5/24/2023 0 Comments Andrew roberts george 3![]() ![]() President Obama famously shillyshallied, before essentially denying it. There is a great debate in modern America about whether the United States is an exceptional nation. Indeed, he was almost the personification of an Enlightenment monarch and Renaissance prince. ![]() Yet what the Americans did in 1776 was to rebel against a king who was not oppressing them. History is so replete with such examples that the story is almost banal. Plenty of peoples throughout history have seized their sovereign independence because they were being oppressed: the biblical Israelites escaping the Egyptians the sixteenth-century Dutch throwing off the Spanish yoke the Greeks rebelling against centuries of Turkish rule the nineteenth-century Italians rejecting the Habsburg Austrians. Americans are rarely accused of underestimating themselves, but might they in fact be a greater people than they think? That thought has regularly occurred to me over the past three years while I was researching and writing my new biography of their last king, George III, and especially when I read Richard Brookhiser’s insightful comment in his recent book Give Me Liberty, where he points out that Britain’s thirteen American colonies in the 1760s and early 1770s were among “the freest societies in the world.” ![]()
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5/24/2023 0 Comments The family romanov![]() They are timeless and seem to represent not just the lost world of old tsarist Russia but also the ruthless and arbitrary brutality of the revolution that destroyed them. It is impossible to resist the lure of those touching, and now iconic, images of Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia in their pretty white lace dresses and large picture hats. You only have to look at any of the illustrated books on the Romanovs to see how incredibly photogenic they were. I wanted, with a passion, to tell the story of those four lovely, much photographed but historically neglected sisters. ![]() Walking the streets of the city, and more importantly, going out into the Koptyaki Forest where the family’s bodies were dumped after they were murdered in July 1918, left an indelible impression on my mind and my creative imagination. ![]() Sense of place is very important to me as a writer, and I was particularly gripped by it when I went to Western Siberia. They were constantly in my head after I visited Ekaterinburg in the summer of 2007 to research my first Romanov book, Ekaterinburg: The Last Days of the Romanovs. ![]() I have always been haunted by the story of the four Romanov sisters. ![]() 5/24/2023 0 Comments Read wait for it by mariana zapata![]() ![]() ![]() I have to tell you that I really have some mad love for this book!Įvery now and again, a read will just leave me speechless where I don’t feel able to write a complete review to do it justice. ![]() The Wall of Winnipeg and Me was such a pleasant surprise and excellent introduction to Zapata’s writing. I also enjoy sports romances, but other than knowing this was about football, I went into this quite blindly. I only hear wonderful things about Mariana Zapata, so I’ve really been looking forward to reading her books for quite some time now. What do you say to the man who is used to getting everything he wants? She has plans and none of them include washing extra-large underwear longer than necessaryīut when Aiden Graves shows up at her door wanting her to come back, she’s beyond shocked.įor two years, the man known as The Wall of Winnipeg couldn’t find it in him to tell her good morning or congratulate her on her birthday. Being an assistant/housekeeper/fairy godmother to the top defensive end in the National Football Organization was always supposed to be temporary. ![]() Vanessa Mazur knows she’s doing the right thing. I have some crazy mad love for The Wall of Winnipeg and Me, and my goodness, I can’t believe I waited so long to read Mariana Zapata’s writing! ![]() 5/24/2023 0 Comments Neil gaiman myths![]() Through Gaiman's deft and witty prose, these gods emerge with their fiercely competitive natures, their susceptibility to being duped and to duping others, and their tendency to let passion ignite their actions, making these long-ago myths breathe pungent life again.". Gaiman fashions these primeval stories into a novelistic arc that begins with the genesis of the legendary nine worlds and delves into the exploits of deities, dwarfs, and giants. Gaiman’s love of Norse mythology surfaces frequently in his work, not least in American Gods, which captures a battle between Odin and Loki. In Norse Mythology, Gaiman stays true to the myths in envisioning the major Norse pantheon: Odin, the highest of the high, wise, daring, and cunning Thor, Odin's son, incredibly strong yet not the wisest of gods and Loki-son of a giant-blood brother to Odin and a trickster and unsurpassable manipulator. I actually read that one because Gaiman himself strongly recommended it before writing his own book on the subject. ![]() ![]() " Neil Gaiman, long inspired by ancient mythology in creating the fantastical realms of his fiction, presents a bravura rendition of the Norse gods and their world from their origin though their upheaval in Ragnarok. The great Norse myths are woven into the fabric of our storytelling from Tolkien, Alan Garner and Rosemary Sutcliff to Game of Thrones and Marvel Comics. Gaiman’s book is still on my to-read list, but consider also Crossley-Holland’s The Norse Myths. ![]() 5/24/2023 0 Comments Number the stars by lois lowry![]() ![]() One day, Annemarie, Ellen, and Annemarie’s five-year-old sister Kirsti walk home from school. Nazi Germany has occupied their country for the past three years. Urn:oclc:701783414 Republisher_date 20120317004156 Republisher_operator Scandate 20120316055025 Scanner . by Lois Lowry Buy Study Guide Number the Stars Summary In 1943, Annemarie Johansen and her best friend Ellen Rosen are ten years old, growing up in Copenhagen, Denmark. Donorįriendsofthesanfranciscopubliclibrary External-identifier ![]() Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 15:56:20 Boxid IA175201 Boxid_2 CH102801 Camera Canon EOS 5D Mark II City New