![]() In In the Country of Hearts, the art of medicine is alive and well. He is himself a warmhearted man who fills his book with fascinating true stories.-Annie Dillard "New York Times Book Review" has used his senses well.-Ferrol Sams, author of Run with the Horsemen "New York Times Book Review"Īs a cardiologist, John Stone knows the intricate mechanics of the heart as a literary man, he suggests the mystery beyond the devices. Stone remains firmly attached to the humanness of its endeavors. He is a cardiologist and professor at Emory University School of Medicine. John Johnstone, Dorothy Perkins, Joel Kupersmith> American Heart Journal. This book should be required reading for every person who aspires to be a physician-it makes me proud that I am a doctor.-Ferrol Sams, author of Run with the HorsemenĪs he explicates and celebrates the possibilities of modern medicine, Dr. John Stone is the author of three other volumes of poetryIn All This Rain, Renaming the Streets, and The Smell of Matchesand In the Country of Hearts: Journeys in the Art of Medicine. John Johnstone, MD is a cardiologist in Richmond, Kentucky. Hooray for knowledge and language and the joining of science and art.-Ellen Gilchrist What a joy when a medical doctor can tell us what he knows and make us understand and believe in the good in ourselves. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() How fine our clinics would be, and how splendid our literature, were all doc-tors and writers alike to have the heart of this Stone.-Gerald Weissmann, editor-in-chief of MD magazine and author of The Woods Hole Cantata ![]()
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![]() ![]() In Donald's skillful hands, Lincoln emerges as a youthful, vigorous President. He presents his findings with the same literary skill and psychological understanding exhibited in his previous biographies, which have received two Pulitzer Prizes." "Much more than a political biography, Donald's Lincoln reveals the development of the future President's character and shows how his private life helped to shape his public career. In preparing it, Donald has drawn more extensively than any previous writer on Lincoln's personal papers and those of his contemporaries, and he has taken full advantage of the voluminous newly discovered records of Lincoln's legal practice. ![]() "This fully rounded biography of America's sixteenth President is the product of Donald's half-century of study of Lincoln and his times. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() From 1949, when "Agent of Vega" (July 1949 Astounding) appeared as the first of four stories featuring sentient Robot Spaceships and "Galactic Zones" troubleshooters with Psi Powers, later assembled as Agent of Vega (coll of linked stories 1960) – they are also included in Agent of Vega and Other Stories (coll 2001) with many other tales – he regularly produced the kind of Genre SF for which he remains most warmly remembered: Space-Opera adventures, several featuring female Heroes depicted with minimum recourse to their "femininity" – they perform their active tasks, and save the Universe when necessary, in a manner almost completely free of sexual role-playing Clichés. (1911-1981) German-born author whose parents were American in the US from 1938, serving with the USAF in World War Two his first story was "Greenface" for Unknown in August 1943. ![]() ![]() ![]() He is determined to build an automaton and enter the clockmakers’ guild if only he can create a working head. And Frederick, the talented and intense clockmaker’s apprentice, seeks to learn the truth about his mother while trying to forget the nightmares of the orphanage where she left him. She learns about a hidden treasure, which she knows will save her family if she can find it. Hannah is a soft hearted, strong willed girl from the tenements, who supports her family as a hotel maid when tragedy strikes and her father can no longer work. ![]() ![]() But when a mysterious green violin enters his life he begins to imagine a life of freedom. The Clockwork Three is a richly woven adventure story that is sure to become a classic!Giuseppe is an orphaned street musician from Italy, who was sold by his uncle to work as a slave for an evil padrone in the U.S. An enchanted green violin, an automaton that comes to life, and a hidden treasure… ![]() ![]() ![]() “But wait, Ben,” you say, “surely I remember there was a dragon at the end of Bleak House.” No, silly reader of my reviews, that was a carriage. Tooth and Claw is the Victorian novel you’ve always wanted: that is, a Victorian novel with dragons. So in that respect, I’m actually really glad I found something like this book: it has so many of the elements I enjoy about Victorian literature, but it’s more readable-and did I mention the dragons? ![]() Some people don’t have the energy or inclination to battle with the stilted (from our perspective) language or the historical context. Indeed, I love Victorian literature, but even I am not crazy enough to recommend it to everyone. We still get self-aware books, but we also get a lot of incredibly earnest narratives. While I’m not here to condemn the novels of any other time period, I will say that over the intervening years, the evolution of novel from a serial and pulp form to a massive, mass-market industry means that the character of the novel has changed. Victorian England was a time of immense social and technological change, novelists of that era tended to be of a position and background that gave them something to say and the means to say it. Victorian authors tend to have an appreciation of irony and