Don’t plan to see this film and then go out for a lively night on the town. You will be so spent after the one hundred forty-one minutes of this gut-wrenching film that when the lights come on at the end, you’ll need a minute to figure out where you are, and then additional downtime to process all you’ve seen. Days later, you’ll still be thinking about this slice of life–and Edith Piaf.
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Maaza Mengiste’s remarkable debut novel, set in her home country of Ethiopia in 1974, brings to life the historical period from the assassination of Emperor Haile Selassie through the communist revolution and the subsequent resistance movement which followed shortly on its heels. A well-publicized 1974 television documentary, showing the educated Ethiopian public the horrors of famine, in which 200,000 people died in the remote areas of their country, juxtaposed against films of the wasteful excesses of palace functions, set the country up for revolution. As all the characters gradually become drawn into the larger political conflicts of the country, the reader is shocked by the extreme cruelty, both physical and emotional, of whoever is in power. The violence, which increases in intensity over the course of three hundred pages, involves false arrests, beatings, rapes, psychological warfare, brutal tortures in an effort to extract sometimes non-existent information, and the mutilation of women and children–very difficult to read for the length of the novel.
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Pierre Arthens, a French food critic who regards himself as “the greatest food critic in the world,” has just discovered that he is dying, with only forty-eight hours to live. A resident of the Rue de Grenelle apartment building which is the center of Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Arthens looks back on his life, trying, in his last hours, to remember the most special flavor of his lifetime, an effort to give his life meaning. As a critic, he has made and destroyed reputations with his pronouncements, but now, on his deathbed, he is vulnerable, forced against his will to confront what he has regarded as his life and to understand where he really fits into life’s grand scheme. Alternating Pierre’s comments about his life with comments by family members and others who have strong feeling about Arthens and his attitudes, author Muriel Barbery recreates in lush and elaborate prose the life of this difficult and unlikable man.
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“As soon as there’s a bomb, an earthquake…or a riot, I call the travel agent,” Tahir Shah says, explaining his thirst for adventure. In this account he searches for King Solomon’s legendary gold mines, armed with books and research he acquired in preparation for his trip and a “treasure map” he purchased in Jerusalem. King Solomon had built a lavishly appointed temple there three thousand years ago, using gold which the Queen of Sheba had brought from Ophir. No one knows from what direction she came or where the legendary Ophir actually was, however, with different researchers claiming that it was in Zimbabwe, South Africa, or even Haiti or Peru. Tahir Shah is determined to find out.
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Retracing the journeys of Captain James Cook, author Tony Horwitz writes a fast-paced, fascinating, and often very humorous account of his “walk” in the footsteps of Captain Cook, an explorer he obviously admires and whom he attempts to understand and make understandable to his readers. Fascinating as a biography of the complex Captain Cook, as a lively record of the age of exploration, as a modern adventure to “romantic” south Pacific islands, and as research on cultural anthropology, this is an exhilarating and fast-paced narrative, one which will reward careful reading and cause the reader to examine the dubious results of “civilization.” Horwitz obviously enjoyed his research, and the reader will, too, however vicariously.
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