Irain Chen Chen itibaren Kukhar Gaon, Uttarakhand 246148, Hindistan
I was kind of disappointed in this story. I've enjoyed her other books but this one wasn't up to par. I definitely prefer Ella Enchanted.
This is a very thorough and very opinionated history of how the Washington DC area built its metro system. It's mostly about the political work that got the Metro built: crafting legislation in Congress, cobbling together federal and local funding, and getting DC, Maryland, and Virginia to compromise. The book talks about the incredible number of obstacles as well as the personalities and motivations of the people who overcame the obstacles. There's some discussion of engineering and architectural decisions too, but it's definitely not the focus. As a native of the DC area who never read much local history, I loved learning more about what made our trains run. But as an advocate of transit and density, I didn't find very much that translates directly to other places. A large part of Metro's success depends on special treatment as the transit system of the nation's capital. Being able to draw on federal funds solved a lot of financial problems, although it certainly created a lot of new problems too. My main discomfort with the book is the way it defends the amount of time it took to build the Green Line to some of DC's poorer neighborhoods and the way it glosses over the impact of gentrification. The author does address these issues though, and talks at length about NIMBYism and the effects of community meetings. He describes some rounds of approval that were meant to include diverse voices but ended up delaying the project by so many years that the interest costs were substantial.
Unlike the other 2 that i've read (Kyrian and Talon). It was a different kind of tvist and a forbidden, breaking-the-lives-rules relationship between Wulf and Cassandra. It was enough heart-breaking that I was filled with joy when they managed to find away to break the curses at the end because of Acheron. Always glad for happy endings, which we will expect from Sherrilyn Kenyon's Dark-Hunter Novels. (atleast in those three I've read so far)
This book is the classic that all Wendell Berry readers should read first. It goes through his ecological ethic and his belief that morality and ecology are inseparable; that our disconnection from the earth and our disconnection from each other are part of the same problem. This quote from his essay Think Little is a perfect introduction to his philosophies. See [http://www.msu.edu/~kikbradl/little.html] ------------------------ Most of us, for example, not only do not know how to produce the best food in the best way - we don't know how to produce any kind in any way. Our model citizen is a sophisticate who before puberty understands how to produce a baby, but who at the age of thirty will not know how to produce a potato. And for this condition we have elaborate rationalizations, instructing us that dependence for everything on somebody else is efficient and economical and a scientific miracle. I say, instead, that it is madness, mass produced. A man who understands the weather only in terms of golf is participating in a chronic public insanity that either he or his descendants will be bound to realize as suffering. I believe that the death of the world is breeding in such minds much more certainly and much faster than in any political capital or atomic arsenal. ------------------------ Wendell Berry has long been an inspiration to me, the kind of person I think about when facing highly symbolic questions that are of little import. What would Wendell Berry think about my job/clothes/car/haircut, I wonder? Alas, in almost all cases I end up feeling like I've let the poor chap down. He is my hero and I love him.
One of the best books ever written. Every time I re-read the book I find something new.
As an AP English teacher, I'd heard colleagues snub this book pretty often, complaining that the writing was bad, the story was bad, etc. With that, and a huge TBR pile, anyway, I put off reading it for years. My mistake. Sure, it's written for a younger audience, but I found the writing to be very good and the story was engaging and lays the groundwork for what I assume will be the more complex plot elements to come.