A very funny, "How to Use This Book" chapter at the start of the guide instructs the reader to "Find the MAP," (words in ALL CAPS indicate entries in the Tough Guide) "Examine the map," "Find your STARTING POINT." From there, the reader must "set about finding an INN, Tour COMPANIONS, an meal of STEW, a CHAMBER for the night, and then the necessary TAVERN BRAWL." In a way, Jones is encouraging the reader to pursue this book as a "choose your own adventure" venture, if you remember those books. Although encyclopedic in nature, The Tough Guide to Fantasyland : The Essential Guide to Fantasy Travel is laid out like a guide book (I almost typed "rough" instead of "tough" so many times while writing this review).
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Very depressing.ĭoree Shafrir: You probably aren’t supposed to come away from the book being inspired to become a journalist. To take the cynical view, it’s a book about technology that doesn’t really exist, and journalism that, for the most part, doesn’t get committed. The Rumpus: So, Startup’s rendering of modern journalism really hit home. Shafrir and I talked recently about Startup and the eternal quest for the story. Anyone who says that portrait doesn’t ring true is either old, oblivious, or lying. So, too, does Katya Pasternack, Shafrir’s scoop-hungry journalist pursuing a sordid story about Mack she’s at the mercy of traffic goals and the whims of her publisher. Stories about strivers like Mack McAllister-an ostensible wunderkind given millions for an app with a dubious purpose-are published so frequently, it’s pointless even to differentiate them. To put that in news terms, several months later Donald Trump declared his candidacy for president.Īnd yet: her depiction of New York’s technology scene and the journalists who cover it doesn’t feel dusty. Shafrir, veteran journalist and editor at BuzzFeed News, began work on her book in January 2015. Somehow, however, Doree Shafrir’s first novel, Startup, has found its time and place. Given the time lag between a book’s conception and publication, the odds of it ultimately seeming of the moment are pretty slim. Hamilton’s life was wreathed in legend even in his time more or less adopted by George Washington, he also had a talent for acquiring powerful enemies who made every effort to discredit the young man as a bastard, a closet royalist, and an enemy of democracy. “The hour was late,” he writes, “my answer brief: Jefferson for the eighteenth century, Hamilton for more modern times.” He capably defends his judgment in this well-written life of Hamilton (1755–1804), who mixed Clintonesque appetites for pleasure and policy-wonking while busily putting the new republic’s economy on a sound footing. Who was right about America-Jefferson or Hamilton? Such, writes Randall (Humanities/ Champlain Coll., Vermont co-author, Forgotten Americans, 1998, etc.), was the single question leveled at him at a meeting of the American Revolution Round Table a few years back. A revealing but measured biography of the younger Founding Father, who, to the horror of libertarians ever since, “ up a blueprint for a relationship between government and money.” Well, 30 mins turned into 1 hour 30 mins and by the morning I had got to a funny part and wanted to find out what happened so I decided to give it another hour. I decided to return it to Audible but it was late so I decided to listen to another 30 mins and return it in the morning. I didn't know the author and I hated it when I first started listening to it - didn't like the characters, didn't care for the narrator and the plot was ridiculous (a sibling being expected to pay off her sister's multi-million dollar debt). This book was a exercise in perseverance for me. STOP! Just go download the dang book!!!! :) Girl, when I heard the Hawk's secretary for the first time I spewed water out of my mouth! She was a hoot!!!! Okay, if you have to ask is this worth a credit. They made KA's character come alive for me. Now on to Kate Russell.O.M.G.! I am soooooo totally in love with your voices. I want a friend in my posse just like her. And even though Hawk's secretary was only in the latter part of the book, she was my favorite character besides the H and H. One of the best books I have listened to period. And girl!!! I either wanted to become one of her characters or to make them all a reality. I have never seen an author pull off dingy without being annoying, but Kristen Ashley did. A little dingy but in the best possible way, with a little "Sex In the City" thrown in. Bad guys blowing up stuff, and a hero worthy of role in "An Officer and a Gentleman." Gwen was the bomb. ~ Erma Bombeck.Ī grandparent will help you with your buttons, your zippers, and your shoelaces and not be in any hurry for you to grow up. Humorists can never start to take themselves seriously. If I had my life to live over, instead of wishing away nine months of pregnancy, I’d have cherished ever moment and realized that the wonderment growing inside me was the only chance in life to assist God in a miracle. Why would anyone steal a shopping cart? It’s like stealing a two-year-old. I never go to a college reunion that I don’t come away feeling sorry for all those paunchy, balding jocks trying to hang onto youth. It hangs heavy for the bored, eludes the busy, flies by the for young, and runs out for the aged. ~ Erma Bombeck.