The Book of My Lives

From Sarajevo to Chicago, Aleksandar Hemon tells the engaging story of his many lives.

By Lisa Weidenfeld / March 25, 2013

The Book of My Lives By Aleksandar Hemon Farrar, Straus and Giroux 224 pp.

Enlarge

Aleksandar Hemon?s The Book of My Lives is a series of mostly chronological autobiographical essays, beginning with his youth in Sarajevo and moving on through his life as an adult in Chicago.

Skip to next paragraph

' + google_ads[0].line2 + '
' + google_ads[0].line3 + '

'; } else if (google_ads.length > 1) { ad_unit += ''; } } document.getElementById("ad_unit").innerHTML += ad_unit; google_adnum += google_ads.length; return; } var google_adnum = 0; google_ad_client = "pub-6743622525202572"; google_ad_output = 'js'; google_max_num_ads = '1'; google_feedback = "on"; google_ad_type = "text"; google_adtest = "on"; google_image_size = '230x105'; google_skip = '0'; // -->

Subscribe Today to the Monitor

Click Here for your FREE 30 DAYS of
The Christian Science Monitor
Weekly Digital Edition

Hemon, a ?New Yorker? contributor who has primarily written fiction outside the magazine, casts an amusingly jaundiced eye back at his younger self. It?s somewhat unexpected, given the still-vivid memories of the violence that took place in Sarajevo, but it turns out that, even in the face of political and social catastrophe, a country can still be filled with feckless youths who believe that every action they take is the most radical and exciting action ever.

In these essays, Hemon manages to write about his own younger days in a way that makes them both uniquely his own, but also universal.

Not everyone has a themed anti-fascism or maybe accidentally pro-fascism birthday party, as a friend of his does, but almost everyone can remember being just as opinionated when they were young. In the US, of course, many of us may recover from an embarrassing party in the wake of a few goofy Facebook photos.That Hemon's fascism party ends with the state police questioning him about his commitment to the country is the particularly Bosnian wrinkle to the story.

The essays, written for a series of different publications, can sometimes shift tonally. Early essays about Hemon's gang of childhood friends are so lighthearted as to be almost a little frivolous. Hemon?s amusement at his own childhood might be a little greater than the reader?s. Fans of Hemon familiar with past work like the heartbreaking ?The Lazarus Project? might be a little surprised to see how much of a teddy bear the author appears to be in real life.

This isn?t to say he skirts serious topics. An essay about his love of and lack of skill in chess touches on fatherhood, both in his relationship with his own father and through the story of one of his chess companions, whose son was shot in the street during the Islamic Revolution in Tehran. Yet overall the tone of the book is not one of pessimism or despair. Despite a life that has seen his family displaced and his childhood home ravaged nearly beyond repair, Hemon seems to remain mostly good-humored.

The final essay proves the exception. It depicts an event of such epically tragic proportions that to describe much of it here would take away from the experience of reading it. Suffice to say, the fact that Hemon continues to write with any humor at all is nothing short of miraculous.

One of the cheerier aspects of the book is Hemon?s long blossoming romance with the city of Chicago. It?s the kind of love letter more often associated with New York. Hemon is an inveterate walker from his days of being a young writer in Sarajevo, and he walks all over Chicago to get a feel for it once he?s unintentionally emigrated there because of the violence back home.

Hemon's initial plan to visit the country for a short stay unexpectedly coincides with the worsening of tensions in his own country, and he finds himself applying for refugee status. Forced to learn to love a new home, Hemon finds himself enchanted with the lake, the neighborhoods, the people, the food. One of the essays is simply a list of reasons he loves it there. The poetry in that list evokes a magical city of random gorgeous images and events.

Visitors to Chicago may complain about the cold, but Hemon finds beauty in the way that very same cold makes people huddle together under the heat lamps on the elevated train tracks, ?an image of human solidarity enforced by the cruelty of nature, the story of Chicago and of civilization.? It takes a special love for the city to stand under those warming lights in the frigid cold and think about anything besides when the next train will be coming. That this essay turned out to be one he wrote for a compilation his future wife was editing only adds to the overall sense that the relationship between Hemon and his adopted home is a romance.

?The Book of My Lives? may not turn out to be the most substantial work in Hemon?s oeuvre. ?The Lazarus Project,? despite being a work of fiction, more powerfully describes the pain of diaspora common to people forced to leave their home country. Nonetheless, Hemon is engaging and interesting company, and the story of his life ? or lives ? is one worth telling.

Lisa Weidenfeld is a Monitor contributor.

