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The Devils’ Dance, Hamid Ismailov Review
The Devils’ Dance by Hamid Ismailov is an unusual novel which shines a light on Central Asia, a region that is still little known in the West. Even today, the Sovietised khanates Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan are generally remembered for being pawns in the Great Game played between Britain and Russia in the nineteenth century as the two imperial powers struggled…
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#book club choice#book review#BookBlast Celebrates Independent Publishing#bookblast recommends#fiction in translation#historical fiction#prizewinning authors#Russian Imperialism
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Helllooo so, reading certain fun posts over at @gabessquishytum ‘s place got me thinking of one of my fave movies and like—
Dream spent years trapped by social expectations in an unhappy and unwanted marraige with Alex Burgess, ignored and withdrawn into his own little world. He has his greenhouse and his bizarre prize-winning hybrid roses, his unpublished forever-not-quite-finished manuscripts, and that’s enough, he thinks.
Until Alex kicks the proverbial bucket and Dream learns that the Burgess family fortune has been so badly mismanaged, he’s inherited nothing from his late husband but a drafty old mansion sitting on a pile of debt.
The creditors are closing in and Dream…hates the house. He always hated it. But dammit, spite is a hell of a drug. He hates his family as much as he ever hated Alex and Fawney Rig, and he refuses to be kicked out of his own home. He needs a source of income, asap.
Luckily his gardener Matthew has pot plants growing in the hedges and more optimism than sense. Win win!
Pretty soon there’s A Lot More than prizewinning roses growing in Dream’s greenhouse. A lot more. Dream must have some sort of eldrich gardening powers, because this stuff is insanely potent and is also growing out of control. They need to find some way to unload this crop, and fast. Dream needs money. The authorities are getting suspicious. Matthew doesn’t want to go to prison. The whole town knows. So off they head towards the big city to try to find a buyer.
And find a buyer they do!
Hob Gadling isn’t…exactly a crime lord. He’d never describe himself that way. He’s just a creatively savvy businessman. And he’s never been more entertained by ANYONE more than he is by this gorgeous and charmingly awkward lunatic who’s somehow wandered into his little seedy underworld with a gardener and the weirdest story that he’s ever heard. He’s head over heels, instantly. And he’s determined to keep Dream out of trouble, if not just because Dream’s wildly delicious, than at least because Hob firmly believes that no one should go to jail for objectively funny crimes.
…I’m just trying to decide who it is in this version of the story that ends up on the floor, stoned out of their mind, eating cereal out of the box and wearing googly-eye glasses. Please watch this movie, for that scene ALONE.
…The gardener in the film’s actually named Matthew and I tend to envision my Sandman-verse human!Matthew based on the Matthew from this flick. Though Grace’s gardener!Matthew was actually Scottish. (The trying-pot-for-the-first-time scene works just as well with Dream looking at Matthew, blurting out “…you’re American!” and then laughing like a lunatic.)
…After the Whole Incident At The End That No One In Town Can Remember, Dream and Hob rename Fawney Rig to Fiddler’s Green, Dream publishes his novels, and of course they rebuild the greenhouse. Bigger this time. And everyone lives happily ever after.
#Dreamling#the sandman netflix#dreamling au#Saving Grace#hob gadling#dream of the endless#wild au speculation#I need to replace my dvd of this flick#before I can even attempt to write this
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Never in My Wildest Dreams by ElleannaQ (@little-engineer-who-cant)
She met him when she was breathing too quickly, blinking back hot tears from her eyes, hands shaking and her hitching sobs barely stifled so as not to make a scene when she slipped out. She met him in the midst of beautiful trellises, painstakingly cultivated vines and prizewinning blooms and the first thing she thought towards his not-at-all defined figure was get away from me.
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Edwina wants a quiet season and secrets herself off in shaded corners and empty gardens to do so. Pity for her peace of mind that many of those corners are already occupied.
loving this fic so far!! we have a broody, post war marquess, davin reynolds, whose sister is the newest diamond and edwina stumbles across him also hiding in the gardens. it's a wonderful friendship struck up by two people fed up with the ton. also the author has edwina spot on!! love this, have a read!!
