I’ve been following Ed Pratt for over a year or so now as he attempts to Unicycle around the world. He’s absolutely smashing it, having unicycled from the UK over Europe, Asia, Australia and New Zealand. I’m very much looking forward to his USA updates. It’s also great to go back to his older videos and see the development he has made as a person and filmmaker. Here is his most recent update:
Jayne Thompson is showing that you don’t have to travel to the other side of the world to have an epic adventure. She is cycling to all 270 London Underground stations which will be a rough distance of 350 miles. She is raising money and awareness for Mind, the mental health charity.
Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda
It’s a book by Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaire of the Canadian Forces.The book chronicles Dallaire’s tour as Force Commander of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) in 1993-1994, during which he witnessed the 1994 Rwandan Genocide.
The book won the 2003 Shaughnessy Cohen Award for Political Writing, and 2004 Governor General’s Award for nonfiction.
Bleak House
It’s a nineteenth century novel by English author Charles Dickens, first published as a serial between March 1852 and September 1853. At the centre of Bleak House is a long-running legal case, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, which came about because someone wrote several conflicting wills. Dickens uses this case to satirise the English judicial system. Though the legal profession criticised Dickens’ satire as exaggerated, this novel helped support a judicial reform movement, which culminated in the enactment of legal reform in the 1870s. A classic recomendation from a lawyer.
Watching the English
In Watching the English anthropologist Kate Fox takes a revealing look at the quirks, habits and foibles of the English people. She puts the English national character under her anthropological microscope, and finds a strange and fascinating culture, governed by complex sets of unspoken rules and byzantine codes of behaviour. A must read for anybody interested in English culture.
War Music
A left field selection from my friend isn a set of poetry. War Music is the working title of British poet Christopher Logue’s long-term project to create a modernist poem based on Homer’s Iliad, begun in 1959. It was originally the name of the first volume of that project, uniting the separately completed Patrocleia (Book 16), GBH (Books 17/18) and Pax (Book 19), which was published in 1981.
*The book links will earn me a penny or two if you decide to buy them here. Personally, I would go to a library and borrow them from there.