Product Description
The Last Rose of Summer (full page illustration) by W. L. Taylor, illustrateds Thomas Moore's song; The Souvenir Cards He Sent Home; How I make myself young at Sixty by Horace Fletcher; Can America Originat its Own Fashions? by Anna Burnham Westermann (illustrated); How Can I Become a Great Piano-Player by Josef Hofmann; The Personal Condut of Belinda, Part XI, by Eleanor Hoyt Brainerd, drawings by B. Martin Justice; Kings and Queens as they Really Are by E. Alexander Powell; The Strangest Watches in the World by Joseph Lewis French (illustrated); The Midnight Voice, a Romance of the Silent Call of a Woman's Heart by Mrs. Charles Terry Collins; The Secret Society of Mothers by Charlotte Reeve Conover; Open Air Schools Abroad by Mary A. Banks; If Children in School Get Restless by Aljean Edward Starr; Woman as Seen from the Back by Marion Wire, drawings by Anna W. Speakman; etc. ... Read more

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This digital document is an article from Library Bookwatch, published by Thomson Gale on February 1, 2005. The length of the article is 538 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Greenwood Press.(Politics and Population Control: A Documentary History)(American Statesmen: Secretaries of State from John Jay to Colin Powell)(Magna Carta)(Genghis Khan and Mongol Rule)(Puebloan Society of Chaco Canyon)(Eleanor of Aquitaine, Courtly Love, and the Troubadours)(The Black Death)(The Crusades)(Brief Article)(Book Review)
Author: Gale Reference Team
Publication: Library Bookwatch (Newsletter)
Date: February 1, 2005
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Page: NA

Article Type: Brief Article, Book Review

Distributed by Thomson Gale ... Read more

Product Description
The life of the Brazilian actress Tonia Carrero in pictures and passion

Tudo na minha vida aconteceu em decorrência de paixões. Sempre quis viver longe da racionalidade. A paixão me empurrou, me fez fazer coisas e por isso não me arrependo de nada.

Este livro foi feito também com paixão. Tônia foi incansável em remexer em seus arquivos, contar histórias, procurar material de texto, como o programa de sua peça Amigos para Sempre, no qual constam depoimentos diversos de muitos amigos ilustres: Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Aníbal Machado, Guilherme Figueiredo, Fernando de Barros, Rubem Braga, entre tantos outros, que traçam um painel da linda mulher e atriz Tônia Carrero. Fez questão que eu lesse seu livro de memórias O Monstro de Olhos Azuis, do qual foram tirados também vários trechos de seus conflitos na infância. Todas as vezes que nos encontramos em sua casa no Jardim Botânico, onde viveu as últimas décadas e se preparava para mudar e começar uma vida nova no Leblon, Tônia foi de uma gentileza enorme, mesmo quando já estava cansada de tanto puxar pela memória ou mesmo de remexer nas gavetas em busca das melhores fotos.

Nesta tarefa, ela e eu contamos com a ajuda de uma pessoa fundamental em sua vida, o sobrinho e afilhado Leonardo Thierry, também ator como ela, que foi incansável buscando sempre fotos ainda melhores, fazendo a cronologia de sua carreira, que está no final deste livro, sugerindo novas formas, acrescentando novas idéias, contando histórias. Com ela, Leonardo certamente aprendeu a nunca querer pouco e buscar sempre a perfeição. E essa colaboração fundamental ele deu a este livro.

Tania Carvalho
... Read more

Product Description

No Ordinary Time is a monumental work, a brilliantly conceived chronicle of one of the most vibrant and revolutionary periods in the history of the United States.With an extraordinary collection of details, Goodwin masterfully weaves together a striking number of story lines--Eleanor and Franklin's marriage and remarkable partnership, Eleanor's life as First Lady, and FDR's White House and its impact on America as well as on a world at war.Goodwin effectively melds these details and stories into an unforgettable and intimate portrait of Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt and of the time during which a new, modern America was born.

