Two Cherokee leaders John Ross and The Ridge, rivals, in disputes and wars, taken through their days up till the civil war and the removal of a nationTwo Cherokee leaders John Ross and The Ridge, rivals, in disputes and wars, taken through their days up till the civil war and the removal of a nation.
With all the details, the crimes, the removals, the wars, the briberies, and deals made, the forced integrations and the insidious diluting of a nation, a lack of concern for a culture and their ways to be preserved, to have them behave in what certain men think the right way. A detailed history of greed and need for monies, land and the toxic pull of capitalism.
There are facts, truth within and there maybe some stereotypes and untruths within this tale, I have read after finishing this, from comments from educated people in this field. Don’t burn these books, discuss, learn, and educate. The cerebral prose, the narrative was captivating, and kept me reading on its grand length, it took some reading to get through and was not the easiest non-fiction of recent.
A portrait of a Cherokee Nation, a tragedy and drama of truth work, agreements signed and broken, love gained, tongues learned, doctrines learned, lives lost, the toxic promise of great monies and gunpowder tempting leaders to sign off their nations demise and doom.
The ballerina that got away and helped others in troubles to have a second or third choice in life. Some sentences shock, potent prose of hauntingly rThe ballerina that got away and helped others in troubles to have a second or third choice in life. Some sentences shock, potent prose of hauntingly retelling in the memoir part, and then her forbearingness, compassion, and great advising in the helping others part of this work. She tells, the author Dr. Edith Eva Eger, of her days vividly, from her darkest days of captivity from Factory to factory, loaded from Train to train and then Shower of one kind cleansing to another of dread, a shower of killing, ultimately from Captivity to survival and living on with resilience, hope and forwardness, and choices to be bigger, greater than her parents could ever want, in helping others in their captivity of all kinds of pains and darkness, to breathing and walking out of their domain into some light, some chance for choice of a better kind, a pursuit of a happiness, a betterment. The authors writing has a melody to telling something so terrible, her voice potent and visceral has you hanging with heartbeat in her place, in her terror of those days past, all evoked before the reader. These brutal facts heard of before, seen on screen, but for me not read in a book before with such great vivid telling and craft in writing coupled with a voice compelling and compassionate. A work of accountabilities and choices, and freeing yourself from captivity within, whatsoever the pain, whatsoever the darkness passeth, and continue on. A must read that will be in best and highly recommended reads lists of 2017. In the foreword Philip Zimbardo PhD writes a fitting account of this work: "The Choice is an extraordinary chronicle of heroism and healing, resiliency and compassion, survival with dignity, mental toughness, and moral courage. All of us can learn from Dr. Eger’s inspiring cases and riveting personal story to heal our own lives."
Excerpts from introduction:
What happened can never be forgotten and can never be changed. But over time I learned that I can choose how to respond to the past. I can be miserable, or I can be hopeful, I can be depressed or I can be happy. We always have that choice, that opportunity for control.
Freedom lies in learning to embrace what happened. Freedom means we muster the courage to dismantle the prison, brick by brick.
Bad things, I am afraid, happen to everyone. This we can’t change. If you look at your birth certificate, does it say life will be easy? It does not. But so many of us remain stuck in a trauma or grief, unable to experience our lives fully. This we can change.
My own search for freedom and my years of experience as a licensed clinical psychologist have taught me that suffering is universal. But victimhood is optional. There is a difference between victimization and victimhood. We are all likely to be victimized in some way in the course of our lives. At some point we will suffer some kind of affliction or calamity or abuse, caused by circumstances or people or institutions over which we have little or no control. This is life. And this is victimization. It comes from the outside. It’s the neighborhood bully, the boss who rages, the spouse who hits, the lover who cheats, the discriminatory law, the accident that lands you in the hospital. In contrast, victimhood comes from the inside. No one can make you a victim but you. We become victims not because of what happens to us but when we choose to hold on to our victimization. We develop a victim’s mind—a way of thinking and being that is rigid, blaming, pessimistic, stuck in the past, unforgiving, punitive, and without healthy limits or boundaries. We become our own jailors when we choose the confines of the victim’s mind.
Whether you’re in the dawn or noon or late evening of your life, whether you’ve seen deep suffering or are only just beginning to encounter struggle, whether you’re falling in love for the first time or losing your life partner to old age, whether you’re healing from a life-altering event or in search of some little adjustments that could bring more joy to your life, I would love to help you discover how to escape the concentration camp of your own mind and become the person you were meant to be. I would love to help you experience freedom from the past, freedom from failures and fears, freedom from anger and mistakes, freedom from regret and unresolved grief—and the freedom to enjoy the full, rich feast of life.
What follows is the story of the choices, big and small, that can lead us from trauma to triumph, from darkness to light, from imprisonment to freedom.
Excerpts:
Memory is sacred ground. But it’s haunted too. It’s the place where my rage and guilt and grief go circling like hungry birds scavenging the same old bones. It’s the place where I go searching for the answer to the unanswerable question: Why did I survive?
First the high kick. Then the pirouette and turn. The splits. And up. As I step and bend and twirl, I can hear Mengele talking to his assistant. He never takes his eyes off me, but he attends to his duties as he watches. I can hear his voice over the music. He discusses with the other officer which ones of the hundred girls present will be killed next. If I miss a step, if I do anything to displease him, it could be me. I dance. I dance. I am dancing in hell. I can’t bear to see the executioner as he decides our fates. I close my eyes.
We were sent to the showers every day at Auschwitz, and every shower was fraught with uncertainty. We never knew whether water or gas would stream out of the tap.
Our skin hardly covers our bones. We are an anatomy lesson. Elbows, knees, ankles, cheeks, knuckles, ribs jut out like questions. What are we now? Our bones look obscene, our eyes are caverns, blank, dark, empty. Hollow faces. Blue-black fingernails. We are trauma in motion. We are a slow-moving parade of ghouls. We stagger as we walk, our carts roll over the cobblestones. Row on row, we fill the square in Wels, Austria. Townspeople stare at us from windows. We are frightening. No one speaks. We choke the square with our silence. Townspeople run into their homes. Children cover their eyes. We have lived through hell only to become someone else’s nightmare.
All of the survivors I met had one thing in common with me and with each other: We had no control over the most consuming facts of our lives, but we had the power to determine how we experienced life after trauma. Survivors could continue to be victims long after the oppression had ended, or they could learn to thrive. In my dissertation research, I discovered and articulated my personal conviction and my clinical touchstone: We can choose to be our own jailors, or we can choose to be free.
