title: Invisible: A Memoir
author:  Hugues de Montalembert 
description: Blinded in a senseless attack in his New York home in 1978, de Montalembert, then a filmmaker and painter, was violently forced out of his intensely visual world. In this raw memoir, more a brainstorming session than a narrative, he approaches his new life with stunning directness, navigating the environs of Manhattan and, not much later, Bali and Greenland, with precocious new confidence and ability. He's also painfully honest about the affects of his blindness, refusing the comfort of standard tropes about spirituality but finding wonder in the kindness of absolute strangers, isolation from those closest to him, and other un-thought-of moments of triumph and despair stemming from the way his condition affects his closest relationships. A French-born artist, de Montalembert will draw inevitable comparisons to Jean-Dominique Bauby (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly), and de Montalembert's effort is certainly a more challenging read, stylistically: broken, brief, at times like a prose poem. It depends on the reader whether this approach makes for a cumulative impact, or just gets tiring. Still, de Montalembert vital, determined voice is worth attending. <br />Copyright  Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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  Kushiel’s Chosen
  
    
  
   _Kushiel 2_
  
   __
  
  Jacqueline Carey
  
  One
  
  No one would deny that I have known hardship in my time, brief though it has
  been for all that I have done in it. This, I think, I may say without
  boastfulness. If I answer now to the title of Comtesse de Montrève and my name
  is listed in the peerage of Terre d'Ange, still I have known what it is to
  have all that I possess torn from me; once, when I was but four years of age
  and my birth-mother sold me into servitude to the Court of Night-Blooming
  Flowers, and twice, when my lord and mentor Anafiel Delaunay was slain, and
  Melisande Shahrizai betrayed me into the hands of the Skaldi.
  
  I have crossed the wilds of Skaldia in the dead of winter, and faced the wrath
  of the Master of the Straits on the teeming waters. I have been the plaything
  of a barbarian warlord, and I __ have lost my dearest friend to an eternity of
  lonely isolation. I have seen the horrors of war and the deaths of my
  companions