Books/Literature (General/Chat)
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The latest Google doodle – a wispy, fanged blonde girl-head floating over a sleeping dark-haired woman – commemorates the 200th birthday of the Irish novelist Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-73). The image honours his most famous story, Carmilla, first published in 1871 in a magazine called The Dark Blue, then incorporated a year later into the important collection In a Glass Darkly. The novella is notable for tackling a vampire theme decades before Le Fanu's countryman Bram Stoker wrote Dracula (which contains several deliberate echoes of Carmilla) and presenting an eroticised view of predatory female friendship which earns it a...
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Sheila Weller’s forthcoming tell-all ‘The News Sorority’ claims to offer up details on the scandalous and sometimes catty escapades of noteworthy newswomen, including how some apparently hold strong disdain for each other. Katie Couric cultivated an “American Girl identity” but she was also a bully with a “chip on her shoulder.” Diane Sawyer strived to be “America’s Aunt” but she rode her staff hard and used “staged humility” to disarm critics. Christiane Amanpour was fearless in the field and would remind her bosses, “Do you know that I’m the world’s best-known foreign correspondent?” And, when feeling threatened, these pioneering, primetime...
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The earliest people in the North American Arctic remained isolated from others in the region for millennia before vanishing around 700 years ago, a new genetic analysis shows. The study, published online Thursday, also reveals that today's Inuit and Native Americans of the Arctic are genetically distinct from the region's first settlers. Inuit hunters in the Canadian Arctic have long told stories about a mysterious ancient people known as the Tunit, who once inhabited the far north. Tunit men, they recalled, possessed powerful magic and were strong enough to crush the neck of a walrus and singlehandedly haul the massive...
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Since the adulterated version of the "There are No Spies" by Bill Granger is being released Thursday as movie with Pierce Brosnan and the very attractive Olga Kurylenko , the republishing of the November Man series in paperback has become available through eBooks on Amazon and Barnes and Noble. I have started to read "There are No Spies". It is a combination of Ian Fleming and Donald Hamilton. It is closer to tone and tenor to Donald Hamilton. The movie is getting beaten up pretty badly. It is a shamed because I really thought Brosnan did a decent job as...
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One of the most important comics of all time became the highest-selling of all time this week: Action Comics #1 sold for $3.2 million dollars on eBay, nailing the record for the most expensive comic sold of all time. The sale beats the previous record holder, a 2011 auction for Action Comics #1 which went for $2,161,000, according to Business Wire. The comic – which looks good at 76 years old – is graded at a 9.0 with white pages. The issue is the first appearance of Jerry Siegel and Joel Shuster creation Superman back in 1938. It also helped...
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Was the dissolution of the United States inevitable? Probably, once all the “diversity” and “multiculturalism” crap got started. Right up to the end the coins carried the motto, E Pluribus Unum, just as the last dreadnought of the Imperial and Royal Austro-Hungarian Navy was the Viribus Unitis. But the reality for both was Ex Uno, Plura. It’s odd how clearly the American century is marked: 1865 to 1965. As the 20th century historian Shelby Foote noted, the first Civil War made us one nation. In 1860, we wrote, “the United States are.” By the end of the war, the verb...
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. 2014-08-24 2014 Christmas Gift List Suggestions for Your Family, Children and Friends ... ===================================================== Churchill -- The River War (Amazon link) ==================================================== The Arab Mind (Amazon link) ==================================================== Sharia Law for Non-Muslims (A Taste of Islam) (Amazon link) ==================================================== The Hadith -- The Sunna of Mohmammed (Amazon link) ==================================================== The Life of Mohammed (A Taste of Islam) (Amazon link) ==================================================== Factual Persuasion of Islamics (Amazon link) ==================================================== A Simple Koran: Readable and Understandable (Amazon link) ==================================================== The Political Traditions of Mohammed: The Hadith for the Unbelievers (Amazon link) ==================================================== Mohammed And the Unbelievers : A Political Life (Amazon link)...
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Pro-choice author Anne Eggebroten, edited a book entitled Abortion: My Choice, God’s Grace which tells the stories of Christian women who had abortions. The book celebrates abortion as an acceptable choice and tries to justify it based on the Bible. There is one story in particular I want to comment on. It is a first-hand account of a pro-choice clinic escort who describes how she got involved in the pro-choice movement. I think what she said is worth considering: My participation in the pro-choice march was motivated by boredom and restlessness as much as by a desire to be of...
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Superman is as American as apple pie, in that both have their origins in the Middle East. Apples, because they are thought to have been first domesticated in Turkey, and Superman, because of his oftentimes overlooked Jewish heritage. Superman’s possible Judaism shouldn’t be a surprise. The hero’s creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, were the children of Jewish immigrants. The comic book industry, where they spent a significant portion of their young careers, was created in New York by Jews like Max Ginsburg, Bob Kahn, and Jacob Kurtzberg, who hid their ethnicity behind names like Gaines, Kane, and Kirby. Over...
