We often use the word "cancer" as a metaphor for society's greatest ills, for deep-seated perils invisible to the naked eye. But what of cancer itself? If you know where to look, so-called "cancer clusters" are as pervasive and permeative in vulnerable populations as the tumors of poverty, classism, environmental injustice, racism, corruption, etc...The evils are cumulative, just like the toxins that are silently spreading into our watersheds, ecosystems, food chains, blood streams, and bloodlines. In this long-overdue biopsy, Arsenault blends investigative journalism, personal narrative, memoir, history, scientific research, and political commentary in a haunting diagnosis of our malignant future.
Each day is a gift composed of twenty-four hours. How many do you spend thinking about what other people think of you? What if you stopped? If your life was free from the tedium of social convention and self-judgment, could you fill it like a jewelry box? In Madeleine Ryan's debut novel, the reader enters the captivating mind of a young woman as she embarks on an epic journey--to a house party. As a woman living with autism, Ryan's narrator perceives the world with documentary clarity. She wastes nothing and savors everything (including her ritual "post-party suppers"). A tantalizing, bingeworthy read, A Room Called Earth is the literary equivalent of sitting inside of a kaleidoscope.
Pullman is decidedly not a literary scholar; he quotes Hitchcock and Sherlock Holmes and reminisces about the torture of learning to understand poetry in a high school classroom. He approaches the poem without pretense, and thus makes it feel lighter, more accessible - more like a miraculous treat for lovers of great storytelling than an intimidating initiation into difficult literature. He has his reading of PARADISE LOST (which became the masterful fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials), but instead of instructing, he encourages us to create our own reading "wholly personal and utterly illogical" and to love the poem before we try to learn it. Those long acquainted with the poem will love this beautifully illustrated edition, with its emphasis on the neglected tradition of reading aloud, and newcomers will be drawn in by the same epic plot, villains, and tragic love that led them to the works of Tolkien and J.K Rowling.
