Hadfield's use of real people brings historical authenticity to the novel, and there are many tidbits of NASA lore that only an insider could provide, but the devotion to technical facts has some drawbacks. Repurposed as a crew liaison for NASA, Zemeckis is involved in both the training for and the mission of Apollo 18. The story opens with not one but two aircraft episodes-a bird strike wrecks an F-4 Phantom and a Cessna 170B is taken out for a rhapsodic spin-then follows the developing career of Kaz Zemeckis, who, until the bird strike cost him an eye, had been a military astronaut with good prospects of going to the moon. Incorporating real-life characters and events, spanning decades and distances both terrestrial and translunar, this NASA-heavy thriller has everything, including perhaps a bit too many meticulously reported technical procedures. A vast Cold War space thriller from astronaut Hadfield.
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Forced to respect each other's abilities, they form an uneasy partnership to solve the murders together. Eojin is young, dangerously unconcerned with social class, and just as eager to uncover the true killer as Hyeon. Her covert investigation soon draws the attention of the new police inspector, Eojin. Desperate to prove that her mentor is innocent and prevent her from being tortured by the police, Hyeon decides to track down the real killer. Then, later that same night, Hyeon discovers that four women have been murdered at the facility where she received her medical training – and her beloved mentor has been accused and imprisoned. For the Crown Prince and his father are often at odds, and scheming courtiers are always poised to fan the flames of conflict within the royal family. But it soon becomes clear that she isn't there to nurse the Crown Prince at all, but rather to be an alibi for his illicit absence from the palace. One night, she is summoned for an unprecedented task: to tend to the Crown Prince himself. Born the unwanted daughter of a concubine, she longs to make something of herself and prove her worth to her dismissive courtier father. Hyeon has worked very hard to become a palace nurse, tasked with tending to the medical needs of the ladies of the court. A nurse becomes a detective in this gripping YA mystery set in 18th century Korea's royal court. 2017b), was accompanied by a short GRB (Abbott et al. The first detection of a binary neutron star merger, GW170817 (Abbott et al. The data release from the third observing run brought the total number of confidently detected binary BH coalescences to approximately 70 (Abbott et al. Since then, nine more binary BH coalescences were observed during the first and second observing runs of advanced LIGO and Virgo detectors (Abbott et al. 2015) detected the first chirp of gravitational waves from a binary BH merger, GW150914 (Abbott et al. On 14 September, 2015, the advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO, Aasi et al. The intervening decade has completely changed this landscape. Therefore, most of the rate predictions, particularly for mergers involving black holes (BHs), were based purely on theoretical models (see, e.g., Mandel and O’Shaughnessy 2010 for a review of the status of models at that time). But no actual compact object mergers were definitively observed. It was believed that short gamma-ray bursts (SGRBs) were associated with mergers of two NSs. At that time, a handful of ultimately merging double neutron star (NS) systems in the Milky Way Galaxy were known from radio pulsar observations, starting with the discovery of Hulse and Taylor ( 1975). It has been more than a decade since Abadie ( 2010) reviewed the literature on compact-object merger rate predictions. He earned a BA from the University of North Texas in 1958 and an MA from Rice University in 1960. The city was the model for the town of Thalia which is a setting for much of his fiction. He grew up on his parents' ranch outside Archer City. McMurtry was born in Archer City, Texas, 25 miles from Wichita Falls, the son of Hazel Ruth (née McIver) and William Jefferson McMurtry. In 2014, McMurtry received the National Humanities Medal. McMurtry and cowriter Diana Ossana adapted the screenplay for Brokeback Mountain (2005), which earned eight Academy Award nominations with three wins, including McMurtry and Ossana for Best Adapted Screenplay. The subsequent three novels in his Lonesome Dove series were adapted as three more miniseries, earning eight more Emmy nominations. His 1985 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Lonesome Dove was adapted into a television miniseries that earned 18 Emmy Award nominations (seven wins). Films adapted from McMurtry's works earned 34 Oscar nominations (13 wins). His novels included Horseman, Pass By (1962), The Last Picture Show (1966), and Terms of Endearment (1975), which were adapted into films. Larry Jeff McMurtry (June 3, 1936 – March 25, 2021) was an American novelist, essayist, prominent book collector, bookseller and screenwriter whose work was predominantly set in either the Old West or contemporary Texas. The minister Thomas Vincent witnessed "a deep silence almost in every place, especially within the walls no ratling Coaches, no prancing Horses, no calling in Customers, nor offering Wares". With so many people dying or fleeing, the economic life of London was badly affected. One of the worst affected areas in the City was St Giles Cripplegate where deaths peaked in September, before rapidly declining. From the first plague death recorded in May 1665, the Bills of Mortality allow us to trace the disease's impact. The population had increased from 200,000 in 1600 to over 350,000 in 1650, leading to overcrowding and encouraging the spread of the disease. The City of London had experienced two major plague epidemics in 16 but, in 1665, more people died than ever before. 