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| new york times summer academy review: The Gifted School Bruce Holsinger, 2020-06-30 INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER Wise and addictive... The Gifted School is the juiciest novel I've read in ages... a suspenseful, laugh-out-loud page-turner and an incisive inspection of privilege, race and class. –J. Courtney Sullivan, author of Friends and Strangers, in The New York Times Smart and juicy, a compulsively readable novel about a previously happy group of friends and parents that is nearly destroyed by their own competitiveness when an exclusive school for gifted children opens in the community, from the author of The Displacements This deliciously sharp novel captures the relentless ambitions and fears that animate parents and their children in modern America, exploring the conflicts between achievement and potential, talent and privilege. Set in the fictional town of Crystal, Colorado, The Gifted School is a keenly entertaining novel that observes the drama within a community of friends and parents as good intentions and high ambitions collide in a pile-up with long-held secrets and lies. Seen through the lens of four families who've been a part of one another's lives since their kids were born over a decade ago, the story reveals not only the lengths that some adults are willing to go to get ahead, but the effect on the group's children, sibling relationships, marriages, and careers, as simmering resentments come to a boil and long-buried, explosive secrets surface and detonate. It's a humorous, keenly observed, timely take on ambitious parents, willful kids, and the pursuit of prestige, no matter the cost. |
| new york times summer academy review: Excellent Sheep William Deresiewicz, 2014-08-19 Deresiewicz takes a sharp look at the high-pressure conveyor belt that begins with demands for perfect grades and culminates in the skewed applications received by college admissions committees. Students are losing the ability to think independently. College is supposed to be a time for self-discovery-- but the system is broken, and he offers solutions on how to fix it. |
| new york times summer academy review: How The Other Half Learns Robert Pondiscio, 2020-06-02 An inside look at America's most controversial charter schools, and the moral and political questions around public education and school choice. The promise of public education is excellence for all. But that promise has seldom been kept for low-income children of color in America. In How the Other Half Learns, teacher and education journalist Robert Pondiscio focuses on Success Academy, the network of controversial charter schools in New York City founded by Eva Moskowitz, who has created something unprecedented in American education: a way for large numbers of engaged and ambitious low-income families of color to get an education for their children that equals and even exceeds what wealthy families take for granted. Her results are astonishing, her methods unorthodox. Decades of well-intended efforts to improve our schools and close the achievement gap have set equity and excellence at war with each other: If you are wealthy, with the means to pay private school tuition or move to an affluent community, you can get your child into an excellent school. But if you are poor and black or brown, you have to settle for equity and a lecture--about fairness. About the need to be patient. And about how school choice for you only damages public schools for everyone else. Thousands of parents have chosen Success Academy, and thousands more sit on waiting lists to get in. But Moskowitz herself admits Success Academy is not for everyone, and this raises uncomfortable questions we'd rather not ask, let alone answer: What if the price of giving a first-rate education to children least likely to receive it means acknowledging that you can't do it for everyone? What if some problems are just too hard for schools alone to solve? |
| new york times summer academy review: Avid Reader Robert Gottlieb, 2017-09-12 Winner of the Anne M. Sperber Prize A spirited and revealing memoir by the most celebrated editor of his time After editing The Columbia Review, staging plays at Cambridge, and a stint in the greeting-card department of Macy's, Robert Gottlieb stumbled into a job at Simon and Schuster. By the time he left to run Alfred A. Knopf a dozen years later, he was the editor in chief, having discovered and edited Catch-22 and The American Way of Death, among other bestsellers. At Knopf, Gottlieb edited an astonishing list of authors, including Toni Morrison, John Cheever, Doris Lessing, John le Carré, Michael Crichton, Lauren Bacall, Katharine Graham, Robert Caro, Nora Ephron, and Bill Clinton--not to mention Bruno Bettelheim and Miss Piggy. In Avid Reader, Gottlieb writes with wit and candor about succeeding William Shawn as the editor of The New Yorker, and the challenges and satisfactions of running America's preeminent magazine. Sixty years after joining Simon and Schuster, Gottlieb is still at it--editing, anthologizing, and, to his surprise, writing. But this account of a life founded upon reading is about more than the arc of a singular career--one that also includes a lifelong involvement with the world of dance. It's about transcendent friendships and collaborations, elective affinities and family, psychoanalysis and Bakelite purses, the alchemical relationship between writer and editor, the glory days of publishing, and--always--the sheer exhilaration of work. |
| new york times summer academy review: The Bridge to Brilliance Nadia Lopez, Rebecca Paley, 2016-08-30 Be inspired by the magnetic young principal who “stands on the front line of the fight to educate America's children. (Brandon Stanton, author of Humans of New York ) and the book that Essence calls Essential reading. In 2010, Nadia Lopez started her middle-grade public school, Mott Hall Bridges Academy, in one of America’s poorest communities, in a record heat wave—and crime wave. Everything was an uphill battle—to get the school approved, to recruit faculty and students, to solve a million new problems every day, from violent crime to vanishing supplies—but Lopez was determined to break the downward spiral that had trapped too many inner-city children. The lessons came fast: unengaged teachers, wayward students, and the educational system itself, rarely in tune with the already disadvantaged and underprepared. Things were at a low ebb for everyone when one of her students told a photographer that his principal, “Ms. Lopez,” was the person who most influenced his life. The posting on Brandon Stanton’s Humans of New York site was the pebble that started a lucky landslide for Lopez and her team. Lopez found herself in the national spotlight and headed for a meeting with President Obama, as well as the beneficiary of a million-dollar campaign for the school, to fund her next dream: a field trip for her students to visit another school—Harvard. The Bridge to Brilliance is a book filled with common sense and caring that will carry her message to communities and classrooms far from Brooklyn. As she says, modestly, “There are hundreds of Ms. Lopezes around this country doing good work for kids. This honors all of them.” |
