Thanks to Margaret Donsbach, a connoisseur of historical novels, for this most helpful book review (to see the original article, click here):

Chrysalis

by Richard Romanus

Reviewed by Margaret Donsbach

Chrysalis is set in a Greek mountain village during World War II and the Greek Civil War. It centers on Maria, a slender, astigmatic young woman whose father has never recovered from her mother’s death in childbirth. In Metsovo, unlike most of the rest of the world, the stronger and more robust a woman is, the more beautiful people find her. Long-suffering and self-effacing Maria, “an aspen among sycamores, was considered the least attractive girl in the village.” She is also secretly, guiltily, in love with her sister’s husband. Soon she will feel more guilty than ever because of an event that demonstrates to her fellow villagers, despite her appearance, her exceptional bravery and physical strength.

As the novel begins in October 1940, Maria is seventeen and Mussolini’s Italian forces are massing on the Greek border not far from Metsovo. Yiannis, her sister’s husband, will soon leave his wife and little daughter to serve as a physician for the Greek army. Because of their celebrated strength, the young women of Metsovo will be recruited to carry supplies to the army’s winter encampment. Maria wants to take part, but her father forbids it. Her defiance triggers a story filled with as much heroism and heartbreak as any story of soldiers in battle. When Yiannis and his fellow soldiers shift from fighting Italians and Germans to fighting fellow Greeks intent on bringing in a Communist government, the novel minimizes politics to emphasize the scant difference between one ravaging army and another.

Romanus writes with a simplicity and directness of style that suggests a villager’s voice. Chrysalis tends to keep readers at a distance from Maria’s emotions, labeling and describing these rather than bringing us inside her character to share what she senses and feels; if this somewhat blunts the story’s emotional power, Chrysalis remains an absorbing and meaningful novel because of its deeply sympathetic heroine and the inherent suspense in a story full of harrowing dilemmas and dramatic events. (2011, 306 pages)

More about Chrysalis at Powell’s Books, Amazon.com or The Book Depository

Θα θέλαμε να ευχαριστήσουμε όλους που ήρθαν στην παρουσίαση του βιβλίου του Αγγέλου Σοφοκλέους. Ελπίζουμε να απολαύσετε τις φωτογραφίες αυτές.

This interview was published today on OnMilwaukee.com:

Milwaukee author Jenny Benjamin talks debut novel

Published May 16, 2013 at 5:31 a.m.

By Colleen Jurkiewicz

A lot of people who read Jenny Benjamin’s new book, “This Most Amazing,” ask her if she modeled her protagonist Dahlia Conti on herself. A Milwaukee-based poet originally from Illinois (like Benjamin), Dahlia is of Italian heritage (like Benjamin).

“And it’s written in the first person,” says Benjamin. But no, Dahlia is not her literary doppelganger. “Not more than all the other characters in the book. But yeah, Dahlia is very easy to connect to.”

Dahlia has some experiences that Benjamin, presumably, cannot personally relate to. The poet travels to Italy to teach writing and begins to have dreams about Vincenzo Lupo, an 18th century deserter of Napoleon’s army who lives in Villeta Barrea in the Italian province of L’Aquila. Homesick for her new love Jonas, Dahlia connects with Vincenzo, who is haunted by demons of his own, even though they are separated by centuries.

A former teacher at NOVA High School in Milwaukee, Benjamin now works as a freelance writer, and “This Most Amazing” is her debut novel. On Friday, May 17, Benjamin will visit Boswell Book Company, 2559 N. Downer Ave., at 7 p.m. For more information, visit boswell.indiebound.com/upcoming-events.

OnMilwaukee.com: Where did the idea for this book come from? The idea that people can be connected across centuries?

Jenny Benjamin: I really think after having kids – just when you read genealogies or histories or just how the idea of DNA – I mean, we’re coded and we have such similar codes to family members hundreds of years ago and even farther distant we are connected in this amazing way of DNA. It starts there. And then just taking some time to imagine your own philosophy and what you think about the soul or the spirit and things like that, if you do come back in another sense, or the recycling of that life.

