loads.of.books's bookshelf: all en-US Mon, 05 May 2025 13:31:48 -0700 60 loads.of.books's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg <![CDATA[The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War]]> 53317422 In his follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Metaphysical Club, Louis Menand offers a new intellectual and cultural history of the postwar years
The Cold War was not just a contest of power. It was also about ideas, in the broadest sense--economic and political, artistic and personal. In The Free World, the acclaimed Pulitzer Prize-winning scholar and critic Louis Menand tells the story of American culture in the pivotal years from the end of World War II to Vietnam and shows how changing economic, technological, and social forces put their mark on creations of the mind.

How did elitism and an anti-totalitarian skepticism of passion and ideology give way to a new sensibility defined by freewheeling experimentation and loving the Beatles? How was the ideal of "freedom" applied to causes that ranged from anti-communism and civil rights to radical acts of self-creation via art and even crime?

With the wit and insight familiar to readers of The Metaphysical Club and his New Yorker essays, Menand takes us inside Hannah Arendt's Manhattan, the Paris of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Merce Cunningham and John Cage's residences at North Carolina's Black Mountain College, and the Memphis studio where Sam Phillips and Elvis Presley created a new music for the American teenager. He examines the post war vogue for French existentialism, structuralism and post-structuralism, the rise of abstract expressionism and pop art, Allen Ginsberg's friendship with Lionel Trilling, James Baldwin's transformation into a Civil Right spokesman, Susan Sontag's challenges to the New York Intellectuals, the defeat of obscenity laws, and the rise of the New Hollywood.

Stressing the rich flow of ideas across the Atlantic, he also shows how Europeans played a vital role in promoting and influencing American art and entertainment. By the end of the Vietnam era, the American government had lost the moral prestige it enjoyed at the end of the Second World War, but America's once-despised culture had become respected and adored. With unprecedented verve and range, this book explains how that happened.]]> 880 Louis Menand 0374158452 loads.of.books 0 to-read 4.20 2021 The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War
author: Louis Menand
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average rating: 4.20
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]]> The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles 16000664 'A tiny unguarded moment had cost him very dear. From then on, you can imagine, he feared ridicule more than ever'

Into the insular town of Ferrara, a new doctor arrives. Fadigati is hopeful and modern, and more than anything wants to fit into his new home. But his fresh, appealing appearance soon crumbles when the young man he pays to be his lover reveals the doctor's homosexuality in a public humiliation.

The second book in Bassani's The Novel of Ferrara, a series of interconnected works, The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles is a gripping and tragic study of the terrifying historical realities that can shatter the course of individual lives.]]> 138 Giorgio Bassani 0141192151 loads.of.books 0 to-read 3.82 1958 The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles
author: Giorgio Bassani
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1958
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]]> <![CDATA[Manual of Painting and Calligraphy]]> 1103854 Manual of Painting and Calligraphy (Manual de Pintura e Caligrafia) is a partially autobiographical novel by José Saramago, first published in 1977, when Saramago's was 55. It was his second novel, but the first had been published thirty years earlier, and so Manual de Pintura e Caligrafia may be seen, among other things, as the initiation of the work and the remarkable series of novels which leads by 1998 to the Nobel Prize in Literature.

"Manual de Pintura e Caligrafia is on the surface a treatise on how and why to write. In it, we follow a portrait painter who is about to change his conception of his craft thanks to his newly acquired habit of writing. At first, we are presented with trivial matters from his daily life, but over the course of his 'autobiographical exercises', which, as if in a travelogue, include descriptions of cities and regions of Italy and paintings he has admired there, we come to understand another set of the novel's themes: fascism, the resurgence of authoritarian ideologies in Europe and, of course, in Portugal.

"As always, Saramago gives us two books in one: until about halfway through, it's one book, and then it becomes another, quite different one. The 'perfect-imperfect couple' of other Saramago novels is evident here, too - anyone who has read a lot of Saramago will understand ;)."]]> José Saramago 1857540433 loads.of.books 0 to-read 4.20 1977 Manual of Painting and Calligraphy
author: José Saramago
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1977
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]]> Cider With Rosie 27396202 Cider With Rosie is a charming memoir of Laurie Lee's childhood in a remote Cotswold village, a world that is tangibly real and yet reminiscent of a now distant past.

In this idyllic pastoral setting, unencumbered by the callous father who so quickly abandoned his family responsibilities, Laurie's adoring mother becomes the centre of his world as she struggles to raise a growing family against the backdrop of the Great War.

The sophisticated adult author's retrospective commentary on events is endearingly juxtaposed with that of the innocent, spotty youth, permanently prone to tears and self-absorption.

Rosie's identity from the novel Cider with Rosie was kept secret for 25 years. She was Rose Buckland, Lee's cousin by marriage.


From the Paperback edition.]]> 228 Laurie Lee loads.of.books 0 to-read 3.75 1959 Cider With Rosie
author: Laurie Lee
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 3.75
book published: 1959
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]]> Autocracy, Inc. 183932735 224 Anne Applebaum 0241627893 loads.of.books 0 4.21 2024 Autocracy, Inc.
author: Anne Applebaum
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average rating: 4.21
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]]> Bibliotherapy in the Bronx 217262696 Discover how a love of books can foster community, understanding, and personal growth.

Bibliotherapy in The BronxÌýby Emely Rumble, LCSW, is a groundbreaking exploration of the healing power of literature in the lives of marginalized communities. Drawing from her personal and professional experiences, Rumble masterfully intertwines storytelling with therapeutic insights to reveal how reading can be a potent tool for self-discovery, emotional transformation, and social change.

In this transformative work, Rumble offers readers an intimate glimpse into her journey as a psychotherapist in the Bronx, where she has spent over 14 years using books to help clients navigate complex emotions, heal from trauma, and find their voices. Through vivid anecdotes and real-world case studies, she demonstrates how literature can serve as a bridge between personal pain and collective healing.

Rich with practical tips, reflective exercises, and book recommendations,ÌýBibliotherapy in The BronxÌýis a valuable resource for anyone interested in the power of words to change lives. Whether you're a therapist, educator, bibliophile, or simply someone seeking deeper understanding and growth, this book offers a compassionate, culturally affirming guide to the transformative potential of storytelling.

Rumble's work is a testament to the enduring power of books to heal, empower, and liberate. In a time when the world feels increasingly divided,ÌýBibliotherapy in The BronxÌýreminds us that the stories we tell—and the stories we read—can unite us in our shared humanity.]]> 240 Emely Rumble 1955905878 loads.of.books 0 to-read 4.73 Bibliotherapy in the Bronx
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]]> Love in Exile 60683642 ‘We ache for love, but love eludes us. Out of this crisis comes so much of what it means to be human�

Shon Faye grew up quietly obsessed with the feeling that love was not for her. Not just romantic love: the secret fear of her own unworthiness penetrated every aspect and corner of her life. It was a fear that would erupt in destructive, counterfeit versions of the real love she craved: addictions and short-lived romances that were either euphoric and fantastical, or excruciatingly painful and unhinged, often both. Faye’s experience of the world as a trans woman, who grew up visibly queer, exacerbated her fears. But, as she confronted her damaging ideas about love and lovelessness, she came to realize that this sense of exclusion is symptomatic of a much larger problem in our culture.

Love, she argues, is as much a collective question as a personal one. Yet our collective ideals of love have developed in a society which is itself profoundly sick and loveless; in which consumer capitalism sells us ever new, engrossing fantasies of becoming more loved or lovable. In this highly politicized terrain, boundaries are purposefully drawn to keep some in and to keep others out. Those who exist outside them are ignored, denigrated, exiled.

In Love in Exile, Shon Faye shows love is much greater than the narrow ideals we have been taught to crave so desperately that we are willing to bend and break ourselves to fit them. Wise, funny, unsparing, and suffused with a radical clarity, this is a book of and for our times: for seeing and knowing love, in whatever form it takes, is the meaning of life itself.]]> 208 Shon Faye 0241605989 loads.of.books 4 <br />� 4.30 Love in Exile
author: Shon Faye
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average rating: 4.30
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�
]]> Story of Your Mother 217113507 What if we consider motherhood an organizing principle instead of a genre or subject? In her debut book of essays, Chantal Braganza explores the space where identity and motherhood meet. For fans of Dionne Brand, Maggie Nelson, Leslie Jamison, Jacqueline Rose, and Sloane Crosley.

How do we tell our children who they are when we're still struggling to find that language to describe ourselves? Journalist Chantal Braganza, who once thought of herself as "an assemblage of parts," reflects on her upbringing as a daughter of Mexican and Indian immigrants while raising her own multiracial sons. She explores what shapes identity, and the things we reach for as we search for our family's place in the world.
Engaging with a unique structural style, Braganza weaves dreamlike memoir sections of her childhood—some memories, some myths passed down from her family in Vallarta, Mombasa, London, and Toronto—with urgent essays about identity. She wrangles with the limits of language—finding that even fluency doesn't guarantee the ability to translate something for your children.
The questions that emerges Can we believe the people who have given us the story of who we are? And how do we, responsibly, craft that story for our own children?]]> 192 Chantal Braganza 0771009682 loads.of.books 0 currently-reading 4.43 Story of Your Mother
author: Chantal Braganza
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]]> Shattered 220773452
On Boxing Day 2022, in Rome, Hanif Kureishi had a fall. When he came to, in a pool of blood, he was horrified to realise he had lost the use of his limbs.

He could no longer walk, write or wash himself. He could do nothing without the help of others, and required constant care in a hospital. So began an odyssey of a year through the medical systems of Rome and Italy, with the hope of somehow being able to return home, to his house in London.

While confined to a series of hospital wards, he felt compelled to write, but being unable to type or to hold a pen, he began to dictate to family members the words which formed in his head. The result was an extraordinary series of dispatches from his hospital bed � a diary of a life in pieces, recorded with rare honesty, clarity and courage.

This book takes these hospital dispatches � edited, expanded and meticulously interwoven with new writing � and charts both a shattering and a reassembling: a new life born of pain and loss, but animated by new feelings � of gratitude, humility and love.]]> 328 Hanif Kureishi 024166795X loads.of.books 0 4.19 2025 Shattered
author: Hanif Kureishi
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 4.19
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]]> <![CDATA[A History of the World in Six Plagues: How Contagion, Class and Captivity Shape Us, from Cholera to Covid-19]]> 220829109 A deeply reported, insightful and literary account of humankind's battles with epidemic disease and their outsized role in deepening inequality along racial, ethnic, class and gender lines.

Epidemic diseases enter the world by chance, but they become catastrophic by human design.

With clear-eyed research and lush prose, A History of the World in Six Plagues shows that throughout history, outbreaks of disease have been exacerbated by and gone on to further expand the racial, economic and sociopolitical divides we allow to fester in times of good health.