“My mama told me something I will never forget,” I began. “She said, ‘We don’t know where we’re going, we don’t know what’s going to happen, but no one can take away from you what you put in your own mind.’ ” I have said these words countless times, to Navy SEALs and crisis first responders, to POWs and their advocates at the Department of Veterans Affairs, to oncologists and people living with cancer, to Righteous Gentiles, to parents and children, to Christians and Muslims and Buddhists and Jews, to law students and at-risk youth, to people grieving the loss of a loved one, to people preparing to die, and sometimes I spin when I say them, with gratitude, with sorrow.
Injustices with a quiet giant, Willie J Grimes. Unsettling on its revelations, informative on the history of injustices. Will Grimes will stay with the Injustices with a quiet giant, Willie J Grimes. Unsettling on its revelations, informative on the history of injustices. Will Grimes will stay with the reader for some time for his patience against the injustice. This work will have you ruminate on the ones that have been sentenced to death innocents unjustly lost. They may be some respite in knowing Grimes was one of the lucky ones that was freed eventually. The life to and fro from prison to prison, the inadequate representations and care, and lack of chances of parole despite the weak evidences against him. The lack of proper due care or maybe even due respect to process evidences, all things preceding and after his arrest. Race could come into this failure, but the lawyers representing him had two others, two white males, who where also exonerated after some time of incarceration also mentioned in this book in not so much detail, this book is more about Grimes’s sphere. Various chapters walk the world around Grimes, his incarceration, his poverty and the pursuit of truth and freedom. There is also some telling on how the North Carolina's Innocence Inquiry Commission was formed and its first few successful exonerations which started the cogs working for some justice upon a part of this earth. A well done representation and informative investigative writing on a tragic case of innocent charged as guilty. https://more2read.com/review/ghost-of-the-innocent-man-by-benjamin-rachlin/...more
A small poem i wrote about this writer and work: a victim we would all hate to be its a stark fact of Roxane gays reality the scars she has will be before thee all a product of just what sometimes just may be no not i not you or me she has time this day to be to be free a caged bird she may no longer be upon the page we will see a possible arena for some vengenace it might just be for something that once had been and the ones that still be the haters that just dont like her size that the eyes see with her beauty with glee with pen she will set her self free then maybe the hearts shall open and see what its like to be the whirlwind of the mind the pains of the heart of what has been a hope that with her sacrifice one can see tomorrow you and many can be free freed hearts free birds from that pains that has been and may be
She is a haitian american writer that stands at six foot three and tells of her scars, her pain, and of how writing saved her life. She was gang raped at 12 and then she found some comfort and security in food and size, her weight slowly grew. With all the unfortunate things that had taken place in her youth some good things she did have were in the form of a family home to go to of loving parents, and an education to fall back on, and she mentions this in this memoir. She humbly bares all upon the page with sometimes brutal honesty. Some hearts may find stirred some what with the evil that people do, bare it up and read just what it was and is like for her. She layers out the chaos into some kind of order in a line one word after another in potent voice with lucid prose, vivid and crafted words. She puts it all down for the world to read, omitting needles words she speaks on the page, and with every word an empathy grows within the reader, her strength grows, a relentless energy, her time, her voice. An author that readers will want to read more of in fiction or in truth. Something that will stay with you possibly and you may hurt and feel for her and the many she tells for, a voice of courage and hope that one can make it through the darkness. She mentions about size and the past in these excerpts from this memoir Hunger. “What does it say about our culture that the desire for weight loss is considered a default feature of womanhood?” “I also want to lose weight. I know I am not healthy at this size (not because I am fat but because I have, for example, high blood pressure).” “I am not angry. I am jealous. I am seething with jealousy. I want to be part of the active world. I want it so very badly. There are so many things I hunger for.” “I was not only writing a memoir of my body; I was forcing myself to look at what my body has endured, the weight I gained, and how hard it has been to both live with and lose that weight. I’ve been forced to look at my guiltiest secrets. I’ve cut myself wide open. I am exposed. That is not comfortable. That is not easy.” “Writing this book is a confession. These are the ugliest, weakest, barest parts of me. This is my truth.” “This book, Hunger, is a book about living in the world when you are not a few or even forty pounds overweight. This is a book about living in the world when you are three or four hundred pounds overweight, when you are not obese or morbidly obese but super morbidly obese according to your body mass index, or BMI.” “Some boys had destroyed me, and I barely survived it. I knew I wouldn’t be able to endure another such violation, and so I ate because I thought that if my body became repulsive, I could keep men away.” “What you need to know is that my life is split in two, cleaved not so neatly. There is the before and the after. Before I gained weight. After I gained weight. Before I was raped. After I was raped.” “This is the body I made. I am corpulent—rolls of brown flesh, arms and thighs and belly. The fat eventually had nowhere to go, so it created its own paths around my body. I am riven with stretch marks, pockets of cellulite on my massive thighs. The fat created a new body, one that shamed me but one that made me feel safe, and more than anything, I desperately needed to feel safe. I needed to feel like a fortress, impermeable. I did not want anything or anyone to touch me.” “Something terrible happened, and I wish I could leave it at that because as a writer who is also a woman, I don’t want to be defined by the worst thing that has happened to me. I don’t want my personality to be consumed in that way. I don’t want my work to be consumed or defined by this terrible something.” “I hope that by sharing my story, by joining a chorus of women and men who share their stories too, more people can become appropriately horrified by how much suffering is born of sexual violence, how far-reaching the repercussions can be.” “I also share what I do of my story because I believe in the importance of sharing histories of violence. I am reticent to share my own history of violence, but that history informs so much of who I am, what I write, how I write. It informs how I move through the world. It informs how I love and allow myself to be loved. It informs everything.” “When I was twelve years old, I was raped. So many years past being raped, I tell myself what happened is “in the past.” This is only partly true. In too many ways, the past is still with me. The past is written on my body. I carry it every single day. The past sometimes feels like it might kill me. It is a very heavy burden.” “There is a before and an after. In the after I was broken, shattered and silent. I was numb. I was terrified. I carried this secret and knew, in my soul, that what those boys did to me had to stay secret. I couldn’t share the shame and humiliation of it. I was disgusting because I had allowed disgusting things to be done to me. I was not a girl. I was less than human. I was no longer a good girl and I was going to hell.” “In my free time, I wrote a lot, dark and violent stories about young girls being tormented by terrible boys and men. I couldn’t tell anyone what had happened to me, so I wrote the same story a thousand different ways. It was soothing to give voice to what I could not say out loud. I lost my voice but I had words. One of my English teachers, Rex McGuinn, recognized something in my stories. He told me I was a writer and he told me to write every day. I realize, now, that being told to write every day is writing advice many teachers give, but I took Mr. McGuinn very seriously, as if he were offering me sacred counsel, and I write every day, still.” “I often tell my students that fiction is about desire in one way or another. The older I get, the more I understand that life is generally the pursuit of desires. We want and want and oh how we want. We hunger.” “One of the many things I have always loved about writing (not to be confused with publishing) is that all you need is your imagination. It doesn’t matter who you are, you can write. Your looks, especially, don’t matter. As a naturally shy person, I loved the anonymity of writing before my career took off. I loved how my stories didn’t care about my weight. When I started publishing that writing, I loved that, to my readers, what mattered were the words on the page. Through writing, I was, finally, able to gain respect for the content of my character.” “When I was twelve years old I was raped and then I ate and ate and ate to build my body into a fortress. I was a mess and then I grew up and away from that terrible day and became a different kind of mess—a woman doing the best she can to love well and be loved well, to live well and be human and good.” “I am increasingly committed to challenging the toxic cultural norms that dictate far too much of how women live their lives and treat their bodies. I am using my voice, not just for myself but for people whose lives demand being seen and heard. I have worked hard and am enjoying a career I never dared think possible.” ...more
This is an essential work on writing. Filled with inspiration and tried and tested advice. This work of his can been added to the Canon of great books oThis is an essential work on writing. Filled with inspiration and tried and tested advice. This work of his can been added to the Canon of great books on writing like that of The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers by John Gardner, On Writing by Stephen King, Bird is Bird by Ann Dillard, Stein On Writing by Sol Stein, and others. Words not wasted, no straying into random nonsense, every piece of information and advice vital, his passion is clear, and he gives a lot in this writing, layered down so clearly and precise with voice and heart it will demand many re-reads for the writer or the lover of writing.