| new york times summer academy review: In the Wild Light Jeff Zentner, 2021-08-10 A poignant coming-of-age novel about two best friends whose friendship is tested when they get the opportunity to leave their impoverished small town for an elite prep school. For fans of Looking for Alaska. Life in a small Appalachian town is not easy. Cash lost his mother to an opioid addiction and his Papaw is dying slowly from emphysema. Dodging drug dealers and watching out for his best friend, Delaney, is second nature. He's been spending his summer mowing lawns while she works at Dairy Queen. But when Delaney manages to secure both of them full rides to an elite prep school in Connecticut, Cash will have to grapple with his need to protect and love Delaney, and his love for the grandparents who saved him and the town he has to leave behind. Jeff Zentner's new novel is a beautiful examination of grief, found family, and young love. |
| new york times summer academy review: The Raven Boys (The Raven Cycle, Book 1) Maggie Stiefvater, 2012-09-18 An all-new series from the masterful, #1 New York Times bestselling author Maggie Stiefvater! Every year, Blue Sargent stands next to her clairvoyant mother as the soon-to-be dead walk past. Blue never sees them--until this year, when a boy emerges from the dark and speaks to her.His name is Gansey, a rich student at Aglionby, the local private school. Blue has a policy of staying away from Aglionby boys. Known as Raven Boys, they can only mean trouble.But Blue is drawn to Gansey, in a way she can't entirely explain. He is on a quest that has encompassed three other Raven Boys: Adam, the scholarship student who resents the privilege around him; Ronan, the fierce soul whose emotions range from anger to despair; and Noah, the taciturn watcher who notices many things but says very little.For as long as she can remember, Blue has been warned that she will cause her true love to die. She doesn't believe in true love, and never thought this would be a problem. But as her life becomes caught up in the strange and sinister world of the Raven Boys, she's not so sure anymore. |
| new york times summer academy review: These Precious Days Ann Patchett, 2021-11-23 The beloved New York Times bestselling author reflects on home, family, friendships and writing in this deeply personal collection of essays. The elegance of Patchett’s prose is seductive and inviting: with Patchett as a guide, readers will really get to grips with the power of struggles, failures, and triumphs alike. —Publisher's Weekly “Any story that starts will also end.” As a writer, Ann Patchett knows what the outcome of her fiction will be. Life, however, often takes turns we do not see coming. Patchett ponders this truth in these wise essays that afford a fresh and intimate look into her mind and heart. At the center of These Precious Days is the title essay, a surprising and moving meditation on an unexpected friendship that explores “what it means to be seen, to find someone with whom you can be your best and most complete self.” When Patchett chose an early galley of actor and producer Tom Hanks’ short story collection to read one night before bed, she had no idea that this single choice would be life changing. It would introduce her to a remarkable woman—Tom’s brilliant assistant Sooki—with whom she would form a profound bond that held monumental consequences for them both. A literary alchemist, Patchett plumbs the depths of her experiences to create gold: engaging and moving pieces that are both self-portrait and landscape, each vibrant with emotion and rich in insight. Turning her writer’s eye on her own experiences, she transforms the private into the universal, providing us all a way to look at our own worlds anew, and reminds how fleeting and enigmatic life can be. From the enchantments of Kate DiCamillo’s children’s books (author of The Beatryce Prophecy) to youthful memories of Paris; the cherished life gifts given by her three fathers to the unexpected influence of Charles Schultz’s Snoopy; the expansive vision of Eudora Welty to the importance of knitting, Patchett connects life and art as she illuminates what matters most. Infused with the author’s grace, wit, and warmth, the pieces in These Precious Days resonate deep in the soul, leaving an indelible mark—and demonstrate why Ann Patchett is one of the most celebrated writers of our time. |
| new york times summer academy review: Troubled Kenneth R. Rosen, 2021-01-12 An award-winning journalist's breathtaking mosaic of the tough-love industry and the young adults it inevitably fails. In the middle of the night, they are vanished. Each year thousands of young adults deemed out of control--suffering from depression, addiction, anxiety, and rage--are carted off against their will to remote wilderness programs and treatment facilities across the country. Desperate parents of these troubled teens fear it's their only option. The private, largely unregulated behavioral boot camps break their children down, a damnation the children suffer forever. Acclaimed journalist Kenneth R. Rosen knows firsthand the brutal emotional, physical, and sexual abuse carried out at these programs. He lived it. In Troubled, Rosen unspools the stories of four graduates on their own scarred journeys through the programs into adulthood. Based on three years of reporting and more than one hundred interviews with other clients, their parents, psychologists, and health-care professionals, Troubled combines harrowing storytelling with investigative journalism to expose the disturbing truth about the massively profitable, sometimes fatal, grossly unchecked redirection industry. Not without hope, Troubled ultimately delivers an emotional, crucial tapestry of coming of age, neglect, exploitation, trauma, and fraught redemption. |
| new york times summer academy review: Savage Theories Pola Oloixarac, 2017 A student at the Buenos Aires School of Philosophy attempts to put her life (academically and romantically) in the service of a professor whose nearly forgotten theories of violence she plans to popularise and radicalise - against his wishes. Meanwhile, a young couple - a documentary filmmaker and a blogger - engage in a series of cerebral and sexual misadventures. In a novel crammed with philosophy, group sex, revolutionary politics and a fighting fish named Yorick, Oloixarac leads her characters and the reader through dazzling and digressive intellectual byways. |