Princeton-trained historian Edna Bonhomme's examination of humanity's disastrous treatment of pandemic disease takes us across place and time from Port-au-Prince to Tanzania, and from plantation-era America to our modern COVID-19-scarred world to unravel shocking truths about the patterns of discrimination in the face of disease. Based on in-depth research and cultural analysis, Bonhomme explores Cholera, HIV/AIDS, the Spanish Flu, Sleeping Sickness, Ebola, and COVID-19 amidst the backdrop of unequal public policy. But much more than a remarkable history, A History of the World in Six Plagues is also a rising call for change.]]> 329 Edna Bonhomme 034970435X loads.of.books 0 to-read 3.00 A History of the World in Six Plagues: How Contagion, Class and Captivity Shape Us, from Cholera to Covid-19
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]]> Whereabouts 56221722
The woman moves through the city, her city, on her own.

She moves along its bright pavements; she passes over its bridges, through its shops and pools and bars. She slows her pace to watch a couple fighting, to take in the sight of an old woman in a waiting room; pauses to drink her coffee in a shaded square.

Sometimes her steps take her to her grieving mother, sealed off in her own solitude. Sometimes they take her to the station, where the trains can spirit her away for a short while.

But in the arc of a year, as one season gives way to the next, transformation awaits. One day at the sea, both overwhelmed and replenished by the sun’s vital heat, her perspective will change forever.

A rare work of fiction, Whereabouts � first written in Italian and then translated by the author herself � brims with the impulse to cross barriers. By grafting herself onto a new literary language, Lahiri has pushed herself to a new level of artistic achievement. A dazzling evocation of a city, its captures a woman standing on one of life’s thresholds, reflecting on what has been lost and facing, with equal hope and rage, what may lie ahead.]]> 176 Jhumpa Lahiri 152662995X loads.of.books 0 to-read 3.85 2018 Whereabouts
author: Jhumpa Lahiri
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2018
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]]> Crossing 230314763 WINNER OF THE FOOTNOTE X COUNTERPOINTS WRITING PRIZE


'Vivid, compassionate, captivating' Elif Shafak

'A special and original voice, one for our times' Philippe Sands

'A moving and tender story about love and identity, and a meditation on the people who make us who we are' Dina Nayeri

A beautifully and compellingly written memoir-family saga where the author retraces the love story between her Palestinian father and Italian mother, and the life of her half-Italian, half-Palestinian family from the 1960s to 2020. After the loss of her mother, she tries to renegotiate her mixed identity and understand her mother's choices from an oppressive childhood in a village in Tuscany to love and community activism in Palestine.

This is a story about grief and what it means to lose not only loved ones, but also a place in the world and a sense of belonging.]]> 272 Sabrin Hasbun 180444152X loads.of.books 0 to-read 0.0 Crossing
author: Sabrin Hasbun
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]]> <![CDATA[Putin's Sledgehammer: The Wagner Group and Russia’s Collapse into Mercenary Chaos]]> 207567896 The astonishing inside story of the Wagner Group, the world's deadliest militia.
In July 2023, the Wagner Group assembled an armed convoy that included tanks and rocket launchers and set out on what seemed like a journey to take control of Moscow. The last person to attempt such a venture was Adolf Hitler.

Wagner's power began from patronage, then grew from international theft and extortion, until it was so great it exposed the weakness of Russia's conventional military and became a threat to the Russian state, one that was not demonstrably eliminated until a private jet containing Wagner's core commanders was blown up in midair.

That Yevgeny Prigozhin, a local criminal thug, was able to build a private army that was on the threshold of overwhelming the world's second largest country seems incredible. In fact, it was inevitable following the hollowing out of the Russian military, the creeping use of contract groups for murky foreign missions, power struggles inside the Kremlin, and the ability of the new militias to corner and exploit the black economy.

Told with unique inside sourcing and expertise, Putin's Sledgehammer is a gripping and terrifying account of a superpower that contracted its soul to a pitiless militia.]]> 480 Candace Rondeaux 1541703065 loads.of.books 0 to-read 4.50 2025 Putin's Sledgehammer: The Wagner Group and Russia’s Collapse into Mercenary Chaos
author: Candace Rondeaux
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 4.50
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]]> The Sea, the Sea 13335675 502 Iris Murdoch loads.of.books 0 to-read 3.97 1978 The Sea, the Sea
author: Iris Murdoch
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1978
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]]> An Unofficial Rose 18730447 287 Iris Murdoch loads.of.books 0 to-read 3.71 1962 An Unofficial Rose
author: Iris Murdoch
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 3.71
book published: 1962
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]]> <![CDATA[The Country Girls: Three Novels and an Epilogue]]> 33931080 A treasure of world literature back in print, featuring a new introduction by Eimear McBride

The country girls are Caithleen "Kate" Brady and Bridget "Baba" Brennan, and their story begins in the repressive atmosphere of a small village in the west of Ireland in the years following World War II. Kate is a romantic, looking for love; Baba is a survivor. Setting out to conquer the bright lights of Dublin, they are rewarded with comical miscommunications, furtive liaisons, bad faith, bad luck, bad sex, and compromise; marrying for the wrong reasons, betraying for the wrong reasons, fighting in their separate ways against the overwhelming wave of expectations forced upon "girls" of every era.

The Country Girls Trilogy and Epilogue charts unflinchingly the pattern of women's lives, from the high spirits of youth to the chill of middle age, from hope to despair, in remarkable prose swinging from blunt and brutal to whimsical and lyrical. It is a saga both painful and hilarious, and remains one of the major accomplishments of Edna O'Brien's extraordinary career.

This omnibus edition includes the novels The Country Girls, The Lonely Girl, and Girls in Their Married Bliss.]]> 560 Edna O'Brien 0374537356 loads.of.books 0 to-read 3.99 1986 The Country Girls: Three Novels and an Epilogue
author: Edna O'Brien
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1986
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]]> On Black Sisters' Street 7469830 On Black Sisters Street tells the haunting story of four very different women who have left their African homeland for the riches of Europe—and who are thrown together by bad luck and big dreams into a sisterhood that will change their lives.

Each night, Sisi, Ama, Efe, and Joyce stand in the windows of Antwerp’s red-light district, promising to make men’s desires come true—if only for half an hour. Pledged to the fierce Madam and a mysterious pimp named Dele, the girls share an apartment but little else—they keep their heads down, knowing that one step out of line could cost them a week’s wages. They open their bodies to strangers but their hearts to no one, each focused on earning enough to get herself free, to send money home or save up for her own future.

Then, suddenly, a murder shatters the still surface of their lives. Drawn together by tragedy and the loss of one of their own, the women realize that they must choose between their secrets and their safety. As they begin to tell their stories, their confessions reveal the face in Efe’s hidden photograph, Ama’s lifelong search for a father, Joyce’s true name, and Sisi’s deepest secrets�-and all their tales of fear, displacement, and love, concluding in a chance meeting with a handsome, sinister stranger.]]> 304 Chika Unigwe 0099523949 loads.of.books 0 to-read 3.94 2007 On Black Sisters' Street
author: Chika Unigwe
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2007
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]]> Unbowed: A Memoir 1070878
“[Maathai’s] story provides uplifting proof of the power of perseverance—and of the power of principled, passionate people to change their countries and inspire the world.â€Ì� â€� The Washington Post

In Unbowed, Nobel Prize winner Wangari Maathai recounts her extraordinary life. When Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement in 1977, she began a vital poor people’s environmental movement, focused on the empowerment of women, that soon spread across Africa. Persevering through run-ins with the Kenyan government and personal losses, and jailed and beaten on numerous occasions, Maathai continued to fight tirelessly to save Kenya’s forests and to restore democracy to her beloved country .]]> 326 Wangari Maathai 0307275205 loads.of.books 0 to-read 4.08 2006 Unbowed: A Memoir
author: Wangari Maathai
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2006
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]]> So Late in the Day 73936042
From one of the finest writers working today, Keegan's new story asks if a lack of generosity might ruin what could be between men and women.]]> 47 Claire Keegan 0571382010 loads.of.books 0 3.97 2023 So Late in the Day
author: Claire Keegan
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2023
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]]> <![CDATA[Gristle: from Factory Farms to Food Safety (Thinking Twice About the Meat We Eat)]]> 1000426 140 Moby 159558191X loads.of.books 0 to-read 3.83 2010 Gristle: from Factory Farms to Food Safety (Thinking Twice About the Meat We Eat)
author: Moby
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2010
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]]> Universality 214269374 Remember—words are your weapons, they’re your tools, your currency: a twisty, slippery descent into the rhetoric of truth and power from a "powerful new voice in British Literature� (The Sunday Times).

Late one night on a Yorkshire farm, in the midst of an illegal rave, a young man is nearly bludgeoned to death with a solid gold bar.

An ambitious young journalist sets out to uncover the truth surrounding the attack, connecting the dots between an amoral banker landlord, an iconoclastic columnist, and a radical anarchist movement that has taken up residence on the farm. She solves the mystery, but her viral exposé raises more questions than it answers, Who wrote it? Why? And how much of it is true? Through a voyeuristic lens, and with a simmering power, the book focuses in on what we say, how we say it, and what we really mean.

The thrilling novel from one of the most acclaimed and incisive young novelists working today, Universality is a compelling, unsettling celebration of the spectacular, appalling force of language. It dares you to look away.]]> 176 Natasha Brown 0593977300 loads.of.books 0 3.42 2025 Universality
author: Natasha Brown
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 3.42
book published: 2025
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]]> <![CDATA[Harpy: A Manifesto for Childfree Women]]> 221560110 'Harpy is a tonic; a tongue-in-cheek manual for dealing with Spanish Inquisition-style questioning about saying pass to procreation and building an enriching life beyond the nuclear family' VOGUE 'Harpy made me nod in recognition, and shake my head with sorrow, and then it made me laugh out loud' EMILIE PINE, author of NOTES TO SELF and RUTH & PEN'Defiant, funny and inspiring' SEÃN HEWITT, author of ALL DOWN DARKNESS WIDE Each generation has more childfree women than the one before. For many, it is an active decision made for a wide range of reasons. Despite this growing trend, we continue to live in a society where women are often judged for deciding to remain childfree - for not conforming to narrow expectations. For being a Harpy. In this timely and thoughtful book, Caroline Magennis looks beyond the often-divisive conversation around women who choose to be childfree and offers an alternative message of hope and celebration. With humour and intelligence, she explores why motherhood isn't right for everybody and how any woman - whether a parent or childfree - can live a full life, while also reminding the reader that your freedoms and the right to autonomy should never be taken for granted.]]> 272 Caroline Magennis 1837730660 loads.of.books 0 to-read 3.00 Harpy: A Manifesto for Childfree Women
author: Caroline Magennis
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]]> <![CDATA[Processed: How the processed meat industry is killing us with the food we love]]> 229002341 Why our love affair with processed meat is killing us. The chilling exposé the food industry doesn't want YOU to know.

They're totally delicious. We love crispy bacon with our eggs for breakfast, ham sandwiches for lunch and snags on election day. Lucie Morris-Marr's family was no different, ordering pepperoni pizzas on Friday nights and putting salami on their summer picnic platters.

But when the Walkley Award-winning investigative journalist was diagnosed with advanced bowel cancer, she learned the chilling truth about our love affair with processed meats.

As Lucie fights for her life, she takes us on a jaw-dropping ride, uncovering the scientific evidence linking our deli favourites with cancer and other serious conditions. She shatters the strange silence enjoyed by the billion-dollar industry that profits from our health risks. Armed with interviews from local and international experts, she asks tough questions about controversial preservatives, fast food, cooking methods and just how processed meats became so embedded in our lives.

