Bøger af James Rumford

For two years Douglas Hergert has been writing a thousand-word anecdotal human-interest column for the Rossmoor News. Rossmoor, an adult community located about 30 minutes east by car from San Francisco, has a population of perhaps 10,000 residents. The community is economically and generationally diverse, but urbane, intelligent, and active, with a high percentage of retired professionals and artists. The Rossmoor setting is a park-like campus complete with redwood groves, lush landscaping, and abundant wildlife, including geese, wild turkeys, and many other resident species. Life at Rossmoor is characterized by the community's amenities, including two golf courses, three swimming facilities (one indoors), a gym, a library, a movie theater, multiple clubhouses, a restaurant and bar, tennis courts, and a newspaper. The Rossmoor News is published weekly by a paid professional staff, and distributed to every resident. The paper is 60-plus pages long, and allocates space for editorial columns and features, some politically oriented, others more general. In his own column, Hergert has written about topics that happen to catch his interest: books, movies, food, travel, nature, current events, places, human-interest anecdotes, or memories from his own life experiences. The tone of his column is generally light, sometimes humorous, with the aim to amuse and inform. This book is a collection of three dozen pieces originally published in the Rossmoor News. Although the writing Hergert does for the News may sometimes convey a distinctly local context, this collection contains a diverse variety of general-interest stories. In these pages you'll read about: the transition from Paris to Rossmoor; the mystery of coq-au-vin; pizza dough as physical therapy; a tale of Christmas in Paris; reflections on bird watching and memory; life and chicken stew in West Africa; Afghanistan in less troubled times; the Ten Commandments and a curious meeting; a travel journal along the California coast; book reviews and movie reviews; life with prosopagnosia (in the title story, "Do I know you?"); how to live with Montaigne; how to make blueberry pancakes; how to use zucchini and arugula in a pasta dish; and how to stuff a turkey. Even if you don't live at Rossmoor, even if you're younger than 55 - and even if you've never taken a ride in a golf cart - you'll find a bounty of compelling, amusing, and revealing reading in this collection of personal stories.

When news reaches a Hawaiian grandmother that Hawai'i has been annexed by the United States in July 1898, she sets to work on a quilt to show her family that, in a time of change, there is one thing that must never be forgotten.In English and Hawaiian, The Flag Quilt is a revised edition of When Silver Needles Swam, which appeared in 1998 to great acclaim, receiving along with other Hawaiian language books from Manoa Press the award Na Manu a Ka'ae from 'Ahahui 'Olelo Hawai'i for helping to preserve the Hawaiian language.James Rumford, an award-winning and internationally recognized author and illustrator of children's books, makes his home in Honolulu.

Longtime San Francisco novelist Laurence Roy has arrived at the end of his writing career. During a period of thirty-five years, he's published dozens of novels - well received, highly regarded, warmly reviewed - though they have not led to great fame or fortune. He is a disciplined professional, devoted to his authorial routine. Writer's block is not part of his vocabulary. But at age sixty, he has abruptly realized that he's had enough of writing. All the same, he has one last novel left, and he has decided - with a sense of uncertainty, ambivalence, puzzlement - to spend six months writing in Paris. Although he cannot guess exactly what this new environment might do for him, he says goodbye to his wife and family, flies to Paris, and moves into a Left Bank apartment that a friend has lent him. As he settles into the neighborhood, he meditates on the long intellectual and creative history of Paris. At the same time he finds himself examining his own existence: his work, his age, his family, his life. What is it about Paris that always seems to lead visiting Americans to think and behave in new ways? He is mystified by this phenomenon, but he comes to treasure the new experience. As his youthful French language skills return to him, he explores the mysterious power of Paris, which somehow draws him forward in ways that he could not have foreseen. Will he finish his novel? Will he come to terms with his family, his professional life, the burdens of advancing age? In the voices of several narrators, Larry's story moves forward and backward in time, set in several international milieus - but Paris is always at the center. Do unpredictable adventures lie ahead? Only Paris knows.

James Rumford, himself a world traveler, has retold Ibn Battutas story in words and pictures, adding the element of ancient Arab mapsmaps as colorful and evocative as a Persian miniature, as intricate and mysterious as a tiled Moroccan wall. Into this arabesque of pictures and maps is woven the story not just of a traveler in a world long gone but of a man on his journey through life.

Shows how important learning is in a country where only a few children are able to go to school.