“My most precious possession, the thing I treasure above anything else in this world, that being my granddaughter, Josephine Diana Malone, I hereby bequeath to James Markham Spear.” Unbeknownst to Josie, Jake and his family were a very special part of her grandmother’s life, and in her will, her grandmother makes a request that will alter both of their lives forever. He hasn’t had much luck in love, with three marriages behind him, but he has created a good life for his kids, who mean the world to him. Jake lives in the coastal town of Madeline, Maine with his three children. As the assistant to a famous photographer, Josie has lived a glamorous life of mingling with celebrities and travelling the world. KA has once again delivered a beautiful love story featuring a quirky, likeable heroine, and a gorgeously sexy, deeply loving alpha hero, and I absolutely loved it!īoth well into their 40s, Josie and Jake meet upon the death of Josie’s beloved grandmother. What can I say that I haven’t said before? Absolutely nothing.
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"Colours" is a war story set in roughly Napoleonic times. Instead it settles for being a story about petty office politics, with quickly forgettable characters. "How the Morning Glory Grows" could have been a steampunk police procedural about steampunk mecha and genetic engineering experts. The story of "No, They Dream of Mechanical Hearts" survives because of villains who aren't ruthless enough to press their case - or clever enough to recognise the implications of imprisoning an expert android crafter in a cell guarded by an android. "Morrow's Knight" takes a while to build up steam - a major strike against a short story, which does not have time to do that - and quickly becomes predictable. It isn't a story it's just a single long scene interrupted by musings. While it has a richly researched world with interesting characters, the story has neither conflict nor any sense of dynamism. The opening story,"'Ascension", is fundamentally static. I honestly expected more from this anthology. These stories also employ tired tropes, like blatantly stupid villains, stereotypical sneering hypocritical Westerners, and characters who are invincible by virtue of being mechanical. That would work in mainstream fiction, but some stories here are not, and fall flat because of it. The stories are all mellow, as smooth and pleasant as the cover. The novelty of the effort - a Singaporean steampunk anthology, with a mainly-female crew, covering imperialism and Asia - outweighs the actual experience of the stories. There have been many successful movie and television adaptations of popular books in the contemporary age that have rooted themselves into our popular culture experience, yet we always hear that same complaint from that one friend (or maybe from ourselves, yikes!) that the film wasn’t as good as the book or that the film did not stay true to the book’s story arc and character developments. Have you ever been around people or been one of those people who are absolute die-hard fanatics about certain books and stories - like the culture-changing Harry Potter book series, the thrilling crime-solving adventures of the Agatha Christie mystery oeuvre, or Frank Herbert’s mind-boggling and affective epic science-fiction novel “Dune” - and then immediately express their distaste and disappointment in the movie or television adaptation once it is released in the movie theatres or streaming services? Well, ladies and gentlemen: This sentiment is more widespread than you think. But I always give out and give up before I get through it. I love Irish poetry, prose and nonfiction. I like Nelson Mandela’s way of restorative reconciliation and inclusion better. I think Isabel Wilkerson’s Casteand Adam Grant’s Think Again forced me to rethink how deeply embedded our unexamined preconceptions are, not just in relation to race, gender, class and religion, but to any number of categories that lead us to see others as inferior, less worthy of being seen and heard. From my senior year in college to my first year in law school, I read five books that made me think it was worth a try: North Toward Home by Willie Morris The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron You Can’t Go Home Again by Thomas Wolfe The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou. I always wanted to be a writer, but doubted my ability to do it. The book that had the greatest influence on my writing Read John Grisham's Sooley, you’ll want to cry too I still believe it’s the greatest novel written since William Faulkner died. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez. He argues that the stories about the country reported in the West are typically superficial, “like splashes of foam on the surface of a massive sea change.” The narrative of Hessler’s own experiences in China begins in May 1999, when the news reaches China that the country’s embassy in Belgrade has been bombed by American planes. Hessler sets out his goal: to describe what is happening in China in a deep and measured way. Reviewers have hailed Oracle Bones as one of the most informative pieces of English-language writing on contemporary China: “Everyone in the Western world should read this book” ( Publishers’ Weekly). These chapters allow Hessler to explore Chinese history and some of the contentious contemporary debates about that history. Woven into this narrative are 13 chapters about the “oracle bones” used by Shang dynasty diviners in the second millennium B.C. The book attempts to provide an overview of contemporary China by recounting Hessler’s experiences in the country and those of some of the people he has met there. Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China's Past and Present is a 2006 work of travel journalism by Peter Hessler, the Beijing correspondent for The New Yorker magazine. And as autonomous vehicles share our streets, we are increasingly putting our lives in their hands. We can no longer assume that our mortgage application, or even our medical tests, will be seen by human eyes. Algorithms decide bail and parole - and appear to assess Black and White defendants differently. Systems cull résumés until, years later, we discover that they have inherent gender biases. Researchers call this the alignment problem. When the systems we attempt to teach will not, in the end, do what we want or what we expect, ethical and potentially existential risks emerge. Recent years have seen an eruption of concern as the field of machine learning advances. Today’s “machine-learning” systems, trained by data, are so effective that we’ve invited them to see and hear for us - and to make decisions on our behalf. A jaw-dropping exploration of everything that goes wrong when we build AI systems and the movement to fix them. Causing severe loss of life and economic disruption, the Ebola crisis was a major tragedy of modern medicine. The brutal virus spread rapidly through a clinical desert where basic health-care facilities were few and far between. Invaluable." -Steven Johnson, The New York Times Book Review In 2014, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea suffered the worst epidemic of Ebola in history. It is hard to imagine a more timely or important book.” -Bill and Melinda Gates " history is as powerfully conveyed as it is tragic. Book excerpt: “Paul Farmer brings his considerable intellect, empathy, and expertise to bear in this powerful and deeply researched account of the Ebola outbreak that struck West Africa in 2014. This book was released on with total page 688 pages. Book Synopsis Fevers, Feuds, and Diamonds by : Paul Farmerĭownload or read book Fevers, Feuds, and Diamonds written by Paul Farmer and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. I see the simple and exceedingly elegant cut of her black dress, and her dark, suggestive beauty offset by her pale and sensitive hands, and the creamy flesh of her slender neck emerging above the modest neckline. In my imagination a streak of light catches Rachel’s very soignèe, very tightly combed and knotted dark hair, and shows off to its best advantage her beautifully shaped head. Since then I have read and re-read this marvelous book several more times, and I think I have finally managed to put my finger on the hook which was from the very start securely lodged in my cheek.įrom the opening chapters an image of Rachel emerged in my imagination as a Franco Zeffirrelli heroine – a delicate combined portrait of Madame Bovary and Jane Eyre in looks – but painted in fine Italian chiaroscuro. Like so many people who have read this book and have never been able to forget it, I was instantly captivated by Daphne Du Maurier’s My Cousin Rachel (published in July of 1951) from the first time I read it as a teenager. That would represent a big challenge for any songwriter, with daunting implications of pretension and hubris. In his world conquering mathematical sequence of albums (+, x, ÷ and =), Sheeran’s end game was always Subtract (-), a work that would strip pop adornments away to focus on pure songcraft, a chance to measure himself against the artistic giants of his chosen field, in the profound realm of Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell rather than the commercial zones of Elton John and Carole King. There has never been a troubadour like him, an acoustic guitar-strumming one-man band who has pushed the folky singer-songwriter genre to the hot centre of the 21st century pop mainstream armed with loop pedals, earworm hooks and a deep affinity for the rhythms of electronic dance music and cadences of hip hop. But his moving and surprising new album potently demonstrates why that would be a shameful loss to music.Īs should be clear from anyone who has followed his improbable rise from street busker to stadium superstar, Sheeran has always been a man with a plan. To which, no doubt, many curmudgeonly pop haters would have crowed good riddance. This week, Ed Sheeran suggested he may quit making music if he lost the plagiarism suit (over alleged similarities between his 2014 hit Thinking Out Loud and Marvin Gaye’s 1973 classic Let’s Get It On) that he has now won. Not a traditional mystery, nor yet pure science fiction or romance, Dead Until Dark broke genre boundaries to appeal to a wide audience of people who simply enjoy a good adventure. When Charlaine began to realize that neither of those series was ever going to set the literary world on fire, she regrouped and decided to write the book she’d always wanted to write. The books, set in Shakespeare, Arkansas, feature a heroine who has survived a terrible attack and is learning to live with its consequences. Soon Charlaine was looking for another challenge, and the result was the much darker Lily Bard series. Her first Teagarden, Real Murders, garnered an Agatha nomination. After a child-producing sabbatical, Charlaine latched on to the trend of series, and soon had her own traditional mystery books about a Georgia librarian, Aurora Teagarden. The resulting two stand-alones were published by Houghton Mifflin. After holding down some low-level jobs, her husband Hal gave her the opportunity to stay home and write. Though her early output consisted largely of ghost stories, by the time she hit college (Rhodes, in Memphis) Charlaine was writing poetry and plays. Charlaine lives in Texas now, and all of her children and grandchildren are within easy driving distance. A native of the Mississippi Delta, she grew up in the middle of a cotton field. Charlaine Harris has been a published novelist for over thirty-five years. |