The Little Prince

I had heard a lot about this book from quite a few students and finally got the chance to read it. Honestly, it wasn't all that I expected it to be and wonder why so many people brag, rant and rave about it as much as they do. That made me question myself if I was the one who had missed out on the "moral" or "hidden meaning" somewhere in the book. In the end I guess I could say this book "grew on me". I thought a bit about the different things the book expounds on and the different planets the Little Prince visits and what stayed with me at the end of my little mind review is how we must each find "our star". In each planet that the Little Prince went to, each person he spoke to saw the stars as something different - the stars had a different meaning and significance to each person. To one it was something of great value; to another, something to worry about, and so on so forth. What each one of us needs to do is find our star - and who knows, our flower as well. 

A little from the book - taken from Wikipedia plus a nice clip of The Little Prince:

The narrator's point of view is interwoven in the first nine chapters and changes from third-person to first person. In the first chapter, we meet the narrator who, as a young boy, uses his imagination to draw pictures. But, when he shows them to the adults, they spurn them, and he quickly decides to abandon his drawing and grow up. As such, he decides to become a pilot, which eventually leads to his crash in the Sahara desert and his meeting with the Prince.

The prince asks the narrator to draw a sheep. Not knowing how to draw a sheep, the narrator shows the prince a picture that he had previously drawn: a boawith an elephant in its stomach (a drawing which previous viewers mistook for a hat). To the narrator's surprise, the prince recognizes the drawing for what it is. After a few failed attempts at drawing a sheep, the narrator draws a box, which he explains has the sheep inside. The prince, who can see the sheep inside the box just as well as he can see the elephant in the boa, says "That's perfect".

The home asteroid or "planet" of the little prince is introduced. His asteroid (planet) is the size of a house and named B-612, which has three volcanoes (two active, and one dormant) and a rose among various other objects. The naming of the asteroid is a conceptual illustration that adults will only believe a scientist who is dressed or acts as they do. According to the book, the asteroid was sighted by a Turkish astronomer in 1909 who had then made a formal demonstration of asteroid B-612 to the International Astronomical Congress. However, due to his clothing, he was ridiculed. After a Turkish dictator forced him and his people to dress like Europeans, he went again to present asteroid B-612 to the International Astronomical Congress. This time, he was believed and was credited with the discovery.

The prince spends his days caring for his "planet", pulling out the baobab trees that are constantly trying to take root there. The trees will make his little planet turn to dust if they are not removed. Throughout the book he is taught to be patient and to do hard work to keep his "planet" in order. The prince falls in love with a rose that takes root in his planet, who appears to not return his love due to her vain nature. He leaves to see what the rest of the universe is like, and visits six other asteroids (numbered from 325 to 330) each of which is inhabited by an adult who is foolish in his own way:

• The King who can apparently "control" the stars but only by ordering them to do what they would do anyway. He then relates this to his human subjects; it is the citizens' duty to obey, but only if the king's demands are reasonable. He orders the prince to leave as his ambassador.
• The Conceited Man who wants to be admired by everyone, but lives alone on his planet. He cannot hear anything that is not a compliment.
• The Drunkard/Tippler who drinks to forget that he is ashamed of drinking.

The Businessman, chapter 13

• The Businessman who is constantly busy counting the stars he thinks he owns. He wishes to use them to buy more stars. The prince then goes on to define property. The prince owns the flower and volcanoes on his planet because he cares for them and they care for him, but because one cannot maintain the stars or be of use to them, he argues, therefore the Businessman cannot own them. In later parts of the book, the prince recalls the Businessman with a particularly vehement disgust.
• The Lamplighter who lives on an asteroid which rotates once a minute. Long ago, he was charged with the task of lighting the lamp at night and extinguishing it in the morning. At that point, the asteroid revolved at a reasonable rate, and he had time to rest. As time went on, the rotation sped up. Refusing to turn his back on his work, he lights and extinguishes the lamp once a minute, getting no rest. The prince sympathizes with the Lamplighter, the only adult he has met who cares about something other than himself.
• The Geographer who spends all of his time making maps, but never leaves his desk to examine anywhere (even his own planet), considering that the job of an explorer. The Geographer is in any case very doubting of any explorer's character and would most likely disregard the report. He does not trust things he has not seen with his own eyes, yet will not leave his desk. Out of professional interest, the geographer asks the prince to describe his asteroid. The prince describes the volcanoes and the rose. "We don't record flowers", says the geographer, "because they are only ephemeral". The prince is shocked and hurt to learn that his flower will someday be gone. The geographer then recommends that he visit the Earth.