OMC: What role did your Italian heritage play in the creation of “This Most Amazing”?

JB: Well, for years there was the family story of – similar to the Vincenzo line – my great-great grandfather was fighting in Napoleon’s army and he just got sick of it and walked home. Which I loved. The town in Italy that is the main setting is my family’s village, Villetta Barrea and I still have cousins there who I correspond with, and they own a restaurant, so there’s a lot of similarities with that. So this idea of that family story, and you just hear it and hear it and hear it, and I played around with it for a number of years in poems and then it just kind of came together when I started thinking about the Dahlia line and how you can connect those two times.

OMC: That story was kind of connected to you the way Dahlia and Vincenzo are connected.

JB: Yeah, it’s interesting. All fiction is based in reality. You’re getting your ideas about characters – sometimes you’ll see it, or it’s a moment you pick up on. I know my grandparents came from Villetta Barrea; they married in this country but came through Ellis Island in the late 1900s. If I do genealogy someday, I’ll have to go back to Villeta Barrea, but it was fun to just imagine it, too, and come up with my own story about it.

OMC: Jonas, Dahlia’s artist boyfriend, lives in the “Third District” of Milwaukee, which is, of course, an allusion to the Third Ward, where Italian immigrants made such a mark. Was that intentional?

JB: Yeah! It was intentional, and I love the Third Ward and that rich history with the Italian community and the Italian Community Center. And then putting Jonas there, I just couldn’t put him anywhere else. Because he’s an artist and MIAD is there; I taught at MIAD for a while, some humanities classes, and yeah, I just couldn’t – once I saw his loft and everything, I just couldn’t put him anywhere else.

OMC: Did you have to do a lot of research for the completion of this novel?

JB: I did. I love that era. In my freelance writing I’ve done some passages for standardized tests on battle plans and what Napoleon did in Egypt. I mean, he was really an interesting person and the campaigns are just amazing to read about. But yes, I had a few core books I read. One was ‘Delizia’ by John Dickie – it’s about the history of food in Italy, that was really a good one.

A couple – the Oxford histories, John Davis, general histories. And I did talk to (Italian scholar) Simonetta Milli Konewko (at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee), so she was really great just to talk to a little bit. And then I found a book on the specific years in Italy that I was writing about, 1796 and 1797; the book was published in 1948, and it was really detailed. It had these little sketches and explained the situation and had these battle scenes – once I found the battle I wanted to depict I would focus on that. And then every time something came up and I would put something in Vincenzo’s hand I would think, ‘Can I put this in his hand?’ and it’s like, ‘No, tin cans aren’t invented yet! Can’t do that.’

So that would lead to a line of research. So there were some core things and then (a process) of looking up – what kind of candles they have, what kind of trees are in that forest.

OMC: Is it hard to create a character that you pour so much of yourself into but then place in another century?

JB: He is such an alive character for me in my head that I think it wasn’t. And then I just looked for entry points – he’s male, so you would think that would be hard, but it really wasn’t, because I just feel like I know him. And then you just think of, well, some things don’t change. We all eat, we all sleep, we all have feelings, we all die. And even emotions, I think, don’t change that much over time.

OMC: The concept of family looms very large in this piece, particularly in the Italian sense of the word. Dahlia is very close with her sister and father, and Vincenzo is very close with his brothers and devoted to his fathers.

JB: Yeah, it’s a big deal. It’s really important. If you’re Italian, I mean, family’s a big deal. So when I was creating the characters, and this is a very Italian family, obviously for Vincenzo but Dahlia (as well), they’re in the contemporary time but they’re very connected to Italy and that kind of thing, so those relationships had to be tight, they had to be very real life. It was kind of easy for me because my family’s very similar. My dad, who died a few years ago, his family – just memories of my dad and his sister and his brother, going to my grandma’s all the time, and these interactions were so valuable for me.

