Donal Ryan4.5 The Spinning Heart speaks for contemporary Ireland like no other novel. Wry, vulnerable, all-too human, it captures the language and spirit of rural Ireland and with uncanny perception articulates the words and thoughts of a generation. Technically daring and evocative of Patrick McCabe and J.M. Synge, this novel of small-town life is witty, dark and sweetly poignant.
Полли Морланд0.0 A journey into the modern life of an ancient virtue – bravery – and a quest to understand who might possess it and how
With The Society of Timid Souls, or How To Be Brave, documentary filmmaker Polly Morland sets out to investigate bravery, a quality that she has always felt she lacked. The book takes inspiration from a vividly eccentric, and radical, self-help group for stage-frightened performers in 1940s Manhattan, which coincided with the terrifying height of World War II and was called The Society of Timid Souls. Seventy years later, as anxiety about everything from terrorism to economic meltdown continues, Morland argues that courage has become a virtue in crisis. We are, she says, all Timid Souls now.
Despite a career in which she has filmed in rebel-held Colombian jungles and at the edge of Balkan mass graves, interviewing convicted murderers, drug-traffickers, and terrorists, Morland herself has never felt brave. Often, the very reverse. So she sets out to discover how and why courage is achieved in an age of anxiety and whether it might even be learned. Drawing on her interviews and encounters with soldiers and civilians, bullfighters and big-wave surfers, dissidents fighting for freedom and cancer patients fighting for their lives, Morland examines bravery across the spectrum: from the first childhood act of defiance by Bernard Lafayette, a leader of the civil rights movement who later faced down the KKK in Alabama, or the reflexive will-to-survive of Vjollca Berisha, a Kosovo Albanian who endured a massacre by playing dead among the bodies of her own family, to the small acts of everyday bravery that quietly punctuate our lives, in schoolyards, labor wards, and hospices the world over.
Along the way, Morland draws attention to some of the myths of bravery that have been conjured and perpetuated over time and argues that, often, courage exists as much in the telling as in the doing. At once an exploration of what bravery means and a chronicle of the author's personal journey among those who embody it, The Society of Timid Souls is a profound, approachable meditation on this most valued and mysterious of human qualities. In setting off on the trail of the lionhearted, Polly Morland finds out a great deal about what makes some of us extraordinary, and what of the extraordinary we all share.
Лотти Могач3.7 У Лейлы умерла мама. Ситуация сама по себе тяжелая, но осложняется еще и тем, что Лейла – человек с особенностями. Ей трудно общаться с людьми, выражать эмоции. Оказавшись один на один с пугающим миром, она все глубже уходит в себя, пока не находит выход – выход в Интернет.
«Красная таблетка», онлайн-клуб для любителей философии, привлекает ее. Она быстро находит друзей и знакомится с харизматичным Адрианом, который предлагает ей рисковое дело – помочь женщине, желающей покончить с собой, уйти на тот свет. И Лейле, если она искренне верит в право человека на добровольный уход, предстоит на это пойти.
Ханна Кент4.2 Исландия, начало XIX века. Молодая женщина Агнес Магнусдоттир приговорена к смертной казни за убийство возлюбленного. В ожидании утверждения приговора Агнес отправляют на отдаленный хутор, где ей предстоит прожить несколько месяцев в обычной семье. Изможденную и закованную в цепи, поначалу крестьяне воспринимают ее как монстра, но с течением времени начинают понимать, что реальная история гораздо сложнее, чем представленная на суде... «Вкус дыма» – это книга о том, чем стали месяцы совместного проживания для Агнес и тех, кто ее приютил. Это психологическая драма, разворачивающаяся на фоне суровых северных пейзажей, среди немногословных и сдержанных людей, способных, тем не менее, на отчаянные поступки.
NoViolet Bulawayo3.1 Darling is only ten years old, and yet she must navigate a fragile and violent world. In Zimbabwe, Darling and her friends steal guavas, try to get the baby out of young Chipo's belly, and grasp at memories of Before. Before their homes were destroyed by paramilitary policemen, before the school closed, before the
But Darling has a chance to escape: she has an aunt in America. She travels to this new land in search of America's famous abundance only to find that her options as an immigrant are perilously few. NoViolet Bulawayo's debut calls to mind the great storytellers of displacement and arrival who have come before her - from Junot Diaz to Zadie Smith to J.M.Coetzee - while she tells a vivid, raw story all her own.