Customer Reviews (161)

Goodwin's reserve, alows her bookto become essential reading
Goodwin tells the inside story of the FDR's White House during World War II. To her credit, Goodwin delivers a solid, scholarly review exploring the personal motivations and complex interaction between Franklyn, Eleanor and their colorful inner circle. Goodwin could have easily cooked this book into a scandal rag. For example, both Franklyn and Eleanor carried on hushed (but by no means secret) love affairs within the White House walls. However, because of Goodwin's reserve, her book should become essential reading if you wish to fully understand FDR's White House. At the book's core is a unique couple who both first rise above their family pedigree and then overcome their personal fears and handicaps to achieve something extraordinary (i.e. the title, "No Ordinary Time"). Eleanor conquers her social shyness to champion the poor, instigating a number of new domestic programs and policies. Franklyn's personal stamina negates his hidden paralysis. His iron will is even more impressive as he defies his own party and strategically delays America's troop deployment into the battlefields of WWII. I recently tried reading (but failed to finish) Gore Vidal's "The Golden Age." It is historical fcition covering the exact same subject matter. Strangely, I found the fictional account to be stiff and the historical account to be heartfelt. Why settle for fiction when the facts are so fascinating?

No Ordinary Time
Like all Doris Goodwin's books, this was beautifully written and easy to read.
I recommend this book on FDR as one of the best.

No Ordinary Time
This book was recommended to me. We were traveling to the Hudson River Valley and were going to stop at Hyde Park. Began the book before we reached FDR's house and am still reading it two weeks later. Yes, it's long, but so well written and so full of fascinating information about two exceptional people. Today's politics is disgusting and irreverent and it's helped me to learn that things haven't changed that much since FDR's days. I have come to admire Eleanor greatly through this read and feel I now have a true picture of their relationship and their contributions to history during what was "No Ordinary Time".

Portrait of a couple, and of a nation
For those who say a man must be a good father and husband in order to be a good leader, I recommend this book to you.Authored by one of America's most famous female historians, this book follows the lives of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt thru their 2nd, 3rd and 4th terms in the White House.The book looks at their personal and public lives, and how they influenced each other, and the history of the world.Written in chronological order, the book covers war planning, domestic politics, the race issue, labor relations, the public growth of Eleanor Roosevelt, along with the lives of numerous residents and visitors to the White House such as Winston Churchill, the Roosevelt children and friends, and the many attractive women who intrigued FDR, some of whom were possible mistresses.What comes across is their respective abilities with people.There is Franklin's ability to communicate with people in person or en masse, and to steer them towards a common goal, which is the essence of leadership.Then there is Eleanor's ability to empathize with people, to understand their wants and needs and to work to help them.What also comes across is the story of Washington's first true power couple, both of whom are so occupied with longer horizons that neither can make the concessions needed to create a happy family.It is clear that FDR cheated on his wife, with multiple women most likely.And the book suggests that Eleanor in turn cheated on FDR, though of a less sexual nature.This failure in marital relations was passed onto their children.The 4 sons went thru 18 marriages between them, and their one daughter also went thru a divorce.The book clearly illustrates how sacrifices for public service often include a ruined family life.So overall, a very insightful and important book about American history, and how history is made by people making decisions on a daily basis often under less than perfect circumstances.

Good Stuff - You'll learn something

Doris Kearns Goodwin hit it out of the park with this one. (Please excuse the obvious baseball metaphor.) The book is a biographical study of Franklin & Eleanor during the FDR years in the White House. The subject itself has all the potential of being a very factual yet boring Sleeper. However, with the author's skill, it turns out to be a biographical Page-Turner. So often books about the FDR administration tend to be either printed tributes to the Roosevelts OR simply a negative display of the author's political differences with the FDR legacy. The book "No Ordinary Time" shows a more humanistic view of two people that left very large foot prints as they went through life. Coincidently, they happened to be in the center of the world's stage at the time. The reader is left to interpret the consequences of those foot prints. ... Read more

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A stunning andprovocative new novel by the internationally celebrated author of The Blind Assassin, winner of the Booker Prize

Margaret Atwood’s new novel is so utterly compelling, so prescient, so relevant, so terrifyingly-all-too-likely-to-be-true, that readers may find their view of the world forever changed after reading it.

With breathtaking command of her shocking material and with her customary sharp wit and dark humour, Atwood projects us into a conceivable future of our own world, an outlandish yet wholly believable place left devastated in the wake of ecological and scientific disaster and populated by characters who will continue to inhabit your dreams long after the book is closed.

