![]() ![]() And shy Kambili must find the strength to keep her family together after her mother commits a desperate act. ![]() As the country begins to fall apart under a military coup, tension within the family escalates. Jaja learns to garden and work with his hands, and Kambili secretly falls in love with a young, charismatic priest. ![]() For the first time they experience freedom from their papa. But everything changes once Kambili and Jaja visit Aunty Ifeoma outside the city. He looms over his family's every move, severely punishes Kambili and her older brother, Jaja, if they're not the best in their classes, and hits their mama if she disagrees with him. Although her papa is generous and well respected, he is fanatically religious and tyrannical at home. Yet, as Kambili reveals in her tender-voiced account, things are less than perfect in her wealthy Nigerian home. She's completely shielded from the troubles of the world. She lives in a beautiful house, has a caring family, and attends an exclusive missionary school. Candidate in Harvard's English Department.īook description: From the outside, fifteen-year-old Kambili has the perfect life. It featured Professor Akua Sarr of Boston College and Kristen Robinson, Ph.D. ![]() This session on Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was hosted by the Committee on African Studies on June 5, 2013. ![]()
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6/21/2023 0 Comments Pretty Dead Queens by Alexa Donne![]() ![]() ![]() There was also far, far too much swearing for my taste. I might have abandoned it, but I pushed myself to continue until-at last-the murder came along. I knew the author was building up to something, but the relationships formed far too quickly even as Donne spent much longer than necessary on setting the scene. For one, the beginning of the book was so slow and seemingly meaningless that I just was not sure what to do with it. In the end, I went with three for a few reasons. I was torn between giving this book four or three stars. ![]() Pretty Dead Queens follows Cecelia as she moves in with her famous mystery-writer grandmother after her mother's death, and a copycat kill of a murder that had taken places fifty years before occurs to one of her new friends. Pretty Dead Queens is the second Alexa Donne book I have read, and it was as different from the first (Brightly Burning) as it could possibly have been. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with a digital ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() There's certainly no shortage of books for young people about the Civil War and many have horrors of war as their focus. Charley's growth from callow braggert in the Bowery to sensitive young man who has looked himself squarely in the face is possible to chart on a time line, deed by deed. The definition of courage should be a logical step for this book as Charley finds his courage far from the field of battle where he was sure he would act so bravely. This deed of courage gives Charley the confidence he needs to move on, knowing he'll return to the mountains and their beautiful solitude when he is ready. Gradually and with subtlety the relationship changes and, when she is hurt, it is concern for her that causes Charley to confront the panther and get Granny home safely. The relationship between the old woman - Granny Bent - and Charley starts out rocky: she is suspicious of him and makes him fetch and carry for her. There he truly proves his courage by saving the life of an old woman. During his first battle, Charley kills a man and is so traumatized by this that he skedaddles to the mountains of Virginia. ![]() Too young to be a soldier, he enlists as a drummer boy. Charley has longed to experience the glory of war and enlists in the Union army to avenge his brother's death and to escape from his previous Bowery life. This accessible novel debates such things as the necessity and horror of war and the recognition of true courage. ![]() 6/21/2023 0 Comments Nameless 2 grant morrison![]() ![]() Frankly, it makes me crave a pulpy, globetrotting adventure comic from Morrison. This issue shines brightest when this pulpy adventure quality surfaces to balance out the weirder, more esoteric elements. He's been hired to steal a magical key, but his obstacles challenges are more in the vein of a David Lynch film than giant boulders or angry natives. ![]() The protagonist (known only as "Nameless"), comes across as a hybrid of John Constantine and Indiana Jones. At times Nameless even boasts a distinctly Spielberg-ian vibe. The horror elements are more a symptom of the underlying conflict in this world rather than at the heart of the story. ![]() Morrison frequently emphasizes tenuous barrier between the real world and the dream world and the amazing things that can unfold when someone is in full, lucid control of their dream self. Bu this new universe Morrison created has much more in common with movies like Inception and The Matrix. ![]() Sure, there's some pretty dark imagery on tap in this issue - sentient, flesh-eating parasites, fathers being driven mad and murdering their families, that sort of thing. Nameless has been billed largely as a horror comic, but this series is actually more steeped in science fiction and the apocalypse. ![]() 6/20/2023 0 Comments Future perfect by steven johnson![]() ![]() ![]() Johnson also serves on the advisory boards of a number of Internet-related companies, including Medium, Atavist,, Betaworks, and. A contributing editor to Wired, he writes regularly for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, and many other periodicals. He has also co-created three influential web sites: the pioneering online magazine FEED, the Webby Award-winning community site,, and the hyperlocal media site outside.in. Johnson is the author of twelve books, largely on the intersection of science, technology, and personal experience. He also has a graduate degree from Columbia University in English literature. He completed his undergraduate degree at Brown University, where he studied semiotics, a part of the school's modern