![]() ![]() Did you know when you began that it was going to be such a family epic? The family story is in some ways the most interesting aspect of the book. And once you start down that avenue of inquiry, it doesn’t take very long to get to Purdue Pharma. In trying to figure out why that was, I realized that there was this huge existing market of people who had developed addictions to opioids through prescription pills. ![]() They had started sending more heroin to the US. One thing I had noticed is that they’re quite sophisticated businesses, these cartels. I also did a big story for The New Yorker about the legalization of marijuana in Washington State, looking at what it means for a drug to be licit versus illicit. ![]() I had done a lot of reporting about the illegal drug business and I’d written two big pieces about the Sinaloa drug cartel. In some ways it grows logically from work I’ve done in the past. Radden Keefe’s previous book, Say Nothing, won a National Book Critics Circle Award in the United States for its investigative account of an unsolved killing linked to the civil conflict in Northern Ireland. ![]() His new book Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty tells the story of a family that grew wealthy in part thanks to a drug, Ox圜ontin, that has been described as a contributing factor in the opioid crisis. Patrick Radden Keefe is a reporter at The New Yorker magazine. ![]()
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![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Our hero, Charlos, is the child of one of the women who made the flight abandoning her family (as they see it). The setting is London, some forty years after the Atlas rocket left Earth for pastures new taking a select few colonist with them (see planetfall). Really clever and well written with an engaging character, and a well developed world. Read moreĪlmost a standalone, even though it's mid-trilogy, it's the best of the set by far. There’s more to Casales’s death than meets the eye, and something much more sinister to the legacy of Atlas than anyone realizes. But the deeper he delves into the case, the more he realizes that escaping the past is not so easy. To figure out who killed one of the most powerful men on Earth, Carlos is supposed to put aside his personal history. ![]() And now, on the eve of the fortieth anniversary of Atlas’s departure, it’s got something to do why Casales was found dead in his hotel room-and why Carlos is the man in charge of the investigation. Atlas is what took his mother away what made his father lose hope what led Alejandro Casales, leader of the religious cult known as the Circle, to his door. But in that moment, the course of Carlos’s entire life changed. Gov-corp detective Carlos Moreno was only a baby when Atlas left Earth to seek truth among the stars. Acclaimed author Emma Newman returns to the captivating universe she created in Planetfall with a stunning science fiction mystery where one man’s murder is much more than it seems-an Arthur C. ![]() ![]() ![]() I’m talking stubby-tailed, fuzzy muzzled, bundles of face-licking love. If you’d like to find out more about this, click here. I take the Bible as inspired truth and that’s what it says (Romans 8:16, 17). ![]() No, I’m not currently on medication for delusions of grandeur. You can read some of my views on homeschooling at: Bonus disclaimer: The last of my nestlings has flown the homeschooling nest, but I continue to tutor writing and history at a local high school homeschool co-op. But allow me this disclaimer: I don’t wear denim jumpers, and I farm out anything related to science or math. I am one of those library-card wielding, mini-van driving, let’s-take-a-jaunt-to-the-grocery-store and call it a field trip kind of homeschoolers. And yes, it’s true…boys are way easier than girls, unless drama is something you crave. I’m a wife of twenty-something years and mother of two sons and two daughters. It’s against the law, although I bet my husband and four children have been tempted now and again to put me in their crosshairs. ![]() While other teens busied themselves throwing parties when their parents weren’t home, I was the nerd holed up in my room with pen and paper. Dare I be so bold as to call myself an author? Being that I’m one of those freaks who attended poetry workshops instead of summer camp during my formative years, yes, I will. ![]() ![]() ![]() The latest fine addition to this group is Emily, which freely speculates about the life of the 19th-century English writer Emily Jane Brontë in the years before she would write her one and only novel, Wuthering Heights. You don't spend a lot of time watching these women scribbling with their quills or banging away at their typewriters, but you do get a rich sense of how their artistic sensibilities came into being. I'm thinking of A Quiet Passion, the Emily Dickinson biopic, and Shirley, about The Haunting of Hill House author Shirley Jackson. ![]() Given