This is Margaret Atwood at the absolute peak of her powers. For readers of Oryx and Crake, nothing will ever look the same again.Amazon.com Review
In Oryx and Crake, a science fiction novel that is more Swift than Heinlein, more cautionary tale than "fictional science" (no flying cars here), Margaret Atwood depicts a near-future world that turns from the merely horrible to the horrific, from a fool's paradise to a bio-wasteland. Snowman (a man once known as Jimmy) sleeps in a tree and just might be the only human left on our devastated planet. He is not entirely alone, however, as he considers himself the shepherd of a group of experimental, human-like creatures called the Children of Crake. As he scavenges and tends to his insect bites, Snowman recalls in flashbacks how the world fell apart.

While the story begins with a rather ponderous set-up of what has become a clichéd landscape of the human endgame, littered with smashed computers and abandoned buildings, it takes on life when Snowman recalls his boyhood meeting with his best friend Crake: "Crake had a thing about him even then.... He generated awe ... in his dark laconic clothing." A dangerous genius, Crake is the book's most intriguing character. Crake and Jimmy live with all the other smart, rich people in the Compounds--gated company towns owned by biotech corporations. (Ordinary folks are kept outside the gates in the chaotic "pleeblands.") Meanwhile, beautiful Oryx, raised as a child prostitute in Southeast Asia, finds her way to the West and meets Crake and Jimmy, setting up an inevitable love triangle. Eventually Crake's experiments in bioengineering cause humanity's shockingly quick demise (with uncanny echoes of SARS, ebola, and mad cow disease), leaving Snowman to try to pick up the pieces. There are a few speed bumps along the way, including some clunky dialogue and heavy-handed symbols such as Snowman's broken watch, but once the bleak narrative gets moving, as Snowman sets out in search of the laboratory that seeded the world's destruction, it clips along at a good pace, with a healthy dose of wry humor. --Mark Frutkin, Amazon.ca ... Read more

Customer Reviews (361)

The world of Oryx & Crake is just around the corner
In grade school I can remember teachers glowing over Margaret Atwood. Having never actually read her writing I was sceptical. Her fans in academia gave me the impression her writing was deep, poetic, even inaccessible to the average reader.

I was very wrong.

Oryx and Crake doesn't sit well after your finished. Something has struck a disturbing chord in the soul. What's bothering you isn't the plot or even the characters... but the kind of future Atwood has envisioned. It's hauntingly plausible.

The novel takes place perhaps a generation from our own. Corporations have grown in power to such an extent that there are no longer towns. Instead the most educated and wealthy live in compounds near their job. These gated communities have their own luxury schools, malls, and housing. Instead of a police force they have corporate security. If you don't live in a corporate compound then you live in the "pleeblands" a place filled with drugs, violence, and sadness. So pervasive is the corporation that you won't hear the word "president" or "government" in Oryx and Crake.

I won't reveal anymore but suffice to say Atwood's schizophrenic protagonist is surrounded by ghosts of consumer past. It alternates between the aftermath of such a society and flashbacks that reveal how it came to be.

There is a lot of social commentary. Child pornography is a central theme; something that bored teens look up on the net in an effort to shock themselves. People who distrust corporate society are labeled extremists and hunted down. The weather has become dangerous every single day.

The world of Oryx & Crake is just around the corner. The book is at once engaging, shocking, disgusting, dirty, and even repulsive - in other words perhaps one of the best books you'll ever read.

Rating (Gouge my eyes out, below average, average, above average, more please)
More please

Liked: realistic future that no one has thought of before, shocking content, the character of Snowman, well structured and planned out

Disliked: nothing

Simply Amazing
Synopsis: Margaret Atwood's dystopian tale, Oryx and Crake, is narrated by Snowman, a man known in the not too distant past as Jimmy. Jimmy is living in a post-apocalyptic world where he seems to be the only survivor except for the "Children of Crake" - the genetically engineered people that survived the world-wide plague with Jimmy. The novel juxtaposes Jimmy's past, when he is still Jimmy, with his future as Snowman, and all the difficulties that both encompass.

Review: I read Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale when I was an undergrad. As much as I adored that novel, I was always intimidated by Atwood's other works. I would finger them delicately in bookstores and stalk the reviews online, but I would never buy one or even check a copy out of the library. A week ago I decided to get over myself and I picked up this book. I am in no way sorry.

