Prairie Fox Reads

  Language, Power, and the Limits of Free Speech: A Review of Speechless by Michael J. Knowles Politics | Nonfiction | History | Philosophy | 383 pages | First published June 22, 2021 Rating: ★★★½☆ In Speechless: Controlling Words, Controlling Minds , conservative commentator Michael J. Knowles argues that political conflicts over language are not peripheral disputes about manners or etiquette. They are struggles over culture, morality, and political authority. Whoever determines which words may be spoken, he contends, gains considerable power to define what society is permitted to regard as true, respectable, or even imaginable. Knowles’s central claim is deliberately provocative: conservatives have misunderstood the modern debate over free speech. By defending a supposedly neutral marketplace in which every idea is treated as equally entitled to public expression, they have failed to protect the moral and cultural principles that once sustained American institutions. In his view...

  Colleen Hoover Grand Central Publishing, 2018/2021 (ebook/print editions) 336 pages (softcover edition reviewed) Disclosure: This review is based on a close reading of Colleen Hoover’s novel and public bibliographic information. It evaluates the book using objective criteria—plot & premise, characterization, pacing & tension, prose/style, structure & point of view, thematic depth, originality, and emotional impact—assigning scores (1–5) with evidence-based justification and concluding with an aggregated assessment.   Overview Verity is a genre‑blending psychological thriller with strong romantic and domestic‑noir elements. Struggling writer Lowen Ashleigh is hired to finish a bestselling series after author Verity Crawford’s incapacitating injury. While cataloguing Verity’s materials, Lowen discovers an unpublished, confessional manuscript that radically reframes the Crawford family’s tragic past. Hoover combines escalating moral dilemmas, unreliable testimony, ...

  Malibu Rising By Taylor Jenkins Reid Genre: Historical Fiction / Family Saga / Contemporary Literary Fiction Publication Year: 2021 My Rating: ★★★★★ (5/5) The Family You Come From and the Family You Choose Some novels are built around a single night. The best ones reveal an entire lifetime within it. In Malibu Rising , Taylor Jenkins Reid takes what appears to be a glamorous summer party and transforms it into a powerful exploration of family, abandonment, identity, and the secrets that simmer beneath even the most enviable lives. Set during a single August day in 1983, the novel follows the famous Riva siblings as they prepare for an annual party that will ultimately change everything. Readers know from the beginning that the Riva mansion will burn. The question is not whether disaster is coming. The question is why. Yet the fire itself is merely a symbol. What Reid is truly interested in is the emotional wreckage that accumulates long before a match is struck. ...