![]() ![]() ![]() Oakland Zoo, 9777 Golf Links Road, Oakland. Barn tour tickets can be purchased in advance or at the event. Plus, the once-a-year opportunity to tour the elephant barn and see an elephant up close. The Oakland Zoo’s annual Celebrating Elephants day includes exciting elephant stations such as touching gigantic pachyderm bones, holding an 11 pound tooth, and more. Montclair Branch Library, 1687 Mountain Blvd., Oakland. Please bring fully charged device if you can, and current library card. One-on-one workshop showing users how to download eBooks and e-audiobooks apps on your mobile device. Oakland Public Library, Lakeview Branch, 550 El Embarcadero, Oakland. Enjoy a journey though the cosmos in one of Chabot Space and Science Center portable planetariums and create an astrocraft while you’re waiting your turn. Please submit your item at least two weeks before event date. Or mail to Montclarion / Piedmonter, 1516 Oak St., Alameda CA 94501. Submit your calendar item to or Type “calendar item” in the subject line. ![]()
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![]() ![]() Lives and hearts collide, revealing an incredibly dark side to the sunny Spanish city. He is backed into a corner of difficult decisions to protect those he loves. Daniel’s photographs leave him with uncomfortable questions amidst shadows of danger. Photography–and fate–introduce him to Ana, whose family’s interweaving obstacles reveal the lingering grasp of the Spanish Civil War–as well as chilling definitions of fortune and fear. ![]() Among them is eighteen-year-old Daniel Matheson, the son of an oil tycoon, who arrives in Madrid with his parents hoping to connect with the country of his mother’s birth through the lens of his camera. ![]() Meanwhile, tourists and foreign businessmen flood into the country under the welcoming promise of sunshine and wine. Under the dictatorship of General Francisco Franco, Spain is living in silence. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Love in a Cold Climate focuses on Polly Hampton, long groomed for the perfect marriage by her fearsome mother, Lady Montdore, but secretly determined to find her own path. The Pursuit of Love follows the travails of Linda, the most beautiful and wayward Radlett daughter, who falls first for a stuffy Tory politician, then an ardent communist, and finally a French duke named Fabrice. ![]() Uncle Matthew is the blustering patriarch, known to hunt his children when foxes are scarce Aunt Sadie is the vague but doting mother and the seven Radlett children are recklessly eager to grow up. We are introduced to the Radletts through the eyes of their cousin Fanny, visiting their Gloucestershire estate. Nancy Mitford modeled the characters in her two best-known novels on her own famously unconventional family. A hardcover omnibus of the comic masterpieces that made Nancy Mitford famous: madcap tales of growing up among the privileged and eccentric in England and finding love in all the wrong places. ![]() ![]() ![]() She described some petty behavior she perpetrated. She described her judgment of the parent in her mind. I especially appreciated the chapter that discussed Kathy who had a parent visit with a foster child’s mom. The author does not shy away from the reality of how difficult foster care can be. This is one of the first books recommended to me when we were considering foster care and adoption. Another Place at the Tabl e by Kathy Harrison If you’re looking for some books about adoption here are a few that I loved. ![]() ![]() And while this doesn’t mean you’ll automatically have more down time-there is a chance you might get a few minutes to yourself to read something that isn’t Goodnight Moon or Dragons Love Tacos for the millionth time. Summer is winding down and you either are starting back to school very soon or have already started. ![]() ![]() “Babette’s Feast” is certainly such a tale, recounting the story of two sisters, Martine and Philippa, from girlhood to old age, and preparing these characters for one remarkable feast bestowed on them and their friends by their mysterious French housekeeper and cook, Babette Hersant. She could easily follow her characters across decades of their lives, to arrive at the moment that crystallized their destiny. Notably, Dinesen wrote in English and then translated her own works into Danish (so you won’t see any translator credited).Īs a teller of tales, Dinesen did not restrict herself to any brief time interval. “Babette’s Feast” first appeared in a magazine, the Ladies’ Homes Journal, in 1950, and it was again published in 1958 in a story collection called Anecdotes of Destiny. Anyone who has read that book, or seen the 1985 film of it, knows that, at the end of her time in Africa, she returned to her native Denmark where she would live out her days crafting her famous memoir as well as an impressive host of short stories. ![]() “Babette’s Feast” is a short story by Isak Dinesen ( Karen Blixen), the Danish author whose real life experiences managing a farm in British East Africa (colonial Kenya) led her to write Out of Africa (1937). ![]() ![]() It is this loneliness that prompts him to accept an invitation to a house-party being held by Lord and Lady Renable, although it doesn’t take him long after his arrival to regret his decision. He is also mourning the recent death of his mistress of ten years, not because he was deeply in love with her, but