![]() Seconds later the comforting aroma of her favorite tea wafted over to her.Īdelaide twisted her napkin in her hands. “Of course you can, but then who would you have to talk to? This is the third night in a row My Lady, perhaps you should tell Byron.” Marius lifted the kettle from the stove and poured the hot water into the waiting tea pot. ![]() “You didn’t have to get up, I am perfectly capable of making a cup of tea,” she said smiling at him from the chair he had steered her to. ![]() She hadn’t been up for more than five minutes when her squire Marius joined her. Silently she walked downstairs and made her way to the kitchen. Quietly she slipped from under the covers and picked up her robe from the foot of the bed and tip toed out of their room. For the third night in a row she had a nightmare where she watched as a young girl calling out for her son Aiden was murdered. She looked over to where her mate lay, still sound asleep. ![]() Adelaide McKenzie gasped and sat up in bed. ![]()
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![]() ![]() Volunteers sign letters of intent and provide DNA samples at age 65, which John and his now-deceased wife Kathy had done ten years prior to the beginning of the story. ![]() John Perry, a 75-year-old retired advertising writer, joins the Colonial Defense Forces who protect human interplanetary colonists. Because the actual fight, light-years from home, is far, far harder than he can imagine-and what he will become is far stranger. He has only the vaguest idea what to expect. And if you survive, you'll be given a generous homestead stake of your own, on one of our hard-won colony planets. ![]() You'll be taken off Earth and never allowed to return. They don't want young people they want people who carry the knowledge and skills of decades of living. Everybody knows that when you reach retirement age, you can join the CDF. The bulk of humanity's resources are in the hands of the Colonial Defense Force. Far from Earth, the war has been going on for decades: brutal, bloody, unyielding.Įarth itself is a backwater. To defend Earth, and to stake our own claim to planetary real estate. The bad news is that planets fit to live on are scarce- and alien races willing to fight us for them are common. The good news is that humanity finally made it into interstellar space. John Perry did two things on his 75th birthday. ![]() ![]() Now back in print, The Cuckoo Tree and The Stolen Lake continue the Wolves Chronicles, the exhilarating and imaginative series that stemmed from Joan Aiken's classic The Wolves of Willoughby Chase.Ī dazzling piece of dramatic, snowballing adventure, The Stolen Lake is full of fantastical details: revolving palaces, witches who are also court dressmakers, an apocalyptic volcanic eruption, and an infernal country with a noticeable lack of female children. Readers who have followed Dido Twite's escapades in Black Hearts in Battersea and Nightbirds on Nantucket will welcome her return in her wildest escapade yet. In this fantasy adventure, a young girl visits a land where birds carry off men, fish eat human flesh, and she must rescue a pilfered lake. ![]() ![]() ![]() The two-week job stretched to two months, and Jessica ended the film with an impressive first credit. Jessica cheerfully admits it wasn't her prodigious talent or charm that inspired the director to tap her to take over the part-it was her hair, which matched the original performer's. Originally hired for two weeks, she got her break when an actress in a principal role suddenly dropped out. She made her feature film debut in 1993 in Hollywood Pictures' comedy Camp Nowhere (1994). A gifted young actress, Jessica has played a variety of roles ranging from light comedy to gritty drama since beginning her career. She studied at the Atlantic Theatre Company with founders William H. Nine months later she was signed by an agent. In love with the idea of becoming an actress from the age of five, she was 12 before she took her first acting class. ![]() ![]() Three years later her father's career brought the family back to California, then to Del Rio, TX, before finally settling in Southern California when Jessica was nine. Her family moved to Biloxi, MS, when she was an infant. Her father is of Mexican descent (including Spanish and Indigenous Mexican roots), and her mother has Danish, Welsh, English, and French ancestry. Jessica Marie Alba was born on April 28, 1981, in Pomona, CA, to Catherine (Jensen) and Mark David Alba, who served in the US Air Force. ![]() ![]() ![]() George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda is the outstanding novel about British Jews and nothing else really comes close. It’s a strange quirk of Anglo-Jewish history that the finest book ever published about Jews in this country was written by a gentile, but it’s indisputably true. George Eliot (1865), engraving from a portrait by Frederick Burton, Wikimedia Commons ![]() How did she pull off this singular feat? And why? Set at the zenith of Victorian England, George Eliot’s last novel displays a deep empathy towards British Jews, while also laying out the author’s firm proto-Zionist sympathies. Who are his real parents? A chance meeting draws him into Whitechapel and the world of British Jews, with whom he has a growing affinity, before eventually discovering the remarkable story of his own birth. Raised in an aristocratic household, Deronda longs to discover his true origins. Published in 1876, Daniel Deronda is a unique novel in the history of 19th century English literature. ![]() ![]() ![]() I read the ebook, and I understand a print version will be forthcoming in September. I had heard, as I think everyone else has, that Business Adventures was a favorite book of Bill Gates and Warren Buffet. John Brooks’s insightful reportage is so full of personality and critical detail that whether he is looking at the astounding market crash of 1962, the collapse of a well-known brokerage firm, or the bold attempt by American bankers to save the British pound, one gets the sense that history really does repeat itself. Stories about Wall Street are infused with drama and adventure and reveal the machinations and volatile nature of the world of finance. ![]() These notable and fascinating accounts are as relevant today to understanding the intricacies of corporate life as they were when the events happened. What do the $350 million Ford Motor Company disaster known as the Edsel, the fast and incredible rise of Xerox, and the unbelievable scandals at General Electric and Texas Gulf Sulphur have in common? Each is an example of how an iconic company was defined by a particular moment of fame or notoriety. This business classic written by longtime New Yorker contributor John Brooks is an insightful and engaging look into corporate and financial life in America. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Extreme ownership requires leaders to look at an organization’s problems through the objective lens of reality, without emotional attachments to agendas or plans.It requires extraordinary humility and courage. Total responsibility for failure is a difficult thing to accept.It’s the leader’s fault when subordinates aren’t doing what they should.The leader must own everything in his or her world.These leadership principles are simple, but not easy.They are simply focused on the mission and how best to accomplish it. The best leaders are not driven by ego or personal agendas.The only meaningful measure for a leader is whether the team succeeds or fails.Without a team, there can be no leadership.But I pick and choose ideas to include at my discretion. The following book summary is a collection of my notes and highlights taken straight from the book. ![]() ![]() ![]() My teacher ruthlessly crushed my aspirations by pointing out that it was just one loooooooooong run on sentence with a solitary period. I remember proudly finishing my first short story ever in the first grade: it had plot, dialogue and a twist! (Yes, I was quite the Margot Tenenbaum-minus the eyeliner and creepy brotherly love.) I even folded the pages and stapled it to mimic grownupped-ness. This is evident in the breathless, tumbling dice style of storytelling that belongs to children. ![]() ![]() She has plenty of money but apart from that she struck me as a neglected child, whom despite receiving no attention, love or stability from her parents was basically a kind and happy person. Reading through reviews I was surprised how many found Eloise spoilt and horrible. It's quite a long book and one I think would make a good book to read alone for a child, there's so much to look at, each page is packed with illustrations. There are lots of French words and expressions that were an enjoyable addition to this story. We see no parents in this story only a nanny who seems kind and tolerant. Although reading this as an adult I became a little tired of the frenetic adventures of Eloise, I know as a child I would have enjoyed these humourous cartoon -like illustrations.Įloise is a young girl who does everything at top speed with the utmost enthusiasm accompanied by a stream of consciousness and several animal companions. I was lucky enough to find a 1958 hardback edition of this book in a charity shop recently. ![]() ![]() ![]() “As soon as I saw it, I knew this was clearly the book I had long heard about. Cowley had heard rumours of it, but had never seen a copy until 2018 when a regular donor, Andrew Richards, revealed to Cowley that he had one. Photograph: Sian Cainīut in early 1970, during the ban, a few hundred copies of a samizdat edition of Portnoy’s Complaint were secretly printed in Melbourne. ![]() ‘300 copies were made completely by hand – then clearly read and read to death’: the cover with Roth’s name misspelled. “Readers would have felt affronted that they could not read his book in Australia.” ![]() “The case really did challenge Australia’s censorship laws because this wasn’t some pulp book this was a novel by a well-known American literary author who won awards,” says Des Cowley, principal librarian at SLV and co-curator of the World of the Book 2022 exhibition, in which the bootleg Roth is now displayed. The publisher, Penguin, attempted to circumvent the ban by printing 75,000 copies locally in 1970, before facing down legal battles across the country.Īfter more than a year of prosecutions of defiant booksellers and publishers, and two trials in New South Wales that both ended with hung juries, the censorship of Portnoy’s Complaint was finally lifted in June 1971, marking the end of book bans in Australia. Portnoy’s story in Australia is well told: the novel was published in 1969 to great fanfare overseas, but it was deemed obscene and imports were banned at the border by John Gorton’s government. ![]() ![]() ![]() Ted's mind-reading powers rub off a bit on Bobby, granting nightmare glimpses of his mom's assault by her rich, vile, jaunty boss. ![]() This pointedly echoes the theme of Lord of the Flies (the one book King says he wishes he'd written): war is the human condition. They close in on Ted and Bobby, just as a gang of older kids menace Bobby and his girlfriend, Carol. ![]() Unfortunately, Ted is being hunted by yellow-jacketed men-monsters from King's Dark Tower novels who take over the shady part of town. King is as good as Spielberg or Steven Millhauser at depicting an enchanted kid's-eye view of the world, and his Harwich is realistically luminous to the tiniest detail: kids bashing caps with a smoke-blackened rock, a car grille "like the sneery mouth of a chrome catfish," a Wild Mouse carnival ride that makes kids "simultaneously sure they were going to live forever and die immediately."īobby's mom takes in a lodger, Ted Brautigan, who turns the boy on to great books like Lord of the Flies. But his widowed mom is impoverished, and so bitter that she barely loves him. The best is "Low Men in Yellow Coats," about Bobby Garfield of Harwich, Connecticut, who craves a Schwinn for his 11th birthday. ![]() Stephen King's collection of five stories about '60s kids reads like a novel. ![]() |