Book Review

(N.B. Fr. Ramon Fruto, CSsR, is the first Redemptorist Filipino ordained priest. He was ordained in 1959 after his theological studies in India. His past ...

At one time in his life, he served with the Department of Foreign Affairs in the Philippine Embassy in Rome and as parish priest in the Franciscan parish in Makati City. Ramon and the Redemptorists of his generation have done. He is now part of the community of OFMs administering the San Vicente Ferrer Parish in Cebu City.) In the 13 chapters of Part Two, “Experiences as a CSsR Missionary in the Field,” Fr. We find this in the lives of heroes, whether of myth or history, and even in the infancy narratives of the Lord. It is a touching piece that offers the human experience of separation a comforting assurance that a reunion is waiting beyond the grave. Ramon’s work with the Redemptorist team to revise the traditional program of the mission days conducted in parishes or communities, mostly in Mindanao. As we look that far back, we see those years shaded in a mist of idealism, innocence, the promise and vision of a future… He now resides in the Holy Redeemer Provincial Center of the Redemptorists in Cebu City.) Karl Gaspar, CSsR, the 153-page manuscript has three parts: the first being “From Boyhood to First Assignment,” with 17 chapters: the first three are about his early life; four to nine are on his experiences during the Second World War; and 10 to 17 are on the birth and development of his Redemptorist vocation, ecclesiastical studies and first assignments. He was Vice-Provincial for the Redemptorists of southern Philippines for a few terms, before appointed Apostolic Administrator of the Diocese of Iligan in 1998-2000. and in various parts of the Visayas.

The heroics of the five Kingdom Keepers who battled the Disney villains to save the parks is now an urban legend recounted by local teens Set in the distant ...

Pearson has crafted an incredible tale that not only picks up the themes of his Return series, but also allows fans of the book series to see their favorite characters in a whole new light. Kids who once thought of nothing about traveling back in time to Disneyland in 1955 (The Return series, Pearson’s second Kingdom Keepers saga, is fantastic and worth rereading), are now the middle-aged adults who have adult responsibilities. Pearson reminds the reader throughout the book that the battles between the Keepers and the Villains are legendary, and therein lies the problem which has caused the cycle to repeat. The central arc to the story is that the Disney Company in the distant future has chosen to spotlight the villains again, thus fueling their power and allowing them to gain power causing trouble in the parks around the globe. They all have all settled into their middle age lives living in the CommuniTree at Epcot, and their past exploits are but a fading memory. Set decades into the future, we’re not entering the Disney Parks that we know but rather a world of maybe and yet to come.

There is little by way of narrative drive in Shirley, but Scott writes very well. Events occur haphazardly and meaning is revealed gradually.

A possible critique would be that this adds up to a book that is less than wholly satisfying, but I rather suspect that a refusal to explain everything, the kind of liminal haze for which bushfire smoke may serve as a potent metaphor, is part of the point. There is an initial promise of a mystery concerning a photograph of the protagonist’s mother taken outside their old house (the eponymous Shirley), which played a role in her leaving Australia. In retrospect, the period in which the majority of Shirley takes place has a liminal quality to it, and this quality is heightened by Scott’s characters, who have a slight air of unreality about them. There is little concrete to cling on to in the early pages. Most of her social interactions are with her downstairs neighbours, the businesswoman Frankie, who idolises her mother, and her live-in ‘sperm donor’ Alex. Ronnie Scott’s second novel Shirley beings in Melbourne at the end of 2019, the air thick with bushfire smoke, a scene those of us living on the east coast of Australia at the time will remember.

Infinix's latest laptop -- Zero Book Ultra features a metal unibody design and is powered by the Intel Core i9-12900H? Is it as good as it's specs sheet?

And the only time I heard the fans spin on this laptop is when I ran the benchmarks. Similarly, on the GPU test, the laptop scored 16730 points on the OpenCL test. When I opened this laptop for the very first time, I was really fascinated by looking at the speaker-like grills on either side of the keyboard. On Geekbench 6 benchmark, the laptop posted 2517 and 12859 points on single-core and multi-core CPU tests. While we cannot deny the fact that the design of this laptop is heavily inspired by the MacBook Pro, I don’t see an issue with that. The Infinix Zero Book Ultra definitely has one of the largest trackpads that I have seen on a Windows laptop in this class.

By Simon Demetriou Using rock-climbing as a metaphor for life's challenges, defeats and successes sounds like a trite idea. One would assume, therefore, ...

At the same time, Sam’s inner life emerges in her journey from finding safety in never being known (as a little girl, she realises that ‘imagination is private! Ultimately, Goodman creates a moving and resonant portrayal of maternal love and frustration, of the struggle and vicarious dreaming involved in giving everything and wanting everything for your children. Sam is elder sister to Noah, two at the novel’s opening, who suffers from behavioural difficulties necessitating multiple school changes and ongoing medication.

One of the best things about interconnected romance novels is that it gives readers the chance to revisit familiar scenes, catch up with old characters and ...