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/csm/~3/EBglUNYaEXg/The-Book-of-My-Lives

washington redskins New Year Outback Bowl Carly Rae Jepsen dallas cowboys Rose Bowl 2013 kim kardashian

Lightning Launcher: More customizations than you can shake a stick at

One of the great features of Android is the ability to change launchers, and within that category the ability to go completely off the rails with customization -- Lightning Launcher is one of those options. It's going to take some work, but the incredible set of controls and changes you can make with this launcher may be worth it if you're motivated. Best of all, it's free as well.

Stick around with us after the break and see how far the customization can go with Lightning Launcher -- users looking for a basic launcher with a few extra perks need not apply.

read more

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/androidcentral/~3/YsxECt8vXRs/story01.htm

Jodi Arias Heat Harlem Shake mediterranean diet chase kim kardashian pregnant papa johns dominos

Decoding the genetic history of the Texas longhorn

Mar. 25, 2013 ? Longhorn cattle have a hybrid global ancestry, according to a study by University of Texas at Austin researchers published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The study of the genome of the Longhorn and related breeds tells a fascinating global history of human and cattle migration. It traces back through Christopher Columbus' second voyage to the New World, the Moorish invasion of Spain and the ancient domestication of the aurochs in the Middle East and India.

"It's a real Texas story, an American story," said Emily Jane McTavish, a doctoral student in the lab of biology professor David Hillis. "For a long time people thought these New World cattle were domesticated from a pure European lineage. But it turns out they have a more complex, more hybrid, more global ancestry, and there's evidence that this genetic diversity is partially responsible for their greater resilience to harsh climatic conditions."

To reconstruct the genetic history of Texas Longhorns, McTavish, Hillis and colleagues from the University of Missouri-Columbia analyzed almost 50,000 genetic markers from 58 cattle breeds. The most comprehensive such analysis to date, it was funded in part by the Cattlemen's Texas Longhorn Conservancy, which helped the scientists get access to samples used by ranchers.

Among the findings was that the Texas Longhorn breed are direct descendants of the first cattle in the New World. The ancestral cattle were brought over by Columbus in 1493 to the island of Hispaniola. They traveled the rest of the way to the continent in 1521 on the ships of later Spanish colonists.

Over the next two centuries the Spanish moved the cattle north, arriving in the area that would become Texas near the end of the 17^th century. The cattle escaped or were turned loose on the open range, where they remained mostly wild for the next two centuries

"It was known on some level that Longhorns are descendants from cattle brought over by early Spanish settlers," said Hillis, the Alfred W. Roark Centennial Professor in the College of Natural Sciences, "but they look so different from the cattle you see in Spain and Portugal today. So there was speculation that there had been interbreeding with later imports from Europe. But their genetic signature is co mpletely consistent with being direct descendants of the cattle Columbus brought over."

The study reveals that being a "pure" descendant of cattle from the Iberian peninsula indicates a more complicated ancestry than was understood. Approximately 85 percent of the Longhorn genome is "taurine," descended from the ancient domestication of the wild aurochs that occurred in the Middle East 8,000-10,000 years ago. As a result, Longhorns look similar to purer taurine breeds such as Holstein, Hereford and Angus, which came to Europe from the Middle East.

The other 15 percent of the genome is "indicine," from the other ancient domestication of the aurochs, in India. These indicine cattle, which often have a characteristic hump at the back of the neck, spread into Africa and from there up to the Iberian peninsula

"It's consistent with the Moorish invasions from the 8th to the 13th centuries," said Hillis. "The Moors brought cattle with them, and brought these African genes, and of course the European cattle were there as well. All those influences come together in the cattle of the Iberian peninsula, which were used to stock the Canary Islands, which is where Columbus stopped and picked up cattle on his second voyage and brought them to the New World."

Once in the New World, most of the cattle eventually went feral. Under the pressures of natural selection they were able to re-evolve ancient survival traits that had been artificially bred out of their European ancestors. Selection for longer horns allowed them to defend against wild predators. They became leaner and more able to survive heat and drought.

"The Longhorns that were in the area when Anglo settlers arrived almost looked more like the ancestral aurochsen than like modern cattle breeds," said McTavish. "Living wild on the range, they had to become very self sufficient. Having that genetic reservoir from those wild ancestors made it possible for a lot of those traits to be selected for once again."

McTavish said it's possible the indicine heritage in particular helped, because the climate in India and Africa tended to be hotter and drier than in Europe.

The Longhorns remained wild on the range, or very loosely managed, until after the Civil War, when Texans rounded up the wild herds and began supplying beef to the rest of the country. Since then the fortunes of the Longhorns have waxed and waned depending on how their unique genetic profile intersects with the changing needs of American consumers.

"The Longhorns almost went extinct starting in the late 19^th century," said Hillis. "A lot of the value of cattle at that time had to do with the fat they had, because the primary lighting source people had was candles, made of tallow, and Texas Longhorns have very low fat content. Ranchers began fencing off the range and importing breeds from Europe that had higher fat content. That's when Americans began developing their taste for fatty beef, so then the other cattle became valuable in that respect as well. The only reason the Longhorns didn't go extinct was because half a dozen or so ranchers kept herds going even though they knew that these other breeds were more valuable in some sense. They appreciated that the Longhorns were hardier, more self-sufficient."

