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review: rooftops of tehran

book info: on sale: now copy from: public library pages: 348 review written: 21.12.17 originally published: 2009 edition read: Penguin NAL 2009 title: Rooftops of Tehran author: Mahbod Seraji In a middle-class neighborhood of Iran's sprawling capital city, 17-year-old Pasha Shahed spends the summer of 1973 on his rooftop with his best friend Ahmed, joking around one minute and asking burning questions about life the next. He also hides a secret love for his beautiful neighbor Zari, who has been betrothed since birth to another man. But the bliss of Pasha and Zari's stolen time together is shattered when Pasha unwittingly acts as a beacon for the Shah's secret police. The violent consequences awaken him to the reality of living under a powerful despot, and lead Zari to make a shocking choice... my thoughts: This book was first published in 2009 and I remember adding it to my list around that time but never actually reading it since I preferred checking out library books to ...

The Secret

thanksgiving + black friday

Hello everyone!
  Are you guys as thrilled as I am for Black Friday? For those who are international or don't know what it is:

 Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving where shops open up incredibly early with ridiculous sales to kick off the holiday season. It's a crazy day with great bargains.

 My brother and Dad  always go to Best Buy and other electronics stores where I usually stayed at home. This time, I'm going. I've been working yesterday, today and tomorrow with babysitting. I intend to use said babysitting money to shop at Barnes and Noble (online or in store, not sure yet) and perhaps get some new shoes and clothing as well. But finally I have an excuse to buy books.

 See, my mum discourages me from buying books (novels especially) because she says that if I read it once, and I know the story, then what's the point of buying it? One can tell she's a huge advocate for libraries :)

 SO I hope you all are doing well! I wish you all a happy Thanksgiving. Now, I know Thanksgiving takes on a different connotation nowadays as being thankful for everything you have. But I'd like to share with you the REAL story, and where exactly Squanto came from and so on. Since I was lazy, and forgot the name of the tribe, I just found this website and copied from it:

 The REAL story of Thanksgiving

The story began in 1614 when a band of English explorers sailed home to  England with a ship full of Patuxet Indians bound for slavery. They left behind smallpox which virtually wiped out those who had escaped.  By the time the Pilgrims arrived in Massachusetts Bay they found only one living Patuxet Indian, a man named Squanto who had survived slavery in England and knew their language.  He taught them to grow corn and to fish, and negotiated a peace treaty between the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag Nation. At the end of their first year, the Pilgrims held a great feast honoring Squanto and the Wampanoags.

But as word spread in England about the paradise to be found in the new world, religious zealots called Puritans began arriving by the boat load. Finding no fences around the land, they considered it to be in the public domain. Joined by other British settlers, they seized land, capturing strong young Natives for slaves and killing the rest.  But the Pequot Nation had not agreed to the peace treaty Squanto had negotiated and they fought back. The Pequot War was one of the bloodiest Indian wars ever fought.

In 1637 near present day  Groton, Connecticut, over 700 men, women and children of the Pequot Tribe had gathered for their annual Green Corn Festival which is our Thanksgiving celebration. In the predawn hours the sleeping Indians were surrounded by English and Dutch mercenaries who ordered them to come outside.  Those who came out were shot or clubbed to death while the terrified women and children who huddled inside the longhouse were burned alive. The next day the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony declared "A Day Of Thanksgiving" because 700 unarmed men, women and children had been murdered.

Cheered by their "victory", the brave colonists and their Indian allies attacked village after village. Women and children over 14 were sold into slavery while the rest were murdered.  Boats loaded with a many as 500 slaves regularly left the ports of New England. Bounties were paid for Indian scalps to encourage as many deaths as possible.  

(read more)

THIS MAN IS EVIL
So you see, once again popular myth has hidden true history. If this shocks you, try searching up Colombus. History books portray him to be a hero who discovered America with the famous story where the Spanish cried "Tierra! Tierra" >_< Are you kidding me? The details of what happened aren't as happy and cheerful, but are pretty graphic and gruesome.

On a lighter note, I hope you have a happy Day of Giving Thanks for What You Have Now.

P.S. I thank my AP Human Geography teacher for shining a light on history for me. Now I know to doubt the history I read (because there isn't one definite history, there are always two sides, dozens of different accounts that have different biases and opinions) and to always look up the real facts. The story of Columbus is a myth, that one obscure historian made up and from which all textbooks copied. Columbus makes me sick, urg. ANYWAY! SORRY! HAPPY HOLIDAY!

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review: the elementary particles

book info: on sale: now copy from: public library pages: 263 review written: 23.5.16 originally published: 1998 ("Les particules élémentaires") edition read: Knopf, 2000, translation by Frank Wynne title: The Elementary Particles author: Michel Houellebecq The Elementary Particles part-story part-metaphysical-rants in an interesting narration from two characters, half-brothers borne of a hippie and absentee mother in the 60s: Michel and Bruno. Michel is an asexual scientist who "expresses his disgust with society by engineering one that frees mankind at last from its uncontrollable, destructive urges" and Bruno is a crass brute driven by sexual desires that lusts after his lost youth. This book follows their stories from childhood to their middle age, spinning around the past and present and major and minor characters in an intriguing narrative that had me reading every single word for fear of missing anything crucial. (quote from book summary) When I first began to...

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