![]() ![]() ![]() If (('gtm=off') const isAppRedirect = ('appRedirect') Ĭonst isAndroid = /Android/i.test(erAgent) Ĭonst isIphone = /iPhone|iPad|iPod/i. Karen Cushman's other books include Catherine, Called Birdy and The Midwife's Apprentice. Dispelling the idea that only men went there to seek their fortune, Cushman focuses on the women and families who created homes and towns from a harsh landscape. Newbery Award-winning author Karen Cushman paints a vivid picture of life in the gold fields. The Ballad of Lucy Whipple is her firsthand account of her struggles in a rough and tumble land. ![]() With each day, the homesick Lucy is more and more determined to take life into her own hands and return to New England. Karen Cushman was born on Octoand grew up in a working-class family in Chicago, but never put much thought into becoming a writer. There are no books, no school-nothing but dust and drunken miners. Reaching California, the Whipples set up a crude boardinghouse, and Lucy is put to work washing, cleaning, and baking pies in the rough mining town of Lucky Diggins. Moving is the last thing the outspoken twelve-year-old, Lucy, wants to do. In the summer of 1849, Lucy Whipple's mother packs up her household and her two young children, and leaves their home in Massachusetts for the gold fields of California. ![]()
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![]() The rest, as they say, is history – and an interesting, unconventional history it is. Knight stores the shoes in his parents' basement and sells them out of the boot of his Valiant. A good athlete at university, Knight goes into partnership with his former track coach, Bill Bowerman, each putting up $500. Aged 24, Knight heads to Japan, where he cold-calls shoe manufacturer Onitsuka and does his first deal, buying 12 pairs of runners for $50. The story of an MBA graduate with a crazy idea of importing running shoes from Japan reads like a parable. His rollicking story on the history of Nike, from its creation in 1962 until it went public in 1980, is a cracking read.Īccording to Forbes magazine, Knight, a native of Oregon in the US, is worth about $US25.1 billion ($35 billion), having created "the most valuable sports brand in the world". That makes the Nike founder a shoe dog extraordinaire. In this memoir Phil Knight tells us that shoe dogs are people who devote themselves to footwear with an all-consuming mania. ![]() ![]() ![]() Over nine chapters, Smith, a biologist and executive director of Environmental Defence, and Lourie, an environmental consultant, examine how the very chemicals that relieve us of bad smells, unsightly stains, sticky foods, invasive weeds and flammability - not to mention brittle toys - threaten our own and our children's health. Slow Death by Rubber Duck: How the Toxic Chemistry of Everyday Life Affects Our Health, written by Rick Smith and Bruce Lourie. ![]() And it's these invisible additives that leave the toy box stewing in a distinctly modern dilemma: A growing body of evidence links the chemicals to "de-masculinizing" effects in infant boys, according to ![]() That vinyl plaything owes its pliability to chemicals called phthalates. Plunge your hands into a well-stocked toy box and no doubt your fingers will alight upon an example of modern chemistry's ingenuity: the soft, rubbery toy that bounces back after being squeezed, pummelled or chewed on. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() I knew he was French, that he lived a long time ago, that he’d written essays (one or two of which I’d read in anthologies) and that the English word ‘essay’ comes from his use of the French word ‘essai,’ a nominative form of the verb ‘essayer,’ meaning ‘to try.’ I also knew that he must have written a lot of essays because every time I sell his book to someone I notice that it is very, very thick.īut now I know much more, not only about Montaigne, who lived from 1533 to 1592, but also about the history of France during his lifetime, about the tradition of philosophy and particularly philosophical skepticism, stretching back to the ancient and forward to the post-post-moderns, and about the influence Montaigne had on his contemporaries and continues to have on writers and thinkers today. A week ago I decided to write something about every book that I finish in June, and so far–not surprisingly–I’ve only written a few half-finished but already-too-long pieces on several books, starting with one that I finished toward the end of May: Sarah Bakewell’s How To Live – or – A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer.īefore reading How to Live, I didn’t know much about Michel de Montaigne. ![]() |