Defending Jacob: A Family Drama (SPOILER ALERT)

Defending Jacob by William Landay is a court drama, a family story, a suspense-thriller all rolled into one. The story is told to us by the father, Andy Barber, the First Assistant District Attorney of a small town in Massachusetts whose life and career took a bizarre turn when his 14-year old son was accused of  murdering a schoolmate.

Landay tells how this once happy suburban family became a portrait of a troubled family.  While he was able to keep his son out of jail and keep his family intact, it resulted to the loss of friends and colleagues. The reader could earlier surmise that what ever the outcome of this trial, Barber is finished.

Landay keeps everyone guessing whether Jacob actually killed his classmate thus laying out the groundwork for everyone to make a judgement.  And then he pulls out a twist.  While Barber insists that his son is not capable of murder, it turned out that violence do run in the family.  It was revealed that Andy's father and Jacob's grandfather is behind bars because of killing a girl.

This revelation will ultimately result in an horrific ending that one would probably not see coming.

The book is a real page turner, the details of what goes on in the life of a defendant in a murder case and how it could impact in the family will keep the reader involved.

(Defending Jacob by William Landay 421 pp.)

Flora Filipina 2012

Last week, we went to see the Flora Filipina Expo 2012, a garden and orchid show at the Quezon Memorial Circle.

It featured garden settings and floral arrangements, as well as orchids. Naturally, it's best seen than read about. Here are some of my favorites.

and here's my favorite display.

Introducing the new iPad

Apple®  introduced earlier the new iPad®, the third generation of its category defining mobile device, featuring a stunning new Retina display, Apple’s new A5X chip with quad-core graphics and a 5 megapixel iSight® camera with advanced optics for capturing amazing photos and 1080p HD video. iPad with Wi-Fi + 4G connects to fast networks worldwide, including AT&T’s and Verizon’s 4G LTE networks, and still delivers the same all-day 10 hour battery life  while remaining amazingly thin and light.

The new iPad’s Retina display delivers four times the number of pixels of iPad 2, so dense that the human eye is unable to distinguish individual pixels when held at a normal distance, making web pages, text, images and video look incredibly sharp and realistic.

from apple.com

With iOS 5.1, the latest update to the world’s most advanced mobile operating system, the new iPad has a number of new features and enhancements including: a redesigned Camera app with video stabilization technology; the ability to delete photos from Photo Stream; support for dictation in English, French, German and Japanese; and Personal Hotspot.

The new iPad also supports dictation, another amazing way to get things done just using your voice. Instead of typing, tap the microphone icon on the keyboard, then say what you want to say and the new iPad listens. Tap done, and iPad converts your words into text. You can use dictation to write messages, take notes, search the web and more.

Morrissey is coming to Manila

It may be almost three decades too late but Morrissey, former front man of my favorite band The Smiths, will have a one night concert here in Manila on May 13, 2012.  Since this is a Greatest Hits Tour, he will be doing his songs as well as from his former band.

Venue of the concert is the World Trade Center in Pasay City. Ticket prices are at PhP5,500 (VIP, reserved seats) and PhP3,500 (Titanium, free seating), and are now Ticketworld.