[edit]The visit to Earth

Chapter 16 begins: "So then the seventh planet was the Earth". On the Earth, he starts out in the desert and meets a snake that claims to have the power to return him to his home planet (A clever way to say that he can kill people, thus "Sending anyone he wishes back to the land from whence he came.") The prince meets a desert-flower, who, having seen a caravan pass by, tells him that there are only a handful of men on Earth and that they have no roots, which lets the wind blow them around making life hard on them.

The little prince climbs the highest mountain he has ever seen. From the top of the mountain, he hopes he will see the whole planet and find people, but he sees only a desolate, craggy landscape. When the prince calls out, his echo answers him, and he mistakes it for the voices of humans. He thinks Earth is unnecessarily sharp and hard, and he finds it odd that the people of Earth only repeat what he says to them.

Eventually, the prince comes upon a whole row of rosebushes, and is downcast because he thought that his rose was the only one in the whole universe. He begins to feel that he is not a great prince at all, as his planet contains only three tiny volcanoes and a flower he now thinks of as common. He lies down in the grass and weeps.

Chapter 21: is the author's statement about human love in that the prince then meets and tames a fox, who explains to the prince that his rose is unique and special, because she is the one whom he loves. He also explains that in a way he has tamed the flower, as she has tamed him, and that this is why he now feels responsible for her.

Chapter 22–23: The prince then meets a railway switchman and a merchant who provide further comments on the ridiculousness and absurdity of much of the human condition. The switchman tells the prince how passengers constantly rush from one place to another aboard trains, never satisfied with where they are and not knowing what they are after, only the children amongst them bothering to look out of the windows. The merchant tells the prince about his product, a pill which eliminates thirst and is therefore very popular, saving people fifty-three minutes a week; the prince replies that he would use the time to walk and find fresh water.

Chapter 24: the narrator's point of view changes again from third person to first person. The narrator is dying of thirst, but then he and the prince find a well. After some thought, the prince bids an emotional farewell to the narrator, explaining to him that while it will look as though he has died, he has not, but rather that his body is too heavy to take with him to his planet. He tells the narrator that it was wrong of the narrator to come and watch, as it will make him sad. The prince allows the snake to bite him and the next morning, when the narrator looks for the prince, he finds the boy's body has disappeared. The story ends with a portrait of the landscape where the meeting of the prince and the narrator took place and where the snake took the prince's life. The narrator makes a plea that anyone encountering a strange child in that area who refuses to answer questions should contact the narrator immediately.

The little prince is represented as having been on Earth for one year, and the narrator ends the story six years after he is rescued from the desert.

[edit]In The Little Prince, Saint-Exupéry talks about being stranded in the desert beside a crashed aircraft. This account clearly draws on his own experience in the Sahara, an ordeal he described in detail in his book Wind, Sand and Stars.

On December 30, 1935 at 14:45, after 18 hours and 36 minutes in the air, Saint-Exupéry, along with his navigator André Prévot, crashed in the Libyan Sahara desert. They were attempting to break the record for the Paris-to-Saigon flight and win a prize of 150,000 francs. Their plane was a Caudron C-600 Simoun n° 7042 (serial F-ANRY). The crash site is thought to have been located in the Wadi Natrun. Both survived the crash, only to face rapid dehydration. Their maps were primitive and ambiguous. Lost in the desert with a few grapes, a single orange, and some wine, the pair had only one day's worth of liquid. After the first day, they had nothing. They both began to see mirages, which were quickly followed by more vivid hallucinations. Between the second and the third day, they were so dehydrated that they stopped sweating altogether. Finally, on the fourth day, a Bedouin on a camel discovered them and administered a native rehydration treatment that saved Saint-Exupéry and Prévot's lives.

In the desert, Saint-Exupéry had met a fennec (desert sand fox), which most likely inspired him to create the fox character in the book. In a letter written to his sister Didi from Cape Juby in 1918, he tells her about raising a fennec that he adored.

Saint-Exupéry may have drawn inspiration for the little prince's appearance from himself as a youth. Friends and family would call him "le Roi-Soleil" ("Sun King"), due to his golden curly hair.

