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a book that mixes the struggle for freedom from slavery with the a young feminist movement. i liked the earlier parts better - the description of life in the south - and i liked the alternating narrators (one black, one white) but i never got a sense of the purpose of the book. to equate the women's movement with slavery is an insult to the barbarism of slavery, and i can't help but notice the author is white and i'm a little sick of white authors inserting themselves (and their great white hope characters) into essentially black stories/narratives. i'm sort of surprised that Oprah would put it on her bookclub list...

still kicking around after 10 years of being published, this book was supposed to be a bible of sorts for meditation. too bad I'm not ready to actually start meditating yet. this book is really meant to be an aid as you start up your practice and contains lots of imagery (which I sort of hated) to help in the meditation process. I found him too goofy at times, too medical at others. and certain phrases he loves to use trigger me to think blah-blah-blah.

i must admit i know very litle about this time in Iran, when the people forced out the shah and then the supposed 'new' republic got hijacked by the Islamic fundamentalists. each chapter acts as both a history lesson and a childhood memoir. i know it was turned into an animated film, an i'm curious to see it.

this was a good primer for someone who is going to read anne frank: diary of a young girl. it spans her entire life and so it covers alot of the political background of the time (even things that anne herself doesn't comment on in her diary). there are lots of asides that are labelled 'snapshots' and they do a good job of expaining world events or political movements in the context of her life. all in all, a great book that will emphasize - once again - that anne frank was not only a real person, but also a real talent that was lost when nazism spread across europe.

i love this man. his humility and humanity are beautifully captured in this meandering memoir of a regular man who happened to find himself in and/or beside the spotlight of fame.
he starts the book with a summary and it's tone continues throughout the book - he's never mean, resentful or cynical. he freely admits it was a series of happy accidents that led him to his career in journalism, his launch as a movie critic (in print and on tv), and his success as a blogger. with his cancer and loss of lower jaw after 3 painful and unsuccessful attempts at reconstruction, he could easily be a miserable so-and-so. but no, he is grateful for his life and the flood of memories that this new silence has brought.

really exciting for the first two-thirds: teens with a wide range of super powers (some useful, some not - think the sidekicks at 'skyhigh' - i mean, the ability to kill plant life or blow hot breath is not exactly 'A' material)
i always enjoy the theme of teens as alien/other - capturing the awkwardness and isolation of high school culture. now a virus has broken out that infects only teens (giving them their powers) and the army quarantines them all. but is the army planning on neutralizing them, or using their powers to fight the war of terrorism? this is what really drives the momentum of the book. once it becomes clear who's the bad guy - it's a boring race to the inevitable finish line.

what a fine writer this david almond is. he wrote My Name is Mina, and so when this book came up during our history studies, i just had to read it alongside ds.
set during the heavy apprehension of the Cuban missile crisis, the story has fear hit home (his father may be seriously ill) and school (nasty teachers enforcing corporal punishment quickly and randomly). it's a well drafted theme that deserves a wider audience than junior fiction. which is pretty much how i felt about 'My Name is Mina - this author is too good to be missing from the young adult section.

this is a horrible book - the content, i mean - not the style or the writing...
i've read the author's other 2 memoirs of Zimbabwe and loved them. same thing this time, 2 or 3 pages in, and i immediately recognized how much i like reading his prose. although the material should be daunting and i should feel reluctant to immerse myself in all this true violence, i continually looked forward to the next time i could pick up the book.
of course, i feel angry about the content. i feel ashamed that this all went on while i lived my little life in 2009, only vaguely hearing the news reports. i feel disheartened over the ease in which some people embody evil.

this topic did not deserve a full book. it could have easily been covered in a pamplet. the author gives a speil about how the conservatives came around to introducing the TFSA and how few canadians are properly taking advantage of it. but then he does his own comparision of this product vs RESPs for education savings and finds RESPs yield a higher rate. same thing when he does a comparison with saving for house using RRSPs - RRSPs are better. and RRSPs are better if you'll be in a lower tax bracket in the future, when you take out the cash. so really, didn't he just explain WHY so many people are not using TFSAs yet? they are choosing superior paths dependant upon their goal.
oh, and the author continually uses 4 or 5% as the annual growth of a TFSA - ha! more like 1-2%