![]() ![]() With an obsessive fascination that is as contagious as it is compelling, author Jacky Colliss Harvey (herself a redhead) begins her exploration of red hair in prehistory and traces the redhead gene as it made its way out of Africa with the early human diaspora to its emergence under Northern skies. ![]() An audiobook that breaks new ground, dispels myths, and reinforces the special nature of being a redhead, with a look at multiple disciplines, including science, religion, politics, feminism and sexuality, literature, and art. Red is a brilliantly told, captivating history of red hair throughout the ages. ![]()
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![]() This movie isn't about gay love, if you look at it through this point of view, it will let you down completely. ![]() One caveat: don't go watching it for the gay theme. If you are looking for real emotions, deep feelings and thoughts that will last in your memory and heart for a long time, then you don't want to miss this movie. So why should a movie be different? If you want speed, then eat at McDonald's, rush in the tube, watch TV commercials, and pay a prostitute for a 5 minute work. When you visit an art museum, would you rush through the rooms? No, you would move slowly, pay attention, and stop at the artworks that mean more to you. When you eat good food in a good restaurant would you like to finish it in two minutes? No, you sit down, enjoy the place, the food, the company and the wine. When you make sex with your girlfriend would you try to make it last five minutes? No you would like to make it last the whole night. ![]() All the most beautiful things in life take time. ![]() ![]() Yes, it's a touch blurry on the vanilla Xbox One, but frame-rate is still solid - just as it is across the other systems. I'll put it quite plainly: for my money, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1+2 is one of the best games of the year and it's my personal favourite release from Activision across the entire console generation. ![]() However, while the original game is over 20 years old now, there's still magic there and I'm astonished by what developer Vicarious Visions has delivered with its remake of the first two series entries. ![]() A franchise icon that fell on hard times, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater had a huge impact on gaming across the generations until somehow, it lost its edge - and its relevance, with the abysmal THPS5 in particular hammering the final nails into the coffin. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Arabella prefers to spend her time in pants, not dresses, being rowdy with the boys she does not like the prim, modest young girls that exist back on earth in England. Plus, the concept of a 19th century world having great access to space travel is beyond tempting.Īrabella of Mars centers around Arabella, a young girl born and raised on Mars (yes, the planet), which is where she feels most at home. I recently received a copy of Arabella of Mars from a giveaway hosted by Wendell over at Bookwraiths, so a huge thank you to her for the opportunity to read this book! I was really excited to read this book because it sounds a bit different from what I normally read and I've been in the mood for something new and exciting. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() The rest of the novel is concerned, min the main, with Harry’s response to his new found insights into the evil and hypocrisy which everyone else takes for granted. “That there were many worlds, layer upon layer, as thin as filo pastry.”įor a time he is completely at peace, but the possibility that a corresponding world of terror may exist sends him fleeing back to his body as it is being carried out the front gate. Harry, however, suffers a heart attack and lies in his backyard, clinically dead for nine minutes. The novel is basically the story of Harry Joy who, like Carey, is in is late thirties and involved in the running of a moderately successful advertising company. Once again Carey won me over in spite of myself. As a result I approached Bliss in a critical frame of mind. Despite this I enjoyed his first two books of short stories, though at times I doubted his motives. I have never been able to fully reconcile his role in advertising with his reputation as one of Australia’s leading younger writers. But even before the literary establishment began its fanfare I was suspicious of Carey’s novel. Its publication was preceded bu profiles of Carey in both The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, both of which later gave the book good reviews. Peter Carey’s first novel, Bliss, must have been one of the most eagerly awaited books of last year. ![]() Review of Bliss, By Peter Carey, University of Queensland Press, 1981. