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How to Talk to Anybody About Anything: Breaking the Ice With Everyone from Accountants to Zen Buddhists
Author:
Book Type: Paperback
6
Author:
Book Type: Paperback
6
Review Date: 6/4/2009
This is from the description on back of book: "Alphabetized like a dictionary, this unique book supplies the most appropriate questions to ask, key words to use, and provocative issues to raise with anyone in more than one hundred fields."
Review Date: 6/6/2009
This is the book description from the inside flap: Andrew Bihaly lived on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the late 1960s. His journal was written from 1966 through 1968 and during tht time, he wrote about hsi life, a life which was profoundly darkened by his past. In 1944, at the age of nine, Andrew was sent by his mother to a monastery in his native Hungary to protect him from the Nazis, and there he was brutalized by a gang of delinquents. From this atrocity and the horrors of the war (his father was murdered on the Eichmann Death March) his psyche ws shattered, and once in America he was trying desperately to put the pieces back together to become whole. In a corrpu and incomprehensible society, he ws destroyed: he committed suicide in the fall of 1968.
To support himself, he worked as a waiter for the metropolian Museum of Art, and later, when fired, took odd jobs and begged. He chose to live honestly, to live a feeling life where he was loved and helped others. Yet, whenever he began a relationship with a girl, spending nights of great passion and tenderness with her he was drawn closer to his mother's debilitating love, to the confusing freedom of the Aquarian Age and the terrors of the monastery in Visegrad, and there was Alfred, his upstairs neighbor, a black man, a hustler, and his friend, who embodies a kind of evil that is both banal and terrifying.
From the past he endured, the present he tried to forget, and the dreams he held, the microcosm of Andrew's journal becomes a deeply moving portrait of the tinmes we are all alive in and brilliantly reflects their loneliness, their joys and bewilderng terrors.
The writing has a rare smplicity and purity. The journal will invite comparisons to the Diary of Anne Frank.
To support himself, he worked as a waiter for the metropolian Museum of Art, and later, when fired, took odd jobs and begged. He chose to live honestly, to live a feeling life where he was loved and helped others. Yet, whenever he began a relationship with a girl, spending nights of great passion and tenderness with her he was drawn closer to his mother's debilitating love, to the confusing freedom of the Aquarian Age and the terrors of the monastery in Visegrad, and there was Alfred, his upstairs neighbor, a black man, a hustler, and his friend, who embodies a kind of evil that is both banal and terrifying.
From the past he endured, the present he tried to forget, and the dreams he held, the microcosm of Andrew's journal becomes a deeply moving portrait of the tinmes we are all alive in and brilliantly reflects their loneliness, their joys and bewilderng terrors.
The writing has a rare smplicity and purity. The journal will invite comparisons to the Diary of Anne Frank.
Review Date: 6/1/2009
This is from the back cover. "At once a mystery story, an adventure tale, and a medieval fable. Knowledge of Angels is a hauntingly poetic masterpiece set in a time of spiritual crisis not so very different from our own. On a beautiful and remote Mediterranenan island just before the Reformation a strange drama is about to unfold. It begins with the discovery of a feral child, raised by wolves and captured by mountain sheperds. Shortly after, a mysterious princely stranger is found washed up on the beach by local fishermen. What inscrutable destiny has brought these two very different visitors to their peaceful island? Is it a sign of angelic intervention? If so, to what purpose? That is what saintly Cardinal Severo wants to find out. Palinor, as the castaway call himself, is a likable but staunch atheist, which on this island is crime punishable by death. The wolf-girl, dubbed Amara, has never heard the word "God". Enlisting the aid of the island's master theologian, Severo sets up a debate intended to save Palinor's soul--and his life. At the same time he sends Amara to a remote convent where a devoted young nun will teach her to speak but be forbidden to mention the name of God. It is Servero's hope to prove both these wayward souls--and to himself--that man is born with the knowledge of angels."
"A novel set in a time and place other than the here and now, but a novel of importance to the here and now---one that prompts us to grapple with the great questions of trust, faith, understanding. A soul-compelling book that will touch man readers deeply."
Robert Coles, author of The Spiritual Life of Children
"A novel set in a time and place other than the here and now, but a novel of importance to the here and now---one that prompts us to grapple with the great questions of trust, faith, understanding. A soul-compelling book that will touch man readers deeply."
Robert Coles, author of The Spiritual Life of Children
Review Date: 6/1/2009
This is from the inside flap: "The extraordinary, miserable, sometimes colorful, always challenging life of a black sharecropper during the pre-World War I and earlier pre-New Deal year is told in his own words. The reader is "there" as a very young Ed Brown becomes the fastest cotton picker on "his" and neighboring farms in the midst of a very cruel world, which is from time to time relieved by some very human laughter. One shares with Ed the life of a defenseless boy in a manmade "frontier" society, gets to know the bosses, friends, animals and some very dangerous enemies. And with the passing of time, the reader experiences Ed's realization of a "modern" slavery. " The first lynchin I knowed of I was nine years old. Hearin the shootin brung a funny feelin. You sort of drawed up like you was dodgin it."
After arguing with his step daddy he left: " I was twelve, it was the last day I was ever a boy at home." His mother had said, " If the white people would forget my color and I could forget slavery we could all the Christians together. Course, you'll do a lot of sinnin but it's better to belong to the church." Years later his doctor said, "Don't be so good the Lord will covet you. Don't be bad enough the devil will get you. Be sort of twist and between, so don't nare one of them want you." Throughout his troubles--his struggle to support his family, his wife's mental breakdown, his daughter's trial for murder, and the drying up of his farm community--there is always the realization of human dignity,: "A man's a man for a' that."
After arguing with his step daddy he left: " I was twelve, it was the last day I was ever a boy at home." His mother had said, " If the white people would forget my color and I could forget slavery we could all the Christians together. Course, you'll do a lot of sinnin but it's better to belong to the church." Years later his doctor said, "Don't be so good the Lord will covet you. Don't be bad enough the devil will get you. Be sort of twist and between, so don't nare one of them want you." Throughout his troubles--his struggle to support his family, his wife's mental breakdown, his daughter's trial for murder, and the drying up of his farm community--there is always the realization of human dignity,: "A man's a man for a' that."
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