The little prince's reassurance to the Pilot that his dying body is only an empty shell resembles the last words of Antoine's younger brother François: "Don't worry. I'm all right. I can't help it. It's my body" (Airman's Odyssey).

The literary device of presenting philosophical and social commentaries in the form of the impressions gained by a fictional extra-terrestrial visitor to Earth had already been used by the philosopher and satirist Voltaire in his story "Micromégas" (1752) – a classic work of French literature with which Saint-Exupéry was likely to be familiar.

Mating In Captivity

 This book was mind opening to say the least. I have somewhat of a sentimental feeling towards it because of some occurrences which happened while I was reading it. Esther Perel tells you a lot of truths right into your face - and it's somewhat shocking when you read it at first, but with time you start to grasp it all in and you see how much that truth makes sense. The part in which she talks about love vs. desire was like a whack on my face, hah! I knew I had just read something that would make me thing – not more, but yes more deeply.

It also was an insightful read which answered questions I had had for years. Yes, my sexuality flourished each day as I read and understood more and more about so many questions that were often deeply rooted in my head but which I never took the trouble to ask just for the simple reason of knowing that I didn't have any answers to them. 

From sexual fantasies, sexuality, keeping desire alive, body language, passion, monogamy, taboos, erotic intimacy, equality...and on the list goes; the author brings the subject up. The fascinating thing about this book is that it isn't a "how-to" manual or another relationship "self-help" book - far from it! Esther Perel enters into your head and makes you realize the whole psychological side of love, sex and relationships. 

I read it and will re-read it - it's worth the time!!!

And to finish off, a quote from the author herself:

“Love enjoys knowing everything about you; desire needs mystery. Loves likes to shrink the distance that exists between me and you while desire is energized by it. If intimacy grows through repetition and familiarity, eroticism is numbed by repetition. It thrives on the mysterious, the novel, and the unexpected.... An expression of longing, desire requires ongoing elusiveness.... Too often, as couples settle into the comforts of love, they cease to fan the flame of desire. They forget that fire needs air.”

Book Review:

Are you happy enough with your relationship but find the sexual excitement has waned or is waning?

Is it possible to reconcile domestic comfort and security with erotic adventure?

Does the togetherness, equality, and openness in intimacy always make for good sex?

Can you have emotional security and trust, and physical passion long-term?

Can you have hot sex with someone you know well?

Ether Perel takes on these tough questions, grappling with the obstacles and anxieties that arise when our quest for secure love conflicts with our pursuit of passion. She invites us to explore the paradoxical union of domesticity and sexual desire, and explains what it takes to bring lust home. Whether or not you are single or in a relationship, the paradox of modern love is reviewed and set alight by her provocative ideas and suggestions.

Through case studies and lively discussion drawn from her twenty years’ experience as a psychotherapist, Esther Perel puts forward the premise that sexual excitement thrives a lot on what is politically incorrect i.e. power plays, unfair advantages, role reversals, imperious demands, ambiguity in gesture and words, seductive manipulations, and subtle cruelties.  In effect, Perel unwraps cultural attitudes towards erotic sex through the titles she chooses for the eleven chapters that make up the book:

1. From adventure to captivity: Why the quest for security saps erotic vitality
2. More intimacy, less sex: Love seeks closeness, but desire needs distance
3. The pitfalls of modern intimacy: Talk is not the only avenue to closeness
4. Democracy versus hot sex: Desire and egalitarianism don't play by the same rules
5. Can do! The Protestant work ethic takes on the degradation of desire
6. Sex is dirty: save it for someone you love: When puritanism and hedonism collide
7. Erotic blueprints: Tell me how you were loved, and I'll tell you how to make love
8. Parenthood: Why three threatens two
9. Of flesh and fantasy: In the sanctuary of the erotic mind, we find a direct route to pleasure
10. The shadow of the third: Rethinking fidelity
11. Putting the X back into sex: Bringing the erotic home

So, according to Perel, the first step to bringing excitement back into your sex life is to leave political correctness out of your bedroom.

"There is no such thing as safe sex," Perel writes. Sex requires mystery, excitement, uncertainty. Which means not knowing everything about your partner. If you find that threatening, she suggests, you would find it less threatening so if you stopped equating intimacy with sex.

This book is not a how to book of exercises to rekindle passion. Rather, it centers on fantasy, play and surrender to the unknown as the path to sexual excitement. It talks about developing an erotic intelligence that balances serious intimacy and sexual play, and that can actually deepen commitment at the same time.

