International Perspective

TOP 5 BOOKS FROM AROUND THE WORLD

Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

A masterly, haunting new novel from a writer heralded by The Washington Post Book World as “the 21st-century daughter of Chinua Achebe,” Half of a Yellow Sun recreates a seminal moment in modern African history: Biafra’s impassioned struggle to establish an independent republic in Nigeria, and the chilling violence that followed.

With astonishing empathy and the effortless grace of a natural storyteller, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie weaves together the lives of three characters swept up in the turbulence of the decade. Thirteen-year-old Ugwu is employed as a houseboy for a university professor full of revolutionary zeal. Olanna is the professor’s beautiful mistress, who has abandoned her life of privilege in Lagos for a dusty university town and the charisma of her new lover. And Richard is a shy young Englishman in thrall to Olanna’s twin sister, an enigmatic figure who refuses to belong to anyone. As Nigerian troops advance and they must run for their lives, their ideals are severely tested, as are their loyalties to one another.

Epic, ambitious, and triumphantly realized, Half of a Yellow Sun is a remarkable novel about moral responsibility, about the end of colonialism, about ethnic allegiances, about class and race-and the ways in which love can complicate them all.

synopsis culled from www.halfofayellowsun.com

When the Ground Turns in its Sleep by Sylvia Sellers-Garcia

Nitido Aman knows he was born in Guatemala, but he doesn’t know where, or why his family left. Raised in the United States by his immigrant parents, he never asked them about his homeland as a child-and they never talked about it. When Nitido loses his father to Alzheimer’s disease, his despondent mother grows increasingly silent. Realizing that his only links to the past are disappearing, he travels to Guatemala, against his mother’s wishes, to see what he can uncover for himself. He arrives in the tiny town of Rio Roto, where he suspects his family came from, prepared to ask questions, and perhaps find work teaching there. But when he is mistaken for the new local priest, Nitido decides to play the part, thinking that the confessional confidences of the townspeople will prove more fruitful than ordinary conversation in leading him to the answers he seeks. What he finds in Rio Roto, though, is a place shrouded in silence and secrets, a place that can neither escape nor give voice to the unnamed horrors it has survived. Nitido is at once determined and frightened to unearth these horrors-even as they force him to reevaluate his own haunted past. In elegant, hypnotic prose, Sylvia Sellers-Garcia delivers a story of divergent cultures and divided identities, of conflicts between generations and civilizations, of mourning, and, finally, of healing. When the Ground Turns in Its Sleep marks her arrival as a distinctive and powerful new voice.

Synopsis called from Amazon.com

Gordon Ramsay’s Playing With Fire by Gordon Ramsay

Not a sausage. That is what Gordon Ramsay had when he started out as a chef, working 16-hour days, 6 days a week. When he was struggling to get his first restaurant in the black, he didn’t think he’d be famous for a TV show about how to run profitable eateries, or that he’d be head of a business empire. But he is and he did. Here’s how. “In the beginning there was nothing. Not a sausage – penniless, broke, fucking nothing – and although, at a certain age, that didn’t matter hugely, there came a time when hand-me-downs, cast-offs and football boots of odd sizes all pointed to a problem that seemed to have afflicted me, my mum, my sisters, Ronnie and the whole lot of us. It was as though we had been dealt the ‘all-time dysfunctional’ poker hand. I wish I could say that, from this point on, the penny dropped and I decided to do something about it, but it wasn’t like that. It would take years before the lessons of life, business and money began to click into place – before, as they say, I had a pot to piss in. This is the story of how those lessons were learned.” This is Gordon Ramsay at his raw, rugged best. PLAYING WITH FIRE is the amazing story of Gordon’s journey from sous-chef to superstar. In his no-holds-barred style, Gordon shares his passion for risk and adventure and his hard-won success secrets.

Synopsis culled from waterstones.com

The Great Wall: From Beginning to End by William Lindsey, Photography by Michael Yamashita

Lindesay’s informative text accompanies 160 photographs by Yamashita, who spent a year photographing along the 4,000-mile expanse for National Geographic.

Synopsis culled from Amazon.com

What is Love by Frank Vilaasa

What Is Love? presents an astonishing new approach to relationships – one that will illuminate and inspire you with its profound insights into the true nature of love. It is about the NOW of relationships – rather than creating dreams and commitments for a non-existent future.

