![]() ![]() ![]() But like Peyton Stone, he has another profession. A 30-year veteran of the clandestine services, William Sewell is a communications security expert by day. This is an adroitly told tale of very real and likely scenarios by someone who has been in some, if not most, of these dark bunkers-and lived to tell about it. A captivating international espionage cliffhanger, William Sewell's new spy thriller is not some fake fantasy conjured by an uninformed novice writer working from his safe, local Starbucks. In Nonofficial Asset his skills, training, tactics, mettle, and allegiance to family and country are all pushed to the limit as he races to prevent nuclear catastrophe. ![]() And when his business partner is murdered in a Shanghai hotel, ominous ghosts from his past return and he's drawn deeper into the covert maze, on the hunt for a stolen nuclear weapon and the rogue Iranian admiral hell-bent on using it. While advancing American interests globally, Stone discovers that those interests can exact a steep personal price. But his real occupation is serving as a "nonofficial asset," a contractor working for the CIA when the government needs complete deniability. On the surface he's a world-renowned security expert. But it's his other profession that might just get him killed. Irwin Award Winner 2013 #1 Goodreads Best Spy Novel 2013 Peyton Stone never quit his day job. ![]()
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5/23/2023 0 Comments Alex haley novel![]() ![]() Each generation must make up its own mind about how it will navigate the treacherous waters of our nation’s racial sin. It affected events far beyond its pages and was a literary North Star…. To quote from the introduction by Michael Eric Dyson: “Alex Haley’s Roots is unquestionably one of the nation’s seminal texts. It is a book for the legions of earlier readers to revisit and for a new generation to discover. Now, Roots once again bursts onto the national scene, and at a time when the race conversation has never been more charged. In the four decades since then, the story of the young African slave Kunta Kinte and his descendants has lost none of its power to enthrall and provoke. The celebrated miniseries that followed a year later was a coast-to-coast event-over 130 million Americans watched some or all of the broadcast. When Roots was first published forty years ago, the book electrified the nation: it received a Pulitzer Prize and was a #1 New York Times bestseller for 22 weeks. Based off of the bestselling author’s family history, this novel tells the story of Kunta Kinte, who is sold into slavery in the United States where he and his descendants live through major historic events. ![]() 5/22/2023 0 Comments Enchanted april author![]() Von Arnim's novel is part of this oeuvre and portrays an escape to a carefully described pastoral enclave away from encroaching urbanisation and the spread of new technologies, in an era when the Great War had left many emotionally and physically starved. The Enchanted April (1922) is a deceptive and timely novel immured in a post-war context, a period noted for its wistful and sometimes satiric writings. As each, in turn, blossoms in the warmth of the Italian spring and finds their spirits stirring, quite unexpected changes occur. Small medieval castle on the shores of the Mediterranean to be let For the month of April, above a bay on the Italian Riviera.'įour very different women-the dishevelled and downtrodden Mrs Wilkins, the sad, sweet-faced Mrs Arbuthnot, the formidable widow Mrs Fisher, and the ravishing socialite Lady Caroline Dester-are drawn to the shores of the Mediterranean that April. 'To Those who Appreciate Wistaria and Sunshine. Oxford Research Encyclopedias: Global Public Health.The European Society of Cardiology Series.Oxford Commentaries on International Law. ![]() 5/22/2023 0 Comments Monique & the mango rains![]() ![]() However, that changed when she met her third husband Sidney Hicks, she tells the crowd. I would take that to my grave, because I saw how they treated the people in my family with that disease - because they made us believe it was a disease.” She adds: “But I kept that secret, and I promised myself I wouldn’t ever tell anyone that. ![]() “So I couldn’t tell my grandmother my secret thoughts and my fantasies because I didn’t want her to love me privately, and I did not want her to leave this Earth thinking that she was a failure.” When we would walk into the store, if I was on a magazine cover, she made sure everybody in that fucking store knew that I was her grandchild, and I was her prize,” Mo’Nique says in the special. ![]() Mo’Nique begins the story noting that she felt “cowardly” after her grandmother died, because she hadn’t shared who she really was with her. ![]() 5/22/2023 0 Comments High rise by jg ballard![]() High-Rise continues in that vein, using its setting as a critique of modern society, as well as modernist architecture's belief in its own power to reshape and remake that society. Ballard's literary reputation firmly rests on his visions of dystopian futures ( Empire of the Sun certainly speaks to what happens when orderly society breaks down). The late British writer Ballard is best known to American audiences for a pair of books that became movies: Empire of the Sun, a story based in part on his own boyhood spent in Shanghai in WWII during Japanese occupation that was adapted by Steven Spielberg and Crash, a highly controversial novel about car crash fetishism adapted by David Cronenberg. ![]() 5/22/2023 0 Comments Edmund Campion by Evelyn Waugh![]() ![]() After the Second World War he published what is for many his masterpiece, “Brideshead Revisited,” in which his Catholicism took centre stage. From this decade come: “Vile Bodies” (1930), “Black Mischief” (1932), the incomparable “A Handful of Dust” (1934) and “Scoop” (1938). It was during this time that he converted to Catholicism.