Hillis, who raises Longhorns of his own out at the Double Helix Ranch, said that the winds of history now seem to be blowing in the Longhorns' direction. They can survive in hotter, drier climates, which will become increasingly important as the world warms. They provide lean and grass-fed beef, which is seen as healthier by many consumers. And their genes may prove valuable to ranchers, who can use the increasingly sophisticated genetic information to selectively breed the Longhorns' toughness into other breeds of cattle.

"It's another chapter in the story of a breed that is part of the history of Texas," he said.

History video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=G7-BlxmKuFM

Share this story on Facebook, Twitter, and Google:

Other social bookmarking and sharing tools:

---

Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of Texas at Austin. The original article was written by Daniel Oppenheimer.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

---

Journal Reference:

1. Emily Jane McTavish, Jared E. Decker, Robert D. Schnabel, Jeremy F. Taylor, and David M. Hillis. New World cattle show ancestry from multiple independent domestication events. PNAS, March 25, 2013 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1303367110

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_science/~3/9vvxqejlDLA/130325160514.htm

steam kristin chenoweth Robert Blake BLK Water ESPYs daniel tosh Jason Kidd

Adam Levine is HOT in His Sexiest Shirtless Photos

Adam Levine loves to take his shirt off. Like, we're talking L-O-V-E type of love here. The man is seen shirtless about as much as he's not (only a slight exaggeration) and frequently flaunts his toned physique in his music videos, his magazine appearances, and even on TV.

Source: http://www.ivillage.com/adam-levines-sexiest-shirtless-photos/1-a-529410?dst=iv%3AiVillage%3Aadam-levines-sexiest-shirtless-photos-529410

oscar nominations C7 Corvette tom brady denver post Scandal denver broncos new england patriots

Dell says Blackstone, Icahn offers may be superior

By Jessica Toonkel and Paritosh Bansal

(Reuters) - Dell Inc said it received alternative proposals from Blackstone Group LP and Carl Icahn that could be superior to the $24.4 billion offer from founder Michael Dell and private equity fund Silver Lake Partners last month.

Michael Dell is willing to explore the possibility of working with third parties regarding alternative offers, the company said on Monday.

However, Dell said the special board committee considering a sale continues to support the company's pending sale to Michael Dell and Silver Lake Partners.

The committee was evaluating the new takeover proposals to decide whether either or both offers are likely to trump the existing take-private deal, Reuters reported on Sunday, quoting a source familiar with the discussions.

Icahn has offered $15 per share for 58 percent of Dell, while Blackstone has proposed paying more than $14.25 per share. The Silver Lake group had agreed to buy all of Dell for $13.65 per share.

Dell's shares were up 4 percent at $14.67 in heavy premarket trading on Monday.

Icahn Enterprises raised the prospect of working with Blackstone, saying the two groups had held preliminary talks.

"We plan to review the Blackstone proposal in greater detail," Icahn Enterprises said on Monday, adding that the Michael Dell-Silver Lake proposal "significantly undervalues Dell."

One issue for the special committee is how to compare the three proposals. Both Blackstone's and Icahn's proposals envision that a portion of Dell's stock will remain publicly traded.

Silver Lake was not reachable for comment outside normal business hours in the United States.

"We continue to believe a higher bid than the current $13.65 per share offer will likely be offered but, based on our assumptions, a $15 per share bid may be a threshold," Wells Fargo Securities Maynard Um said in a note.

"We believe a higher Silver Lake/Dell bid might still be a more attractive and strategic option, assuming information regarding the public stub and financial services sale is accurate," he said.

The rival bids for Dell throw the future of the PC-maker into question. A "go-shop" period - during which the target company actively looks for rival offers - for a deal of this size rarely yields competing offers. The bids now could potentially turn the sale of Dell into a three-horse race, which could drag out for months.

It also could threaten the future of Michael Dell, who founded the technology giant at the age of 19 with just $1,000. Under the Silver Lake plan, he planned to contribute his roughly 16 percent share of Dell's equity to the deal, along with cash from his investment firm MSD Capital, and to remain CEO of the company. Silver Lake is putting up $1.4 billion in the deal.

The Silver Lake group has no plans to increase or amend its offer until Dell's special committee comes out with a ruling on the rival proposals, two sources close to the matter said late on Sunday. They said for now the buyout firm and Michael Dell planned to move forward with their current deal.

But the current plan to take the company private has come under attack from several high-profile Dell shareholders such as Southeastern Asset Management and T. Rowe Price.