“We get our voice from the voices of others. Read promiscuously. Imitate, copy, but become your own voice. Write about that which you want to know. Better still, write toward that which you don’t know. The best work comes from outside yourself. Only then will it reach within. Be bold in the face of the blank sheet.”
“So you go back and begin again. Open elegantly. Open fiercely. Open delicately. Open with surprise. Open with everything at stake. This, of course, is a bit like being told to walk a tightrope. Go ahead, then, walk the tightrope! Relax yourself into the tension of the wire. The first line, like the first step, is only the first of many, yet it sets the shape of what is to come. Try walking a foot off the ground, then two feet, then three. Eventually you might go a quarter mile in the sky. Then again, you might stumble and fall. No matter. It is, after all, a work of the imagination. You won’t die trying. At least not yet.”
“DON’T WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW, WRITE toward what you want to know. Step out of your skin. Risk yourself. This opens up the world. Go to another place. Investigate what lies beyond your curtains, beyond the wall, beyond the corner, beyond your town, beyond the edges of your own known country.”
“DON’T LET THE TERROR OF THE WHITE page shrink-wrap your mind. The excuse that you have writer’s block is far too easy. You have to show up for work. You have to sit in the chair and fight the blankness. Don’t leave your desk. Don’t abandon the room. Don’t go off to pay the bills. Don’t wash the dishes. Don’t check the sports pages. Don’t open the mail. Don’t distract yourself in any way until you feel you have fought and tried. You have to put in the time. If you are not there, the words will not appear. Simple as that.”
One mans journey to make a difference, to be down in the trenches, toe to toe, and guide students to a better hope, a better dream, through education.One mans journey to make a difference, to be down in the trenches, toe to toe, and guide students to a better hope, a better dream, through education. Teaching in a school that almost kids have been left behind, forgotten, given up on. He persists to try to breakthrough the levels of dialogue and try to break into the many character shells the inner city students have put up, trying to instilling love for learning. Inspiring tale of the battle of the school room, every student described in a way that the reader has a great sense of their turbulent lives in the street and at home, the hearts at conflict with themselves, ones of today. The future, the next generation, something so important, and an eye into how things are failing and how students are falling into the cracks from their home battles, to battle within the schools with race and gender equality. Written in very readable and easy layered out sentences, non-fiction reading like fiction with very real characters, memorable in the readers mind, a joy to read. review @ http://more2read.com/review/battle-room-314-ed-boland/...more
“Mutai is a Kenyan, a Kalenjin, and a Kipsigis. He was born in the village of Equator, which sits at nearly 9,000 feet in the lush highlands at the we“Mutai is a Kenyan, a Kalenjin, and a Kipsigis. He was born in the village of Equator, which sits at nearly 9,000 feet in the lush highlands at the western escarpment of the Rift Valley, and, as its name suggests, at the belt-line of the world. He is a husband, a father, a son, a grandson, a nephew, a cousin, a coach, a businessman, and a potentate. He is a rich man who grew up without shoes.”
A retelling of the marathon, from its roots of origin, to how it exists today. You will read of the history of how it has found its way to cities like Boston, New York, and London. He has put before the reader facts, true lives he accounts on, and one great runner he expounds on right from his youth to his most recent achievements. The author successful puts in the readers mind a story behind the face, the winner, the elite athlete, Geoffrey Mutai, his life, his struggle, and the whole human drama and journey the marathon incorporates.
The telling, the facts, read well, and the author handles them with style and presents to the read a work that is insightful, easy reading, and a joy to read at the same time. This tale would appeal to the athlete, the casual jogger, and to the reader that is just curious of what the marathon is about.
Excerpts
“Why does it matter whether the sub-two-hour marathon is possible? And if it is possible, what will it mean when the first 1:59:59 marathon is run? At one level, the achievement will signify nothing. To complete 26 miles and 385 yards in less than two hours using only one’s God-given gifts would be, of course, an exceptional feat of speed, mental strength, and endurance. But the marathon length is a scruffy figure, only fixed by the Olympic Committee in 1921 to match the course of the 1908 London Olympic marathon, which was itself designed to accommodate the peculiar viewing demands of the British royal family. Why should we care if some extraordinary person can run this arbitrary distance in just over, or just under, two hours? For curious reasons, we do care and it does matter. Twenty-six miles and 385 yards is not just a distance. It has become a metaphor. Nobody finds the marathon easy—even professionals, especially professionals. The distance is democratic that way. Everyone who runs a marathon is running against his or her limits. Everyone is forced to manage a certain amount of pain and to recruit hidden reserves. Whatever one’s talent or preparation, nobody runs an easy marathon. Geoffrey Mutai’s prayer at the startline is not to win the race, but to finish it. On the other side of the coin, the marathon is also a race that is possible for almost anyone with enough patience and willpower to complete. The distance is democratic that way, too. For this reason, it has become an event against which hordes of everyday people—fat people, thin people; people crooked by time and people sprightly as foals; rich people and people in need—test themselves. I’m running against cancer. I’m running for my dad. I’m running for a personal best. As Chris Brasher, cofounder of the London Marathon, once said, the race has become “the great suburban Everest.” Now, in the popular imagination, the marathon is not primarily a test of athletic talent, but a test of character. The race has become a carnival of men and women, some in outrageous costumes, each attempting to overcome a personal hurdle for the public good, or a public hurdle for a personal good. A British man named Lloyd Scott is perhaps the most extreme of these charitable masochists. Among other stunts, he has completed both the New York and London marathons in an antiquated deep-sea diving suit weighing 130 pounds, and has raised nearly £5 million for charity in the past decade. When he received the MBE (Member of the British Empire) honor from the Queen for his fund-raising feats, he said that it should stand for “Mad, Bonkers, and Eccentric.”