The Last Lecture

On a rainy day I walked into a little magazine store. As an avid book reader the first thing that caught both my eye and attention was a bottom little shelf with covered with books. I crouched down and must have spent the next half an hour there skimming through that wonderful world of pages, ink and letters. At last I left with three new books in my bag and a large smile on my face. Honestly, I don't even know why I bought Pausch's book. I had never even heard about him and didn't have a clue of who he was. But as soon as I started reading his book I knew that he had something important to say and I would be doing myself a favor to learn with his words.

The fact that he was a fellow teacher must also have been something that made me "bond" with the book. This first book of his is nothing more than snippets of his "Last Lecture" which he delivered at Carnegie Hall. He was asked what wisdom he would try to impart to the world if he knew it was his last chance. And last chance it surely was, because a month before giving the lecture, Pausch had received a prognosis that the pancreatic cancer with which he had been diagnosed a year earlier was terminal.

Despite knowing he only had a few short months to live he continued upbeat, making the most out of life, enjoying its simple joys to the full and giving, giving, giving. Always making of life a giving experience.

A beautiful chapter of the book - I think one of my favorites - is where he speaks in the meaning of helping others achieve their dreams. Rather than achieving only our own personal dreams, what will give you even more pleasure and satisfaction is helping others achieve their own dreams. Potential is there in every being, but a true leader makes you realize how you can achieve your dreams with your potential. And that's what distinguishes a leader from everyone else.


Many things in my own personal life were put in focus and I took a chance to stop and choose what it is that I want to be the meaning in my life. 
What were my childhood dreams? Did I still want to achieve them? My answer was a loud and clear: YES! I still wanted to travel to India (one of my first childhood dreams - this dream developed after seeing a benefit dance concer for the blind which occured there), I still had the deep desire to write a book on my life (another MAJOR childhood dream), I still imagined myself speaking French fluently, and I still dreamt in building a charity work for children. I wrote all my childhood dreams on paper and then defined clear, concrete goals to start from that moment on. And so, after tapping into my childhood dreams I am now starting to set those dreams in motion!
How about you? Dig deep, re-discover your childood desires and make them come true!!!


Here is a little about Randy Pausch and his book "The Last Lecture":

Each year at a series known as The Last Lecture, a Carnegie Mellon University faculty member is asked to deliver what would hypothetically be a final speech to their students before dying. It is a wonderful tradition in which both speaker and listeners take a moment to reflect upon what matters most in this life. In September 2007, the speaker, 47-year-old computer science professor and father of three, Randy Pausch, didn't have to imagine that he was confronting his imminent demise because, in fact, he was. Pausch had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and, at the time of his Last Lecture, had only been given three to six months to live. Pausch's speech, entitled "Achieving Your Childhood Dreams," was every bit as upbeat and inspirational as the man himself. Rather than focusing on dying, it was a speech about living, about achieving one's dreams and enabling the dreams of others, about truly living each day as though it were your last.

As of this writing, Randy Pausch's Last Lecture has been downloaded by over 10 million viewers. If you haven't watched the Last Lecture, let me recommend it as an excellent investment of one hour of your day today. You'll find various methods of doing so here:www.cmu.edu/uls/journeys/randy-pausch

So far Randy Pausch has beaten the odds, and he continues to inspire his audience. The Last Lecture, published April 2008 by Hyperion, resulted from collaboration with Jeffrey Zaslow, a columnist for The Wall Street Journal. With a desire to elaborate on his ideas in print form, but not wanting to take precious time away from his children, Pausch, a self-avowed efficiency nut, spent fifty-three daily bike rides on his cellphone headset conveying his thoughts to Zaslow who helped shape the stories into book form.

The Last Lecture is a slender book that can be read in just a few sittings. It is full of stories and aphorisms, many of which are familiar from its video progenitor. We revisit Randy Pausch's fulfillment of his childhood dreams and the principles he learned along the way. These gems include Pausch's view that "life's brick walls are there to show us how badly we really want something," the notion that "experience is what you get when you didn't get what you wanted," and a quotation from the Roman philosopher Seneca who said that "luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity."