With tips on making the transition to healthier foods, Processed is essential reading for anyone who cares about their health.

'Impassioned, informed and well documented' - Matthew Evans

'A firecracker of a book!' - Tracey Spicer

'Demystifies the system around the way we produce our food, market it and sell it to an unwitting public.' - Ronni Salt

'A must-read for anyone concerned about health and longevity.' - Melanie Schilling

'Thought-provoking and, at times terrifying, Processed will make you stop, think and change the way you eat.' - Paula Joye]]> 400 Lucie Morris-Marr 1761066218 loads.of.books 0 currently-reading 4.00 Processed: How the processed meat industry is killing us with the food we love
author: Lucie Morris-Marr
name: loads.of.books
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]]> <![CDATA[In the Garden: Essays on Nature and Growing]]> 57025373 169 Niellah Arboine loads.of.books 0 4.00 2021 In the Garden: Essays on Nature and Growing
author: Niellah Arboine
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2021
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]]> Memoirs of Hadrian 60686231 Librarian note: An alternative cover for this ISBN can be found here.

Framed as a letter from the Roman Emperor Hadrian to his successor, Marcus Aurelius, Marguerite Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian is translated from the French by Grace Frick with an introduction by Paul Bailey in Penguin Modern Classics.

In her magnificent novel, Marguerite Yourcenor recreates the life and death of one of the great rulers of the ancient world. The Emperor Hadrian, aware his demise is imminent, writes a long valedictory letter to Marcus Aurelius, his future successor. The Emperor meditates on his past, describing his accession, military triumphs, love of poetry and music, and the philosophy that informed his powerful and far-flung rule. A work of superbly detailed research and sustained empathy, Memoirs of Hadrian captures the living spirit of the Emperor and of Ancient Rome.]]> 288 Marguerite Yourcenar 0141184965 loads.of.books 0 to-read 4.34 1951 Memoirs of Hadrian
author: Marguerite Yourcenar
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 4.34
book published: 1951
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]]> Gliff 200459614 O brave new world, that has such people in't.

Once upon a time not very far from now, two children come home to find a line of wet red paint encircling the outside of their house.

What does it mean?

It’s a truism of our time that it’ll be the next generation who’ll sort out our increasingly toxic world.

What would that actually be like?

In a state turned hostile, a world of insiders and outsiders, what things of the past can sustain them and what shape can resistance take?

And what’s a horse got to do with any of this?

Gliff is a novel about how we make meaning and how we are made meaningless. With a nod to the traditions of dystopian fiction, a glance at the Kafkaesque, and a new take on the notion of classic, it's a moving and electrifying read, a vital and prescient tale of the versatility and variety deep-rooted in language, in nature and in human nature.]]> 288 Ali Smith 0241665574 loads.of.books 0 4.11 2024 Gliff
author: Ali Smith
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 4.11
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]]> raw content 212113443
But outside of her work, Grace is not a careful person. Her father's history as a police officer working across an infamous case of child abuse shadows her life, as does the violent history entrenched across the landscape of her childhood, and her fears often surface as recklessness.

When Grace becomes unexpectedly pregnant, she tries to accommodate her boyfriend and the prospect of the baby in her life. But after the relief and strange joy of the birth, Grace starts to imagine all sorts of terrible injuries and deaths befalling her child. The steep stairs to her apartment, the kitchen scissors, a boiling kettle all suddenly hold visceral and overwhelming potential for disaster. The baby's vulnerability terrifies fault-lines in her relationship begin to show, and her family history and repressed memories of violence break to the surface.]]> 220 Naomi Booth 1472159349 loads.of.books 0 to-read 4.45 raw content
author: Naomi Booth
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 4.45
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date added: 2025/04/10
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]]> Ootlin 63836681
Jenni Fagan was property of the state before birth. She drew her first breath in care and by the age of seven, she had lived in fourteen different homes and had changed name multiple times.

Twenty years after her first attempt to write this powerful memoir, Jenni is finally ready to share her account. Ootlin is a journey through the broken UK care system - it is one of displacement and exclusion, but also of the power of storytelling. It is about the very human act of making meaning from adversity.

'Beautiful, deep, dangerous, transfixing . . .it will burn a home in your heart, it has in mine. Read every word of every page. Turn them carefully. Jenni Fagan is made of fire and spirit. From start to finish I could not put it down. Close the door. Sit down now. Read Ootlin. Read' LEMN SISSAY

'Essential reading, life changing, I couldn't stop reading once I started . . . Unbelievably brave. Beautiful , earth shattering and unforgettable. A truly rare talent' SAMANTHA MORTON]]> 327 Jenni Fagan 1804942146 loads.of.books 0 4.54 2023 Ootlin
author: Jenni Fagan
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 4.54
book published: 2023
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]]> <![CDATA[Great Japanese Stories: 10 Parallel Texts]]> 96177646 A captivating selection of short stories in the original Japanese alongside their English translations This new dual-language edition of ten stories selected from The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories celebrates some of the very best twentieth-century literature from Japan. Each story appears in the original Japanese alongside an expert English translation, providing unique cultural insight and literary inspiration for language learners. Ranging from a witty send-up of modern social graces to a powerful evocation of the aftermath of the atomic bomb, this remarkable collection includes works from beloved authors Abe Akira, Akutagawa Ryunosuke, Betsuyaku Minoru, Hoshi Shinichi, Kawakami Mieko, Kono Taeko, Murakami Hakuri, Ohba Minako, Ota Yoko and Uchida Hyakken.]]> 272 Jay Rubin 0241634474 loads.of.books 0 3.68 Great Japanese Stories: 10 Parallel Texts
author: Jay Rubin
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 3.68
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]]> Jealousy: Vintage Minis 33876547
Selected from the book In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust

VINTAGE MINIS: GREAT MINDS. BIG IDEAS. LITTLE BOOKS.

Also in the Vintage Minis series:
Desire by Haruki Murakami
Eating by Nigella Lawson
Home by Salman Rushdie
Babies by Anne Enright]]> 96 Marcel Proust 1784872695 loads.of.books 0 to-read 3.28 Jealousy: Vintage Minis
author: Marcel Proust
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 3.28
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date added: 2025/04/07
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]]> <![CDATA[Our Spoons Came from Woolworths]]> 25489203 Our Spoons Came from Woolworths. But Barbara Comyns’s beguiling novel is far from tragic, despite the harrowing ordeals its heroine endures.

Sophia is twenty-one and naïve when she marries fellow artist Charles. She seems hardly fonder of her husband than she is of her pet newt; she can’t keep house (everything she cooks tastes of soap); and she mistakes morning sickness for the aftereffects of a bad batch of strawberries. England is in the middle of the Great Depression, and the money Sophia makes from the occasional modeling gig doesn’t make up for her husband’s indifference to paying the rent. Predictably, the marriage falters; not so predictably, Sophia’s artlessness will be the very thing that turns her life around.]]> 224 Barbara Comyns 1590178963 loads.of.books 0 to-read 3.94 1950 Our Spoons Came from Woolworths
author: Barbara Comyns
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1950
rating: 0
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]]> Half a Lifelong Romance 25937741 379 Eileen Chang 0307387542 loads.of.books 0 to-read 3.99 1948 Half a Lifelong Romance
author: Eileen Chang
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1948
rating: 0
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]]> The Premonition 122778203 I had a premonition of setting out on a journey and getting lost inside a distant tide ... It was the beginning of summer, and I was nineteen years old.

Yayoi lives with her perfect, loving family - something 'like you'd see in a Spielberg movie'. But while her parents tell happy stories of her childhood, she is increasingly haunted by the sense that she's forgotten something important about her past.

Deciding to take a break, she goes to stay with her mysterious but beloved aunt Yukino, whose strange behaviour includes waking Yayoi at two in the morning to be her drinking companion, watching Friday the 13th repeatedly and throwing away all the things she wants to forget.

Living a life without order, Yukino seems to be protecting herself, but beneath this facade Yayoi starts to recover lost memories, and everything she knows about her past threatens to change forever.]]> 133 Banana Yoshimoto 0571382304 loads.of.books 0 3.40 1988 The Premonition
author: Banana Yoshimoto
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 3.40
book published: 1988
rating: 0
read at: 2025/04/03
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]]> Fugitive Pieces 15836 Winner of the Lannan Literary Fiction Award
Winner of the Guardian Fiction Award
Ìý
In 1940 a boy bursts from the mud of a war-torn Polish city, where he has buried himself to hide from the soldiers who murdered his family. His name is Jakob Beer. He is only seven years old. And although by all rights he should have shared the fate of the other Jews in his village, he has not only survived but been rescued by a Greek geologist, who does not recognize the boy as human until he begins to cry. With this electrifying image, Anne Michaels ushers us into her rapturously acclaimed novel of loss, memory, history, and redemption.
Ìý
As Michaels follows Jakob across two continents, she lets us witness his transformation from a half-wild casualty of the Holocaust to an artist who extracts meaning from its abyss. Filled with mysterious symmetries and rendered in heart-stopping prose, Fugitive Pieces is a triumphant work, a book that should not so much be read as it should be surrendered to.]]> 294 Anne Michaels 0679776591 loads.of.books 0 to-read 3.93 1996 Fugitive Pieces
author: Anne Michaels
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1996
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/03
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]]> <![CDATA[Anywhere But Here: How Britain's Broken Asylum System Fails Us All]]> 221480634 'A copy should be on every desk not just in the Home Office, but throughout government. A brilliant and hugely timely book.' Caroline Lucas, author of Another England

What is it like to arrive on our shores with nothing and be pushed to the margins of society?

Who stands to gain from an asylum system that is intentionally hostile?

Anywhere But Here is a powerful exposé of Britain's broken asylum system and how it fails us all.


Each year tens of thousands of people risk their lives to cross the Channel in small boats hoping to find safety in Britain. Yet the very system designed to protect them has all but collapsed.


With unique and unparalleled access, award-winning journalist and former Home Office insider Nicola Kelly takes us behind the scenes of the small boats crisis for the first time.


We follow the under-resourced coastguard overseeing search and rescue operations in the Channel. The decision-makers hired from McDonald's and Aldi to conduct 'life and death' asylum interviews. The immigration barristers securing last-minute reprieves for deportees who narrowly escaped death. And we step inside the Home Office corridors as ministers and advisors respond to emerging crises and scandals, from Windrush to the Rwanda plan.


At its heart are the stories of war-torn arrivals, lone teenagers and trafficked women attempting to settle in cities, towns and villages across the UK. We travel to meet them, exploring where they have fled from and why, and the response of local communities to their new neighbours.


