I liked Hunger Games (Book 1) so much that I just ordered “Catching Fire” (The Second Book of the Hunger Games) by Suzanne Collins. My students say book 2 is better than book 1.
I bought for my Kindle .Already Gone by John Rector, “…A raw, gripping thriller about the price paid for past sins…”
I just downloaded “The Hunger Games” by Suzanne Collins to my Kindle. I heard about the book first from a friend at the end of September, and then today, from a student on the big Yellow Bus.
In a not-too-distant future, the United States of America has collapsed, weakened by drought, fire, famine, and war, to be replaced by Panem, a country divided into the Capitol and 12 districts. Each year, two young representatives from each district are selected by lottery to participate in The Hunger Games. Part entertainment, part brutal intimidation of the subjugated districts, the televised games are broadcasted throughout Panem as the 24 participants are forced to eliminate their competitors, literally, with all citizens required to watch.
I bought for my Kindle Joel Rosenberg’s new novel Tuesday.
Rosenberg writes, “I wrote “The Tehran Initiative” to encourage the American people to imagine the chilling implications of the Iran threat and to imagine a world in which the U.S. and our NATO allies don’t take decisive action to neutralize Iran’s nuclear program and terror infrastructure. What could happen if the West waits too long and Iran does, in fact, get the Bomb? Would Iran attach nuclear warheads to ballistic missiles and fire them at the U.S. and Israel? Would Iran give nuclear warheads to terrorists and smuggle such bombs inside the U.S. to annihilate several American cities and decapitate our government? Or would Israel launch a preemptive military strike against Iran so as to thwart a Second Holocaust? And if so, would Washington back up Israel, our most faithful ally in the Middle East, or cut her loose? These are critical questions. Unfortunately, they are not fictional. They are real and pressing.”
Paperback: 182 pages
Publisher: Alder Hill Press (August 14, 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0983440514
ISBN-13: 978-0983440512
You know the story:
Jack and Jill went up the hill
To fetch a pail of water.
Jack fell down and broke his crown
Jill came tumbling after.
What if Jack wanted to change the outcome? How would he go about it?
Arnold has come up with an ingenious way to find solutions to problems using Creative Problem Solving Process or CPS and she uses nursery rhymes to show the reader how to go through the process. It’s easy to read. Takes maybe an hour and all the while I was reading, I was itching to try CPS out on some of my seemingly intractable problems. Just reading about Jack and Jill started my creative mind working on solutions.
One thing I would like to discuss with Arnold is the business that stress plays in hindering creativity. She writes that Time Pressure and Peer pressure are two things that squelch creativity. I understand Peer pressure. When peers says “That will never work!” or rolls their eyes, that can have a dampening effect on future suggestions.
I’ve learned, however, that any goal has to have a time limit. To say that a time limit is harmful to creatively solving a problem doesn’t fit with what I’ve learned. Maybe, I’m confusing setting a goal: I am enjoying my month long vacation in Mexico in March, with the problem of no money. If the problem I’m trying to solve is no money, I have Time pressure, March, and Arnold says that squelches my creativity: finding a solution to the money problem.
Aside from that nit, I enjoyed reading the book and now my wife and I will have a Mexico discussion.
Alicia Arnold holds a Master of Science degree in Creative Studies from the International Center for Studies in Creativity at Buffalo State College and an M.B.A in Marketing from Bentley University. Alicia is a certified facilitator of the Osborn-Parnes Creative Problem Solving process and an invited speaker at the annual Creative Problem Solving Institute. She is published on the topic of creativity with Bloomberg Businessweek, The National Association of Gifted Children, iMedia Connection and blogs about creativity and innovation.
*Disclaimer* A special thanks goes out to Rebecca at Cadence Marketing for a review copy of this book. It in no way influenced my review.
When I imagine Greece, that picture is my vision.
Now I’m reading “Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World” by Michael Lewis and I’m getting an entirely different picture. Can there be a more ineptly run country?
Lewis writes:
“As it turned out, what the Greeks wanted to do, once the lights went out and they were alone in the dark with a pile of borrowed money, was to turn their government into a pinata stuffed with fantastic sums and give as many citizens as possible a whack at it.”
I found myself almost gagging as Lewis ticks off statistic after statistic, story after story of Grecian financial incompetence, greed, and bribery. Then, a heavy gloom settles round my shoulders as I read about Iceland and Ireland that are in the same deep weeds; infected with a similar disease.
I hope the old Greece that I carry in my mind can survive this crisis.
I just pre-ordered my Kindle copy:
I just ordered:
Karl Marlantes, author of best seller “Matterhorn,” grew up in Seaside, Oregon. Now he’s out with a sequel or prequel, “What It Is Like to Go to War,” because he was writing it before writing Matterhorn. I just ordered the book.
Writing was another form of therapy. While he was working on “Matterhorn,” Marlantes was trying to write another kind of book, one that would help him get the novel published and help him understand what he’d been through. He jokingly called it “The 15 Things They Can’t Teach You in Boot Camp and Maybe They Shouldn’t” and thought it could be his first breakthrough, long before the success of “Matterhorn.”
“No one would read ‘Matterhorn,’” Marlantes says. “All my friends who wanted to help, and of course they were experts in the publishing industry, they were saying, ‘Well, of course. You’re an unknown writer. Who’s going to take risks on a fiction writer no one’s heard of? You need to publish a non-fiction book, and then when it’s published you can publish ‘Matterhorn.’”
It didn’t work out that way, but it worked out. After “Matterhorn” came out, Morgan Entrekin, the publisher at Atlantic Monthly Press, asked Marlantes if he had another manuscript, and Marlantes was ready. The “Boot Camp” book became “What It Is Like to Go to War,” and it explores the relationship between combat and spirituality, something that has consumed Marlantes for decades.
I just ordered for my Kindle at Amazon.com The Art of Fielding: A Novel by Chad Harbach
Amazon Best Books of the Month, September 2011: Though The Art of Fielding is his fiction debut, Chad Harbach writes with the self-assurance of a seasoned novelist. He exercises a masterful precision over the language and pacing of his narrative, and in some 500 pages, there’s rarely a word that feels out of place. The title is a reference to baseball, but Harbach’s concern with sports is more than just a cheap metaphor. The Art of Fielding explores relationships–between friends, family, and lovers–and the unpredictable forces that complicate them. There’s an unintended affair, a post-graduate plan derailed by rejection letters, a marriage dissolved by honesty, and at the center of the book, the single baseball error that sets all of these events into motion. The Art of Fielding is somehow both confident and intimate, simple yet deeply moving. Harbach has penned one of the year’s finest works of fiction. –Kevin Nguyen
