![]() ![]() ![]() What’s a Jersey girl to do about all this? Something outrageous, of course, that leads to a mad chase on the turnpike-and readers grinning appreciatively at another wonderful romp. So she scrambles an egg and downs a multivitamin with her orange juice: “A healthy breakfast to start the day off right-just in case I lived through the morning.” The ensuing complications include: Champ Ramirez, that no-account sociopath, freed from the slammer and on the prowl for her hunkish Detective Joe Morelli and his special kind of prowling-everlastingly lustful and now senior bounty-hunter Ranger the dangerous, her erstwhile mentor, casting looks at her that are distinctly non-mentorish. In turn, this has the effect of connecting Steph to various hard guys who mean her serious harm. Soon enough, Steph discovers that dead-head Fred is connected to some high-powered scams nobody would have believed he had the gumption for. Besides, not much is happening in the way of miscreants jumping bail, which means she’s got time on her hands. And either the Plums stick together, Stephanie’s told, or they get picked off separately. ![]() Actually, nobody could really miss the disagreeable old coot, but he is family. This time out the trouble (and fun) starts when Steph’s mom informs her that Uncle Fred is missing. Or rather misadventure, since nothing ever goes right for Stephanie, thank heaven. Stephanie Plum, the bodacious bounty-hunter from Trenton, New Jersey, returns for her fifth adventure (Four to Score, 1998, etc.). ![]()
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![]() Author Tract: In one letter, Father Christmas spends some time talking about how much he dislikes cars.Father Christmas' handwriting is particularly trembly, although his hand usually steadies up when he has to draw anything his secretary's notes in the margins are written in a neat, flowing hand and in a different color of ink the North Polar Bear writes with vaguely runic block letters, and draws in a similarly bold and angular style. ![]()
![]() ![]() But he was a Carlisle, for heaven’s sake! Did Father truly expect him to give up all his wild ways? Certainly, he’d reined himself in and was decidedly more careful now, including staying away from the married ladies of the ton. ![]() So he’d promised to put the reputation of the family and its legacy before all else. He didn’t know which was worse-being threatened to a duel by Lord Bancroft or seeing the disappointment on Father’s face. Good God, he still felt the embarrassment of that evening. ![]() After all, that talk with Father last year when he’d gotten caught with Lady Bancroft provided enough of an object lesson to last a lifetime. But his parents disapproved of the women whose company he favored, so he’d had no choice but to spend time covering his tracks. Damnation, he’d been out later than he’d intended. Sebastian Carlisle strode up the front steps of Park Place just as the first pinks of dawn began to lighten the sky. ![]() ![]() Their stories are told in layers and chapters which alternate past with present. In the modern view of the same place it is now a Trump-governed land and Willa is the main protagonist – a woman who has been blown into a tumble-down home with her rag-tag family of husband, adult daughter, father-in-law and a motherless grandchild. ![]() In the process, Thatcher gets to meet both Treat and Landis, although only one – significantly – becomes a friend. She then creates the fictional character of science teacher Thatcher Greenwood who strives to bring a new curriculum to the Vineland school. Heading back to the late 1870s, she takes town founder and one-time mayor Charles Landis and renowned botanist Mary Treat, and embellishes on the known facts. Kingsolver has taken the bare bones of history and bent them into the present day setting of Vineland in New Jersey. The themes of caring for our environment and pushing back against the darker side of capitalism often emerge in her work and do so again in her magnificent work Unsheltered. ![]() Thoughtful readers who care about the environment are likely to sit up when American novelist Barbara Kingsolver brings out a new book. ![]() Gillian McAinsh reviews Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver ![]() ![]() ![]() Kenji shows up, ready for the upcoming battle, and it is evident to Adam, that like himself, Kenji is also wary of Juliette, as neither of them know who else could have hurt Kenji. The boys head out to the mess hall in the morning, and Juliette joins Adam while he tries to eat–neither of them can eat, because different events are gnawing at them internally. ![]() But it turns out that the news has spread that Warner has escaped Omega Point, somehow, though no one knows how, and Adam is pissed because he thinks Castle was in the wrong letting Warner walk around like that. ![]() James says something about an individual being gone, and Adam assumes that James is referring to Kenji, who was grievously injured trying to stop a fight between Adam and Warner, at the same time that Juliette was doing that. What It’s About: Adam is woken up by