Pausch is a fantastic storyteller, and recalls and distills the essentials of his life's anecdotes more than most of us would be able. The Last Lecture addresses more of his struggles with cancer than it did in video form, but always from the angle of a challenge requiring a creative solution, which is how Randy Pausch seems to have approached his entire life.

This book will be read by millions, but was written solely for Randy Pausch's three young children, Dylan, Logan, and Chloe, for whom Pausch is recording all of the fatherly advice he won't be around to give later on. It is because Pausch's advice is so universal in its wisdom and his voice so clear in its delivery, that we eavesdroppers can also benefit.

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas

An ironically ironic book. I gobbled this book down in one day. Yep, just like that. 

I didn't think much about it until I was done reading it and was able to stop down and ponder a bit on everything I had just taken in.

Books are amazing instruments. They have the power to make us stop, wonder, think and figure things out that we would have never given a second thought to if we hadn't taken the time to pick up that book, leaf through it, skim through it, delve into its pages head straight and find then yourself in a semi state of shock as you turn the last page. For me there is nothing more motivating - something that makes me want to change, transform myself, grow and accept new challenges in my life - than reading a book. And it doesn't have to be "THE book" - all it has to be able to do is mess in my mind and make me think when I am done reading it. I must agree with those that say that books are emotionally manipulative, because that is how I feel pretty much every time I finish reading a good book. This one was no exception.

Like many other books related to Jews, the holocaust, concentration camps, etc. that I read; it spoke to me a lot. But this time it spoke to me in a very different way. John Boyne makes very little mention of the horrors of war and shows a different angle of the story as we know it. 

The book is written in an easy and simple language; it's concise and makes you get the point in a very subtle way. Out of it all though, what I liked the most was the end. Why? Because it's an end that speaks the truth and makes you see the main picture; a picture that so many writers tried to pass to their readers yet failed. Yes, it's heartbreaking end but I couldn't think of a better way to finish it myself even if I tried. 

Book Review: Irish writer John Boyne's fourth novel is the first he has written for children. It's a touching tale of an odd friendship between two boys in horrendous circumstances and a reminder of man's capacity for inhumanity.

Bruno is a nine-year-old boy growing up in Berlin during World War II. He lives in a five-storey house with servants, his mother and father and 12-year-old sister, Gretel. His father wears a fancy uniform and they have just been visited by a very important personage called the Fury, a pun which adult readers should have no trouble deciphering. As a consequence of this visit, Bruno's father gets a new uniform, his title changes to Commandment and, to Bruno's chagrin, they find themselves moving to a new home at a place called Out-With.

When Bruno gets there he is immediately homesick. He has left his school, his three best friends, his house, his grandparents and the bustling street life of urban Berlin with its cafes, fruit and veg stalls, and Saturday jostle. His new home is smaller, full of soldiers and there is no one to play with. From his bedroom window, however, he notices a town of people dressed in striped pyjamas separated from him by a wire fence. When he asks his father who those people are, he responds that they aren't really people.

Bruno is forbidden to explore but boredom, isolation and sheer curiosity become too much for him. One day, he follows the wire fence cordoning off the area where these people live from his house. He spots a dot in the distance on the other side of the fence and as he gets closer, he sees it's a boy. Excited by the prospect of a friend, Bruno introduces himself. The Jewish boy's name is Shmuel. Almost every day, they meet at the same spot and talk. Eventually, for a variety of reasons, Bruno decides to climb under the fence and explore Shmuel's world.

After some initial tonal clunkiness where you can almost detect the author thinking "how do I write a child", the story is an effortless read that puts you directly into Bruno's worldview. It is elegant story-telling with emotional impact and an ending that in true fairytale style is grotesquely clever.

Bruno's friendship with Shmuel is rendered with neat awareness of the paradoxes between children's naive egocentricity, their innate concept of fairness, familial loyalty and obliviousness to the social conventions of discrimination. 

People of the Book

People of the Book (Arabic: أهل الكتاب‎ ′Ahl al-Kitāb) is a term used to designate non-Muslim adherents to faiths which have a book of prayer. The plot of this book is all about that: the fictional story of the Haggadah. 


A student of mine reccomended me this book. She has a natural talent for arts so, as expected, she loved it. I thought I would like it more than I did though but it's an interesting book written by Geraldine Brooks.

The plot of the book traces the fictional history of the Haggadah by traveling forwards and backwards in place and time.In the present day, Hanna Heath, an Australian book restorer, goes to Sarajevo to do restoration and conservation on the book before it is put on display. As part of her conservation efforts, she tries to ascertain more about the book’s history. In parallel, the reader learns about the book’s travels and owners as it journeys back in time across Europe.

