6/30/2023 0 Comments Novel crossing to safetyThe historical saga is mainly the true story of Mary Hallock Foote, child of a wealthy New York Quaker family, born in 1847. The daughter is a flower child from Berkeley and our old-fogey narrator spares no words in telling us what he thinks about that generation. Their family dramas provide us with at times humorous interludes to the main historical saga. He has a local woman and her daughter help him bathe and dress, take dictation and type his story. An older divorced man confined to a wheel chair with one leg missing, Stegner interweaves his narrator’s isolation on a western ranch and his family’s efforts to get him into some kind of assisted living. Layered on the frontier story is the fictional story of the man writing it who turns these pioneers into his grandparents. It’s a great read that is largely based on the true story of a woman pioneer in the west when so many other books about this era tell the stories of men. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1972, this book is considered by some to be Stegner’s masterpiece.
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6/30/2023 0 Comments The million marco poloIt is perhaps no surprise, then, that for much of the remainder of his life Polo was ridiculed and derided by his countrymen in Venice. If Polo was to be believed (and if the maps he returned with were any indicator) nearly half the world was mired in ignorance and idolatry, sworn enemies of Western Christianity (a hard pill for any medieval reader to swallow). When Marco Polo’s account of his travels throughout Asia was released in the year 1299 (originally entitled Il Milione or The Million, a reference to the sheer numbers of people and riches described within) his descriptions of “heathen” rituals and perversities horrified the European world. Delivered at the annual Graduate Student Symposium at Perdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana in March 2013 6/30/2023 0 Comments Havoc at prescott high book 2The story picks up right where Book Four left off, with the school under attack from the Grand Murder Party. It ends up feeling disingenuous and rushed. One of my biggest problems with romances is when the author realizes they're almost at their word count, then try to finish everything up in a neat little bow in a single chapter. This author did not phone it in, even a little bit. I love that these books continued to surprise me, even until the very end. This is a massive book, a great send off to fantastic characters. I flew through the first four books, only to realize that the last in the series still had not come out yet. I have been waiting for this book to come out for what feels like forever. ***This review contains mild spoilers, mostly for previous books in the series. 6/30/2023 0 Comments Darwyn cooke dc comics"His were some of the most beautiful, fun DC superhero images we have ever seen." "His take on the most iconic heroes in the world were breathtakingly direct and elegant, powerful and cool," the publisher said. Saturday, DC Comics wrote a comprehensive tribute to Cooke's life, art and legacy. On Friday, Cooke's family reported on his personal blog that he had begun receiving palliative care "following a bout with aggressive cancer." He became well known for his retro-inspired designs of several major characters, and DC Comics in a statement noted that his take on Catwoman is still the template used today, as well as for the television series Gotham. He won the 2006 Eisner Award for Best Single Issue for his work on DC's Solo #5 and also was recognized five times by the Joe Shuster Awards for achievement by Canadian comic book creators.Ĭooke's breakthrough performance in print came with Batman: Ego, published in 2000. He was 53.Ĭooke began as an animator on two key cartoon series in the 1990s: Batman: The Animated Series and Superman: The Animated Series, before joining the print medium. Darwyn Cooke, the influential illustrator of numerous iconic heroes in the DC universe of characters, died on Saturday after a short battle against cancer. |