#moodboards are one of my love languages#fic rec monday#gift edit#bridgerton#bridgerton fic#historical romance#edwina sharma#edwina sharma x oc#fic rec
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Oh yeah Microsoft Word? You’re gonna try to correct prizewinning author Banana Yoshimoto? You’ve got issues with the prose of international bestseller Banana Yoshimoto? You think touchstone of modern Japanese literature Banana Yoshimoto could’ve been a little more succinct? Go fuck yourself Microsoft Word.
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Nonfiction Recommendations: Jewish American Heritage Month
Black, White and Jewish by Rebecca Walker
The Civil Rights movement brought author Alice Walker and lawyer Mel Leventhal together, and in 1969 their daughter, Rebecca, was born. Some saw this unusual copper-colored girl as an outrage or an oddity; others viewed her as a symbol of harmony, a triumph of love over hate. But after her parents divorced, leaving her a lonely only child ferrying between two worlds that only seemed to grow further apart, Rebecca was no longer sure what she represented. In this book, Rebecca Leventhal Walker attempts to define herself as a soul instead of a symbol—and offers a new look at the challenge of personal identity, in a story at once strikingly unique and truly universal.
Bad Jews by Emily Tamkin
What does it mean to be a Bad Jew? Many Jews use the term “Bad Jew” as a weapon against other members of the community or even against themselves. You can be called a Bad Jew if you don’t keep kosher; if you only go to temple on Yom Kippur; if you don’t attend or send your children to Hebrew school; if you enjoy Christmas music; if your partner isn’t Jewish; if you don’t call your mother often enough. The list is endless.
In Bad Jews, Emily Tamkin argues that perhaps there is no answer to this timeless question at all. Throughout American history, Jewish identities have evolved and transformed in a variety of ways. American Jewish history is full of discussions and debates and hand wringing over who is Jewish, how to be Jewish, and what it means to be Jewish. In this book, Emily Tamkin examines the last 100 years of American Jewish politics, culture, identities, and arguments. Drawing on over 150 interviews, she tracks the evolution of Jewishness throughout American history, and explores many of the evolving and conflicting Jewish positions on assimilation; race; Zionism and Israel; affluence and poverty, philanthropy, finance, politics; and social justice. From this complex and nuanced history, Tamkin pinpoints perhaps the one truth about American Jewish It is always changing.
Genius & Anxiety by Norman Lebrecht
In a hundred-year period, a handful of men and women changed the way we see the world. Many of them are well known—Marx, Freud, Proust, Einstein, Kafka. Others have vanished from collective memory despite their enduring importance in our daily lives. Without Karl Landsteiner, for instance, there would be no blood transfusions or major surgery. Without Paul Ehrlich, no chemotherapy. Without Siegfried Marcus, no motor car. Without Rosalind Franklin, genetic science would look very different. Without Fritz Haber, there would not be enough food to sustain life on earth.
What do these visionaries have in common? They all had Jewish origins. They all had a gift for thinking in wholly original, even earth-shattering ways. In 1847 the Jewish people made up less than 0.25% of the world’s population, and yet they saw what others could not. How? Why?
Norman Lebrecht has devoted half of his life to pondering and researching the mindset of the Jewish intellectuals, writers, scientists, and thinkers who turned the tides of history and shaped the world today as we know it. In Genius & Anxiety, Lebrecht begins with the Communist Manifesto in 1847 and ends in 1947, when Israel was founded. This robust, magnificent volume, beautifully designed, is an urgent and necessary celebration of Jewish genius and contribution.
People Love Dead Jews by Dara Horn
Renowned and beloved as a prizewinning novelist, Dara Horn has also been publishing penetrating essays since she was a teenager. Often asked by major publications to write on subjects related to Jewish culture—and increasingly in response to a recent wave of deadly antisemitic attacks—Horn was troubled to realize what all of these assignments had in common: she was being asked to write about dead Jews, never about living ones. In these essays, Horn reflects on subjects as far-flung as the international veneration of Anne Frank, the mythology that Jewish family names were changed at Ellis Island, the blockbuster traveling exhibition Auschwitz, the marketing of the Jewish history of Harbin, China, and the little-known life of the "righteous Gentile" Varian Fry. Throughout, she challenges us to confront the reasons why there might be so much fascination with Jewish deaths, and so little respect for Jewish lives unfolding in the present.