Situated on the beaches and the ports, in the hotels, the courtrooms and the detention centres where the futures of those affected unfold, this is a searing investigation into one of the most urgent issues and shocking injustices of our time]]> 398 Nicola Kelly 1783968567 loads.of.books 0 to-read 4.71 Anywhere But Here: How Britain's Broken Asylum System Fails Us All
author: Nicola Kelly
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 4.71
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]]> The Netanyahus 55817233 240 Joshua Cohen 1913097609 loads.of.books 0 to-read 3.81 2021 The Netanyahus
author: Joshua Cohen
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2021
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]]> Intimations: Six Essays 54313380 Deeply personal and powerfully moving, a short and timely series of reflective essays by one of the most clear-sighted and essential writers of our time

Written during the early months of lockdown, Intimations explores ideas, feelings and questions prompted by an unprecedented situation. What does it mean to submit to a new reality � or to resist it? How do we compare relative sufferings? What is the relationship between time and work? In our isolation, what do other people mean to us? How do we think about them? What is the ratio of contempt to compassion in a crisis? When an unfamiliar world arrives, what does it reveal about the world that came before it?

Suffused with a profound intimacy and tenderness in response to these extraordinary times, Intimations is a slim, suggestive volume with a wide scope, in which Zadie Smith clears a generous space for thought, open enough for each reader to reflect on what has happened � and what might come next.]]> 97 Zadie Smith 073524118X loads.of.books 0 3.95 2020 Intimations: Six Essays
author: Zadie Smith
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2020
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]]> <![CDATA[It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over]]> 195467897 It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over is voraciously alive in the afterlife. Adrift yet keenly aware, she notes every bizarre detail of her new reality. And even if she has forgotten her name and much of what connects her to her humanity, she remembers with an implacable and nearly unbearable longing the place where she knew herself and was known—where she loved and was loved. Traveling across the landscapes of time and of space, heading always west, and carrying a dead but laconically opinionated crow in her chest, our undead narrator encounters and loses parts of her body and her self in one terrifying, hilarious, and heartbreaking situation after another. A tale for our dispossessed times, and one of the sharpest and funniest novels of recent years, It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over plumbs mortality and how it changes everything, except possibly love.]]> 122 Anne de Marcken 180427075X loads.of.books 0 to-read 3.81 2024 It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over
author: Anne de Marcken
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2024
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date added: 2025/04/01
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]]> The Cancer Journals 51704137 Moving between journal entry, memoir, and exposition, Audre Lorde fuses the personal and political as she reflects on her experience coping with breast cancer and a radical mastectomy.

First published over forty years ago, The Cancer Journals is a startling, powerful account of Audre Lorde's experience with breast cancer and mastectomy. Long before narratives explored the silences around illness and women's pain, Lorde questioned the rules of conformity for women's body images and supported the need to confront physical loss not hidden by prosthesis. Living as a "black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet," Lorde heals and re-envisions herself on her own terms and offers her voice, grief, resistance, and courage to those dealing with their own diagnosis. Poetic and profoundly feminist, Lorde's testament gives visibility and strength to women with cancer to define themselves, and to transform their silence into language and action.]]> 69 Audre Lorde 0143135201 loads.of.books 0 4.48 1980 The Cancer Journals
author: Audre Lorde
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 4.48
book published: 1980
rating: 0
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]]> The Assault 214994222 A timeless classic from the author of The Discovery of Heaven

'Fuelled with energy, drama and emotional weight, combined with a light touch and a fast-moving story. Grab it while you can' Times

'Acknowledged as Holland's finest novelist' Guardian

'Mulisch is a rarity ... an instinctively psychological novelist' John Updike

In the bitter final months of the Second World War, the body of a Dutch Nazi collaborator is found on the doorstep of an ordinary family home. The repercussions are complex and the family is killed and the house burned to the ground; only the twelve-year-old son, Anton, survives. Following Anton as he reckons with this trauma through his life, The Assault is a powerful excavation of resistance and the collateral damage wrought on innocent people in times of war.

A runaway bestseller that sold 200,000 copies on first publication, this is a classic of Dutch literature from one of the greatest European writers of his time.

With an introduction by Thomas Harding, author of Hanns and Rudolf]]> 200 Harry Mulisch 180522168X loads.of.books 0 4.60 1982 The Assault
author: Harry Mulisch
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 4.60
book published: 1982
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life]]> 25073935 The latest edition of the communication guide that has sold more than 1,000,000 copies
Ìý
An enlightening look at how peaceful communication can create compassionate connections with family, friends, and other acquaintances, this international bestseller uses stories, examples, and sample dialogues to provide solutions to communication problems both at home and in the workplace. Guidance is provided on identifying and articulating feelings and needs, expressing anger fully, and exploring the power of empathy in order to speak honestly without creating hostility, break patterns of thinking that lead to anger and depression, and communicate compassionately. Included in the new edition is a chapter on conflict resolution and mediation.]]> 244 Marshall B. Rosenberg 189200528X loads.of.books 0 4.35 1999 Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life
author: Marshall B. Rosenberg
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 4.35
book published: 1999
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth]]> 38532119 be less because they earn less. Her personal history affirms the corrosive impact intergenerational poverty can have on individuals, families, and communities, and she explores this idea as lived experience, metaphor, and level of consciousness.

Smarsh was born a fifth generation Kansas wheat farmer on her paternal side and the product of generations of teen mothers on her maternal side. Through her experiences growing up as the daughter of a dissatisfied young mother and raised predominantly by her grandmother on a farm thirty miles west of Wichita, we are given a unique and essential look into the lives of poor and working class Americans living in the heartland. Combining memoir with powerful analysis and cultural commentary, Heartland is an uncompromising look at class, identity, and the particular perils of having less in a country known for its excess.]]> 290 Sarah Smarsh 1501133098 loads.of.books 0 to-read 3.74 2018 Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth
author: Sarah Smarsh
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2018
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]]> <![CDATA[Wasteland: The Secret World of Waste and the Urgent Search for a Cleaner Future]]> 63251764 An award-winning investigative journalist takes a deep dive into the global waste crisis, exposing the hidden world that enables our modern economy � and finds out the dirty truth behind a simple question: what really happens to what we throw away?

In Wasteland, journalist Oliver Franklin-Wallis takes us on a shocking journey inside the waste industry—the secretive multi-billion dollar world that underpins the modern economy, quietly profiting from what we leave behind. In India, he meets the waste-pickers on the front line of the plastic crisis. In the UK, he journeys down sewers to confront our oldest—and newest—waste crisis, and comes face-to-face with nuclear waste. In Ghana, he follows the after-life of our technology and explores the global export network that results in goodwill donations clogging African landfills. From an incinerator to an Oklahoma ghost-town, Franklin-Wallis travels in search of the people and companies that really handle waste—and on the way, meets the innovators and campaigners pushing for a cleaner and less wasteful future. Ìý
Ìý
With this mesmerizing, thought-provoking, and occasionally terrifying investigation, Oliver Franklin-Wallis tells a new story of humanity based on what we leave behind, and along the way, he shares a blueprint for building a healthier, more sustainable world—before we’re all buried in trash.]]> 392 Oliver Franklin-Wallis 0306827115 loads.of.books 0 to-read 4.45 2023 Wasteland: The Secret World of Waste and the Urgent Search for a Cleaner Future
author: Oliver Franklin-Wallis
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 4.45
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]]> Morning and Evening 221326443 Morning and Evening is a novel concerning the beautiful dream that our lives have meaning.]]> 104 Jon Fosse 1804271217 loads.of.books 0 4.17 2000 Morning and Evening
author: Jon Fosse
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2000
rating: 0
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]]> A Life in Words: Memoirs 14741988
Source: ]]> 312 Ismat Chughtai 0143420313 loads.of.books 0 to-read 3.83 2012 A Life in Words: Memoirs
author: Ismat Chughtai
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2012
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date added: 2025/03/28
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]]> <![CDATA[Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress―and How to Bring It Back]]> 214175076 A provocative exploration about the architecture of power, the forces that stifle us from getting things done, and how we can restore confidence in democratically elected government—“the best book to date on the biggest political issue that nobody is talking about� (Matthew Yglesias)

America was once a country that did big things—we built the world’s greatest rail network, a vast electrical grid, interstate highways, abundant housing, the Social Security system, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and more. But today, even while facing a host of pressing challenges—a housing shortage, a climate crisis, a dilapidated infrastructure—we feel stuck, unable to move the needle. Why?

America is today the victim of a vetocracy that allows nearly anyone to stifle progress. While conservatives deserve some blame, progressives have overlooked an unlikely culprit: their own fears of “The Establishment.� A half-century ago, progressivism’s designs on getting stuff done were eclipsed by a desire to box in government. Reformers put speaking truth to power ahead of exercising that power for good. The ensuing gridlock has pummeled faith in public institutions of all sorts, stifled the movement’s ability to deliver on its promises, and, most perversely, opened the door for MAGA-style populism.

A century ago, Americans were similarly frustrated—and progressivism pointed the way out. The same can happen again. Marc J. Dunkelman vividly illustrates what progressives must do if they are going to break through today’s paralysis and restore, once again, confidence in democratically elected government. To get there, reformers will need to acknowledge where they’ve gone wrong. Progressivism’s success moving forward hinges on the movement’s willingness to rediscover its roots.]]> 416 Marc J. Dunkelman 154170021X loads.of.books 0 3.97 Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress―and How to Bring It Back
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]]> The Message 210943364
The first of the book’s three intertwining essays is set in Dakar, Senegal. Despite being raised as a strict Afrocentrist, Coates had never set foot on the African continent until now. He roams the “steampunk� city of “old traditions and new machinery,� but everywhere he goes he feels as if he’s in two places at once: a modern city in Senegal and a mythic kingdom in his mind. Finally he travels to the slave castles off the coast and has his own reckoning with the legacy of the Afrocentric dream.

He takes readers along with him to Columbia, South Carolina, where he meets an educator whose job is threatened for teaching one of Coates’s own books. There he discovers a community of mostly white supporters who were transformed by the “racial reckoning� of 2020. But he also explores the backlash to this reckoning and the deeper myths of the community—a capital of the confederacy with statues of segregationists looming over its public squares.

And in Palestine, Coates discovers the devastating gap between the narratives we’ve accepted and the clashing reality of life on the ground. He meets with activists and dissidents, Israelis and Palestinians—the old, who remember their dispossessions on two continents, and the young, who have only known struggle and disillusionment. He travels into Jerusalem, the heart of Zionist mythology, and to the occupied territories, where he sees the reality the myth is meant to hide. It is this hidden story that draws him in and profoundly changes him—and makes the war that would soon come all the more devastating.

Written at a dramatic moment in American and global life, this work from one of the country’s most important writers is about the urgent need to untangle ourselves from the destructive nationalist myths that shape our world—and our own souls—and embrace the liberating power of even the most difficult truths.]]> 232 Ta-Nehisi Coates 0593230388 loads.of.books 0 4.51 2024 The Message
author: Ta-Nehisi Coates
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 4.51
book published: 2024
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]]> Perfection 203200544 112 Vincenzo Latronico 1804271055 loads.of.books 0 to-read 3.85 2022 Perfection
author: Vincenzo Latronico
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/26
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]]> Nothing ... Except My Genius 15697914
This new selection drawn from Wilde's stories, novels, plays, features, reviews and letters provides an invaluable introduction and reference to Wilde the artist and the man. The full extent of his wit is on display here, together with the serious, reflective and often melancholy side to his character so eloquently expressed in 'De Profundis' and 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol'.]]> 108 Oscar Wilde 1856132811 loads.of.books 0 3.43 1997 Nothing ... Except My Genius
author: Oscar Wilde
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 3.43
book published: 1997
rating: 0
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]]> Flesh 215548433 A propulsive, hypnotic novel about a man who is unravelled by a series of events beyond his grasp.

