Cliffs of Despair
By Tom Hunt
Random House
Despite its title, this book will surprise you with funny moments, thanks to the appealing self-mockery of its author. Tom Hunt, a Connecticut teacher, says that he has "always been drawn to darkness -- to Dostoyevsky, Hopper, desolate landscapes, the double lives of crooked CEOs, pedophiliac priests and treasonous CIA agents." After his brother-in-law took his own life, Hunt decided to research suicide by visiting the high cliffs of England's Beachy Head, the world's third most popular suicide spot (after the Golden Gate Bridge and Japan's Aokigahara Woods). The act is so common there that a suicide-prevention group has installed a phone booth, and waiters in a local pub are told to watch for solitary drinkers. Over several visits, Hunt gets nowhere as an investigative journalist (the area's residents won't talk about its morbid fame), but succeeds as an earnest and compassionate listener when he visits a man who jumped but survived, views a body with a local mortician and befriends the family of a suicide. The book that grew out of his quirky curiosity is a kind and thought-provoking look at the act of self-destruction and the mysteries it leaves behind.
Nightlife
By Thomas Perry
Random House
This suspense novel features an unconventional villain, a serial killer who follows no discernible pattern and learns the finer points of murder as she goes along. Within the first 95 pages she stabs a woman to death, shoots two men and pushes another from an eighth-floor balcony. Perry's storytelling is also unpredictable. His characters come and go. A man who plays a big role in one chapter will all but disappear in the next. When we finally figure out who the main players will be, we're surprised that there are only two: The villain, who changes her name no fewer than eight times and leaves a grisly trail throughout the West; and Portland homicide detective Catherine Hobbes, the only investigator who doesn't under-estimate the killer because of her gender. The good news is that this mystery has more substance than melodrama.
A Handful of Dust:
Disappearing America
By David Plowden
Norton
"Photography is straight poker," Plowden says. "You play the hand you were dealt, or fold." He does not like to "disturb the light," so he works with what the day brings and does not resort to artificial means. This gives the photographs in his new book an appropriate look of stark reality, for the places in them are obsolete and have been left to suffer the cruelties of weather and time. These scenes seem familiar when we look at them: abandoned farms, churches, schoolhouses, banks and other businesses. A few of the images were taken in New Mexico and New England, but most were made in the Midwest, an area Plowden knows well. In Illinois, he found the deteriorating doors of an empty drugstore -- above them are the names of six pharmacists from several generations of the same family. And in Iowa he photographed a room in a deserted farmhouse. Dirt and dry grass had blown in and scattered across the floor, yet the air still hinted at the small human dramas that took place there.
Animals in Translation
By Temple Grandin
Harcourt
Grandin is autistic, which has made her life difficult and yet she believes it has given her a special understanding of animals. New in paperback is her engaging discussion of why she says "animals saved me" when she was a girl, of the many things she has learned about them and of her long-held belief that animals and autistic people are "visual thinkers." The result, she writes, is that autistic people can think the way animals think. "Autism is a kind of way station on the road from animals to humans, which puts autistic people like me in a perfect position to translate `animal talk' into English," she writes. "I can tell people why their animals are doing the things they do." Her book is anecdotal, provocative and appealingly chatty, whether she's talking about dogs, horses, cattle, pigs or cats. One book critic called it "hilarious, fascinating, and just plain weird." And Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, author of The Hidden Life of Dogs noted that Grandin "has a Ph.D., but the autism has probably served her better."
The Inheritance of Loss
By Kiran Desai
Atlantic
Much of this disarming novel takes place during the mid-1980s along the border between India and Nepal, where endless rebellion and political insurgency have ensured, as Desai says, that "it had always been a messy map." On a mountain ledge sits a house called Cho Oyu, its one-time grandeur lost, "its lines grown indistinct with moss." Inside are an irascible old judge and his beloved dog; the judge's orphaned teenage granddaughter, Sai; and their impoverished cook. In the early pages, this isolated existence is disrupted by evidence of yet another political uprising even as a second story unfolds in the US, where the cook's homesick son, Biju, tries to eke out a living as an illegal alien. The novel moves between India and America as political turmoil escalates, romance blossoms for Sai, loss comes to the judge and a somber Biju realizes that he and his father are no longer relevant to each other's lives.
On April 26, The Lancet published a letter from two doctors at Taichung-based China Medical University Hospital (CMUH) warning that “Taiwan’s Health Care System is on the Brink of Collapse.” The authors said that “Years of policy inaction and mismanagement of resources have led to the National Health Insurance system operating under unsustainable conditions.” The pushback was immediate. Errors in the paper were quickly identified and publicized, to discredit the authors (the hospital apologized). CNA reported that CMUH said the letter described Taiwan in 2021 as having 62 nurses per 10,000 people, when the correct number was 78 nurses per 10,000
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May 5 to May 11 What started out as friction between Taiwanese students at Taichung First High School and a Japanese head cook escalated dramatically over the first two weeks of May 1927. It began on April 30 when the cook’s wife knew that lotus starch used in that night’s dinner had rat feces in it, but failed to inform staff until the meal was already prepared. The students believed that her silence was intentional, and filed a complaint. The school’s Japanese administrators sided with the cook’s family, dismissing the students as troublemakers and clamping down on their freedoms — with
As Donald Trump’s executive order in March led to the shuttering of Voice of America (VOA) — the global broadcaster whose roots date back to the fight against Nazi propaganda — he quickly attracted support from figures not used to aligning themselves with any US administration. Trump had ordered the US Agency for Global Media, the federal agency that funds VOA and other groups promoting independent journalism overseas, to be “eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law.” The decision suddenly halted programming in 49 languages to more than 425 million people. In Moscow, Margarita Simonyan, the hardline editor-in-chief of the
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