Horn draws upon her travels, her research, and also her own family life—trying to explain Shakespeare’s Shylock to a curious ten-year-old, her anger when swastikas are drawn on desks in her children’s school, the profound perspective offered by traditional religious practice and study—to assert the vitality, complexity, and depth of Jewish life against an antisemitism that, far from being disarmed by the mantra of "Never forget," is on the rise. As Horn explores the (not so) shocking attacks on the American Jewish community in recent years, she reveals the subtler dehumanization built into the public piety that surrounds the Jewish past—making the radical argument that the benign reverence we give to past horrors is itself a profound affront to human dignity.
#jewish american heritage month#jewish heritage#judaism#nonfiction#nonfiction books#Nonfiction Reading#history#Reading Recs#reading recommendations#Book Recommendations#book recs#TBR pile#tbr#tbrpile#to read#Want To Read#Booklr#book tumblr#book blog#library blog
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(JTA) — Bruce Friedman was moved by “The Diary of Anne Frank” when he read it at age 9. As a child in a kosher-keeping Jewish home on Long Island, he saw in the Holocaust memoir an essential lesson for Jewish and non-Jewish children alike.
“You learn to sympathize, empathize, share the fear and the horror and the fright and disgust with man’s inhumanity to man,” he recalled about the book. “And it’s not just the Nazis. It’s the human condition. We’re really good at hurting each other.”
And yet decades later, Friedman filed a challenge with his local school district in Florida to remove a new version of the diary from classroom shelves. The book, he wrote on a district form, “does disservice to lessons on the Holocaust.”
He added, in all-caps, “PROTECT CHILDREN!”
Last month, the local school board sided with Friedman and voted to remove “Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation” from all grade levels in the district, with a spokesperson saying it was removed “based on state statute.” Also removed based on Friedman’s challenge: William Styron’s Holocaust novel “Sophie’s Choice.”
The successes followed two of hundreds of challenges Friedman has filed against books in Clay County, near Jacksonville, where he moved from New York during the pandemic. He has files on thousands more books that others have challenged. From his home there, the Jewish father has become one of the country’s most prolific and zealous participants in the movement to purge public schools of certain books.
The movement has largely targeted books featuring LGBTQ themes and content about racial equity, while catching books on other topics — including Jewish stories — in its dragnet. In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis has embedded the values of the movement into state law, making it easier for a small number of parents — or even just one — to force their districts to make books inaccessible to students.
The movement is most closely associated with a group called Moms of Liberty and inherits its worldview and tactics from decades of Christian family-values advocacy. But it turns out its flag-bearers can be Jewish dads, too.
Friedman recognizes that he stands out. “I figured we’d have a lot to talk about, Jew boy,” he told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
He stands out in another way, too. Unlike many of his fellow book challengers, Friedman, a self-identified “bibliophile,” insists he reads every book he seeks to remove. He documents his objections as he goes in reams of challenge forms that he stores in his home office.
In objecting to a children’s biography of Harriet Tubman, for example, he says, “Telling them that the Civil War was all about slavery is a lie.” The picture book “Arthur’s Birthday,” featuring the cartoon aardvark, was bad in his view because “it is not appropriate to discuss ‘spin the bottle’ with elementary school children.” To Friedman, “Americanah,” a prizewinning novel by Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie about the immigrant experience, is “a horrible piece of garbage.” Reading from his own file on the book, he listed off its problems: “Attempted suicide, immigration fraud, promiscuity, infidelity, abortion, racism, sex, critical race theory.”
For months Friedman has battled the Clay County school board over books, even becoming a conservative folk hero when his antics at a school board meeting drew censure. This week, when Friedman attempted to read from the Mindy McGuinnis novel “Heroine,” about the opioid crisis, board members cut off his microphone, telling him there were children present. When he attempted to keep reading, two police officers escorted him from the podium.
Yet a newer board member has frequently taken his side, recently describing “every single book we’ve banned” as “filthy, filthy pornography” and adding, “People who tell you different have not read the books, period.”
Recently, the board met to revise its book policy — but a school district official said Friedman would complicate the task.
“Mr. Friedman’s erratic and inconsistent challenges make it impossible for us to predict and devise a solution,” the school district’s chief academic officer, Roger Dailey, told the board during its Sept. 26 workshop. “I don’t know that there is a way to satisfy him.”
More than 60% of all book challenges nationwide in the 2021-2022 school year came from just 11 people. In this context, the volume of Friedman’s challenges carry weight far beyond his own district — and he’s only picked up the pace since.