“In these final moments of stillness, however, Mutai banished impure thoughts and the crowding, conflicted voices. He attempted to focus. Psychologists talk about a Zen-like state of instinctual action in which the greatest sporting performances are attained. They call it Flow. The French cyclist Jean Bobet described a similar but distinct experience called La Volupté, which “is delicate, intimate and ephemeral. It arrives, it takes hold of you, sweeps you up and then leaves you again. It is for you alone. It is a combination of speed and ease, force and grace. It is pure happiness.” Mutai has his own term: the Spirit. The way he understood it, the brutality of his training regime—125 fierce miles a week—was endured to attain this sensation. Thousands of hours of suffering for these minutes of sweetness: speed and ease, force and grace. The more harder you train, he would say, the more you get the Spirit. . . . It gains on you. So far, in his career, the Spirit had allowed Mutai the courage to remake the sport of marathon running, and to destroy previous conceptions of what was possible; to lose his own fear, and implant it in the hearts of his competitors.”
“In Boston, Mutai picked as never before. On the cold morning of April 18, 2011, with a breeze at his back, he beat his countryman Moses Mosop in a thrilling race, and finished in a time of 2:03:02-a course record by nearly three minutes, and almost one minute faster than Haile Gebreselassie’s world record of 2:03:59. Mosop finished four seconds behind Mutai, in 2:03:06. These were absurd, freakish times. Despite its length, the professional marathon is a sport of tiny margins—a few seconds here, a few seconds there. Nobody in the modern era had broken a course record at a major marathon by nearly three minutes before Mutai. Looking on, the American marathon great, Bill Rodgers, who was himself a four-time winner of the Boston Marathon, thought the clocks were broken. “It was something incredible,” said Rodgers. “I ran with a tailwind in Boston one day, and I ran 2:09:55. He ran more than six minutes faster!” The clocks were working. However, Mutai’s run would not stand as an official world record. It is one of many bizarre quirks of the sport of professional road running that, despite being the oldest continuously contested marathon in the world, Boston does not count for world record purposes.”
“It was not a brick wall. On May 6, 1954, despite dire prognostications from armchair pundits, some of whom believed a human would die if he attempted to run a mile in under four minutes, a junior doctor named Roger Bannister ran 3:59:4 for the mile at the Iffley Road running track in Oxford, England. The world of athletics moved on fast. Six weeks after Bannister made history, Landy himself obliterated the new world record, running 3:58 dead. In the years that followed, sub-four-minute miles became commonplace among elite athletes. (In 2011, the fifth American high school boy broke the barrier.) The four-minute mile was only unbreakable until one man broke it. “Après moi,” said Bannister, “le déluge.”
The information contained within, the evidences and theories, may help us have a safer and more humane society in the future or it may not, but you wiThe information contained within, the evidences and theories, may help us have a safer and more humane society in the future or it may not, but you will read some shocking facts found in piecing together the anatomy of violence. Have you ever wondered at the evil that men do and the theories why? Behind the fictional characters like Donald Draper of Mad Men, Norman Bates of Psycho, and Rambo of First Blood there is an unseen tapestry, of thinking and behaviour. Behind the shocking truths that hit our news reports of school shootings, mass murders, terrorism, news on violence and abuse there are darker truths that lurk in the anatomy of the offender and this book dissects and examines the flags of danger. The author tells you of the evidences found in researching the anatomy of violence. This work explains the shades of the brain, the behaviours displayed, the social and the home aspects that contribute to an evolution into violence, he does not blame and pass down the roots of violence to Cain and Abel in their act of killing of kin and then on being a born condition with no other possible ailments, but explains the roots of violence with more insidious and complex workings at work. With the simple imaging of the brain the hallmarks of a persons potential for violence could be documented. This reading may have you looking at people you recognise in society and in your home and thinking of ways they could be helped, this reading is a much needed essential work on a human stain that will never magically be wanded away but needs efforts by all the faces of humanity in its toil and struggle to be cured. Written with vast and great knowledge on the subject in an easy read terminology that everyone could understand, one that can could be used many times over for referencing particular conditions of behaviour. Evidences and theories pieced together giving plenty of food for thought on the anatomy of violence.
Excepts "The bright sunlight of my sisters radiant life was overshadowed by a particularly acute form of leukaemia. On September 18, Roma's life was snuffed out-perhaps mercifully-in just two weeks, although that's painfully long compared with the victims of most acts of violence. We all miss her, just as Clare does to this day. I have reflected a great deal on Roma, and her death has profoundly affected my thinking. The other cancer that bloodies the lives of so many other people-violence-is to me as much medical as the sickness that killed my sister. For me, Roma's death is a metaphor for how I think we need to treat violence. It requires more compassion, less retribution, and a new clinical perspective that I want to move you toward considering."
"Do violent offenders have abnormal functioning in terms of how they think, feel, and behave? Yes, they certainly do. Does this "dysfunction" have a biological basis? Is something not going right in their development? I have argued that crime germinates early in life from a neurodevelopment and genetic base. I've suggested that there is a heck of a lot that is just not working right in violent offenders. They are also impaired in how they perform in life-whether at school, at home, or at work. Violence certainly causes distress to others, and the offender himself is frequently in a distressed state. Repeated violent offending is a clinical disorder." ...more
The Planes went down not in the sea, or the woods, and not somewhere that could easily be located by a rescue team or on a land that they could arriveThe Planes went down not in the sea, or the woods, and not somewhere that could easily be located by a rescue team or on a land that they could arrive safely on. The bleakest of environments the remotest of places, Greenland. Not just one crash, but many, lives lost in the rescue effort. Greenland will host men that represent bravery, determination and great willpower for survival, all in cause for the greater good of their fellow men, while a war raged with men an even greater war took hold, with a lethal and power force that does not discriminate, nature. The rescue of the men in Greenland became a great challenge and proved to be a disastrous and terrible beauty, unforgiving to its denizens with the accumulating snow and snow storms, its unstable shifting icy surface and no exact crash position, time held the most paramount importance, every second counted and was a second closer to a grim end, in freezing conditions people would loose something if not their minds or starvation then possibly limbs.
