This is about a passage through a continent filled with the most confusing contrasts: the ageing Soviet jets, on their way to strafe Unita positions against a backdrop of palms and an azure sea; the boy in the Angolan town Viana whose leg had been blown off by a landmine but whose hope and trust seemed to deny the agony of a land torn by bloody warfare; the almost serene stillness of the Tete valley in Mozambique, chilling for its nightmare scenery of burnt-out trucks and its forlorn landscape. Through it, Wender travels deeper into perhaps one of the most inexplicable events and places of this century. Rwanda.
The book is a cycle of love poems, which McKuen numbered rather than giving them individual titles. The author believed this gave them a more subjective, personal feel.Â
Orla McLeod knows too much about violence for her own good. She knows about pain and how to inflict it, she knows about guilt and she knows about survival. And because she was barely a teenager when she learnt all this, she knows what these things can do to a child.
This is a gripping story of identity, connection with our past, and the power of words to create or devastate. Crossing two decades, from the vibrant revolutionary murals of Mexico City to the halls of a Congress bent on eradicating the color red, The Lacuna is as deep and rich as the New World itself.
Kowalski introduces Haley Bombauer (a.k.a Flash Jackson), a girl who is longing to burst out of the confines of her provincial upbringing. With compassion and humor, the novel tells of her emergence into a world that 'was not designed with girls in mind'.
EVEN Boston has its tender- loin districts. One of them slopes off the fringes of Beacon Hill and is known as Scollay Square. Scollay was a "liberty town" through World War II, and it is of this time in this place that Pearl Schiff writes in a first novel at once distin- guished for its brutal candor and reportorial skill.
Scollay Square is "a catchy tune with dirty lyrics," and among those singing it within the taverns, movies and penny arcades sprawling along its brightly lit course are derelicts, bookies, short-order cooks, bar- tenders, drunks, sailors and girls. Especially sailors and girls. Not all the liberties in- volved come free, of course, and sometimes the price is to be measured in heartaches and despair rather than money. But some of the temporary attach- ments of the square come to bloom. It is to Miss Schiff's credit that she sees the humani-ties as well as the nihilisms of her scene.
