Unaware Laura is dead, Chyna sneaks aboard the motor home and finds her friend's corpse. Before she can intervene, Vess kills Laura and takes her to his motor home. Chyna hears Laura screaming and runs upstairs, intending to attack Vess with a knife. After discovering that Laura has been tied up and raped, Chyna leaves, promising to return. This comes to a violent end when serial killer Edgler Vess breaks into the house in the night and methodically kills all of the occupants except Laura and Chyna. I have not come across another book yet that was as unputdownable. Here are my ratings and micro descriptions for the 66 that I have read: 172. Chyna, who was abused and neglected by her mother as a child, finds that the Templeton house provides something she has yearned for: acceptance. I have read about 300 books in the past two years and by far my favorite was Intensity. I love alien and creature feature novels. According to Koontz, he wrote the novel with the intention of subverting the commonly-held idea that thrillers must have periods of low action to move the pace along, instead opting to keep the tension high throughout the novel and moving from conflict to conflict without periods of released tension.Ĭhyna Shepherd is a college student visiting the family of her friend, Laura Templeton, for a long weekend. Intensity is a novel by the best-selling author Dean Koontz, released in 1995.
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Dillon would also star in two more films based on Hinton novels: Tex (1982) with Estevez and Coppola's Rumble Fish (1983) with Lane. The film helped spark the Brat Pack genre of the 1980s. Thomas Howell (who garnered a Young Artist Award), Rob Lowe, in his feature film debut, Emilio Estevez, Matt Dillon, Tom Cruise, Patrick Swayze, Ralph Macchio, and Diane Lane. The film is noted for its cast of up-and-coming stars, including C. Jo Ellen Misakian, a librarian at Lone Star Elementary School in Fresno, California, and her students were responsible for inspiring Coppola to make the film. Hinton and was released on March 25, 1983, in the United States. The film is an adaptation of the 1967 novel of the same name by S. The Outsiders is a 1983 American coming-of-age crime drama film directed by Francis Ford Coppola. Where Wells wrote a series of four stories that each gave a snapshot of emotional development and then kept them in separate novellas to let them stand on their own and build on each other, Yang has written those separate stories and put them all in one book. In some ways, this is the opposite of the cool technique that Martha Wells used for her first four Murderbot novellas. But chaining those extended short stories together into one novel didn’t feel like it created the narrative cohesion I wanted. Each section felt like an extended short story about that time period in our POV character’s life. Part of my sense of being narratively adrift grew from the way in which the book is divided into sections, with each section separated from the last by a big temporal gap. The book certainly seems to have worked better for other people than it did for me. I’m not sure how much my perspective has been shaped by that prolonged delay, and I can only recommend that you take my review with a grain of salt or three. But that means that I’m writing this from an odd place. I suspect that the biggest cause for that was my own fault: I put the book down about halfway through, and then took over a month to return to it and finish it. The Black Tides of Heaven, by Neon Yang, left me feeling a little narratively unmoored. The author’s name has changed since initial publication, hence the different name on some hard copies and publicity images An ex husband of Elizabeth is also in trouble and asks for her help and Joyce decides she wants a dog. His friends from the Thursday Murder Club, Ron, Joyce and Elizabeth, together with Chris and Donna from the local police, are determined to see justice done. Ibrahim decides to throw caution to the wind and start living life to the full so after a very pleasant three hour visit to a book shop, returning to his car he is struck down and kicked by an hooded youth on a bicycle stealing his mobile phone. Winner of the CrimeFest Audible Sounds of Crime: Best Audiobook 2022 Can the Thursday Murder Club find the killer (and the diamonds) before the killer finds them? And if they find the diamonds, too? Well, wouldn't that be a bonus?īut this time, they are up against an enemy who wouldn't bat an eyelid at knocking off four septuagenarians. His story involves stolen diamonds, a violent mobster and a very real threat to his life.Īs bodies start piling up, Elizabeth enlists Joyce, Ibrahim and Ron in the hunt for a ruthless murderer. He's made a big mistake, and he needs her help. Narrated by Lesley Manville, soon-to-be star of The Crown, and featuring an exclusive interview between Richard Osman and Lesley Manville.Įlizabeth has received a letter from an old colleague, a man with whom she has a long history. The second novel in the record-breaking, million-copy best-selling Thursday Murder Club series by Richard Osman. A drug that, in contrast to Arthur’s claims, led to high dependency, Valium became one of the bestselling medicines of the 1960s and 1970s and Arthur made sure that he received a healthy percentage cut on sales. He also paid for his two younger brothers, Mortimer and Raymond, to attend medical school and the three of them bought or set up a number of businesses, one of them being Purdue Frederick, a small pharmaceutical company that would later change its name to Purdue Pharma.