And that’s still in the lab, because outside the lab lies even more drudgery endless paperwork to apply for research grants, constant academic or corporate social infighting, political pressures… The appalling state of today’s science is matched only by our disgusting lack of knowledge about it.Īll of this must have crossed Gregory Benford’s mind as he sat down to write Cosm, his latest science-fiction novel. Answers are found after messy, meticulous trial-and-error procedures that don’t result in flashes of insight as much as in slow theoretical elaboration. Real-world science truly doesn’t work that way. One cannot count the number of cheap stories in which The Answers seem to be held by one clever fellow who can also whip up a universe-saving device in five minutes and still get the girl. Avon EOS, 1998, 374 pages, C$8.99 mmpb, ISBN 2-1Įven though “Science” is fully half of science-fiction, its representation in most SF stories is simply appalling.
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With the exception of a hilarious stint in the Philippines as an ‘authenticity advisor’ to a Hollywood produced Vietnam War film (a barely disguised Apocalypse Now) and a pitiful coup attempt from the Thai jungle, this is where the main part of the novel takes place. Nguyen describes it with chilling effect.Īs part of the General’s staff, our protagonist is one of the lucky ones to be airlifted out of Saigon and on to California. We’ve all seen the horrific images, people climbing the walls of the American embassy, clambering into helicopters. As the book starts, Saigon is about to fall to the Viet Cong and Westerners and Vietnamese are fleeing. Our narrator, the ‘bastard’ result of a love affair between a Vietnamese teenager and a Catholic priest, is a military officer and the assistant to a high-ranking Vietnamese General. The Sympathizer (the author’s first!) is not a novel without flaws but Nguyen’s excellent writing, original angle and biting satire make up for the shortcomings. Rarely have American double standards, displacement, issues of identity and cultural imperialism made me laugh so much. Viet Thanh Nguyen doesn’t shy away from the big issues in this Pulitzer Prize winning book about the aftermath of the Vietnam War. With the feel of a modern classic, This Tender Land is an enthralling, bighearted epic that shows how the magnificent American landscape connects us all, haunts our dreams, and makes us whole. Over the course of one unforgettable summer, these four orphan vagabonds journey into the unknown, crossing paths with others who are adrift, from struggling farmers and traveling faith healers to displaced families and lost souls of all kinds. Together, they steal away in a canoe, heading for the mighty Mississippi in search for a place to call home. Out of pity, they also take with them a brokenhearted little girl named Emmy. Odie and his brother, Albert, are the only white faces among the hundreds of Native American children at the school.Īfter committing a terrible crime, Odie and Albert are forced to flee for their lives along with their best friend, Mose, a mute young man of Sioux heritage. It is also home to Odie O’Banion, a lively orphan boy whose exploits constantly earn him the superintendent’s wrath. In the summer of 1932, on the banks of Minnesota’s Gilead River, the Lincoln Indian Training School is a pitiless place where Native American children, forcibly separated from their parents, are sent to be educated. Louis Fischer opines that throughout his life, Gandhi concentrated on the personal ‘one man’s day-to-day behaviour’. His autobiography is of great value to India, not only because it gives a measure of the greatness of the nation’s ‘Father’ but also because it affords some important lessons to India. It is the story of a person written by himself and of all autobiographies, Gandhi’s is among the most frank and truthful. It had the benefit of being revised later from the point of view of language by an eminent English Scholar.Īn autobiography is by definition self-revelatory. The translation, as it appeared serially in Young India, had the benefit of Gandhiji’s revision. Mahadev Desaiwho was close to Gandhi and studied him at closer quarters translated his autobiography into English in such a way that one feels as if it was done by Gandhi himself, and it has a continuous influence on Indian writing in English. Unlike Jawaharlal Nehru, who loved English and felt more at home in it than any other language Gandhi wrote it in his mother tongue Gujarati but not in English. His autobiography, The Story of My Experiments with Truth is an imperishable classic. Gandhi exercised a potent influence on our society through his own writing in English and Gujarati. They have been studying it and harvesting various things for food and to prepare to fight the Polars. They can survive because their planet is similar to Earth. It ends up that 4 aliens are stranded on Earth and have amnesia. I wasn’t sure from the blurb exactly what this book was about. They must prevail because the fate of their planet lies in their hand. She must find a way to restore her family before all is lost. Shiray is frantic when she is the first to find out about their true destiny and that the love of her life no longer remembers who she is. The role it manifests in these characters’ lives is a catastrophic cyclone. They wonder if it’s more than a dream, or is it déjà vu? The mind is a complex mystery. They have amnesia and no memory of their past. Their mission is compromised and they’re faced with life changing events. They travel to Earth to obtain the resources