The noise was ended now. The smoke drifted like thin, gray wisps of fog above the tortured earth and the shattered fences and the peach trees that had been whittled into toothpicks by the cannon fire. For a moment silence, if not peace, fell upon those few square miles of ground where just a while before men had screamed and torn at one another in the frenzy of old hate and had contended in an ancient striving and then had fallen apart, exhausted.
- From Way Station by Clifford D. Simak
If you had a friend of eclectic tastes who was going to be recuperating at home for a lengthy period and who was a reader, which books would you placing in a Get Well Soon package?
My selections would include:
1. The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Age 13 3/4 by Sue Townsend
2. The Great Railway Bazaar by Paul Theroux
3. Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller
4. Erasure by Percy Everett
4. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
5. Any of Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot mysteries
6. Middle Passage by Charles Johnson
7. Directions to Servants by Jonathan Swift
8. Shogun by James Clavell
9. Station Eleven by Emily St. John
9. City Primeval by Elmore Leonard
10. Master and Commander by Patrick O'Brian
11. Unreliable Memoirs by Clive James
12. The Secret History by Donna Tartt
13. The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
A lawyer who read an early draft of Pilate's Magician predicted that the book would have a particular appeal to lawyers.
So far, he appears to be correct although I certainly sought a wider audience.
Christians? Jews? Roman history buffs?
Teachers should prepare the student for the student's future, not the teacher's past. Most teachers rarely discuss the important topic of the future of their field, and when this is pointed out they usually reply: "No one can know the future." It seems to me the difficulty of knowing the future does not absolve the teacher from seriously trying to help the student to be ready for it when it comes. It is obvious the experience of an individual is not necessarily that of a class of individuals; therefore, any one person's projection into the future is apt to be somewhat personal and will not be universally accepted. This does not justify reverting to impersonal surveys and losing the impact of the personal story.
- From The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn by Richard W. Hamming
Towards the end of November, during a thaw, at nine o'clock one morning, a train on the Warsaw and Petersburg railway was approaching the latter city at full speed. The morning was so damp and misty that it was only with great difficulty that the day succeeded in breaking; and it was impossible to distinguish anything more than a few yards away from the carriage windows.
- From The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
From The Lamp Magazine in 2024: Helen Andrews analyzes the changes in HR.
An excerpt:
"The result has been the feminization of the American workplace, the inevitable effect of giving H.R. ladies veto power over everything that happens there. This feminization has happened even in the most unlikely workplaces. Astrophysics is a predominantly male profession. Yet Dr. Matt Taylor found himself in the middle of an international scandal in 2014 when, during a press conference to announce that his team had become the first to land a spacecraft on a comet, he showed up wearing a rockabilly-style shirt with busty pinup girls on it. The shirt was denounced as disrespectful to women. His tearful forced apology was a conspicuous triumph for H.R. ladies everywhere."