“He’s been incredibly successful,” said Tasslyn Magnusson, who researches school book bans for the literary free-speech group PEN America and considers Friedman one of the biggest players in a movement she sees as attacking public education. “He’s by far the best example of how this is not about the books, but this is about destroying the system.”
Friedman’s allies, too, say he is making an outsized impact. He is “an amazing person, very patient, compassionate, and really wanted to dig into the issue of the books,” said Elana Yaron Fishbein, the founder of No Left Turn in Education, which has a list of books it deems “problematic.” Friedman is the group’s Florida chapter head; with his master list of every book challenged in every district, Fishbein said, he “really went above and beyond.”
Friedman is not the only Jew who is active in the book-challenge movement. There is Fishbein, an Israeli-born mother and a former employee of the Philadelphia Jewish federation who founded No Left Turn in Education in 2020 to combat what she says is “a leftist agenda” in public and private schools. And Brooke Weiss, a Jewish mother in Charlotte, North Carolina, is a lead organizer in Moms For Liberty. Weiss told JTA she has never challenged a book herself, but she helped put together the group’s first-ever conference earlier this year, attended by several Republican presidential candidates.
Yet Friedman, who is involved in both groups, stands out for the sheer volume and intensity of his challenges; he is responsible for more than a third of all challenges in Florida, and for 94% of the challenges in his district, which has acceded to hundreds of his requests to pull books and has removed more books than any other in the state as a result. He insists that his efforts are on behalf of children like his own, whom he pulled from public school when they lived back in New York out of concerns about what the child was learning there.
“I want all lessons in all schools to respect innocence,” Friedman told JTA.
Friedman said his father was a Navy veteran who worked printing art for periodicals, while his mother worked a variety of jobs including as an accountant, seamstress and Yiddish teacher. He celebrated his bar mitzvah in Jerusalem, visiting the Western Wall. His parents, who are still alive, raised him “Conservative, leaning Orthodox” — he now participates in Jewish life via his local Chabad-Lubavitch center — and they imparted other values, too.
“My house that I grew up in was filled with books, and I had unfettered access to everything,” Friedman said. “I was the kind of guy who would stay close to librarians. The library was my happy place.”
Now, looking back, he says the unfettered access wasn’t always to his benefit. He has challenged “Slaughterhouse-Five,” the classic by Kurt Vonnegut about the bombing of Dresden during World War II, which he said he wrongly appreciated as a 12-year-old. “When I read it I had no regard for my own innocence,” he said.
Friedman attended multiple colleges in the New York area and worked as a construction manager in New York. He became radicalized by what he saw in public schools a decade ago, when his wife’s son entered kindergarten on Long Island. Schools in New York and around the country had recently adopted the Common Core, a set of educational standards meant to unify and improve what is taught across districts and states.
The standards had drawn backlash from conservatives who saw them as trampling on the principle of local control of schools. (People from across the ideological spectrum also argued that — in language presaging the book-ban movement — the standards were not always “age-appropriate” for children.)
Friedman said the standards caused his now-stepson to experience “considerable harm,” declining to offer specifics. The couple pulled him from public school and enrolled him in an evangelical Christian school that had eschewed the Common Core. The school’s outlook was also new for Friedman’s wife, who was raised Catholic, and the religious approach was not his own — “I was born a Jew. I will die a Jew,” Friedman said — but the family loved the school. When he saw Fishbein talking about No Left Turn on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show following the 2020 racial justice protests, he knew he had found his new cause.
Friedman moved his family from New York to Florida during the pandemic, “in pursuit of less tyrannical, more favorable governance and in the spirit of liberty.” (He noted that while he doesn’t regret the move, he does miss his family and “the pizza.”) His arrival in Florida came just as DeSantis was making “parents’ rights” a legislative priority. The timing was perfect for him to inaugurate No Left Turn’s presence in that state.
When Friedman and his family moved to Florida, he made the decision to put his son — now in high school — back in public school, believing that his evangelical education had given him “a very good moral base” that would insulate him from danger. But he forbade his stepson from ever using the school library and threw himself into monitoring the library’s contents.
There were so many parents out there, Friedman reasoned, who didn’t have time to thoroughly monitor their children’s media consumption like he did. Even if most of those parents might be fine with their kid reading the occasional racy book passage, some might not be.
