Elevate Difference

Reviews tagged love

Song Over Quiet Lake

In Song Over Quiet Lake, Sarah Felix Burns tells several intertwining stories of loss, love, and healing. The novel centers on an unlikely friendship between a young white woman, Sylvia, and a Tlingit elder, Lydie Jim. Both are students at the University of British Columbia, and they meet when Sylvia is assigned to be Lydie’s tutor.

Our Family Wedding

Welcome to the new post-racial America, where at long last African Americans and Latinos can star together in a major studio movie every bit as crappy as anything White people have ever done. Our Family Wedding is...

Contents of a Mermaid’s Purse

Phoebe Tsang’s Contents of a Mermaid's Purse is somewhat like a real purse a modern woman might have: familiar and, at the same time, exotic—and so is what it holds. Dumping the purse’s contents onto the table to sift through proves to be an exercise in strange beauty—an alluring siren’s call fulfilled.

Pagan Astrology: Spell-Casting, Love Magic, and Shamanic Stargazing

Astrology and magic have been topics that I have been interested in over the years. I had my chart done years ago, and found the correlations between my sign and my personality amazingly accurate (I am truly an Aquarius).

Parenthood

Based on the 1989 Ron Howard movie Parenthood, writer Jason Katims has revised the premise into a modern day, one-hour drama that explores the many facets of being a parent. The stellar cast includes Lauren Graham (Gilmore Girls), Craig T.

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet

Some of the best American literature tells the story of the immigrant experience. Numerous writers have written about the sense of loss both material and psychological that comes with leaving your country and everything that is familiar to start a new life. Many of the characters in these novels never seem completely at home in their new land, but they soldier on for economic reasons, or because they’re committed to making a life in this new world Equally compelling is the story of first-generation Americans who have one foot in the modern world and one foot in the past.

I Still Do: Loving and Living with Alzheimer’s

I Still Do was written to help anyone who has or may be coping with someone in their family who has Alzheimer’s. It is a candid and emotional portrayal of author Judith Fox’s husband Ed along with their heartfelt story. Fox loves photography and capturing that perfect picture, and it shows in the photos in this book, as well as in the striking photo on the book cover.

Mutluluk

In his first few shots, all very wide angles and washed-out greens, Abdullah Oguz shows his cards as an ambitious, technically brilliant filmmaker. In the Anatolian countryside, a flock of sheep turns a slow circle as the camera, peering down on a girl’s body, does the same. A melody—composed by Zülfü Livaneli, who also wrote the book on which this film was based—hums through the valley.

Trees Zine #4

A quarter page booklet of photocopied text with one off-center staple and as much profundity as you can cram in that meager space—how else would you present yourself to the world? I thought that zines went out with the twentieth century, at least in the sense of personal confessionals, and journaling went out traded out for online diaries, journals, and social networks. These days even the formal blog seems to be winnowing down to its base denominator: trading out contemplation for a sound bite, reflection for a terse witticism.

Cooking Dirty: A Story of Life, Sex, Love and Death in the Kitchen

My initial reaction after reading this book was to hurl it across the room and never see it again. Dramatic? A bit, yet justifiable. In an autobiographical narration, Jason Sheehan attempts to merge his experience as a cook with being a writer, but fails miserably. Cooking Dirty is not your average tale of a typical award-winning chef. There’s no culinary school or classical training involved, just the lessons he learned from the School of Hard Knocks.

When Women Were Warriors Book I: The Warrior's Path

I usually do not read fantasy books, but The Warrior's Path changed my mind. Catherine M. Wilson writes a beautifully well-crafted story that incorporates the elements of fantasy without entering any stereotypes. The first of three books in the When Women Were Warriors series follow Tamras, who trains to become a warrior like the other women in her family.

It's Beginning to Hurt

As the title of It’s Beginning to Hurt suggests, one may expect this book to be a compilation of short stories filled with love, despair, loss, and anguish that reach into the profound depths of unimaginable hurt—and it is.

My Life in a Nutshell (10/10/2009)

Obie award winner Hanne Tierney’s latest work, My Life in a Nutshell, doesn’t shy away from big themes. Death, friendship, jealousy, love, lust, mourning, and carrying on in the face of life’s abundant whammies make appearances in this innovative, clever, and totally absorbing forty-five-minute puppet show for adults.

When I Forgot

This kind of forgetting does not erase memory, it lays the emotion surrounding the memory to rest. – Clarissa Estes The protagonist of this short, dense novel is Anna Louhiniitty, a twenty-something Finnish journalist. It’s a slushy April day in Helsinki. Anna sits at a café table. She’s supposed to be transcribing an interview. On the table sits a copy of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, that famous novel of war, suicide, and society parties.

