Liška Bystrouška
Rudolf Těsnohlídek
This story tells how the vixen is captured but escapes, marries, and raises a litter. She is shot by a poacher, but her spirit survives in her cubs.
Read Time: ~5 hr
Burning down my masters' house
by Jayson Blair (2004)
About this book
"Burning Down My Masters' House is the memoir that captures the pain, anger and fierce determination of Jayson Blair. A young black journalist who descended from slaves, he rose to become a national correspondent at The New York Times before igniting the largest journalism scandal in decades." "Blair accepts all the words that have been used to describe him: liar, thief, fabricator and plagiarist. He does not push responsibility for his actions onto anyone else, but seeks to explain how someone with talent and opportunity could fall from such great heights, primarily by his own hand. For the first time, in his own words, Blair seeks to answer the question that consumed media watchers, writers and readers everywhere: How could such a thing have happened at The New York Times?" "Blair lays out his acts of deception and examines the reasons behind them. He openly and honestly describes the anger that developed inside him while growing up black in the white South. He tells how his drug and alcohol addiction fanned the sparks of this anger into an all-consuming rage." "Burning Down My Masters' House take the reader to the inner-city streets of New York during the World Trade Center attacks and to the Washington D.C. area during the sniper shootings. Against the backdrop of some of the biggest stories of the new millenium is the story of one man's personal struggles with the trauma of covering, and becoming a part of, emotionally-loaded news events. Blair also provides his own critical analysis of how the news media covers topics, and where it often falls short of its goals to be fair, balanced and objective." "Blair recounts the battle with mental illness that sent him spinning recklessly out-of-control and eventually ended his career as a journalist. In candid detail, he reveals his struggle to recover from a disease - a form of manic-depression with psychotic symptoms - that caused him to succumb to exhilarating highs and catastrophic depressions. Blair tells of deep psychosis, a suicide attempt, hospitalization in a mental institution and his struggle with powerful drugs that eventually allowed him to function again and begin the search for answers."--BOOK JACKET.
Setting / LocationNew York City
Story EraModern Era
Protagonist / CoreBurning down my masters' house Lead Character
Readers who enjoyed this also loved
Coleridge
Richard Holmes
Winner of the 1989 Whitbread Prize for Book of the Year, this is the first volume of Holmes's seminal two-part examination of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, one of Britain's greatest poets. Coleridge: Early Visions is the first part of Holmes's classic biography of Coleridge that forever transformed our view of the poet of 'Kubla Khan' and his place in the Romantic Movement. Dismissed by much recent scholarship as an opium addict, plagiarist, political apostate and mystic charlatan, Richard Holmes's Coleridge leaps out of the page as a brilliant, animated and endlessly provoking figure who invades the imagination. This is an act of biographical recreation which brings back to life Coleridge's poetry and encyclopaedic thought, his creative energy and physical presence. He is vivid and unexpected. Holmes draws the reader into the labyrinthine complications of his subject's personality and literary power, and faces us with profound questions about the nature of creativity, the relations between sexuality and friendship, the shifting grounds of political and religious belief. - Publisher.
Where does the weirdness go?
David Lindley
Few revolutions in science have been more far-reaching - but less understood - than the quantum revolution in physics. Everyday experience cannot prepare us for the strange phenomena of the subatomic world, where quantum effects become all important. Here, particles can look like waves, and vice versa; electrons seem to lose their identity and instead take on a shifting, unpredictable appearance that depends on how they are being observed; and a single photon may sometimes behave as if it could be in two places at once. In the world of quantum mechanics, uncertainty and ambiguity become not just unavoidable, but essential ingredients of science. But then comes an even more disturbing thought: When we look at the world around us, why do we not see the quantum weirdness that pervades its most fundamental structure? If the familiar world of everyday experience is built from ambiguous and unreliable subatomic ingredients, how can it be as solid, dependable, and predictable as we know it to be? David Lindley explains how physicists are finally beginning to find an answer to the most perplexing question of all: How does our Newtonian world arise from its quantum foundations? With that understanding, Lindley brings the quantum revolution full circle, showing how the familiar and trustworthy reality of the world around us is actually a consequence of the ineffable uncertainty of the subatomic quantum world - the world we can't see.
Searching for Red Eagle
Mary Ann Wells
"Before I had heard of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, or even Jesus, I knew who William Weatherford was. He was Red Eagle, the icon implanted in my heart as an example of what a truly noble human being should be," Mary Ann Wells says of her distant kinsman. Red Eagle, the child of a Scottish trader and a mixed-blood Muscogean mother, became a notable leader among the Red Stick Creeks and was the unyielding adversary of the American government during the Creek War of 1813-14. He stands accused in traditional accounts of having masterminded one of the worst massacres of whites in American history. This book, for the first time, gives an Indian perspective to the narrative. To find the real Red Eagle, Wells has probed the published records and combined them with stories she had heard from family members. Her true encounter with Red Eagle occurs, however, in mystic experiences. She finds him not in the processes of linear thought of European history but through the thought world of Native American narrative. Wells, who identifies herself both as a mystic and a revisionist, acknowledges that she has inherited both Billy Weatherford's bloodline and his ethnic identity. Shifting between historical episodes and the present, Wells pursues the true story. Her suspenseful prose gives a visceral sense of how Indians felt as victims of the American government and of how they had no recourse but to fight.