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Padraig o tuama in the shelter6/26/2023 ![]() Sometimes we feel like exiles – in our land, in our languages and in our bodies.Īnd sometimes we feel surrounded by welcome.Īs we seek to be human together, may we share the things that do not fade: ![]() Sometimes we are in shadow, and sometimes we are surrounded by shelter. We know that sometimes we are alone, and sometimes we are in community. – It is in the shadow of each other that the people live. – It is in the shelter of each other that the people live. Take some time, out of your busy day, to reflect in awe with Jesus on the words of Pádraig Ó Tuama about finding meaning and clarity in our messy, flawed, and yet beautiful, relationships. I recently read this prayer from him and felt it spoke so powerfully to me of us all working and living beside each other, striving for harmony as we struggle with differences, hurts, sorrows and find ways to celebrate our joys and successes. ![]() ![]() Pádraig Ó Tuama is a poet, theologian and conflict mediator in Northern Ireland and was the leader of the Corrymeela Community (Ireland’s oldest peace and reconciliation community) from 2014 to 2019. My son André has been reading and appreciating the poetry of Pádraig Ó Tuama and has shared some of it with me from time to time. ![]()
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Bonfire of the vanities novel6/26/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Wolfe's novel is a big, panoramic story of the metropolis that reinforces the author's reputation as the foremost chronicler of the way we live in America.Īdapted to film in 1990 by director Brian De Palma, the movie stars Tom Hanks, Bruce Willis, Melanie Griffith, and Morgan Freeman. Not because it is a superb portrayal of the New York of the 1990s. When he is involved in a freak accident in the Bronx, prosecutors, politicians, the press, the police, the clergy, and assorted hustlers high and low close in on him, licking their chops and giving us a gargantuan helping of the human comedy, of New York in the 1980s, a city boiling over with racial and ethnic hostilities and burning with the itch to Grab It Now. The Bonfire of the Vanities: A Novel Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002, 704 pages ISBN 1429960566, 9781429960564 topics: fiction usa This is definitely towards the top of my all-time fiction list. Sherman McCoy, the central figure of Tom Wolfe's first novel, is a young investment banker with a fourteen-room apartment in Manhattan. Brilliant high comedy.” (The New Republic) "No one has portrayed New York Society this accurately and devastatingly since Edith Wharton" ( The National Review) THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES by Tom Wolfe RELEASE DATE: Nov. ![]() Vintage Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities, the #1 bestseller that will forever define late-twentieth-century New York style. ![]()
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Murder at Stake by Constance Barker6/25/2023 ![]() Yeah, right." Fashion spreads far beyond the ready-to-wear trade. Struggling past the crowds outside French Connection's Oxford Circus store at the weekend, I noticed the windows' new ironic slogan: "Apparently, there are more important things in life than fashion. Nor, it might be added, do the police themselves have to plunge so recklessly into armed stake-outs in which someone, who may turn out only to be holding a chair leg, gets killed.įashion is all-pervasive, even in modes of carrying out crime. Nor do drug trade rivals have to be mown down in the public street, as if Britain had suddenly become Al Capone's Chicago. There are many ways of robbing a small jeweller's shop - the crime during which 64-year-old Marian Bates was shot dead in Nottingham earlier this month - without firing live bullets. Even so, gun murders have rocketed in recent years and glamour still seems to be part of the equation. It may be true that England and Wales have one of the world's lowest rates of gun murder, and that Britain probably has the world's toughest gun ownership laws. In 1990, the story was filmed, with Kiefer Sutherland and Emily Lloyd, as Chicago Joe and the Showgirl. They were caught: Hulton was hanged Jones was reprieved, and released after 10 years in jail. ![]() ![]() ![]() Orwell doesn't go into the details, but what ended the crime-spree was that Hulton shot dead a taxi driver, and Jones then robbed him (the full proceeds were a cigarette case, a silver pencil and 95p). ![]()
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The land of green plums by herta muller6/25/2023 ![]() ![]() Like many of Müller's books, The Land of Green Plums illustrates the position of dissidents from the German minority in Romania, who suffered a double oppression under the regime of Nicolae Ceauşescu. Müller said the novel was written "in memory of my Romanian friends who were killed under the Ceauşescu regime". The narrator is an unidentified young woman belonging to the ethnic German minority. The novel portrays four young people living in a totalitarian police state in Communist Romania, ending with their emigration to Germany. The Land of Green Plums ( German: Herztier) is a novel by Herta Müller, published in 1994 by Rowohlt Verlag. ![]()
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The life of olaudah equiano6/25/2023 ![]() ![]() By chance, he and his sister were reunited when their masters crossed paths. Until he reached the sea, his language was similar enough to those of other tribes, and he was even able to pick up two or three new tongues. He was afraid of being stung by poisonous snakes but held out until he was rescued by the very same old woman who, now sympathetic to him, pleaded his case to his master.Īfter a time, he was sold again, and traveled closer to the sea coast. Everyone looked for him, but he was perfectly concealed in the dense brush. He planned to escape from this situation, but his plan was thwarted when he accidentally killed an old slave woman's chicken and had to hide himself for fear of her wrath. Their sorrow was heightened when they were soon separated from each other.Įquiano ended up in the hands of a chieftain in a lovely part of the country, where he was put to work at the bellows. ![]() One day, while on watch, he and one of his sisters were seized by a kidnapper. During the afternoons, he and his siblings would keep watch for kidnappers who stole unattended village children to use as slaves. He was the youngest son of seven brothers and sisters, and was trained in agriculture and war. ![]() Equiano explains how his memories are bittersweet, especially given the events of his early years. ![]()