| new york times summer academy review: Fear City Kim Phillips-Fein, 2017-04-18 PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST An epic, riveting history of New York City on the edge of disaster—and an anatomy of the austerity politics that continue to shape the world today When the news broke in 1975 that New York City was on the brink of fiscal collapse, few believed it was possible. How could the country’s largest metropolis fail? How could the capital of the financial world go bankrupt? Yet the city was indeed billions of dollars in the red, with no way to pay back its debts. Bankers and politicians alike seized upon the situation as evidence that social liberalism, which New York famously exemplified, was unworkable. The city had to slash services, freeze wages, and fire thousands of workers, they insisted, or financial apocalypse would ensue. In this vivid account, historian Kim Phillips-Fein tells the remarkable story of the crisis that engulfed the city. With unions and ordinary citizens refusing to accept retrenchment, the budget crunch became a struggle over the soul of New York, pitting fundamentally opposing visions of the city against each other. Drawing on never-before-used archival sources and interviews with key players in the crisis, Fear City shows how the brush with bankruptcy permanently transformed New York—and reshaped ideas about government across America. At once a sweeping history of some of the most tumultuous times in New York's past, a gripping narrative of last-minute machinations and backroom deals, and an origin story of the politics of austerity, Fear City is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the resurgent fiscal conservatism of today. |
| new york times summer academy review: Academy Street Mary Costello, 2015-04-07 A vibrant, intimate, hypnotic portrait of one woman's life, from an important new writer Tess Lohan is the kind of woman that we meet and fail to notice every day. A single mother. A nurse. A quiet woman, who nonetheless feels things acutely—a woman with tumultuous emotions and few people to share them with. Academy Street is Mary Costello's luminous portrait of a whole life. It follows Tess from her girlhood in western Ireland through her relocation to America and her life there, concluding with a moving reencounter with her Irish family after forty years of exile. The novel has a hypnotic pull and a steadily mounting emotional force. It speaks of disappointments but also of great joy. It shows how the signal events of the last half century affect the course of a life lived in New York City. Anne Enright has said that Costello's first collection of stories, The China Factory, has the feel of work that refused to be abandoned; of stories that were written for the sake of getting something important right . . . Her writing has the kind of urgency that the great problems demand (The Guardian). Academy Street is driven by this same urgency. In sentence after sentence it captures the rhythm and intensity of inner life. |
| new york times summer academy review: My Education Susan Choi, 2013-07-03 An intimately charged novel of desire and disaster from the National Book Award-winning author of Trust Exercise and A Person of Interest Regina Gottlieb had been warned about Professor Nicholas Brodeur long before arriving as a graduate student at his prestigious university high on a pastoral hill. He’s said to lie in the dark in his office while undergraduate women read couplets to him. He’s condemned on the walls of the women’s restroom, and enjoys films by Roman Polanski. But no one has warned Regina about his exceptional physical beauty—or his charismatic, volatile wife. My Education is the story of Regina’s mistakes, which only begin in the bedroom, and end—if they do—fifteen years in the future and thousands of miles away. By turns erotic and completely catastrophic, Regina’s misadventures demonstrate what can happen when the chasm between desire and duty is too wide to bridge. |
| new york times summer academy review: Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It Maile Meloy, 2009-07-09 One of the New York Times 10 Best Books of 2009-- now adapted into the feature film Certain Women, starring Kristen Stewart-- award-winning writer Maile Meloy's short stories explore complex lives in an austere landscape with the clear-sightedness that first endeared her to readers. Don't miss her new novel, Do Not Become Alarmed. Meloy's first return to short stories since her critically acclaimed debut, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It is an extraordinary new work from one of the most promising writers of the last decade. Eleven unforgettable new stories demonstrate the emotional power and the clean, assured style that have earned Meloy praise from critics and devotion from readers. Propelled by a terrific instinct for storytelling, and concerned with the convolutions of modern love and the importance of place, this collection is about the battlefields-and fields of victory-that exist in seemingly harmless spaces, in kitchens and living rooms and cars. Set mostly in the American West, the stories feature small-town lawyers, ranchers, doctors, parents, and children, and explore the moral quandaries of love, family, and friendship. A ranch hand falls for a recent law school graduate who appears unexpectedly- and reluctantly-in his remote Montana town. A young father opens his door to find his dead grandmother standing on the front step. Two women weigh love and betrayal during an early snow. Throughout the book, Meloy examines the tensions between having and wanting, as her characters try to keep hold of opposing forces in their lives: innocence and experience, risk and stability, fidelity and desire. Knowing, sly, and bittersweet, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It confirms Maile Meloy's singular literary talent. Her lean, controlled prose, full of insight and unexpected poignancy, is the perfect complement to her powerfully moving storytelling. |
| new york times summer academy review: Max and the Midknights Lincoln Peirce, 2024-01-02 INCLUDES A NEW MAX SHORT STORY AND ACTIVITY! A NEW YORK TIMES bestseller from the creator of Big Nate, now an Emmy-nominated animated TV show on Paramount+ and Nickelodeon. No one expected Max to be a knight, but when Uncle Budrick is captured, someone has to save the day! Join the hilarious band of misfit adventurers in book 1 of the Max and the Midknights trilogy. Max is epic fun! --JEFF KINNEY, New York Times bestselling author of the DIARY OF A WIMPY KID series Max wants to be a knight! Too bad that dream is about as likely as finding a friendly dragon. But when Max's uncle Budrick is kidnapped by the cruel King Gastley, Max has to act...and fast! Joined by a band of brave adventurers--the Midknights--Max sets out on a thrilling quest: to save Uncle Budrick and restore the realm of Byjovia to its former high spirits! Magic and (mis)adventures abound in this hilarious illustrated novel from the New York Times bestselling creator of the Big Nate series, Lincoln Peirce. Fantastic! I loved it! --DAV PILKEY, New York Times bestselling author of the DOG MAN series |
