![]() ![]() ![]() I thought that the Templer Knights was some historical group that fought in the crusades and was disbanded by the church and would later be part of freemason folk lore. So I made phone call to my dear friend and He told me that he was now the Commander of the New York Commandery Of the Templar Knights. So when I heard that he not only joined a worldwide organization but represented its leadership in the New York region I had to find out more. Many times he has been asked to join the Knights of Columbus or some other worthy organization, Deacon Ben certainly lends his support but always puts being a Deacon first. ![]() I have always know him to be a man with great focus especially when it come to the matters of spirituality. Deacon Ben LoCasto has been a friend for a while. ![]()
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![]() ![]() Read "Small Fry" one way and you'll find the account of a reluctant, sometimes outright hostile, mercurial father whose daughter is constantly reaching after the tiniest crumbs of love and attention. ![]() It's the story of a family that is as imperfect as every family, things complicated by wealth, fame and, in the end, illness and death. It's the story of her single mother trying to keep it together and often not succeeding. It's a story of a girl growing up in 1980s and '90s California trying to fit into two very different families and not belonging in either. We also knew that he was not a particularly nice person, that he was a genius, a charismatic visionary, the co-founder of Apple Computer.īut the book is more than the missing piece of the Steve Jobs puzzle. He looms larger than life even on the pages where he is missing - and he missed a lot. ![]() The ghost of Steve Jobs haunts "Small Fry," the memoir by his first daughter, Lisa Brennan-Jobs. ![]() ![]() ![]() When Wren struggles with her feelings about Darra, she says "It's not that I don't like her - it's just that.she knows too much about me."įrost created a new form of poem for Darra's voice. Wren's poems are written in free verse which Frost explains are the placement of words "like musical notation." Each word that Frost chooses for Wren evokes a powerful image. Frost uses two different voices to give each girl a unique sound. Hidden explores the complex feelings people have towards each other. This emotionally charged book is one that teenage girls will understand with an uncanny awareness of teenage emotions. ![]() This multi-layered novel-in-poem, is a story about memories and an unanticipated friendship. Years later, both are at Camp Oakwood and unexpectedly meet. What happened to the little girl? Where is she? Wren is well-hidden in the locked garage, but she hears the violent behavior Darra's dad displays to Darra and her mother. When the news reports that a little girl was in the car, Darra's family are surprised and worried. ![]() When they were eight years old, Darra's dad, a car thief, didn't know that Wren was in the back seat of the car he stole. ![]() This is a beautiful story about Wren and Darra, two teenagers who are confronted with having to remember and understand a traumatic event both experienced years before. ![]() ![]() ![]() Nor is the trauma felt across black America in his parents’ generation when in 1968 Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated, crushing hopes for “fundamental change” that had been gathering around the US civil rights movement for the best part of a decade.Īs a figure of Glaude’s parents’ generation, Baldwin was both a giant and an anomaly – the kid from Harlem whose depiction of black American life through the great migration (in 1953’s Go Tell It on the Mountain) had made him a literary sensation while still in his 20s. The trauma of that inheritance – “our bodies carry the traumas forward,” Glaude writes – is never far from the page. ![]() Glaude, who is distinguished professor and chair of the African American studies department at Princeton University (where he has been teaching a seminar on Baldwin for several years), is also a native of Jackson County, Mississippi, the US state that suffered the highest number of lynchings – 581 between 18. For many, Baldwin’s writing has long been a touchstone of anti-racist humanism, but the sense of that particular epithet has never landed more emphatically for me than while reading Eddie S Glaude Jr’s Begin Again, his potent meditation on the enduring legacy of Baldwin’s life and thought, a New York Times bestseller and one of a number of titles that have spoken to the soul of public outrage at George Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis last May. ![]() M ichael Ondaatje once wrote that if Van Gogh was “our 19th-century artist-saint” then James Baldwin was “our 20th-century one”. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() The chef frequently assumed a highly visible seat at Babbo’s bar, doing no cooking but sipping wine and making sure to be seen while the underlings he had molded labored in the kitchen to fulfill the promise of his innovative menus. Buford sometimes has trouble not stooping to grovel when he brings the American-born, Italian-trained Batali onto the scene, but he nonetheless manages a full portrait of the celebrity chef as occasional paranoid, willful boor and megalomaniacal disciplinarian. The author worked as a lowly, often humiliated cooking intern at New York’s celebrated Babbo restaurant-the “slave,” as he puts it, of chef and partner Mario Batali. New Yorker staff writer and obsessed foodie Buford ( Among the Thugs, 1992) infiltrates a top chef’s kitchen to plumb Italian food as haute cuisine. ![]() ![]() Noir or novela negra stories enabled their authors to arrive at a more genuine rendering of their national situations. ![]() What