York, N.Y. ![]() 5/24/2023 0 Comments Girls & Sex by Peggy Orenstein![]() She examines the ways in which porn and all its sexual myths have seeped into young people's lives, what it means to be the "the perfect slut" and why many girls scorn virginity, the complicated terrain of hookup culture, and the unfortunate realities surrounding assault ![]() While the media has focused-often to sensational effect-on the rise of casual sex and the prevalence of rape on campus, Orenstein brings more to the table. Drawing on in-depth interviews with over seventy young women and a wide range of psychologists, academics, and experts, journalist Peggy Orenstein pulls back the curtain on the hidden truths, hard lessons, and important possibilities of girls' sex lives in the modern world. ![]() Even in this age of helicopter parenting, the mothers and fathers of tomorrow's women have little idea what their daughters are up to sexually or how they feel about it. A generation gap has emerged between parents and their girls. ![]() 5/24/2023 0 Comments Concourse santino hassell![]() ![]() She would often reference a friend named Sonny in her author’s notes. To understand Santino Hassell we must first know who Aya Maxwell is.Īya started her career in the early 2000’s as a fic writer, notably of Gundam Wing fanfiction (hence the ‘Maxwell’ in her username). The subject of this post was a Big Name author in the M/M Romance community. ![]() M/M Romance has become popular in recent years but before the success of stories like Captive Prince and Red, White, and Royal Blue, the M/M Romance community was mostly focused on small, digital-first indie publishers like Riptide Publishing and Dreamspinner Press. M/M Romance is the name for a loosely connected community of authors and readers of original queer male romance (M/M) novels. ![]() The events are told as I watched them unfold and supported using evidence collecteed by The Salt Miners. This is a short tale of how a bisexual, cancer-ridden, chronic pain-afflicted single father of 2 from New York turned out to be a bored housewife in Texas. ![]() 5/24/2023 0 Comments Blood & Spirits by Dennis Sharpe![]() I pull my face out of the hole it had been planted in, letting plaster dust fall, coating my chest and legs like snow. I've never met others that can actually touch things physically, they must be fairly potent. These things are like Lucy the disembodied dead who haven’t moved on. “For a shadow, you hit like a sledgehammer!” The words barely escape before something else slams into the base of my skull embedding most of my upper body in the wall and all but removing my head. Being hit by a car doesn't even compare to this, and I didn't even see it coming. It’s almost a full second before my body registers the actual pain of the blow my stomach just took. I’m suddenly in the air, and moving backward rapidly toward the wall. Lost in the surreal sight of them for a moment, I inch further into the room without noticing that some were now moving behind me. It’s like shadows were cast and left behind to do as they please. There are silhouettes of people, but I can see through them. ![]() ![]() There’s a tingling sensation up my legs and back before I can even really focus on the parlor’s details. “Inching into the room, it’s clear something is wrong here. ![]() 5/24/2023 0 Comments Immanuel kant![]() ![]() The formulation of autonomy concludes that rational agents are bound to the moral law by their own will, while Kant's concept of the Kingdom of Ends requires that people act as if the principles of their actions establish a law for a hypothetical kingdom. Kant's formulation of humanity, the second section of the categorical imperative, states that as an end in itself, humans are required never to treat others merely as a means to an end, but always as ends in themselves. His principle of universalizability requires that, for an action to be permissible, it must be possible to apply it to all people without a contradiction occurring. Kant formulated the categorical imperative in various ways. ![]() ![]() It states that an action can only be moral if (i) it is motivated by a sense of duty and (ii) its maxim may be rationally willed a universal, objective law.Ĭentral to Kant's theory of the moral law is the categorical imperative. Kantian ethics refers to a deontological ethical theory developed by German philosopher Immanuel Kant that is based on the notion that: "It is impossible to think of anything at all in the world, or indeed even beyond it, that could be considered good without limitation except a good will." The theory was developed in the context of Enlightenment rationalism. ![]() 5/23/2023 0 Comments Trail of lightning![]() ![]() Another form of water that often appears in Trail of Lightning is storm water, which sometimes relates to the Big Water. For example, Kai reports to Maggie that in the Burque, there are water barons who control access to water. ![]() ![]() Similarly, the scarcity of water in the Sixth World emphasizes how necessary it is for humans. In this sense, water symbolizes life and rebirth. Although the characters of Trail of Lightning are all old enough to have lived in both eras, the Big Flood provides a distinct transition between a period that seems more familiar to readers today and the novel’s era of monsters and mythology. This is part of the Diné cyclical nature of worlds, as Coyote explains to Kai. The first time that monster hunter Maggie. She is a serious, hard-headed, and determined person, although the betrayal of her former mentor Neizghání and a lot of death and killing in her past both haunt her throughout the novel. This flood represents a rebirth of the world, the transition from the old ways of the Fifth World to the new ways of the Sixth World. In her buzzy 2018 novel, Trail of Lightning, Hugo and Nebula award-winning author Rebecca Roanhorse deftly adds new layers to post-apocalyptic tropes. Maggie Hoskie, a 20-year-old Dinétah (Navajo) monster hunter with supernatural powers, is the protagonist of Trail of Lightning. This is the apocalyptic flood that recently wiped out much of North America. One form of water that has a significant impact on the world of Trail of Lightning is the Big Water. ![]() |