that there are few activities less inherently cinematic than writing, I'm surprised and heartened by how many good movies I've seen in recent years that have convincingly entered the lives and minds of authors. Emily speculates about the life of the 19th-century English writer Emily Jane Brontë (Emma Mackey) in the years before she wrote Wuthering Heights. ![]() ![]() ![]() Her thoughts and emotions were so honest and though not everyone can relate to her struggles as a historian, I think many readers can identify with how carrying around painful or traumatic memories can take a toll on you. Sometimes it takes me a while to connect to a character but I clicked with Yetu quickly. Rivers Solomon has such a way with words and this was a short but hauntingly beautiful story. There she learns new things about herself, the world outside her community, and what they’ll need to do if they are to continue to survive. ![]() ![]() So she runs away from her people and finds herself on the surface. The responsibility is an important one but eventually, the weight of all those memories and the trauma that comes with them becomes too much for Yetu. ![]() A long time ago it was decided that their past was too traumatic to be remembered all the time by everyone, so that very heavy burden falls to the historian. Their story is told through the eyes of Yetu, the historian. Inspired by a song from the This American Life episode “We Are In The Future,” by the rap group Clipping, The Deep is the story of the water-dwelling descendants of pregnant African slave women who were thrown overboard by slavers. PUBLISHED: Novem/ Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio / Genre: Fantasy / Narrated by: Daved Diggs ![]() ![]() ![]() Seeing it as a sign of his destiny, he takes what little he has and crosses the Sahara Desert to his destination. What do I mean? First, a quick outline of the book: Santiago is a poor shepherd boy living in Spain, and he has a recurring dream where he finds buried treasure beneath the Great Pyramid of Giza. The title alone was intriguing enough, but when I found out it was an adventure novel, and a short one at that, I decided it might be worth a read.Īnd, like anyone who’s read the book knows, the first readthrough isn’t exactly clear. I discovered “The Alchemist” in high school while doing research for a literature paper. ![]() ![]() Cover art of "The Alchemist" by Paulo Coelho. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Looking back it's interesting that I have enjoyed but have never been "over the moon" about any of her books. I have read several books by Marie Benedict and she seems to have made a niche for herself in mining compelling stories from historical female characters. We are seeing it time and again in present days. It is however, important to read this book and know that it is not merely the uneducated who can fall under the spell of a charismatic leader. That anyone thought this was acceptable is horrifying and depressing. He saw them beaten, stomped and trampled. He watched as the residents, unionists and others tried to fight back against these people who wanted them "gone". He and his friends rolled marbles into the road to trip the horses on which the police sat. The adulation of Mosley was horrifying to me, my father-in-law was present in his home on Cable Street watching as Mosley's fascists, protected by the police, marched through the streets of the East End. ![]() I do not understand why anyone of means and education would think fascism would serve them -most of them would lose their wealth and power - no dictator would allow those Lords any real voice! I was shocked at how easily the aristocrats were able to be swayed to the lure of fascism, how easily they could ignore the danger of Hitler and his evil plans. This book was easy to read, informative and well researched. I love historical fiction and I love Marie Benedict's work. ![]() ![]() ![]() “Tea will do the trick, but true flames within need the heat of the lie of love. To complement the heat of the fire warming the outer shell, I need the heat of the lie to warm the inner most self.” She gets up and walks to the kitchen to put the kettle on. ![]() “Winter is coming and I need a well spun lie to keep reality at bay. She shivers as the outside cold creeps in. A well spun lie is often better than truth, for who really wants to wake up and smell the roses, or rather the stink of reality and all it brings.” ![]() “The words of an author are to be like magic, transporting the reader into the web of lies making them take those lies for truth. “How real do you need your words to be? Does an author not want their lies to be taken for truth? Isn’t this whole writing malarky set up to spin truth from lies, from figments of imagination?” She laughs as she remembers how every lie has to have a seed of truth in order for it to work. “Reality, real, really?” asks Lucy the writer who happens to stumble upon her words. ![]() |