![]() ![]() ![]() When one sister brings an unnamed shame upon the family, they move from their village to the capital. But the text does not go beyond Nujood’s childlike impressions of the world, sketching a general impression of an impoverished family with loving but strict parents. She tells her tale with the assistance of co-author Delphine Minoui, a Le Figaro reporter who covers the Middle East. ![]() Nujood is not only the subject of the story, but the narrator. It also gave Ali a chance to attend school, escape subjugation to sharaf – a patriarchal Bedouin honor code – and nourish dreams of one day becoming a lawyer and helping girls like herself. But in Nujood Ali’s case, the act of asking for a divorce – not to mention getting it – shook the Muslim world, caused the Yemeni parliament to raise the age of consent to 17 for boys and girls, and earned the then-10-year-old international press attention, including being named Glamour magazine’s Woman of the Year in 2008. High-profile divorces are usually thrilling tabloid fodder. ![]()
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![]() ![]() There he meets Mitko, a charismatic young hustler, and pays him for sex. On an unseasonably warm autumn day, an American teacher enters a public bathroom beneath Sofia’s National Palace of Culture. "Garth Greenwell's What Belongs to You appeared in early 2016, and is a short first novel by a young writer still, it was not easily surpassed by anything that appeared later in the year.It is not just first novelists who will be envious of Greenwell's achievement." -James Wood, The New Yorker Named One of the Best Books of the Year by More Than Fifty Publications, Including: The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New York Times (selected by Dwight Garner), GQ, The Washington Post, Esquire, NPR, Slate, Vulture, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Guardian (London), The Telegraph (London), The Evening Standard (London), The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Miami Herald, T he Millions, BuzzFeed, The New Republic (Best Debuts of the Year), Kirkus Reviews, and Publishers Weekly (One of the Ten Best Books of the Year) A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice.A Finalist for the Green Carnation Prize.A Finalist the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize.A Finalist for the James Taite Black Prize for Fiction.A Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction. ![]() ![]() A Finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.Longlisted for the National Book Award in Fiction ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() "Evolution has never been a very controversial part of Catholic discourse even though the Archbishop of Vienna has made some retro noises on the subject," she writes. (The whole world is dying, but - wait - Cedar's mother has hurt her feelings.) And when Cedar does reflect on biology, the Incarnation and the more profound concerns of the day, we get passages that sound like an undergraduate cramming on a term paper. ![]() The plot material is here for an interesting exploration of Anglo and Native American attitudes about women, reproductive freedom and environmental protection, but those issues remain overshadowed by Cedar's far less interesting rumination on her parents. For one thing, Cedar Hawk Songmaker is nowhere near as fine a writer as Louise Erdrich, and the choice to keep us trapped in Cedar's diary constrains the narrative considerably. Whom can she trust? Who might betray her next? But the novel remains weirdly depth-resistant. ![]() ![]() ![]() However, recent scholarship has suggested that Shays' role in the protests was significantly and strategically exaggerated by Massachusetts elites, who had a political interest in shifting blame for bad economic conditions away from themselves. Historically, scholars have argued that the four thousand rebels (called Shaysites) who protested against economic and civil rights injustices by the Massachusetts Government were led by American Revolutionary War veteran Daniel Shays. ![]() The fight took place mostly in and around Springfield during 17. Shays ' Rebellion was an armed uprising in Western Massachusetts and Worcester in response to a debt crisis among the citizenry and in opposition to the state government's increased efforts to collect taxes both on individuals and their trades. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Within a few months, Einstein had written a series of papers, including his famous equation E = mc 2, all of which transformed our understanding of the universe. Scientists call 1905 Albert Einstein’s annus mirabilis – his miracle year. Our contemporary understanding of gravity comes from Einstein’s theory, which continues to stand as one of the best-tested theories in science. His 107-year-old theory also predicted many scientific phenomena years before they were observed, including the existence of black holes, gravitational waves, gravitational lensing and the expansion of the universe. ![]() Normally stars near the Sun are overwhelmed by the bright sky but during a solar eclipse, the Moon obscures the Sun, creating a sky dark enough to photograph stars.Įinstein’s theory revealed a radically new framework for physics, abolishing existing notions of space and time. The theory predicts that light from a distant star, passing near the Sun, will follow the curve as it travels to the Earth, making the star appear to be displaced in the sky – it even predicts by how much the stars will appear to be out of place! Did you know extensive work took place to prove Albert Einstein’s ground breaking Theory of General Relativity?