culture and media department. Steven grew up in Washington, D.C., where he attended St. ![]() Steven Berlin Johnson (born June 6, 1968) is an American popular science author and media theorist. Brown University (B.A., Semiotics, 1990) Ĭolumbia University (M.A., English Literature) ![]() ![]() ![]() The wisest, clearest, and most experienced of critics have notoriously been wrong about the phenomena of their own day. In speaking of what is proceeding around us no one can be trusted to be authoritative. But in the continent of literary criticism, where all else is imperial, there is a province which is still republican, and that is the analysis of contemporary literature, the frank examination of the literary life of to-day. In dealing with such subjects the critic must persuade himself that he is capable of forming an opinion, and must then give us his opinion definitely. That Homer is a great poet, and that the verse of Milton is exquisite, are not Questions at Issue. ![]() When a writer speaks to us of the works of the dead masters, of the literary life of the past, we demand from him the authoritative attitude. To the essays which are here collected I have given a name which at once, I hope, describes them accurately and distinguishes them from criticism of a more positive order. ![]() 6/20/2023 0 Comments The double saramago![]() ![]() Saramago is, in the not uncommon fashion of Latin intellectuals, an avowed Communist his sympathy for workers broadens and solidifies his fictional thought-experiments. His prose is open to philosophical and psychological speculation as well as to homely folk wisdom, and its flights into the impossible are balanced by a feeling for the daily routines and labors that compose, for most of humanity, the substance of existence. He found his groove in the baroque magic-realist historical novel “Baltasar and Blimunda” (1982 in Portugal, when he turned sixty 1987 in the U.S.), and combines, in the novels of his productive eighth decade-“Blindness” (1995, 1997), “All the Names” (1997, 1999), and “The Cave” (2000, 2002)-fantastic premises with a relaxed, disarmingly direct style and a quizzical, respectful interest in everyday life. He was a late starter in the lists of fiction, having been a civil servant and sometime journalist to the age of fifty. ![]() The Portuguese novelist José Saramago, born in 1922, has not let the Nobel Prize, which he received in 1998, slow him down. ![]() ![]() ![]() Indeed, many people had written on the African presence in pre-Columbian America before Van Sertima. The ideas and themes presented in They Came Before Columbus were not novel. He was recognised for his work in this field by being requested by the Nobel Committee of the Swedish Academy to nominate candidates for the Nobel Prize in Literature from 1976 to 1980.īut it was as a historian that the great man made his greatest impact with his 1977 groundbreaking work, “They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America”. He was also the author of several major literary reviews published in Denmark, India, Britain, and the United States. As a literary critic, he was the author of Caribbean Writers, a collection of critical essays on the Caribbean novel. Van Sertima was first of all, an amazing polymath in this age of specializations and sub-specializations – a literary critic, a linguist, a historian and an anthropologist – who made a name for himself in all these fields.Īs a linguist, he was the compiler of the Swahili Dictionary of Legal Terms, based on his field word in Tanzania, East Africa in 1967. Ivan Van Sertima,hardly did justice to this great son of Guyana. ![]() 6/20/2023 0 Comments Blackberries seamus heaney![]() ![]() Harwood uses passing time for her poem, she uses imagery like “flickering lights” to describe passing of time. While the first stanza Heaney uses sensuous imagery and a more positive tone to describe this type of stanza, he uses techniques like similes to explore taste and smell “”sweet like thickened wine” Heaney describes the blackberries before they became rotten. Heaney uses imagery and change of negative tone to describe how the black berries overtime became a “fur, a rat-grey fungus” to show the audience the change of mood and the sight that Heaney saw. Both poets use a negative tone in their poems and they use imagery and similes to describe and explore the passing of time. Both poets use symbolism to explore themes of loss of innocence, showing contrast between youth and growing up from being happy and young to being disappointed. Heaney and Harwood both focus on the idea and themes of youth going into adulthood, from an innocent child or a time in their youth where they perceived life with hope and high expectations until adulthood that shows its harsh realities and disappointment. ![]() ![]() Poems Blackberry Picking by Seamus Heaney and In the Park by Gwen Harwood explore themes of loss and innocence. ![]() ![]() ![]() They’re just friends, of course, until one night when things fall apart. Over tequila, perilously balanced dining hall trays, and video games, the two cope with disappointments that nobody else understands. Nevertheless, an unlikely alliance blooms between Corey and Hartley in the “gimp ghetto” of McHerrin Hall. But a serious accident means that Corey Callahan will start school in a wheelchair instead.Īcross the hall, in the other handicapped-accessible dorm room, lives the too-delicious-to-be real Adam Hartley, another would-be hockey star with his leg broken in two places. ![]() ![]() What now? She expected to start Harkness College as a varsity ice hockey player. I did the review for the first book months ago and you can check it below: Now, almost 12 days later, I’ve finished the whole series and Sarina might be one of my favorite authors of all times. Then I remembered “The Year We Fell Down”, and how much I had loved it, so I decided to give a chance to the second book in the series and OMG I am so grateful I did it. I had tried several books but none of them got me. I decided to read the rest of Sarina’s books because I was facing a huge ‘book hangover’. ![]() |