![]() ![]() The president also made admissions that played right into the premier’s hands. ![]() Kennedy spent a lot of time defending aspects of the pre-World War II status quo, like British imperialism, that he didn’t actually want to defend. This got him stuck in time-wasting discussions about Marxism, where he was totally out of his league. Kennedy ignored warnings from his advisors not to do things like, say, debate communist ideology with a 61-year-old Soviet. “Compared to him, Eisenhower is a man of intelligence and vision.” “This man is very inexperienced, even immature,” Khrushchev told his interpreter. ![]() “He had no real idea how tough it was going to be… He went in there unprepared and Khrushchev walked all over him.” Yet despite Kennedy’s desire to be taken seriously, “he really didn’t listen closely to his own advisors,” Reeves says. ![]()
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![]() ![]() Throughout the 1980s, the British were captivated by the doomed marriage in 1981 of 33-year-old Prince Charles and 20-year-old Lady Diana, step-granddaughter of “Queen of Romance” Barbara Cartland. This was also the shoulder-pads decade of career feminism and the UK’s first woman Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. ![]() Aware of dismissive or hostile attitudes to the genre, Marxist, Freudian and feminist psychoanalytic critics debated issues around mass readership, cultural representations of desire and fantasy, and the conservative or transgressive nature of popular fiction. In the 1980s, feminist academics (including myself) became intrigued by romance reading, partly because-paradoxically-the rise of the women’s movement in the 1970s was matched by significant growth in sales of romantic fiction. ![]() ![]() ![]() Kling is a wonderful novel about loss, pain, and recovery. Shadows don’t haunt his eyes and eat away at him in the night.īut the ranch and Jake can’t save me from the darkness inside, or the knowledge of what I’ve done. He’s gorgeous, cheerful, healthy and sane. The one bright spot in this mess is his new-and only-ranch hand, Jake. The place is struggling, and ALS is destroying my dad. The staff is gone, and there aren’t any visitors. But she doesn’t know my secrets…or what I did.Įverything has changed at the ranch since I was there last. With the rash of suicides at my school, I’ve been shipped off to my dad’s Wyoming ranch for “my own safety.” My mom worries I’ll be next-another depressed teenager whose blood will end up on the train tracks. Unlucky number seven.ĭead teenager number seven. ![]() Summary from Goodreads: They think I’ll be number seven. ![]() ![]() ![]() One intriguing possibility for young Richard to have survived is presented. Ms Gregory manages to create the atmosphere of mistrust and fear that has always been associated with the reign of Henry VII as so many were looking to return the house of York to the throne either through remaining family members (Warwicks) or the rumored return of the sons of Edward IV, long thought to have disappeared from their imprisonment in the Tower of London. Let’s just say they weren’t the best of friends and leave it at that. This novel assumes that Elizabeth and Richard were lovers and that she was in deep mourning when forced to marry Henry for the good of her family and the good of the country. ![]() He grew up in exile, ruled by a domineering mother who felt that her son was the God ordained King of England and she would do anything to see him on the throne. Henry VII was not secure on his throne and felt that having a York connection would help him with the people but nothing could help him in the personality department. Gregory’s Cousins’ War series continues with this tale of Elizabeth of York, the young woman who married Henry Tudor after Richard III was killed at the battle of Bosworth. ![]() ![]() ![]() Indeed, if we had any framework, it was a bad one that drew a false distinction between manmade and natural disasters. It struck me even before COVID-19 that we didn’t have a good framework for thinking about disaster. With that said, disasters are the great punctuation marks in history. I have never wanted to be writing about just one of those topics. My interest in history is always that interface between the economic and the geopolitical. Is this subject matter new territory for you? Ferguson also compares the public health responses and implications of the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020–21 with those of the recent past resulting from the H1N1 virus (“Spanish Flu”) of 1918–19 and the H2N2 strain (“Asian Flu”) of 1957–58.ĭoom is a book focused primarily on disasters and how societies respond to them. In this respect, he zooms in on the COVID-19 pandemic and explains why some governments, such as those in Taiwan, South Korea, and Israel, effectively mitigated “excess mortality” caused by the initial wave of the virus while others failed. He addresses central themes of the book, including why all major disasters of history are at least somewhat political in nature. ![]() In this interview, Milbank Senior Fellow Niall Ferguson discusses his newly released best seller, Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe (Penguin Press, 2021). ![]() |