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I picked up this CD because of the album cover—I was intrigued because one of the band members was shown playing the hurdy gurdy. As it turns out, there is some great hurdy gurdy playing, but there is much more: wonderful vocal harmonies, great fiddling, Québécois foot percussion, and always infectious melodies and driving rhythms. A great album.
Tagged: Folk music
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A time bending tale of love trying to stretch to its limits. This science fiction film has characters who win you with their believability and their commitment never to give up on love.
Tagged: Feature film, Science fiction
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In 1925, given only a year to live by his doctor, Henry Stuart leaves his home and grown sons in Idaho to move to the woods on the eastern shore of Mobile Bay, Alabama, where he builds a round house and lives for more than two decades, while visitors make a pilgrimage to visit him on the property he names after Leo Tolstoy. Very quirky, yet lovable character.
Tagged: Fiction
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Emerson is considered to be a man of mythic proportions. His influence on his era was incalculable and extends forward into our own. What made a man who was unremarkable and uninspired into a legend who started a philosophy (Transcendentalism) and spurred others into action on large causes (women’s suffrage, anti-slavery, etc…)? Gougeon explores these tantalizing questions.
Tagged: Biography, Non-fiction
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A practical and funny memoir of an ex-suburbanite’s adventures creating a sustainable lifestyle in New Mexico, living “off the grid” with dairy goats, monsoons, and biofuels.
Tagged: Memoir, Non-fiction
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The first collection of Richard Thompson’s wonderful daily comic strip. Cul de Sac has been compared to Peanuts and Calvin and Hobbes, and yet manages to hold its own. Quirky, funny, animated, and totally addictive.
Tagged: Humor
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In an alternate history where the US created a ‘Pale of Settlement’ for Jews after World War II in a desolate corner of Alaska, Yiddish is spoken, ultra-Orthodox gangsters control the islands and a lonely detective tries to solve the murder of a neighbor he barely knew. No ordinary crime novel, Chabon’s language is extraordinarily rich and the setting imaginative and evocative.
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A brief but hilarious introduction to Western philosophy as told through jokes. Learn while you laugh.
Tagged: Humor, Non-fiction, Philosophy
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A close look into the intriguing Amish practice of “turning loose” their youth at 16, and its results. Included is the author’s perspective on this society within a society and what that could mean to us.
Tagged: Non-fiction, Sociology
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The author traces the Big Bang through the rise of civilization, documenting his work with a host of the world’s most advanced scientists and mathematicians to explain why things are the way they are. The author provides witty, interesting and, most importantly, understandable commentary on the many subjects the book addresses.
Tagged: History, Non-fiction, Science
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Armstrong is a well-known biographer and author on religious and cultural subjects. This memoir is her most personal to date and helps us to understand her interest in the subjects she so skillfully covers, as a person with one foot in the world of the secular and the other in the sacred. She does not skirt around the difficult questions but shows rare candor.
Tagged: Memoir, Non-fiction
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A humorous look at our thoughts and perceptions around happiness. Psychologist Daniel Gilbert explains why our predictions of what will make us happy are often wrong. He also examines how our memories of happy times may be distorted. This is not a self-help book, but Gilbert does help us become more realistic in our search for happiness.
Tagged: Non-fiction, Psychology