What happened to the Grumman Duck amphibious plane and the three men it carried?
At the end of this book the author writes, "This book tells two true stories, one from the past and one from the present. The historic story revolves around three American military planes that crashed in Greenland during World War II," and
"I played a role in the Duck Hunt, and I appear in the book, but it isn't about me. It's about ordinary people thrust by fate or duty into extraordinary circumstances, one group in 1942 and another group seventy years later. Separated by time but connected by character, their bravery, endurance, and sacrifices reveal the power of humanity in inhumane conditions. I hope I've done them justice." Well you have Mitchell Zuckoff done a great justice in this wonderful story of truth, you have done research that truly goes beyond the norm for writing non-fiction and will be like ancient carving on a tree, for many a reader etched in the mind. A story, a rescue that would prove to present "a miracle on ice."
"A more immediate worry was the cold. They had no heat, no light, no stove. They had no sleeping bags, no heavy clothing, no Arctic survival gear. A few seconds outside would coat a man's face with frost. In minutes, blood would rush from his extremities to his core. Exposed skin would die. In the sky, the men on a B-17 were warriors. On the ground, they were frozen sardines in a busted-open can."
"The war would wait, but freezing American airmen wouldn't."
"In a world where size generally matters, Greenland's doesn't. The island is globally overlooked despite being enormous: more than sixteen hundred miles from north to south, and eight hundred miles at its widest point. Greenland could swallow Texas and California and still have room for a dessert of New Mexico, Arizona, Florida, Pennsylvania, and all of New England. It's three times the size of France, and it occupies more than twice the area of the planet's second-largest island, New Guinea. Yet Greenland is the world's loneliest place. With fifty-eight thousand residents, it has the lowest population density of any country or dependent territory. Only Antarctica, with no permanent residents, makes Greenland seem crowded. If Manhattan had the same population density as Greenland, its population would be two."
"To fight cabin fever, they played word games. They named all the countries, rivers, capitals, islands, and every other geographical feature they could think of. They told and retold their life stories and talked about whatever came to mind. Still they ran out of things to say, so they spent long periods in silence. The isolation, the wind, the moving glacier beneath their feet, and the relentless cold preyed on their nerves. They seemed to take turns breaking down, wishing their ordeal were over, one way or another. Each time, the other two would comfort the crying man. When the cycle unraveled, all three sank into despair at the same time. They hatched a suicide pact."
A story of truth from Maya Angelou’s life, its a tale of the love for her mother, her journey of learning and loving life. The authors journey inspireA story of truth from Maya Angelou’s life, its a tale of the love for her mother, her journey of learning and loving life. The authors journey inspires, her words enrich and warm the reader, she captivates, has your attention, she invites you into her world, her hard times and good times, her fears and hopes on her road of discovery, her writing flows fluidly, you feel part of her turbulent life for a time. You learn of her growth, her jobs and her love for music and art.
This is a memorable story of two great women Maya Angelou and Vivian Baxter. Their story may inspire, and be a lesson to those that feel like just giving up and quitting, they had plenty of fight, determination, love and hope.
“She made a funny face and against my will, I smiled. She kissed me on my lips and started to cry. “That’s the first time I have seen your smile. It is a beautiful smile. Mother’s beautiful daughter can smile.” I was not used to being called beautiful. That day, I learned that I could be a giver simply by bringing a smile to another person. The ensuing years have taught me that a kind word or a vote of support can be charitable gift. I can move over and make another place for another to sit. I can turn my music up if it pleases, or down if it is annoying. I may never be known as a philanthropist, but I certainly want to be known as charitable.”
“If pessimism insists on occupying my thoughts, I remember there is always tomorrow. Today I am blessed.”
“I had a physical response to art. I breathed deeply and was relieved. For the first time in my life art seemed to have a tonal quality. I could almost hear the art as if it were a great chord of a symphonic piece.”
“This is the role of the mother, and in that visit I really saw clearly, and for the first time, why a mother is really important. Not just because she feeds and also loves and cuddles and even mollycoddles a child, but because in an interesting and maybe an eerie and unworldly way, she stands in the gap. She stands between the unknown and the known.”
“You’ve been a hard worker-white, black, Asian, and Latino women ship out of the San Francisco port because of you. You have been a shipfitter, a nurse, a real estate broker, and a barber. Many men and-if my memory serves me right-a few women risked their lives to love you. You were a terrible mother of small children, but there has never been anyone greater than you as a mother of a young adult.”(Maya Angelou said to her mother)
Rory Carroll takes you inside the walls of Miraflores palace and shows us how Hugo Chavez rose to power. He tells and shows his skill in politics and Rory Carroll takes you inside the walls of Miraflores palace and shows us how Hugo Chavez rose to power. He tells and shows his skill in politics and his failure in having a peaceful Venezuela. He takes you back to his dreams and a pledge under a particular acacia tree in 1982, where once in 1830 Bolivar made an oath to free and empower his people, and onto the military conspiracy and coup to take leadership.
The author writes on the successes and the failures, he covers in great detail from solider to president, the power journey till this day where he is now ailing in health due to cancer. A story of power and revolution. I never knew much of Chavez until reading this. The facts speak for themselves anyone who promises to lead and aid people must have some responsible peace but with the high murder rate, kidnappings and drug trafficking something is not right and this author shows you what he did well and what he failed at. Love Chavez or hate him, this is a brilliant portrait layered out in words.
It was interesting to learn of Gabriel Garcia Marquez interviewing Hugo Chavez a great writer who seems to be around many a powerful man including Fidel Castro. I am now inspired to read soon The Autumn of Patriarch by him a book that has been sitting on my bookshelf for a while
Excerpts:
"What Chavez said mattered. He was a master of language and communication. He toyed with words, revived old ones, coined new ones, made them sing and sting. Words can provoke reactions and create their own reality. In Venezuela words spawned hatred and polarisation. Chavez's spurned allies found their voice and hurled back their own insults."
