Just before his death, Duke William had sent messengers to his king the messengers carried a request. KING LOUIS VI and I were staying in a hunting lodge outside Paris when word came that William, Duke of Aquitaine, had died. As a sort of "literary biography," this would be an excellent short novel to pair with a more formal biography for a project aligned to Common Core standards. The royal courts were known for foul play and much dalliance, but Konigsburg adeptly navigates the scandal while keeping the intrigue. Occasional black and white drawings accompanied by calligraphy add to the medieval feel. Per the end matter, all characters in the story were real people. Historical fact and believable fiction blend as Eleanor weds and divorces Louis of France, and then weds Henry of England, creating rebellions, setting standards of culture, and proving that women can rule kingdoms along the way. After a brief but slowly-paced beginning that sets up the Heaven framework for the story, each section of Eleanor's life gallops along as it's recalled by one of her friends in a Chaucer-esque tale. As vivacious Eleanor of Aquitaine, a real-life queen of 12th-century England and France, awaits the arrival of her husband Henry into Heaven, she and three acquaintances recall her remarkable life on earth.
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He doesn’t understand how this therapy is supposed to work, and worse, he feels like he is imposing on his family. This story gonna make you mad.īrother Rifle, by Daryl Gregory – A Marine suffering from PTSD alongside his traumatic brain injury. He makes some dangerous connections involving why certain cities are more violent than others, and how the uptick in violence is connected to, well, that’s spoiler territory. Obvs, his job is more complicated than that, but he’s good at the work, and he makes friends. To pay off his student loans, Kenny gets a job sorting data. The Hurt Pattern, by Tochi Onyebuchi – What is this doing in a fiction anthology? Other than the “connect yourself to your computer at work, and then literally unplug”, the rest of this sure doesn’t feel like fiction. I’ve not read everything in the antho yet, and maybe I never will.īut here are some stories that have already made an impression on me. As with all anthologies, some stories are forgettable, and some shine like supernovas. The cover led me to believe this is all robot stories, but what I found was more a spectrum of cyborg, to disembodied AIs, to actual robots. I’ve been dipping my toes into Made to Order: Robots and Revolution, edited by Jonathan Strahan. They're both looking for a place to belong, and if they're able to let go of past mistakes and learn to trust again, they might just find what they need in Knights Bridge.and each other. Kylie and Russ have more in common than they or anyone else would ever expect. But his bigger challenge is getting Kylie to let loose a little.like the adventurous characters she depicts in her work. Her opposition to converting part of the old hat factory into a theater is a challenge. Keeping tabs on Daphne while she considers starting a small children's theater in town doesn't seem like a tough job until he runs into Kylie. Russ is in Knights Bridge to keep his client and friend, eccentric Hollywood costume designer Daphne Stewart, out of trouble. And then California private investigator Russ Colton moves in. She carefully guards her privacy in the refurbished nineteenth-century hat factory where she has a loft. No one seems to know her here-and she likes it that way. Kylie Shaw has found a home and a quiet place to work as an illustrator of children's books in little Knights Bridge, Massachusetts. New York Times bestselling author Carla Neggers returns to charming Swift River Valley, where spring is the time for fresh starts and new beginnings. The plot of The Lost World was not entirely new even when it was first published in 1912. The squat, feisty, quarrelsome, boastful Challenger with the “face and beard of an Assyrian Bull” and a “stunted Hercules” is far removed from the eccentric, intellectual resident of 221B Baker Street with his Stradivarius violin and swirling tobacco mists. With Dinosaurs, ape-men, diamonds and secret tunnels the book is filled with enough action, excitement, drama and adventure to go around.įor Sherlock Holmes enthusiasts, Conan Doyle's hero in this book Professor Challenger is almost the antithesis of the cerebral sleuth. A journalist who undertakes a life threatening mission to impress the woman he loves, a mysterious plateau in South America that none of the locals dare to enter and an adventurous English aristocrat are all charectors you will encounter in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World. But as a public personality or pseudo-celebrity, she’s shunned the spotlight, preferring instead to stick to her keyboard, spending decades creating the characters, storylines and narratives in her many books, from children’s stories to steamy adult romances.ĭirected by Davina Pardo and Leah Wolchok, Judy Blume Forever gives the author (and her many, many fans and champions) the chance to tell her story herself at 85, Blume has seen some things, and in direct-to-camera interviews for the film, she’s here to tell us all about them. I, on the other hand…well, I don’t actually know what I was doing, because after the deep dive into her work and life that is Judy Blume Forever, I wish I’d had her witty and wise prose to see me through those rocky, confusing times.