![]() ![]() What else can one make of a book that jumps from the bedside of the narrator’s dying father to intricate tales of Baybars and Fatima, legendary figures from the early days of the Arab world? ![]() Hmmm.Ĭlearly, the best approach to this collection of complexities is to take it as a fabulous amusement. Alameddine paints when he’s not writing fiction al-Kharrat is in line to inherit the family’s Toyota dealership, but would rather noodle on the guitar. Both were born in Lebanon and educated in the United States, and they share an artistic temperament. (Note, though, that the on-line dictionaries I’ve consulted don’t seem to recognize the Arabic term.)Ĭompounding our confusion is that al-Kharrat seems to bear a marked resemblance to his creator. That’s “Osama the Liar”, according to Alameddine. How much of it we should take for gospel is moot, for although the book includes as astute an analysis of Lebanon and its troubles as you’ll find, it’s also narrated by a young man named Osama al-Kharrat. Rabih Alameddine is a modern-day Scheherazade, spinning out 1,001 nights’ worth of entertainment in this remarkable book, which is part fable, part memoir, and part family history.Īlameddine calls The Hakawati “a story”, which in itself blurs the line between fact and fiction. ![]() Doubleday Canada, 513 pp, $32.95, hardcover ![]()
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![]() ![]() ![]() Blackwood had a varied career, working as a dairy farmer in Canada, where he also operated a hotel for six months, as a newspaper reporter in New York City, bartender, model, journalist for The New York Times, private secretary, businessman, and violin teacher. According to Peter Penzoldt, his father, "though not devoid of genuine good-heartedness, had appallingly narrow religious ideas." After he read the work of a Hindu sage left behind at his parents' house, he developed an interest in Buddhism and other eastern philosophies. His father, Sir Stevenson Arthur Blackwood, was a Post Office administrator his mother, Harriet Dobbs, was the widow of the 6th Duke of Manchester. Between 18, he lived at Crayford Manor House, Crayford and he was educated at Wellington College. Life and work īlackwood was born in Shooter's Hill (now part of south-east London, then part of north-west Kent). Joshi stated, "His work is more consistently meritorious than any weird writer's except Dunsany's" and that his short story collection Incredible Adventures (1914) "may be the premier weird collection of this or any other century". ![]() ![]() The Centaur, " The Willows", " The Wendigo"Īlgernon Henry Blackwood, CBE (14 March 1869 – 10 December 1951) was an English broadcasting narrator, journalist, novelist and short story writer, and among the most prolific ghost story writers in the history of the genre. ![]() ![]() ![]() The desperate mayor (Hugh Bonneville) is willing to pay fifty cents for every dead rat. They arrive at the strangely silent town of Bad Blintz. Keith (Himesh Patel), a clumsy orphan with serious flute skills, charms the mesmerized vermin into the river. On cue, a swarm of rodents invades to scare the bejesus and savings out of the hapless frightened. Rats will bring the deadly plague and kill them all. ![]() Maurice (Hugh Laurie), a loquacious orange tabby, stirs up the deepest fears of gullible villagers. I especially got a kick out of the characters' goofy names.īased on the novel "The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents" by Terry Pratchett, the film opens with a hilarious swindle in progress. There's a darker tone that hearkens back to the original wary intent of fables and folklore. The film serves as a slick CGI twist on the classic Pied Piper of Hamelin. The Amazing Maurice will have you in stitches as a clever take on fairy tales, anthropomorphized animals, and predictable plot structures. A smooth-talking con artist cat and his merry band of equally sentient rodents find big trouble while attempting to scam a desperate medieval town. ![]() ![]() ![]() At each step of the recovery process, Awdish was faced with something even more unexpected: repeated cavalier behavior from her fellow physicians―indifference following human loss, disregard for anguish and suffering, and an exacting emotional distance. ![]() ![]() Awdish spent months fighting for her life, enduring consecutive major surgeries and experiencing multiple overlapping organ failures. Rana Awdish never imagined that an emergency trip to the hospital would result in hemorrhaging nearly all of her blood volume and losing her unborn first child. The New York Times Book Review: "Awdish's book is the one I wished we were given as assigned reading our first year of medical school, alongside our white coats and stethoscopes.dramatic, engaging and instructive."Ī riveting first-hand account of a physician who's suddenly a dying patient and her revelation of the horribly misguided standard of care in the medical worldĭr. ![]() ![]() ![]() They name themselves the First Druid Council. ![]() Also, the Elves begin to emerge after having been in seclusion and hiding for centuries.Ī thousand years before The Sword of Shannara, an Elf named Galaphile gathers all of the people who still had some knowledge of the old world to Paranor to try to bring peace and order to all of the races. During this time, Mankind mutated into several distinct races: Men, Dwarves, Gnomes and Trolls, all named after creatures from "age-old" myths. Only traces of technological artifacts have been found most advanced technology has been lost, but magic has been rediscovered. ![]() These wars rearranged the planet's geography and wiped out most human life on Earth. The Sword of Shannaras events take place 2000 years after the "Great Wars": a nuclear holocaust that has wiped out most of the planet. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Under given assumptions, the separation technique will result in accurate partial sources. The proposed partial source separation technique is supported by several theorems. The partial source separation procedure has two main stages: obtain uncorrelated sources by eigenspace transformation and joint diagonalization and obtain partial periodic sources correlated with random noises from the uncorrelated sources by decorrelation. A partial unknown source separation technique is proposed by combining signal eigenspace transformation, covariance joint diagonalization and decorrelation of correlation sources. In this paper, a separation problem on partial unknown sources such as periodic sources correlated with random noises is introduced. Actual periodic disturbances are partial unknown sources in measured signals and have certain correlation with random noise sources in time domain. Separating and eliminating periodic disturbances from measured signals are a key problem to obtain original responses used for further system identification and evaluation. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() She does intertwine stories into her books, both personal and stories of people she knows or has interviewed. Brown is a social scientist, researcher and storyteller, so her books are based on research, which I like. So, to say that in a very short time I have become a Brené Brown super fan, would be putting it mildly. I started with The Gifts of Imperfection and once I finished it, I just went back and ordered all the rest because I knew that I would eventually want to read them all. I perused the Brené Brown website and ordered a few, okay all of her books. ![]() I did a little more searching and found her TED talks about vulnerability and courage and the Super Soul Interview that she did with Oprah. Well, this just happened to be right around the same time that Brown launched her weekly podcast Unlocking Us which I immediately began listening to and looking forward to each week. A couple close friends suggested that I look for podcasts from her. My introduction to Brené Brown came last spring when I was looking for something to listen to on my walks. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Her performance brings a light Southern accent that enhances the local flavor and credibility of each story.Ĭharlaine Harris is a prolific New York Times and USA Today best-selling author. Narrator Johanna Parker inhabits Sookie - and breathes life into the undead and all kinds of creepy and kooky characters. ![]() Along with plot twists, romantic entanglements, intriguing characters, supernatural conflicts, and murder mysteries, this urban fantasy series hooks listeners with biting satirical commentary. If only she weren’t so powerless against her hunky vampire boyfriend, Bill. In each novel, she’s on the frontlines of trying to mitigate the havoc of otherworldly creatures on the human world of Bon Temps. Sookie Stackhouse, a telepathic with a down-to-earth personality and spicy sense of humor, is uniquely qualified to deal with the weres (as in werewolves) and shape-shifters who have come out of their closets around the Bayou. And, oh yeah, she hears the secret thoughts of all kinds of humans and other creatures. Sookie Stackhouse is a bubbly barmaid in Louisiana - with a vampire for a boyfriend. ![]() ![]() ![]() After all, he's Prince Kaspar Kandinsky, Prince of Cats, a Muscovite, a Londoner and a New Yorker, and as far as anyone knows, the only cat to survive the sinking of the Titanic… Because everything changes with a cat like Kaspar around. Pretty soon, events are set in motion that will take Johnny - and Kaspar - all around the world, surviving theft, shipwreck and rooftop rescues along the way. Johnny was a bell-boy, you see, and he carried all of Countess Kandinsky's things to her room.īut Johnny didn't expect to end up with Kaspar on his hands forever, and nor did he count on making friends with Lizziebeth, a spirited American heiress. ![]() ![]() Kaspar the cat first came to the Savoy Hotel in a basket - Johnny Trott knows, because he was the one who carried him in. A heart-warming, colour-illustrated novel about Kaspar the Savoy cat, from the award-winning author of Born to Run and The Amazing Story of Adolphus Tips ![]() ![]() Catherine Blake is the beautiful widow of a war hero, a hospital volunteer-and a Nazi spy under direct orders from Hitler: uncover the Allied plans for D-Day. The problem is that Catherine Blake is also a deep-cover Nazi spy, charged by Hitler with uncovering the details of D-Day. The Nazis, however, have also chosen an unlikely agent. "In wartime," Winston Churchill wrote, "truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies." For Britain's counterintelligence operations, this meant finding the unlikeliest agent imaginable-a history professor named Alfred Vicary, handpicked by Churchill himself to expose a highly dangerous, but unknown, traitor. Is "A ROLLER-COASTER WORLD WAR II ADVENTURE that conjures up memories of the best of Ken Follett and Frederick Forsyth" ( The emaciated Wynnes return to his middle-class London home where his wife and child waited made for a. ![]() Bestselling author Daniel Silva's celebrated debut novel, The unlikely British spy was freed in 1964 in exchange for Soviet spy Konon Molody. ![]() |