Part family story, part beekeeping odyssey, The Honey Bus is a rich and lyrical memoir of a girl who journeyed into the hive-and found herself. The bees became a guiding force in May's life, teaching her about family and survival, and it was during this pivotal time in May's childhood that she learned to take care of herself. May turned to her grandfather and the art of beekeeping as an escape from her troubled reality. Beekeeping and its life lessons is the subject of Meredith May’s memoir, The Honey Bus: A Memoir of Loss, Courage and a Girl Saved by Bees (Park Row 24.99 337 pages). Everything she needed to know about life and family was right before her eyes, in the secret world of bees. That first close encounter was at once terrifying and exhilarating for May. Sample Book Insights: 1 I learned to keep my back to the wall and my eyes on my mother at. She was five years old, her parents had recently split and suddenly she found herself in the care of her grandfather, an eccentric beekeeper who made honey in a rusty old military bus in the yard. Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Meredith May recalls the first time a honeybee crawled on her arm. Description An unforgettable story about finding home in the most unusual of places, and how a tiny, little-understood insect could save a life.
0 Comments
Now we all know that in the real world nobody’s actually any good at sex, and there’s always someone trying to put a stop to it (hopefully not your consenting participating partner-of-choice) but fun-filled fictional fornication has usually sought to be a jolly, joyous affair – which is why so much pornography aspires to low comedy. I’ll let you in on a little secret: if you do it right – and who does? – sex is supposed to be fun. Tomorrow I’ll write about something with violence and explosions, so come back then. If reading about such things is likely to offend you, please stop now and go away. This book contains stories and images of an extremely adult nature, specifically designed for adult consumption and the kind of coarse and vulgar language that most kids are fluent in by the age of ten. By Gilbert Hernandez (Eros Comics/Fantagraphics Books) In the prologue, Eleanor and Felicity Leong, her sister-in-law, along with young Nick and Astrid, their children, show up at the Lancaster Hotel in London, tired and wet from walking through the rain. Eleanor is revered by her friends due to her marriage to Phillip Young, who hails from one of the wealthiest and more elite families in Singapore. After marrying Phillip Young, she struggled to gain acceptance into his prominent family due to her status, and was under extreme pressure to give birth to a child.Įleanor's closest friends are Carol Tai, Daisy Foo, Lorena Lim, and Nadine Shaw, all members of a Bible Study group ran by Carol. She is a domineering mother, having spent most of her adult life trying ensure the inheritance of Nick, her only child, and preserve his place as her mother-in-law Shang Su Yi's favorite grandson.Įleanor was born into a wealthy, but middle-class family. Eleanor is the wife of Phillip Young and the mother of Nick Young. In the course of the 3 upper-class Geste boys running away from their aunt’s manor house and joining the French Foreign Legion, we encounter nigs, niggers, Injuns, Arab squaws, dagos, aborigines of the Congo, and a Jewish Cockney pawnbroker drawn to stereotype and referred to sarcastically as a Child of Israel or simply, “the Child”.Īlthough Beau Geste is a book of its time, the author does seem aware of the atrocities committed by King Leopold of Belgium’s men in the Congo, and makes it clear he doesn’t approve. I’m not in favor of banning books–I’m in favor of reading them to deeply understand history.Īnd there is plenty here to offend just about everyone. Not because I subscribe to its old-fashioned arrogance and casual racism, but because I feel it’s important to know how societies thought, felt, and acted in former times. I’m glad this adventure novel is still around. Courtesy of a special order from Auntie’s Bookstore She received the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2014. A Wizard of Earthsea received an American Library Association Notable Book citation, a Horn Book Honor List citation, and the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award in 1979. Her other books included the Earthsea series, The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia, The Lathe of Heaven, Four Ways to Forgiveness, and The Telling. Her first science-fiction novel, Rocannon's World, was published in 1966. She won a Fulbright fellowship in 1953 to study in Paris, where she met and married Charles Le Guin. She received a bachelor's degree from Radcliffe College in 1951 and a master's degree in romance literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance from Columbia University in 1952. Le Guin was born Ursula Kroeber in Berkeley, California on October 21, 1929. Walsh does a fine job describing the life of