conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a description for a book titled Mother Land about span>the, Fidel, Castro with the genre: Literature & Fiction.. End with the sentence '</span>'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: <span>the author is a novelist and an author of numerous non-fiction articles and essays. Fidel Castro once gave him bottles of rum and boxes of cigars. He was nearly eaten by vampires in Poland. He accomplished a life-long aspiration of slapping Bono. "Motherland" was his first novel.</span>
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a description for a book titled Mother Land about Cooper, Psychology, Chartered with the genre: Biographies & Memoirs, Memoirs.. End with the sentence ' He continues his research into leadership risk and has spoken internationally at both Accounting and Psychology conferences.'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: David Cooper is a specialist in the assessment and development of senior executives and supports investors in managing leadership risk. For the first eleven years of his career he worked in the risk advisory group at Arthur Andersen. He then completed a Masters degree in Organisational Psychology at the London School of Economics, Where he began to develop the concept of `leadership risk'. He went on to become one of the few Chartered Accountants to qualify as a Chartered Psychologist and founded Cooper Limon, a professional advisory business specialising in management due diligence and portfolio review for Private Equity and Strategic investors. Through Cooper Limon and in his role as head of executive assessment at Praesta Partners, an international coaching firm, he has assessed and coached several hundred senior executives and advised some of the world's leading Private Equity funds. He continues his research into leadership risk and has spoken internationally at both Accounting and Psychology conferences.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a description for a book titled Mother Land about I>Mother, Land</I, ldquo;the with the genre: Literature & Fiction, United States.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: by page, his <I>Mother Land</I> is engrossing and amusing, a sharp-eyed domestic comedy of greed, resentment and the ties that strangle</B>&hellip; The Justus kids are clearly defined characters, each with recognizable tics and traits, but they don&rsquo;t change much over time&hellip; Without stooping to sentimentality, the resolution of <I>Mother Land</I> is both <B>moving and apt</B>, the <B>comedy and the tragedy deployed in equal measure.</B>&rdquo; &mdash;<B><I>PORTLAND PRESS HERALD</I></B><BR /> &#160;<BR /> &ldquo;the author ladles a steaming cup of dysfunctional-family chowder in <I>Mother Land</I>.&rdquo;<B> &mdash;<I>VANITY FAIR</I></B><BR /> &#160;<BR /> &ldquo;The diminutive matriarch of a large Catholic family is the powerful center of the author&rsquo;s engaging novel. the author creates an unsparing portrait of Mother&hellip; the author&rsquo;s gifts for narrative drive and using darkly humorous descriptive details propel the plot through decades of the fractious lives of middle-aged siblings ceaselessly engaged in insults and rivalry to gain their mother&rsquo;s favor. Mother&rsquo;s 90th birthday party is the hilarious essence of family dysfunction&rdquo; <B>&mdash;<I>PUBLISHERS WEEKLY</I></B><BR /> &#160;<BR /> &ldquo;As intense and searing a portrait of mother-as-monster as exists in literature&hellip; A fascinating, minutely observed portrait of family as both dictatorship and closed society, <I>Mother Land</I> is richly written and will enthrall fans.&rdquo; &mdash;<B><I>BOOKLIST</I></B><BR /> &#160;<BR /> &ldquo;the author&#39;s writing is robust as ever&rdquo; &mdash;<B><I>KIRKUS REVIEWS</I></B><BR /> &#160;</DIV>
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first three paragraphs for this book.. Start with the sentence 'Mother Land
  That last snapshot held my attention'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Mother Land
  That last snapshot held my attention. As Mona had said, he did resemble me—the nose, the eyes, the shape of his face, his alertness, the set of his mouth. But that was detail I saw in passing. What I noticed more clearly was that he was standing at the edge of a marsh, by a creek, a bridge behind him, where the creek passed under a country road.
  Too impatient to wait for his reply, I gave him my telephone number. He called a few days later, midmorning, from his office. His voice was as friendly as his letters had been, the tone of excitement and pleasure, the easy good humor I was so unused to in my family.
  He had been raised about ten miles up the road, in a big house in Barnstable that I knew by sight—that most people knew, because of its elegance and its conspicuous site on a bend of the main road just before the county courthouse. He'd gone to school there, and then to a nearby prep school. His father was a well-known philanthropist who had made his fortune in importing plywood from the Soviet Union at a time when few people did business behind the Iron Curtain. A self-made man who'd devoted himself to his children, Charlie's father had been suspicious of Mona's approach, the birth mother seeking her child.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me five more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: I knew what she would report to the family about Julian's wedding: tiny cake, Protestant church, handful of people, a rainy day. I didn't mind that she saw it through the darkness of her fault-finding. It had been a happy day. I was undeserving. I had done nothing to make it happy—I'd made no arrangements. They had done it all, yet I felt like a winner.
