What is it about women in their forties, fifties and beyond? What’s that you say? They feel invisible? A bit boring? Something about menopause? No, actually, I was going to say they’re absolutely bloody brilliant. That’s why (especially after entering my own fifth decade) I wondered where all the kickass midlife women were on TV and in literature. One editor admitted to me once that it was ‘safer’ to write about younger women, that people weren’t so drawn to the midlife heroine. But the more I thought about it, the more I realised how many great stories just weren’t being told.
This poignant, tragi-comedy of a novel is
both relatable and uplifting.
And though the protagonist is going through a bit
of a crisis, it’s ultimately a story of a woman finding herself and coming into
her own.
Grace’s relationship with her teenage daughter is so well described –
as mum of a teen girl I recognised the sadness she felt when she realised her
daughter needed her less than she’d used to.
Although published posthumously in 2021,Silverview was substantially written, then set aside, some time before John le Carré died. His son Nick Cornwell (aka novelist Nick Harkaway), who edited the book for publication, speculates in an afterword that this was because its view of British Intelligence was more disenchanted than any of Le Carré’s previous novels.
I wonder whether there were two further reasons, one profound and one prosaic: that the novel is suffused with death and would therefore make an appropriately elegiac swansong, and that as his shortest novel in nearly 40 years, it would better bookend his 1961 debut, Call for the Dead.
Whatever the reason, it’s a classic Le Carré tale of loyalty and betrayal - and a book that will always be one of my favorite reads in any given year.
Korean edition of [Silverview] by John Le Carre. An instant New York Times bestseller. In his last completed novel, John le Carré turns his focus to the world that occupied his writing for the past sixty years--the secret world itself. A mesmerizing story of an encounter between innocence and experience and between public duty and private morals. Korean edition translated by Jo Yeong Hak.
After college I joined the CIA. They assigned me to the Iran-Iraq military account so I had a front-row seat for the Persian Gulf War. I went on to do two tours at the NSC and a quick stop at DoD in between, all working on Middle East political and security issues. I was unexpectedly thrown out by Bush II in 2001 and so had to flee to the think tank world. I’ve since written ten books on the political-military affairs of the Middle East and am now working on my eleventh, a history of the U.S. and Iraq since 1979 titledThe Iraq Wars.
This is the first volume of the U.S. Army’s official two-volume history of the Iraq War, from 2003 to 2006. They are big and long, but if you are serious about military history or the Middle East, you owe it to yourself to read them. If you do, you will be richly rewarded. Like the famous U.S. Army “Green Books” of World War II,The U.S. Army in the Iraq Waris magnificent. You could not imagine that a government product could be so gracefully written, so wise, and so insightful. Together, the two volumes cover the entire span of the conflict, brilliantly explaining what happened and why, and providing a new and comprehensive understanding of one of America’s longest and most important conflicts.
The Iraq War has been the costliest U.S. conflict since the Vietnam War. To date, few official studies have been conducted to review what happened, why it happened, and what lessons should be drawn. This publication, The U.S. Army in the Iraq War Volume 1: Invasion Insurgency Civil War 2003 – 2006, is the Army’s initial operational level analysis of this conflict, written in narrative format, with assessments and lessons embedded throughout the work. This study reviews the conflict from a Landpower perspective and includes the contributions of coalition allies, the U.S. Marine Corps, and special operations forces. Presented principally…
When I moved to Kingston, Ontario, Canada in 2001 I was amazed to find how this city, unlike many North American cities, has preserved and celebrated its past. It’s in the architecture, the streets, the fabric, and the soil. As someone with a deep love of reading and exploring history, I immediately began to research my new home. I didn’t discover the sort of bloodless accounts often taught in school, replete with dates and facts. This history simmers and boils; full of tales of pirates and officers, gadflies and ne’er-do-wells, countless plucky frontiersmen and women. There is enough raw material for a thousand novels.
