Hitherto, in descriptively treating of the Sperm Whale, I have chiefly dwelt upon the marvels of his outer aspect; or separately and in detail upon some few interior structural features. But to a large and thorough sweeping comprehension of him, it behooves me now to unbutton him still further, and untagging the points of his hose, unbuckling his garters, and casting loose the hooks and the eyes of the joints of his innermost bones, set him before you in his ultimatum; that is to say, […]
Checking Tags for Multiple Authors
Assuming the blubber to be the skin of the whale; then, when this skin, as in the case of a very large Sperm Whale, will yield the bulk of one hundred barrels of oil; and, when it is considered that, in quantity, or rather weight, that oil, in its expressed state, is only three fourths, and not the entire substance of the coat; some idea may hence be had of the enormousness of that animated mass, a mere part of whose mere integument yields such […]
Beasts of no nation
This book broke my heart. I literally had to stop reading at certain parts for days in order not to wallow in despair. Written by a former child soldier in Sierra Leone, in an attempt to reproduce the cadences and rhythm of his native tongue Mende, he here tells the story of the village Imperi which was destroyed in a surprise rebel attack and was sequentially abandoned. Slowly, after years of neglect the villagers return, first the elders, who take it upon themselves to clear […]
The Radiance of Tomorrow…aaaannnd Cannonball!
It is the end, or maybe the beginning, of another story. Every story begins and ends with a woman, a mother, a grandmother, a girl, a child. Every story is a birth… To round out my ten African books of the year, I picked up this novel by Ishmael Beah, known for his previous non-fiction, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of A Boy Soldier. After reading this, I definitely want to pick that one up, too. This is fiction, but it’s obviously based on truth. […]