ĭon’t worry about who doesn’t like you, who has more, or who’s doing what. ~ Erma Bombeck.īefore you try to keep up with the Joneses, be sure they’re not trying to keep up with you. Kids need love the most when they’re acting most unlovable. Erma Bombeck was a prominent American humorist. When Sam explains everything that has gone wrong during his bad day, it’s presented as a run-on sentence in giant text that covers all of two pages. Some books have special moments in them that enhance the joy of reading them aloud. Just like in Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus, the illustrations are set against pages of solid color, making the characters and their experiences the only element in the story, which gives them added significance. The message is delivered with the perfect combination of humor and warmth. The story is simple enough for even young children to understand, yet it doesn’t talk down to its audience. Looks like scaring is a good aerobic workout.Īuthor/illustrator Mo Willems has become one of my favorite authors and this book is an excellent example of everything I love about his work. In Deep Water – Skinny-dipping to cool off in the Trinity River couldn’t cause any uld it?ĭeputy’s Bride - Can Sadie have a new life or will her old one rear its ugly head? In Too Deep – The peace of the day is shattered when her best friend steps too far into the Trinity River. This book introduces the first two heroes of the Naked Bluff, Texas Series With the future uncertain, he figured a passion-filled night might lighten the load of his matrimonial chains. Pissed, his bad mood eases when he learns a special lady was meeting him at his hunting cabin. Now a city girl, she’d probably turn out to be just like his family’s deserting momma, who’d bail when the going got tough. But at what cost? Will it secure their future or ruin her squeaky-clean reputation?Įxcited to celebrate his success of completing a long cattle drive with a sexy lady, Trent is blindsided with the news of an arranged marriage between him and a girl he hasn’t seen in four years because she’d hightailed it to Boston. Not wanting him to sleep with a painted lady or two on the eve of their engagement, she arranges a seduction. Furious, Catherine Jensen refuses to allow her dream of marrying Trent McCall to fall into ruins because of an end-of-the-trail party. Yet they, and their radical tendencies, received a surprising amoung of serious attention, investigation, and imitation (and, further indicating their prominence in 1970s America, unreasonable hostile criticism). These books were disquieting: different, difficult, untraditional, unclassifiable, and at times interpretable. (Copenhagen and Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2000)Īs one of the most innovative periods in American letters, the 1970s (roughly speaking) gave birth to an unprecedented number of literary experiments, producing scores of outlandish and frequently outrageous metafictional/surfictional/cirtifictional/superfictional/fabulational novels by writers such as Sukenick, Federman, Katz, Gass, Gins, Kostelanetz, and Major. Take It or Leave It (Normal, Illinois: FC2, 2000) and The Twofold Vibration. Reviews of Raymond Federman's Take It or Leave It and The Twofold Vibration In the second essay, all of the images are related. Throughout the first essay in the book Berger draws heavily on work by Walter Benjamin to explain how reproduction changes what images mean by circulating them in new ways and alongside new ideas breaking down rarified narratives handed down from elite which often seek stabilize our understanding meanings From this premise Berger explains how images have layers deeper meaning beyond what they show on the surface they can offer a valuable document of how their creator saw the world but their underlying politics can also be obscured or mystified in order to uphold powers that be. Another way of phrasing this: all images are encoded with ideology regardless if their creators consciously want them to be. This term is used to describe paintings, photographs, films or any other representation that humans can construct and it’s assumed that every image externalizes its creator’s way of seeing. One way to recreate our way of perceiving the world is through images. John Berger opens his seminal text Ways of Seeing with an observation that seems counterintuitive, considering its status as a written text: that, as we inhabit the world, we constantly perceive it, only later naming the things we see. 1-Page Summary of Ways Of Seeing Overview Sarah Andersen, a 30-year-old cartoonist and the illustrator of a semiautobiographical comic strip, “Sarah’s Scribbles” also created the graphic novel “Fangs,” which was nominated for an Eisner Award. On, an artist wrote an opinion piece about how she felt violated by the alterations to her original artwork, spewed by an algorithm for an alt-right message Now the apps are being used by groups to create art that furthers their controversial politics. has reported on machine learning algorithms “scraping” the works of human artists. Cartoonist Decries Algorithm’s Theft of Her Work, Twisted for Alt-Right Politics She’s depicted here with some of her cartoons in an image created by her digital publisher, Tapas Media. Artist Sarah Andersen wrote an opinion piece for The New York Times protesting the use of her art by an image generator. |