The Boy who did not come back from Heaven

http://newsfeed.gawker.com/little-boy-who-claimed-to-die-and-visit-heaven-admits-h-1679811262?utm_campaign=socialflow_gawker_facebook&utm_source=gawker_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow

‘I did not go to heaven’: Paralyzed boy admits he made up best-selling book about how he ascended to paradise and met Jesus after car wreck.

Alex co-wrote the book with his father, pictured. He is now divorced from his mother and lives separately from his son

His story was made into the best-selling book The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven, which was co-authored with his father Kevin and first published in 2010.
The mother adds that Alex previously told a pastor that the book was made up, but was told the publication was ‘blessing’ people and to stay quiet.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2913259/Man-wrote-best-selling-book-saw-heaven-near-death-experience-six-year-old-admits-thing-up.html#ixzz3P3Ua9IhU
Some of the comments in the Dailymail are really very funny!

Was there not a similar case of a surgeon that also wrote a book about going to heaven but it was debunked by the doctors who attended to him?

So by the way near death experiences do have a neurological explanation about what happens when the brain is starved from oxygen. I am just saying. https://justfletcher.wordpress.com/2013/07/03/proof-of-heaven/

Cheers 2015!!! May this be your blessed year!

My favorite book of 2014?

Difficult to choose but this one for me takes the prize. If you like wine and you love France or is it the other way round, if you love France and well you have to be a wine lover  of course– the ghost of the grape – then you will get much enjoyment from this book. And some excitement too. I will now look at a glass of wine with a different eye. Excuse the pun!

The reviews:-

Journalist Maximillian Potter uncovers a fascinating plot to destroy the vines of La Romanée-Conti, Burgundy’s finest and most expensive wine.

In January 2010, Aubert de Villaine, the famed proprietor of the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, the tiny, storied vineyard that produces the most expensive, exquisite wines in the world, received an anonymous note threatening the destruction of his priceless vines by poison-a crime that in the world of high-end wine is akin to murder-unless he paid a one million euro ransom. Villaine believed it to be a sick joke, but that proved a fatal miscalculation and the crime shocked this fabled region of France. The sinister story that Vanity Fair journalist Maximillian Potter uncovered would lead to a sting operation by some of France’s top detectives, the primary suspect’s suicide, and a dramatic investigation. This botanical crime threatened to destroy the fiercely traditional culture surrounding the world’s greatest wine.

SHADOWS IN THE VINEYARD takes us deep into a captivating world full of fascinating characters, small-town French politics, an unforgettable narrative, and a local culture defined by the twinned veins of excess and vitality and the deep reverent attention to the land that runs through it.

 

“A rare book that transcends the narrow interests of wine lovers.”—The New York Times, named a Best Wine Book of 2014

 

 

Maximillian Potter, an award-winning journalist, is the senior media adviser for the governor of Colorado. He was the executive editor of 5280: Denver’s Magazine, and previously a staff writer at Premiere, Philadelphia, and GQ. He has been a contributing editor to Men’s Health/Best Life and Details, and contributes to Vanity Fair. Potter is a native of Philadelphia, with a BA from Allegheny College and an MSJ from Northwestern University’s Medill School. He lives in Denver with his wife and two sons.

Dijon 2012

Cheers!!!  On 2015!

Maybe I am the crazy one?

Crazy people are not locked up, they walk the streets (of Hollywood too)!

Somebody sent me this clip and thought I may enjoy it. Well you have to define enjoy I suppose but my reply was that maybe she committed a crime and wants to claim insanity.
In the latest episode of ‘Gwyneth Paltrow states the absolute ridiculous’, the actress has claimed that saying negative things to water can hurt its feelings.

WATER?

OK but I think I prefer Shirley Valentine talking to the wall.

