![]() One being that of the deceased main character as she tried to figure out who killed her, along side other people reading her journal. The Ghosts of Thorwald Place is told from two points of view. Betrayal, anger and nearly every other dark emotion can be found in the various homes of Thorwald Place. The twisted and dark pasts of the various tenants are put on display for the ghostly wanderer as she tries to figure out who killed her, and how she can prove that. The main character’s ghostly adventures display the ghosts housed in the expensive apartment building are far more than just the obvious. ![]() What is that? Well, you will have to read the novel to find out. However, she soon finds that she is not the only ghost in the area, and there may be much worse than the person who ended her life looming around Thorwald Place. ![]() The Ghosts of Thorwald Place is a hauntingly (yes, pun entirely intended) fantastic novel about a woman who is mysteriously killed and forced to haunt the building she was living in. ![]()
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![]() ![]() It is a work of fiction, yet goes to great lengths to prevent the reader from sympathizing with any one major character or side. ![]() What makes Bonfire remarkable, however, is its bizarre devotion to objectivity. ![]() ![]() The book has everything-conniving politicians who demonize McCoy for political gain, an Al Sharpton-esque leader in the black community who brings racial tensions to a fever pitch, and incredible media spin, with journalists who try to convict McCoy in the court of public opinion before he even goes to trial. It follows McCoy's fall from the heights of a self-proclaimed "Master of the Universe" to his new role as a social pariah and public punching-bag, while also detailing the tangential stories of the controversy, from the reporter who uncovers and investigates the car accident to the district attorney's office that prosecutes McCoy. The novel follows Sherman McCoy, a Wall Street trader, who finds himself the center of controversy when he becomes an accomplice to a hit and run that resulted in the hospitalization and ultimate death of a young African American, Henry Lamb, in the process. Three decades down the road and we're still facing the same issues as a nation as we were then. The Bonfire of the Vanities celebrates its 30th anniversary this month, and, despite the time that has passed since it was written, it still holds up. ![]() ![]() ![]() Already you can see what the primary dilemma of such a project is: how to make such an expansive history with so many characters orderly in composition yet alive to the reader. It starts with the pre-Socratic philosophers and ends with today’s academic philosophy. Grayling’s tome is exactly what it says it is: the history of philosophy. A few people will read the book once I can’t imagine anyone will read it twice. If anything, you’d be working in the train’s engine room. If anything, you’re traveling against the river’s current. Even these metaphors don’t really capture the difficulty in reading it. It offers no moment or incentive to stop, meander, or backtrack, the goal being not to enjoy the journey but to reach the end. Or, to change metaphors, the book is a bullet train rather than a car ride. ![]() ![]() Because the water is shallow, your legs would always be bumping up against the debris (a stand-in for academic jargon). Traveling down it, you’d have little to see and little time to see it. Grayling’s The History of Philosophy were a river, it would be shallow with a strong current. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Twelve years later Edmund Gosse spoke of the cycle's “noble dignity,” “stainless harmony,” and “high ethical level of distinguished utterance” (11, 21). Hall Caine called them “essentially feminine in their hyper-refinement, in their intense tremulous spirituality” (310–11), while Eric Robertson wrote that “no woman's heart indeed was ever laid barer to us, but no heart could have laid itself bare more purely” (281). Victorian readers saw nothing shocking or immodest about the sonnets and actually admired them a great deal, particularly because they seemed, oddly enough, to uphold an idealized model of devout and reticent femininity. ![]() The radical nature of the work, however, seems to have been lost on its nineteenth-century audience. Certainly a speaker like the narrator of Barrett Browning's sonnets, loudly proclaiming her right to adopt postures of adoration and unworthiness toward a male love object, had never before disturbed its rarefied spaces. The genre, which had always required its female inhabitants to maintain an aloof and icy silence, was not accustomed to female voices. As the first love sonnet sequence written by a woman in English, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese challenged the conventions of amatory poetry when it was published in 1850. ![]() |