Bøger af Edward Burns

"An Irish-American family comes to life in this first novel by actor and independent filmmaker Ed Burns. The book opens at a wake, as our twelve-year-old narrator, an aspiring writer, takes in the death of his beloved grandfather, Pop, a larger-than-life figure to him. The overflowing crowd includes sandhogs in their muddy work boots, old Irish biddies in black dresses and cops in uniform, along with the family in mourning. There's an open casket, the first time he's seen a dead person. Later, at the bar across the street, he tells a story to the assembled crowd about the day his dad proposed to his mom, and how he almost got beat up by her brothers for it, and then how Pop made him propose twice. His mom calls him "Kneenie," and with her husband and older son Tommy lost to her, he's the best thing she's got. He sees her struggling, but doesn't know how to help-since like his brother and father before him he knows he'll also abandon her soon enough. Stories cascade between the prior generation's colorful origins in the Bronx and the softer world of the Long Island town of Gibson, where the family lives now. There are scenes in the Rockaways, at Belmont Race Track, and in Montauk. Out of individual struggles a collective warmth emerges, a certain kind of American story, raucous and joyous"--

Sure, she can be a little overbearing sometimes, but baby-faced Johnny Rizzo loves his fiancée Claire, and he made her a promise: by the time he's 25-years-old, he'll trade his current dream job as a local sports talk radio host (even if it is the 2 a.m. slot) for something that'll pay bigger bucks. And Johnny's nothing, if not a man of his word. Now he's flying to New York to interview for some snoozeville job that Claire's well-to-do father set up. Enter Uncle Terry, who lives in New York, a rascally womanizer bent on turning a day in the Hamptons into a final fling for his nephew. Nice guy Johnny's not interested, of course, but then he meets the lovely Brooke.... A master of the modern relationship dramedy, Edward Burns is once again in top form as a writer, director, and actor. His swaggering bartender Terry is the perfect foil to baby-faced Matt Bush's (Adventureland) Johnny, and together they're great at trading Burns' characteristically sharp dialogue. More contrasts are mined with Anna Wood's image-conscious Claire and Kerry Bische's (Scrubs) Brooke, a blonde-haired and bright-eyed free spirit. Burns wraps a summery tone around Johnny's real crisis: follow through with your promises, or follow your heart?

The purpose of this book is to focus on how the mental retardation/intellectual disability category is used to stigmatize and deprive children of educational opportunity, many of whom are black, and then to deny adults, many of whom are also black, lesser culpability for capital crimes as mandated by the Supreme Court in Atkins v. Virginia in 2002. For many black children the mental retardation/intellectual disability category has been a ready solution, incorrect as it is, to explain the effects of segregation and discrimination. Likewise for adults, States routinely re-interpret and contort the definition of intellectual disability so that the task for identifying offenders who warrant lesser culpability is very much "discretionary, haphazard, and discriminatory" (Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238, 1972).The determination of mild Intellectual disability and the death penalty is ripe with racism. This has been the case for children "denied the opportunity of an education...made available to all on equal terms" as promised in Brown and for adults seeking Atkins relief. Hopefully, this book will provide some insight into the relationship between mild intellectual disability for children, and the many factors that should be considered when determining whether an adult offender is entitled to lesser culpability when a State seeks the death penalty.

The book enlarges the usual focus with a wider range of writers than the conventional ossified canon taking in a revaluation of many rarely studied dramatists, a reconsideration of pastoral, and the instatement of women writers as major contributors to the culture of the age.