6/30/2023 0 Comments Runaway van draanenHolly's diary entries, which include poetry, unspool as ongoing conversations with Ms. Sammie introduces Holly to two women (mother and daughter) who eventually become the family Holly has been longing for. Constantly moving from place to place, Holly is caught off guard when Sammie, from the soup kitchen, offers help. Evans, Holly runs away, eventually making her way to California. Leone, who gives Holly the journal ("It'll help you turn the page"). Evans accuse her of lying, stealing and drug use, then, as punishment, lock Holly in the laundry room for days. Holly has already thwarted the sexual advances of one foster father and now, living with the Evans, things aren't any better. Through her journal entries, 12-year-old Holly Janquell reveals her experiences living in foster homes since her mother died of a drug overdose two years ago.
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6/30/2023 0 Comments The employees ravn(It is the Danish writer’s second novel-she is also a poet, critic, and translator-and was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2021.) Ravn’s plot depends too on the stock motif of a specimen-gathering spacecraft a long way from home, controls set for catastrophe. So it transpires in Olga Ravn’s laconic, discomposing The Employees. A sci-fi staple: if you invent a race of near-humanoid slaves, in time they will turn on you with vengeful intent, not to mention awkward existential questions. “Fucker” becomes “father” in later cuts of the film-unfortunate literalism. “I want more life, fucker!” says the replicant Roy Batty in Blade Runner (1982) before he destroys the corporate scientist who made him. The Employees, by Olga Ravn, translated by Martin Aitken, New Directions, 125 pages, $ 19.95 6/30/2023 0 Comments Ballard the drowned worldHope for the Future versus Memories of Man’s PastĪll of man’s superiority-his ability to change the course of great rivers, produce food in surplus, travel vast distances in a short period of time-are all distant memories. There are conflicts experienced by the characters amongst themselves but if one looks at these human conflicts, the root of these struggles would still stem from how the characters respond to an ever increasingly hostile ecosystem and how it creates fertile ground for disagreement. Humans struggle to keep on living and adapting to a planet whose environment seems to be fully determined to wipe humanity off the record. This is the novel’s central theme and most enduring source of conflict in the lives of the characters: the struggle of man versus the forces of nature gone awry because of cosmic phenomena. The novel asserts that man is ultimately at the mercy of nature and whatever advantage has been built up is at best a charade and that man must accept helplessness. We are thankful for their contributions and encourage you to make your own. These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community. 6/30/2023 0 Comments The cosmic serpent by jeremy narbyNarby does well to question the assumptions of scientists who dismiss all teleology in favor of mechanistic interpretations that are often deeply inadequate, and he does well to inquire into the meaning of the vast commonality of forms between science and world mythologies, but his answers too often come off as groundless invention. Of his assertion that the Amazonians' specific knowledge of pharmacology derives from hallucinogenic trance (and not from some other more diffuse source), he undertakes no experimental test, offering the typical complaints that the ""presuppositions"" of science are too narrow to permit the test. Throughout, Narby appears to mistake enthusiasm for evidence and he takes similarities of form (e.g., any helical pattern, hexagon or snakelike figure) to be proof of identity or of casual connection: that the serpent of shamanic lore is DNA. His defense of the rights of indigenous peoples against usurpation by capitalist, technological countries is admirable his methodology is not. Anthropologist Narby's very personal account of his encounters with Amazonian shamanism and his passionately researched syntheses of anthropological, biochemical, neurological and mythological scholarship fascinate but do not convince. |