The Twits by Roald Dahl
The Twits is a humorous children’s book written by Roald Dahl and illustrated by Quentin Blake. It was first published in 1980.
Mr. and Mrs. Twit are two ugly, smelly, nasty, stupid people who spend their lives playing nasty tricks on each other. They also enjoy being cruel to animals, which they do by luring birds to glue-smothered trees so they can be baked into bird pie, read The twits and enjoy a classic tale of revenge of the critters.
Alice’s attention is caught by a strange white rabbit pulling a watch out of his waistcoat. So she follows this time conscious clothed rabbit down the proverbial “rabbit hole” and falls into a new dimension of adventure and awesome but strange lovable characters.
There is the Cheshire Cat which Alice finds in a tree. It constantly grins (quite dashingly!) and disappears and reappears whenever it likes and sometimes just leaves its grin behind. The Cheshire Cat is probably the only character in Wonderland who actually listens to Alice. With his remarks, he teaches Alice the ‘rules’ of Wonderland.
Then there is The Caterpillar is sitting on a mushroom while smoking a hookah, when Alice first meets him. He is rather strict and not very friendly, and corrects Alice’s recitation of a poem, he does help her by advising her to eat from the mushroom if she wants to change her size (WTF?). He is they main reason why a hell of a lot of people think that the story of Alice in Wonderland contains hidden meanings to drug use, or that the author was on drugs when writing the book.
He is just an innocent blue caterpillar sitting on a mushroom advising Alice on the nuances of consuming too many mushrooms to become big (or is it bigger) and he is smoking a hookah which is not necessarily used for drug consumption and actually causes less damage to his lungs than (do caterpillars even have lungs???)
Then there is my favorite The Mad Hatter is one of the members of the Mad Tea Party. He also appears as a witness during the trial and is occasionally is very rude and provokes Alice during the tea party. When he is called upon by the Queen, he is very nervous and frightened. Obviously submissive in presence of authority figures and a demon among peers…
The phrase ‘mad as a hatter’ was common in Carroll’s time. ‘Mad as a hatter probably owes its origin to the fact that hatters actually did go mad, because the mercury they used in their trade.
In case you were wondering about the tag on the Mad Hatter’s hat. It is a price tag, displaying the price ‘ten and six’: 10 shillings and 6 pennies.
The Evil The Queen of Hearts who is one of the playing card characters Alice meets when she is finally able to enter the beautiful garden through the tiny door in the hallway. The Queen of Hearts rules over Wonderland and is a tyrant – violent, authoritative, dominant. She likes to play croquet with live flamingoes and hedgehogs as mallets and balls and constantly orders the beheading of people when something isn’t to her liking, good to be queen!. She is feared by all other Wonderland inhabitants because of her lack of patience and explosive character.
The Queen of Hearts by Disney Carroll wrote the following about the Queen of Hearts: “I pictured to myself the Queen of Hearts as a sort of embodiment of ungovernable passion – a blind and aimless Fury.”
The white rabbit, kind of Alice’s guide through her adventure a little absentminded, nervous though confident about himself
Alice grows and shrinks. She gets caught in houses and below tables because of her size. She finally learns how to control her size with judicially eating her mushrooms. As each new event happens, she describes her experiences as “curiouser and curiouser.”
Alice and her adventures are probably known the world around. Her story has been made into movies, television specials and stage plays. This imaginative tale is timeless. So is the book. The book describes the action and characters, yet still leaves so much room for the imagination to roam. If you’ve never read this children’s book, READ IT. If you read it a long time ago, READ IT AGAIN. If you cannot read watch the movie (apparently its out in 3D! (Whoooohoooo!)
You can’t go wrong with this one. It’s not just for children.
Be prepared to get trapped right from the first page. Barbara is a genius.
The time is 1995, but everybody is linked by their past. Brilliant Australian Caroline can command everyone except her own ghoulish mother, which means that things aren’t easy for Josh and Zoe, her husband and twelve-year-old daughter. Josh has bizarre origins in a South African mining town, but now teaches mime in Bristol. Zoe reads girls’ ballet books and longs for ballet lessons; a thing denied her until, on a school French exchange, she meets a runaway boy in a woodland hut. Meanwhile, on the east coast of Africa, Hattie Thomas, Josh’s first love, has taken to writing girls’ ballet books from the turret of her fabulous house – that’s when she can carve out the space between the forceful presence of Herman and her crosspatch daughter Cat who, after some illicit snooping, is secretly planning a make-or-break essay on mask dancers in Mali. Hattie wakes from a dream of Stravinsky’s Pulcinella and asks herself about the composer, ‘Do his glasses look sexy?’ His glasses are just like Josh’s glasses from two decades earlier. From far and wide, they are all drawn together; drawn to Jack’s place. Or is he Jacques? Or Giacomo? Beautiful, mysterious Jack, the one-time backyard housemaid’s child who, having journeyed via Mozambique and Senegal to Milan, is back exactly where he started – only not for long. In its mix of people from different spheres, the book throws up the complexity, cruelty and richness of the global world while, as a sequence of personal stories, it comes together like a dance; a masquerade in which things are not always what they seem.
From a man who is held dear by millions of micro entrepreneurs giving them wings for a start in a world where naked capitalism does not observe their existence comes his third book titled “Building Social Business – The new kind of Capitalism that serves humanities most pressing needs.”
Muhammad Yunus is the founder of the Grameen Bank a Nobel peace prize winning organization which has been a path breaking funding organization and now is some sort of a pilgrimage for development economists to be emulated across the world.
Here develops his bold new concept that promises to revolutionize the free-enterprise system: social business. Designed to fill the gap between profit-making and human needs, social business applies entrepreneurial thinking to problems like poverty, hunger, pollution, and disease, creating selfsupporting, self-replicating enterprises that create jobs and generate economic growth even as they provide goods and services that make the world a better place. Partnering with some of the world’s greatest corporations, Yunus and Grameen Bank have already launched several social businesses that are addressing challenges like malnutrition, lack of potable water, and endemic illness in Yunus’s homeland of Bangladesh, and other organizations around the world are developing their own experiments in social business. In this book, Yunus traces the development of the social business idea; explains its lessons for entrepreneurs, social activists, and policy makers; offers practical guidance for those who want to create social businesses of their own; and shows why social business holds the potential to redeem the failed promise of free enterprise.
A must read for anybody interested in how a simple idea can really make a world of a difference, given dedicated and driven people and most importantly vision. Probably the only book micro economist networkers will ever need to read.
Mr. Yunus you rock!
Dear John is trademark Nicholas Sparks-romantic, sappy, sad and redeeming. If you enjoyed any of Sparks’ earlier novels, you will most probably enjoy Dear John, a love story about an army sergeant who falls in love shortly before 9/11. Sparks’ writing is smooth and easy, but the characters and plot are could have been a little more memorable.
Recommended for those who like sappy tragic romantic comedies, but not for those who like a little meat in their reading (in the ilk of Mills & Boons)
This book is a return to Sparks’ old writing style. Quite Similar to The Notebook, and A Walk to Remember, this book is a must read for any Sparks’ fan, as well as anyone wanting an old fashioned love story…full of love, heartache, romance, fulfillment, tragedy, and sacrifice.
Goobes 