īest known for works including Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret (soon to be released as a film of its own, a long-overdue adaptation of the 1970 young adult novel), Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing and many, many more, Judy Blume has long been a treasure among readers seeking to find themselves (or, equally, lose themselves) in worlds few if any other authors were bold enough to put to the page. During those turbulent pre-teen years when every kid is looking for answers and intel about life’s most salacious secrets, my peers might’ve been turning to the revealing and relatable works of prolific author Judy Blume. It’s best to start with a confession: I’m no Blume-ite. Nelvana of the Northern Lights holds the distinction of being Canada’s first national superhero, and is one of the first superheroines in comics she predates Wonder Woman by several months. This past week Hope Nicholson and Rachel Richey launched a Kickstarter project aimed at republishing the original print run of Nelvana that was published from 1941 to 1947, a project which has seen a tremendous amount of support from the comic book community. Created by Adrian Dingle–and adapted from an Inuit legend about a witch-like character of the same name–Nelvana was a Canadian hero in a time where Canadians had no other heroes to latch on to. Seventy-two years ago, the very first issue of Nelvana of the Northern Lights was published by Hillborough Studios in the first issue of Triumph-Adventure Comics. “Nelvana of the Northern Lights” is one of Canada’s Golden Age comic book heroes. Donald won his second Pulitzer, in 1988, for “Look Homeward: A Life of Thomas Wolfe” (1987). Donald made the case for Sumner, often dismissed as a seething radical and crank, as an authoritative moral voice on the issue of rights for black Americans, more often right than wrong, and well out in front of his party and its leader, Lincoln. “Charles Sumner and the Rights of Man” followed in 1970. “Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War” (1960), the first volume in his magisterial biography of Sumner, won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1961. He went on to write and edit numerous histories of the Civil War, which were praised as much for their narrative vigor and elegance of style as for their insights into the period. Donald, a native of Mississippi, first made his mark with “Lincoln’s Herndon” (1948), a study of Lincoln’s law partner and early biographer, William Henry Herndon. His death was confirmed by his wife, Aida D. David Herbert Donald, a leading American historian of Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War who won Pulitzer Prizes for his biographies of the abolitionist statesman Charles Sumner and the novelist Thomas Wolfe, died Sunday in Boston. by the Kingston Trio, whose New Frontier album including the song sold several hundred thousand copies. So it was a revelation to me to find out just how many different ways that artists have found to present this classic love song, penned by the late great Ewan MacColl as a paean to his great love (but at the time, not his wife) Peggy Seeger (the couple pictured at left) and first brought to wide attention in the U.S. Well, doing these video reports has been an education for me, and I've found a wide variety of interpretations in songs that I would have guessed had really only one basic arrangement, even really common ones like Scotch and Soda or Greenback Dollar or Someday Soon. A few months back, I mentioned in one of these weekend videos posts that I didn't intend to do any really high profile songs by the Kingston Trio that became famous in subsequent versions because I thought there just wouldn't be enough variety in the performances to justify the time and effort - and I specifically mentioned "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" as an example of such a song. He was a history buff and enjoyed hunting, fishing, sailing, poker, chess, pool, and pipe collecting. After graduating he was employed by the United States Navy as a nuclear engineer. After returning from Vietnam he attended The Citadel where he received an undergraduate degree in physics. He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross with bronze oak leaf cluster, the Bronze Star with "V" and bronze oak leaf cluster, and two Vietnamese Gallantry Crosses with palm. He served two tours in Vietnam (from 1968 to 1970) with the United States Army as a helicopter gunner. Jordan was born in Charleston, South Carolina. He also wrote under the names Reagan O'Neal and Jackson O'Reilly. Robert Jordan was the pen name of James Oliver Rigney, Jr., under which he was best known as the author of the bestselling The Wheel of Time fantasy series. Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. Finding out that the father of your children, the man you've loved for 25 years, is a notorious serial killer and that's not a knowledge that's easy to grasp. But the movie doesn't do a good job at making its lead character sympathetic or likable. There's a reason that a lot of films, with the exception of superhero films and other epic-type films, don't go over 2 hours very often. So you can play around with the character more than you would with a film, where you have a very limited amount of time. A book, or a short story in a book full of them, can be as long as you want it to be. In a television series, you have considerably more time, over a number of episodes, in order to tell the story you want, within reason of course. Films are, obviously, a more limiting form of storytelling than TV series or books. At least from how she views Bob after finding out that he is a serial killer. It's one that fails to fully realize the potential of its story from Darcy's viewpoint and what must be going through her mind as she discovers that the life she has led with her husband of 25 years has been a total lie. Not a particularly good movie to be honest. |