![]() ![]() She recalls tender childhood moments when her mother would direct her to books: “ The Mill on the Floss when I was ill Ballet Shoes when I demanded dance lessons A Little Princess when I felt overlooked.” With her mother now diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and “fading from my life”, Biggs goes on to ask: “How could I find the books I needed now?” In the first chapter, Biggs tells us about her heartbreak after she and her husband separated and the way that she looked to writers to guide her in her new life. ![]() ![]() I had started reading A Life of One’s Own, a new book by Joanna Biggs, which explores nine female writers – from Mary Wollstonecraft to Toni Morrison – who have had to “begin again”. The places we go, or the people we look to in times of any need were on my mind that day. ![]()
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![]() ![]() Dying is about the vulnerability and strength, courage and humility, anger and acceptance that it takes to live a good life and say goodbye to it in peace. She tells us why she would like to be able to choose the circumstances of her own death. And I am making dying bearable for myself. On why she decided to write the memoir, Taylor relates: I am making a shape for my death, so that I, and others, can see it clearly. She completed her memoir Dying in the space of a few weeks. ![]() This is a brief and clear-eyed account of what dying taught Cory: amid the tangle of her feelings, she reflects on the patterns of her life, and remembers the lives and deaths of her parents. Cory Taylor was an award-winning Australian writer who died from melanoma-related brain cancer at 61. With her illness no longer treatable, she began at the start of 2016 to write about her experiences and, in an extraordinary creative surge, wrote what would become Dying: A Memoir. This is a brief and clear-eyed account of what dying taught Cory: amid the tangle of her feelings, she reflects on t At the age of sixty, Cory Taylor was dying of melanoma-related brain cancer. With her illness no longer treatable, she began at the start of 2016 to write about her experiences and, in an extraordinary creative surge, wrote what would become Dying: A Memoir. At the time of her death, Australian writer Cory Taylor had been labouring to overcome and then simply live with the ravages of cancer, which had been diagnosed ten years earlier after a biopsy on a mole excised from the back of her knee came back positive as stage-four melanoma. At the age of sixty, Cory Taylor was dying of melanoma-related brain cancer. ![]() ![]() In vivid prose that recreates the sights, sounds, and smells of battle, The Killer Angels makes readers feel that they are right there in the midst of the action. ![]() Through dialogue and inner monologue, the author explores the great issues of the day, including slavery, states' rights, and theories of war and how they are applied to the battle at hand, as well as religious and philosophical issues such as the role played by chance and destiny in the great battle. Shaara reveals the thoughts and feelings of these and other soldiers as they play out their parts in the historic battle: why they fight, what motivates them, what their beliefs are, what decisions they make and why. Lee, commander of the Army of Northern Virginia, and Lieutenant General James Longstreet, commander of the Confederate First Army Corps and Lee's second in command, and on the Union side, Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, commander of the Twentieth Maine Infantry regiment. Shaara describes the battle from the points of view of several of the main participants, the most important being, on the Confederate side, General Robert E. Michael Shaara's novel The Killer Angels (1974) covers a four-day period (June 29, July 1-3, 1863) during which the Battle of Gettysburg, the turning point of the American Civil War, was fought in Pennsylvania. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Cheryl does not steer clear of the tough issues presented here, and while strongly portrayed, I did not feel it overwhelmed the story. I was reminded of such stories as FIRESTARTER (by Stephen King) and other familiar dystopian novels I've read lately (DIVERGENT, THE HUNGER GAMES, UGLIES). It creates a strange closeness and dependance of the mother upon her daughter's powers to protect them from being caught, and a distance because of the mother's suppressed powers. Her mother's powers are mysteriously suppressed and the why is only revealed later on in the story. I loved the role reversal in the relationship of Caitlyn and her mom. The tension resulting from being on the run immediately drew me into the story. Cheryl does it again, and drew me into the world of Caitlyn, a teen with mental telepathy (she can read minds and make suggestions that results in a potentially manipulative effect). I was thrilled to get a chance to read Hunted, having recently read Scars (also by Cheryl), and being blown away by that story. ![]() ![]() She is very clever at it, winning more than her share of prizes, but her successes aren't enough to keep the wolf from the door. She deals with their poverty by entering the jingle contests that were the rage in the 50's and early 60's, even sending in multiple entries in the names of the children. ![]() Evelyn, a stay-at-home wife and mother, deals with this abuse by