This book wasn't exactly my cup of tea but the the writer is real good and that keeps you going as you read the book. Spent my early Carnaval mornings reading this book.

Book Review:

When Hanna Heath, a manuscript conservator, first touches the centuries-old Hebrew codex known as the Sarajevo Haggadah, she feels a “strange and powerful” sensation, something “between brushing a live wire and stroking the back of a newborn baby’s head.” The manuscript is small, the binding soiled and scuffed, but its lavish illuminations — miniature scenes “as interpreted in the Midrash,” created “at a time when most Jews considered figurative art a violation of the commandments” — are stunning. It’s the spring of 1996 in Sarajevo, and Hanna has been called in to examine the book before it’s put on display.

To understand the work of the craftsmen who created the medieval texts she restores, Hanna has made her own gold leaf and created white pigment by covering lead bars with the dregs of old wine and animal dung. She’s familiar with “the intense red known as worm scarlet ... extracted from tree-dwelling insects” and the blue, “intense as a midsummer sky, obtained from grinding precious lapis lazuli.” Looking closely at the parchment of the Haggadah, she can tell it comes from “the skin of a now-extinct breed of thick-haired Spanish mountain sheep.” These lush details, at once celebratory and elegiac, will appeal to the sort of reader who picks up a book just for the feel of it.

Hanna is opposed to “chemical cleanups” and “heavy restorations,” believing that damage and wear reveal much about how and where a manuscript has been used. “To restore a book to the way it was when it was made is to lack respect for its history,” she tells Ozren Karaman, the Muslim librarian who risked his life to save the Haggadah while Sarajevo was being shelled. During her examination of the manuscript, Hanna finds a fragment of an insect’s wing and a small white hair, which she slips into glassine envelopes for later analysis. These clues and other oddities — where are the book’s clasps? — are the springboard for Geraldine Brooks’s panoramic third novel, “People of the Book.”

Brooks, who won the Pulitzer Prize for her previous novel, “March,” has drawn her inspiration from the real Sarajevo Haggadah. As she explains in an afterword, little is known about this book, except that it has been saved from destruction on at least three occasions: twice by Muslims and once by a Roman Catholic priest. Building on these fragments of information, Brooks has created a fictional history that moves to Sarajevo in 1940, then back to late-19th-century Vienna, 15th-century Venice, Catalonia during the Spanish Inquisition and finally Seville in 1480, the new home of the artist responsible for the Haggadah’s illuminations.

The history of this holy book is a bloody one, bound with brutality and humiliation. Families who protect it are torn apart; the book itself is plundered to pay for a questionable medical cure, then lost in a game of chance. A particularly disturbing scene occurs during the Inquisition in a grotesquely named “place of relaxation” where those accused of heresy by the Spanish authorities are tortured.

Brooks’s extensive research is evident throughout, but she occasionally chokes her storytelling with historical detail; her dialogue can also be heavy with exposition. The narrative works best when the burden of the past is borne more lightly, when Brooks burrows into her characters’ inner lives. In fin-de-siècle Vienna, for example, a syphilitic bookbinder, overcome by symptoms of dementia, forgets how to make tea or even pursue his craft. Terrified, he experiences his thoughts as “an army in retreat, ceding ever more territory to his enemy, the illness.”

An inscription in the real Sarajevo Haggadah reads Revisto per mi. Gio. Domenico Vistorini, 1609. Taken with the notion that a Catholic priest surveying the codex during the Inquisition might choose to save it, Brooks creates another memorable character, an erudite scholar with “an innate reverence for books.” Sometimes, he finds, “the beauty of the Saracens’ fluid calligraphy moved him. Other times, it was the elegant argument of a learned Jew that gave him pause.” This priest haunts the sacristy for draughts of unconsecrated communion wine, intent on obliterating painful memories from his childhood — “the blowing sand of that desolate town,” the secret niche within a carved Madonna — not to mention thoughts of all the texts he has sent to the fires in his 17 years as a censor.

In the intimate first-person narration of the captive artist who creates the book’s original illuminations, a longing for freedom — a theme echoed throughout the Haggadah’s account of the liberation of the Jews — is eloquently evoked. Imagining a walk to the coast, holding an enchanted staff, the artist believes that “the great sea would part, and I would cross it, and make my way, in slow stages, down all the dusty roads that lead toward home.”