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Laura Ingalls Wilder penned one of the most beloved children's series of the 20th century, but her forthcoming autobiography will show devoted "Little House on the Prairie" fans a more realistic, grittier view of frontier living. "Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography" — Wilder's unedited draft that was written for an adult audience and eventually served as the foundation for the popular series — is slated to be released by the South Dakota State Historical Society Press nationwide this fall. The not-safe-for-children tales include stark scenes of domestic abuse, love triangles gone awry and a man who lit himself on fire...
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"We just want to tell everyone that individuals can make effort to make the world a better place to live for everyone and we shouldn't judge each other according to the cover," said Sarvebaz.YezdanY and SarvebaZ HeraneR are making commuting in Tehran more enjoyable by providing a mobile bookstore in their taxi. There are 40 titles on display in the cab, all in Farsi. One of the favorites, Sarvebaz said, is George Orwell's Animal Farm. "We just want to tell everyone that individuals can make effort to make the world a better place to live for everyone and we shouldn't...
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An effort is underway to honor one of Waukegan's favorite sons, the late science fiction pioneer Ray Bradbury. Waukegan Public Library Executive Director Richard Lee said nearly all the details remain to be worked out beyond the basic idea -- a realistic statue or bust of Bradbury, who wrote evocatively of the fictional Green Town, a recognizable stand-in for his hometown. lRelated A history of Waukegan The effort echoes the push for a statue memorializing another Waukegan legend, comedian Jack Benny, a radio and early TV star honored with a downtown statue in 2001.
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Follows a deep-cover operative named Martin Odum, who has an uncanny ability to transform himself into a different person for each job.
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Canterbury Cathedral, where Archbishop Thomas Becket was killed, is the city’s biggest tourist attraction with a million visitors every yearAfter nearly 1,000 years, murder in the cathedral is still luring visitors to Canterbury. It was in the Canterbury Cathedral in 1107 that Archbishop Thomas Becket was killed, viciously, by four knights who believed they were doing the bidding of King Henry 2. As a result, Becket became a martyr and the cathedral a place of pilgrimage to his shrine. The homicide was the subject of Murder in the Cathedral, a verse drama by T.S. Eliot, and was more famously immortalised...
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He’s best remembered as the creator of James Bond, but before he became a successful author, Ian Fleming was a man of many parts. Something of a playboy in his younger years, he was a traveller and a linguist before he worked as a journalist and a stockbroker in the 1930s. At the outbreak of war, Ian Lancaster Fleming was commissioned as a Lieutenant Commander in the Naval Intelligence Division, and worked at the Admiralty directly under the Director of Naval Intelligence Admiral John Godfrey. It was a role he found he had remarkable aptitude for, and he was to...
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I'm not sure if this is permitted, but if not the monitor can remove my post. I'm informing you about my book free on Kindle today, Aug. 11, because I believe it is in the public interest. The book is called: Injustice Hits Rock Bottom Down Under: The Vakras Case. Vakras and his girl-friend are non-Jews but they called out an anti-Semite on their Internet site referring to him as a left-wing Nazi. He sued and a brain-dead judge gave him $450,000 even though everything they said about him was true and their comments were virtually unknown among the public....
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Growing up in a Latino household meant that there were a lot of hardcore superstitions running rampant throughout daily life. Superstitious beliefs go together with Hispanic homes in the way that rice and beans and chanclas do. They just fit. From purses on the floor to itchy palms, we've gathered the top eight superstitions every Latino grew up with, and put them in a list, of course. And here they are. Don't Put Your Purse on the Floor Listen, you like your money, right? Well you won't have any if you put that purse on the floor. So pick it...
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IN HINDSIGHT, Joe Paterno wrote, the day after he got fired with a phone call, he wished he had done more. He had not committed a crime, he had not witnessed a crime, he had reported what sounded like a crime to his superiors. The haters jumped all over that sentence, like it was some kind of a confession that the legendary Penn State football coach had somehow enabled Jerry Sandusky to sexually abuse those kids, while he looked the other way. The haters spent a lot less time debating the note he scribbled on a pad before going to...
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The NBCUniversal-owned cable network has put into development Ghost Brigades, a drama based on John Scalzi's Hugo-nominated Old Man's War universe book series, The Hollywood Reporter has learned. The NeverEnding Story's Wolfgang Petersen will oversee development on the project alongside Scott Stuber (Safe House), with Jake Thornton and Ben Lustig (Winter's Knight) on board to pen the first script. The drama hails from Universal Cable Productions, Petersen's Radiant Productions and Stuber's Bluegrass Films. Ghost Brigades follows John Perry, who at 75 enlists in the Colonial Defense Force to fight a centuries-long war for man's expansion into the cosmos. Technology allows...
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Mary Baxter Gresham was 42 when her invalid son, LeRoy, died in June 1865. She had already lost two infant children and had just lived through the upheaval of the Civil War in Macon, Ga. But when 17-year-old LeRoy, know as “Loy,” died on June 18 in the house where he was born, she was devastated. “God has tried me often and in many ways but never has my heart been so wrung as now,” she wrote to her sister, Sallie, on July 12. “And yet the trial had so much mercy mixed with it that my soul swells within...
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