OMC: What’s your writing process like?
JB: I’m an outliner and I’m not an outliner. I go back and forth. For this I did do a pretty tight outline to keep track of the timelines. But sometimes what I’m doing is I’m writing to a certain scene – I want to get to this line of dialogue or this scene, what things have to happen to be there? It’s plotting out but then also thinking of character. There’s a lot of things that are just written or research that I write about, that I compose on the computer, that you don’t even put in the book.

It’s just backstory so you can really understand the characters, to get to know them. I like to think of it as kind of a linear chaos. I know where I’m going but I’m very open to those serendipitous moments you don’t expect. It’s a great feeling – like ‘Wow, I didn’t know that was going to happen.’

OMC: Italian language and phrases punctuate both the prose and the dialogue. When you’re writing in English but embellishing with another language, how do you know decide a passage is crying out for some Italian?

JB: It’s kind of doing it by feel. I know that sounds really weird, but yeah, I think that I would just sense when it would do something to add it. It’s just like coming up with an image or some metaphor or getting a beat on a dialogue point what the action is to describe the character, it was just kind of an organic thing. You want it to add to it, not to distract, and that’s a balance.

OMC: Do you think of this novel as a kind of homage to your family and those ties to Italy and Villetta Barrea?

JB: It has turned into that. It really has. And especially as different family members have read it. And my mom especially – who is going to turn 80 – and my dad’s gone and a lot of his siblings are gone. Only his youngest, my uncle Cesare (is alive), so that family is dying, and it’s sad. So (my mom) was very young coming into this Italian family – she’s not Italian – and she said ‘Jenny, I feel so connected to them’. And that meant a lot to me. So it’s turned into that.

Source: http://onmilwaukee.com/market/articles/thismostamazing051613.html

As one of our readers states it,

This challenging but absolutely rewarding manifesto offers the reader a deep insight into the shocking reality of our oncology centers. Definitely not an easy read and not for the fainthearted, this black-humorous book will stay in the readers’ memory because of Draenne’s mastery

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in writing about cancer in such an honest way [...] Ignorance is not always bliss…

Draenne, the author of this book, is a mental health professional who is trying not to go mental.

If you dare to challenge your (in)sanity, dive into the first pages of Master & Cancer.

Welcome to reality!

P.S.: We are open to all hate mail and love letters equally <3

Αναδημοσίευση από e-skepsis.blogspot.gr

Δημήτρης Μπαλτᾶς

Στέφανος Εὐαγγελίδης, Στυλιανή Χ., Ἐγκλήματα καί τιμωρία, Ἐκδόσεις Ἀρμίδα, Λευκωσία 2012, σελ. 135.

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This book you’ll either love or hate <3

Wisdom by a neurotic

clinical psychologist
………………………….COMING OUT IN APRIL………………………….

Black humor at its finest, the manifesto MASTER & CANCER is about a man who hates you without bias.

To quench his hatred, he became a clinical psychologist  tending to those dying of cancer.

His ways are the offspring of  political incorrectness.

As for you, dear reader, this despicable healer can actually help you get rid of any unnecessary empathy for your dying husband, wife, father, or child, in order to prepare you for the sweet suffering that always lies ahead.

Because suffering is the sweetest kind of freedom.

Thus, you have a new breed of man: a very flawed yet original Übermensch.

You will love to hate him, but you cannot call him a hypocrite.

By Ruben De Baerdemaeker

Fonts of wisdom

If you enjoy reading – and let’s assume you do; otherwise, what you are doing now makes no sense at all – you have an interest in fonts. Not an active interest, perhaps, but fonts matter to you: you will “like” some typefaces more than others, and, given the choice between two versions of the same text, set in a different type, you will probably find it relatively easy to decide which you find more appealing. You will not even find it difficult to ascribe certain characteristics to a type you encounter – some are “serious” and “classical”, others are “modern”, “inviting” or even (an attribution with dubious implications) “funny”.