"On 17 December 1982, the anniversary of Bolivar's death in 1830, Chavez was the chosen orator for a barracks ceremony. He told the assembled soldiers to picture the liberator in the sky, watchful, frowning, because what he had left undone remained undone. Afterwards Chavez, Baduel and two other captains, Jesus Urdaneta Hernandez and Felipe Acosta Carles, jogged six miles to the Saman del Guere, an acacia tree under whose shade Bolivar used to rest. It was a humid, sticky day and the friends arrived drenched in sweat, Chavez last. There they plucked leaves, a military ritual, and Chavez improvised another speech, this time paraphrasing Bolivar's famous 1805 oath: I swear to the God of my fathers, I swear on my homeland, I swear on my honour, that I will not let my soul feel repose, nor my arm rest until my eyes have seen broken the chains that oppress us and our people by the order of the powerful. The others echoed his words, and a conspiracy was born."
"Colombian cocaine had long trickled through Venezuela en route to Europe and the US. Under the comandante it became a stream, then a river. It was not his intention, but it flowed from his decisions."
"The revolution inherited grave social problems and made them worse. In 1998, the year before Chavez took office, there were 4,500 murders, a grim per capita rate on par with much of Latin America. A decade later it had tripled to more 17,000 per year, making Venezuela , more dangerous than Iraq, and Caracas one of the deadliest cities on earth. Eight times more murderous, it was calculated, than Bogota, Colombia's capital. With less than one percent of cases ever solved it was, all things considered, a good place to commit murder. Kidnappings, previously a rarity, became an industry with an estimated 7,000 abductions per year. To allay their terror the rich and middle class invested in bodyguards and armoured cars, or emigrated, but most of the killing and dying was done by gangs - in slums fighting for drugs, turf, women and prestige."
This is a work of non-fiction that covers man quest into the unknown, his exploring and discovering of a great beast. A white man had not traveled as This is a work of non-fiction that covers man quest into the unknown, his exploring and discovering of a great beast. A white man had not traveled as far as our explorer in here across dangerous territory tribal controlled regions in remote areas of Gabon. The public, the critics at first did not believe in his discoveries but time would tell and all would eventually talk of his expeditions and cash in on the discoveries. The black and white movie King Kong has many of the explorers footsteps used in done ways. I did feel that I was amidst the King Kong movie, especially the recent remake, minus the great fiction figure of King Kong himself in here you are in company of a great mammal a Gorilla. A Gorilla that was hardly known of to the masses of the metropolis of U.S and U.K. There was quite a hard time had by the explorer during a passage of a smallpox outbreak, the villagers and his expedition crew were all struck with this ugly head of outbreak of disease and he was the sole guilty party in bringing this danger to the people. In some ways ironically they were in search of a beast but they presented themselves as white beasts to the locals, in bringing death by disease to their community.
I found the book interesting and educating, the amusement at the masses unknown of gorillas memorable. The killing and bringing home Specimens of Gorilla tragic and in history a great achievement and triumph was undertaken in the action of it outlawed. A memorable research in the journey to the heart of the Gorilla and the people around it.
“Of all the stories Wilson told, however, none fascinated the boy more than the story of the njena. The creature was shrouded in obscurity, spoken of by the locals as if it were a mythical monster, not a real animal. The njena was a mystery just waiting to be solved.”
“Audubon himself shot most of the birds he drew-a necessary compromise that inspired generations to refine their own appreciations of nature and, in some cases, to work to protect such species from endangerment. In twentieth century, that compromise became unnecessary. Hunting lost whatever scientific, academic, and artistic authority it once claimed. But in the mid-nineteenth century, naturalists felt little moral pressure pushing them away from hunting. If anything, they were pushed toward it by scientists and academic institutions with a wolfish demand for specimens.”
“While he waited in Olenda, the pox continued to tear through the community.”Not a day passed without its victims,” he later wrote, “each fresh death being announced by the firing of guns, a sound which each time pierced through me with a pang of sorrow. From morning to night, in my solitude, I could hear the cries of wailing, and the mournful songs which were raised by the relatives round the corpses of the dead.”
“When I was a young girl growing up in a sleepy Appalachian paper mill town, I had a lot of dreams for a girl with limited opportunity. Probably th
“When I was a young girl growing up in a sleepy Appalachian paper mill town, I had a lot of dreams for a girl with limited opportunity. Probably the biggest of all my dreams was just to get away from where I was.”
This is the opening testament of the author who set on a road to do that very same thing for a group of unfortunate girls that reside in conditions more darker and truer than fiction, this dilemma is a common and increasing reality of our modern age.
She goes on to write in her introduction.
“My own life journey, from a poorly educated girl in a small mountain town to a Harvard educated writer, teacher, and social advocate is one message of hope. But then so are the stories of seven determined girls who were every bit as gifted and promising as I once was. Each different, but all steadfast in their desire for a better life than the one they had inherited. These daughters and granddaughters of southern Appalachian workers have grit and resolve, but they need much more if they are to succeed in our new unforgiving economy. The stories that follow provide a chronicle of one teacher’s odyssey in poor America, and of the pitfalls and possibilities that arose along a road carved out of simple materials: literature, reading and stories of childhood dreams.”
I fitting account of the tragedy and triumph that resides in these pages touching and awe inspiring. A teacher, a heroine, equipped with a pencil, a sword of victory. With hope and belief in oneself on a journey, a road on out to a greater good, the pen could be mightier against the sword/destroyers of dreams. A true story to read, that may inspire many. We need more teachers like this to instil a love for the written word, I know from first hand experience, I left school at 16 born of immigrant parents with an illiterate mother, how it sadness me to see how my mother lost out in life without being able to read words and sentences, to joy at beautiful prose, to be enlightened and aware of many things in our glorious world of written words.
Every Monday after school during the regular school year, and every day during summer school this teacher met with her students to read and talk about books and to write stories of their own. Literature proved to me a more powerful teaching tool than anything that this teacher could use. What she learned was that they wanted to read of horrors and the supernatural as she explains here.
“The parts of the story jammed against one another: a young girl, Stephen King, horror. This want what I had in mind when I had created my literature class for girls.”
She goes on to tell what she had learned of this..
“In their improbable way, I was learning, that horror stories offered hope. Hapless heroines could outwit sinister spirits and crazies. Even stories of Rose Madder could find the inner strength to defeat the horrifying monster that Norman had become. Spirits such as Blair’s Ghost Rose could speak out in angry voices, letting others know how trapped and alone they felt. I too was trying to create hope around the only form of transcendence I knew: an education rich in literature and reading.”
And also in this paragraph.