Although it doesn’t quite hit the high expectations that Things We Never Get Over set in place, Things We Hide From the Light remains a detailed, twisty love story that offers a welcome return to a familiar series and will no doubt entertain, delight and consume fans of the first book all over again. Things We Hide From the Light is a romance novel that’s built entirely around the push and pull between its two main characters, and it’s fair to say that neither Nash or Lina are willing to be the first to give in. Things We Hide From the Light is a warm, emotional love story, yes, but it also struggles to recapture all of the same magic that came before.

Joseph Earl Thomas's remarkable debut, “Sink,” recounts the coming-of-age of a young man for whom poverty, violence, drug abuse and racism were simply facts ...

But perhaps one of the biggest boons of “Sink” is its insistence that care is, above all, shared. In the ecosystem of American publishing, the lack of emphasis on the exceptional is exceptional. Midway through the memoir, noting the role of great (white) authors and their pursuit of the canonical whale, Joey thinks, “Perhaps whale watching should be an option, if only to turn it down.” But this white canon exists for Joey on equal footing with the fandoms that permeated his childhood. It reinforces the idea that geographic distance isn’t the sole barometer of ground covered in an individual’s journey. Later still, speaking of an errant trick-or-treating venture, Thomas writes: “He’d never seen the boys before despite how familiar their bodies felt next to his, like a reflection of the only older boys he’d ever know, those destined to become the only men he knew, whose bodies were just like his and his like theirs, all of them terrified to admit this to themselves or each other.” The prose rips and shines. The action games “Castlevania: Symphony of the Night” and “Star Ocean: The Second Story” stand alongside the anime TV series “Dragon Ball Z,” which in turn occupies the same level of importance as Incubus records, which Joey loves as much as “Pokémon Red.” Of the latter, Thomas writes: “That you brought Dratini” — a Pokémon character — “up from birth, though, grounds you. It was not your place to reply.” Later, after his pet bird dies, he writes a sort of recipe for resurrection, replete with “lime and other stuff,” noting each ingredient’s specific weight, aligning them with the mechanics of the manga series “Fullmetal Alchemist,” whose plot also hinges on transmutation. In the library of this memoir’s mind, the video game series “Final Fantasy” occupies currency equivalent to “Moby-Dick,” and awareness of each is essential to the conditioning of the protagonist’s sensibility: “Much like Sonic the Hedgehog,” Thomas writes, referring to the video game character, “Joey just knew that life would be about navigating the machinery of other people’s lust, greed, anger or hurt, spinning signs and jumping high over the spikes, but not too high, skirting just under the sharp thingies on the ceiling, and most of all, being thankful that if all else failed, at least there was a roof.” What the reader ultimately receives is the extract of a life. The trick of memoir resides in the illusion it conjures: Living is ongoing, but the packaged product can imply a totality. Thomas’s insightfulness also applies to the role of language in this book: It both illuminates and obfuscates. It’s a truth that can undermine the tidy forms of best intentions, but one that — thankfully, generously — remains effervescent throughout the entirety of “Sink: A Memoir,” by Joseph Earl Thomas.

In his new memoir, Will Schwalbe — theater nerd and bookworm — describes the bond he continues to share with a former Navy SEAL turned eco-warrior.

The playwright in Schwalbe comes to the fore in his extensive re-creation, with Maxey, of their long-ago dialogues, which are sometimes just monologues with prompts. He takes forever to find out the names of Maxey’s four children and balks on writing a check to his nonprofit. I don’t know if Schwalbe fully let his guard down, but — swimming with stingrays, learning to breathe deeply — he stepped out of his comfort zone, and for this: applause. (Schwalbe likes drinking, he freely admits, almost as much as he likes books.) Membership will be “the best chapter in your soft, preppy, silver-spoon, privileged life,” a recruiter swears to Maxey. The society, never named but not Skull and Bones, taps 15 rising seniors who have nothing particular in common to dine together twice a week, with an unlimited account at the liquor store and a keg in the basement of their granite meeting hall. Many times when Schwalbe restrains himself from confiding in or asking something of Maxey — like what terrible thing happened to him when he was stationed in Panama — I found myself wanting to scream: “SAY IT! The two men were both recruited for a secret society at Yale in the ’80s, where Maxey was a jock, a bulging-biceped, extroverted wrestler who occasionally hurled homophobic obscenities, and Schwalbe an indoorsy classical civilization major with a perm and a penchant for Prince. “One of the best things about books is that they are always there for you; they will forgive you endless amounts of neglect and still be ready to greet you, unchanged.” Unlike, say, people. An early AIDS activist, he once labored on a play called “Traitors” about roommates who turn on a young man after he “lets down his guard,” a favored phrase. Long before the smartphone became our universal social escape hatch, he’d carry around something between covers, Linus-like, “as a kind of security blanket,” he writes. Many writers struggle to find their form: the genre in which they feel most free and productive — most themselves. Will Schwalbe once planned to be a playwright.

A new book by Joel Warner traces the fate of the parchment on which the infamous author wrote “120 Days of Sodom,” a trail involving scholars, ...