The gold standard source for what life was like for the hardy souls arriving in Upper Canada in the early 19th century. Although writing from a position of relative privilege, Moodie writes of hardships and deprivations that make the modern reader blanch. We wonder whether we could have survived what she and her family endure. She writes with richness and great humanity so that we can vividly imagine what it must have been like for her to be taken from the relatively comfortable life she’d known and to make a life in the bush. Despite her trials and tribulations, she comes to have a great love for the beauty and wildness of her adopted home.
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it.
This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.
Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been…
Having spent most of my life in the Midwest, I know a little (or a lot) about growing up in a small-town environment. When I was younger, I was annoyed by all the things I now find charming about this genre of romance books. The nosy neighbor, the know-it-all jock, the downtrodden wallflower? Stereotypical but oh-so-real. I have written several series set in small towns and have come to love them all. It’s now my go-to genre when I want to sit and relax.
My writing takes readers behind the scenes of major moments in pop culture history and examines the lasting impact that our favorite TV shows, music, and movies have on our society and psyches. I investigate why pop culture matters. I have written eight books, including the New York Times bestseller Seinfeldia, When Women Invented Television, Sex and the City and Us, and my latest, So Fetch. I’ve chosen books here that share my mission not only by going behind the scenes of major films but also by chronicling their effects on people’s real lives as well as culture and society at large.
As someone who wrote a book about Mean Girls, I have to quarrel just a bit with that subtitle. But twenty years after its release, Anchorman remains vital comedy viewing and shares a lot in common with Mean Girls: both came out in 2004, and both were made by a team of Saturday Night Live alums (in this case, Will Ferrell and Adam McKay), and both were crucial in shaping the comedy of the last two decades.
Austerlitz dives deep, showing the comedic and societal forces swirling beneath the surface of this quite silly-looking comedy, from Steve Carrell to Judd Apatow, from pioneering real-life news anchor Jessica Savitch to George W. Bush.
This is the book about Anchorman that you didn’t know you needed.
From the author of Generation Friends, featuring brand-new interviews with Will Ferrell and Adam McKay, a surprising, incisive, and often hilarious book about the film that changed comedy, Anchorman.
It’s been nearly twenty years since Ron Burgundy burst into movie fans’ lives, reminding San Diego to “stay classy” while lampooning a time gone by—although maybe not as far gone as we might think? In Kind of a Big Deal, comedy historian Saul Austerlitz tells the history of how Anchorman was developed, written, and cast, and how it launched the careers of future superstars like…
I have been fortunate to have had many Supreme Court experiences–seven arguments, a clerkship for Justice John Paul Stevens, head of Justice Stephen Breyer’s confirmation team, two books on the Court, analysis for the media, and my current Georgetown Law School position teaching constitutional law. I love to read about the Supreme Court and write and talk about the Court and its Justices. The vivid sagas that underlie the Justices and their cases help us to understand this powerful institution about which we know less than our other branches. It has never been more important to understand the Supreme Court and its role in American life and our constitutional democracy.
Nobody knows the Supreme Court better than long-time journalist Joan Biskupic. Her biography of Sandra Day O’Connor, our first woman Justice, is both riveting and revealing.
In the current age of dramatic change at the Court, O’Connor’s careful centrist approach is especially important to consider and remember. O’Connor’s background as an elected official in the Arizona legislature, our last Justice to have electoral experience, which used to be common among Justices, gave her especially valuable insights and experience.
Sandra Day O'Connor, America's first woman justice, became the axis on which the Supreme Court turned. She was called the most powerful woman in America, and it was often said that to gauge the direction of American law, one need look only to O'Connor's vote. Then, just one year short of a quarter century on the bench, she surprised her colleagues and the nation by announcing her retirement.
Drawing on information from once-private papers of the justices, hundreds of interviews with legal and political insiders, and the insight gained from nearly two decades of covering the Supreme Court, Joan Biskupic…
I take great pride in having somehow turned a passion for visiting presidential libraries into an academic career. I’ve now conducted extensive research at eight of them, and have future projects lined up to get me to the rest. This experience means I can and frequently do ruin family gatherings by challenging distant relations to quizzes about obscure details involving presidential pets. But it has also left me well-placed to write a number of articles and books exploring how domestic politics shapes the development and execution of U.S. foreign policy. I’ve done this while affiliated with the University of Oxford and, more recently, at City, University of London.
