What book are you currently reading?

[Piling]

Little is what it seems to be in a leafy Savannah neighborhood as members of an afternoon cocktail and dog walking club mourn a neighbor’s death. Jealousies surface when friends vie for the widower running for mayor. An old woman with an infamous uncle plots to avenge a wrong. Memories haunt a once successful children’s writer. And a model has won the trip of a lifetime.

But a killer lurks and secrets unfold, as does a web of deceit. Is anyone really who he or she seems to be? A mysterious South American, a young Italian count, and a charitable nephew add suspicion and intrigue, as do an enigmatic organization linked to organized crime, a handsome firefighter, and three widows with hidden agendas. What’s a retired accountant’s secret, and why did a former showgirl really have plastic surgery?

The plot thickens, the Georgia temperature rises, and someone is destined for an early unmarked grave. The truth contorts to a climax that leaves readers breathless.

Currently reading it. Agreeable.

[Piling]

I have begun the French version of this book (slightly different, no quote, only questions, and I don't see thelink with Potter).

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005O7 ... F3X4A7UFEH


It isa nice short diary for lazy people. The most amusing is after 5 years to compare your different answers, year after year :

http://wordsnquotes.com/post/1092398112 ... y-potter-s

I like to open it, each morning, and discover the question of the day, like an advent calendar for 5 years.

[Piling]

For nearly a century the two most powerful nations on earth, Victorian Britain and Tsarist Russia, fought a secret war in the lonely passes and deserts of Central Asia. Those engaged in this shadowy struggle called it 'The Great Game', a phrase immortalized by Kipling. When play first began the two rival empires lay nearly 2,000 miles apart. By the end, some Russian outposts were within 20 miles of India. This classic book tells the story of the Great Game through the exploits of the young officers, both British and Russian, who risked their lives playing it. Disguised as holy men or native horse-traders, they mapped secret passes, gathered intelligence and sought the allegiance of powerful khans. Some never returned. The violent repercussions of the Great Game are still convulsing Central Asia today.

Wonderfully written, a passionant story. If you have loved Kim, Corto Maltese and Captain Corcoran, you would just adore it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_ ... pkirk_book)

[Piling]

Opened for the 3rd or the 4th time The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, by Carson McCullers, one of the most beautiful novel in the world.

And wonderful incipit also :

In the town there were two mutes, and they were always together.

Carson was a genius for finding her novel's titles : The Heart is a Lonely Hunter ; Reflection in a Golden Eye ;
Clock Without Hands ; The Ballad of the Sad Café ; Illumination and Night Glare.

I am jealous of that ability, because I am a 0 for finding titles.

[RomaMater]

The Revolt of the Masses

"The Revolt of the Masses is the English translation of José Ortega y Gasset's book La rebelión de las masas. The Spanish original was first published as a series of articles in the newspaper El Sol in 1929 and as a book in 1930; the English translation, first published two years later, was authorized by Ortega. While the published version notes that the translator requested to remain anonymous, more recent editions also record that its US copyright was renewed in 1960 by a Teresa Carey, and the US Copyright Office's published list of US copyright renewals for January 1960 gives the translator as J. R. Carey.

A second translation was published in 1985 by the University of Notre Dame Press in association with W.W. Norton and Co. This translation was completed by Anthony Kerrigan (translator) and Kenneth Moore (editor). An introduction was written by novelist Saul Bellow.

In this work, Ortega traces the genesis of the "mass-man" and analyzes his constitution en route to describing the rise to power and action of the masses in society. Ortega is throughout quite critical of both the masses and the mass-men of which they are made up, contrasting "noble life and common life" and excoriating the barbarism and primitivism he sees in the mass-man. He does not, however, refer to specific social classes, as has been so commonly misunderstood in the English-speaking world. Ortega states that the mass-man could be from any social background, but his specific target is the bourgeois educated man, the señorito satisfecho (satisfied young man or Mr. Satisfied), the specialist who believes he has it all and extends the command he has of his subject to others, contemptuous of his ignorance in all of them. Ortega's summary of what he attempted in the book exemplifies this quite well, while simultaneously providing the author's own views on his work: "In this essay an attempt has been made to sketch a certain type of European, mainly by analyzing his behaviour as regards the very civilization into which he was born". This had to be done because that individual "does not represent a new civilisation struggling with a previous one, but a mere negation ...""