Furthermore, if you would ask a group of people to compare two fonts, a serif and and a sans serif font – let’s say Baskerville and Gill Sans – and you would ask them to decide which of the two is more “modern”, it is very likely that you will get the correct answer: sans serif fonts are – and look, and “feel” – much more modern than serif fonts: they simply do away with the unnecessary, ornamental part of a letter (which is pretty much what a serif is, after all), so that they look more like Picasso than Rubens, more Bauhaus than Sistine Chapel, more Hemingway than Shakespeare. And yet, when it comes to books – we simply do not use them.

Old fonts

Open up any recently published book, and you may well encounter an old style or “Garalde” font[1] such as Caslon (c. 1725), Garamond (1540s), or even, harking back to the age of incunabula (books printed before 1501), Bembo, based on a font cut as early as 1495, or Jenson, going back – staggeringly – as far as 1470. Alternatively, you may find yourself facing a slightly younger “transitional” font like Baskerville (named after the man who elaborated and updated Caslon’s letters in 1757). Both these groups of fonts seem to sit comfortably between the “humanist” types that were modelled on formal renaissance handwriting (e.g. Centaur), and the “Didone” or “modern” types (such as Bodoni or Didot – the two names that blend to give this group of typefaces its odd-looking moniker).

The evolution of classical fonts (humanist – old style – transitional –Didone) is marked by (among other things) a move towards greater contrast between thin and thick strokes. So whereas “humanist” types typically (no pun intended) have little variation in line width and are hence relatively “dark” (referring to the overall impression of the page – it has nothing to do with the colour of the letter), Didone typefaces move abruptly from thick to thin strokes.

So this must be part of the explanation we are looking for: real “humanist” types are a bit too dark, squat and archaic to our tastes, and the Didones, while very elegant and dainty, give you a headache because mainly the vertical lines stand out, which can make text look a bit like a lengthy barcode.

[1] I’m using the elegantly named “Vox-ATypl classification” of fonts, here – the names of different styles sometimes vary, as does the classification of individual fonts.

Reblogged from

• Editorial
• The Guardian, Friday 22 March 2013 22.17 GMT

Four and a half years ago, the American Treasury secretary was worn down by rescuing reckless institutions, and so decided to get tough with one. Its name was Lehman Brothers

Four and a half years ago, the American Treasury secretary Hank Paulson was worn down by rescuing reckless institutions, and so decided to get tough with one. Its name was Lehman Brothers, and the world is still living with the consequences. The problem was not that his concerns about indulging companies that took dangerous risks were silly; they were well founded. No, the problem was that in his impatience to impose some discipline on an unruly system, he lost sight of the reality that all financial order is based upon the foundation of the banks being able to honour their debts. Watching Europe‘s bumbling response to the crisis in Cyprus this week, it has felt as if the lessons of 2008, or something very like them, are having to be learned over again.

Since Lehman, we’ve grown familiar with the phrase “too big to fail“. In responding to a small island, a mere quarter-percent drop in the eurozone ocean, the continent’s institutions initially acted as if following a dangerous corollary – too small to care. There are disputes about whether President Nicos Anastasiades was following orders, inproposing to rescue banks by helping himself to a chunk of every deposit within them, including those below €100,000 which Europe had previously sworn would be safe everywhere. But even if the idea had a Cypriot genesis, Brussels and Frankfurt should have known that the Cypriot people would never wear it, and yet the plan was pushed all the way to parliament in Nicosia where, attracting zero support, it collapsed and died. Once again, in connection with a currency supposed to bind a continent together, the democratic will of a southern nation has been considered as an afterthought. Far too late, it was remembered that all economic arrangements rely on consent, but at least a scrap of the trust has now been rescued by the apparent shared understanding that any levy will now respect that promised €100,000 guarantee.