Fifteen-year-old István lives with his mother in a quiet apartment complex in Hungary. New to the town and shy, he is unfamiliar with the social rituals at school and soon becomes isolated, with his neighbour � a married woman close to his mother’s age � as his only companion. These encounters shift into a clandestine relationship that István himself can barely understand, and his life soon spirals out of control.

As the years pass, he is carried gradually upwards on the currents of the twenty-first century’s tides of money and power, moving from the army to the company of London’s super-rich, with his own competing impulses for love, intimacy, status and wealth winning him unimaginable riches, until they threaten to undo him completely.

Spare and penetrating, Flesh is the finest novel yet by a master of realism, asking profound questions about what drives a life: what makes it worth living, and what breaks it.]]> 334 David Szalay 152992684X loads.of.books 0 to-read 4.08 2025 Flesh
author: David Szalay
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 4.08
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]]> Nova Scotia House 218583908 ‘A work of genius� Philip Hoare
‘One of the best things I’ve read in many many years� Hilton Als
'Beautifully provocative ... the most compelling exploration of life, death, love and resistance that I've read for a very long time' Eimear McBride

A story of loss and grief, sex and love, and refusing to relinquish dreams

He said he would understand if it was too much for me, that I could leave him, that I was young, I should be living, I said to him, I am living.

Johnny Grant faces stark life decisions. Seeking answers, he looks back to his relationship with Jerry Field. When they met, nearly thirty years ago, Johnny was 19, Jerry was 45. They fell in love and made a life on their own terms in Jerry’s 1, Nova Scotia House. Johnny is still there today � but Jerry is gone, and so is the world they knew.

As Johnny’s mind travels between then and now, he begins to remember stories of Jerry’s of experiments in living; of radical philosophies; of the many possibilities of love, sex and friendship before the AIDS crisis devastated the queer community. Slowly, he realizes what he must do next—and attempts to restore ways of being that could be lost forever.

Nova Scotia House takes us to the heart of a relationship, a community and an era. It is both a love story and a lament; bearing witness to the enduring pain of the AIDS pandemic and honouring the joys and creativity of queer life. Intimate, visionary, and profoundly original, it marks the debut of a vibrant new voice in contemporary fiction, and a writer with a liberating new story to tell.
]]> 224 Charlie Porter 1802067450 loads.of.books 0 to-read 4.15 2025 Nova Scotia House
author: Charlie Porter
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2025
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]]> <![CDATA[Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country]]> 124961437 A fearless, powerfully written on-the-ground account of a nation careening into violent autocracy—told through harrowing stories of the Philippines� state-sanctioned killings of its citizens—from a journalist of international renown

“My job is to go to places where people die. I pack my bags, talk to the survivors, write my stories, then go home to wait for the next catastrophe. I don’t wait very long.�

Journalist Patricia Evangelista came of age in the aftermath of a street revolution that forged a new future for the Philippines. Three decades later, in the face of mounting inequality, the nation discovered the fragility of its democratic institutions under the regime of strongman Rodrigo Duterte.

Some People Need Killing is Evangelista’s meticulously reported and deeply human chronicle of the Philippines� drug war. For six years, Evangelista chronicled the killings carried out by police and vigilantes in the name of Duterte’s war on drugs—a war that has led to the slaughter of thousands—immersing herself in the world of killers and survivors and capturing the atmosphere of fear created when an elected president decides that some lives are worth less than others.

The book takes its title from a vigilante whose words seemed to reflect the psychological accommodation that most of the country had made: “I’m really not a bad guy,� he said. “I’m not all bad. Some people need killing.�

A profound act of witness and a tour de force of literary journalism, Some People Need Killing is also a brilliant dissection of the grammar of violence and an important investigation of the human impulses to dominate and resist.]]> 428 Patricia Evangelista 0593133137 loads.of.books 0 to-read 4.19 2023 Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country
author: Patricia Evangelista
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2023
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]]> <![CDATA[Dear Minnie: Conversations with Remarkable Mothers]]> 214645310 "A must-read for anyone seeking to understand the messy, miraculous truth of motherhood." - KATIE PIPER

"It was the first time I’d ever signed ‘Mummy�, and it was a goodbye letter."

"I feel so honoured to have carried you both for nine months and delivered you safely into the arms of your parents."

"I knew I had to be in that little girl's life. The next time I got out, I never used drugs again."

"As a refugee, I say to my daughter, 'You have been born in a safe place. Never take that for granted.'�

After having her first child, Stacey Dooley had a new understanding of what family means � but not everyone’s experience of motherhood is the same. In Dear Minnie, Stacey brings her trademark empathy and investigative skill to an entirely new ‘frontline�, exploring the varied perspectives of mothers of all experiences.

Using letters that each mother has written to their child as her starting point, Stacey’s frank, honest, and moving inquiry takes in experiences from pregnancy to birth and beyond, uncovering the messy truths and different emotional journeys women take, as well as the common bonds they all share.

Dear Minnie shines a light on the quiet selflessness, resilience, pain, trauma, grief, and joy of every kind of mother, to tell a story that transcends culture and geography, and speaks to us all.]]> 200 Stacey Dooley 1473533864 loads.of.books 0 4.36 Dear Minnie: Conversations with Remarkable Mothers
author: Stacey Dooley
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 4.36
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]]> Frenchman's Creek 27823692 253 Daphne du Maurier loads.of.books 0 to-read 4.00 1941 Frenchman's Creek
author: Daphne du Maurier
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1941
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/22
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[We Are Not Numbers: The Voices of Gaza’s Youth]]> 220343035 ***THE NUMBER 5 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER***

***THE IRISH BESTSELLER***

'This book is a jailbreak and a miracle' NAOMI KLEIN

'Essential . . . A project that insists on liberation' TA-NEHISI COATES

'You'll carry [it] in your heart for a long time' KAMILA SHAMSIE

'Wondrous, devastating and vibrant' BRYAN WASHINGTON

'Impossible to put down or forget' RIZ AHMED

A teenage girl stares at her roof, hoping it won’t collapse over her head. A young student searches the Internet for photos of libraries around the world, hoping he’ll be able to visit them one day. Another walks around the city, taking notes of all the buildings she dreams of repairing.

These are the stories of young people from Gaza, born under Israeli occupation and blockade. They are people who have endured unspeakable struggles and losses, who keep fighting to be recognised not as numbers, but as human beings with hopes, dreams and lives worth living.

We Are Not Numbers was founded in 2014 to give voice to the youth of Gaza. In this collection, vital, urgent and full of heart, spanning over ten years to the present moment, we gain an unparalleled insight into the past, as well as the current and next generation of Palestinian leaders, artists, scientists and scholars and imagine where we might go from here.

'A vital book . . . a profoundly important literary event' CHINA MIEVILLE

'A brilliant collection of voices that lays bare the struggles and suffering of ordinary young Palestinians' MONICA ALI

'We Are Not Numbers is not just a book � it's my life, their life, and our shared story . . . This is Gaza as it truly is, written by those who live it every day' MOTAZ AZIZA

'A rebellion against the singular story. An insightful, multifaceted glimpse into the besieged Gaza Strip, where millions of people continue to confront a genocide waged by an Israeli regime' MOHAMMED EL-KURD]]> 327 Ahmed Alnaouq 1804955701 loads.of.books 0 5.00 2025 We Are Not Numbers: The Voices of Gaza’s Youth
author: Ahmed Alnaouq
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 5.00
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Dirty Old London: The Victorian Fight Against Filth]]> 21945078
Through thematic chapters, Jackson describes how Victorian reformers met with both triumph and disaster. Full of individual stories and overlooked details—from the dustmen who grew rich from recycling, to the peculiar history of the public toilet—this riveting book gives us a fresh insight into the minutiae of daily life and the wider challenges posed by the unprecedented growth of the Victorian capital.]]> 293 Lee Jackson 0300192053 loads.of.books 0 to-read 3.76 2014 Dirty Old London: The Victorian Fight Against Filth
author: Lee Jackson
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2014
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/21
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]]> Adrift 8112028 Before The Perfect Storm, before In the Heart of the Sea, Steven Callahan’s Adrift chronicled one of the most astounding voyages of the century and one of the great sea adventures of all time. In some ways the model for the new wave of adventure books, Adrift is now an undeniable seafaring classic, a riveting firsthand account by the only man known to have survived for more than a month alone at sea, fighting for his life in an inflatable raft after his small sloop capsized only six days from port.

Racked by hunger, buffeted by storms, scorched by the tropical sun, Callahan drifted for 1,800 miles, fighting off sharks with a makeshift spear and watching as nine ships passed him by. “A real human drama that delves deeply into man’s survival instincts� (Library Journal), Adrift is a story of anguish and horror, of undying heroism, hope, and survival, and a must-read for any adventure lover.

“An utterly absorbing saga.� - Newsweek

“Fascinating…a clearly written ocean yarn in which the stakes are high and a brave man wins through.� - Wall Street Journal

]]> 256 Steven Callahan 1615582916 loads.of.books 0 to-read 3.92 1986 Adrift
author: Steven Callahan
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1986
rating: 0
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]]> The Red Parts 263257
In an instance of remarkable serendipity, more than three decades later, a 2004 DNA match led to the arrest of a new suspect for Jane's murder at precisely the same time that Nelson was set to publish a book of poetry about her aunt's life and death - a book she had been working on for years, and which assumed her aunt's case to be closed forever.

