![]() Batman and Superman have been around since before I was born and I’m not tired of them yet. I am not usually a big fan of stories that never end but I make an exception for heroes. I want the plots to be complex and a little drawn out. I want to know more about what they are thinking and plotting. I want to know more about the characters. Certainly, much bigger than most novels in this genre, but again, I like that. The protagonist Min-Su is someone I can sympathize and empathize with, but to be honest, all these characters are portrayed in a very realistic way. It was immediately apparent that PB & Jason (Peanut Butter & Jelly?) is an interesting and exciting new voice in American literature. The writing is the first thing that captured my attention in Lightforce. ![]() This is the future of the United States, heroes of all kinds. ![]() I like that Min-Su Lee is part Korean, part Caucasian, and all American. He comes across as an old man in the same way that Spiderman sometimes does in Marvel comics and that’s a pretty good trick to be able to pull off. I like that the protagonist is young in spirit but has experienced enough of the harshness of life that at times he almost comes across as an old man. So, I guess it’s fair to say that Lightforce by PB & Jason, was written for guys like me. ![]()
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![]() ![]() Kara’s memoir reveals how she broke through the fear of losing everything, bucked powerful forces to take control of her life and career, and reclaimed her love of running. Kara became a crusader for female athletes and a key witness helping to get Salazar banned from coaching at the Olympic level. Told with stunning honesty, The Longest Race is an unforgettable story and a call to action. Meanwhile, Nike stood by Alberto for years and proved itself capable of shockingly misogynistic corporate practices. He pushed the limits of anti-doping rules, and created what Kara experienced as a culture of abuse, the extent of which she reveals in her book for the first time. But behind the scenes, Salazar was hiding dark secrets. Kara was soon winning a World Championship medal, going to the Olympics, and standing on the podium at the New York and Boston marathons, just like her coach. Coached by distance running legend Alberto Salazar, it seemed like the opportunity of a lifetime. Then in 2004, she was invited to join a secretive, lavishly funded new team, dubbed the Nike Oregon Project. ![]() She excelled at running from a young age and was offered a Nike sponsorship deal when she graduated from college. ![]() ![]() Kara Goucher grew up with Olympic dreams. In this unvarnished and affecting memoir, Olympian Kara Goucher reveals her experience of living through and speaking out about one of the biggest scandals in running. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() I’ll read a book, take a while to read the next, and have forgotten much of what happened in the previous book. Someone has to die.įor some reason, this series hasn’t stuck in my head much. But there’s only one way to restore order. If the balance between life and death isn’t fixed, both the Underworld and Pierce’s home back on earth will be wiped away. The sacrifice seemed worth it, though, because it meant she could be with the boy she loves.īut now her happiness - and safety - are threatened, all because the Furies have discovered that John has broken one of their strictest rules: He revived a human soul. Seventeen-year-old Pierce Oliviera knew by accepting the love of John Hayden, she’d be forced to live forever in the one place she’s always dreaded most: the Underworld. From #1 New York Times bestselling author Meg Cabot, the dark reimagining of the Persephone myth comes to a thrilling conclusion.ĭeath has her in his clutches. ![]() ![]() ![]() On one of the skeletons she finds a labyrinth-engraved ring which she takes. Upon hearing voices, seemingly whispering her name, she is drawn into a cave. ![]() ![]() ( January 2019)Īlice Tanner is working at an excavation in France when she finds something. ![]() However, the broadcast version only runs for three hours. The running time was originally announced, and is still stated on the official website, as being "four hours". in May 2014, and was set to air in Austria and Germany early 2013. The series aired in Canada, Korea, Poland and Portugal in autumn 2012, in Sweden in December 2012, the UK in March 2013, the U.S. The executive producers were Tim Halkin, Liza Marshall, Ridley Scott, Tony Scott, Rola Bauer, Jonas Bauer, and Hodges. Adrian Hodges adapted the novel for the series, which was directed by Christopher Smith.Ī German-South African co-production, the two-part series was filmed on location in the medieval town of Carcassonne in southwest France and Cape Town, South Africa. Other cast members include Katie McGrath, Tom Felton, Sebastian Stan, Emun Elliott, Tony Curran, and John Hurt. The setting jumps between modern and medieval France and follows two women (played by Vanessa Kirby and Jessica Brown Findlay) who are searching for the Holy Grail. Labyrinth is a historical television miniseries based on the 2005 novel of the same name by Kate Mosse. ![]() ![]() This book follows one individual through many difficult years, through trauma and heartbreak, determination and loyalty, and an unvoiced wrestling with himself and how he is in the world.When I learned that the author had been isolated through her childhood, enduring the crippling pain of her disability, it resonated with what I knew of the main character here. ![]() I appreciate a writer with the confidence to allow me to really see where I am, where my characters are, to live and breathe with them, the quiet moments as well as the ferocious ones, to see what is different in their world and what I recognise from my own. I am pulled into the story but not hurled into it. The characters are well drawn and I care very much what happens to them. I could not have asked anything more of this book. I am a reader who loves excellent writing that doesn’t interfere with the flow of a story. ![]() I've long been curious about Rosemary Sutcliff’s novels, but I don’t think I’d ever read one before The Lantern Bearers. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Aeronautical details show up in several of his novels (including the one at hand) - most famously No Highway, which concerned the failure of an airplane due to metal fatigue - which happened just a few years later to the DeHavilland Comet. Shute later formed his own company, which developed the Envoy, a trainer for the UK air force. He graduated from Oxford with an Engineering degree (Mechanical Engineering, we'd say now) and worked on airplanes and airships - notably leading the development of the R-100, a promising British dirigible project that was scrapped after a test airship from a parallel government project crashed. He served in the First World War in its late months. Nevil Shute Norway was born in England in 1899, His father became head of the Post Office in Ireland (shades of Trollope!), and Shute spent a few years there, and tended the wounded during the Easter Rising in 1916. ![]() ![]() “4 3 2 1” is indeed a doorstop of forking paths.Īll four Archie Fergusons share the same origin story, one that has much in common with Auster’s: a paternal grandfather who arrives in the United States with a Jewish name, which gets converted to something more Gentile-friendly on Ellis Island a family history marred by murder an emotionally remote, entrepreneurial father a childhood in suburban New Jersey, a place that Archie, in all his incarnations, comes to detest. “Clearly you’ve read Borges by now,” the faculty adviser remarks to one of these iterations of Archie Ferguson, a character who, like most of Auster’s heroes, is fanatically bookish. In “4 3 2 1” (Holt), Auster’s first novel in seven years and, at eight hundred and sixty-six pages, the longest by far of any book he has published, a single man’s life unfolds along four narrative arcs, from birth to early adulthood. It’s an idea that resonates through the work of the writer Paul Auster, in whose fiction both selves and stories are precarious constructions, fascinating but unstable, more illusion than reality. Illustration by Sébastien PlassardĪccording to a currently popular line of philosophy, a self is merely the sum of all the stories we tell about a particular human body. ![]() ![]() Auster’s summarizing style of narration closes like a fist around the proceedings. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Sheridan gives a strong sense of the rapine of the warlords who were Chiang's off-and-on allies, and of the feeble heritage of Sun Yat-sen's patriotic platitudes. The Kuomintang turned into a mere holding operation and faded into chaos. However, the book underlines Chiang's failure to give the masses a ""Strength through Joy"" spirit and, as wartime inflation of 300% gave way to postwar collapse, the anti-Communist pitch became emptier and emptier. The KMT did ensure that forced opium production took up at least a fifth of Chinese cropland by the 1929-1933 period, and they consolidated a soldier recruitment system that approximated Nazi roundups. The KMT failed either to create an effective dictatorship or to mobilize fascist passions which could ensure willingness to "sacrifice." Thus the difficulty in squeezing enough wealth out of the peasantry to meet a foreign debt which totaled half the national revenue. Sheridan's focus on the KMT brings more to light than do many surveys of Mao's revolutionaries. Sheridan, a Northwestern University scholar, concentrates on the Kuomintang movement of Chiang Kai-shek, insisting that we judge a political force by whether it solves the problems posed to it, not, as Chiang's partisans prefer, by means of what-if's. Book Synopsis After the 1911 fall of the Manchus came the most hideous breakdown in Chinese history. ![]() ![]() Wells (1866-1946) is well known in literature as a futurist and a literary sensation with his sci-fi novels The Time Machine and War of the Worlds. This is a beautifully written little tale with a thought-provoking ending. Are we all then no better than brushed exteriors, whited sepulchres–“ “We none of us know what the fair semblance of a human being may conceal, sir. “The crumpled paper rose and billowed on the counter more and more and more, until he was nearly hidden from us, until he was altogether hidden, and still his voice went on and on. Listen for the touch of philosophical talk going on beneath the illusion of The Magician pulling out streams of colored paper from the father’s hat. The Magician’s many marvels carry mysterious weight and entertainment. But the father wants to draw the line with intelligence and practicality. Gip is a boy who believes in the reality of magic, as all children do in their innocence and trust. ![]() Come meet Gip and his father as they enter The Magic Shop on Regent Street in London. ![]() Wells takes these powers beyond our normal physical limitations, doubt, and desires. ![]() ![]() The elements of magic in fiction are often mesmerizing. Conjuring, the real and the unreal, glass balls, demons clinging to a coat sleeve, charming illusions and evil magic. ![]() ![]() Conniff: A chronicle of the historic lawsuit brought against Frank Conniff by his cats, Millie & Barney.Conniff also hosts the monthly Cartoon Dump at Q.E.D. After a year long Hollywood dry spell, he restarted his career with an Elvira TV movie and eventually scored gigs on Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Invader Zim and a string of progressive radio shows on Air America.More recently, Conniff has reteamed with MST3K expats for the movie riffing series, Cinematic Titanic, gone full bore into the lucrative world of podcasting and recently published his second book, Cats V. After leaving the show (the only cast member to do so amicably, by his own account), Conniff went on to write for an incredibly diverse series of shows. ![]() ![]() In the Twin Cities, he met the Mystery Science Theater 3000 team, ultimately joining the show in its second season as a writer, and more notably to fans, mad scientist’s assistant, TV’s Frank. A stint in rehab moved Frank Conniff from New York City to Minneapolis, derailing his standup career for a bit and ultimately kickstarting his career as a TV writer. ![]() |