“It’s not the kids that have a wicked dark sense of humor like I was,” he said, describing the child he pictures in his head when he files his challenges. “It’s for the sheltered little people who have parents that are so concerned with their souls that they don’t want them harmed.”
Friedman soon began reading school library books in his spare time, searching for objectionable content he could denounce, and scouring negative online reviews for more dirt on the books. He has turned the book challenge process into a science, filing flurries of official request forms — often with only one or two words of objection listed on them — which, under state law, must be considered by a formal review committee. He also has the ability to appeal any decision the committee makes, and usually does, if the decision doesn’t involve removing the book.��
Recently, he says he landed a local job — but he has kept up the book challenges. “Employment has not slowed me,” he said. “I have the time to devote because I am a very motivated and determined person, and also because I don’t eat or sleep as I ought to.”
For the book challenges Friedman doesn’t author, he volunteers to serve on the committee that will decide their fates, as a parent representative. He then attends public board meetings to hammer home his objections in person; he went viral last year when he attempted to read aloud from a memoir by author Alice Sebold at one board meeting, as part of his justification for why he wanted it removed from the district.
As Friedman began reciting Sebold’s graphic accounting of a sexual assault, the board cut off his mic, warning him not to read “pornography” during a meeting being streamed to the public. “Hush your mouth and listen,” the school board attorney instructed him. This was hypocrisy, Friedman thought: If he can’t read a book aloud at a public board meeting because it’s pornographic, why should that same book be available in public school libraries?
Thanks in part to Friedman’s inspiration, reading objectionable book passages aloud at school board meetings has since become a tried-and-true tactic for activists who want books removed. Recent legislation in Florida even encourages such behavior by requiring boards to remove the book if they cut off such a reading for obscenity concerns.
The intensity of the efforts to ban books in Clay County has alarmed some educators there.
“One of the courses that I teach is on the Holocaust,” a district history teacher said during a school board meeting last year, speaking against the district’s mass book removals spurred on by Friedman. “Do I need to paint you a picture?”
A picture is exactly what Friedman didn’t like about the illustrated version of “The Diary of Anne Frank,” which was adapted by Ari Folman and David Polonsky and published in 2018 by the foundation that controls the diary’s copyright. In an image inspired by a passage in Frank’s original diary, she shares a brief memory of same-sex attraction, which was unacceptable to Friedman.
“The fact that little Anne Frank once had some lesbian thoughts that made their way into her diary, does that help a kid learn the horrors of Holocaust or inhumanity? No. So what is it helping the kid learn?” he asked. Employing a term, sometimes used as part of anti-LGBTQ rhetoric, that describes adults training children to accept sexual abuse, he added, “As far as I’m concerned, it’s grooming.”
Friedman’s opposition to the book distinguishes him from Fishbein, who said she supports only “some” of Friedman’s challenges, such as one for the frequently challenged graphic novel “Gender Queer.” The Anne Frank adaptation is a different story: “We do not oppose the use of this book in schools,” she said. Friedman himself has taken to clarifying, in his challenges, that he is not acting on behalf of No Left Turn even as he continues to use an email address associated with the group.
Yet his campaign against “Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation” has caught on. Since Friedman first pushed his district to review the book this past winter, another Florida district removed it outright after it was challenged by a Moms For Liberty member there. Last month, a school in Texas fired a teacher who reportedly read it aloud to her eighth-grade students.
Critics of Friedman’s movement say it builds on a history of censorship that has always boded ill for the Jews. Copies of Jewish texts have been burned by antisemitic regimes throughout history, including France in the 1200s and the Roman Inquisition in the 1500s. The Nazis led a campaign not only to burn Jewish books, but also to wipe out what they deemed “degenerate art” — which often meant, if not works by Jews, then modernist pieces the regime considered to be vulgar or not generally supportive of their aims.
“There are parallels with book burnings,” Aaron Herschel Shapiro, an instructor of Jewish American literature at Middle Tennessee State University, told JTA about the contemporary movement. “The rhetoric alone makes that clear. The books, and the ideas they contain, are framed as some sort of cultural contagion that must be purged. That’s a bit on the nose, no?”