1776, Alice in Wonderland, To Kill a Mockingbird) this was the only disappointment. My Antonia was one of my all-time favorite books (read in print), and I hoped I would get similar pleasure from listening to O Pioneers on a cross-country car trip, but of the many audiobooks I listened to on the trip (The Great Gatsby, A Farewell to Arms, Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn. Would you be willing to try another one of Kate Reading and Ken Burns (introduction) ’s performances? This is a silly question to ask-why would people want to know a reviewer's favorite character? And the men were portrayed with voices that made me think of fake mustaches in a junior high drama production. The inflections of the women's voices generally drove me nuts. Alexandra's voice sounded like Luna Lovegood, and Marie is portrayed as ditsy rather than feisty. Not this performance-Cather wrote strong women, and this narrator conveys them poorly. Would you listen to O Pioneers! again? Why? Outward appearances are calmly noted: the grey classroom with its humming computer "projecting a blank blue rectangle on to the wall" the faces and gestures of the students themselves, one with "a demolished beauty she bore quite regally", one "whose expression I had watched grow sourer and sourer as the hour passed", each of them a study in shyness, charm, naivety, smugness or some other sharply observed quality. But Cusk, who has a gift for making the most mundane situations compelling, plunges right in, emerging with a miniature tour de force of human portraiture and storytelling virtuosity. It doesn't perhaps sound like the most riveting premise for a scene, and there must be plenty of people in the creative writing business who have resisted doing their own version of it, wary of the risks of literary shop-talk. I n one of many remarkable passages in Rachel Cusk's new novel, the narrator, an English writer who has flown to Athens for a few days to teach a writing workshop, gives a detailed account of her first class, in which she asks each of the 10 students to talk about something they noticed on their way in. They told their parents, "we just want this river the way it was when you were kids. It seemed an impossible task.Ĭhildren brought jars of dirty river water to the politicians. However, a woman named Marion Stoddard organized her neighbors and her community to try to clean up the Nashua. The mills were built on rivers to use the water to power the millwheels but also to use as a "garbage can" for the mill waste.Īnd so, by the 1950's many of America's rivers were grossly polluted. That value system translated in the deforestation of much of the North American continent for farms.Īs time passed, the colonists built mills and towns. When I studied Colonial American history at Yale University, I was suprised to read the many references in the journals written by the colonists that expressed this attitude toward the land. They also believe that God brought them to this new land to vanquish and to "use" it. The european colonists bring with them a very different value system: they think of nature as something to conquer and as trees, a set of commodities to buy and sell for profit. The Nashaway indians think of themselves as part ofnature and are grateful for the clean drinking water and good fish to eat that the river provides them. A River Ran Wild begins with the first native americans deciding to settle upon its banks. But this deflection meant that the country’s problems, from racism to inequality, were never confronted directly. For centuries, he shows, America’s constant expansion - fighting wars and opening markets - served as a “gate of escape”, helping to deflect domestic political and economic conflicts outward. In The End of the Myth, acclaimed historian Greg Grandin explores the meaning of the frontier throughout the full sweep of US history - from the American Revolution to the War of 1898, the New Deal to the election of 2016. Today, though, America has a new symbol: the border wall. Symbolizing a future of endless promise, it was the foundation of the United States’ belief in itself as an exceptional nation - democratic, individualistic, forward-looking. Winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfictionįrom a Pulitzer Prize finalist, a new and eye-opening interpretation of the meaning of the frontier, from early westward expansion to Trump’s border wall.Įver since this nation’s inception, the idea of an open and ever-expanding frontier has been central to American identity. On the facing page, the word “white” accompanies a black woman with white hair. The word “Black” is next to a white woman wearing black clothes. Then comes a series of illustrative plays on words. “Lovely is different.” A girl with one blue eye and one brown eye looks directly at the viewer. Lovely, a debut picture book written and illustrated by Jess Hong, is a lively ode to being different. This book gives a positive view of LGBTQ families and are great books for kids with two mums or two dads, as well as for kids who could benefit from seeing a different kind of family structure. From hide-and-seek to dress-up, then bath time and a kiss goodnight, there’s no limit to what a loving family can do together, sharing the loving bond between same-sex parents and their children. One of the only original board books about gay parents! Rhythmic text and illustrations with universal appeal show a toddler spending the day with its mommies. Mommy, Mama, and Me Daddy, Papa, and Me by Lesléa Newman From race to gender identities to abilities and more, we’ve created a list of our favourite books which we hope will encourage kids to use their imagination, exposing them the beauty of uniqueness and inclusion |