I am thinking of getting this book:-

An Amazon Best Book of the Month, May 2014: A successful young author suffering from writer’s block journeys to New Hampshire to visit his former professor. Shortly after he arrives, the bones of a girl are found buried in the professor’s backyard. Now the professor has been arrested for the murder of the girl–who disappeared in 1975 at the age of fifteen–and the author has an idea: he will write a book based on the case that will ultimately exonerate his professor and jumpstart his writing. Already a massive best seller in Europe (and translated into 32 languages), The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair arrives in North America amid such wild praise you might expect something groundbreaking. Instead, what you get is a wonderful, fun, and boisterous read, a book with an uncanny ability to both fascinate and amuse you. Twists and turns and oddball characters make this a rollicking bullet-train of a novel. –Chris Schluep

Anybody read it?

What is on Your Bedside Table?

What are you reading at the moment?

I have found this book and it is fascinating. It kind of fits in with one of  my previous blogs – Postcards from the past.

The description comes from Amazon

“I think people marry far too much; it is such a lottery, and for a poor woman—bodily and morally the husband’s slave—a very doubtful happiness.” —Queen Victoria to her recently married daughter Vicky

Headstrong, high-spirited, and already widowed, Isabella Walker became Mrs. Henry Robinson at age 31 in 1844. Her first husband had died suddenly, leaving his estate to a son from a previous marriage, so she inherited nothing. A successful civil engineer, Henry moved them, by then with two sons, to Edinburgh’s elegant society in 1850. But Henry traveled often and was cold and remote when home, leaving Isabella to her fantasies.

No doubt thousands of Victorian women faced the same circumstances, but Isabella chose to record her innermost thoughts—and especially her infatuation with a married Dr. Edward Lane—in her diary. Over five years the entries mounted—passionate, sensual, suggestive. One fateful day in 1858 Henry chanced on the diary and, broaching its privacy, read Isabella’s intimate entries. Aghast at his wife’s perceived infidelity, Henry petitioned for divorce on the grounds of adultery. Until that year, divorce had been illegal in England, the marital bond being a cornerstone of English life. Their trial would be a cause celebre, threatening the foundations of Victorian society with the specter of “a new and disturbing figure: a middle class wife who was restless, unhappy, avid for arousal.” Her diary, read in court, was as explosive as Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, just published in France but considered too scandalous to be translated into English until the 1880s.

As she accomplished in her award-winning and bestselling The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher, Kate Summerscale brilliantly recreates the Victorian world, chronicling in exquisite and compelling detail the life of Isabella Robinson, wherein the longings of a frustrated wife collided with a society clinging to rigid ideas about sanity, the boundaries of privacy, the institution of marriage, and female sexuality.

if you want the ebook, please leave a comment.

Who lived here?

 

Not a very good photo I agree – it was taken with one of the first generation digital cameras..

 

 

This house featured in a book which then became a movie and it belonged to a famous person. Do you know?

 

The Decision

Was not mine but boy am I glad somebody made it.

(Check View from the Side’s Challlenge.)

I am talking about getting a Kindle.

Loved reading all my life and as a child went to the library and read almost all the books. Even in class, especially in class. Stopped reading novels when I went to varsity because my social life was too important. Took it up when I started to work.

But of late I found that I am an impulsive  book buyer and a lot of the books I did not finish simply because they were not that good. And if you have an obsession like I have, leaving one book for the next before completing  the first one is quite difficult.  It took me 3 months to get through Dan Brown ‘s daVinci Codewishing I never bought the stupid book.

So I read little. And I missed a lot. Never considering a kindle –  a Kindle if you are in love with books?

Then in August 2010 this box arrived with one Kindle .

 

My reading habits have changed , I used to read mostly non-fiction now I love fiction  too. I can pick and choose and I get to read whatever takes my fancy . You can get the first chapter on appro and then you know.

And I am saving forests! I don’t have to dust . I am green. And happy!  Visitors may borrow my books and never return them,  I don’t mind.

 

Just one of the book shelves in the house. I can have 3500 books on my kindle. More than I can read in a lifetime for sure. I am slowly boxing  up the paperbacks because the SPCA shop can sell it for proceeds.

Textbooks? No I am not ready for that one yet.

 

PS

http://sarchasm2.wordpress.com/ will tell you where you can find ‘my’ books.