The Red Parts chronicles the uncanny series of events that led to Nelson's interest in her aunt's death, the reopening of the case, the bizarre and brutal trial that ensued, and the effects these events had on the disparate group of people they brought together. But The Red Parts is much more than a "true crime" record of a murder, investigation, and trial. For into this story Nelson has woven an account of a girlhood and early adulthood haunted by loss, mortality, mystery, and betrayal, as well as a look at the personal and political consequences of our cultural fixation on dead (white) women.]]> 201 Maggie Nelson 141653203X loads.of.books 0 to-read 4.04 2007 The Red Parts
author: Maggie Nelson
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2007
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/19
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]]> Survival in Auschwitz 6174
In 1943, Primo Levi, a twenty-five-year-old chemist and “Italian citizen of Jewish race,� was arrested by Italian fascists and deported from his native Turin to Auschwitz. Survival in Auschwitz is Levi’s classic account of his ten months in the German death camp, a harrowing story of systematic cruelty and miraculous endurance. Remarkable for its simplicity, restraint, compassion, and even wit, Survival in Auschwitz remains a lasting testament to the indestructibility of the human spirit.]]> 187 Primo Levi 0684826801 loads.of.books 0 to-read 4.20 1947 Survival in Auschwitz
author: Primo Levi
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1947
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Cutting: Understanding and Overcoming Self-Mutilation]]> 203499 269 Steven Levenkron 0393319385 loads.of.books 0 to-read 3.83 1998 Cutting: Understanding and Overcoming Self-Mutilation
author: Steven Levenkron
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1998
rating: 0
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]]> The World That Was Ours 23999659 'This passionately political memoir,' observed The Times, 'is vibrant with the dilemmas of everyday family life, quick-witted dialogue, fast-paced adventure and novelistic detail.' Yet the political background is not dwelt on: it is simply taken for granted that civilised South Africans fought apartheid and the uncivilised propped it up. The main strength of the book is as an outstanding personal memoir; in this respect it bears comparison with autobiographies by Nadezhda Mandelstam and Christabel Bielenberg. 'It reads like a thriller page after page... The loveliest of Hilda Bernstein's works about the ugliest of her times' said Albie Sachs in the Independent.]]> 344 Hilda Bernstein 1906462321 loads.of.books 0 to-read 4.00 1967 The World That Was Ours
author: Hilda Bernstein
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1967
rating: 0
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]]> Fragments 4934961
Winner of the National Jewish Book Award

Translated from the German by Carol Brown Janeway.]]> 155 Binjamin Wilkomirski 0330349929 loads.of.books 0 to-read 2.91 1995 Fragments
author: Binjamin Wilkomirski
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 2.91
book published: 1995
rating: 0
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]]> Auschwitz: A History 37486376 176 Sybille Steinbacher 0141987480 loads.of.books 0 to-read 3.91 2004 Auschwitz: A History
author: Sybille Steinbacher
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2004
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/19
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]]> How Can You Bear to be Human? 31358750 How Can You Bear To Be Human? 143 Nicolas Bentley loads.of.books 0 to-read 2.33 1959 How Can You Bear to be Human?
author: Nicolas Bentley
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 2.33
book published: 1959
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/19
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]]> Three Letters from the Andes 2612347 Three Letters from the Andes 118 Patrick Leigh Fermor 0140167889 loads.of.books 0 to-read 3.25 1991 Three Letters from the Andes
author: Patrick Leigh Fermor
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 3.25
book published: 1991
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/19
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]]> Lies and Sorcery 62001844
A heavily abridged English translation of Lies and Sorcery came out in the 1950s under the title of House of Lies. Jenny McPhee’s new translation is the first complete English rendering of the book that Georg Lukács considered the greatest of modern Italian novels.]]> 800 Elsa Morante 1681376849 loads.of.books 0 to-read 4.02 1948 Lies and Sorcery
author: Elsa Morante
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 4.02
book published: 1948
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/18
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]]> <![CDATA[The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea]]> 895680 181 Yukio Mishima 0099284790 loads.of.books 4 3.74 1963 The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea
author: Yukio Mishima
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 3.74
book published: 1963
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/26
date added: 2025/03/17
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]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Love]]> 7130670 134 Raymond Carver 0099530325 loads.of.books 3 3.76 1981 What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
author: Raymond Carver
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 3.76
book published: 1981
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/08
date added: 2025/03/17
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]]> Notes to Self 42373438
In this debut, Emilie Pine speaks to the events that have marked her life—those emotional disruptions for which our society has no adequate language, at once bittersweet, clandestine, and ordinary. She writes with radical honesty on the unspeakable grief of infertility, on caring for an alcoholic parent, on taboos around female bodies and female pain, on sexual violence and violence against the self. This is the story of one woman, and of all women.

Devastating, poignant, and wise—and joyful against the odds�Notes to Self is an unforgettable exploration of what it feels like to be alive, and a daring act of rebellion against a society that is more comfortable with women’s silence.]]> 224 Emilie Pine 0241986222 loads.of.books 4 4.20 2018 Notes to Self
author: Emilie Pine
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/30
date added: 2025/03/17
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]]> <![CDATA[Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder]]> 199344846
On the morning of August 12, 2022, Salman Rushdie was standing onstage at the Chautauqua Institution, preparing to give a lecture on the importance of keeping writers safe from harm, when a man in black—black clothes, black mask—rushed down the aisle toward him, wielding a knife. His first thought: So it’s you. Here you are.

What followed was a horrific act of violence that shook the literary world and beyond. Now, for the first time, and in unforgettable detail, Rushdie relives the traumatic events of that day and its aftermath, as well as his journey toward physical recovery and the healing that was made possible by the love and support of his wife, Eliza, his family, his army of doctors and physical therapists, and his community of readers worldwide.

Knife is Rushdie at the peak of his powers, writing with urgency, with gravity, with unflinching honesty. It is also a deeply moving reminder of literature’s capacity to make sense of the unthinkable, an intimate and life-affirming meditation on life, loss, love, art—and finding the strength to stand up again.]]> 209 Salman Rushdie 0593730240 loads.of.books 4 3.99 2024 Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder
author: Salman Rushdie
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2024
rating: 4
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]]> Stone Yard Devotional 168632462 A deeply moving novel about forgiveness, grief, and what it means to be 'good', from the award-winning author of The Natural Way of Things and The Weekend.

A woman abandons her city life and marriage to return to the place of her childhood, holing up in a small religious community hidden away on the stark plains of the Monaro. She does not believe in God, doesn't know what prayer is, and finds herself living this strange, reclusive life almost by accident.

As she gradually adjusts to the rhythms of monastic life, she finds herself turning again and again to thoughts of her mother, whose early death she can't forget. Disquiet interrupts this secluded life with three visitations. First comes a terrible mouse plague, each day signaling a new battle against the rising infestation. Second is the return of the skeletal remains of a sister who left the community decades before to minister to deprived women in Thailand - then disappeared, presumed murdered. Finally, a troubling visitor to the monastery pulls the narrator further back into her past.

With each of these disturbing arrivals, the woman faces some deep questions. Can a person be truly good? What is forgiveness? Is loss of hope a moral failure? And can the business of grief ever really be finished? A meditative and deeply moving novel from one of Australia's most acclaimed and best loved writers.

"Wood joins the ranks of writers such as Nora Ephron, Penelope Lively and Elizabeth Strout." THE GUARDIAN UK]]> 320 Charlotte Wood loads.of.books 4 3.73 2023 Stone Yard Devotional
author: Charlotte Wood
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2023
rating: 4
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]]> <![CDATA[The Chibineko Kitchen (Meals to Remember at the Chibineko Kitchen, #1)]]> 214054405 Follow the bank of the Koitogawa river until you reach the beach. From there a path of white seashells will lead you to the Chibineko Kitchen. Step inside, they'll be expecting you.

These are the directions Kotoko has been given. She arrives at the tiny restaurant, perched right by the water, early in the morning. Still reeling from the sudden death of her brother, she's been promised that the food served there will bring him back to her, for one last time.

Taking a seat in the small, wood-panelled room, she waits as Kai, the restaurant's young chef, brings out steaming bowls of simmered fish, rice and miso soup. Though she hadn't ordered anything, Kai had somehow known the exact dish her brother always used to cook for her. And as she takes her first delicious bite, the gulls outside fall silent and the air grows hazy . . .

Soul-nourishing and comforting, The Chibineko Kitchen will help you remember what matters most in life.]]> 208 Yuta Takahashi 1399817612 loads.of.books 3 4.09 2020 The Chibineko Kitchen (Meals to Remember at the Chibineko Kitchen, #1)
author: Yuta Takahashi
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/28
date added: 2025/03/17
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]]> <![CDATA[A Kick in the Belly: Women, Slavery and Resistance]]> 58754075
The forgotten history of women slaves and their struggle for liberation. Enslaved West Indian women had few opportunities to record their stories for posterity. In this riveting work of historical reclamation, Stella Dadzie recovers the lives of women who played a vital role in developing a culture of slave resistance across the Caribbean.

Dadzie follows a savage trail from Elmina Castle in Ghana and the horrors of the Middle Passage, as slaves were transported across the Atlantic, to the sugar plantations of Jamaica and beyond. She reveals women who were central to slave rebellions and liberation. There are African queens, such as Amina, who led a 20,000-strong army. There is Mary Prince, sold at twelve years old, never to see her sisters or mother again. Asante Nanny the Maroon, the legendary obeah sorceress, who guided the rebel forces in the Blue Mountains during the First Maroon War.

Whether responding to the horrendous conditions of plantation life, the sadistic vagaries of their captors or the “peculiar burdens of their sex,� their collective sanity relied on a highly subversive adaptation of the values and cultures they smuggled from their lost homes. By sustaining or adapting remembered cultural practices, they ensured that the lives of chattel slaves retained both meaning and purpose. A Kick in the Belly makes clear that subtle acts of insubordination and conscious acts of rebellion came to undermine the very fabric of West Indian slavery.]]> 224 Stella Dadzie 1839763884 loads.of.books 5 4.35 2020 A Kick in the Belly: Women, Slavery and Resistance
author: Stella Dadzie
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/01
date added: 2025/03/17
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]]> Nuclear War: A Scenario 210456579 This is a minute-by-minute account of what comes next.
It has to be read to be believed.

There is only one scenario other than an asteroid strike that could end the world as we know it in a matter of hours: nuclear war.

Until now, no one outside official circles has known exactly what would happen if a rogue state launched a nuclear missile at the Pentagon. Second by second and minute by minute, these are the real-life protocols that choreograph the end of civilization as we know it.

Decisions that affect hundreds of millions of lives need to be made within six minutes, based on partial information, in the knowledge that once launched, nothing is capable of halting the destruction.
Based on dozens of new interviews with military and civilian experts who have built the weapons, been privy to the response plans, and taken responsibility for crucial decisions, this is the only account of what a nuclear exchange would look like.
Nuclear War is at once a compulsive non-fiction thriller and a powerful argument that we must rid ourselves of these world-ending weapons for ever.]]> 375 Annie Jacobsen 1911709593 loads.of.books 4 4.35 2024 Nuclear War: A Scenario
author: Annie Jacobsen
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/05
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]]> Milk and honey 23513349 Milk and Honey is a collection of poetry and prose about survival. About the experience of violence, abuse, love, loss, and femininity.

It is split into four chapters, with each chapter dealing with a different pain. Healing a different heartache. Milk and Honey takes readers through a journey of the most bitter moments in life and finds sweetness in them -- because there is sweetness everywhere if you are just willing to look.]]> 204 Rupi Kaur 1502784270 loads.of.books 1 3.96 2014 Milk and honey
author: Rupi Kaur
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2014
rating: 1
read at: 2025/01/06
date added: 2025/03/17
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]]> The Barefoot Woman 39380515 A moving, unforgettable tribute to a Tutsi woman who did everything to protect her children from the Rwandan genocide, by the daughter who refuses to let her family's story be forgotten.

The story of the author's mother, a fierce, loving woman who for years protected her family from the violence encroaching upon them in pre-genocide Rwanda. Recording her memories of their life together in spare, wrenching prose, Mukasonga preserves her mother's voice in a haunting work of art.]]> 146 Scholastique Mukasonga 1939810043 loads.of.books 4 4.08 2008 The Barefoot Woman
author: Scholastique Mukasonga
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2008
rating: 4
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date added: 2025/03/17
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]]> <![CDATA[Africonomics: A History of Western Ignorance and African Economics]]> 209966927 We need to think differently about African economics.