was it, though, that drew so many authors from very diverse countries to this trope? Answering that question may also shed light on its appropriation in other parts of the world as well. These political structures included dictatorship, institutionalized revolution, or democratic transition. Through a markedly realist aesthetic based largely in the subgenre of the “hardboiled” detective novel and the iconic “film noir” movement of the 1940s (both essentially products of the Depression-era U.S.), Spanish-speaking writers were able to confront the ideologies of their governments, as well as the current state of social affairs and politics in various countries that were undergoing periods of massive political and economic upheaval as they began to enter into a much more globalized world economy during the late 20 th Century. ![]() Noir as Politics: Spanish Language Hardboiled Detective Fiction and the Discontents of the Left ![]() ![]() The different characters of her stories are based on people she met during her life or from her own personal experience. Russo also contributed several short stories and essays to anthologies published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Vintage, and Algonquin. Her next young adult novel, Birthday, was published by Flatiron Books in 2019 and is a follow-up to her award-winning debut If I Was Your Girl, following two teenagers whose lives intersect starting from both their 13th birthdays. It also received a starred review from Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly, and Booklist. If I Was Your Girl won the Stonewall Book Award for the Young Adult category in 2017 and the Walter Dean Myers Award for Outstanding Children's Literature in 2017. If I Was Your Girl is about a trans girl going to a new school and falling in love with a boy. Russo's debut young adult novel, If I Was Your Girl, published in 2016 by Flatiron Books. In addition to her literary efforts, she campaigns heavily for HIV awareness and de-stigmatization. She wanted to write a book about a transgender character with a happy ending. Her debut young adult novel If I Was Your Girl is the first widely distributed young adult book about transgender teens written by a transgender woman. Russo is a transgender woman who transitioned in late 2013. ![]() ![]() Meredith Russo (born circa 1986/1987) is an American young adult author from Chattanooga, Tennessee. ![]() ![]() ![]() Grant Association's Presidential Library, this definitive edition enriches our understanding of the antebellum era, the Mexican War, and the Civil War. With annotations compiled by the editors of the Ulysses S. An introduction contextualizes Grant's life and significance, and lucid editorial commentary allows the president's voice and narrative to shine through. Grant is the first comprehensively annotated edition of Grant's memoirs, fully representing the great military leader's thoughts on his life and times through the end of the Civil War and his invaluable perspective on battlefield decision making. Yet a judiciously annotated clarifying edition of these memoirs has never been produced until now. Bush both credit Grant with influencing their own writing. ![]() Mark Twain, Gertrude Stein, Matthew Arnold, Henry James, and Edmund Wilson hailed these works as great literature, and Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. His two-volume memoirs, sold door-to-door by former Union soldiers, have never gone out of print and were once as ubiquitous in American households as the Bible. Grant (1822-1885) was one of the most esteemed individuals of the nineteenth century. ![]() ![]() ![]() Since publishing his first book in 1989, he has published or co-published more than 500 titles, more than any other trade book publisher in Alabama history. He is responsible for the acquisitions, editorial, and production parts of NewSouth’s publishing program. Williams is the editor-in-chief of NewSouth Books, which he co-founded with publisher Suzanne La Rosa in 2000. This Lunch and Learn will feature two of Williams’ books: “This Day in Civil Rights History” and “100 Things You Need to Know About Alabama.” The Demopolis Public Library will present Lunch and Learn program with author Randall Williams on Thursday, Feb. ![]() ![]() ![]() Even if not always convincing, the plotting exerts a sure grip, commanding the imagination well past the final page. The climactic scene, in which the boys kidnap Lani and Claire and take them to the docks, crackles with suspense. Instead, she befriends the intriguing outcast. Plum-Ucci's talent is such that readers will share rather than dismiss Claire's curiosity. Claire McKenzie isnt up to tormenting Lani with the rest of the high school elite. When an orderly tells her about androgynous "floating angels," spiritual beings that help people in need, the discussion plants a question in Claire's mind, and as odd events continue, she skates close to asking if Lani might be one of those angels. They bond, a bit quickly, as he helps her face her "hidden garbage," (among other things, her recent ill health is due to an eating disorder). When Lani finds her fainting, he pries her secrets out of her, then takes her to a hospital where she can get tested without parental consent. Claire has been hiding much of her identity, too: she conceals her electric guitar and the bloody lyrics she writes, and she doesn't tell her friends or her alcoholic mother that she suspects her leukemia has returned. When Lani shows up on Hackett Island, neither Claire nor her cheerleader friends can tell if Lani is male or female (Asked if he's a girl, he says, "Oh! No. ![]() Claire McKenzie, narrator of this taut, provocative novel, wonders not only "what happened to Lani Garver" but about who-and what-Lani is. ![]() |