What's Everyone Reading?

[EagleSmack]

Thunderhead ~ Preston & Child

 

[AnnaG]

“Estranged Bodies: Shifting Paradigms and the Biomedical Imaginary” edited by Margrit Shildrick and Deborah Lynn Steinberg.

 

[Blackleaf]

At around this time, my mother, on a journey of her own to Wonsan to visit Uncle "Cinema", saw a policeman order an old woman down from the top of the train. Her clothing was bulging with some contraband she was hoping to sell. The police were always alert for smuggled goods that they could confiscate for themselves and sell.

"Please don't search me." She was begging him from the top of the train. "It's all I have."

"Get down right now, you old bitch," the policeman yelled.

The woman asked to be helped down.

The policeman reached up to her. As she took his hand, her free arm shot up and her fist closed over the electrified wire above the train. Both were killed instantly. She must have thought, If I'm going, I'm taking this bastard with me.

An extraordinary insight into life under one of the world’s most ruthless and secretive dictatorships – and the story of one woman’s terrifying struggle to avoid capture/repatriation and guide her family to freedom.

As a child growing up in North Korea, Hyeonseo Lee (born in 1981 or 1982) was one of millions trapped by a secretive and brutal communist regime. Her home on the border with China gave her some exposure to the world beyond the confines of the Hermit Kingdom and, as the famine of the 1990s struck, she began to wonder, question and to realise that she had been brainwashed her entire life. Given the repression, poverty and starvation she witnessed surely her country could not be, as she had been told, “the best on the planet”?

Aged seventeen, she decided to escape North Korea. She could not have imagined that it would be twelve years before she was reunited with her family.

She could not return, since rumours of her escape were spreading, and she and her family could incur the punishments of the government authorities – involving imprisonment, torture, and possible public execution. Hyeonseo instead remained in China and rapidly learned Chinese in an effort to adapt and survive. Twelve years and two lifetimes later, she would return to the North Korean border in a daring mission to spirit her mother and brother to South Korea, on one of the most arduous, costly and dangerous journeys imaginable.

This is the unique story not only of Hyeonseo’s escape from the darkness into the light, but also of her coming of age, education and the resolve she found to rebuild her life – not once, but twice – first in China, then in South Korea. Strong, brave and eloquent, this memoir is a triumph of her remarkable spirit.

 

[EagleSmack]

 

[gopher]

one of the greatest novellas I have ever read ~ amazing that I only read it now after all these years

 

[JLM]

Instructions!! Same as every Xmas to get all the new gadgets and paraphernalia operational.

 

[EagleSmack]

The Wild Blue ~ Ambrose

 

[Ludlow]

I haven't read anything in awhile. Been a weird year. Last book I read was The Spiral Staircase by Karen Armstrong. Sort of an autobiography. One of my favorite authors and teachers.

Also "The Prophet" by Khalil Gibran.

 

[Angstrom]

Virtuoso: The Tool Cabinet and Workbench of Henry O. Studley

Virtuoso: The Tool Cabinet and Workbench of Henry O. Studley - Lee Valley Tools

 

[DaSleeper]

Instructions!! Same as every Xmas to get all the new gadgets and paraphernalia operational.

I'm not politically correct

 

[Retired_Can_Soldier]

Now that I am officially out of work, I recommend you check out a book by moi? Why yes, I am pandering.

http://www.amazon.ca/Acadia-Event-M...tmm_pap_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1451253260&sr=8-1

Marty Croft has it all. A beautiful wife and a successful career as a commercial artist. However, he has a secret and it has come back to haunt him. Enter Gordon Shamus. Gordon is a psychopath with a short fuse who won’t take "no" for an answer. Forced back into a world he thought he had left behind Marty heads to the ice roads of Canada to do one last heist. In a twist of fate, that becomes least of his worries. At the Acadia Diamond Mine they have made a major discovery. Something buried in the ice, not of this world and it is about to be unleashed.

Endorsed by Star Trek Voyager Screenwriter, Gregory L. Norris. as an epic page turner.

 

[EagleSmack]

Underboss: Life of Sammy "The Bull" Gravano" ~ P. Maas

 

[JLM]

Queen of the Godforsaken by Mix Hart.

 

[gopher]

Orwell's classic re the effort to liberate Catalonia from the fascists.

 

[EagleSmack]

The Zealot ~ Simon Scarrow

 

[darkbeaver]

THE CHRONOLOGY ISSUE​

"History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there."
- George Santayana, American philosopher (1863-1952)

The British Encyclopaedia names Joseph Justus Scaliger (1540-1609) as the founder of the consensual chronology we live with. Scaliger had considered himself a great mathematician and boasted to have solved the classical “ancient” mathematical ‘Quadrature of Circle’ problem that was subsequently proven insoluble.​

His principal works Opus Novum de emendatione temporum (1583) and Thesaurum temporum (1606) represent a vast array of dates produced without any justification whatsoever, containing the repeating sequences of dates with shifts equal to multiples of the major cabbalistic numbers 333 and 360. Numerology was considered a major science then and J.J.Scaliger was a prominent cabbalist of his time.​

The English philosopher William Ockham (allegedly 1225-1279 AD) said: "entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity". `Ockham’s razor` applied to history leaves us with a vision of humankind where civilization comes into being in the VIII- X centuries at the earliest, if civilization is understood as a hierarchical system consisting of state, army, ideology, religion, communication and writing.​

Neither J.J.Scaliger nor his followers, clergy or humanists have paid much attention to Ockham’s law when they crafted Roman and Greek Antiquity. Their clients were condottieri upstarts who were seeking legitimacy in days of yore in order to become Popes, Cardinals or to found regal dynasties such as the Medici. They paid exceedingly well for a glorious but fictitious past.​

Thorough research shows that there is literally no reliably datable information about events before the VIII century, and that there is only very scarce information originating from the VIII to the X century. As a matter of fact, most events of “Ancient” History took place from the XI to the XVI century, were replicated on paper in 1400-1600 AD, and positioned under different labels in an imaginary past.​

We have cross-checked archaeological, astronomical, dendro-chronological, paleo-graphical and radiocarbon methods of dating of ancient sources and artefacts. We found them ALL to be non-independent, non-exact, statistically implausible, contradictory and inevitably viciously circular because they are based or calibrated on the same consensual chronology.​

Unbelievable as it may seem, there is not a single piece of firm written evidence or artefact that could be reliably and independently dated earlier than the XI century. Classical history is firmly based on copies made in the XV-XVII centuries of 'unfortunately lost' originals.​

- See more at: History: Fiction or Science by Dr Prof A.T.FOMENKO et al ... Delamere Resources


http://www.bookmasters.com/marktplc/01098.htm#sthash.OBiPJylz.dpuf

 

[Retired_Can_Soldier]

High recommend.

My favorite is THREE DAY ROAD, but THE ORENDA is also excellent. I am going to read Through Black Spruce once I get my signed copy mailed to me by the author.

 

[Ron in Regina]

'Sandstorm' by James Rollins. I've been on a
James Rollins kick lately. The SIGMA Force
Series is pretty good!!!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Rollins

 

[Retired_Can_Soldier]

Here's a quick read from a shameless self promoter.

An Epic read from the same shameless self-promoter.

And a debut read by, you guessed it, the same shameless self promoter.

 

[Walter]

The Pale Horseman