| new york times summer academy review: American Prison Shane Bauer, 2019-06-11 An enraging, necessary look at the private prison system, and a convincing clarion call for prison reform.” —NPR.org New York Times Book Review 10 Best Books of 2018 * One of President Barack Obama’s favorite books of 2018 * Winner of the 2019 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize * Winner of the Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism * Winner of the 2019 RFK Book and Journalism Award * A New York Times Notable Book A ground-breaking and brave inside reckoning with the nexus of prison and profit in America: in one Louisiana prison and over the course of our country's history. In 2014, Shane Bauer was hired for $9 an hour to work as an entry-level prison guard at a private prison in Winnfield, Louisiana. An award-winning investigative journalist, he used his real name; there was no meaningful background check. Four months later, his employment came to an abrupt end. But he had seen enough, and in short order he wrote an exposé about his experiences that won a National Magazine Award and became the most-read feature in the history of the magazine Mother Jones. Still, there was much more that he needed to say. In American Prison, Bauer weaves a much deeper reckoning with his experiences together with a thoroughly researched history of for-profit prisons in America from their origins in the decades before the Civil War. For, as he soon realized, we can't understand the cruelty of our current system and its place in the larger story of mass incarceration without understanding where it came from. Private prisons became entrenched in the South as part of a systemic effort to keep the African-American labor force in place in the aftermath of slavery, and the echoes of these shameful origins are with us still. The private prison system is deliberately unaccountable to public scrutiny. Private prisons are not incentivized to tend to the health of their inmates, or to feed them well, or to attract and retain a highly-trained prison staff. Though Bauer befriends some of his colleagues and sympathizes with their plight, the chronic dysfunction of their lives only adds to the prison's sense of chaos. To his horror, Bauer finds himself becoming crueler and more aggressive the longer he works in the prison, and he is far from alone. A blistering indictment of the private prison system, and the powerful forces that drive it, American Prison is a necessary human document about the true face of justice in America. |
| new york times summer academy review: Lobby Hero Kenneth Lonergan, 2002 THE STORY: When Jeff, a luckless young security guard, is drawn into a local murder investigation, loyalties are strained to the breaking point. As Jeff's tightly wound supervisor is called to bear witness against his troubled brother, and an attra |
| new york times summer academy review: Nietzsche and the Burbs Lars Iyer, 2019-12-03 In a work of blistering dark hilarity, a young Nietzsche experiences life in a metal band & the tribulations of finals season in a modern secondary school When a new student transfers in from a posh private school, he falls in with a group of like-minded suburban stoners, artists, and outcasts—too smart and creative for their own good. His classmates nickname their new friend Nietzsche (for his braininess and bleak outlook on life), and decide he must be the front man of their metal band, now christened Nietzsche and the Burbs. With the abyss of graduation—not to mention their first gig—looming ahead, the group ramps up their experimentations with sex, drugs, and...nihilist philosophy. Are they as doomed as their intellectual heroes? And why does the end of youth feel like such a universal tragedy? And as they ponder life's biggies, this sly, elegant, and often laugh-out-loud funny story of would-be rebels becomes something special: an absorbing and stirring reminder of a particular, exciting yet bittersweet moment in life...and a reminder that all adolescents are philosophers, and all philosophers are adolescents at heart. |
| new york times summer academy review: The Torture Letters Laurence Ralph, 2020-01-15 Torture is an open secret in Chicago. Nobody in power wants to acknowledge this grim reality, but everyone knows it happens—and that the torturers are the police. Three to five new claims are submitted to the Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission of Illinois each week. Four hundred cases are currently pending investigation. Between 1972 and 1991, at least 125 black suspects were tortured by Chicago police officers working under former Police Commander Jon Burge. As the more recent revelations from the Homan Square “black site” show, that brutal period is far from a historical anomaly. For more than fifty years, police officers who took an oath to protect and serve have instead beaten, electrocuted, suffocated, and raped hundreds—perhaps thousands—of Chicago residents. In The Torture Letters, Laurence Ralph chronicles the history of torture in Chicago, the burgeoning activist movement against police violence, and the American public’s complicity in perpetuating torture at home and abroad. Engaging with a long tradition of epistolary meditations on racism in the United States, from James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, Ralph offers in this book a collection of open letters written to protesters, victims, students, and others. Through these moving, questing, enraged letters, Ralph bears witness to police violence that began in Burge’s Area Two and follows the city’s networks of torture to the global War on Terror. From Vietnam to Geneva to Guantanamo Bay—Ralph’s story extends as far as the legacy of American imperialism. Combining insights from fourteen years of research on torture with testimonies of victims of police violence, retired officers, lawyers, and protesters, this is a powerful indictment of police violence and a fierce challenge to all Americans to demand an end to the systems that support it. With compassion and careful skill, Ralph uncovers the tangled connections among law enforcement, the political machine, and the courts in Chicago, amplifying the voices of torture victims who are still with us—and lending a voice to those long deceased. |
| new york times summer academy review: Lunch Lady and the Summer Camp Shakedown Jarrett J. Krosoczka, 2012-02-29 From the author of National Book Award finalist Hey, Kiddo. Lunch Lady and the Breakfast Bunch kids are looking forward to a relaxing summer vacation with no funny business. What evils could befall them at summer camp? Of course, there is the legendary swamp monster. Stories say he haunts the camp at night. But that's just a legend. Or is it? Once again, Dee, Hector, and Terrence must help Lunch Lady prevail against a secret enemy! |