This book expands the horizon to include coverage of many of the crises and conflicts of the post-Cold War era. In doing so, it draws on an unusually rich range of primary sources for a book of this scope.
Its treatment of the role played by Congress is particularly notable, which should perhaps be no surprise given the author’s expertise in chronicling several of the major legislative battles in U.S. history. Somehow still coming in around the 500-page mark, the book’s briskly paced narrative makes it possible to devour it in one sitting. Indeed, you might find it hard not to.
In Arsenal of Democracy , historian and public intellectual Julian Zelizer shows how internal politics have influenced American foreign policy since the Cold War. Rejecting the notion that, prior to the presidency of George W. Bush, politics stopped at the water's edge," Zelizer exposes the partisan fighting that shaped the foreign policies of presidents from FDR to Kennedy to Reagan, revealing the extent to which the GOP and Democratic party have alternately sought to define themselves as the party of war and the party of peace as the political mood shifted. Republicans, he shows, have not always been hawks during…
As a writer of thrillers whose debut novel was considered Noir, I’ve always been fascinated by tales of characters that are not always the most likeable. Noir fiction is characterized by cynicism, fatalism, and moral ambiguity. Similar to its successful films, I love when you feel for an anti-hero. That despite their questionable motives, the author or director manages to make you root for them in the end.
Another Jim Thompson classic, The Grifters is about a trio of con artists trying to move up from being small-time crooks. They add love and a mother/son relationship into the mix which only makes things worse. The film directed by Stephen Frears is a master-class in acting from Anjelica Huston, Annette Bening, and John Cusak. The scene at the end couldn’t be more shocking as a way to wrap up a noir film. Money is paramount in the world of the grifters, everything else secondary. What could be more noir than that?
Roy Dillon is young, good-looking and devastatingly charming. He's also a completely amoral con man. Lily, his mother, works for the mob. Moira Langtry, Roy's mistress, is always looking for the main chance, and so is Carol Roberg, the nurse brought in to look after Roy when a bad choice of mark means he has an unfortunate encounter with a baseball bat and a bad case of internal bleeding. Together they make up a perverse quadrangle of love and greed in a coruscating novel of corruption.
I have been fascinated by ancient Greece and Rome since I first saw Italy and Greece as a teenager, revisiting them whenever I can. I studied ancient history at Cambridge University and have written eight books about it, most recently The Colosseum. After living in Paris, Rome, and London, I am now based in Wiltshire in southwest England, almost within sight of Stonehenge. There is a small megalith outside my own house.
Simon Goldhill powerfully demonstrates why we remain indebted to the ancient world in so many ways. It is not just that classical columns often decorate our buildings or that classical legends inspire our films and books, our whole life still bears the cultural and psychological imprint of ancient Greece and Rome. Our current obsession with gyms, for example, stems from the Greek passion for exercising in public (and they did so naked). Gymnasium is in origin a Greek word. While Greeks and Romans took different views from us on numerous things, from romantic love to slavery, the issues they first confronted and debated still matter. Unsurprisingly for the ancient world, far from being peopled with dead white marble statues gathering dust in museums, throbbed with impassioned life. The echoes of their tumultuous lives haunt us still.
Simon Goldhill examines the most basic areas of our lives today, from marriage and sex to politics and entertainment. Whether we are falling in love or waging wars in the name of democracy, he reveals how Classical ideas continue to shape our behaviour and our attitudes in crucial ways. Full of surprising facts and startling stories, it will appeal to anyone interested in history and its influence on our lives. It is as wide-ranging as it is readable, with a brilliant cast of characters. Few books could bring together Freud, Plato, Queen Victoria, Romeo and Juliet, George W. Bush and…