And yet it’s clear that in the night hours of his dank prison tower, even the marquis was desperately trying to create something more than material. “120 Days of Sodom” is a relentless spectacle of violence and grotesquerie. “I am nothing but a machine,” one libertine announces in a revealing moment in the novel’s introduction. The story’s most important figure is the marquis himself, a scion of one of France’s most powerful noble families. “The Curse of the Marquis de Sade” is nevertheless more demure than one might expect. (The boy counted the hours.) By adulthood, Sade was incapable of coping with intimacy. There’s a moment deep in the Marquis de Sade’s novel “120 Days of Sodom” when a libertine laments the numbness of having committed every possible debauchery. “For her,” Warner writes, “the answer was easy: 1929, the year she obtained ‘120 Days of Sodom.’” She was shy until her ancestor’s scroll — which she acquired from a German bookseller who collaborated with Bloch to publish the book — transformed her into an artist, a writer and a political radical in an open marriage. In 2014, it became central to what was either, Warner writes, “a decade-long, continent-spanning, billion-euro con” or a conspiracy of officials and cultural elites. In 37 days, he wrote 157,000 words on a 40-foot scroll while imprisoned in the Bastille, creating, he bragged, “the most impure tale ever written since the world began.” “120 Days of Sodom” chronicles four months of depravity involving multiple victims in a remote castle. There’s Iwan Bloch, a pioneering German sexologist so captivated by the scroll’s revelations that he risked prosecution to spearhead the first publication of “120 Days of Sodom,” in 1904.

True Life,” a collection of verse by the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski, arrives in English translation almost exactly two years after his death.

The final two lines of “Enlightenment” dare the poet’s appraisal of himself: “I found, much later, a moment’s joy/and melancholy’s dark contentment.” The book’s epigraph is from the philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas: “The true life is absent. The poems of “True Life” do not denounce these horrors explicitly, but seemingly allude to them almost as if in passing. One way to define his importance is related to the title “True Life” — characteristically large, with an equally characteristic, gentle smile at its own unlikely and much-thwarted ambition and its limits. Zagajewski invokes and declines a particular intellectual-historical source in a poem of 11 short lines, entitled “Enlightenment.” They deploy understatement like a talisman as they enter the grandly menacing yet oblivious borderland of our worst human doings. The seeming opposites — historical vision and personal tone — pervade “True Life,” posthumously published in an effective English translation by Clare Cavanagh. To put that point another way, Zagajewski by implication doubts the reassurance of “never again” or “never forget.” Slogans cannot correct the absence of moral imagination. This plain, absolute judgment is the opposite of any dramatic recounting of atrocity. That ongoing story makes Zagajewski’s poem of shared, discordant layers of loss and persistence feel all the more poignant, and the more urgently relevant, since the invasion of Ukraine by the Putin regime, with its war crimes against an entire population. “To Go to Lvov” has provided a model — intensely local, adamantly not nationalistic — for poems rooted in Philadelphia, Buenos Aires and Lahore. Possibly because Zagajewski attains a scale that is epic in a poetic voice that is intimate, nearly mild.

We Should Not Be Friends: The Story of a Friendship," by Will Schwalbe (Knopf) Will Schwalbe's new memoir, “We Should Not Be Friends,” explores an unlikely ...

Those post-graduation interactions, coupled with phone calls, letters and emails, provide a fully realized picture of Maxey and his life. And how, despite those few slip-ups, they always managed to right the (friend) ship. A medical diagnosis that is eerily similar to one that befell his biological father.

He started his journalism career as an assistant to Robert Silvers at The New York Review of Books and was soon contributing reviews there, as well as to Slate ...

He started his journalism career as an assistant to Robert Silvers at The New York Review of Books and was soon contributing reviews there, as well as to Slate and, of course, to Newsday. A deep and abiding interest in books and ideas has been clear in Tony’s work here from the start. Scott joined The Times as a film critic, after working as a Sunday book critic at New York Newsday. Eleven days later, we published his first review, of the comedy “My Dog Skip”: “a relaxed, modest evocation of the mythology of small-town mid-20th-century American childhood, with its lazy summers, its front porches and picket fences, and its fat-tired, chromed-plated bicycles.” Four years later, he was named co-chief film critic, alongside Manohla Dargis. In many ways this is a natural progression. Jackson over a review of Marvel’s The Avengers garnered substantial media coverage ( “Tony was a literature concentrator at Harvard, graduating magna cum laude in 1987, and is a graduate-school dropout in American literature (Johns Hopkins: thank you, next!). Now, after more than 2,220 movie reviews and nearly 1,300 other essays, articles and appraisals, Tony comes full circle. A Times spokesperson said that the outlet will be hiring another film critic. “In many ways this is a natural progression,” they added in the note. That was true for Scott as well, whose 2012 dustup with Samuel L. He started his journalism career as an assistant to Robert Silvers at The New York Review of Books and was soon contributing reviews there, as well as to Slate and, of course, to Newsday.”