For centuries, Westerners have tried to ‘fix� African economies. From the abolition of slavery onwards, missionaries, philanthropists, development economists and NGOs have arrived on the continent, full of good intentions and bad ideas. Their experiments have invariably gone awry, to the great surprise of all involved.

In this short, bold story of Western economic thought about Africa, historian Bronwen Everill argues that these interventions fail because they start from a misguided that African economies just need to be more like the West. Ignoring Africa's own traditions of economic thought, Europeans and Americans assumed a set of universal economic laws that could be applied anywhere. They enforced specifically Western ideas about growth, wealth, debt, unemployment, inflation, women’s work and more, and used Western metrics to find African countries wanting.

The West does not know better than African nations how an economy should be run. By laying bare the myths and realities of our tangled economic history, Africonomics moves from Western ignorance to African knowledge.]]> 304 Bronwen Everill 0008581169 loads.of.books 4 3.67 Africonomics: A History of Western Ignorance and African Economics
author: Bronwen Everill
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 3.67
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rating: 4
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]]> <![CDATA[Looking at Women Looking at War: A War and Justice Diary]]> 211003691
When Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Victoria Amelina was busy writing a novel, taking part in the country’s literary scene, and parenting her son. Now she became someone new: a war crimes researcher and the chronicler of extraordinary women like herself who joined the resistance. These heroines include Evgenia, a prominent lawyer turned soldier, Oleksandra, who documented tens of thousands of war crimes and won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2022, and Yulia, a librarian who helped uncover the abduction and murder of a children’s book author.

Everyone in Ukraine knew that Amelina was documenting the war. She photographed the ruins of schools and cultural centers; she recorded the testimonies of survivors and eyewitnesses to atrocities. And she slowly turned back into a storyteller, writing what would become this book.

On the evening of June 27th, 2023, Amelina and three international writers stopped for dinner in the embattled Donetsk region. When a Russian cruise missile hit the restaurant, Amelina suffered grievous head injuries, and lost consciousness. She died on July 1st. She was thirty-seven. She left behind an incredible account of the ravages of war and the cost of resistance. Honest, intimate, and wry, this book will be celebrated as a classic.]]> 320 Victoria Amelina 1250367689 loads.of.books 5 4.48 Looking at Women Looking at War: A War and Justice Diary
author: Victoria Amelina
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 4.48
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]]> <![CDATA[From Here to Eternity: Travelling the World to Find the Good Death]]> 42245451 Smoke Gets in Your Eyes expands our sense of what it means to treat the dead with “dignity.�

Fascinated by our pervasive terror of dead bodies, mortician Caitlin Doughty set out to discover how other cultures care for their dead. In rural Indonesia, she observes a man clean and dress his grandfather’s mummified body. Grandpa’s mummy has lived in the family home for two years, where the family has maintained a warm and respectful relationship. She meets Bolivian natitas (cigarette-smoking, wish-granting human skulls), and introduces us to a Japanese kotsuage, in which relatives use chopsticks to pluck their loved-ones� bones from cremation ashes.

With curiosity and morbid humor, Doughty encounters vividly decomposed bodies and participates in compelling, powerful death practices almost entirely unknown in America. Featuring Gorey-esque illustrations by artist Landis Blair, From Here to Eternity introduces death-care innovators researching green burial and body composting, explores new spaces for mourning—including a glowing-Buddha columbarium in Japan and America’s only open-air pyre—and reveals unexpected new possibilities for our own death rituals.]]> 248 Caitlin Doughty 1474606539 loads.of.books 4 4.34 2017 From Here to Eternity: Travelling the World to Find the Good Death
author: Caitlin Doughty
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/17
date added: 2025/03/17
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]]> <![CDATA[The Meteorites: Encounters with Outer Space and Deep Time]]> 213994114 'The Meteorites conjures a small epiphany about our own place in the universe' The Sunday Times

'Stunning and riveting' Noreen Masud, author of A Flat Place

'Absolutely fascinating' Mark Haddon

'Dazzling' Financial Times

From your window you can see the stars and distant light years away, it's easy to think that our existences and theirs will never intersect. Yet meteorites - mysterious, irregular rocks of sometimes immense value - connect us with the vastness of the universe. They may have brought the first life to our planet, and today they still reveal extraordinary scientific insights.

Helen Gordon reveals the fascinating stories of fallen meteorites and the lives they've touched - from collectors to kings, scientists to farmers. She meets amateur astronomers and gem dealers, goes meteorite hunting across rooftops and learns what objects moving through space can tell us about the fragility of life on Earth.]]> 288 Helen Gordon 1800815360 loads.of.books 4 3.97 2025 The Meteorites: Encounters with Outer Space and Deep Time
author: Helen Gordon
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/24
date added: 2025/03/17
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]]> Stay with Me 209810206
In Stay with Me, Hanne Ørstavik returns to her theme of love, this time exploring how it can be intertwined with insecurity, fear and violence. How do you recognize love? What if your deeply rooted need to protect yourself also means shutting love out?

‘Soul-searching on speed. Ørstavik writes with such distressing courage that as a reader, you become sweaty-palmed. Stay with Me is Hanne Ørstavik at her very best; so intense and profound that the unease becomes contagious . . . Above all, she conveys a spiritual openness that feels naked and vibrantly intense.� Dagbladet]]> 216 Hanne Ørstavik 1916751083 loads.of.books 5 3.44 2023 Stay with Me
author: Hanne Ørstavik
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 3.44
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/01
date added: 2025/03/17
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]]> <![CDATA[Gonzo Capitalism: How to Make Money in the New Economy]]> 216434746 New York Times bestselling author, podcast host, and serial entrepreneur Chris Guillebeau introduces readers to the new age of finance, spearheaded by the innovative Millennial and Generation Z creators, entrepreneurs, and investors.]]> 272 Chris Guillebeau 1035020084 loads.of.books 1 3.33 Gonzo Capitalism: How to Make Money in the New Economy
author: Chris Guillebeau
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 3.33
book published:
rating: 1
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date added: 2025/03/17
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]]> The War of the Poor 57029140
The history of inequality is a long and terrible one. And it's not over yet. Short, sharp and devastating, The War of the Poor tells the story of a brutal episode from history, not as well known as tales of other popular uprisings, but one that deserves to be told.

Sixteenth-century Europe: the Protestant Reformation takes on the powerful and the privileged. Peasants, the poor living in towns, who are still being promised that equality will be granted to them in heaven, begin to ask themselves: and why not equality now, here on earth?

There follows a violent struggle. Out of this chaos steps Thomas Muntzer: a complex and controversial figure, who sided with neither Martin Luther, nor the Roman Catholic Church. Muntzer addressed the poor directly, encouraging them to ask why a God who apparently loved the poor seemed to be on the side of the rich.

Eric Vuillard tells the story of one man whose terrible and novelesque life casts light on the times in which he lived - a moment when Europe was in flux. As in his blistering look at the build-up to World War II, The Order of the Day, Vuillard here once again takes us behind the scenes at a moment when history was being written.]]> 80 Éric Vuillard loads.of.books 2 3.18 2019 The War of the Poor
author: Éric Vuillard
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 3.18
book published: 2019
rating: 2
read at: 2025/03/10
date added: 2025/03/17
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]]> Firstborn: A Memoir 214986210 A lapidary memoir of losing a child before she can be born, which the author began writing the day she came home from the hospital—a storyÌýabout the intimate closeness of our most searing losses and our brightest hopes

“Some days I still think this is all just a sad story I’ll tell Simone one day.�

Lauren Christensen is a 30-something editor in New York City when she meets her husband, Gabe, a writer with whom she falls in love right away. Her beloved grandfather is dying, but the young couple is bringing new life into the Lauren and Gabe joyfully discover she is pregnant with their daughter, Simone.

As she faces the prospect of becoming a mother herself, Lauren learns to let go of the fear of abandonment and need for control that growing up with a largely absent father and a high-powered mother who was always away on business instilled in her. She and Gabe are incandescently happy in their exuberant, messy, beautiful shared world. But just weeks after their wedding, they learn that their worst nightmare has come Simone is dying in the womb.

In fierce, intimate, spellbinding prose, Lauren Christensen brings us to the very heart of the human how do we live when everyone who makes up our world will someday be gone? And how can we mourn when the cosmic order has been turned upside down—when a child dies before she is born? As she comes up against the brutal limits of maternal healthcare, and the limitlessness of her love for her daughter, Lauren Christensen finds a key, generous and brave, in which to share her loss, a testimony whose diamond-like brilliance refracts a universal light.]]> 208 Lauren Christensen 0593831810 loads.of.books 4 4.28 2025 Firstborn: A Memoir
author: Lauren Christensen
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/11
date added: 2025/03/17
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]]> <![CDATA[Why Did You Come Back Every Summer]]> 189187552 188 Belén López Peiró 1913867803 loads.of.books 4 4.35 2018 Why Did You Come Back Every Summer
author: Belén López Peiró
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/11
date added: 2025/03/17
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]]> <![CDATA[Impossible City: Paris in the Twenty-First Century]]> 198122929 'Kuper is a shrewd observer [in] this entertaining mix of memoir and anthropology' The Sunday Times

From the bestselling author of Chums comes an explorer's tale of a naïf getting to understand a complex, glittering, beautiful and often cruel city.

Simon Kuper has experienced Paris both as a human being and as a journalist. He has grown middle-aged there, eaten the croissants, taken his children to countless football matches on freezing Saturday mornings in the city's notorious banlieues, and in 2015 lived through two terrorist attacks on his family's neighbourhood. Over two decades of becoming something of a cantankerous Parisian himself, Kuper has watched the city change.

This century, Paris has globalised, gentrified, and been shocked into realising its role as the crucible of civilisational conflict. Sometimes it's a multicultural paradise, and sometimes it isn't. This decade, Parisians have lived through a sequence of terrorist attacks, record floods and heatwaves, the burning of Notre Dame, the storming of the city by gilets jaunes, and the pandemic. Now, as the Olympics come to town, France is busy executing the 'Grand Paris' the most serious attempt yet to knit together the bejewelled city with its neglected suburbs.

This is a captivating memoir of today's Paris without the clichés.]]> 271 Simon Kuper 1800816499 loads.of.books 5 4.14 Impossible City: Paris in the Twenty-First Century
author: Simon Kuper
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 4.14
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/05
date added: 2025/03/17
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]]> Abolition. Feminism. Now. 53657256 An urgent, vital manifesto of intersectional, internationalist, abolitionist feminism, from leading scholar-activists Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, Erica Meiners, and Beth E. Richie.

As a politic and a practice, abolition increasingly shapes our political moment—halting the construction of new jails and propelling movements to divest from policing. Yet erased from this landscape are the central histories of feminist organizing—usually queer, anti-capitalist, grassroots, and women of color—that continue to cultivate abolition. Also erased is a recognition of the stark reality: abolition is our best response to endemic forms of state and interpersonal gender and sexual violence.

Amplifying the analysis and the theories of change generated from vibrant community based organizing, Abolition. Feminism. Now. surfaces necessary historical genealogies, key internationalist learnings, and everyday practices to grow our collective and flourishing present and futures.]]> 150 Angela Y. Davis loads.of.books 0 to-read 4.30 2022 Abolition. Feminism. Now.
author: Angela Y. Davis
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2022
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]]> Grief Is for People 127282631 Following the death of her closest friend, Sloane Crosley explores multiple kinds of loss in this disarmingly witty and poignant memoir.