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Gardner also develops the theme of heroism as another moral force that enables society to advance by elevating Unferth, a minor character in the original poem, to a major character and foil for Grendel. Such is the power of art, Gardner seems to be saying, that even a monster can be affected by it. As a would-be artist, Grendel strives, however comically, to escape from his baseness. ![]() In Gardner's version, however, Grendel becomes a three-dimensional character with, in Howell's words, "a sense of humor and a gift for language." Grendel even has a weakness for poetry. A relatively minor character in Beowulf, Grendel is a symbol for "darkness, chaos, and death," according to critic John M. As a professor of English specializing in medieval literature, Gardner had been teaching Beowulf, the source of inspiration for Grendel, for many years at various colleges. The novel was praised as a literary tour de force and named a book of the year by Time Newsweek magazines. ![]() Completed in 1970 and published the following year, Grendel was the first of John Gardner's novels to bring him not just critical but popular success. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() A survivor in Jessie Greengrass’s haunting new novel The High House sums it up: “The whole complicated system of modernity which had held us up, away from the earth, was crumbling … and we were becoming again what we had used to be: cold, and frightened of the weather, and frightened of the dark. But now, as extreme weather swirls around the globe, melting glaciers, burning forests, flooding districts and annihilating species, the climate emergency has brought the unimaginable into our daily lives and literature. Everything about this story – the image, the circumstances – seems stranger than fiction.Ī year before Simon’s tweet, in a landmark polemic, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh had questioned why so few writers – himself included – were tackling the world’s most pressing issue in their fiction. “In the pantheon of visual metaphors for America today, this is the money shot,” he wrote of the picture, which was taken by an amateur photographer who spotted the photo-op as she was about to skydive out of a plane. ![]() ![]() I n September 2017, David Simon, creator of The Wire, tweeted a photograph of golfers calmly lining up their putts on an Oregon course as wildfires raged in the background. ![]() ![]() ![]() It’s a barbaric place that, to all appearances, is post-postapocalyptic, if not still dumbed-down and reeling from the great period of global warming that followed “the Terrible Events” of a thousand-odd years past. Polyphony can afford only so much solace against the vulgar world beyond the walls. Saunt Edhar is a place devoted not just to learning, but also to singing, specifically of the “anathem,” a portmanteau of anthem and anathema. ![]() The narrator, a youngish acolyte, lives in a monastery-like fortress inhabited by intellectuals in retreat from a gross outer world littered by box stores, developments and discarded military hardware. Stephenson ( The System of the World, 2004, etc.), an old hand at dystopian visions, offers a world that will be familiar, and welcome, to readers of A Canticle for Leibowitz and Dune-and, for that matter, The Glass Bead Game. A sprawling disquisition on “the higher harmonics of the sloshing” and other “polycosmic theories” that occupy the residents of a distant-future world much like our own. ![]() ![]() ![]() But what if a jealous classmate and Lexie's own small lies to her grandmother manage to derail her plans? Inspired by a project organized by teacher-missionary Sidney Gulick, in which U.S. Meanwhile, Lexie's class has been raising money to ship a doll to the children of Japan in a friendship exchange, and when Lexie learns that the girl who writes the best letter to accompany the doll will be sent to the farewell ceremony in San Francisco, she knows she just has to be the winner. But Mama's new husband doesn't think a little girl should live with parents who work all night and sleep all day. It's 1926, and the one thing eleven-year-old Lexie Lewis wants more than anything is to leave Portland, Oregon, where she has been staying with her strict grandparents, and rejoin her mother, a carefree singer in San Francisco's speakeasies. ![]() Can a ship carrying Friendship Dolls to Japan be Lexie's ticket to see her fun-loving mother again? A heartwarming historical novel inspired by a little-known true event. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() It is, to put it simply, phenomenal not just the best biography of Vanderbilt ever written, but perhaps one of the best American biographies delivered in many years. National Book Award for Non-Fiction (2009)Ĭheck out our online store for more great resources and learn about our virtual book clubs at . Stiles 'The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt' is the biography I had been longing for. Epic in its scope and success, the life of Vanderbilt is also the story of the rise of America itself.Īwards: Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography (2010), In between we see how the Commodore helped to launch the transportation revolution, propel the Gold Rush, reshape Manhattan, and invent the modern corporation. ![]() Meticulously researched and elegantly written, The First Tycoon describes an improbable life, from Vanderbilt’s humble birth during the presidency of George Washington to his death as one of the richest men in American history. Stiles tells the dramatic story of Cornelius “Commodore” Vanderbilt, the combative man and American icon who, through his genius and force of will, did more than perhaps any other individual to create modern capitalism. ![]() See images for the condition of this book.īlurb: In this groundbreaking biography, T.J. Condition: Signs of wear and consistent use. ![]() |