#bookwarms

[lefterisfilippou]

Καλημέρα . Φωτογραφία I Heard It Through The Grapevine by David Dubnitskiy. #filippoucafeclassique #lefterisfilippou #jazz #art #cofee#musiclovers #poetry #literature #bookwarms (στην τοποθεσία Filippou cafe classique) https://www.instagram.com/p/Cdu4A__KJHr/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[lefterisfilippou]

Καλημέρα . The great Italian revolutionary photographer, Tina Modotti and Frida Kahlo.. . . #filippoucafeclassique #lefterisfilippou #jazz #art #cofee #cofeelovers #musiclovers #poetry #literature #bookwarms #drinks (στην τοποθεσία Filippou cafe classique) https://www.instagram.com/p/CZoa0sFK9BV/?utm_medium=tumblr

[lefterisfilippou]

Καλημέρα . . . #filippoucafeclassique #lefterisfilippou #jazz #art #coffee #coffeelovers #musiclovers #poetry #literature #bookwarms #drinks (στην τοποθεσία Filippou cafe classique) https://www.instagram.com/p/CXIttoAKsUm/?utm_medium=tumblr

[lefterisfilippou]

Καλημέρα . . . #filippoucafeclassique #lefterisfilippou #jazz #art #coffee #coffeelovers #musiclovers #poetry #literature #bookwarms #drinks (στην τοποθεσία Filippou cafe classique) https://www.instagram.com/p/CWu3sjpqhpY/?utm_medium=tumblr

[laysamina]

Ne güzeldir tanıdık yüzlerle, kokularla karşılaşmak. Ne güzeldir o ciltlere dokunmak, eski dostlara rastlamak... #haydarpaşasahaffestivali #kitaplariyikivar #cumartesihalleri #booksaddict #bookwarms #saturdaymood (Haydarpaşa railway station)

[rhapsodicstanza]

Book Review: Promethea by M.M. Abougabal

Book Review: Promethea by M.M. Abougabal #Books #Fiction #Bookreview #Novel #Mystery #Thriller #Suspense

Promethea, by Mahmoud M. Abougabal.

Published as an eBook on Kindle on 8th of April 2014.

129 pages, 19 chapters.

Promethea by M.M. Abougabal

Prometheaby Mahmoud M. Abougabal is a piece of art in the world of fiction literature, shrewdly blending together historical facts with such an ingenious cliff- hanging fiction, that would surely leave you at the edge of your seat holding your breath with…

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[rhapsodicstanza]

Men We Reaped: A Memoir of the African American Youth

  “We saw the lightning and that was the guns; and then we heard the thunder and that was the big guns; and then we heard the rain falling and that was the blood falling; and when we came to get in the crops, it was dead men that we reaped.”

—Harriet Tubman

  This is how Jesmyn Ward chose to start her memoirs, with a quote that inspired the title of her book "Men We Reaped"; it is then, easy to predict that this is a story loaded with blood, death, and the endless struggles that come with being a black male living in the American South.

The book generally talks about modern day exertion of the African American youth, but Jesmyn Ward takes us back to her ancestors to prove that all current strives are relevant to the history of slavery in America.

Five young mean who are dear and close to Ward die of what might seem as different and various causes during a time-span of 5 years, however, by the end of the book, Ward realizes  that the real reason for all of these deaths is one; nothing more than  the hopelessness that comes with the poverty and racism that comes in parallel with being an African American in the US.

As I was reading this book, there were various moments where I got too emotional. Jesmyn Ward perfected her mission of connecting the reader to the on going hardships of Black American youth by personalizing it and giving names to the subjects of the predicament.

The language Ward used in this book is deliciously poetic, with a rich and deep texture, leaving you continuously craving more while being transfixed by the details and mesmerized by the fervors of her story.

