Book Beginnings on Friday is a meme hosted by Gilion from Rose City Reader. Instructions are pretty clear: just share the opening sentence of your current read, making sure that you include the title and author so others know what you're reading.
I, Flannery Culp, am playing solitaire even as I finish this.
Ezra F. Vogel, a Harvard professor specializing in Far East affairs, has won the 2012 Lionel Gelber Prize for his book about China under Deng Xiaoping.
Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China, published by Harvard’s Belknap Press, was named winner on Monday of the literary award honouring the best book on international affairs.
The prize, a $15,000 award named for late Canadian diplomat Lionel Gelber, is presented annually by the Lionel Gelber Foundation, Foreign Policy magazine and the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto.
Vogel’s book examines how the Chinese leader confronted the damage wrought by Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution and loosened the economic and social policies that had stunted China’s growth. The leader's move to push modernization and ease trade relations with the West lifted hundreds of millions of his countrymen out of poverty.
“The rise of China as a mighty global economic power, which now seems so inexorable, was never foreordained,” said George Russell, executive editor of Fox News and chair of the five-person Gelber Prize jury.
“That it happened, and how it happened, depended enormously on the wiles, stratagems and vision of the short, pugnacious man who is the subject of this deeply informed book by one of the West’s most important Asia scholars."
Vogel won in a field that included another book on China by Nobel Prize-winner Henry Kissinger.
The other contenders were:
Award-winning director and screenwriter Shandi Mitchell won the Kobzar Literary Award at a gala event in Toronto for her debut novel, Under This Unbroken Sky: A Novel. The award, presented biannually since 2006, commemorates literary work that best presents a Ukrainian Canadian theme. Fiction, non-fiction, poetry, playwriting, screenwriting and young adult literature are all eligible for the $25,000 prize.
Mitchell's novel follows the Mykolayenko family as they struggle to survive Prairie life in Depression-era Canada. The jury, which consisted of Denise Chong, Nino Ricci, Randall Maggs and M.G. Vassanji, called Under This Unbroken Sky a "compelling and poignant narrative that honours the ancestry of many Canadian Ukrainians who worked for a better life during the depression era."
The other finalists were:
- Larissa Andrusyshyn for Mammoth
- Myrna Kostash for Prodigal Daughter: A Journey to Byzantium
- Myroslav Shkandrij for Jews in Ukrainian Literature: Representation and Identity
- Rhea Tregebov for The Knife Sharpener's Bell
Mitchell, who is Ukrainian on her father's side, dedicated the award to her grandmother and to the stories she never told. "It did mean a great deal to come back to the Ukrainian community with this story. It meant a great deal to say a story that my baba could never speak aloud. Those silences are chasing generations," she said. "We are losing all our narratives, and we need to gather them."
Mitchell receives $20,000 of the purse. The remaining $5,000 will go to her publisher, Penguin Group Canada. The four remaining finalists received $1,000 each.
I remember, in no particular order:
--a shiny inner wrist;
--steam rising from a wet sink as a hot frying pan is laughingly tossed into it;
--gouts of sperm circling a plughole, before being sluiced down the full length of a tall house;
--a river rushing nonsensically upstream, its wave and wash lit by a half dozen chasing torchbeams;
--another river, broad and grey, the direction of its flow disguised by a stiff wind exciting the surface;
--bathwater long gone cold behind a locked door.
This last isn't something I actually saw, but what you end up remembering isn't always the same as what you have witnessed.Ain't that the truth!