The shareholders have said that his offer undervalues the company and pledged to vote against the deal, which requires a majority of shareholders, excluding the founder, to pass.

Brian Marshall, an analyst at ISI Group said in a report on Sunday that he did not expect the Silver Lake group to raise its offer meaningfully above the rival bids, "given significant challenges facing the PC business and a long transformation ahead."

RIVAL BIDS

Under Icahn's proposal, Dell shareholders will have a choice of electing cash or stock, but there would be a cap on the amount of cash they could get, the source said.

In other words, if all Dell shareholders chose to cash out, they could only sell 58 percent of their stock, retaining the other 42 percent that will remain publicly traded.

Icahn is being advised by investment bank Jefferies Group Inc. He plans to fund his bid with his own money, Dell's cash as well as new debt.

The activist investor, who has taken a stake in Dell, earlier this month demanded Dell pay out $15.7 billion in special dividends. He is no longer asking for that, the source said.

Jefferies declined to comment on Sunday.

Blackstone recently hired Dell's former vice president of corporate strategy, David Johnson.

Under Blackstone's proposal, Dell also would have a certain amount of stock publicly traded. But unlike the Icahn proposal, Blackstone has proposed buying out any shareholder that wants to cash out of Dell.

Blackstone is being advised by Morgan Stanley, which has also given it a highly confident letter of financing, the source said.

Morgan Stanley declined to comment on Sunday.

There have also been some conversations about the Blackstone group selling Dell's financial services business, but that is not part of the current proposal, the source said.

NEXT STEPS

Dell was regarded as a model of innovation as recently as the early 2000s, pioneering online ordering of custom-configured PCs and working closely with Asian component suppliers and manufacturers to assure rock-bottom production costs.

But as of 2012's fourth quarter, Dell's share of the global PC market had slipped to just above 10 percent from 12.5 percent a year earlier as its shipments tumbled 20 percent, according to research house IDC.

Michael Dell returned to the company as CEO in 2007 after a brief hiatus, but has been unable to engineer a turnaround thus far. Dell's focus on corporate computing in recent years has yet to yield results, critics note.

Competing successfully against incumbents, including IBM and Hewlett-Packard, will not be easy no matter what the corporate structure.

A source earlier said that Dell had slashed its internal forecast for fiscal 2013 operating profit to about $3 billion - down sharply from the $3.7 billion it had predicted previously. The source added that more details will be revealed in a proxy filing which is expected by the end of this week.

Meanwhile, if the special committee of the board decides that either - or both - of the rival bids for Dell are reasonably likely to lead to superior offers, Icahn and Blackstone will have to present firm bids for Dell. The negotiations are likely to take weeks, the source said.

At that point, the special committee will again need to decide whether the firm bids from Icahn and Blackstone, which include features such as committed financing, were superior to the Silver Lake-Michael Dell agreement.

If they are superior, Silver Lake and Michael Dell will get one shot at revising their original bid. Unlike most other go-shop processes, where the original bidders get several chances to match rival bids, Dell has given its founder and Silver Lake the right to do so only once.

(Additional reporting by Nadia Damouni and Greg Roumeliotis in New York and Sayantani Ghosh in Bangalore; Editing by Theodore d'Afflisio, Stephen Coates and Saumyadeb Chakrabarty)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/dells-board-evaluates-rival-bids-source-004054117--sector.html

stoudemire jordan hill tony nominations dark knight trailer dallas mavericks washington capitals delmon young

The PS4's processor and performance: what we know and what we think we know

After all the press events, TV cameos and probing interviews, what do we really know about the PS4? The announcement of the next-gen console is a prime example of having an abundance of specs and a lack of knowledge. Although Sony put out a sheet of stats about the console's processor and memory, many of the words it used -- Jaguar cores, compute units, unified memory -- are more ambiguous than they may sound.

Nevertheless, even with all these foggy bits, there are some things -- five, in fact -- that we probably can predict about the PS4's hardware. They're listed after the break in order of decreasing certainty. All the way from confident logic down to... well, not quite flailing around with a butter knife during a power cut, but you get the picture.

Filed under: Gaming, Sony

Comments

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/02/25/playstation-4-processor/

solar storms uganda the parent trap invisible children kony 2012 space weather sunspots pac 12 tournament

An App Called PAUL Predicts The Videos You Want

With tablets and smartphones consuming more and more video content, a new app for Android simply called ?PAUL? aims to ease that ever-increasing network strain by using a predictive cache/download algorithm. Similar to peak-shaving in electrical grids, PAUL begins to predict your video consumption habits and downloads videos that it thinks you'll like, whenever you're logged into a WiFi network.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/OB4Ae60H04o/

al gore la dodgers lawrence o donnell magic johnson jetblue pilot solicitor general neighborhood watch