ĭuring the thirties Waugh produced one gem after another. ![]() His second marriage to Audrey Herbert lasted the rest of his life and begat seven children. Waugh would derive parts of “A Handful of Dust” from this unhappy time. She proved unfaithful, and the marriage ended in divorce in 1930. After inglorious stints as a school teacher (he was dismissed for trying to seduce a school matron and/or inebriation), an apprentice cabinet maker and journalist, he wrote and had published his first novel, “Decline and Fall” in 1928. In 1924 Waugh left Oxford without taking his degree. When asked if he took up any sports there he quipped, “I drank for Hertford.” He said of his time there, “…the whole of English education when I was brought up was to produce prose writers it was all we were taught, really.” He went on to Hertford College, Oxford, where he read History. In fact, his book “The Loom of Youth” (1917) a novel about his old boarding school Sherborne caused Evelyn to be expelled from there and placed at Lancing College. His only sibling Alec also became a writer of note. ![]() Evelyn Waugh's father Arthur was a noted editor and publisher. ![]() 5/22/2023 0 Comments Story of your life book ted chiang![]() ![]() The best science fiction stories combine wonderful storytelling with a sense of wonder. Science fiction is notoriously hard to define because everyone wants to define it differently, but I’d like to think “Story of Your Life” fits within everyone’s definition of science fiction.įor me, the best science fiction does two things, and the greatest does three. There were many stories in The Big Book of Science Fiction that I don’t believe deserve that label, but this story does. “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang is the epitome of what science fiction strives to achieve. Today I read “Story of Your Life” for the third time, and watched Arrival for the second time. There are copies on the internet and it can be found in many anthologies, but it’s best to own a copy of Stories of Your Life and Others. I want to explore how and why this story works and that means spoilers, and “Story of Your Life” is much too lovely to spoil for anyone. Warning: Don’t read this essay if you haven’t read “Story of Your Life,” or at least seen Arrival. ![]() Story #104 of 107: “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang Group Read 27: The Big Book of Science Fiction ![]() 5/22/2023 0 Comments Stevenson donkey![]() As a young man, he mixed in London literary circles, receiving encouragement from Andrew Lang, Edmund Gosse, Leslie Stephen and W. E. Henley, the last of whom may have provided the model for Long John Silver in Treasure Island. He is best known for works such as Treasure Island, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Kidnapped and A Child's Garden of Verses.īorn and educated in Edinburgh, Stevenson suffered from serious bronchial trouble for much of his life, but continued to write prolifically and travel widely in defiance of his poor health. Robert Louis Stevenson (born Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson 13 November 1850 – 3 December 1894) was a Scottish novelist, essayist, poet and travel writer. Bound set of many of Stevenson's works, 1909 ![]() 5/21/2023 0 Comments Glimmerglass by jenna black![]() ![]() Caught between two worlds, Dana isn't sure where she'll ever fit in and who can be trusted, not to mention if her world will ever be normal again. ![]() Someone's trying to kill her, and everyone seems to want something from her, from her newfound friends and family to Ethan, the hot Fae guy Dana figures she'll never have a chance with. Fleeing from her out-of-control mother, Dana travels to Avalon to seek the father she has never known. Soon, Dana finds herself tangled up in a cutthroat game of Fae politics. Set in Avalon, a fictional city-state where faeries and humans co-exist in something resembling peace, our heroine is a Faeriewalker with the unique ability to travel between both worlds. Soon, Dana finds herself tangled up in a cutthroat. But from the moment Dana sets foot in Avalon, everything goes wrong, for it turns out she isn't just an ordinary teenage girl-she's a Faeriewalker, a rare individual who can travel between both worlds, and the only person who can bring magic into the human world and technology into Faerie. But from the moment Dana sets foot in Avalon, everything goes wrong, for it turns out she isn't just an ordinary teenage girl she's a Faeriewalker, a rare individual who can travel between both worlds, and the only person who can bring magic into the human world and technology into Faerie. ![]() ![]() When her alcoholic mom shows up at her voice recital drunk, again, Dana decides she's had enough and runs away to find her mysterious father in Avalon: the only place on Earth where the regular, everyday world and the captivating, magical world of Faerie intersect. It's all she's ever wanted to be, but it couldn't be further from her grasp.ĭana Hathaway doesn't know it yet, but she's in big trouble. ![]() 5/21/2023 0 Comments A psalm for the wild built series![]() This is the task Becky Chambers takes up in her new novella, A Psalm for the Wild-Built, a new series from Tor Books called “Monk and Robot.” The premise brings us centuries in the future and past a few key lessons in the course of human technology and social relationships. ![]() What’s hard is to think bigger and beyond: to envision a way that it could be different, to inhabit possibilities, and to even rediscover what the struggle of life would be when the obvious causes of our ills have been defeated. ![]() The inspiration is all around us, the logical conclusion of the visible paths forward. It’s easy to string together a dystopian futurescape, complete with collapsing climate, authoritarian and disparate political enemies, and technology that crushes us with its stifling uniformity. ![]() |