. This goal is life and consciousness, created by a self-organizing and self-complexifying universe. A universe in which the emergence of thinking beings is a fundamental and integral part of the overall scheme of things." (p. 272-3)
The main motor behind this evolution should be a blend of molecular Darwinism and the 'law' of organizational complexity, a mix of the second law of thermodynamics, physics, computation and chemistry.
Paul Davies is not sure how it could work, but he states: "the atom treated as a particle corresponds to hardware. When a quantum measurement is made, the wave "collapses" ... But this in turn affects the subsequent behaviour of the particle. There is thus a sort of hardware-software entanglement in quantum mechanics ... Could some sort of quantum-organizing process be just what is needed to explain the origin of informational macromolecules?" (p. 260-1)
This is a very bold speculation. But, for me, it is too beautiful to be true.
Gerald M. Edelman in his book 'Bright Air, Brilliant Fire' convinced me that the origin of consciousness doesn't lay on the quantum but on the biological level (biochemical processes). Secondly, I believe that Gould and Dawkins are right and that we live in a pointless universe. Thirdly, Roger Penrose convinced me that trying to present the mind as a computer is a dead end.
Even if you don't agree with all his propositions, you should read this compelling book, which flows like a dazzling waterfall.
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This book is mainly about a true brave heart named Rhayader and Paul Gallico uses very good word pictures and he is a talented writer. Go read this book!!!
Moslems are mostly represented as naive and bloodthirsty primitives.
Some of the dialog is stilted (it was originally written in German) and you encounter long stretches with speeches like:
"That surprises you, O Seyd?"
"Allah leads astray those against whom he has turned his wrath."