The China-Africa Parallax

Where are we most vulnerable? Where I described we’d be three years ago in:

THE CHINA-AFRICA PARALLAX: A RYAN AND GILLIAN MYSTERY (sequel of Songs of Sadness, Songs of Love), by Larry K. Andrews. (Action-Thriller. Author House, ISBN 978-1-4520-1765-5) The China-Africa Parallax: A Ryan and Gillian Mystery describes how representatives of China and Africa are conspiring to steal research data from major US universities. They will kill anyone who gets in their way in order to achieve their ultimate goal: China’s economic and military domination of the world. This is a fast-moving mystery with an emphasis on today’s geo-political issues and economics. Ryan Graves and his wife, Gillian Davies, characters introduced in Songs of Sadness, Songs of Love, assume perilous, key roles central to the FBI strategy to thwart the devastating conspiracy

Calling Me Home, Julie Kibler

Eighty-nine-year-old Isabelle McAllister has a big favor to ask her hairdresser, Dorrie. She wants the black single mother to drop everything and drive her from Texas to a funeral in Ohio tomorrow. Dorrie, fleeing problems of her own and curious about Isabelle's past, agrees, not knowing it will be a journey that changes both their lives. Isabelle confesses that, as a teen in 1930s Kentucky, she fell in love with Robert Prewitt, a would-be doctor and the black son of her family's housekeeper in a town where blacks weren't allowed after dark. The tale of their forbidden relationship and its tragic consequences just might help Dorrie find her own way. 

The Usage Game

The Usage Game: Catering to Perverts

Geoffrey K. Pullum
University of Edinburgh

[To be presented at the Cambridge Symposium on Usage Guides and Usage Problems, 26–27 June 2014.]

ABSTRACT

I am sure most educated users of works on grammar and usage believe that they seek a sensible relationship in which they are treated like grownups and provided with authoritative information about Standard English. There is a great deal of evidence, however, that what many of them really want is to be dominated, humiliated, and punished. They yearn, they positively lust, to be forced to use their language in certain ways and to be disciplined for any transgressions. One sign of this is that The Elements of Style, with its 105 pages of century-old maxims from Strunk and opinionated stylistic nonsense from White, far outsells Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage, with its 978 pages of brilliant and clearly explained objective scholarship, about a century newer (and costing very little more). This poses a dilemma for usage guide authors. The advice of economics is of course to supply what the customer wants; but ethics may differ: usage guide authors find themselves in the role of pornographers serving a community of masochistic perverts. Worse, if they dare to provide evidence refuting myths about grammatical correctness in English they are attacked for lowering standards and promoting anarchy. I will review this problematic situation, and make some modest proposals about how the users of Standard English might be drawn out of their dark fantasy world into the daylight of mature and healthy linguistic behaviour.

Sarah's Key

June 28^th      Sarah's Key, Tatiana de Rosnay

                        Sarah's Key, first published in September 2006. Two main parallel plots are followed through the book. The first is that of ten-year-old Sarah Starzynski, a Jewish girl born in Paris, who is arrested with her parents during the Vel' d'Hiv Roundup. Before they go, she locks her four-year-old brother in a cupboard, thinking the family should be back in a few hours. The second plot follows Julia Jarmond, an American journalist living in Paris, who is asked to write an article in honour of the 60th anniversary of the roundup.

The Perfect Theory

Almost a century after Einstein first proposed it, the full ramifications of the General Theory of Relativity are still being debated. Pedro Ferreira is Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Oxford, and his new book The Perfect Theory (Little, Brown) brings to life both the science and the scientific controversies which have surrounded the General Theory since its conception

2014 Book Discussions, June - October

June 28^th      Sarah's Key, Tatiana de Rosnay

Sarah's Key, first published in September 2006. Two main parallel plots are followed through the book. The first is that of ten-year-old Sarah Starzynski, a Jewish girl born in Paris, who is arrested with her parents during the Vel' d'Hiv Roundup. Before they go, she locks her four-year-old brother in a cupboard, thinking the family should be back in a few hours. The second plot follows Julia Jarmond, an American journalist living in Paris, who is asked to write an article in honour of the 60th anniversary of the roundup.

July 26^th         You, Too, Can Be 10% Happier, Dan Harris

 After 9/11, I spent many years covering wars overseas. When I  came home I got depressed and did a really stupid thing, which is that I self-medicated with recreational drugs, including cocaine and Ecstasy. While I wasn't doing it at work and I definitely wasn't doing it while I was on the air, I later learned from my doctor that (the drugs) primed me to have a panic attack on Good Morning America. It was extremely embarrassing, and that realization of what a moron I'd been kind of set me off on this strange journey.

Aug 23rd        Calling Me Home, Julie Kibler

 Eighty-nine-year-old Isabelle McAllister has a big favor to ask her hairdresser, Dorrie. She wants the black single mother to drop everything and drive her from Texas to a funeral in Ohio tomorrow. Dorrie, fleeing problems of her own and curious about Isabelle's past, agrees, not knowing it will be a journey that changes both their lives. Isabelle confesses that, as a teen in 1930s Kentucky, she fell in love with Robert Prewitt, a would-be doctor and the black son of her family's housekeeper in a town where blacks weren't allowed after dark. The tale of their forbidden relationship and its tragic consequences just might help Dorrie find her own way. 

Sept 27^th        Angela's Ashes, Frank Mc Court

 Angela's Ashes is a 1996 memoir by the Irish author Frank McCourt. The memoir consists of various anecdotes and stories of Frank McCourt's impoverished childhood and early adulthood in Brooklyn, New York, and in Limerick, Ireland. It also includes McCourt's struggles with poverty, his father's drinking, and his mother's attempts to keep the family alive. Angela's Ashes was published in 1996 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography. A sequel to the book, 'Tis, was published in 1999, and was followed by Teacher Man in 2005.

Oct 25^th          The Accident, Chris Pavone

As dawn approaches in New York, literary agent Isabel Reed is turning the final pages of a mysterious, anonymous manuscript, racing through the explosive revelations about powerful people, as well as long-hidden secrets about her own past. In Copenhagen, veteran CIA operative Hayden Gray, determined that this sweeping story be buried, is suddenly staring down the barrel of an unexpected gun. And in Zurich, the author himself is hiding in a shadowy expat life, trying to atone for a lifetime’s worth of lies and betrayals with publication of The Accident, while always looking over his shoulder.

Over the course of one long, desperate, increasingly perilous day, these lives collide as the book begins its dangerous march toward publication, toward saving or ruining careers and companies, placing everything at risk—and everyone in mortal peril.  The rich cast of characters—in publishing and film, politics and espionage—are all forced to confront the consequences of their ambitions, the schisms between their ideal selves and the people they actually became