Grief Is for People is a deeply moving and surprisingly suspenseful portrait of friendship and a book about loss packed with verve for life. Sloane Crosley is one of our most renowned observers of contemporary behavior, and now the pathos that has been ever present in her trademark wit is on full display. After the pain and confusion of losing her closest friend to suicide, Crosley looks for answers in friends, philosophy, and art, hoping for a framework more useful than the unavoidable stages of grief.]]> 208 Sloane Crosley 0374609845 loads.of.books 0 to-read 3.84 2024 Grief Is for People
author: Sloane Crosley
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/16
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]]> <![CDATA[Grief Works: Stories of Life, Death and Surviving]]> 31378901 Death affects us all. Yet it is still the last taboo in our society, and grief is still profoundly misunderstood...

In Grief Works we hear stories from those who have experienced great love and great loss - and survived. Stories that explain how grief unmasks our greatest fears, strips away our layers of protection and reveals our innermost selves.

Julia Samuel, a grief psychotherapist, has spent twenty-five years working with the bereaved and understanding the full repercussions of loss. This deeply affecting book is full of psychological insights on how grief, if approached correctly, can heal us. Through elegant, moving stories, we learn how we can stop feeling awkward and uncertain about death, and not shy away from talking honestly with family and friends.

This extraordinary book shows us how to live and learn from great loss.]]> 320 Julia Samuel 024127074X loads.of.books 0 to-read 3.97 2018 Grief Works: Stories of Life, Death and Surviving
author: Julia Samuel
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/16
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]]> <![CDATA[The Upside-Down World: Meetings with the Dutch Masters]]> 77265052
Arriving as a young writer in an ancient Dutch town, Benjamin Moser found himself visiting—casually at first, and then more and more obsessively—the country’s great museums. Inside these old buildings, he discovered the remains of the Dutch Golden Age and began to unearth the strange, inspiring, and terrifying stories of the artists who gave shape to one of the most luminous moments in the history of human creativity. Beyond the sainted Rembrandt—who harbored a startling darkness—and the mysterious Vermeer, whose true subject, it turned out, was lurking in plain sight, Moser got to know a whole galaxy of the doomed virtuoso Carel Fabritius, the anguished wunderkind Jan Lievens, the deaf prodigy Hendrik Avercamp. And through their artwork, he got to know their country, from the translucent churches of Pieter Saenredam to Paulus Potter’s muddy barnyards, and from Pieter de Hooch’s cozy hearths to Jacob van Ruisdael’s tragic trees.

Year after year, as he tried to make a life for himself in the Netherlands, Moser found friends among these centuries-dead artists. And he found that they, too, were struggling with the same questions that he was. Why do we make art? What even is art, anyway—and what is an artist? What does it mean to succeed as an artist, and what does it mean to fail? Is art a consolation—or a mortal danger?

The Upside-Down World is an invitation to ask these questions, and to turn them on their to look, and then to look again. This is Holland and its great artists as we’ve never seen them before. And it’s a sumptuously illustrated, highly personal coming-of-age-story, twenty years in the a revealing self-portrait by one of the most acclaimed writers of his generation.]]> 395 Benjamin Moser 1324092262 loads.of.books 0 to-read 4.19 The Upside-Down World: Meetings with the Dutch Masters
author: Benjamin Moser
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 4.19
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]]> <![CDATA[From Here to the Great Unknown]]> 204905217
A month later, Lisa Marie was dead, and the world would never know her story in her own words, never know the passionate, joyful, caring, and complicated woman that Riley loved and grieved.

Riley got the tapes that her mother had recorded for the book, laid in her bed, and listened as Lisa Marie told story after story about smashing golf carts together in the yards of Graceland, about the unconditional love she felt from her father, about being upstairs, just the two of them. About getting dragged screaming out of the bathroom as she ran towards his body on the floor. About living in Los Angeles with her mother, getting sent to school after school, always kicked out, always in trouble. About her singular, lifelong relationship with Danny Keough, about being married to Michael Jackson, what they shared in common. About motherhood. About deep addiction. About ever-present grief. Riley knew she had to fulfill her mother’s wish to reveal these memories, incandescent and painful, to the world.

To make her mother known.

This extraordinary book is written in both Lisa Marie’s and Riley’s voices, a mother and daughter communicating—from this world to the one beyond—as they try to heal each other. Profoundly moving and deeply revealing, From Here to the Great Unknown is a book like no other—the last words of the only child of an American icon.]]> 304 Lisa Marie Presley 0593733878 loads.of.books 0 4.26 2024 From Here to the Great Unknown
author: Lisa Marie Presley
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/15
date added: 2025/03/15
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]]> Grafas Montekristas, 1 knyga 23550364 325 Alexandre Dumas loads.of.books 0 to-read 4.43 1844 Grafas Montekristas, 1 knyga
author: Alexandre Dumas
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 4.43
book published: 1844
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/14
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]]> <![CDATA[Born to Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics and Creative Lives]]> 907447
Frank J. Sulloway envisions families as ecosystems in which siblings compete for parental favor by occupying specialized niches.ÌýÌýCombing through thousands of biographies in politics, science, and religion, he demonstrates that firstborn children are more likely to identify with authority whereas their younger siblings are predisposed to rise against it. Family dynamics, Sulloway concludes, is a primary engine of historical change. Elegantly written, masterfully researched, Born to Rebel is a grand achievement that has galvanized historians and social scientists and will fascinate anyone who has ever pondered the enigma of human character.

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year

"An important and valuable study that will define research agendas for years to come. It is also hugely fun to read."
--Boston Globe

]]> 672 Frank J. Sulloway 0679758763 loads.of.books 0 to-read 3.76 1996 Born to Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics and Creative Lives
author: Frank J. Sulloway
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 3.76
book published: 1996
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/14
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]]> <![CDATA[Thunderclap: A Memoir of Art and Life and Sudden Death]]> 62919831
As a brilliant art critic and historian, Laura Cumming has explored the importance of art in life and can give us a perspective on the time and place in which the artist worked. Now, through the lens of one dramatic event in 17th-century Holland, Cumming “has fashioned a book that combines memoir, art criticism, and history to illuminating effect� ( The New York Times Book Review ).

In 1654, the Thunderclap—an enormous explosion at a gunpowder store—devasted the city of Delft, killing hundreds of people, including the extraordinary painter Carel Fabritius, and injuring thousands more.

Framing the story around the life of Fabritius, Cumming illuminates this extraordinary moment in art history while also writing about her own father, a painter. Like Dutch art, the story gradually links country, city, town, street, house, interior—all the way to the bird on its perch, the blue and white tile, the smallest seed in a loaf of bread. The impact of a painting and how it can enter our thoughts, influence our view and understanding of the world is the heart of this book. Cumming has brought her unique eye to her most compelling subject yet.

Featuring beautiful full-color images of Dutch paintings throughout.]]> 272 Laura Cumming 1982181745 loads.of.books 0 4.15 2023 Thunderclap: A Memoir of Art and Life and Sudden Death
author: Laura Cumming
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/12
date added: 2025/03/12
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]]> <![CDATA[An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination]]> 6434345 This book is about what happened next. In her ninth month of pregnancy, she learned that her baby boy had died. How do you deal with and recover from this kind of loss? Of course you don't--but you go on. And if you have ever experienced loss or love someone who has, the company of this remarkable book will help you go on.
With humor and warmth and unfailing generosity, McCracken considers the nature of love and grief. She opens her heart and leaves all of ours the richer for it.]]> 208 Elizabeth McCracken 0316027669 loads.of.books 0 to-read 4.34 2008 An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination
author: Elizabeth McCracken
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2008
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/11
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]]> <![CDATA[Writing on the Wall: Graffiti and Rebellion in Eighteenth-Century Britain]]> 195710362 'Fascinating ... not only a history of graffiti, but also a history of the 18th century through lost voices of the people who lived through it.' The Times

What if walls could talk? For historian Madeleine Pelling, they can - if you know where to look.

A brilliant new cultural history of the long eighteenth century, Writing on the Wall is told through the marks its citizens left behind, bringing into focus lost voices from the highest to the lowest in society. From the centre of London to the islands of the Caribbean, Pelling goes in search of graffiti, evidence of how ordinary people experienced the world-changing events that defined their lives - from political prisoners to sex workers, homesick sailors, Romantic poets and the artisans of the industrial revolution.

Here are lives, loves, triumphs and failures, scratched into the walls of prisons and latrines, chalked up on doors and etched into windows. The names of their creators may be lost to history, but together they tell the real story of Britain's most rebellious and transformative century.]]> 347 Madeleine Pelling 1800812019 loads.of.books 0 to-read 3.89 Writing on the Wall: Graffiti and Rebellion in Eighteenth-Century Britain
author: Madeleine Pelling
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 3.89
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]]> The Vanishing 598535
The Vanishing has been filmed twice, once in Holland and once in the USA. Stanley Kubrick told the director George Sluizer that he thought the Dutch film of The Vanishing was even more frightening than his own film, The Shining.]]> 115 Tim Krabbé 0747565333 loads.of.books 0 to-read 3.56 1984 The Vanishing
author: Tim Krabbé
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 3.56
book published: 1984
rating: 0
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]]> An Instance of the Fingerpost 883214
An Instance of the Fingerpost is a magnificent tour de force: an utterly compelling historical mystery story with a plot that twists and turns and keeps the reader guessing until the very last page.]]> 698 Iain Pears loads.of.books 0 to-read 3.94 1997 An Instance of the Fingerpost
author: Iain Pears
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1997
rating: 0
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]]> Mapp and Lucia 60441795 0 E.F. Benson 0141911980 loads.of.books 0 to-read 3.33 1931 Mapp and Lucia
author: E.F. Benson
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 3.33
book published: 1931
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Germany Since 1945: Politics, Culture, and Society]]> 36859653
Split into three parts roughly devoted to a quarter-century each, this book guides students through contemporary Germany from the catastrophe of war, genocide and the country's division to the very different challenges facing the reunified Germany of the 21st century. There are key primary source excerpts integrated throughout the text, as well as 32 images, numerous maps, charts and tables and a detailed bibliography to further aid study. The book is complemented by online resources which include sample syllabi and a pedagogical supplement.

Germany Since 1945 underscores both the particularities of German history and the international trends and transactions that shaped it, giving good coverage to key aspects of post-1945 German society and politics,

* East and West German paths to reconstruction
* The development of consumer society and the welfare state
* The politics of memory and coming to terms with the Nazi past
* The Cold War
* New social and political movements that opposed the postwar status
* Immigration and the move toward a multicultural society

This is an essential text for any student of contemporary German history.]]> 384 Peter C. Caldwell 1474262414 loads.of.books 0 to-read 3.62 Germany Since 1945: Politics, Culture, and Society
author: Peter C. Caldwell
name: loads.of.books
average rating: 3.62
book published:
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date added: 2025/03/08
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]]>