| new york times summer academy review: Abigail Magda Szabó, 2020-01-09 A teenage girl's difficult journey towards adulthood in a time of war. Szabo is skilful at creating moments of heart-rending tension, often through exquisite, evocative prose . . . the novel has a devastating power Spectator Of all her novels, Magda Szabó's Abigail is the most widely read in her native Hungary. Now, fifty years after it was written, it appears for the first time in English, joining Katalin Street and The Door in a loose trilogy about the impact of war on those who have to live with the consequences. It is late 1943 and Hitler, exasperated by the slowness of his Hungarian ally to act on the Jewish question and alarmed by the weakness on his southern flank, is preparing to occupy the country. Foreseeing this, and concerned for his daughter's safety, a Budapest father decides to send her to a boarding school away from the capital. A lively, sophisticated, somewhat spoiled teenager, she is not impressed by the reasons she is given, and when the school turns out to be a fiercely Puritanical one in a provincial city a long way from home, she rebels outright. Her superior attitude offends her new classmates and things quickly turn sour. It is the start of a long and bitter learning curve that will open her eyes to her arrogant blindness to other people's true motives and feelings. Exposed for the first time to the realities of life for those less privileged than herself, and increasingly confronted by evidence of the more sinister purposes of the war, she learns lessons about the nature of loyalty, courage, sacrifice and love. Translated from the Hungarian by Len Rix |
| new york times summer academy review: Commonwealth Ann Patchett, 2016-09-08 'Dazzling ... life-affirming and compulsively readable' Sunday Times 'Patchett blends wisdom and humanity jointly with the icy forensic gaze of someone not afraid to expose the frailties of human behaviour ... Read it' Jojo Moyes 'An outstanding novel ... a master of her art' Observer It is 1964: Bert Cousins shows up at Franny Keating's christening party uninvited and notices a heart stoppingly beautiful woman. When he kisses Beverly Keating, his host's wife, he sets in motion the joining of two families, whose shared fate will be defined on a day seven years later. In 1988, Franny Keating, now twenty-four, is working as a cocktail waitress in Chicago. When she meets the famous author Leon Posen one night at the bar, and tells him about her family, she unwittingly relinquishes control over their story... |
| new york times summer academy review: A Window Opens Elisabeth Egan, 2015-08-25 What happens when having it all proves too much to handle? In this “fresh, funny take on the age-old struggle to have it all” (People) a wife and mother of three leaps at the chance to fulfill her professional destiny—only to learn every opportunity comes at a price. “A winning, heartfelt debut” (Good Housekeeping), A Window Opens introduces Alice Pearse, a compulsively honest, longing-to-have-it-all, sandwich generation heroine for our social-media-obsessed, lean in (or opt out) age. Like her fictional forebears Kate Reddy and Bridget Jones, Alice plays many roles (which she never refers to as “wearing many hats” and wishes you wouldn’t, either). She is a (mostly) happily married mother of three, an attentive daughter, an ambivalent dog-owner, a part-time editor, a loyal neighbor and a Zen commuter. She is not: a cook, a craftswoman, a decorator, an active PTA member, a natural caretaker, or the breadwinner. But when her husband makes a radical career change, Alice is ready to lean in—and she knows exactly how lucky she is to land a job at Scroll, a hip young start-up which promises to be the future of reading. The Holy Grail of working mothers―an intellectually satisfying job and a happy personal life―seems suddenly within reach. Despite the disapproval of her best friend, who owns the local bookstore, Alice is proud of her new “balancing act” (which is more like a three-ring circus) until her dad gets sick, her marriage flounders, her babysitter gets fed up, her kids start to grow up, and her work takes an unexpected turn. In the midst of her second coming of age, Alice realizes the question is not whether it’s possible to have it all but, what does she really want the most? “Smart and entertaining…with refreshing straight-forwardness and humor” (The Washington Post), “fans of I Don’t Know How She Does It and Where’d You Go, Bernadette will adore A Window Opens” (Booklist, starred review). |
| new york times summer academy review: Summerlong Dean Bakopoulos, 2015-06-16 The author of Please Don’t Come Back from the Moon and My American Unhappiness delivers his breakout novel: a deft and hilarious exploration of the simmering tensions beneath the surface of a contented marriage which explode in the bedrooms and backyards of a small town over the course of a long, hot summer. In the sweltering heat of one summer in a small Midwestern town, Claire and Don Lowry discover that married life isn’t quite as they’d predicted. One night Don, a father of three, leaves his house for an evening stroll, only to wake up the next morning stoned, and sleeping in a hammock next to a young woman he barely knows. His wife, Claire, leaves the house on this same night to go on a midnight run—only to find herself bumming cigarettes and beer outside the all-night convenience store. As the summer lingers and the temperature rises, this quotidian town’s adults grow wilder and more reckless while their children grow increasingly confused. Claire, Don, and their neighbors and friends find themselves on an existential odyssey, exploring the most puzzling quandaries of marriage and maturity. When does a fantasy become infidelity? When does compromise become resentment? When does routine become boring monotony? Can Claire and Don survive everything that befalls them in this one summer, forgive their mistakes, and begin again? Award-winning writer Dean Bakopoulos delivers a brutally honest and incredibly funny novel about the strange and tenuous ties that bind us, and the strange and unlikely places we find connection. Full of mirth, melancholy, and redemption, Summerlong explores what happens when life goes awry. |
| new york times summer academy review: A Widow for One Year John Irving, 2012-05-08 “One night when she was four and sleeping in the bottom bunk of her bunk bed, Ruth Cole woke to the sound of lovemaking—it was coming from her parents’ bedroom.” This sentence opens John Irving’s ninth novel, A Widow for One Year, a story of a family marked by tragedy. Ruth Cole is a complex, often self-contradictory character—a “difficult” woman. By no means is she conventionally “nice,” but she will never be forgotten. Ruth’s story is told in three parts, each focusing on a critical time in her life. When we first meet her—on Long Island, in the summer of 1958—Ruth is only four. The second window into Ruth’s life opens on the fall of 1990, when she is an unmarried woman whose personal life is not nearly as successful as her literary career. She distrusts her judgment in men, for good reason. A Widow for One Year closes in the autumn of 1995, when Ruth Cole is a forty-one-year-old widow and mother. She’s about to fall in love for the first time. Richly comic, as well as deeply disturbing, A Widow for One Year is a multilayered love story of astonishing emotional force. Both ribald and erotic, it is also a brilliant novel about the passage of time and the relentlessness of grief. |