Kinky Gazpacho: Love, Life, and Spain

Lori Tharps’ Kinky Gazpacho does what memoirs do best: it brings us the author’s journey through her inner psychological life. The book spans Tharps’ kindergarten “Culture Day” in Milwaukee, Wisconsin through her present life as a freelance writer in Philadelphia.

"Socialism Is Great!": A Worker's Memoir of the New China

"Socialism Is Great!": A Worker's Memoir of the New China is an account by journalist Lijia Zhang, who came of age in China during the ‘80s.

East of the Sun

East of the Sun follows the journey of three young women and their quest for love, life, and self-discovery in the autumn of 1928. The story begins in London with Viva Holloway, an orphan and aspiring writer who takes on the responsibility of chaperoning three young adults—Rose, Tor and Guy—in traveling to India.

The Old Garden

A garden is a metaphor for revolution. When painstakingly cared for, dry and barren ground can eventually yield the most beautiful of things. A garden can change an unruly landscape to an ordered plot, produce food and purpose, and forever capture the energy of a gardener with loyalty, conviction, and a love of what it could become.

The Time Traveler’s Wife

When I started reading The Time Traveler's Wife, I was hooked right away. I don't read fiction very often, so it was a refreshing change of pace, and the concept was cool: a man with a genetic condition that makes him time travel, but he can't control it. The narration in the novel switches back and forth between the two main characters, Clare and Henry.

The Time Traveler’s Wife

Shortly after I started reading The Time Traveler's Wife, I found out that there was a movie coming out, and was interested in seeing how the two would compare. Book-to-movie adaptations are generally thought to be letdowns, but I wanted to see exactly how a love story about a time traveler—from a book more than 500 pages long that shifts through time and narration—would look on film.

Picking Bones from Ash

Marie Mutsuki Mockett’s debut novel, Picking Bones from Ash, drew me in from the first sentence. Satomi, one of the two main characters of the book, learns from her mother at a young age that in order to be safe in this world, a woman must be talented—not well educated and certainly not beautiful, a woman must be talented.

Been Here a Thousand Years

Been Here a Thousand Years, Mariolina Venezia’s novel that sweeps across Italy’s history from 1861 to 1989, with certain ideas and images already floating in the periphery: Berlusconi’s wife explaining the reasons for their divorce, my own memories of whistles and blatant gazes from men during a visit to Florence, high fashion seemingly making women into glorified clothes hangers.

Karma Calling

Director Sarba Das has taken the stomach-churning subject of credit card debt and used it as a hilarious plot device in this endearing romp of a screwball romantic comedy. Watching Karma Calling is definitely non-stop farcical fun as the maxed out Raj’s, a Hindu family living above their means in Hoboken, are pestered by credit card call center collectors based in India. Ingenious scenes highlight the absurdity of our hyper-globalized world as the Indian collectors learn how to sound American and choose fake names based on popular American sitcoms.

Vodou Love Magic: A Practical Guide to Love, Sex, and Relationships

Kenaz Filan’s book Vodou Love Magic: A Practical Guide to Love, Sex, and Relationships is just that—a practical guide, arguably perhaps a little too practical. At times, it even felt like I was reading a self-help book with Vodou spells thrown in as a bonus.

From the Heart

There are several good songs on From the Heart, but by the end of the album, I was sick of the slow, languorous ballads that Babyface does so well. There’s nothing wrong with most of the songs; they’re just bland, and the delivery becomes monotonous after sixteen tracks.

From the Heart

The Isley Brothers have been making fantastic and varied music since the 1950s, or as their DefJam website says, creating “Baby Makin’ Music.” Personally, I would prefer listening to From The Heart with a glass of wine while chopping vegetables, making dinner rather than babies.

From the Heart

Think back to a time when the art of "wooing" someone was appreciated, a skill that was improved and mastered over time. This was a time when walking hand-in-hand with your beloved was considered a milestone in a relationship. In this era—mid-twentieth century America—From the Heart was born, traveling through time, space, and dimension to sweep us off our feet. This is the loveliest assemblage of Sinatra's early work.

The Temptation of the Night Jasmine

Lacking familiarity with Lauren Willig’s Pink Carnation series did not detract from my enjoyment of The Temptation of the Night Jasmine, the fifth installment in the series.

To Love What Is: A Marriage Transformed

Two a.m. When you are young, this is the time that bars close, new love springs unbidden in doorways, and entire dramas are played out in the time it takes a traffic light to change. When you are older, with marriage and children under your belt, it is the hour at which a ringing phone wakes you in terror, not annoyance; when a voice in the darkness signals illness, not invitation; when awakening in a strangely empty bed, one will know that something has gone awfully wrong with the person whose warmth still lingers in the covers.

To Survive

The name Joan Wasser is not well-known to most people, but it should be.
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