These self-contained historical interludes shelter within the overarching and at times problematic story of Hanna Heath. An irreverent Aussie, she’s an appealing character, but as she travels to Vienna, Boston and London, meeting with experts who might help answer her questions about the Haggadah, the structure of the narrative works against her. A chapter that ends with Hanna wondering about the insect wing or the stain will be followed by a historical interlude solving that piece of the puzzle. Not only predictable, this back-and-forth scheme also creates a discrepancy: the reader learns far more than Hanna ever will.

Woven into the puzzle-solving is the account of Hanna’s romance with the Muslim librarian who has saved the book, as well as glimpses of her disastrous and at times melodramatic relationship with her mother. (“How is your latest tatty little book, anyway? Fixed all the dog-eared pages?”) Readers will eventually learn why Dr. Heath, an eminent neurosurgeon, is so dismissive, but this part of the plot has an artificial feel.

We are left wishing Brooks had found a less obtrusive way to gather up the many strands of her narrative. While peering through a microscope at a rime of salt crystals on the manuscript of the Haggadah, Hanna reflects that “the gold beaters, the stone grinders, the scribes, the binders” are “the people I feel most comfortable with. Sometimes in the quiet these people speak to me.” Though the reader’s sense of Hanna’s relationship with the Haggadah rarely deepens to such a level, Geraldine Brooks’s certainly has.

Lisa Fugard has written frequently for The Times’s Travel section and is the author of a novel, “Skinner’s Drift.”

The Truth About Managing Your Career - Karen Otazo

A lot of truths. Many which we already know and have heard about pratically our whole lives but forget to put in practice (at least in my case). A lot of them seem so insignificant but when you mount them all up together they make a whole big difference. One of the most amazing things about this book is that you can be a student that has just graduated or a top business man and you will still find it extremely beneficial and useful. The chapters are clear, concise and enlightening.

Here are just a few of Karen's "truths" on:

How to make a great first impression

Working more smoothly with bosses and colleagues

Building a high-performance personal network

Managing workloads

Deciding who to trust (and distrust!)

Handling enemies and overcoming career setbacks

Getting noticed, getting ahead, getting to the top!

Ah, and one last thing...if you care about your career, you need to invest in this excellent, well-written book.

Book Review:

What do we know--really know--about achieving exceptional career success? What are the best ways to get on the fast track, and stay there? The Truth About Managing Your Career reveals what really works: 60 proven principles and easy career management techniques you can start using right now.

Written in an easy, down-to-earth style, this book has been endorsed by some of the best minds in business, including Lois Frankel, NYTimes bestselling author of Nice Girls Don't Get the Corner Office and Art Kleiner, Editor of Strategy+Business and author of Who Really Matters: The Core Group Theory of Power, Privilege and Success.

From Lois Frankel, author of Nice Girls Don't Get the Corner Office: "A cutting-edge pioneer in the field of business coaching, Dr. Karen Otazo knows--and speaks--the truth about how to get and keep the job you want. Regardless of your age or stage of your career, you'll find practical tips and tools to make your workplace journey smoother, more enjoyable, and potentially more profitable. The Truth about Managing Your Career is a must-have for your career library."

Fala Sério Pai!!!

A dorky, corny, silly book for pre-teens on puberty – but very funny nonetheless!!! This usually wouldn’t be my choice of book for a good read but since I had already read one of her books – “Fala Sério Amor” – about a year ago and had almost literally wet my pants of so much laughing I thought I would read this one as well.

Talita Rebouças has a different style of writing. You can read one of her books in a day if you wish to do so as the major part of her books are dialogues and there is little narration. A lot of people complain about her style of writing as they say it’s completely void of talent but I think that just by her being able to capture such a large crowd of young readers is already a proof of her talent as not all writers are able to do so.

The book is sweet and cuddly while at the same time keeping the readers humor alive and holding on to his sides from time to time. She retells bits of her life spent together with her father – from the time she was born until she turned 21 and went to live on her own. The nice thing about it is the portrayal it gives of the father-daughter relationship and makes you realize (or remember, for those who have already realized!) that in the end, everything our father’s do they do it for our own good!

CHEERS TO ALL FATHER’S – My Daddy Boo being the best of them all!!!