Peder Brown’un Bilgeliğinden ücretsiz kitap indir

Sawyer Zhang sawyerzhan0724 — Very, very hit or miss. A few awesome contributors did not make up for a whole bunch of mediocre ones.

Ali Gumulcine aligumulcine — Braving Home sounds like the title of a survivor’s memoir, so I approached this book cautiously. I’ve got nothing against survivors’ memoirs (Morbid Curiosity magazine stands as testimony to that), but I started reading Braving Home in the middle, picking the essay that most appealed to me, figuring that I could skip the rest if needed. After that first essay, I was hooked. Halpern’s description of sitting on the lanai in the dark Hawaiian evening, watching the lava flow all around him, guaranteed I’d read on to see where else he would venture. My initial interest was piqued by the locales Halpern visits: a bed-and-breakfast in the midst of an abandoned subdivision on the shoulders of an active volcano, the canyons of Malibu — “wildfire capital of North America.” The only omission I found in the book was when he explored an isolated high-rise built by the U.S. military in Alaska which has become a self-sustaining town — and Ballard’s book wasn’t mentioned. Very disappointing, but a minor point. Beyond the locations, I grew curious about the people inhabiting these out-of-the-way places. First of these was a gentleman living in a trailer on the site of Princeville, North Carolina, the first free black town in the country. Princeville sits on the floodplain of the Tar River, regularly wipes the town off the map. Despite that, Thad Knight — 72-year-old son of a sharecropper — moved back as soon as the floodwaters receded and began to rebuild his home. Halpern’s curiosity is about what drives a person like that. Why would anyone choose to stay in a place that might kill him? What about the notion of “home” that ties a person to a piece of ground, come what may? Halpern does remarkably well at leaving himself out of his stories. Even though he is the viewpoint character, Halpern doesn’t seem interested in telling us about himself. His focus is on the people he meets. Still, one has to marvel at a young man who drives out to a often-flooded town, planning to camp without checking the weather forecast (it called for rain), and ends up sleeping in a total stranger’s spare room for a week. Halpern’s hunger for home — and desire to get the story — require him to time his visits during the height of the danger: hurricane season on Louisiana's Grand Isle or Malibu in August. While he doesn’t seem like anyone who might be useful when the wildfire comes, he does appear to be a good listener. Braving Home demonstrates that he’s a good storyteller, too.