Word: townes
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...straightforward of the two. Davidar's narrator Vijay, a journalist, recounts the story of the first few years of his career working for the Indian Secularist, a tiny journal in Mumbai. After the bloody anti-Muslim riots of 1992, Vijay is sent by his editor to a mountain tea town where a religious shrine threatens to become the rallying point for another bout of violence. The novel is both artful rhetoric and page-turning thriller. Davidar, the former head of publishing giant Penguin's India operations (and now Penguin's top man in Canada), keeps the story rolling on even...
...size sex doll named Bianca--some folks have trouble accepting it. Brother Gus (Paul Schneider) is concerned that Lars found "a fiancé in a box." One guy mutters that Lars is "in love with that slutty hunk of silicone." But most of the other residents of this wintry Midwestern town go with the flow. They've been urging the cripplingly shy Lars to get a girlfriend. And this one is gorgeous enough to be an instant local celebrity; she looks like Angelina Jolie but smaller and less animated. So let Lars be her Brad Pitt or even her Billy...
Lars and the Real Girl, which begins as a standard indie study of the sympathetic oddball, soon reveals itself as a gentle comedy of community. Prodded by the town doctor (Patricia Clarkson), Gus and his pregnant wife Karin (Emily Mortimer) figure out that for Lars, Bianca is not a sex object but a love object--an outlet for the tenderness he has never been able to express and that his indulgent friends are thrilled to see bloom. Most movies celebrate the journey to another place. Lars pursues the counterargument--that most of us are defined by our past...
Children in Taiji often wolf down tasty school lunches of short-finned pilot whale. Deep-fried dolphin and sweet-and-sour minke whale are also occasional cafeteria offerings in this small fishing town, where sea mammals have long been considered a reliable source of protein. Taiji (pop. 3,600) is proudly regarded as the birthplace of Japan's 400-year-old whaling industry. But Hisato Ryono, a local assemblyman whose uncle used to work as a commercial whaler, is having second thoughts about schools serving his sons flippered fare. Not because he is finally bowing to international opposition...
Ryono is up in arms because recent tests show that dolphin meat sold in local supermarkets has mercury levels up to 29 times the acceptable maximum set by the Japanese Health Ministry. But these alarming results have not led the town government to ban dolphin meat from school cafeterias. Quite the contrary: Taiji officials are pushing ahead with plans to finish building a $2.9 million processing plant, roughly half of which will be reserved for butchering cetaceans--which include dolphins as well as whales. The mayor has expressed hopes that the new facility will lead to more sea-mammal hunting...