| new york times summer academy review: Shape Jordan Ellenberg, 2021-05-25 An instant New York Times Bestseller! “Unreasonably entertaining . . . reveals how geometric thinking can allow for everything from fairer American elections to better pandemic planning.” —The New York Times From the New York Times-bestselling author of How Not to Be Wrong—himself a world-class geometer—a far-ranging exploration of the power of geometry, which turns out to help us think better about practically everything. How should a democracy choose its representatives? How can you stop a pandemic from sweeping the world? How do computers learn to play Go, and why is learning Go so much easier for them than learning to read a sentence? Can ancient Greek proportions predict the stock market? (Sorry, no.) What should your kids learn in school if they really want to learn to think? All these are questions about geometry. For real. If you're like most people, geometry is a sterile and dimly remembered exercise you gladly left behind in the dust of ninth grade, along with your braces and active romantic interest in pop singers. If you recall any of it, it's plodding through a series of miniscule steps only to prove some fact about triangles that was obvious to you in the first place. That's not geometry. Okay, it is geometry, but only a tiny part, which has as much to do with geometry in all its flush modern richness as conjugating a verb has to do with a great novel. Shape reveals the geometry underneath some of the most important scientific, political, and philosophical problems we face. Geometry asks: Where are things? Which things are near each other? How can you get from one thing to another thing? Those are important questions. The word geometrycomes from the Greek for measuring the world. If anything, that's an undersell. Geometry doesn't just measure the world—it explains it. Shape shows us how. |
| new york times summer academy review: Old In Art School Nell Painter, 2019-08-27 A New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award A Princeton professor-turned-artist recounts her late-in-life career change in this “feisty and delightfully irreverent memoir” about art and coming-of-age in your 60s (Boston Globe). “A glorious achievement . . . a cup of courage for everyone who wants to change their lives.” —Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage Following her retirement from Princeton University, celebrated historian Dr. Nell Irvin Painter surprised everyone in her life by returning to school—in her sixties—to earn a BFA and MFA in painting. In Old in Art School, she travels from her beloved Newark to the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design; finds meaning in the artists she loves, even as she comes to understand how they may be undervalued; and struggles with the unstable balance between the pursuit of art and the inevitable, sometimes painful demands of a life fully lived. How are women and artists seen and judged by their age, looks, and race? What does it mean when someone says, “You will never be an artist”? Who defines what an artist is and all that goes with such an identity, and how are these ideas tied to our shared conceptions of beauty, value, and difference? Bringing to bear incisive insights from two careers, Painter weaves a frank, funny, and often surprising tale of her move from academia to art in this “glorious achievement—bighearted and critical, insightful and entertaining. This book is a cup of courage for everyone who wants to change their lives” (Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage). |
| new york times summer academy review: White Tears Hari Kunzru, 2017-03-14 White Tears is a ghost story, a terrifying murder mystery, a timely meditation on race, and a love letter to all the forgotten geniuses of American music and Delta Mississippi Blues. An incisive meditation on race, privilege and music. Spanning decades, this novel brings alive the history of old-time blues and America’s racial conscience.—Rabeea Saleem, Chicago Review of Books Two twenty-something New Yorkers. Seth is awkward and shy. Carter is the glamorous heir to one of America's great fortunes. They have one thing in common: an obsession with music. Seth is desperate to reach for the future. Carter is slipping back into the past. When Seth accidentally records an unknown singer in a park, Carter sends it out over the Internet, claiming it's a long lost 1920s blues recording by a musician called Charlie Shaw. When an old collector contacts them to say that their fake record and their fake bluesman are actually real, the two young white men, accompanied by Carter's troubled sister Leonie, spiral down into the heart of the nation's darkness, encountering a suppressed history of greed, envy, revenge, and exploitation. |
| new york times summer academy review: Ground Zero Alan Gratz, 2021-02-02 The instant #1 New York Times bestseller. In time for the twentieth anniversary of 9/11, master storyteller Alan Gratz (Refugee) delivers a pulse-pounding and unforgettable take on history and hope, revenge and fear -- and the stunning links between the past and present. September 11, 2001, New York City: Brandon is visiting his dad at work, on the 107th floor of the World Trade Center. Out of nowhere, an airplane slams into the tower, creating a fiery nightmare of terror and confusion. And Brandon is in the middle of it all. Can he survive -- and escape? September 11, 2019, Afghanistan: Reshmina has grown up in the shadow of war, but she dreams of peace and progress. When a battle erupts in her village, Reshmina stumbles upon a wounded American soldier named Taz. Should she help Taz -- and put herself and her family in mortal danger? Two kids. One devastating day. Nothing will ever be the same. |
| new york times summer academy review: Elliot Allagash Simon Rich, 2016-05-22 Fellow high school losers, use your video game money to buy this book! Simon Rich will make you relive the dread, the hilarity, and the insanity of those formative years like no one else. Open at your own peril!—Gary Shteyngart There are things money can’t buy: integrity, honor, discipline. Unfortunately for Seymour Herson, he’s got a more pressing matter at hand: surviving eighth grade. He’s dead last in just about everything at Glendale, the Manhattan private school his parents are working so hard to keep him in. His grades are so low a C warrants a celebration. His athletic skill is limited to how much chocolate milk he can drink in one sitting. You’d think someone with such a natural knack for underachieving could at least have a pretty good social life, but Seymour’s more familiar with the lockers he’s been stuffed in than the kids they belong to. To top it off, being bullied constantly lands him in detention along with his tormentors. His newest? Elliot Allagash, heir to the Allagash fortune, descendant of the inventor of paper, particularly talented at pushing kids down the stairs. But Elliot’s interest seems to go beyond run-of-the-mill bullying. Bored with being forced to study alongside commoners, Elliot sees a golden opportunity to bring chaos to Glendale’s entire social order: Seymour. Set on transforming Seymour into the most popular and successful kid in school, Elliot takes matters into his own evil little hands. With his vast amount of money and questionable connections, making Elliot a superstar should be a piece of cake. If a few lives get ruined in the process, that’s just a happy little coincidence. If only Seymour wasn’t so dead set on being nice. “Reading this hilarious morality tale about the cost of that popularity makes me happy that I went through my high school years as an outsider. And it makes me even happier that Simon Rich did.”—Seth Meyers I found Simon Rich's first novel, about an evil teenage billionaire, to be suspenseful and hilarious. I am so glad I don't have to lie in this blurb like I usually do.—Judd Apatow |