because they had been comfortable together and he had cared for her. ![]() His London home feels empty and he doesn’t much like the idea of returning to his principal seat at Lindsey Hall for the summer because that will be empty, too. He has fulfilled the vow he made when he assumed the title to make sure that they were all well taken care of – and at the age of thirty-five, realises he is lonely. Now that his brothers and sisters are all happily settled and starting families of their own, Wulfric is at a loss. In Slightly Dangerous, we discover more about what has made him into the man he is and watch him unravel a bit as he finally meets his match. He’s been a strong secondary presence in the other books in the series and has come across as a rather forbidding man with a reputation for being extremely proper, arrogant and cold, able to wound at twenty paces simply by virtue of a raised quizzing glass and a disdainful look. ![]() Vincent and a handful of others, is one of historical romance’s best beloved and most unforgettable heroes. In this final book in Mary Balogh’s Bedwyn series, the limelight at last turns to Wulfric, Duke of Bewcastle, the eldest of the six Bedwyn siblings who, along with the Marquess of Dain, Sebastian St. ![]() ![]() ![]() It’s when your foot tilts excessively inward or outward that pronation goes from a natural, neutral movement to a risky one. Most important, he says, “it’s a way for your body to absorb force so you don’t hurt yourself.” This shifting keeps us nimble on our feet and able to navigate uneven terrain, says Lee Welch, a doctor of physical therapy specializing in lower-extremity injuries in runners and the co-owner of The Running PTs. ![]() As they push away from the ground, the foot tilts outward into a supinated position, explains Kate VanDamme, a physical therapist and orthopedic clinical specialist at the NYU Langone Health Sports Performance Center. When a person runs, the foot naturally tilts inward to a pronated position with each step. Everyone needs some degree of pronation, or side-to-side flexing of the foot. ![]() ![]() New York Times bestselling author Meagan Spooner grew up reading and writing every spare moment of the day, while dreaming about life as an archaeologist, a marine biologist, an astronaut. Who will survive: the Beauty, or the Beast? A world that can bring her ruin or salvation. But Yeva’s father’s misfortune may have cost him his mind, and when he goes missing in the woods, Yeva sets her sights on one prey: the creature he’d been obsessively tracking just before his disappearance.ĭeaf to her sisters’ protests, Yeva hunts this strange Beast back into his own territory-a cursed valley, a ruined castle, and a world of creatures that Yeva’s only heard about in fairy tales. Out in the wilderness, there’s no pressure to make idle chatter with vapid baronessas…or to submit to marrying a wealthy gentleman. ![]() So when her father loses his fortune and moves Yeva and her sisters back to the outskirts of town, Yeva is secretly relieved. ![]() ![]() Though she grew up with the city’s highest aristocrats, far from her father’s old lodge, she knows that the forest holds secrets and that her father is the only hunter who’s ever come close to discovering them. ![]() Beauty knows the Beast’s forest in her bones-and in her blood. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() In laying out marvellous happenings they debunk the possibility of the miraculous. Rushdie’s novels were described as magical realism but the magic in them is not backed by faith and they emerge more as satire. Its miracles do not affirm, and an instance would be a Gabriel Garcia Marquez ‘fairy tale’ about a ragged angel that lands in a farm its miraculous powers do not restore a blind man’s eyesight but give him three new teeth, as consolation. Magical realism uses fantastic elements but where earlier forms incorporating the fantastic affirmed a moral order with divinity in command, magical realism is an exploration (like realism) of a godless universe. Rushdie himself wrote ‘magical realism’ in Midnight’s Children (1981), his most important novel, a literary form perhaps also not tenable today. In an interview related to his new novel Quichotte Salman Rushdie insightfully announces the end of realism as a form of literary fiction since it depends on a compact between the writer and his/her readers on the meaning of the world and that is no longer possible with disruptive elements like the social media and fake news emerging. ![]() This is your guide to the Booker contenders. Editor's note: Up to 14 October, when the Man Booker Prize 2019 winner will be announced, Firstpost will be reviewing the five books on the shortlist. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() He lives in Santa Barbara, California, with his longtime partner, Abir. Pike was born in Brooklyn, New York, but grew up in Los Angeles. In YA, his Last Vampire series-often called Thirst-is a big favorite among his fans. See moreĬhristopher Pike is a bestselling young adult novelist and has published several adult books as well- Sati and The Season of Passage being the most popular. Currently, several of Pike's books are being turned into films and in the fall of 2022, Netflix will be releasing a. ![]() Christopher Pike is a bestselling young adult novelist and has published several adult books as well- Sati and The Season of Passage being the most popular. ![]() |