Calling all parents - Something for you to read

Just bought myself another book at Popular Bookshop. It was on sale at only RM9.90. Just couldn't resist it.

Elaine St. James is a best-selling author and has been acclaimed by The New York Times as the leader of the simplicity movement. She is the author of three national best sellers, Simplify your Life, Inner Simplicity and Living Your Simple life.

Simplify With Kids takes the simplicity movement to its next logical step and is a simple, step-by-step guide for minimizing the distractions that make life with kids a never-ending battle with the clock, our nerves, and with our innate desire to create happy, healthy lives. Contrary to misperceptions, you don't have to drop out to simplify your life; you don't have to move to the woods to simplify your life; you don't have to move across town to simplify your life.

Applying the same successful formula that made St. James' s previous books bestsellers, Simplify With Kids offer practical, down-to-earth advice in one to three page narratives for each of one hundred issues -- vital, perplexing, time-demanding issues that all parents face. Based on personal experience with their children and stepchildren, on the letters received from thousands of readers, and on the information gleaned from focus groups, seminars, and media interviews with people around the country, Simplify With Kids addresses all the areas of family life that need simplifying

Simplify Your Life with Kids offers you solutions for beleagured parents everywhere, with practical down to earth advice.

Click on the link below to view book on Google Book.

SIMPLIFY YOUR LIFE WITH KIDS

Reading Pramoedya Ananta Toer

Picked up a good book to read , The Mute's Soliloquy, after my good friend, Rev. Anthony Loke blogged about Pramoedya's other work Arok of Java .
I had read Pramoedya's earlier work Keluarga Gerilya (published in 1950) back when I was in Form Six for my Malay literature paper . I enjoyed it though it was in Malay. The other was Sandera by Arena Wati.

The Mute's Soliloquy" is a loose autobiography woven together from letters and essays Pramoedya wrote secretly on Buru; he never expected them to survive, but a Catholic priest smuggled them out. The book is an extraordinary mixture of advice to his children, wrenching self-examination and testimony of his time on Buru, a place of shifting, petty rules, grinding labor and indifference to life. "I saw my friends killed by soldiers just for fun," Pramoedya told.

In 1965, Pramoedya Ananta Toer was detained by Indonesian authorities and eventually exiled to the penal island of Buru. Without a formal accusation or trial, the onetime national hero was imprisoned on Buru for eleven years. He survived under brutal conditions, somehow managing to produce his masterwork, the four novels of the Buru Quartet, as well as the remarkable journal entries, essays, and Letters that comprise this moving memoir

Reminiscent of the work of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Mute's Soliloquy is a harrowing portrait of a penal colony and a heartbreaking remembrance of life before it. With a resonance far beyond its particular time and place, it is Pramoedya's crowning achievement -- a passionate tribute to the freedom of the mind and a celebration of the human spirit.

Read tribute to Pramoedya Ananta Toer