| new york times summer academy review: Sweet Land of Liberty Thomas J. Sugrue, 2009-10-13 Sweet Land of Liberty is Thomas J. Sugrue’s epic account of the abiding quest for racial equality in states from Illinois to New York, and of how the intense northern struggle differed from and was inspired by the fight down South. Sugrue’s panoramic view sweeps from the 1920s to the present–more than eighty of the most decisive years in American history. He uncovers the forgotten stories of battles to open up lunch counters, beaches, and movie theaters in the North; the untold history of struggles against Jim Crow schools in northern towns; the dramatic story of racial conflict in northern cities and suburbs; and the long and tangled histories of integration and black power. Filled with unforgettable characters and riveting incidents, and making use of information and accounts both public and private, such as the writings of obscure African American journalists and the records of civil rights and black power groups, Sweet Land of Liberty creates an indelible history. |
| new york times summer academy review: The Glass Castle Jeannette Walls, 2007-01-02 A triumphant tale of a young woman and her difficult childhood, The Glass Castle is a remarkable memoir of resilience, redemption, and a revelatory look into a family at once deeply dysfunctional and wonderfully vibrant. Jeannette Walls was the second of four children raised by anti-institutional parents in a household of extremes. |
| new york times summer academy review: She's Come Undone Wally Lamb, 2012-12-11 Meet Dolores Price. She's thirteen, wise-mouthed but wounded. Beached like a whale in front of her bedroom TV, she spends the next few years nourishing herself with the chocolate, crisps and Pepsi her anxious mother supplies. When she finally rolls into young womanhood at 257 pounds, Dolores is no stronger and life is no kinder. But this time she's determined to rise to the occasion and give herself one more chance before really going belly up. In his extraordinary coming-of-age odyssey, Wally Lamb invites us to hitch an incredible ride on a journey of love, pain, and renewal with the most heartbreakingly comical heroine to come along in years. At once a fragile girl and a hard-edged cynic, so tough to love yet so inimitably loveable, Dolores is as poignantly real as our own imperfections. |
| new york times summer academy review: Pregnant Girl Nicole Lynn Lewis, 2021-05-04 A NPR BOOKS WE LOVE 2021 Selection “[T]his book is so much more than a memoir . . . . Her prose has the power to undo deep-set cultural biases about poverty and parenthood.”—New York Times Book Review An activist calls for better support of young families so they can thrive and reflects on her experiences as a Black mother and college student fighting for opportunities for herself and her child. Pregnant Girl presents the possibility of a different future for young mothers—one of success and stability—in the midst of the dismal statistics that dominate the national conversation. Along with her own story as a young Black mother, Nicole Lynn Lewis weaves in those of the men and women she’s worked with to share a new perspective on how poverty, classism, and systemic racism impact teen pregnancy and on how effective programs and equitable policies can help teen parents earn college degrees, have increased opportunity, and create a legacy of educational and career achievements in their families. After Nicole became pregnant during her senior year in high school, she was told that college was no longer a reality—a negative outlook often unfairly presented to teen mothers. Nicole left home and experienced periods of homelessness, hunger, and poverty. Despite these obstacles, she enrolled at the College of William & Mary and brought her 3-month-old daughter along. Through her experiences fighting for resources to put herself through college, she discovered her true calling and founded her organization, Generation Hope, to provide support for teen parents and their children so they can thrive in college and kindergarten—driving a 2-generation solution to poverty. Pregnant Girl will inspire young parents faced with similar choices and obstacles that they too can pursue their goals with the right support. |
| new york times summer academy review: Trading in the Zone Mark Douglas, 2001-01-01 Douglas uncovers the underlying reasons for lack of consistency and helps traders overcome the ingrained mental habits that cost them money. He takes on the myths of the market and exposes them one by one teaching traders to look beyond random outcomes, to understand the true realities of risk, and to be comfortable with the probabilities of market movement that governs all market speculation. |
| new york times summer academy review: The Honeys Ryan La Sala, 2022-08-18 When Mars Matthias loses his sister Caroline under horrific circumstances, it propels him to learn all he can about the once-inseparable sibling who'd grown tragically distant. Mars's gender-fluidity means he's often excluded from the traditions - and expectations - of his politically-connected family, including attendance at the prestigious Aspen Conservancy Summer Academy where his sister devoted so much of her time. But with his grief still fresh, he insists on attending in her place. The setting may be pristine and sun-drenched, but there's an undercurrent of tension buzzing ominously. Mars seeks out his sister's old friends: a group of girls dubbed the Honeys, named for the beehives they maintain behind their cabin. They are beautiful and terrifying - and Mars is certain they're connected to Caroline's death. But the longer he stays at Aspen, the more the sweet mountain breezes give way to hints of decay. Mars's memories begin to falter, bleached beneath the relentless summer sun. Something is hunting him in broad daylight, toying with his mind. If Mars can't find it soon, it will eat him alive... Heathers meets Midsommer |
| new york times summer academy review: Henderson the Rain King Saul Bellow, 1996-06 A middle-age American millionaire goes to Africa in search of a more meaningful life and receives the adoration of an African tribe that believes he has a gift for rainmaking |