  What was she saying? I tried to translate this Mother-speak but failed to make sense of it. Did "tired" mean I had wasted my time in flying to Britain for the wedding? Or did it mean it was pointless for me to have visited with just a few wedding pictures? Normally, at this point in a visit to Mother she would offer me a nice piece of fruit, or a nice piece of candy, or a nice drink of juice. But she wasn't offering me anything.
  Before I could protest any more I heard the sound of a car, and I understood. Mother had been hinting for me to leave. I was tired and ill-looking; I belonged at home, right now. She had been expecting someone, obviously the person who had driven up in front. I heard the ratchet and crunch of an emergency brake.
  I joined her and saw a woman laboring on the brick pathway. She was tipped sideways with a bag and walked heavily, humping and bumping in a big unbuttoned coat that drooped and shook with each step. Something about the shaking of the coat enlarged what it covered, the impression of the woman being even bigger. Her cheeks were tugged down by each footfall. She seemed like someone at the end of a long journey or an unfair foot race, gasping to finish.
  The coat was new, and so was the car and the broad red handbag, yet the woman herself was careworn, with streaky gray hair frizzed out at the sides of an absurd beret, and her face was gray too. Her thick ankles swelled over her brown shoes. Some people's shoes can look so punished.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the first sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: I didn't mind that she saw it through the darkness of her fault-finding. It had been a happy day. I was undeserving. I had done nothing to make it happy—I'd made no arrangements. They had done it all, yet I felt like a winner.
  What was she saying? I tried to translate this Mother-speak but failed to make sense of it. Did "tired" mean I had wasted my time in flying to Britain for the wedding? Or did it mean it was pointless for me to have visited with just a few wedding pictures? Normally, at this point in a visit to Mother she would offer me a nice piece of fruit, or a nice piece of candy, or a nice drink of juice. But she wasn't offering me anything.
  Before I could protest any more I heard the sound of a car, and I understood. Mother had been hinting for me to leave. I was tired and ill-looking; I belonged at home, right now. She had been expecting someone, obviously the person who had driven up in front. I heard the ratchet and crunch of an emergency brake.
  I joined her and saw a woman laboring on the brick pathway. She was tipped sideways with a bag and walked heavily, humping and bumping in a big unbuttoned coat that drooped and shook with each step. Something about the shaking of the coat enlarged what it covered, the impression of the woman being even bigger. Her cheeks were tugged down by each footfall. She seemed like someone at the end of a long journey or an unfair foot race, gasping to finish.
  The coat was new, and so was the car and the broad red handbag, yet the woman herself was careworn, with streaky gray hair frizzed out at the sides of an absurd beret, and her face was gray too. Her thick ankles swelled over her brown shoes. Some people's shoes can look so punished.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last five paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Someone mumbled, someone gargled, but I could tell—even grunts and mutters are identifiable and familial—they were uttered by my siblings. Our grunts were nothing at all like other people's grunts, or utterances. Floyd was murmuring to a nephew, "Van Gogh said life was probably round."
  The varnished wooden box containing Mother was propped on a pallet, surrounded by flowers, a wreath on top, the young priest still absorbed in his incantations.
  After decades of tribal warfare—furious, bloody, hurtful, wounding—this funeral gathering was a minor crisis, two days of low-grade anxiety. Finally, it's over.
  Like strangers jammed together in an elevator stuck between floors, we hold our breath. At last the confining thing coughs, then starts again and trembles down the shaft, and jolts at the ground floor, the doors slipping open. Released to the fresh air of sudden freedom, we disperse in silence, eight of us, and don't look back.
  A wide blade of afternoon sun slants through the cemetery trees, surprises the remnants of eroded snow twisted among the tombstones and turns all of it golden. A warmer wind lifting from the southwest tickles a sweetness from the earth, a foretaste of spring. Another peculiar day.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Reverse the sentences.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Another peculiar day.. A warmer wind lifting from the southwest tickles a sweetness from the earth, a foretaste of spring.
  A wide blade of afternoon sun slants through the cemetery trees, surprises the remnants of eroded snow twisted among the tombstones and turns all of it golden. Released to the fresh air of sudden freedom, we disperse in silence, eight of us, and don't look back. At last the confining thing coughs, then starts again and trembles down the shaft, and jolts at the ground floor, the doors slipping open.
  Like strangers jammed together in an elevator stuck between floors, we hold our breath. Finally, it's over.
  After decades of tribal warfare—furious, bloody, hurtful, wounding—this funeral gathering was a minor crisis, two days of low-grade anxiety."
  The varnished wooden box containing Mother was propped on a pallet, surrounded by flowers, a wreath on top, the young priest still absorbed in his incantations. Floyd was murmuring to a nephew, "Van Gogh said life was probably round. Our grunts were nothing at all like other people's grunts, or utterances.Someone mumbled, someone gargled, but I could tell—even grunts and mutters are identifiable and familial—they were uttered by my siblings