You will also learn:

How to get beyond difficulties and differences
How you can best help your partner
How to create an abundant flow of love
How to enjoy an ongoing, blissful sexuality
How relationships can further your spiritual awareness
These and other issues are explored in practical detail. This book exposes the illusions that people often have about loving relationships, and reveals with amazing clarity and wisdom the true nature of love. You will learn how to change unrealistic expectations into achievable aspirations. Through simple, practical steps you will discover how to create a relationship that is nurturing and fulfilling to the heart and soul.

Synopsis culled from ebay.com.au

TOP 5 MUSEUMS FROM AROUND THE WORLD

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Picasso Museum in Barcelona, Spain

The Museu Picasso as it’s know is the most visited art gallery in Barcelona and caters to over 1,000,000 visitors per year. This gallery is home to one of the World’s largest collection of Picasso’s artwork.

The museum’s curators have arranged the paintings in chronological order from Picasso’s early days to his final works. Arranging the paintings in this way gives you a fascinating insight into the development of Picasso thinking over time and shows how he developed the distinctive designs that he is famous for today.

National Cultural History Museum in Pretoria, South Africa

The State Museum of the South African Republic (ZAR) was a national museum, founded by and intended for the Government. The policy of the Staatsmuseum provided for historical, anthropological, archaeological and natural history collections and exhibitions.

The Museum was situated in the small market hall on Market Square (now Strijdom Square) in Pretoria – a locality that attracted many visitors, but with a bad environment for collections. Soon the hall was too small to accommodate the Museum.

Work already started on the new building in Boom Street, Pretoria, prior to the outbreak of the Anglo-Boer War. The building was completed after the War and opened on 15 December 1904. The name was first changed to Pretoria Museum and then to the Transvaal Museum.

Attention was now paid especially to the expansion of natural history collections and exhibitions. Soon, this museum was also too small. In 1912 part of this collection moved to a new building in Paul Kruger Street. The natural history exhibitions followed in 1925.

For many years, however, the museum in Boom Street remained a landmark in Pretoria. The historical, anthropological and archaeological collections were housed and displayed there, but without museological care. As these consisted of objects of historical significance, a cultural historian, Mrs. Kotie Roodt-Coetzee, was appointed in 1953. She started collecting cultural history objects and information. From 1963 this new section had a separate budget.

Separation between the cultural history and natural history sections of the Transvaal Museum was completed with the founding of the National Cultural History and Open Air Museum (NATCOM) on 21 August 1964.

In 1988 the name was shortened to National Cultural History Museum (NCHM) because of a new approach favouring in situ preservation (site museums) instead of the removal of structures (open air museums). The NCHM head office was already managing a number of satellite museums that had been developed over the years, such as the Kruger, Voortrekker Monument, Sammy Marks, Pierneef, Coert Steynberg and Pioneer Museums, as well as the Willem Prinsloo Agricultural Museum. The Tswaing Crater Museum, situated in a locality north of Pretoria where salt had been mined, was the first enviro museum to be developed in South Africa.

For nearly thirty years the NCHM endeavoured to find a suitable site for a functional museum, as the old building in Boom Street became more and more dilapidated. This building had to be evacuated when a water pipe burst, resulting in a flood damaging the objects on display. The offices moved to new premises.

In 1993 the old Mint building in Visagie Street, Pretoria, was allocated as new museum of culture. A functional facility with practical areas for exhibitions, storage and communication was the result of a creative process of adapting a building designed for a mint to a museum. The Museum opened on 1 March 1997.

Natural History Museum in London, U.K

The Natural History Museum promotes the discovery, understanding, enjoyment, and responsible use of the natural world. It houses world-class collections, fantastic exhibitions and landmark buildings.

Historic Village of Hokkaido in Sapporo, Japan

The Historic Village of Hokkaido (kaitaku no mura) is an open air museum in the suburbs of Sapporo. It exhibits about 60 typical buildings from all over Hokkaido, dating from the Meiji and Taisho Periods (1868 to 1926), the era when Hokkaido’s development was carried out on a large scale.

The open air museum is divided into a town, fishing village, farm village and mountain village section. The Historical Museum of Hokkaido (kaitaku kinenkan), which documents the history of Hokkaido’s development, can be found nearby.

Bangladesh National Museum in Shahbag, Dhaka

The Bangladesh National Museum, originally established on 20 March 1913, albeit under another name, and formally inaugurated on 7 August 1913, was accorded the status of the national museum of Bangladesh on 17 November 1983. It is located Shahbag, Dhaka. The museum is well organized and displays have been housed in several departments like department of ethnography and decorative art, department of history and classical art, department of natural history, and department of contemporary and world civilization. The museum also has a conservation laboratory.