deprivation, poverty and worship that the monks lead at the monastery (including a glossary and a timetable of life at the abbey) and explaining how main character Will came to be there. The premise of a medieval abbey with something ominous buried just beyond the church graveyard and the fantastic cover art by David Frankland - don't miss the creatures in the trees. I have to start this review by saying that, while I am frequently opining that very few kids books need to be 400 pages long (or more) I think that Pat Walsh could have easily added another 75+ pages a the start of her book and I would have been quite happy. When it came out in paperback this year I decided to buy it and add it to my huge pile of books to read. I have wanted to read The Crowfield Curse by Pat Walshsince it was first released in 2010. She was born with a heart arrhythmia and cannot do strenuous activities. Darcy and her twin brother Jamie “shared” Tom as children but Tom was mainly Jamie’s friend. It is almost her raison d’etre and it terrifies her at the same time. In the end, 99 Percent Mine was a mixed bag and I’m not quite sure how I feel about it.ĭarcy Barrett has had a crush on her neighbour and brother’s best friend, Tom Valeska, since they met when she was eight years old. There were things I liked, things I didn’t like and things which confused me. It’s very possible I’m an outlier so make of this review what you will. Well, I’ve now finished the book but I can’t say my thoughts are much clearer. This is an actual DM I sent to a friend last night: “I need you to read 99 Percent Mine and tell me what I think of it. Kaetrin Book Reviews / C+ Reviews brother's best friend / Contemporary / friends-to-lovers / renovation 11 Comments JanuREVIEW: 99 Percent Mine by Sally Thorne 240)Ī good café on the Place St.-Michel - Miss Stein instructs - Shakespeare and Company - People of the Seine - A false spring - The end of an avocation - "Une génération perdu" - Hunger was good discipline - Ford Madox Ford and the Devil's disciple - With Pascin at the dôme - Ezra Pound and the measuring worm - A strange enough ending - The man who was marked for death - Evan Shipman at the Lilas - An agent of evil - Winters in Schruns - Scott Fitzgerald - Hawks do not share - A matter of measurements - Additional Paris sketches. It is a literary feast, brilliantly evoking the exuberant mood of Paris after World War I and the youthful spirit, unbridled creativity, and unquenchable enthusiasm that Hemingway himself epitomized Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein tender memories of his first wife, Hadley and insightful recollections of his own early experiments with his craft. It is his classic memoir of Paris in the 1920s, filled with irreverent portraits of other expatriate luminaries such as F. Published posthumously in 1964, A Moveable Feast remains one of Ernest Hemingway's most beloved works. If you are building a house, a sailboat, or a catapult, here is a handy tool for understanding the mechanics of joinery, floors, ceilings, hulls, masts or flying buttresses. For architects and engineers there are cogent explanations of the concepts of stress, shear, torsion, fracture, and compression, and chapters on safety design and the relationship of efficiency to aesthetics. Gordon strips engineering of its technical mathematics and communicates the theory behind the structures of a wide variety of materials.Chapters on ”How to Design a Worm” and ”The Advantage of Being a Beam” offer humorous insights into human and natural creation. In a style that combines wit, a masterful command of his subject, and an encyclopedic range of reference, J. Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down is an informal explanation of the basic forces that hold together the ordinary and essential things of this world from buildings and bodies to flying aircraft and eggshells. For anyone who has ever wondered why suspension bridges don't collapse under eight lanes of traffic, how dams hold back or give way under thousands of gallons of water, or what principles guide the design of a skyscraper, a nightgown, or a kangaroo, this book will ease your anxiety and answer your questions. I have to transform them into written words, succinct sentences, and barren terms. They are delivered with hesitance, sometimes distrust, always with fear. I hear words, spoken in the mouths of children, threaded in complex narratives. My task there is a simple one: I interview children in court, following the intake questionnaire, and then translate their stories from Spanish to English.īut nothing is ever that simple. The questions of the title refer to the forty questions on the intake questionnaire for unaccompanied child migrants used in the federal immigration court in New York City where the author began working as a volunteer interpreter in 2015. Instead there are four chapters of varying lengths. This little book is not pretentious, calling itself an “essay” rather than a “book” – but it packs a punch. |