Īlbert Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, first presented in 1915, states that massive objects, such as planets and stars, curve the fabric of space and time around them. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() I, for one, have no idea which were which. It is supposed to be a melding of events that are entirely true and wildly fictional. It is hard to know how to describe this story. and possibly murder.Įndlessly surprising, this sly, sharp-edged narrative is the author at his very best, making readers laugh out loud at the most unexpected things in a dead-funny depiction of growing up in a slightly off-kilter place where the past is present, the present is confusing, and the future is completely up in the air. ![]() As one obituary leads to another, Jack is launced on a strange adventure involving molten wax, Eleanor Roosevelt, twisted promises, a homemade airplane, Girl Scout cookies, a man on a trike, a dancing plague, voices from the past, Hells Angels. But plenty of excitement (and shocks) are coming Jack's way once his mom loans him out to help a fiesty old neighbor with a most unusual chore-typewriting obituaries filled with stories about the people who founded his utopian town. Melding the entirely true and the wildly fictional, Dead End in Norvelt is a novel about an incredible two months for a kid named Jack Gantos, whose plans for vacation excitement are shot down when he is "grounded for life" by his feuding parents, and whose nose spews bad blood at every little shock he gets. Dead End in Norvelt is the winner of the 2012 Newbery Medal for the year's best contribution to children's literature and the Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction! ![]() ![]() ![]() I had occasion to ask those questions recently when I began writing an article about the anti-business journalism of New York Times financial columnist Gretchen Morgenson (published in this issue of TNI). Milton Friedman not pro-capitalist? Is the pope Protestant? What did Rand mean? Over the years, whenever I have set out to gather analyses of economic interventionism and anti-business leftism, I have often turned to Friedman first.Īnd yet I distinctly remember hearing philosopher Ayn Rand remark that she did not consider Milton Friedman to be a defender of capitalism at all, although she understood why some people thought he was. My educational debt to him stretches back four decades, to that famous book, which I read in high school shortly after its publication. Personally, I learned an inestimable amount about economic liberty from Milton Friedman. The article’s subtitle read: “The man who made free markets popular again.” The editorial in the next day’s Wall Street Journal carried the headline “Capitalism and Friedman,” playing off the title of his 1962 work Capitalism and Freedom. ![]() Last year, on November 16 (the anniversary of the Federal Reserve System, ironically), Milton Friedman died at the age of ninety-four. ![]() ![]() Oscar’s second adventure There’s a Goldfish in my Shoe! was released in the fall of 2009, the same year that Valerie's debut juvenile novel, Tumbleweed Skies, was published. In 2008 There’sĪ COW Under My Bed! introduced Oscar Ollie Brown. Although nearly three decades went by before she began to pursue writing seriously, Valerie never forgot her teacher’s words.Īfter producing a number of books for teens, Sherrard turned her hand to picture books and juvenile novels. Alf Lower, praised and encouraged her efforts and instilled in her a lifelong belief in her ability to write. ![]() ![]() Valerie Sherrard first decided to become an author when she was in grade six! Her homeroom teacher that year, Mr. ![]() ![]() ![]() Prior to the Ban, which became law in June 1599 at the behest of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London, Shakespeare had written many plays depicting episodes from English history in a manner which satirized his own time. It seems likely that Shakespeare wrote the play shortly after the so-called Bishops' Ban had forbidden the printing of new English history plays. ![]() ![]() Who are the heroes? Where are the out and out villains, the machiavels, who are so evident in many of Shakespeare's other plays? Where are the women? Is their relative absence significant? What does it say about politics and politicians? What does it say about the people? As a play which showcases the art of rhetoric, what does it say about rhetoric itself? If the play is to be considered a tragedy, where is there evidence of nobility or the tragic flaw which is nobility's undoing? What is the moral perspective?īefore we begin answering the multifarious questions that Julius Caesar poses, let's look at the historical context in which it was written. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() And slowly, the stories of her roots begin to change how Gayle sees her future. Gayle is stuck cleaning up after Great, the old family matriarch who stays upstairs in her bed.īut the more she spends time with Cookie and Great, Gayle learns about her family's history and secrets, stretching all the way back through the preachers and ancestors of the past. In a small town in Georgia, there is nowhere to go but church, nothing to do but chores, and no friends except her goody-goody, big-boned, kneesock-wearing cousin, Cookie. When fourteen-year-old Gayle gets in trouble with a boy-again-her mother doesn't give her a choice: Gayle is getting sent away from New York to her family down South, along with her baby, José. T his novel by a master storyteller and Newbery Honor-winning author is about one girl's discovery of her family history-and her own place within it. Rita Williams-Garcia's masterful and bold Coretta Scott King Honor Book is fresh, funny, and powerfully relevant. ![]() |