Just over two hundred years ago, there were one billion humans on Earth.
There are now over seven billion of us.
And, sometime this century, the world population will reach at least ten billion.
Deforestation. Desertification. Species extinction. Global warming. Growing threats to food and water. The driving issues of our times are the result of one huge problem: Us.
As the population continues to grow, our problems will increase. And this means that every way we look at it, a planet of ten billion people is likely to be a nightmare.
Stephen Emmott, a scientist whose lab is at the forefront of research into complex natural systems, sounds the alarm. TEN BILLION is a snapshot of our planet, and our species, approaching a crisis, and a stark analysis of where this leaves us. TEN BILLION is not another climate book. TEN BILLION is a book about us.
Шерин Эль Феки0.0 **Kirkus Best Books of the Year (2013)**
If you really want to know a people, start by looking inside their bedrooms.
As political change sweeps the streets and squares, the parliaments and presidential palaces of the Arab world, Shereen El Feki has been looking at an upheaval a little closer to home—in the sexual lives of men and women in Egypt and across the region. The result is an informative, insightful, and engaging account of a highly sensitive and still largely secret aspect of Arab society.
Sex is entwined in religion, tradition, politics, economics, and culture, so it is the perfect lens through which to examine the complex social landscape of the Arab world. From pregnant virgins to desperate housewives, from fearless activists to religious firebrands, from sex work to same-sex relations, Sex and the Citadel takes a fresh look at the sexual history of the region and brings new voices to the debate over its future.
This is no peep show or academic treatise but a highly personal and often humorous account of one woman’s journey to better understand Arab society at its most intimate and, in the process, to better understand her own origins. Rich with five years of groundbreaking research, Sex and the Citadel gives us a unique and timely understanding of everyday lives in a part of the world that is changing before our eyes.
Феликс Мартин0.0 What is money, and how does it work?
The conventional answer is that people once used sugar in the West Indies, tobacco in Virginia, and dried cod in Newfoundland, and that today's financial universe evolved from barter.
Unfortunately, there is a problem with this story. It's wrong. And not just wrong, but dangerous.
Money: the Unauthorised Biography unfolds a panoramic secret history and explains the truth about money: what it is, where it comes from, and how it works.
Drawing on stories from throughout human history and around the globe, Money will radically rearrange your understanding of the world and shows how money can once again become the most powerful force for freedom we have ever known.
Джилл Хорнби0.0 There's only room for one Queen Bee: A hilarious and touching novel about the social world of school mothers.
It's the start of another school year at St. Ambrose. While the children are busy in the classroom, their mothers are learning sharper lessons. Lessons in friendship. Lessons in betrayal. Lessons in the laws of community, the transience of power...and how to get invited to lunch.
Beatrice -- undisputed queen bee. Ruler, by Divine Right, of all school fundraising, this year, last year, and, surely, for many to come.
Heather -- desperate to volunteer, desperate to be noticed, desperate to belong.
Georgie -- desperate for a cigarette.
And Rachel -- watching them all, keeping her distance. But soon to discover taht the line between amused observer and miserable outcast is a thin one.
THE HIVE is a wickedly funny and brilliantly observed story about female friendship, power plays, and the joys and perils (well, mainly perils) of trying to do one's part.
Стивен Гросс3.9 A Sunday Times bestseller
Longlisted for the Guardian first book award
A Radio 4 Book of the Week
This book is about learning to live.
In simple stories of encounter between a psychoanalyst and his patients, The Examined Life reveals how the art of insight can illuminate the most complicated, confounding and human of experiences.
These are stories about our everyday lives: they are about the people we love and the lies that we tell; the changes we bear, and the grief. Ultimately, they show us not only how we lose ourselves but how we might find ourselves too.
Клэр Тревьен0.0 Anchors, shipwrecks, whales and islands abound in this first collection by Anglo-Breton poet Claire Trévien. These poems are sketches, lyrics, dreams, and experiments in language as sound.
Trévien’s is a surreal vision, steeped in myth and music, in which everything is alive and – like the sea itself – constantly shifting form. Fishermen become owls; one woman turns into a snake, another gives birth to a tree; a glow-worm might be a wasp or ‘a toy on standby’. Struck through with brilliant and sometimes sinister imagery reminiscent of Pan’s Labyrinth or an Angela Carter novel, The Shipwrecked House is a unique and hallucinatory debut from a poet-to-watch.
