Who is Dan Brown?

Dan Brown

Dan Brown is an American author of thriller fiction. He is best known for the 2003 bestselling novel, The Da Vinci Code.

Early life

He was born on June 22, 1964,  in Exeter, New Hampshire, USA. He is the eldest of three children. His early life was influenced by his parents:

• His father, Richard G. Brown, was a teacher of mathematics, and wrote textbooks from 1968 until his retirement in 1997.
• In Addition both of his parents are also singers and musicians, having served as church choir masters.

After graduating from Phillips Exeter, Brown attended Amherst College. Brown spent the 1985 school year abroad in Seville, Spain, where he was enrolled in an art history course at the University of Seville. Brown graduated from Amherst in 1986. 1991, he moved to Hollywood to pursue a career as singer, songwriter and pianist. It was there that he met Blythe Newlon, a woman 12 years his senior, who later became his wife. Dan Brown Started teaching to support himself.

Secrets and Puzzles

The presenece of secrets and puzzles in Dan Brown's novels has their origine in his childhood. In fact, mathematics, music and languages were a common characteristic of his education. When he was a child, he participated in elaborate treasure hunts devised by their father on birthdays and holidays. For example on Christmas Brown and his siblings did not find gifts under the tree, but followed a treasure map with codes and clues throughout their house and even around town to find the gifts. In addition this, Brown spent a lot of time working out anagrams and crossword puzzles.

Career

After dabbling with a musical career, Dan Brown started writing. He read Sidney Sheldon's novels and was influenced by his style especially in the novel The Doomsday Conspiracy. He was inspired to become a writer of thrillers and started working on Digital Fortress, setting much of it in Seville, Spain, where he had studied in 1985. His wife, with whom he co wrote a book with his wife, 187 Men to Avoid: A Guide for the Romantically Frustrated Woman, did much of the promotion of the novel when it was released.
Brown subsequently wrote Deception Point and Angels & Demons, the latter of which was the first to feature the lead character, Harvard symbology expert Robert Langdon.
Brown's first three novels had little success. However, when he released The Da Vinci Code, it quickly became a bestseller, going to the top of the New York Times Best Seller list during its first week of release in 2003. It is now credited with being one of the most popular books of all time, with 81 million copies sold worldwide as of 2009.
Brown's next novel featuring Robert Langdon, The Lost Symbol, was released on September 15, 2009.It had a huge success and according to the publisher, on its first day the book sold over one million in hardcover and e-book versions in the U.S., the U.K. and Canada. The story takes place in Washington D.C. over a period of 12 hours, and features the Freemasons.

Writing habits

Because Dan  Brown does a lot of research, he spends years writing his novels. He has a habit of rising at 4:00am when there are no distractions (a practice he began with Digital Fortress when he had two daytime teaching jobs) and when he feels most productive, in order to give symbolic importance to the first order of business each day. He keeps an antique hourglass on his desk in his lof where he does his writing, so that he can stop briefly every hour to do push-ups, sit-ups and stretching exercises to keep his blood flowing.
Recuring themes in his books include Chritianity, historical events, codes, puzzles, treasure hunts, secretive organizations and academic lectures on obscure topics.

Bibliography

• Digital Fortress, 1998
• Angels & Demons, 2000
• Deception Point, 2001
• The Da Vinci Code, 2003
• The Lost Symbol, 2009

Who is Katrina Kaif?

Katrina Kaif is a British Indian actress and former model. She was born in Hong Kong. Her father is Indian and her mother is British.

Early life

Her parents divorced when she was very young. She began her modeling career at the age fourteen; her first job was for a jewelry campaign. She continued modeling in London under a contract with the Models 1 Agency and did campaigns for houses such as La Senza and Arcadius, and even walked on the London Fashion Week. She moved to Mumbai after meeting London-based filmmaker Kaizad Gustad, who gave her a part in his film Boom (2003). In India, however, filmmakers were initially hesitant to sign her because she could not speak Hindi. But later she was offered a series of roles.

Movies

• Kaif saw moderate success with the 2005 film Sarkar, where she played the bit part of Abhishek Bachchan's girlfriend, and Maine Pyaar Kyun Kiya (2005), where she was paired opposite Salman Khan.
• In 2007, Kaif appeared in her first major hit movie, Namastey London, wherein she starred as a British Indian girl alongside Akshay Kumar for the second time after the box office letdown Humko Deewana Kar Gaye (2006). 
• Her run of hit films continued with Apne, Partner, and Welcome.
• In 2008, she played the villain role for the first time in Abbas-Mustan's hit action thriller Race. She played the role of Saif Ali Khan's secretary who is secretly in love with his hostile stepbrother (played by Akshay Khanna). Kaif's second release of the year was Anees Bazmee's production Singh Is Kinng, opposite Akshay Kumar. The film was a big success at the box office. Kaif's final release of the year, Subhash Ghai's Yuvvraaj, was a commercial failure, but its script has made its way into the Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences for artistic merits, original screenplay with a substance, and the film as a whole.
• Kaif's first release for 2009, New York, with John Abraham, was a critical and commercial success. Kaif's performance was highly regarded.
  She next played a bit role as a biker chick in the multi-starrer action film Blue, popularly known as India's first underwater thriller, which performed decently at the box office. The film was not successful.
  At the year's end, she appeared in Ajab Prem Ki Ghazab Kahani, with Ranbir Kapoor, and De Dana Dan with Akshay Kumar. Both films were commercial successes.
• Kaif's first film of 2010 was Raajneeti, where she appeared opposite Ranbir Kapoor. The film did extremely well at the box office, receiving a blockbuster status. She is also starred in Farah Khan's Tees Maar Khan with Akshay Kumar. The film was released on 24 December 2010. Although the film was not successful, Kaif's item song Sheila Ki Jawani was a hit.
  