his younger brother, James, yapping at him in the early morning hours. ![]() ![]() ![]() Little wonder that the family dynamics dominated newspaper headlines for decades starting in the 1920s, when Nancy and Diana were debutantes, prominent among the cast of Bright Young Things. Jessica, the Communist, and then the journalist. Then there was Diana, known first as a great beauty of her generation, then as the fascist. Pamela, the “boring” one, as Tina Brown described in a New York Times review of a 2016 group biography. Just now, a Mitford revival has been sparked by the excellent adaptation of the eldest sister’s popular postwar novel The Pursuit of Love. Their associations and affairs are the stuff of 20th-century-history exams. And why not? They were beautiful, aristocratic, and wild. ![]() Still, every now and then, there is a flurry of new, or renewed, interest in the Mitford girls. After close to a century of tabloid features on one or all six of them, the youngest and last surviving died in 2014 at age 94. The Mitford sisters never really go anywhere-they are all dead, so perhaps a difficult task. ![]() ![]() Buddhism holds that human suffering is a result of not seeing the world clearly-and proposes that seeing the world more clearly, through meditation, will make us better, happier people. And it is designed to make happiness hard to sustain.īut if we know our minds are rigged for anxiety, depression, anger, and greed, what do we do? Wright locates the answer in Buddhism, which figured out thousands of years ago what scientists are only discovering now. ![]() The mind is designed to often delude us, he argued, about ourselves and about the world. ![]() Robert Wright famously explained in The Moral Animal how evolution shaped the human brain. From one of America’s greatest minds, a journey through psychology, philosophy, and lots of meditation to show how Buddhism holds the key to moral clarity and enduring happiness. ![]() ![]() But he realises some of his audience-especially some of the old guard-will not be able to accept his evidence and line of reasoning. He knows his views will be seen as controversial by some of his contemporaries, and he’s out to convince. That should be a good enough reason for anyone to read it.ĭarwin describes his masterpiece as ‘one long argument’. ![]() To read Origin is to have the theory explained to you by the man himself. Darwin’s great theory of evolution by means of natural selection forms the foundation of modern biology. ![]() True, some of the language is occasionally heavy going-Darwin wrote in haste, had a thing for double negatives and rogue commas, and occasionally embarked on convoluted, heavily nested sentences requiring several deep breaths to read out loud-but, minor stylistic concerns aside, over a century and a half after its publication, Origin is still a rewarding read for anyone wanting to get inside the mind of one of the most important figures in the history of science. As revolutionary scientific works go, Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species is remarkably accessible to the ordinary reader. ![]() ![]() ![]() Neither of the Williams sisters has even kissed a boy, but they are poor and Black, and for those handling the family’s welfare benefits, that’s reason enough to have the girls on birth control. At the Montgomery Family Planning Clinic, she hopes to help women shape their destinies, to make their own choices for their lives and bodies.īut when her first week on the job takes her along a dusty country road to a worn-down one-room cabin, Civil is shocked to learn that her new patients, Erica and India, are children-just eleven and thirteen years old. Fresh out of nursing school, Civil Townsend intends to make a difference, especially in her African American community. Inspired by true events that rocked the nation, a searing and compassionate new novel about a Black nurse in post-segregation Alabama who blows the whistle on a terrible injustice done to her patients, from the New York Times bestselling author of Wench “Deeply empathetic yet unflinching in its gaze…an unforgettable exploration of responsibility and redemption.”-Celeste Ng ![]() Winner of the 2023 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work - Fiction ![]() ![]() ![]() Of course, the abhorrent and absurd truth is that both Lexington and Jarret are considered livestock, resources to be exploited until they die. The young man and the horse are sent south, eventually to the massive racing operation of Richard Ten Broeck in Louisiana. Warfield is blackmailed into selling both Lexington and Jarret. It turns out there is a law forbidding Black people from running horses, and so Dr. ![]() Once Lexington wins his first race, Harry’s ownership gives covetous White horsemen the necessary leverage to take the animal from him. Elisha Warfield, offers to give the colt Lexington to Harry in lieu of a year’s wages so that Harry, if he makes the horse a success, might earn enough to purchase his son. Jarret is the child of Harry Lewis, a horse trainer who was able to buy his own freedom in antebellum Kentucky. ![]() |