![]() ![]() In Heavy, Laymon writes eloquently and honestly about growing up a hard-headed black son to a complicated and brilliant black mother in Jackson, Mississippi. ![]() Laymon invites us to consider the consequences of growing up in a nation wholly obsessed with progress yet wholly disinterested in the messy work of reckoning with where we’ve been. ![]() In his essays, personal stories combine with piercing intellect to reflect both on the state of American society and on his experiences with abuse, which conjure conflicted feelings of shame, joy, confusion and humiliation. In this powerful and provocative memoir, genre-bending essayist and novelist Kiese Laymon explores what the weight of a lifetime of secrets, lies, and deception does to a black body, a black family, and a nation teetering on the brink of moral collapse. ![]()
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![]() ![]() If you want the chance to turn your startup into the next Google or Twitter, then read this trenchant guide from someone who played key roles in the growth of these companies." "Elad Gil is one of Silicon Valley's seriously knowledgeable and battle-tested players. In what Reid Hoffman, cofounder of LinkedIn and co-author of the #1 NYT bestsellers The Alliance and The Startup of You calls "a trenchant guide," High Growth Handbook is the playbook for turning a startup into a unicorn. ![]() ![]() Across all of these break-out companies, a set of common patterns has evolved into a repeatable playbook that Gil has codified in High Growth Handbook.Ĭovering key topics including the role of the CEO, managing your board, recruiting and managing an executive team, M&A, IPOs and late stage funding rounds, and interspersed with over a dozen interviews with some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley including Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn), Marc Andreessen (Andreessen Horowitz), and Aaron Levie (Box), High Growth Handbook presents crystal clear guidance for navigating the most complex challenges that confront leaders and operators in high-growth startups. Well-known technology executive and angel investor Elad Gil has worked with high growth tech companies like Airbnb, Twitter, Google, Instacart, Coinbase, Stripe, and Square as they've grown from small companies into global brands. ![]() ![]()
![]() ![]() If she failed to produce two pages during the day, they wouldn't go out that night. Hinton was suffering from writer's block, and he forced her to write two pages a day. Hinton did meet her future husband, David Inhofe, in a freshman biology class, and it was due to him that she finished her second book, That Was Then, This is Now. ![]() She found herself teaching all day and then worrying about the kids all night. However, during her student teaching, she decided that she did not have the physical stamina to be a teacher. The success of The Outsiders enabled Hinton to attend the University of Tulsa where she earned a degree in education in 1970. Her mother's reaction to the novel was shock she said, "Susie, where did you pick up all of this?" Although she also had friends who were Socs, she definitely did not consider herself a part of that group. She has stated that her biggest compliment was that her greaser friends liked the book. ![]() Hinton was not a member of a gang when she wrote The Outsiders, but she was a friend to many greasers. The publisher - believing that the book would have more credibility if people assumed that a male had written it - advised her to use her initials, S. She began writing the first draft of the novel when she was 15, and writing and rewriting took a year and a half before she was happy with the final copy. ![]() The Outsiders was published in 1967, when Hinton was only 17 years old and attending Will Rogers High School. Susan Eloise Hinton was born in 1950 in Tulsa, Oklahoma. ![]() ![]() Chan's Passepartout has stolen the Jade Buddha from the Bank of England and must return the Buddha to his small Chinese village in order to save his people. ![]() The second, and more glaring, departure from Verne's novel is Jackie Chan as Passepartout, Fogg's "French" valet (the 1956 version featured a memorable performance from Mexico native Cantinflas as the quirky sidekick). In the novel, Fogg's wager is 20,000 pounds, not necessarily his reputation and lifestyle as an inventor. Note here the first of many departures from the original story. If he loses, he must forfeit his right to invent and he must steer clear of the Academy. Fogg accepts the challenge with the understanding that, if he wins, he can assume the title of Minister of Science within England's Royal Academy. However, this film version does maintain the book's basic premise in that members of an elite English club challenge Fogg to travel around the world in, you guessed it, 80 days. Verne also incorporated his fascination with science by writing of Fogg's great inventions and ideas-things that would be difficult to put to film convincingly, even in our high–tech world of Computer Generated Images (CGI). Verne wrote a novel in which the story and characters traversed several continents and met a wealth of diverse people in a wealth of odd situations. ![]() To be fair, 80 Days is not an easy story to film. Cecile de France, Steve Coogan, and Jackie Chan ![]() ![]() ![]() The book takes time to build up but once it does, it whooshes past you and without realizing it, you’re at 60% and you’re so close to the end that you’re wondering what are the plot points / twists and then, BAM – it hits you in the stomach like a bullet.