To begin with, Atwood's use of language is superb. She deftly crafts scenes that come alive through her detailed descriptions.

While normally not a fan of science fiction, I enjoyed the story Atwood was telling. Jimmy/Snowman is a fascinating character. He was so human, in a novel that is exploring genetic engineering or everything from plants to people, that one could not help but become entangled in his tale, and have sympathy for him, even when some of his actions weren't sympathetic.

Bottom line, I couldn't put this novel down. Atwood is a genius and I cannot wait to explore her other novels.

A prediction of our future? Perhaps....
What a terrifying tale of the future that Margaret Atwood has envisioned for humanity. The story of Oryx and Crake is actually the story of Snowman, whose real name is Jimmy, and is the narrator of this post-Orwellian nightmare. I was not aware that this is the first book in a series, called the MaddAddam Trilogy, until after I had begun reading it, but I will most definitely continue with the other two books.
Snowman is narrating this tale as one of the very few humans left alive. Some ravaging disease, something engineered by man and has Ebola-like tendencies to reduce its victims to a liquified, bloody mess, has eliminated everyone, at least as far as Snowman knows. He is not sure whether there are any other humans like him left, but there are the Children of Crake living nearby, or Crakers as Snowman calls them, humanoid beings engineered by Crake, who was a "frenemy" of Jimmy's before the plague.
The flashbacks of life before, told from Jimmy's perspective, narrate a world divided into areas of science, known as Compounds, whose inhabitants are those brainiacs who engineer all of modern medicine and who live isolated, perfect lives away from the rest of humanity (Jimmy's first home is in the compound HealthWyzer). Everyone else lives in the "pleeblands" (LOVE that term!), areas where life is not much different than the here and now that we enjoy. Jimmy and Crake live in one such compound growing up, and there they enjoy a sheltered existence. Eventually they both go away to colleges and Crake becomes a scientist at the most wealthy and well-known compound, RejoovenEsense, while Jimmy is a low-earning copy writer for AnooYoo.
The main story narrates Jimmy's so-called life after the plague, and mainly shows his struggle to remain sane as he is alone on earth, even though he is not technically alone.
This story is one of the most creatively written stories I have ever read. Ms. Atwood's ability to build upon reality and successfully weave her fantasy is refreshing. One of my favorite aspects of the novel were the various animals that she had the scientists invent. Pigoons, for instance, are quite prominent in the tale. A pigoon is a genetically-modified pig that is used to grow transplant organs, but Jimmy suspects that they are used for food as well, which brings up an interesting canibalistic overtone. This very clearly reminded me of another terrific book, Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro. That had a similar theme and was also quite a nightmarish tale, but very different from this one. One main difference is Ms. Atwood's ability to inject humor into such a dark story. It is, of course, dark humor, but unlikely all the same.
To some extent, this story reminded me of The Stand by Stephen King. The Stand was more focused on the aftermath, rather than building the world which spawned the before. I am wondering if the other two books will focus more on the after. It did seem that the main question that arises from the reader (how humanity got wiped out) was indeed answered, but the after story line, that of Snowman rather than Jimmy, was left unanswered.
If you like a good, cautionary tale, one with a lot of imagination and quite a bit of social commentary mixed in, I would highly recommend this book. I am looking forward to reading the rest of the MaddAddam series.

Oh what could have been....
This book had so much potential as Atwood is a very good writer.My main problem with the book was that her near future America could never be even close to true.The characters sit around and watch child pornography, bestiality, torture, suicides, and murders for fun as teenagers.This is a common practice in this America of Atwood's and is considered normal.Can anyone see this ever happening?No way because she ignores all morality, and thus religion, which is a major influence in the world whether the author wants it to be or not.I am not a holy roller, I don't go to church, but I can't see how in a very short time the world would be completely without any religion or morality.This lack of morality or religion happens without a war, plague, alien invasion, etc... it just happened.The characters are pretty much completely unlikeable and so is the country and the world.Please no one give Atwood the bomb because she will use it.lol, I'm joking kind of....

great read
an interesting and thoughtful read about a dystopian and not so distant future.orwell fans should love it. ... Read more