Posts by John Angelo
Part 2: New Hampshire’s unique connection to documented UFO encounters and the author who wrote about them.
The heart of The Interrupted Journey is reading the transcription of the tapes. The Hills originally presented to Dr. Hill with detailed and disturbing intense dreams and anxiety (Betty), and an ulcer, high blood pressure and PTSD (Barney).
It is a gritty, necessary and ultimately hopeful book that details his amazing journey from soul-crushing physical and sexual abuse to an advocate who’s addressed both Washington D.C.’s National Press Club and Georgetown University’s conference on “Children in Slavery-The 21st Century Summit.” The latter was sponsored by both the State Department and the United Nations.
Meredith Hall’s memoir Without a Map (Beacon Press; 2007) and novel Beneficence (David R. Godine; 2020) turn on single shattering events that leave families emotionally adrift before navigating decades-long journeys involving loss, missing puzzle pieces, redemption and ultimately forgiveness and love.
Carol Robidoux, New Hampshire Press Association’s 2020 Journalist of the Year, addressed a group of 25 UNH OLLI life-long learning members on Friday afternoon at UNH’s Manchester millyard campus.
Writer and poet May Sarton prefaces her 1968 memoir Plant Dreaming Deep with an untitled poem whose last two lines are “…Homeward at last toward the native source /Seasoned and stretched to plant his dreaming deep.”
Approximately 225 people attended a candlelight vigil in Goffstown’s town square Wednesday night in clear but very cold weather to bear witness to the nine lives lost to ICE agents around the country.
John Irving’s breakthrough novel The World According to Garp (1978) won the National Book Award and was short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize. Showing his versatility, he also received an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for Cider House Rules (2000) and a Lambda Literary Award, given to writers addressing LGBTQ+ issues, in 2013 for In One Person. A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989) is the best-selling of his 16 novels.
After 16 seasons of working Holiday retail hell, six of which I was forced to listen to a looping disco Christmas tape, I run with all possible haste away from Black Sabbath Friday and Soul Sacrifice Cyber Monday.
Instead, I offer a more substantial but totally unattainable Holiday and New Year’s wish list:
Simply put, New Hampshire gambling revenues are up while lottery and liquor store revenues are down. The Big Con here is the state’s willingness to trade long term gambling problems and ruined lives for short term mo’money. Desperate people do desperate things. It’s not if but when New Hampshire will be hit with a gambling scandal. Underage teens around the country are already registering to bet online with personal info “borrowed” from an uncle.
The setting is but a backdrop. While the storyline of the novel entertainingly grabs the reader’s interest, you can’t help but root for Victoria and Lucien, it is the humor that kept me glued to the page.
The long and winding road that landed Hans and Margret Rey into a modest cottage for 20 summers in Waterville Valley starting in the 1950s, is no less enticing than the adventures of their creation, a clever and now-famous monkey named Curious George. The perennial children’s book and now media favorite first appeared in 1941, a year after the Reys fled Paris on bicycles constructed by Hans from a tandem bicycle and spare parts.
This is in response to the recent Ink Link article “It Was Horrifying: Chester Family’s Scare Highlights Gap in NH’s Group Home System.” The article detailed a significantly developmentally-disabled man recently and unfortunately wandering from his Chester home and unexpectedly entering the home of a neighbor.
I moved to Manchester in September, 1978, from the Connecticut flatlands. I was just in time to witness the dart-in-the-forehead angst of Red Sox Nation when Yankee Bucky Dent sent the Sox crashing in a flaming spiral, and then the publication by Viking Press of the novel The Dogs of March by Ernest Hebert.
Picoult’s books have sold over 40 million copies in 34 languages. This is the best of times for the author. Wonder Woman, indeed. She’s the recipient of the New England Booksellers Award for Fiction, New Hampshire’s Literary Award, and Cosmopolitan Magazine’s award for Fearless Fiction. And the honors beat goes on…Picoult was named in 2018 as one of Princeton’s 10 most influential living alumni. Partial company is Michelle Obama and Jeff Bezos.
A new monthly Ink Link column by John Angelom Ink in the Wild, featuring profiles of books and writers, both current and past, who have contributed to New Hampshire’s rich literary tradition.
All ice cream is not equal. Several people have told me recently that New Hampshire was No. 1 in the country in per capita consumption of ice cream.
Lorrie and I have been without a television going on 15 years. Aside from events such as the aforementioned annual religious event of American football, there is precious little that we are tempted to watch in real time.
When it comes to transgender people, one gender identity, gender expression, gender-binary definition or sexual orientation doesn’t begin to describe the 1.4 million Americans who identify themselves as transgender.
Pulitzer Prize-winning humorist Dave Barry penned a book in the 1980s titled Homes and Other Black Holes: The Happy Homeowner’s Guide to Ritual Closing Ceremonies, Newton’s First Law of Furniture Buying, the Lethal Chemicals Man, and Other Perils of the American Dream. The cover depicts a homeowner dumping a wheelbarrow full of money into a demolished foundation. That about covers it.