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WW2 is about to start but life for a young boy in a small town in Albania is still a game. Yet, as the town falls to the Italians, the Greeks, then the Nazis, the boy grows up. Falling in love with unattainable women, seduced by magic and literature and finally forced to flee, his existence changes from marvellous, terrifying and extraordinary into a primitive world where the severed arm of a British airman becomes a talisman and girls vanish-possibly killed by their own fathers. Forging the unexpected and terrible link between childish playfulness and a horrifying political future, Kadare has created a story with a depth and brilliance characteristic of the master story-teller.

There's no doubting the conservative bona fides of Bruce Fein. A high-level Justice Department lawyer in the Reagan administration in the 1980s and previously a resident scholar with the Heritage Foundation, he is a long-time advocate for uncompromising right-wing political principles. Yet paradoxically, Fein has been, and remains, one of the most eloquent and incisive political voices over the last decade. He was one of the earliest and most emphatic critics of Bush and Cheney's radical abuses of executive power. Two weeks after The New York Times revealed in December, 2005, that Bush had ordered the NSA to illegally eavesdrop on Americans without the warrants required by law, Fein used his column in the right-wing Washington Times to warn that "Mr. Bush has adamantly refused to acknowledge any constitutional limitations on his power to wage war indefinitely"; to scorn as "war powers nonsense" the theories assembled "to defend Mr.

You can feel it. Or maybe you can't. It doesn't matter whether you feel it or not. It's happening. The story of the United States of America as we know it -- not merely as the world's dominant superpower, but as a discrete political, economic, and geographic entity -- is drawing to a close due to a convergence of emerging economic, environmental, and political crises. Nothing lasts forever, empires least of all. And this one, which only began to expand in earnest circa the year 1900, doesn't feel like it has the staying power of ancient Rome. Not at all.

Dino is a placid, unambitious man. Living in a small provincial town, he and his wife spend their time planning journeys to faraway places-journeys they never take. Dino's only passion is billiards, and he spends his evenings in the local billiards hall honing his technique. One day, however, Dino's quiet life is interrupted - his wife falls pregnant. This the first in a series of events that shake him from his slumber and force Dino to test himself for the first time. As in his widely praised Fists, Pietro Grossi's stripped-down prose brings out the epic human drama in a tale of everyday life.

"Now when I look back, I can finally see the dots connecting. I can see that everything stands or falls on leaders and leadership. And leadership is all about inspiring hope, because hope makes a difference, serving people and adding value."

A wonderfully told story of the pain of individuals using each other for their own purposes. I enjoyed this book very much and as the author diligently builds upon two people using each other to satisfy their loneliness and then the numbness of the suffering that is created from such a codependent relationship. The unfortunate pain of almost redemption but never resolution at the end of the book left me feeling the way I should feel: a bit saddened for both of the characters.