Īs the owner of a medical advertising agency, Arthur aggressively marketed Valium direct to physicians with misleading and false information. He funded himself through college and medical school, partly by his work as an advertising copywriter, trained as a psychiatrist and became a leading medical publisher. Arthur was an extraordinary figure, highly gifted and even more motivated. Keefe begins his story with Arthur Sackler, the eldest of three boys born to a Ukrainian Jewish grocer in Brooklyn in 1913. more entify with everything Lucy is going through, especially recently. I loved all of the characters, as well as the descriptions of New York, that added just the right touch.The thing I loved most about this book was that although I am old enough to be Lucy's mother (or another aunt0, I can id. Review 2: I started reading this book this afternoon, and had to keep reading. It made me sad as I read, but I did like the ending wrapped things up rather nicely Lucy was well written coming from such a difficult childhood to her future. But the idea of living your own life and following your heart more than doing what others expect of you is quite a revelation that many struggle with. It was kind of sad and bittersweet at times. I got this free and just dove in not knowing what to expect. Review 1: This was an easy read and totally unexpected. Not knowing the name of a person close enough to be almost family, or even a family member, is an occasional hazard of Chinese, and sometimes Chinese-American, life. As the Wangs drive away from Ama’s house, it dawns on them that, should the need arise, they have no idea how to look her up by name. It’s the only available vehicle that hasn’t been repossessed. Now that Charles has lost everything with the collapse of his cosmetics empire (it’s 2008) and must gather his two younger children from boarding school and college to take refuge in the home of his eldest child, Ama provides a means of travel from Los Angeles to upstate New York: a Mercedes station wagon Charles sold to her for a dollar sixteen years ago. “Ama,” wet nurse to Charles Wang, father of the clan, followed Charles from Taiwan to California and provided the children with a steady adult presence - as well as many years of housekeeping - through the death of Charles’s first wife and his remarriage to a woman who never quite fit in. the World, are the offhand ones, such as when the Chinese-American family named in the title realizes they don’t know the name of the woman who raised most of them. Some of the funniest moments in Jade Chang’s first novel, The Wangs vs. It was adapted in 1998 into the Academy Award-winning film What Dreams May Come starring Robin Williams, Cuba Gooding, Jr., and Annabella Sciorra. The plot centers on Chris, a man who dies then goes to Heaven, but descends into Hell to rescue his wife.
This brings me to a specific example, to show Cipolla’s crystal clear insight. You can be intelligent and stupid.Īnd two, to show that economists can have useful insights into the human condition. Stupid people are the ones who harm others and often themselves, while the behaviour of intelligent people is aimed at helping others. Not stupid on the face of it, although as he points out, intelligence or IQ has nothing to do with the basic laws of stupidity. He was no slouch, a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as well as the American Philosophical Society. I bring this up for two reasons: one, to insure myself against a tirade when I call those people stupid I am using the term in the Cipolla sense, recognising these laws as set out by the Italian economic historian Carlo Cipolla in 1976, who died in 2000. ‘A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while him/herself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.’ There are five such laws, as we’ll see, but No. Qualifying for the 3rd Basic Law of Human Stupidity is effortless for some, especially when they talk about the old anthropogenic global warming claptrap aka Climate Change (but not only). Only after his death did the republic fall. He held office for five years as Lord Protector. Cromwell founded the British Empire based on sea power and trade. Cromwell's achievement abroad was equally impressive - witness Clarendon's judgement 'the glory he had at home was but a shadow of the greatness he had abroad'. He defeated the royalists in Scotland and Ireland, bringing those recalcitrant outbacks into England's orbit. He played a dominant role in the execution of Charles I. Parliament's victory in the Civil War owed him an immense debt. He transformed the social and political establishment of his day. Yet within a decade he would rule the British Isles.Ĭromwell's achievement was indeed amazing. Obscure, poor, unstable, seemingly not very bright, Cromwell looked like a natural loser rather than a natural leader. The scruffily, badly shaven, purple-faced backbencher was just what he seemed: a failed Huntingdonshire businessman, a religious eccentric, 'an unguided missile not really under ground control'. 'That sloven' was Oliver Cromwell, haranguing the first session of the Long Parliament. Hampden, who is that sloven?' demanded the nattily dressed Philip Warwick. |