Search results for: Don Quixote

Fun Facts Friday: Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
Fun Facts Friday , Latest Posts / September 29, 2017

Today is the birthday of one of the greatest authors in history: Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (29 September 1547 – 23 April 1616. As you can tell, I am a fan. Not only because of the Quixotic pun of this blog’s name, but also because I think that Don Quixote is still one the most relevant stories in the world. “The pen is the language of the soul; as the concepts that in it are generated, such will be its writings.” Miguel de Cervantes 1 ) Very little is known about Cervantes’ early childhood, however we do know that he was a favorite student of Madrid humanist Juan Lopez. 2 ) In 1569, while living in Rome, Cervantes enlisted in the Spanish fleet to fight against the Turks. He suffered injury at the Battle of Lepanto (1571) which ended his aspirations for military glory. 3 ) On his way home from the war (1575) Miguel and his brother Roderigo were captured by Barbary pirates and became slaves until their ransom was paid five years later. 4 ) Returning to Madrid, Cervantes started writing. Even though he is thought to have written as many as 30 plays, only two survived today. 5 ) Cervantes…

Author Q&A with Elizabeth L. Silver
Author Q&A , Latest Posts / June 24, 2013

Elizabeth L. Sivler wrote one of this summer’s hottest books The Execution of Noa P. Singleton and was kind enough to answer a few questions for me. Q. How did for the idea for the novel came about? A. In my last semester of law school, I enrolled in a class on capital punishment. As part of the course, I visited Texas’s death row and worked on a clemency petition, where I spoke with inmates and victim family members. Then, for two years following law school, I was a judicial clerk for one of the nine judges on the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals and worked on several death penalty appeals. I researched the law and examined several cases from both an advocate as well as neutral perspective and wanted to present both sides of the death penalty debate by removing the obvious questions of whether or not the person did the crime, to instead focus on the question of punishment. How does society treat its prisoners? How do we accept our own shortcomings and mistakes? How does our guilt define us? These were just a handful of issues that I hoped to explore by examining the death penalty through…

Book Review: Cervantes Street by Jaime Manrique
5 Stars , Fiction , Historical Fiction , Latest Posts / January 10, 2013

Article first published as Book Review: Cervantes Street by Jaime Manrique on Blogcritics About: Cervantes Street by Jaime Manrique is a historical-fiction novel about Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s journey to write Don Quixote. The book is peppered with literary references to Cervantes’ works as well as works of the time, while I didn’t get many I did enjoy learning about them. 320 pages Publisher: Akashic Books (September 4, 2012) Language: English ISBN-10: 161775126X My rat­ing for Cervantes Street — 5 Buy this book in paper or in elec­tronic format* Thoughts: As followers of my blog know, I am a big fan of Don Quixote, probably more to the nostalgia associated with the story from my childhood than anything to do with the classic story. However, when I did read the full length novel (both parts) I understood why the book has become such a literary classic. Unfortunately, many readers get daunted by the sheer size of Don Quixote. The stories in the classic tale need knowledge of the time’s pop-culture in order to fully enjoy the reading experience. However, the same could be said for Shakespeare and several other authors from the far and not-so-far past. For those readers who are overwhelmed by the size of the classic book, Cervantes…

Guest Review: The Enlightened Heart, ed. Stephen Mitchell
Guest Posts , Latest Posts / September 19, 2012

Life has been frightening and cataclysmic lately, so I needed some reading material that would reconnect me with a sense of the spiritual. I also haven’t had a lot of time to read, I’ve been writing so much. So the book I just finished was unlike my usual favorites: nonfiction books about history or colorful, literary adventure novels. I decided to pick up a book I’d had on my shelf for a long time, The Enlightened Heart: An Anthology of Sacred Poetry, edited by Stephen Mitchell. Buy this book in paper or electronic format This remarkable volume serves as a history of world religion, as well as a collection of beautiful poetry. In fact, we might not even have considered many of these works “poetry” the way we normally think of it. Many of the world’s great religious classics, (and indeed most highbrow literature before a few hundred years ago) were written in verse rather than prose, as the divinity they were meant to express can only be captured, even in part, by the beauty of a poetic treatment. In order, The Enlightened Heart contains selections from: the Upanishads, the Book of Psalms, the Tao Te Ching, the Bhagavad Gita,…

Taste Test
/ October 9, 2010

In order for any reviewer to be relevant, you must first find out if you and the reviewer share the same taste, otherwise every review, no matter how profound, is meaningless to you. I like to read, always have and probably always will. My taste ranges wildly from biographies to fiction, from young adult to hard core history books. Here is a list of books of different genre I ranked from 1(hated it) to 5 (couldn’t put it down) – if you agree with these rankings, or close to them, you’d probably find my reviews helpful. Don Quixote (Fiction) – 5 John Adams (Biography) – 5 The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Fiction) – 4 His Excellency: George Washington (biography) – 4 American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson (History) – 3 Little Bee (Fiction) – 3 Eat, Pray, Love (Memoir) – 1 Hopefully I won’t have many more books to add in the 1 (hated it) and 2 (didn’t like it) categories. The rating represents how I enjoyed the book and nothing else, I also rate each book independently and consider the genre and how the book is marketed (my expectations). For example, if I pick up a book…

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