The Association of Jewish Libraries has come out against the movement that Friedman represents. “Book bans result in the suppression of history and distortion of readers’ understanding of the world around them,” the group said in a statement last year.
Despite the fact that at least one Moms For Liberty chapter has quoted Hitler in its communications, Weiss says she sees her movement as actually safeguarding Jewish stories and students. She became involved in Moms for Liberty after her daughter was asked, on a quiz about the Octavia Butler novel “Kindred,” to compare slavery and the Holocaust; the correct answer was that slavery was “just as horrible over a much longer duration,” which Weiss said was “Holocaust-minimizing.” Still, she said, “Even my mother has made the claim that this organization is antisemitic.”
Some of the most prominent Jews in the book-banning movement reject any uncomfortable historical resonances. “If we are talking about removing ‘Gender Queer’ from the school, why does that not work out well for the Jews?” Fishbein said. “What does that have to do with Jews or not Jews?”
Friedman, too, rejects the criticism, which he said in an email is coming from “misinformed people that feel it’s a precursor to the next Krystallnacht,” referring to the pogrom that is considered the start of the Holocaust.
“When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When you, Andrew, represent your Jewish publication, the JTA, you might feel that everything on earth is about Jewishness,” he said. “The only thing Jewish about my efforts is that they seem to connect with our people’s passion for justice.”
Friedman is continuing his challenges at a full pace, and told the board at its September meeting that he would continue doing so until it established “a rubric and a guideline” for how to better deal with content he believes is “pornographic.” This month, he filed one for Antonio Iturbe’s young-adult Holocaust novel “The Librarian of Auschwitz.” The book is based on the true story of the Jewish Auschwitz survivor Dita Kraus, who as a teenager guarded a slim volume of smuggled books in the death camp’s children’s unit so that the kids would have something to read. Kraus is still alive today.
Friedman’s challenge to the book, which he shared with JTA, doesn’t mention Kraus’ quest to protect children’s books from Nazis. Instead, he quotes from sections describing nude, emaciated Auschwitz prisoners and Jewish corpses, passages which he believes are inappropriate for all age levels. A message to the board further articulating his objections suggests that his main issue with the book is that it mentions the Holocaust at all.
“Unsupervised forays into the horrors of the Holocaust can be traumatizing for children,” he writes. “They are almost certain to have some impact on a child. I wouldn’t necessarily expect this impact to be positive.” Elsewhere he repeats his familiar objections: “PROTECT CHILDREN,” he writes in all caps. “DAMAGED SOULS.”
Emily Knox, a University of Illinois professor who researches book challenges, told JTA the movement’s ambitions are inherently at odds with learning about the Holocaust.
“The issue with challengers is that they want books to be pure. And so what they will say is, ‘Why would someone put this terrible thing in a book?’” she said. “But it’s impossible to have a clean book on the Holocaust. That’s not something that exists, unless you decenter the Jewish experience in the Holocaust.”
New laws on the horizon would open the door to even more book challenges. Over the summer, Florida passed a new law that allows any county resident, not just parents, to challenge any book in the district. If even a single challenge claims a book contains sexual content, that book would have to be pulled immediately until a further review can be taken.
One book that Friedman personally says he doesn’t plan to challenge is a Holocaust work that has become a symbol of the broader book-ban movement. Art Spiegelman’s graphic memoir “Maus,” which relays the experiences of his father’s survival of the Holocaust, last year was removed from a middle school lesson plan in Tennessee after the board objected to some of its illustrations, and has been on the chopping block in other districts in Missouri and Iowa. But just like with “The Diary of Anne Frank,” Friedman has positive memories of reading the book as a teen.
“I absorbed it immediately. I thought it was fantastic,” Friedman recalled. “As far as graphic novels go, and history lessons at the same time, it’s probably one of the very best.”
Still, he said, he’s fine with local efforts to remove the book from schools — even if it comes at a cost to Jews.
“That’s local control,” he said. “That’s the way it’s supposed to work. Even if their reasons are racist, even if they want that book gone because they don’t want any sympathy for Jews and they hate them, that’s local control.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Bruce Friedman has filed more than 3,000 book challenges. In fact, he has filed hundreds, but maintains a master list of all book challenges filed across the country which totals more than 3,000.