they need to give their world a fighting chance. The Royal 4 of Kadan live in the Sonar galaxy three million light years from Earth. Life on Earth is not the only place where devastation occurs and hard choices must be made. Is it more than déjà vu? With the Romeland family it may be destined to be true. Notes: The current error page you are seeing can be replaced by a custom error page by modifying the "defaultRedirect" attribute of the application's configuration tag to point to a custom error page URL. Think Star Wars meets Avatar: The Last Airbender The Five Worlds are on the brink of extinction unless five ancient and mysterious beacons are lit. This tag should then have its "mode" attribute set to "Off". Palacio, 1 New York Times bestselling author of WONDER, hails this adventure series as Mind-blowingly beautiful.A must-read. It could, however, be viewed by browsers running on the local server machine.ĭetails: To enable the details of this specific error message to be viewable on remote machines, please create a tag within a "web.config" configuration file located in the root directory of the current web application. The current custom error settings for this application prevent the details of the application error from being viewed remotely (for security reasons). Runtime Error Description: An application error occurred on the server. Runtime Error Server Error in '/' Application. Jordan Kisner photo credit: Ebru Yildiz Event date: Essayist Jordan Kisner and poet Isabel Duarte-Gray join Kolbe for a magnetic evening of words that move, prod, and heal. Interspersed throughout are interludes on love, family life, and escapes into art and history, bringing back the hot clamor of the outside world. Written during Kolbe’s years in medical school, residency, and time as a hospital physician during the COVID-19 surge in New York City, the poems in Little Pharma navigate, through an eponymous persona, the murky channels of the hospital and clinic, the borderlands of the living and the dead, and the journey from novice to healer. Greenlight celebrates the launch of Little Pharma, the 2020 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize-winning book of poetry by Brooklyn-based physician, medical ethicist, and poet Laura Kolbe. In conversation with Jordan Kisner & Isabel Duarte-Gray St Joseph's University (Brooklyn Voices Series)īook Launch: Laura Kolbe presents Little Pharma: Poems. This book is a spinoff of The Dark Eyes Duet, featuring Wolf & Amethyst, but can be read as a total standalone. Nightwolf is a contemporary vampire romance with a friends-to-lovers twist. Too bad my heart doesn’t know the difference. After all, I’m a human and he’s a vampire and he’s told me more than once that those love stories never end well. He’s the type of guy most women find themselves falling for (and not just because they might end up his next meal).īut despite the simmering sexual tension and yearning between us, I know there’s no way I’ll ever be able to tell him how I feel. Wolf is not only a deadly, charismatic vampire with great persuasion skills, he also happens to be built like a Nordic God, all solid muscle and chiseled bone structure and haunting eyes that I sometimes think tell me more than he wants me to know. I mean, sure he’s probably seen me give him heart eyes more than once. It’s because we live in the same house together, work at the same exclusive club together, and he happens to be my best friend with absolutely no idea how I feel about him. Yet the fact that he’s a sexy, centuries-old blood-drinking vampire isn’t what makes our relationship complicated. My name is Amethyst DeMille and I’m in love with a vampire. Darkly comic and viciously original, Viscera is an unforgettable journey through swords-and-sorcery fantasy where strangeness gleams from every nook and cranny. Some survivors are human, while others are close enough, but all are struggling to carve out their lives in a world both unforgiving and wondrous. The Gone-Away gods were real, once, and taller than towers.īut they're long dead now, buried in the catacombs beneath the city of Eth, where their calcified organs radiate an eldritch power that calls out to anyone hardy enough to live in this cutthroat, war-torn land. It's far and away the weirdest, most original thing you will read this year, and Gabriel Squailia gives it heart that matches its entrails beat-for-beat." is dark, weird, and wonderfully human, and I cannot recommend it enough. Crichton’s novel combines Beowulf’s story with Ibn Fadlan’s account of his journey among the Bulghars, which gives the novel a geographical and multi-cultural approach that was absent in the Anglo-Saxon poem. The article focuses on the encounter with the otherness represented by Grendel in the original Beowulf and on how it changes in its rewriting 'Eater of the Dead' by Michael Crichton (1997): from the threat morally and ethically posed of the medieval poem to the contemporary anthropological threat revealing our fear for previous stages of evolution. If a culture can, or can try to, define itself and narrate its own survival through its hero, a hero needs an antagonist to define itself: Beowulf’s antagonist is the well-known monster called Grendel. But in the poem another main cultural encounter takes place. "The Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf, as we read it, is already the literary place of a cultural encounter over centuries between an old Germanic heroic story and the Christian culture of the writer, a novel of our days which re-uses the story is the continuation of a tradition already inscribed in the old poem. |