“The young girls in my reading class were not alone. Horror fiction had become rampant in popular culture, so much so that parents and teachers had begun to voice concern about images of maiming and psychopathic mayhem flooding the popular book and movie market. These movies- Final Destination, The House of 1,000 corpses, Slash, 13 Ghosts-were geared to a ravenous audience of horror fans, many of them still in their teens. Such trends had led to a flurry of writing about the subject by literary and film critics, cultural scholars, and even psychoanalysts. One explanation offered for the feeling that my girls experienced when reading scary books is the notion of a psychic safety valve. Fans of horror and ghost stories can experience a thrilling read, and yet know that in the end they will be safe. This can be cathartic-like screaming bloody murder on a roller coaster ride, then walking off with tears of laughter streaming down your face. But this wasn’t the only explanation for the strange appeal of horror. Every reader of fiction searches for the threads that can connect her life to the landscape she inherits. And these threads of connections need not be real-or not something you can see or touch in the everyday world. Fiction’s special appeal is that it can take us out of this world and help us connect with what can only be seen through the imagination’s inner eye. Part of the beauty of ghost stories was that they were not real. Crazy, weird, and Elizabeth’s favourite word, boring-this is how my students felt about reading a realistic novel. Elizabeth wasn’t yet ready for novel about a girl who was “just like her.” Could I bring myself to enjoy the kind of book that she loved?”
An awe inspiring story on a woman and seven girls battle against the odds. These girls she taught had come from poor families, broken, and problem riddled. Some girls had parents in jail or dead, addicted to drugs, alcohol or who were violent abusers. They, under this mentoring, had hope instilled but ultimately their surroundings, their home lives still had a tragic and out of their hands part in their fates. Think in a more pleasant tone of the great Matilda, from that Roald Dahl story, and how she was helped by her kind and committed teacher against a bad teacher and bad parenting. A great teacher does wonders, a soul that one would look back on with pleasant memories and happiness on how they did it right! A change needs to come about, to save our youth, we all need to act and help in the greater cause and message that lies in this unmissable read for 2013.
‘ “What is it about Stephen King’s books that you really enjoy?” I asked. “The parts when scary things happen,” said Blair. “And I like to read long books.” Rose Madder was 420 pages long.
This story of one precocious young girl, her Stephen King book, and a hopelessly idealistic teacher helps to shed light on a big dilemma. How can education open doors for girls such as Blair, the daughter of poor whites, and a girl with dreams as big as any girl in America? Her small but important life story is part of a larger American narrative. She is the young heir to a labour history, a slice of our national life that is disappearing. The courageous southern migrants who fled Appalachian poverty had come to Midwest cities in search of manufacturing jobs and a better future for their children. Now young Blair had inherited a forgotten landscape, tormented by job loss and a growing street-drug problem. Dropout rates were high too, reflecting an intergenerational history-the earlier workers of Blair’s neighbourhood could find jobs without high school diploma-but also a sense of detachment from school. What Blair most needed was a first-rate education that would allow her to create a new kind of future, leading her away from the streets and their torments and toward he life her Grandma Lilly envisioned for her. But when I set out to become an educational agent for hope and change for Blair, I discovered that the single thing that could have made the biggest difference in her life-public education-was itself part of the problem. In spite of the intentions of individuals at Blair’s school, who were as hardworking as they were big-hearted, she was caught up in the same two-tiered system of schooling I had lived through. Its like John Dawson, an Appalachian migrant who moved to inner-city Chicago in the 1950s, remarked: “A poor kid don’t get the same teachin’ that a rich kid gets.” '
A family past revisited. Tragedy in a death under questionable circumstances. A son wants to find the truth and wants not to upset his mother in unravelA family past revisited. Tragedy in a death under questionable circumstances. A son wants to find the truth and wants not to upset his mother in unraveling the past. In this story of truth the author has give us a poignant and wonderful look into his life and strung it swell together in great words in the right places. In his search he makes the reader look within his or her life, at the greater things that need to be taken account of. He had me thoroughly captivated in this story. Defiantly one not to miss for 2013 that will be hitting Best of Lists through the year.
“For a good hundred years, there was nothing like it on earth. An entire square mile of Chicago, devoted to butchering cattle and hogs or any other beast a man could ship from America’s hinterlands-our prairies and plains- turning it into canned meat, churning all of it into the bounty of America. This was the land of swift, the kingdom of Armour. Chicago as the dis-assembly line. Chicago-how fast and how efficiently a creature could be reduced. Rendered. Broken down. On summer nights, when the wind blew off the lake, the stench of death and dung hung over the whole city. My grandmother told me that some nights in her bed, she’d be awakened by what she called “the sad groaning”-beasts in the dark, all those miles away. Chicago.”
“My father was the Night Slot Man. Thats a newspaper term. From the time he is a young boy of six or seven in Dust Bowl Nebraska, back in the depression, all he wants is to work in newspapers. All he wants is to escape, to get to Chicago and be a newspapermen, just like his bother.”
“She begins to see there is a world beyond the world she knows. A world of smart, knowing men. A world at the center of the world. A world that knows whats happening. A world where things happen.”
“All through her childhood, whenever you ask her a question about her life or what she is doing or where she is going, she will fix you in her gaze and say to you, her son: “Don't ask me about my business.” Omerta.”
“Omerta. After he died, silence descends. Silence and fear. My twin poles: my binary back holes. I live in fear of upsetting my mother, of even uttering my fathers name. I believe that even by saying his name, I might kill her. Or, she might kill me. Three of us remained. Three atoms that retreat to the outer edges of our chamber. A nuclear family flawed, reduced. We drift apart. Unable to bond. Not knowing how. Survivors who stagger into a shelter or a bombed-out ruin, each eyeing the others from our shadowy corner. Wondering. Calculating. He died and we never spoke again about him. Every once in a while, id find the courage to ask about him. Every once in a while, the questions nagging in my head-How did he die?-would become too much and id forget the rules and ask.”
“I understand you now, those of you who build your roadside shrines. Your frail white cross, lashed to the guard-rail. Two wooden garden stakes bound with rusted wire. Your son”s name, stencilled. Or your wife's. A plastic bouquet. Faded flag. We see your shrine as we speed by, rounding a curve. A glint of colour catches our eye. Maybe remnants of that weathered teddy bear. All of it marking that place where someone loved left the road. The sod black and torn. The gap in the guardrail. The tree trunk, shorn. It is our need to mark. To witness. Our need to create scared ground. “History happened here,” guidebooks like to say. No, we say-personal history ended here.”