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Revolt_of_the_Masses

[Anthea]

The Revolt of the Masses

"The Revolt of the Masses is the English translation of José Ortega y Gasset's book La rebelión de las masas. The Spanish original was first published as a series of articles in the newspaper El Sol in 1929 and as a book in 1930; the English translation, first published two years later, was authorized by Ortega. While the published version notes that the translator requested to remain anonymous, more recent editions also record that its US copyright was renewed in 1960 by a Teresa Carey, and the US Copyright Office's published list of US copyright renewals for January 1960 gives the translator as J. R. Carey.

A second translation was published in 1985 by the University of Notre Dame Press in association with W.W. Norton and Co. This translation was completed by Anthony Kerrigan (translator) and Kenneth Moore (editor). An introduction was written by novelist Saul Bellow.

In this work, Ortega traces the genesis of the "mass-man" and analyzes his constitution en route to describing the rise to power and action of the masses in society. Ortega is throughout quite critical of both the masses and the mass-men of which they are made up, contrasting "noble life and common life" and excoriating the barbarism and primitivism he sees in the mass-man. He does not, however, refer to specific social classes, as has been so commonly misunderstood in the English-speaking world. Ortega states that the mass-man could be from any social background, but his specific target is the bourgeois educated man, the señorito satisfecho (satisfied young man or Mr. Satisfied), the specialist who believes he has it all and extends the command he has of his subject to others, contemptuous of his ignorance in all of them. Ortega's summary of what he attempted in the book exemplifies this quite well, while simultaneously providing the author's own views on his work: "In this essay an attempt has been made to sketch a certain type of European, mainly by analyzing his behaviour as regards the very civilization into which he was born". This had to be done because that individual "does not represent a new civilisation struggling with a previous one, but a mere negation ...""

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Revolt_of_the_Masses

Looks interesting think I will read it myself

[Piling]

Blooms of Darkness, by Aharon Appenfeld. Fine books.



When Aharon Appelfeld was seven years old the Nazis occupied Czernowitz, his hometown. They penned the Jews into a ghetto and eventually sent whoever had not been shot or starved to death on a forced march across the Ukraine to a labor camp. As men, women, and children fall away around them, Aharon and his father miraculously survive, and Aharon, even more miraculously, escapes from the camp shortly after he arrives there.

The next few years of Aharon’s life are both harrowing and heartrending: he hides, alone, in the Ukrainian forests from peasants who are only too happy to turn Jewish children over to the Nazis; he has the presence of mind to pass himself off as an orphaned gentile when he emerges from the forest to seek work; and, at war’s end, he joins the stream of refugees as they cross Europe on their way to displaced persons’ camps that have been set up for the survivors. Aharon eventually makes his way to Palestine; once there, he attempts to build a new life while struggling to retain the barely remembered fragments of his old life, and he takes his first, tentative steps as a writer. As he begins to receive national attention, Aharon realizes his life’s calling: to bear witness to the unfathomable. In this unforgettable work of memory, Aharon Appelfeld offers personal glimpses into the experiences that resonate throughout his fiction.

[Anthea]

[Anthea]

[Anthea]

A book I intend to read:

TV host Jeff Corwin is on quest to save nature’s beauty
Corwin fund-raiser to benefit EcoZone





Jeff Corwin has reported on wildlife and conservation issues from all over the world, but his message to local audiences is to get to know what’s going on in the environmental mini-zone outside your door.

He embodied that message in his idea for a complex of multidimensional, interactive environmental exhibits called the EcoZone at the South Shore Natural Science Center in Norwell.

“Saving the world’s animals and, in turn, the health of our planet, begins in your own backyard,’’ Corwin said.

The host of numerous shows on Animal Planet and the Travel Channel, Corwin will speak next Monday at a science center fund-raiser where new EcoZone exhibits will be unveiled. The center has always been close to his heart, the naturalist said in an interview last week.

Growing up in the woods and wetlands of Norwell opened the world of nature to him and led to childhood adventures, Corwin said. “I was very lucky when we moved to Norwell. It was a great refuge. There were woods, meadows, swamps, a river, coastal habitat, and wetlands.’’