The crucial question, however, is whether the scrambled rethink this weekend will be bold enough. On Cyprus’s part, capital controls are reportedly under consideration, an extraordinary departure within a single currency zone. As with Mr Paulson’s reluctance to stand behind Lehman’s dodgy dealings, the reluctance of the Germans to stand behind stricken Cypriot financial institutions is understandable: they have grown bloated; they have acted imprudently; they have relied too much on funds from Russian tax-dodgers, whom bizarrely the Russian state has been defending all week. German politicians are doing no more than respecting the will of their own people in trying to ensure that all this does not go unpunished. But again, as with Mr Paulson, they need to stop and do a commonsensical check on the consequences of being bloodyminded about extracting a price – in this case €6bn – which could soon look paltry in the scale of things.

For if the doors of Cypriot banks were to open on Monday without this thing being resolved, Europe as a whole should wake up scared: for panic can be contagious. If the consequence, as is possible, were the island to slip out of the euro and Cypriot pounds being printed, then the spell of the single currency’s permanence would be broken for good. The consequences would even go beyond Europe. Since 1970, of 147 banking crises tracked by the IMF, none have imposed a blanket loss on all depositors. The next year, Richard Nixon broke the dollar’s link to gold, since when the value of money has been underpinned by nothing but the word of government. We live with the uncomfortable truth that there is never enough money in the vaults to pay every depositor, largely because we trust the authorities to see to it that – when the pinch comes – the cash would be there. That promise may only ever have been implicit, but it does not follow that there would not be grave consequences from the world seeing that it can be broken.

By Haris Ioannides…

I was asked the other day if I had posted my opinion of what is currently going on here in Cyprus.

My response was, “I better not. It’s all still too painful and moreover, we’re still riding out a major storm. It may be too soon to comment”.

But I have to say what is on my mind or I’m going to explode. And nobody wants to see what goes on inside the head of a publisher. But if I had to sum it up in one single sentence, so be it.

“It’s a dark, dark place filled with big words making up large sentences, most all up a semi-banker’s colon”.

Pardon the publisher humor.

I’m exceedingly upset with everything that is transpiring around me. I am appalled by that complete lack of professionalism that I see everywhere. It’s mind-blowing.

Politicians that would (and have done so) sell their mothers for money or for a chair in an office with their name on the door;

Bankers who are clueless as to how the game of monopoly is played;

Journalists who vilify others (mainly our EU partners and particularly Germany) in order to create sensationalistic news and steer the focus away from the real issues.

How small must their d***s be? Seriously? People with inadequacy complexes just go out and buy Porches or Humvees. They don’t rule, they don’t lead, and we shouldn’t be giving them any power what so ever! Not even electrical power.

But we are ruled by people who we voted for. So let’s not blame others for our own choices. Nobody is out to get no one. We are victims of our inability to grasp the simplest of equations; the bigger fish always eats the smaller fish. We are victims of our own naiveté. Taking a knife to a gun fight is at best stupid.

When I was an officer in the army, there was an ancient Greek saying hanging over my captain’s wall. It’s a shame he was part of the same long line of incompetents running this country and never bothered reading it. Even if he had, I doubt he’d get it.

‘‘Τον άρχοντα τριών δει μεμνήσθαι∙ πρώτον μεν ότι ανθρώπων άρχει∙ δεύτερον κατά νόμους άρχει∙ τρίτον ότι ουκ αεί άρχει’’

(Αγάθων, 450-400 π.Χ.)

Roughly translated it says:

Rulers need to keep three things in mind: first, that they rule over people, second, that they rule by law, and third, that they do not rule forever.

But there’s always a solution. In these dark hours we can still call upon one man. The only person can resolve this.

I would like to

officially extend a warm invitation to Mr. Chuck Norris to negotiate on our behalf with the IMF’s, the ECB’s, the EU’s and all other acronyms out there and then if he could please make a house call to our Parliament, I’d appreciate it. Show them what’s what brother.

Wishing the world a great weekend.

If more thoughts pop into my head, I’ll be sure to share them with you

In the meantime, watch this. Brilliant commentary by a brilliant man.