(Broca’s area, which blacks out during flashbacks, is on the left side.) Without sequencing we can’t identify cause and effect, grasp the long-term effects of our actions, or create coherent plans for the future. Deactivation of the left hemisphere has a direct impact on the capacity to organize experience into logical sequences and to translate our shifting feelings and perceptions into words. However, having one side or the other shut down, even temporarily, or having one side cut off entirely (as sometimes happened in early brain surgery) is disabling. Even as we enumerate a loved one’s virtues to a friend, our feelings may be more deeply stirred by how her face recalls the aunt we loved at age four.3 Under ordinary circumstances the two sides of the brain work together more or less smoothly, even in people who might be said to favor one side over the other. What it recalls feels like intuitive truth-the way things are. It reacts automatically to voices, facial features, and gestures and places experienced in the past. The right brain stores memories of sound, touch, smell, and the emotions they evoke. We call on it to explain our experiences and put them in order. “The left and right sides of the brain also process the imprints of the past in dramatically different ways.2 The left brain remembers facts, statistics, and the vocabulary of events.
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I was daunted by the size all 620 pages of it. My co-editor, Kristin, originally received it, but seeing as it was more my genre preference than hers, she passed it off to me. We received many books to review and Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr was one of them. **A copy of this book was provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review.** And in a not-so-distant future, on the interstellar ship Argos, Konstance is alone in a vault, copying on scraps of sacking the story of Aethon, told to her by her father. Tucked among the library shelves is a bomb, planted by a troubled, idealistic teenager, Seymour. His path and Anna’s will cross.įive hundred years later, in a library in Idaho, octogenarian Zeno, who learned Greek as a prisoner of war, rehearses five children in a play adaptation of Aethon’s story, preserved against all odds through centuries. Outside the walls is Omeir, a village boy, miles from home, conscripted with his beloved oxen into the invading army. This she reads to her ailing sister as the walls of the only place she has known are bombarded in the great siege of Constantinople. Restless, insatiably curious, Anna learns to read, and in this ancient city, famous for its libraries, she finds a book, the story of Aethon, who longs to be turned into a bird so that he can fly to a utopian paradise in the sky. Thirteen-year-old Anna, an orphan, lives inside the formidable walls of Constantinople in a house of women who make their living embroidering the robes of priests. It is dark days for the galaxy as the destructive Clone Wars between the Republic and the Separatists have just begun. This is Chen’s first Star Wars novel and follows these two great characters as they embark on a dangerous political adventure right after the events of the film, Attack of the Clones. However, this is not the only recent Star Wars release that focuses on this iconic duo, as author Mike Chen presents Star Wars: Brotherhood. Fans like me are currently having a great time with the Obi-Wan Kenobi live-action show that has been all manners of fun, especially as it brings Ewan McGregor and Hayden Christensen back to their iconic roles as Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker. Publisher: Penguin Random House Audio (Audiobook – )Ģ022 is a great time to be a Star Wars fan as we are currently being bombarded with a string of awesome shows, cool comics, and fantastic novels (a movie also would be nice, but apparently there are issues there). The theme of being captured and escaping is an important recurrence throughout Middle Earth, as can be seen by Gandalfs torment on the tower of Orthanc, and Eowyn's fear of a cage, and the noble Beren is no exception as he is incarcerated by the dark lord and his assistant Sauron, who later becomes the creator of the One Ring. The same can be said of Beren and Luthien, who are also kept apart by war and captivity, after Luthien’s father sends Beren on an impossible mission to retrieve a Silmaril from the crown of the evil Morgoth, in order to receive his blessing to wed his daughter. Although the portrayal of the elves is different in the books and the films, this fading of the Evenstar and her immortality remains consistent in both. Throughout much of the trilogy, Aragorn is away fighting in the battle of the war of the ring, whilst Arwen is fading away in Rivendell. Beren and Luthien’s story, like that of Arwen and Aragorn, is a tale of two lovers who are destined to be torn apart, but ultimately always find their way back to one another. As a mute teenager, she learned to exist beyond language, “absorbing the flow of time like balls of cotton” now, recently bereaved by the death of her mother and by the loss of custody of her son following a divorce, she retreats again, into the featureless privacy of her apartment by day and the streets by night, attempting to exhaust herself enough to sleep. For the woman appears almost to repudiate any other ways of communicating, eschewing written notes to her therapist or attempts to convey information through sign language.Īlmost from the start the reader suspects that the woman’s silence represents a more profound alienation from meaning or, perhaps, a sense of being overwhelmed that might be traced back to her childhood, when the letters and phonemes that fascinated her simultaneously threatened to “thrust their way into her sleep like skewers”. The book explores the extent to which this sudden disappearance of words, which first befell the unnamed woman when she was a teenager and has now recurred at a particularly vulnerable moment in her life, amounts to a more catastrophic rupture with language. O ne of the two central protagonists of Han Kang’s Greek Lessons, the 2011 novel from the International Booker prizewinner, which has just been translated from Korean into English, has lost the power of speech. There had even been, so the rumour went, a number of fake Kit Armstrongs floating around the web. He was in fact already very present on YouTube, playing Bach ridiculously well at six, his feet barely reaching the pedals. When I suggested to Alfred’s manager Tom Hull that I wanted to make a film about the master and his young apprentice, he warned that they were shielding Kit from media attention, as they – wisely - didn’t want him spun into another celeb prodigy. It was the Nocturne he now played me that decided Alfred to teach Kit Armstrong - the first child pianist he had ever taken on. He slipped the CD into the player, his eyes sparkling with enthusiasm.