appealing to her priest, who is no help at all. He's resigned to a dead-end factory job that barely pays the bills, and is given to fits of alcohol-induced rage. But Kelly was a garage-band crooner whose voice was ruined in an auto accident. At first glance their life seems idyllic they call each other "Mother" and "Father" and seem to dote on the kids. Kelly and Evelyn Ryan live in Defiance, Ohio with their 10 children. ![]() ![]() Writing and teaching career Īside from her debut novel’s critical acclaim, Grace has also been translated into Mandarin. In 2018, she founded the REDEEMED Project, which paired writers and lawyers with those convicted of crimes in order to help clear their criminal records and help them reenter society. In 2010, she shifted her legal career to become a criminal defense attorney. She started practicing corporate law which took her to San Francisco, London, and Los Angeles. ![]() Education and career Law career ĭeón graduated from high school at 16, finished her undergraduate degree from Cal State Long Beach at 19, and moved on to graduate from Trinity Law School with her law doctorate while still in her early 20s. Her second novel, The Perishing, is slated to be released November 2, 2021. She was an NAACP Image Awards Nominee for her debut novel, Grace which also won the 2017 American Library Association's Black Caucus Award for Best Debut Fiction and was named one of The New York Times Critics’ Top Books of 2016 by critic Jennifer Senior. Natashia Deón is an American novelist, attorney, and activist. ![]() ![]() ![]() Blending blues-based hard rock and intricate progressive constructions, Kansas staked out its own musical territory, at once original and accessible. The original sextet - guitarist Richard Williams, drummer Phil Ehart (who are both still with the band), guitarist-keyboardist Kerry Livgren, singer-keyboardist Steve Walsh, singer-violinist Robbie Steinhardt and bassist Dave Hope - looked like quintessential Midwesterners but traded in compositional and lyrical complexities that sounded like something from across the pond. ![]() It’s fair to say the rock world didn’t quite know what to make of Kansas when the band rolled out of Topeka 50 years ago. ![]() ![]() ![]() The story is one of the most inventive which I’ve come across in a long while, and I loved the way in which Hughes crafted his tale. All of my apprehension about it dissipated on the first page however, and I found The Iron Man to be an incredibly enjoyable little novel. This sounds very sci-fi, I know, and my wariness of choosing this as my first Hughes book to read was based purely upon the fact that I don’t overly enjoy science fiction as a genre. ![]() A friendship with a young boy named Hogarth ensues, and to prove his worth to the sceptical adults, the Iron Man is tasked with saving the earth from an evil space creature. What they don’t factor into the equation is that the Iron Man is able to escape. He is found by a group of local villagers whilst snacking on their farm equipment, and they decide that the best thing to do in such circumstances is to build an enormous pit and lure the Iron Man inside. ![]() The Iron Man tells the story of a ‘man’ made entirely of metal, thought at first to be an enemy of the people. I therefore thought that rather than miss out on contributing entirely, I would schedule a review for one of my favourite books, Ted Hughes’ The Iron Man, which just so happens to have been published in 1968. I was hoping to be able to read and review something new for the wonderful 1968 reading club, hosted by Simon and Kaggsy, but my best intentions have been swallowed up in thesis writing. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() He's going to do the research though, because of course he is. He's come to ask Adam to do research about unraveling Greenmantle's evil spider web, but Adam is clearly busy with at least seven jobs and school and Cabeswater and his upcoming court date and everything else he does. It's Ronan's white dream monster from the night of Kavinsky's death and, thank goodness, Ronan is right behind it. As soon as he figures it out, the eeriness goes away. The cards show him three sleepers, but Adam already knows about them, one to wake, one to definitely not wake, and another one, and then Cabeswater shows him a part of the ley line to repair. Cabeswater begins to call to him in an eerie way, creeping him out until he grabs Persephone's tarot cards to help him discover what it wants. While the cave-discovering and cheese-eating is happening, Adam is alone at work fixing cars, hating the cooling weather for chapping his hands. ![]() ![]() ![]() But when he discovers another undercover policeman on the Council, Syme begins to question his role in their operations. Yet one of their number - Thursday - is not the revolutionary he claims to be, but a Scotland Yard detective named Gabriel Syme, sworn to infiltrate the organisation and bring the architects of chaos to justice. ![]() The council is governed by seven men, who hide their identities behind the names of the days of the week. The Central Anarchist Council is a secret society sworn to destroy the world. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday is a thrilling novel of deception, subterfuge, double-crossing and secret identities, and this Penguin Classics edition is edited with an introduction by Matthew Beaumont. ![]() |