can wield characters-as-social-commentary like nobody’s business. ![]() One reason I love the Victorian novel? It’s remarkably self-aware. ![]() ![]() ![]() Hollander would go on to write twenty-three other books, ranging from erotic fiction to sex education to misery memoir about losing her mother, as well as a column for Penthouse that ran for thirty-five years! Her book caught the public imagination and became an instant bestseller and erotic classic. ![]() At the height of the sexual revolution, Hollander’s career choice was sensibly seen as one of power and emancipation rather than choosing to be an exploited victim and possibly a trafficking statistic (the fact that she had ‘trafficked’ herself from Holland to the USA being neither here nor there) that would be the case today. In her case, it was The Happy Hooker, an autobiographical erotic book inspired by her life as a high-class call girl in manhattan, a career she chose after quitting her job as a secretary in the Dutch consulate – she was arrested and deported from the US in 1969, but her decision to write up her experiences proved to be an inspired one. Xaviera Hollander rose to fame in 1971, the right person at the right time with the right book. The life and times of the world’s most famous sex worker, and her curious LP. ![]() ![]() ![]() "Niven's work has been an intriguing and consistent universe, and this book is the keystone of the arch. But who will sit on the Ringworld Throne? ![]() Now it looks as if the Ringworld itself needs a Protector. And the Ghouls have their own agenda-if anyone dares approach them to learn.Įach race on the Ringworld has always had its own Protector. Incoming spacecraft are being destroyed before they can reach the Ringworld.Vampires are massing. Something is going on with the Protectors. legendary beings brought together once again in the defense of the Ringworld. The human, Louis Wu the puppeteer known as the Hindmost Acolyte, son of the Kzin called Chmeee. ![]() the most astonishing feat of engineering ever encountered.A place of untold technological wonders, home to a myriad humanoid races, and world of some of the most beloved science fiction stories ever written ![]() ![]() ![]() While somewhat maintaining the playfulness of Zemecki’s film with a narrator who is laugh-out-loud funny, wry and forthright, I found the novel to simultaneously be extremely immediate, considering personal and international issues. ![]() The process of time, the way the past introduces the present and the present informs the future, man’s ability to actively change the future with actions in the present are all central ideas of the novel. It is from here that Lerner’s novel takes its name (10:04 is the moment that lightning strikes the bell tower that initiates the protagonist’s voyage through time and space), and Lerner seems to concern himself and reinvent the themes of that film in what is a distinctly twenty-first century novel. Having read the book, I feel that a good place to start for those who haven’t seen it is Robert Zemeckis’s 1985 time travelling Back to the Future. As far as I can tell, the book seemed to steamroll onto the British literary scene and the ubiquitous intelligent reviews lauding 10:04 as this year’s great novel saw it climb speedily up my reading list. Since its publication in September 2014, New York-based writer Ben Lerner’s second novel, 10:04, has drawn praise from all corners of the publishing world and was recently announced on the shortlist for the prestigious Folio Prize 2015. ![]() ![]() ![]() He has been busy elsewhere in the meantime, launching Virgin America airlines, V Australia airlines, Virgin Atlantic Little Red airlines, and investing heavily in Virgin Galactic, perhaps because – as he has started saying – he has a plan to move to Mars. How much, Naomi Klein asked Branson, will he have put into his pledge by then? "I suspect it will be less than $1bn right now," he confessed. ![]() ![]() "We have to make it a win-win for all concerned." "Gaia capitalism", Branson has called his vision. Some pays for the snazzy Carbon War Room, a sort of green-tech Dragons' Den. Some goes into developing low-carbon fuels. A $25m investment went into the Virgin Earth Challenge, a prize for inventing something to suck up all the planet-wrecking carbon emitted by gas-guzzling industries like his own. E ight years ago, Richard Branson, the tie-loathing adventurer (as his Twitter feed has it) and figurehead of Virgin Atlantic airlines, Virgin Galactic space travel and so on, pledged to invest around $3bn (£1.85bn) in green technologies by 2016. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Clemons explains that the Freedom Schools curriculum was designed to be an antidote to the watered-down learning materials available to African American children in their public schools. Hale explains that the first Freedom School emerged during the summer of 1964 in Mississippi when, in the face of persistent de jure segregation and the exclusion of African American children from access to high-quality schooling, Southern civil rights activists created a Freedom School to offer African American children high-quality opportunities to learn. ![]() In this month’s episode of NEPC Talks Education, NEPC Researcher Christopher Saldaña interviews Kristal Moore Clemons, the national director of the Children’s Defense Fund’s Freedom Schools program Kendall Deas, a post-doctoral fellow in the African American Studies program at the University of South Carolina and University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign professor Jon Hale about Freedom Schools. ![]() |