| new york times summer academy review: Fire with Fire Destiny Soria, 2021-06-08 Two sisters. Divided they burn. Two sisters raised to be fierce dragon slayers end up on opposing sides of an impending war when one forms an unlikely, magical bond with a dragon, in this exciting, fresh contemporary young adult fantasy. Dani and Eden Rivera were both born to kill dragons, but the sisters couldn't be more different. For Dani, dragon slaying takes a back seat to normal high school life, while Eden prioritizes training above everything else. Yet they both agree on one thing: it's kill or be killed where dragons are concerned. Until Dani comes face-to-face with one and forges a rare and magical bond. As she gets to know Nox, she realizes that everything she thought she knew about dragons is wrong. And, with Dani lost to the dragons, Eden turns to the mysterious and alluring sorcerers to help save her sister. Now on opposite sides of the conflict, the sisters will do whatever it takes to save the other. But the two are playing with magic that is more dangerous than they know, and there is another, more powerful enemy waiting for them both in the shadows. PRAISE FOR FIRE WITH FIRE 'Fire With Fire is the dragon slaying urban fantasy sister story I didn't know I needed and now can't stop thinking about!' Mackenzi Lee, New York Times bestselling author of The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue 'Soria's fantasy balances entertainment and substance' Booklist 'Soria skillfully delves into the complexities of sibling dynamics' Publishers Weekly 'This exciting, inclusive fantasy with a dash of romance brings lots of sassy dragon snark to the table . . . An absorbing and high-spirited read' Kirkus |
| new york times summer academy review: The Three Questions graf Leo Tolstoy, 1983 A king visits a hermit to gain answers to three important questions. |
| new york times summer academy review: Alone Time Stephanie Rosenbloom, 2018-06-14 'Full of heart.' Michael Harris, author of Solitude Being alone isn't something to endure - it's something to relish. ________ The average adult spends about a third of his or her waking time alone. Yet research suggests we aren't very good at using, never mind enjoying, alone time. Rising to the challenge, travel writer Stephanie Rosenbloom explores the joys and benefits of being alone in four mouth-watering journeys to the cities of Paris, Istanbul, Florence and New York, in four seasons. This is a book about the pleasures and benefits of savouring the moment, examining things closely, using all your senses to take in your surroundings, whether travelling to faraway places or walking the streets of your own city. Through on-the-ground observations and anecdotes, and drawing on the thinking of artists, writers and innovators who have cherished solitude, Alone Time illuminates the psychological arguments for alone time and lays bare the magic of going solo. |
git - Create a new branch - Stack Overflow
Nov 9, 2022 · Create new branch git checkout -b At this point I am slightly confused about where you want to commit your current branch. I am assuming that you are …
Creating a new column based on if-elif-else condition
Lets say above one is your original dataframe and you want to add a new column 'old' If age greater than 50 then we consider as older=yes otherwise False. step 1: Get the indexes of rows …
Move the most recent commit (s) to a new branch with Git
Oct 27, 2009 · git checkout -b newbranch # switch to a new branch git branch -f master HEAD~3 # make master point to some older commit Old version - before I learned about git branch -f. git …
Difference between 'throw' and 'throw new Exception ()'
throw new Exception(ex.Message); is even worse. It creates a brand new Exception instance, losing the original stack trace of the exception, as well as its type. (eg, IOException). In addition, …
Replace new lines with a comma delimiter with Notepad++?
Apr 1, 2013 · This answer repeats the accepted answer and this answer refers to an antique version of Notepad++, version 7.4.x is now available. Welcome to Stack Overflow but please …
python - Create new column based on values from other columns / …
As long as the necessary logic to compute the new value can be written as a function of other values in the same row, we can use the .apply method of the DataFrame to get the desired …
New lines inside paragraph in README.md - Stack Overflow
When editing an issue and clicking Preview the following markdown source: a b c shows every letter on a new line. However, it seems to me that pushing similar markdown source structure …
How to add a new project to Github using VS Code
Here are the commands you can use to add a new project to GitHub using VS Code: git init git add . git commit -m "Initial commit" git remote add origin git push -u origin master …
Creating new file through Windows Powershell - Stack Overflow
Aug 1, 2017 · Create a touch command to act as New-File like this: Set-Alias -Name touch -Value New-Item This new alias will allow you to create new files like so: touch filename.txt This would …
Power BI, IF statement with multiple OR and AND statements
Aug 22, 2019 · Stack Overflow for Teams Where developers & technologists share private knowledge with coworkers; Advertising Reach devs & technologists worldwide about your …
git - Create a new branch - Stack Overflow
Nov 9, 2022 · Create new branch git checkout -b At this point I am slightly confused about where you want to commit your current branch. I am assuming that you are …
Creating a new column based on if-elif-else condition
Lets say above one is your original dataframe and you want to add a new column 'old' If age greater than 50 then we consider as older=yes otherwise False. step 1: Get the indexes of …
Move the most recent commit (s) to a new branch with Git
Oct 27, 2009 · git checkout -b newbranch # switch to a new branch git branch -f master HEAD~3 # make master point to some older commit Old version - before I learned about git branch -f. git …
Difference between 'throw' and 'throw new Exception ()'
throw new Exception(ex.Message); is even worse. It creates a brand new Exception instance, losing the original stack trace of the exception, as well as its type. (eg, IOException). In …
Replace new lines with a comma delimiter with Notepad++?
Apr 1, 2013 · This answer repeats the accepted answer and this answer refers to an antique version of Notepad++, version 7.4.x is now available. Welcome to Stack Overflow but please …
python - Create new column based on values from other columns …
As long as the necessary logic to compute the new value can be written as a function of other values in the same row, we can use the .apply method of the DataFrame to get the desired …
New lines inside paragraph in README.md - Stack Overflow
When editing an issue and clicking Preview the following markdown source: a b c shows every letter on a new line. However, it seems to me that pushing similar markdown source structure …
How to add a new project to Github using VS Code
Here are the commands you can use to add a new project to GitHub using VS Code: git init git add . git commit -m "Initial commit" git remote add origin git push -u origin …
Creating new file through Windows Powershell - Stack Overflow
Aug 1, 2017 · Create a touch command to act as New-File like this: Set-Alias -Name touch -Value New-Item This new alias will allow you to create new files like so: touch filename.txt This would …
Power BI, IF statement with multiple OR and AND statements
Aug 22, 2019 · Stack Overflow for Teams Where developers & technologists share private knowledge with coworkers; Advertising Reach devs & technologists worldwide about your …