įor Alfred Brendel to approve of a pianist’s Chopin was remarkable: he had once told me that he’d left the composer alone as Alfred Cortot’s Chopin could not be bettered. Alfred led me into his inner sanctum, a practice room filled to bursting with two Steinways, a large carved idol from New Guinea, Liszt’s death mask and a rich and varied collection of paintings and images, some of them revealing the pianist’s wicked Dadaist sense of humour. The study population was in two streams, the first stream was for survey and the second stream was for content analysis. The survey and content analysis were adopted as the design for the study. The study was guided by social responsibility, agenda setting and main streaming theories. To achieve this, four objectives and four corresponding research questions were set. This study investigated female lawyers perception of media coverage of child rights issues in Rivers state. The implications that an understanding of trauma and its effects might have for resettlement work undertaken with young custody-leavers.The links between trauma and young people’s behaviour, including the extent of their capacity to comply with youth justice interventions.The effects that such trauma can have on young people in the short-term, and its longer term impacts on emotional, social, and neurological development.The prevalence of different types of traumatic childhood and adolescent experiences in the backgrounds of young offenders.Definitions of trauma and the different ways in which trauma has been understood in the research and practice literature.It aims to highlight what is currently known about trauma within the population of young offenders, and to identify the importance of this knowledge for effective resettlement practice. The report presents key findings from a review of the research and practice literature concerning trauma in the backgrounds of young people who offend. The art alone from Deodato and Martin is wonderful, deftly mixing the modern and the archaic. Some very nice humour in the “Covfefe” puppet.īerserker Unbound #2 is another wonderful issue from Jeff Lemire, Mike Deodato Jr., Frank Martin, and Steve Wands. Wonderful character moments here and further insight into the horrors that the animals have seen.īattlepug #1 brings the web comic to regular monthly print comics from Mike Norton, Allen Passalaqua, and Crank! While it does help to have read the previous adventures, you can pick up and enjoy this humorous take on sword and sorcery fairly easily. While Jesse and her caravan continue to try to make it out west, her animal friends attempt to plan for her upcoming 13th birthday. Greg Pak, Nico Leon, Pop Mhan, Federico Blee, and Joe Sabino continue to weave together intrigue, superhero action, and romance with a very interesting mystery evolving.Īnimosity #23 is part one of “Rites of Passage” from Marguerite Bennett, Elton Thomasi, Roberto De Latorre, Rob Schwager, and Taylor Esposito. Agents of Atlas #2 again seems to focus more on Amadeus Cho and his perspective than the rest of the team, but it’s still very entertaining. The structure-life relationship was tested statistically, after controlling for urban form and socio-demographic confounders, including land use, density, block size, parks, income, age, and demographics. Urban life was captured using a combination of Twitter activities, Point-Of-Interests, and walking trips, aggregated at the district level. The structural qualities of an urban street network, conceived as “semilattice”, “complex network” and “living structure”, were measured using graph-topological indicators. We translated his constructs and premises into a mathematically testable form. This study aims to test Alexander’s urban structural theory under a comprehensive research framework. Subsequent literature failed to distinguish the structural differences between the old and new cities in systematic ways, nor is his asserted structure-life relationship verified with rigor. Alexander's idea, although widely influential, remains contested for its lack of empirical support. This structural distinction can explain, or perhaps determine “the patina of life” in old urban districts and the lack of such in new ones. The latter is shaped in a graph-theoretical “tree”, which lacks the structural complexity as its sub-systems are compartmentalized into a single hierarchy. The former resembles a “semilattice”, or a complex system encompassing many interconnected sub-systems. Christopher Alexander, a British-American scholar, famously differentiated an old (natural) city from a new (planned) one in structure. Sunflower Sisters contributes to a positive movement towards tackling colourism, which starts by empowering children and changing the way we think and speak about this subject, and carrying through this message to future generations. She aims to tackle colourism across black and brown communities everywhere, in a sensitive and authentic way. This debut book by children’s author Monika Singh Gangotra combines her professional and personal experience of colourism to varying degrees throughout her life. This uplifting children’s picture book with colourful illustrations and a window into the cultural differences and similarities through joyous wedding ceremonies, is the first in a new book series by Monika Singh Gangotra, following the lives of the sunflower sisters. Offering a window into the lived experiences of children affected by colourism, this book follows the sunflower sisters as they grow into strong and independent young women, supported and empowered by their mums.īy embracing and celebrating the colour of their dark brown skin and their South Asian and Nigerian communities and traditions, Amrita and Kiki discover how to empower other women to do the same. Sunflower Sisters - Monika Singh Gangotra & Michala Dias-Hayesīest friends Amrita and Kiki celebrate the joy in experiencing each other’s communities and traditions in this children’s picture book by Monika Singh Gangotra (author) and Michaela Dias-Hayes (illustrator). |