“To this day, still, I scavenge for scraps in the hearts and minds of men I meet. Forever searching, believing the answers are out there. Somewhere. Because we without fathers must out of necessity create ourselves. Its true that “necessity is the mother of invention.” But for those of us without fathers, there is a deeper truth-necessity is the mother of self-invention.”
Rory Carroll takes you inside the walls of Miraflores palace and shows us how Hugo Chavez rose to power. He tells and shows his skill in politics and his failure in having a peaceful Venezuela. He takes you back to his dreams and a pledge under a particular acacia tree in 1982, where once in 1830 Bolivar made an oath to free and empower his people, and onto the military conspiracy and coup to take leadership.
The author writes on the successes and the failures, he covers in great detail from solider to president, the power journey till this day where he is now ailing in health due to cancer. A story of power and revolution. I never knew much of Chavez until reading this. The facts speak for themselves anyone who promises to lead and aid people must have some responsible peace but with the high murder rate, kidnappings and drug trafficking something is not right and this author shows you what he did well and what he failed at. Love Chavez or hate him, this is a brilliant portrait layered out in words.
It was interesting to learn of Gabriel Garcia Marquez interviewing Hugo Chavez a great writer who seems to be around many a powerful man including Fidel Castro. I am now inspired to read soon The Autumn of Patriarch by him a book that has been sitting on my bookshelf for a while
Excerpts:
"What Chavez said mattered. He was a master of language and communication. He toyed with words, revived old ones, coined new ones, made them sing and sting. Words can provoke reactions and create their own reality. In Venezuela words spawned hatred and polarisation. Chavez's spurned allies found their voice and hurled back their own insults."
"On 17 December 1982, the anniversary of Bolivar's death in 1830, Chavez was the chosen orator for a barracks ceremony. He told the assembled soldiers to picture the liberator in the sky, watchful, frowning, because what he had left undone remained undone. Afterwards Chavez, Baduel and two other captains, Jesus Urdaneta Hernandez and Felipe Acosta Carles, jogged six miles to the Saman del Guere, an acacia tree under whose shade Bolivar used to rest. It was a humid, sticky day and the friends arrived drenched in sweat, Chavez last. There they plucked leaves, a military ritual, and Chavez improvised another speech, this time paraphrasing Bolivar's famous 1805 oath: I swear to the God of my fathers, I swear on my homeland, I swear on my honour, that I will not let my soul feel repose, nor my arm rest until my eyes have seen broken the chains that oppress us and our people by the order of the powerful. The others echoed his words, and a conspiracy was born."
"Colombian cocaine had long trickled through Venezuela en route to Europe and the US. Under the comandante it became a stream, then a river. It was not his intention, but it flowed from his decisions."
"The revolution inherited grave social problems and made them worse. In 1998, the year before Chavez took office, there were 4,500 murders, a grim per capita rate on par with much of Latin America. A decade later it had tripled to more 17,000 per year, making Venezuela , more dangerous than Iraq, and Caracas one of the deadliest cities on earth. Eight times more murderous, it was calculated, than Bogota, Colombia's capital. With less than one percent of cases ever solved it was, all things considered, a good place to commit murder. Kidnappings, previously a rarity, became an industry with an estimated 7,000 abductions per year. To allay their terror the rich and middle class invested in bodyguards and armoured cars, or emigrated, but most of the killing and dying was done by gangs - in slums fighting for drugs, turf, women and prestige."
“A library is a miracle. A place where you can learn just about anything, for free. A place where your mind can come alive.”
This author bares his soul“A library is a miracle. A place where you can learn just about anything, for free. A place where your mind can come alive.”
This author bares his soul in his memoir, he tells of his life, he is six feet seven inches tall, a librarian that may stand out from many you may have met with.
If he is not in a battle at one stage and then coming to terms with his Tourette Syndrome later on in this story of his, he is lifting great weights, kettle-bells while listening to audiobook of Don Quixote, or he is monitoring Internet usage on library computers and trying not to notice what you book you loan out from the library, if he is not reading the newest Stephen King after reading the authors whole collection he maybe trying to understand the world we live in, its people, and his relationship with God.
A poignant and heartfelt memoir that has you immersed and was a joy to read. His choice of words and sentences make the story flow with ease into an understanding revelation of ones life.
This Librarian will be a memorable character in the mind of the reader, he has widened the understanding of one getting through life with Tourette Syndrome with his passion and love for words, stories, libraries.
”Inside the library was order. Information cataloged into rows, authors, titles, columns, shelves, and librarians preferences. Everything had its place. Everything proceeded according to patterns established even before the current crop of ancient librarians began working there. The lights were dim and the atmosphere was the opposite of the manic landscape outside.”
“She learned that, in the broadest sense, Tourette Syndrome affects people in two ways. It either makes them move involuntarily, vocalize involuntarily, or both. These movements or sounds are called “tics.” Motor and vocal tics both have a continuum that can swing pretty freaking far. Mom was both unnerved and incredulous. The book made it sound like Tourette Syndrome was a life sentence of perversion.”
“It’s hard to talk about my mom without making her sound fanatical, because she weighs all decisions against her faith, but nothing is further from the truth. Nobody laughs more than my mom. Nobody is more playful. Or humble. She’s no grim True Believer. There’s a verse in the Book of Mormon that sums her up perfectly: Men (and women) are that they might have joy. Mom didn’t believe that her purpose was to be grave and dour and disapproving of every little thing. Her purpose was to have joy, and nothing was more joyful to her than raising her kids righteously.”
“The tics: While it was true that I could no longer scream, and being in public was easier, I finally had a verification of something I had long suspected—there was a daily intensity quota that must be met. I had to expend a certain amount of energy on tics each day. It could be meted out over many small tics, or a few dozen huge ones. So even though I wasn’t screaming, my body was still trying; it just couldn’t make the noise. If I couldn’t be noisy, I could still be an abomination of motor skills gone amok.”
“I want people to agree with Luis Borges, who said, “I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.” Or Thomas Jefferson, who said, “I cannot live without books.”
Tom Clancy, a writer who has made millions writing sentences like, “But at a time like this, a man had to hold his woman,” still wins my heart by making statements like “The only way to do all the things you’d like is to read.” In Something Wicked This Way Comes, when the kids were investigating the unholy provenance of Darks carnival, who found the origin story? Charles Halloway, the librarian!
Bill Gates said, “I’d be happy if I could think that the role of the library was sustained and even enhanced in the age of the computer.” And here’s Warren Buffett: “If past history was all there was to the game, the richest people would be librarians.”……..To see the value of a library, ignore the adults. Find an inquisitive child who doesn’t have an iPhone yet, take them to the library, and tell them that they can learn anything they want there.”