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Connie willis time travel books6/25/2023 ![]() In a time of superstition and fear, Kivrin - barely of age herself - finds she has become an unlikely angel of hope during one of history's darkest hours. For her instructors in the twenty-first century, it meant painstaking calculations and careful monitoring of the rendezvous location where Kivrin would be received.īut a crisis strangely linking past and future strands Kivrin in a bygone age as her fellows try desperately to rescue her. ![]() ![]() A Hugo and Nebula Award-winning novel of plague and time travel by an SFWA Grand Master of Science Ficiton.įor Kivrin Engle, preparing an on-site study of one of the deadliest eras in humanity's history was as simple as receiving inoculations against the diseases of the fourteenth century and inventing an alibi for a woman traveling alone. With Doomsday Book, she takes listeners on a thrilling trip through time to discover the things that make us most human. ![]()
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The last stand stephen king6/25/2023 ![]() ![]() (Filming on the nine-episode series began in September 2019.) If there’s an incidental lesson, it’s that Covid-19 has changed the narrative when it comes to plagues, in ways that will show up onscreen in due course. It’s a Hollywood-style outbreak, racing past quarantines and leaving bodies dramatically splayed around the landscape. The pandemic that King imagined in 1978 wasn’t like the one we’re experiencing now, though, and in the new mini-series “The Stand,” premiering Thursday on CBS All Access, the depiction of it doesn’t resonate in any strong way with our nerve-racking experiences of the last 10 months. ![]() ![]() That would seem to make it pretty relevant, or at least timely, in the year of Covid-19. Stephen King’s slab of a novel, “The Stand” (originally 800-plus pages, later expanded to 1,100-plus), begins with a manufactured viral epidemic that wipes out most of the human race. ![]()
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Ball lightning book review6/24/2023 ![]() ![]() Disillusioned, Chen leaves the military research group. After building the weapon and forming a specialized military unit to use the device, they successfully deploy the weapon against anti-technology eco-terrorists who try to blow up a nuclear plant, but kill a group of schoolchildren that had been held hostage. They learn how to capture these macro-electrons and turn them into a weapon that can destroy targeted types of matter wood, stone, or even microprocessors. With the help of a theoretical physicist, Ding Yi, they discover that ball lightning is not formed by lightning conditions, but rather when lightning encounters "macro- electrons" hypercharging the electrons until they express their energy. During his research, military technology researcher Lin Yun recruits him into a weapons development team. Both traumatized and inspired by that experience, he makes the investigation of ball lightning his life's work, first getting his PhD in the subject, then exploring the phenomenon through both applied and theoretical research. The novel follows the experiences of a first-person protagonist, Chen, whose family was killed by ball lightning while he was in high school. In 2018 the English version, translated by Joel Martinsen, was published in the US by Tor Books. The original Chinese version was published in 2004. Ball Lightning ( Chinese: 球状闪电) is a hard science fiction novel by Chinese author Liu Cixin. ![]()
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Isadora wing novels6/24/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() A social outcast as a dwarf living in a small German town, Trudi becomes the town’s unofficial historian and storyteller, transforming over the course of the novel from malicious gossip to caring artist. This novel, written in 1994, follows the life of Trudi Montag from 19. Stones From The River by Ursula Hegi (1994) Written in the midst of the Sexual Revolution and second-wave feminism, Fear of Flying depicts a protagonist who proved highly controversial at the time: an intellectually powerful and sexually awakened woman. The author of a book of erotic poems, Isadora writes of her adventures on a trip to Vienna to attend a psychoanalytic conference with her husband, where she meets another man who lures her away on a jaunt across Europe. This #1 New York Times bestselling novel follows Isadora Wing, a highly phobic and sexually liberated anti-hero. ![]()
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![]() ![]() In the thick of the battles of Spotsylvania, the Wilderness and Petersburg, the 57th Massachusetts probably suffered more casualties than any other in the Army of the Potomac. Grant's Overland campaign is an unusually detailed study of men at war, as well as a superb unit history. ![]() "This comprehensive, muster-to-disbandment account of a regiment involved in Ulysses S. Army of the Potomac, Overland Campaign, Va., 1864, Petersburg Crater, Battle of, Va., 1864, Armed Forces - Military life, Military campaigns, Regimental histories, Massachusetts - History - Civil War, 1861-1865 - Regimental histories, United States - History - Civil War, 1861-1865 - Regimental histories, Massachusetts - History - Civil War, 1861-1865 - Personal narratives, United States - History - Civil War, 1861-1865 - Personal narratives, Petersburg (Va.) - History - Siege, 1864-1865, United States - History - Civil War, 1861-1865 - Campaigns, Massachusetts, United States, Virginia, Virginia - Petersburg Publisher Mechanicsburg, PA : Stackpole Books Collection inlibrary printdisabled internetarchivebooks Digitizing sponsor Kahle/Austin Foundation Contributor Internet Archive Language English Army of the Potomac - Military life - History, United States. Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, 57th (1864-1865), United States. ![]() Publication date 2015 Topics United States. ![]() |