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Historic Haunts
If some of the hauntings in this chapter strike you as more noteworthy than those found elsewhere in the book, that’s only because they occur (or still occur) in famous places, including the battlefield at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida. But for every such site there are at least two you’ve probably never heard of: a nineteenth-century New Orleans mansion, a long-gone lifesaving station on Florida’s east coast, a ramshackle old mansion in Rhode Island.
Moreover, none of the spirits you’ll meet here are those of the American statemen or industrialists or prizewinning authors you remember from your history textbooks, nor are they the ghosts of legendary stars from the world of sports and entertainment. In this chapter, it’s the places haunted by spirits that have some kind of historical significance, whether because the sites were in some way tied to a historic event or are simply representative enough of a former era to be accurately described as historic. Some of these sites can still be visited, while others are either off-limits or no longer stranding.
And the ghosts themselves? Among the cast of characters are Civil War soldiers who may or may not still roam the fields on which they fought, slaves who suffered horribly at the hands of an imperious society figure in old New Orleans, a music-loving young girl in Memphis who made an ornate theatre her home, and ghostly would-be shoppers who poke around the stalls of a famous Seattle market.
Who says that adding a few supernatural shenanigans to your knowledge of history isn’t a good idea? And surely picking up a few real-world historical facts on the occasional page is a bonus.
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(via (8) The power of literature | Caroline Donahue | TEDxGreekStWomen - YouTube)
18 Oct 2024Writer, podcaster, and book coach Caroline Donahue explores the power of literature, delving into how writing books encapsulates the spirit of our time, giving writers a pathway to illuminate more hopeful ways forward in society and culture. Caroline shares the importance of reading and how stories subconsciously teach readers about human relationships, consent and connection - in turn impacting our own relationships in the real world. Caroline is an American writer, podcaster and writing coach who has been investigating the psychology of creativity and writing for over twenty years. Donahue’s books include ‘The Story Arcana Guides: The Author’s Journey’ and ‘Writing through Fear’. She has also hosted the award-winning ‘Secret Library’ podcast; interviewing prizewinning and bestselling debut authors. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community
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One Minute Reviews: The Facts of Life by Graham Joyce
The Facts of Life is a novel by Graham Joyce (1954–2014) set in Coventry shortly after World War II. Its central characters are an elderly woman, Martha Vine, her seven daughters, and her grandson, Frank, who is the out-of-wedlock son of her youngest daughter, Cassie. Cassie has episodes where she wanders off and behaves irrationally, so the family does not believe that she is responsible enough to be capable of raising a child. They agree that they will share the task of raising Frank. He thus grows up in a sequence of households, specifically, those of his grandmother and five of his six aunts.
One of the emphases of the book is on the interpersonal relationships of the Vine family, and on how Martha surreptitiously manipulates her daughters to achieve her goals.
The novel also describes the destruction of Coventry during World War II, as well as its rebuilding afterwards. One of the highlights of the book is a surreal flashback that takes place during the Blitz, from the point of view of Cassie as she is roaming the streets and trying as best she can to help. Joyce was originally from Coventry, and he interviewed survivors of the Coventry Blitz to prepare for writing this book.
Graham Joyce is generally considered a genre author, writing fantasy and horror, but to me, The Facts of Life reads more like literary fiction. There is a supernatural element in this book, in that some of the family members possess the ability to talk to ghosts. In a standard fantasy novel, one might expect the characters to have some control over this ability. However, The Facts of Life treats this supernatural element more like a magical realist novel would: the ghosts intrude at unpredictable times, often delivering cryptic messages. (This may be the reason that Joyce named his character Cassie: like Cassandra in Greek mythology, she knows when the Luftwaffe is going to bomb Coventry, but she can’t tell anybody because nobody would believe her.)
The Guardian’s obituary of Graham Joyce says:
The work of Graham Joyce, the prizewinning author of more than a dozen horror and dark fantasy novels, who has died of cancer aged 59, was largely unacknowledged in the world of mainstream literature, but his books and stories were extraordinarily successful, winning him a huge and admiring popular readership and many awards…. Many critics believe one of his best books to be his ninth novel, The Facts of Life (2002)…. The quality of writing, the detail and insight into the social background, would clearly designate it as a literary novel. But the element of dark fantasy meant that it was generally regarded as a genre novel.
As an aside, let me say that I suspect that the reason The Facts of Life did not come to the attention of the literary fiction community was not the element of fantasy that it contained, but rather that Graham Joyce had already been slotted into the category of fantasy/horror writer, based on his earlier works.