ĮLW is a beautifully written book where the protagonist is a popular girl, but with a secret – she’s diagnosed with Purely Obsessional OCD. Well, a major chunk was read today – across train travelling, during lectures and I even put my Malhar work on hold. īut I finally picked it up the day it released and even though University stuff called, I finished it in two days. I picked it up in May, but then decided to press pause on it until the release date came closer. So it started when Netgalley approved me for this book and I was pretty surprised since I’d only just started reading on the site and had very few (two) reviews up. I just finished Every Last Word an hour ago and since then I haven’t been able to function properly. This is the first book this year that has given me such a major hangover after The Dream Thieves, but then all of Stiefvater’s books are love but I digress. ![]() My Rating: 5 Stars on 5 Such a gorgeous cover. Book: Every Last Word by Tamara Ireland Stone ![]() ![]() ![]() With this heartwarming tale, Williams has created a budding family that readers will root for. Maya’s determination is admirable as she manages her illness and works for the happy ending she deserves. But as Maya, who has sickle cell anemia, grows close to Derek and Jamila, she worries her prognosis will be too much for them to handle. A struggling bridal shop owner finds love with a wedding dress designer in this inspiring romantic romp from Williams ( Healing Hannah’s Heart ). Meanwhile, Maya gets a chance to showcase her designs, which have always been rejected by her famous boss. While home for only a few months, shes thrilled to find an opportunity at the local bridal gown boutique, never expecting sparks to fly with its owner. ![]() Maya’s experience and eye for style breathes new life into Derek’s almost-bankrupt business, and her presence gives Derek and Jamila hope for a brighter future. Derek Sullivan’s wife died in a mass shooting three years ago, and now he’s working to save the shop he inherited from his mother and reconnect with his 12-year-old daughter, Jamila. bridal gown brand, she accepts a temporary job at a bridal shop while she’s there. Maya Jackson returns to Charleston, S.C., to help her father recover from a broken hip. A struggling bridal shop owner finds love with a wedding dress designer in this inspiring romantic romp from Williams ( Healing Hannah’s Heart). ![]() ![]() ![]() The actual setting is a small island called Thisby (which I imagined was off the Scottish coast, but the novel doesn’t make the setting clear) in the early part of the 20th century. If the novel is set in Britain, which I pretended it was. This anecdote is probably tangential to this review of American young adult author Maggie Stiefvater’s standalone 2011 novel The Scorpio Races, but if it proves anything, the British sure like their horses. If I remember this right, the ponies would get rounded up each year by the locals and would be taken to London where they would be sold for a pound each. Yes, there are wild ponies in Dartmoor belonging to no one but the land. The weirdest thing was all the wild ponies running around. That wasn’t the weirdest thing about the place, though. One of the strongest memories I have of the country and the vacation overall is when we visited Dartmoor, which looked like an alien planet to me with all the craggily rocks jutting out all over the place. ![]() Fifteen years ago this month, I visited England with some members of my family. ![]() ![]() Thanks to a no-show job (as a union bricklayer), Hill managed to live an ostensibly normal suburban life with his wife (a nice Jewish girl from Long Island who seems to have viewed her husband as a good provider with odd business associates) and two daughters. Bootleg cigarettes, hijacked cargoes, stolen credit cards, bookmaking, loan-sharking, and a wealth of other illegal enterprises nonetheless provided Hill with a steady flow of easy money. The Mafia, however, seems not to be an equal-opportunity employer, and lack of an Italian surname precluded his advancement. ![]() ![]() Sicilian ancestry (on his mother's side) gained Hill entr‚e into the rackets before he was a teen-ager. Before that 1980 day, Hill had enjoyed a consistently prosperous career as a street soldier (or wise guy) for Paul Vario, an aging underboss in the Brooklyn-based mob headed by Gaetano Lucchese. ![]() In matter-of-fact style, Pileggi (an investigative reporter for New York magazine) tells the story of Henry Hill, whose for-the-record existence ended at age 36 when he entered the Justice Department's Federal Witness Protection Program. ![]() Crime does pay-and well, most of the time, according to this unsentimental profile of a lower-echelon hoodlum turned informant. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Kinzer contends that “as the 20th century dawned, the United States faced a fateful choice…whether to join the race for colonies, territories and dependencies that gripped European powers.” He concludes that Americans chose the path of empire “with astonishing suddenness in the spring of 1898” by annexing Hawaii, and then taking Cuba and the Philippines from Spain. He’s right about this, but he’s wrong about when America gave in to its imperialist “instincts.” ![]() Stephen Kinzer opens his latest book, The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire, with an enduring, important question: “How should the United States act in the world?” Before offering his answer, he argues that “Americans are imperialists and also isolationists… Both instincts coexist within us.” ![]() |