These landscapes provided opportunities to look for animals, explore, and “have adventures,’’ Corwin said. Norwell’s quaking bog gave him a place to muck around and hunt for salamanders and frogs.

He studied biology at Bridgewater State College and wildlife conservation at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and views himself as a practicing naturalist. In addition to hosting numerous programs on wildlife and conservation issues on television, he has written on these subjects and this month published a book titled “100 Heartbeats: The Race to Save Earth’s Most Endangered Species.’’

The title refers to species in which only 100 or fewer individuals remain - species and sub-species closest the brink of extinction such as the giant Abingdon Island tortoise, whose sole remaining member (called Lonesome George) lives in a zoo in California, where his keepers search for a near enough cousin to mate him with.

As Corwin writes in “Heartbeats,’’ along with the geological period that saw the extinction of the dinosaurs (believed to have been caused by a giant meteorite crash), the current period has seen the most life form extinctions in the history of the Earth. But this time, extinctions are caused by human beings.

“We are the meteorite,’’ Corwin said.

His book also details the efforts to save shrinking species, many of them successful, such as the conservation community’s revival of the American bald eagle population. “It’s not too late,’’ he said.

Corwin was in Washington, D.C., last week speaking about his book’s message of crisis and hope at the Smithsonian Museum. “100 Heartbeats’’ will be the theme of a two-hour television documentary that will be shown on MSNBC Sunday at 8 p.m.

The South Shore native’s belief that his neighbors should focus on the ecosystems of Southeastern Massachusetts inspired the natural science center’s EcoZone, which opened seven years ago and depicts the plant and animal life of river, wetlands, woodland, and meadow habitats.

The museum’s fund-raiser will open the EcoZone’s new exhibits, including a colorful mosaic created for the museum and the “Fossils of Massachusetts’’ exhibit, which includes some touchable fossils of plants and sand ripples.

In addition to Corwin’s talk and a chance to mingle with the TV host, guests will also get a copy of his new book. The event includes refreshments, music, and a cash bar.

http://www.boston.com/ae/tv/articles/20 ... es_beauty/



Mahout (Keeper) For a Night

“I once had the opportunity to visit the David Sheldrick Elephant Orphanage in Nairobi, Kenya, while filming an episode of my show. I was designated as the mahout-or keeper-for the night of a 3-month-old calf that had lost his family to poachers. As we bedded down in his cage, my main job was to make sure the 350-pound calf had the tactile contact with me that he needed to sleep peacefully. Things began well enough, with him nodding off easily, but in the middle of the night, I felt a knocking at my back. He was having a nightmare, and I instinctively cupped his eyes so he couldn’t see the light from the oil lamp hanging from the ceiling. The trembling of his trunk slowed, and his breathing softened. Just as he was drifting off again, he started to twist a lock of my hair with the tip of his trunk. All 40,000 muscles in that miniature proboscis were working together to make sure that its tip-which is 10 times more sensitive than a human finger-brought him the soothing contact he needed. Suddenly, I grasped the trauma that a creature this sensitive must experience in the presence of a poacher’s brutality.”

-excerpt from Jeff Corwin 100 Heartbeats

[Piling]

Currently reading Life After Life, by Kate Atkinson, and it is a very fine novel :

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/j ... ack-review

[Anthea]

Old secrets die hard....

The quiet scandal surrounding her parents' deaths twenty years ago has always haunted Beryl Tavistock. Now she's decided that the only way to exorcise the ghosts of the past is to search for the truth. Beryl starts asking dangerous questions, and the answers are proving that old secrets die hard.

Caught in what's become a deadly game of cat-and-mouse, her quest takes her from the rain-slick streets of Paris to the sun-drenched isles of Greece. And as she gets pulled into a world of espionage, Beryl quickly discovers that she needs help. Richard Wolf, an ex-CIA agent and a man she's only just met, is her only hope.

But in a world where trust is a double-edged sword, friends become enemies, and enemies become killers

[Anthea]

Must read:

[Piling]

I thought you were against animal's expliotation and killing ? A shepherd does nothing but breeding sheeps pour wood AND meat.

[Anthea]

I thought you were against animal's expliotation and killing ? A shepherd does nothing but breeding sheeps pour wood AND meat.