Success

Aside from film acting, she has a number of endorsement deals, and is one of the top paid Bollywood actresses in this respect. Katrina Kaif was also voted the sexiest Asian woman in the world by Eastern Eye in the years 2008, 2009 and 2010.

More on Katrina Kaif on Wikipedia

Who is Abdelkebir Khatibi?

Abdelkebir Khatibi

Abdelkebir Khatibi (11 February 1938 – 16 March 2009) was a Moroccan literary critic, novelist and playwright. He was born on February 11, 1939 in the Atlantic port city of El Jadida and died on March 16, 2009. He was greaty influenced by  the rebellious spirit of 1960s counterculture in his late twenties. In his writings, he challenged  the social and political norms upon which the countries of the Maghreb region were built.

His career

A native of the Atlantic port city of El Jadida, Abdelkebir Khatibi was born in the middle period of Morocco's 44-year (1912–56) status as a French protectorate. A French-speaking member of the educated class, he studied sociology at the Sorbonne, receiving a doctorate in 1967. His dissertation, Le Roman maghrébin (The Maghribian Novel), which examines the question of how a novelist could avoid propagandizing in the context of a postrevolutionary society, and its follow-up, Bilan de la sociologie au Maroc (Assessment of Sociology Concerning Morocco) were both published shortly after the Paris Spring unrest of May 1968. He won numerous awards including the Grand Prix de l'Académie française (1994), the Grand Prix of Morocco (1998), Award of l'Afrique méditerranéenne/Maghreb (2003), and the prize of la Société des Gens de Lettres (2008) awarded for the first time to an arab author.

Bibliography

Major books

• Études sociologiques sur le Maroc [Sociological Studies Regarding Morocco] (1971)
• La Mémoire tatouée [Tattooed Memory] (1971) ISBN 2-264-00220-4
• La Blessure du nom propre [The Wound Under Its Own Name] (1974)
• Le Livre du sang [The Book of Blood] (1979) Gallimard ISBN 2-07-028677-0
• De la mille et troisième nuit [From the Thousand and Third Night] (1980)
• Amour bilingue [Bilingual Love] (1983); Love in Two Languages (1990 English translation by Richard Howard, published by University of Minnesota Press)
• Un été à Stockholm' [A Summer in Stockholm] (1992), Flamarion ISBN 2-08-066473-5
• Triptyque de Rabat [Rabat Triptych] (1993)

Plays

• La Mort des artistes [The Death of the Artists] (1964)
• Le Prophète voilé [The Veiled Prophet] (1979)

Who is Muammar Gaddafi?

Muammar Gaddafi

Muammar Gaddafi is commonly referred to as Colonel Gaddafi. He has been the leader of Libya since a military coup he led in 1969. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Gaddafi's government was considered a Pariah state by the West, denounced for many things:

• oppressing internal dissidence,
• acts of state-sponsored terrorism,
• assassination of expatriate opposition leaders,
• and crass nepotism which amassed a multi-billion fortune for himself and his family.

Gaddafi renamed the Libyan Arab Republic to Jamahiriya in 1977, based on his socialist and nationalist political philosophy published in Green Book.

Green Book

The green book consists of three parts:

• The Solution of the Problem of Democracy: 'The Authority of the People' (published in late 1975)
• The Solution of the Economic Problem: 'Socialism' (published in early 1977)
• The Social Basis of the Third International Theory (published in September 1981)

The Green Book rejects modern liberal democracy, "free press", and capitalism. Democracy in Libya is based on direct democracy in the form of popular committees. (However this system is limited by the fact that Gadaffi himself appoints a cabinet and departamental ministers, and the influence of unelected revolutionary committees throughout the government.) Freedom of speech is based on state ownership of all book publishers, newspapers, television and radio stations, on the grounds that private ownership would be undemocratic. (At least one observer has called the resulting media "dull" and lacking in a "clash" of ideas.) Libya's economic system is based on the premise that all employees must be "partners not wage-workers", and forbids paying employees a wage in return for labor

Dictatorship

In 1979, he relinquished the title of prime minister, and has since been called the "The Brother Leader" or "The Guide" in Libya's Socialist Revolution.He is the longest serving of all current non-royal national leaders and he is one of the longest-serving rulers in history. Gaddafi was a firm supporter of OAPEC (Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries) and led a Pan-African campaign for a United States of Africa. After the 1986 bombing of Libya and the 1993 imposition of UN sanctions, Gaddafi gradually sought more benign relations with the west, resulting in the lifting of UN sanctions in 2003.

Protests

In early February 2011, major political protests (inspired by recent similar events in Tunisia, Egypt and other parts of the Arab world), which quickly turned into a general uprising, broke out in Libya against Gaddafi's government. After losing much of his country to rebels and experiencing mass defections, Gaddafi defiantly vowed to "die a martyr" if necessary in his fight to maintain power.

Source: Wikipedia