Jesmyn Ward narrates her story of the grief of losing in an asynchronous order, starting from the death of their friend by overdose on cocaine in 2004 and ending with the loss of her own brother, leaving her with the deepest scar. I can't tell if choosing that order of events added to the book or not, but after finishing the book, I realized that this order got me confused. 

By the end of book, the reader will definitely come to the same conclusion as Jesmyn did.

“By the numbers, by all the official records, here at the confluence of history, of racism, of poverty, and economic power, this is what our lives are worth: nothing.”

In short, the best description of the book would be as Gary Younge described it in his review published in the Guardian: "The Men We Reaped is an eloquent account of a psychological, sociological and political condition all too often dismissed as an enduring pathology"

Synopsis

"In five years, Jesmyn Ward lost five young men in her life—to drugs, accidents, suicide, and the bad luck that can follow people who live in poverty, particularly black men. Dealing with these losses, one after another, made Jesmyn ask the question: Why? And as she began to write about the experience of living through all the dying, she realized the truth—and it took her breath away. Her brother and her friends all died because of who they were and where they were from, because they lived with a history of racism and economic struggle that fostered drug addiction and the dissolution of family and relationships. Jesmyn says the answer was so obvious she felt stupid for not seeing it. But it nagged at her until she knew she had to write about her community, to write their stories and her own."

  Author's Biography

Jesmyn Ward is a former Stegner fellow at Stanford and Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi. Her novels, Where the Line Bleeds and Salvage the Bones, are both set on the Mississippi coast where she grew up. Bloomsbury will publish her memoir about an epidemic of deaths of young black men in her community. She is an Assistant Professor at the University of South Alabama.

Jesmyn Ward is the author of Where the Line Bleeds, Salvage the Bones, and Men We Reaped. She is a former Stegner Fellow (Stanford University) and Grisham Writer in Residence at the University of Mississippi. She is an associate professor of Creative Writing at Tulane University.

  Her work has appeared in BOMB, A Public Space and The Oxford American.

[rhapsodicstanza]

The Forty Rules of Love; a book by Elif Shafak, is without a doubt my new bible (along with The Little Prince). It is the type of book that you need to return to every once in a while, to inhale the fresh air of love, spirituality and inspiration within its pages. The title of the book was a discouragement for me; I refused to read a novel with the word “love” in its title fearing that it would be just another tacky, repeated love story. Now I am thankful for the friends who insisted that I must read it. This spiritual passionate novel is about Ella, who is reading a manuscript for a novel that she is sent to appraise, about the 13th-century wandering Sufi Dervish, Shams of Tabriz, and his heartening relationship with Mawlana Jalal Uddin Rumi, the advocate of love and poetry of the Sufi way. Ella, a seemingly happy content wife and mother of 3 starts falling in love with more than just the book she is reading. The story of how Shams transformed and altered with nothing but divine love the life and ways of Rumi, inspired Ella to change her life intensely, and so it will do to you. While flipping the pages of this book you will find yourself joyfully and peacefully immersed in the story of Shams and Rumi, relishing the details and the history, and you will without a doubt start looking within your soul for all the answers you are now desperately looking for. The writing style of Elif Shafak in this exceptional book is captivating, genuine and unique; changing narrators between chapters gives you a broader perspective of the events, as you see them through their eyes. You feel yourself getting closer to each character, understanding them in a better way. Additionally, her outstanding attention to details, even in naming chapters all starting with the letter B due to its significance as she mentioned in the beginning of the book, takes this book to its best-seller rank. Everything about this book is pure perfection. I cannot recall enjoying a fictional book as much as I did with this one in a long time. If there is, anything that I would have wanted Elif to do differently is for her to write more. I feel that there is still more to be told about the other characters; however, some do believe that less is more, although my appetite for this book disagrees. The Forty Rules of Love; is merely a book with forty lessons of life that will set you free. *Elif Shafak was born in Strasbourg, France, in 1971. She is an award-winning novelist and the most widely read woman writer in Turkey