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2008 – Lioness at Large

Year: 2008

Literature Reviews

E.M. Forster: Howards End

Homecomings Most of us connect the notion of “home” or “childhood home” with one particular place, that innocent paradise we have since had to give up and keep searching for forever after. In Ruth Wilcox’s world, Howards End is that place; the countryside house where she was born, where her family often returns to spend […]

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Literature Reviews

Edith Wharton: The Age of Innocence

Love, Loneliness, and the Strictures of Society Imagine living in a world where life is governed by intricate rituals; a world “balanced so precariously that its harmony [can] be shattered by a whisper” (Wharton); a world ruled by self-declared experts on form, propriety and family history – read: scandal –; where everything is labeled and […]

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Literature Reviews

Michael Cox: The Meaning of Night

“For Death is the meaning of night, the eternal shadow into which all lives must fall, all hopes expire.” Phoebus Rainsford Daunt, we learn from this book’s alleged editor (one J.J. Antrobus,* who claims to have discovered the collection of quarto-leaf pages making up the “confession” reproduced herein amidst a series of papers recently left […]

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Literature Reviews

Jhumpa Lahiri: Interpreter of Maladies

Interpreting Maladies An Interpreter of Maladies is not, as Mrs. Das thinks (and as the reader of Jhumpa Lahiri’s stories may initially be thinking, too), a medical doctor or a psychologist; someone who interprets the origin and meaning of his patients’ various illnesses and malaises and then prescribes the adequate treatment. No: an Interpreter of […]

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Literature Movies Reviews

Ellis Peters: A Morbid Taste for Bones

The First Chronicle of a Truly Rare Benedictine’s Adventures In a number of visions, a young monk of the Benedictine abbey of Saint Peter and Saint Paul at Shrewsbury believes he has encounters with St. Winifred, in her earthly life a girl from a remote Welsh village decapitated by an evil-spirited nobleman. The saint, Brother […]

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Literature Reviews

Agatha Christie: Miss Marple’s Final Cases

Dear Aunt Jane’s Final Short Cases “Miss Marple insinuated herself so quickly into my life that I hardly noticed her arrival,” Agatha Christie wrote in her posthumously-published autobiography (1977) about the elderly lady who, next to Belgian super-sleuth Hercule Poirot, quickly became one of her most beloved characters. Somewhat resembling Christie‘s own grandmother and her […]

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Literature Reviews

Eudora Welty: One Writer’s Beginnings

Glimpses Into a Unique Writer’s Mind “Listening,” “Learning to See” and “Finding a Voice,” Eudora Welty entitled the three chapters of her autobiography “One Writer’s Beginnings.” And while these may be steps that most writers will undergo at some point, Welty’s compact memoir is notable both because it allows a rare glimpse into the celebrated […]

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Literature Movies Reviews

William Shakespeare: The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (Folger Library Edition)

To thine own self be true … William Shakespeare‘s Hamlet is arguably the most famous play ever written in the English language; it presents the world with questions and characters that have been the subject of thespian and scholarly debate ever since the Prince of Denmark’s first appearance on the stage of London’s Globe Theatre. […]

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Literature Reviews

Agatha Christie: Miss Marple – The Complete Short Stories

Dear Aunt Jane’s Shorter Cases “Miss Marple insinuated herself so quickly into my life that I hardly noticed her arrival,” Agatha Christie wrote in her posthumously-published autobiography (1977) about the elderly lady who, next to Belgian super-sleuth Hercule Poirot, quickly became one of her most beloved characters. Somewhat resembling Christie‘s own grandmother and her friends, […]

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Literature Reviews

William Shakespeare: The Sonnets

Lord of my love, to whom in vassalage … Thy merit hath my duty strongly knit, To thee I send this written embassage, To witness duty, not to show my wit. (Sonnet No. 26) How to do justice to the legacy of literary history’s greatest mind – moreover in such a limited review? Forget Goethe’s […]

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Literature Movies Reviews

Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Beauty is a form of Genius.” Oscar Wilde was one of the foremost representatives of Aestheticism, a movement based on the notion that art exists for no other purpose than its existence itself (“l’art pour l’art”), not for the purpose of social and moral enlightenment. Born in Dublin and a graduate of Oxford’s Magdalen College, […]

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BookLikes Imports Linked Items Literature Reviews

Agatha Christie: The Thirteen Problems

The Tuesday Club Puzzles “Miss Marple insinuated herself so quickly into my life that I hardly noticed her arrival,” Agatha Christie wrote in her posthumously-published autobiography (1977) about the elderly lady who, next to Belgian super-sleuth Hercule Poirot, quickly became one of her most beloved characters. Somewhat resembling Christie‘s own grandmother and her friends, although […]

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Literature Reviews

John Nichols: A Fragile Beauty

In Harmony With the Earth “An albatross around his neck” John Nichols called his 1974 novel The Milagro Beanfield War in an afterword to the book’s 1994 anniversary edition, because he felt that particularly after Milagro had, over multiple obstacles, been made into a 1988 movie directed by Robert Redford, it had eclipsed much of […]

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Cooking - Food - Drink Lifestyle Literature Reviews

Sarah R. Labensky / Alan M. Hause: On Cooking

Culinary Arts “Cookery is become an art, a noble science; cooks are gentlemen.” – Robert Burton, British author (1621). One of the many neat features of studying at Cornell University is that, even if you’re not enrolled in its famous School of Hotel Administration, you can attend one of the cooking and wine tasting classes […]

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Literature Reviews

Val McDermid: A Place of Execution

A multi-layered thriller which asks difficult questions. A Place of Execution is a chilling tale set in rural Derbyshire, and woven around the disappearance of Alison Carter, a teenage girl. The year is 1963, and the place is the (fictional) backwater village of Scardale; secluded from modern life, populated by only a few families who […]

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Literature Movies Reviews

Reginald Fleming Johnston: Twilight in the Forbidden City

A compelling (if biased) account reflecting unique insights You may have heard that “Twilight in the Forbidden City” is the book that Bernardo Bertolucci’s movie “The Last Emperor” is “based” on. If at all, however, this is true only with regard to the first part of the movie (the book was published in 1934, just […]

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Literature Reviews

Tony Hillerman: Sacred Clowns

One of the Biggest Highlights in an Outstanding Series Against his editor’s counsel, Tony Hillerman switched from nonfiction to fiction writing over 30 years ago, with a story ultimately entitled “The Blessing Way;” introducing an (at the time) new type of hero and a new setting to the realm of the mystery novel – a […]

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