Isabel Allende ( http://www.isabelallende.com/en/home/8 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isabel_Allende) is arguably the world’s most widely read Spanish language author. She has had a long and fascinating life which reflects so much of the history of our times. This magical realist novel catapulted her to literary fame, and it was in virtue of this and her wider oeuvre that she […]
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Antonio Tabucchi (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Tabucchi) was an Italian academic deeply interested in Portuguese culture, which he taught at The University of Sienna. His novel ‘Sostiene Pereira’ (translated as ‘Pereira Declares’, and sometimes‘Pereira Maintains’) has received international recognition. The novel is set in Portugal in the summer of 1938, during the dictatorship of Salazar (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant%C3%B3nio_de_Oliveira_Salazar). The summary is as
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Bestselling Australian author Kate Morton (https://katemorton.com/) is gaining an appreciative following. See if you agree with the buzz in the bookselling press and fiction world by trying her latest mystery novel. The plotting is nicely done, and the atmosphere well conjured. The summary, as follows, revolves around a missing child. In June 1933 the Edevane
The reclusive German writer Patrick Süskind (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Suskind) produced one internationally acclaimed bestseller. This was Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. The novel examines what happens when one man’s indulgence in his greatest passion, his sense of smell, leads to murder. The summary is as follows. In the slums of eighteenth-century France, the infant Jean-Baptiste Grenouille
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For as long as humans have thought deeply about existence there has been an intuition that there must be some universal principle of natural order. This would be a background reality to which even the gods as imagined in human culture would be subject. It has been conceived as the Indian Vedic ‘Rta’ and ‘Dharma’,
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Perhaps life hasn’t turned out entirely as you’d hoped? Your car is less prestigious than the BMW Series 7 next door. You’re holidays are not exotic, your marriage has not endured as a lovestruck dream, your children’s behaviour is disappointing. You’ve been overlooked in the race for promotion. In your early 20s your ambition was
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Lisa Jardine has died on 25 October 2015. (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/11955153/Lisa-Jardine-historian-obituary.html, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_Jardine) Daughter of Jacob Bronowski, she became a brilliant historian, Renaissance scholar, humanist and polymath. Everything I have read of hers has been a pleasure and an education. Hers was the voice of sanity, erudition and wisdom. Selecting only one of her works is difficult, but please read Ingenious
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Professor Joshua Greene (http://www.joshua-greene.net/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Greene_(psychologist)) is the director of Harvard University’s Moral Cognition Lab. He offers a grand synthesis of neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy here. His thesis in this book, Moral Tribes, is as follows. Human brains have evolved for tribal life, for getting along with a select group of others (‘Us’). Our hominid ancestors had to fight off everyone else (‘Them’). Modern
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All human cultures that we know of, literate and non-literate, have constructed stories about their own origins. It’s a perfectly natural thing to do. At an individual level the child asks ‘Where did I come from, Mummy?’ So, it’s equally compelling for a tribe or civilisation to ask ‘Where did we come from? The answers,
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