Review submitted by Peter Shor.
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Behind ‘Oppenheimer,’ a Prizewinning Biography 25 Years in the Making
Martin Sherwin was hardly your classic blocked writer. Outgoing, funny, and athletic, he is described by those who knew him as the opposite of neurotic. But by the late 1990s, he had to admit he was stuck. Sherwin, a history professor and the author of one previous book, had agreed to write a full-scale biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer two decades earlier. Now he wondered if he would ever…
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Donald Rayfield OBE author & translator Interview
Donald Rayfield OBE is Emeritus Professor of Russian and Georgian at Queen Mary University of London. He has translated Georgian, Russian and Uzbek poets and prose writers, and won the EBRD literature prize in 2019. What sort of books were in your family home? Which ones had an impact on you as you were growing up? Very few: in my primary-school years my family moved all round Australian mining…
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#adult readers#book club choice#diverse books#exiled writers#literature in translation#prizewinning authors#russian culture#russian history#Russian Imperialism#translator Q&A
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Unbelievers
BOOK REVIEWUnbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubtby Alec Ryrie 2019 About the AuthorAlec Ryrie graduated from Cambridge University with a degree in history and received a doctorate in theology from Oxford University. He is the author of the prizewinning Being Protestant in Reformation Britain and The Sorcerers Tale: Faith and Fraud in Tudor England. About the Book“How has unbelief come to…
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Max Ritvo Poetry Prize
Designed to honor the legacy of one of the most original and accomplished poets to debut in recent years—and to reward outstanding poets for years to come—the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize awards $10,000 and publication by Milkweed Editions to the author of a debut collection of poems. Selected by an independent judge, the prizewinning poet will receive a standard royalty contract, simultaneous publication of the collection in cloth and audiobook editions, national distribution, and a comprehensive marketing and publicity campaign.
Submissions Open: April 1–May 31
https://milkweed.org/max-ritvo-poetry-prize
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Of course, it proved too good to be true - unless it was an in-joke between the two of them...
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Get (Now) Dinners with Ruth: A Memoir on the Power of Friendships BY : Nina Totenberg
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Celebrated NPR correspondent Nina Totenberg delivers an extraordinary memoir of her personal successes, struggles, and life-affirming relationships, including her beautiful friendship of nearly fifty years with Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.Four years before Nina Totenberg was hired at NPR, where she cemented her legacy as a prizewinning reporter, and nearly twenty-two years before Ruth Bader Ginsburg was appointed to the Supreme Court, Nina called Ruth. A reporter for The National Observer, Nina was curious about Ruth?s legal brief, asking the Supreme Court to do something revolutionary: declare a law that discriminated ?on the basis of sex? to be unconstitutional. In a time when women were fired for becoming pregnant, often could not apply for credit cards or get a mortgage in their own names, Ruth patiently explained her argument. That call launched a remarkable, nearly fifty-year friendship. Dinners with Ruth is an extraordinary account of two women who paved the way
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A Hunger - Ross Raisin
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by Ross Raisin.
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Ebook PDF A Hunger | EBOOK ONLINE DOWNLOAD Hello Book lovers, If you want to download free Ebook, you are in the right place to download Ebook. Ebook A Hunger EBOOK ONLINE DOWNLOAD in English is available for free here, Click on the download LINK below to download Ebook A Hunger 2020 PDF Download in English by Ross Raisin (Author).
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From the prizewinning author of God's Own Country and A Natural comes a moving and intimate exploration of marriage, devotion and sacrifice, and a woman's enduring search for freedom.A Hunger is the story of Anita, a talented sous-chef at a high-end London restaurant. At home, however, her husband Patrick is suffering from dementia and declining rapidly. As she is thrown between two conflicting worlds ? the exciting bustle of her kitchen and her exhausting new role as a carer ? Anita must make a decision about her husband's future, as well as her own. Should she free them both by acting on his last plea for mercy, or should she remain faithful to the person Patrick once used to be? A decision complicated by ambition and the guilt of her own past ? and by her intensifying friendship with another man, Peter, and the temptation of a new life.A Hunger is a novel about love and sacrifice, and how illness and duty affect ordinary lives. With tenderness and precision, Ross Raisin explores
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