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Review: Le Medecin de Java, par Alexandre Dumas, père, aka L'ile de Feu

(English translation is below…) Incroyablement bon ! Entre Dracula par Bram Stoker, Romeo et Juliette, et Zorba – mais c’est meilleur que tous les trois !! Et le Tome II était encore mieux que le premier. Des belles sacrifices par des mères, des belles vengeances, des morts atroces avec beauté, des exemples de la justice et de l’injustice extrêmes et clair mais qui donnent rire au même temps…

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#Alexandre Dumas #bookreviews #Dumas #french #livres

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Greek Study Notes, Page 16, Impersonal Verbs, and Colors?

     This is a surprise, looking back on these notes, that we seem to have gotten to colors only on page 95?  Generally language classes start off by learning colors.  So these impersonal verbs seem very much like the same set of verbs into which I translated these notes in Spanish: debo should have been ‘tengo que’ to be more precise.   Not it is becoming very clear why learning new languages…

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#Greek #languagelearning #PublicDomainInfrastructure

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A Language For Adding Bus Stops, er, Words?

    (rescheduled from June 1st…)   Esperanto uses suffixes and a few prefixes to build many words in easy to understand ways that stick in the memory.  The advantages of agglutinative languages, like Esperanto and Turkish, are that they are highly logical.  Esperanto has no exceptions, meaning it requires less memorization than other languages. Given the interest that some of my regular readers…

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#Esperanto #languagelearning #ProjectDoBetter #PublicDomainInfrastructure

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Review: Chevy Chase: A Home Suburb for the Nation's Capital, by Lampl & Williams

    This excellent book, part of my reading as I created the singing walking tours of DC which went into my book Stayed on Freedom’s Call, StayedOnFreedomsCallGoodReads was coauthored by Elizabeth Jo Lampl and Kimberly Prothro Williams, adn published by Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission, the Montgomery county historical preservation commission, and the MD Historical Trust…

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#bookreviews #books #dc #DCtours #PublicDomainInfrastructure

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Repost of Updated Review of E. George's Write Away

Review of Write Away: One Novelist’s Approach to Fiction and the Writing Life, by Elizabeth George  

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#bookreviews #writing

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Review: Rules for a Pretty Woman, by Suzette Francis

This book actually surprised the dickens out of me. I thought it would be a silly romance novel that I would skim through in a couple of hours and move on to the next book on my stack, but it turns out not only to be a hard-hitting book with some serious research (and connections to other books, like Secret City: A History of Race Relations in the Nation’s Capital , Stayed on Freedom’s Call:…

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#bookreviews #books #PublicDomainInfrastructure

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Review: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, Hunger Games #0, by Suzanne Collins

      Thank you for the fan art in the Featured Image, above, by ConfusedChameleon.  This book is actually a prequel to the original series, The Hunger Games, #1, set sixty-four years before the first book, in which we meet Katniss in book #1.  We see the hero of this book, or the anti-hero, for most of the story, as the villain from the main series, Snow.   Well before he becomes president,…

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#1 #bookreviews #books #PublicDomainInfrastructure #writing

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Review: Mockingjay, Hunger Games #3, by Suzanne Collins

     First, thank you for this wonderful Fan Art By David Beauchene.      Second, I guess I should summarize:  In the first two books, Katniss finds herself in the Arena as a Tribute to an infernal system designed to keep the twelve districts in line to the Capitol.  Now, she is the face of the revolt against that system.  And she is only a teenager, still.      Now, the review:  I can see,…

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#bookreviews #books #PublicDomainInfrastructure

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Review: Catching Fire, Hunger Games #2

     First, thanks to Fan Artist  AMClaussen, for posting this work of fan art in today’s Featured Image. I have read The Hunger Games books, all except for the new prequel, now, in several languages, but it is still a good read and a great listen.  Particularly in the original, even if I normally try to avoid reading anything in English, as I have a hard enough time keeping up on my other…

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#bookreviews #books #childhood #PublicDomainInfrastructure

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Review: The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins

   I really enjoyed the second reading of this book, The Hunger Games, which is the first in the Hunger Games series, (well, I enjoyed reading it the first time, but it was even better in the original English, the second reading around), and this cool fan art placed in the Public Domain by a kind artist, Cor-Sa, whose original page appears to be gone, now, via Wikimedia Commons.  This is the…

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#bookreviews #books #childabuse #PublicDomainInfrastructure #writing

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Review: Herland, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

This book really took me by surprise, when I read this for Dr. Christy Hammer’s MAT course back in 2002, and have never forgotten it.  As a woman just coming out of the IT world to become a mathematics teacher, I was surprised by the ideas in this book. While clearly not an inclusive utopia, I loved Herland’s ideals of harmonious living. This classic introduced me to both utopian writings and…

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#bookreviews #books #PublicDomainInfrastructure #WomenInTech

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Greek Study Notes, Page 15, and Page Numbers?

   Project Do Better (linked below…) officially tries to stress language learning as another tool for global understanding and empathy building in Phase II, but I have started posting my Greek notes now, so that something may be available to any Serving Adults wishing to use them for that purpose.        I should note that in my notes, (sorry, my phone rotated the image and I could not get it…

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#Greek #languagelearning #ProjectDoBetter #PublicDomainInfrastructure

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Ministry Mondays: El Ministerio del Tiempo (S2e13) "Change of Time" & What If The Spanish Armada Had WON...

Last week we reviewed capitulo 20 , and now in chapter 21, the most excellent of all of the episodes of this excellent series, “Cambio de Tiempo” we go to a time no one ever wanted to see, except the macho men, that is… Plymouth, England,  the coast 1588, where we still hear cannons and screaming men on sinking Spanish Ships. But not for long. The King, enraged at his loss, calls for the current…

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#ElMinisterioDelTiempo

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Review: The Warmth of Other Suns, by Isabel Wilkerson

    This book, which got me from the end of the first page her comment that People of Color, faced with impossible odds down South, did what people have always done in such situations: “They Left.”  Like my maternal grandparents from Georgia, and my maternal great grandfather, from Virginia, and my paternal side, from Maryland.  When I was in elementary school up in New Jersey, near Newark, at…

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#BlackHistory #bookreviews #familyhistory #PublicDomainInfrastructure

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Ministry Mondays: El Ministerio del Tiempo (S2e12) "Until Time Separates You" & Who Is The Person Standing In Front of You?

Last week we reviewed capitulo 19, linked in the main review page below, and now chapter 20, “Hasta que el Tiempo os Separe” takes us to a castle wedding, and a duel. #BodorrioMdT (now it is time to make fun of really expensive, ridiculously over-done weddings…) Opening with a weeping bride being threatened and cajoled who then finds a passage from her 1212 castle to the 2016 mansion version…

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#BodorrioMdT #castellano #ElMinisterioDelTiempo #Spanish

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Review: The Threads Of Time, The Fabric Of History: Profiles Of African American Dressmakers And Designers From 1850 To The Present, by Rosemary E. Reed Miller

      I read this book for the tours I created while I was running my walking DC cooperation tour guiding company, SHIRtours, in DC, in 2012.  The well-known work of Elizabeth Keckley is mentioned first, after a brief biography of how Lincoln’s dress maker came to DC with her son in early 1860, quickly became Mary Todd Lincoln’s dressmaker and confidant before a misunderstanding over Keckley’s…

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#BlackHistory #bookreviews #PublicDomainInfrastructure

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Ministry Mondays: El Ministerio del Tiempo (S2e11) "Time of What is Hidden" & Christopher Who?

This week we, in chapter 19, “Tiempo de lo oculto” takes us to a hidden place, that might soon not be so hidden” The Ministry! 🙂 Can’t even have a nice shave in peace without somebody threatening the reveal the existence of the ministry right, Salvador? So, in the ’90s or so, or maybe the 1980s, the ministry had hired a nutcase to do shows about all kinds of conspiracy theories, and including…

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#castellano #ElMinisterioDelTiempo #languagelearning #Spanish