A Single Thread: The Sunday Times Bestseller

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October 1962 in Washington, DC. Youngest of 3 children. Father was a photographer for The Washington Post. Multithreaded processes can be implemented as user-level threads or kernel-level threads. Details about these are provided using the following diagram −

Mrs. Speedwell sniffed. “Don’t bother. I may be dead by then.” One of Tom’s best qualities was that he knew when to keep quiet. But it was not easy to meet men, because there were two million fewer of them than women. After the Great War took both her beloved brother and her fiancé, Violet Speedwell has become a "surplus woman," one of a generation doomed to a life of spinsterhood after the war killed so many young men. Yet Violet cannot reconcile herself to a life spent caring for her grieving, embittered mother. After countless meals of boiled eggs and dry toast, she saves enough to move out of her mother's place and into the town of Winchester, home to one of England's grandest cathedrals. There, Violet is drawn into a society of broderers--women who embroider kneelers for the Cathedral, carrying on a centuries-long tradition of bringing comfort to worshippers. Purtroppo il libro è piuttosto mediocre, senza né infamia né lode, fino a tre quarti destinato a due solitarie stelle si è risollevato un filo a poche pagine dalla fine. If you have been using Javascript for a while then you may come across the phrase that it’s a single threaded language.

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The multiple threads of a given process may be executed concurrently (via multithreading capabilities), sharing resources such as memory, while different processes do not share these resources. In particular, the threads of a process share its executable code and the values of its dynamically allocated variables and non- thread-local global variables at any given time. Thank you to the team at LoveReading UK, for sending me a copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. Il ricamo a punto croce è un'arte nobile e antica, l'800 è stato il suo secolo d'oro e si è ricamato di tutto: cuscini tovaglie, lenzuola arazzi; l'iconografia classica della donna di quel secolo è il viso sottomesso, piegato sul tombolo e le dita che scorrono sulla tela. Well, it’s on her hands. If I don’t wake up one morning and no one discovers me dead in my bed for days, she’ll be sorry then! Or maybe she won’t be. Maybe she’ll carry on as usual.”

Of course, life as an independent woman in 1932 is hard. A typist for Southern Counties Insurance, Violet barely makes enough money to cover her rent at Mrs. Harvey's boardinghouse. Budgeting for one hot dinner a week and subsisting on margarine and Marmite sandwiches leaves Violet practically starving. She's emotionally starving, too. Chevalier ( New Boy, 2017, etc.) masterfully portrays the bleak lives of the “surplus women” left to carry on after a generation of young men—their potential husbands—were killed in World War I. Telling the tale of the Lost Generation from a woman's perspective, Chevalier fills in the outlines of these forgotten women with unending penny-pinching, mended dresses, and lonely evenings with tea and a Trollope novel. Yet a chance glimpse into a special service at her church opens the door to Violet’s healing: She finds the broderers, a group of women embroidering gorgeous, colorful seats and kneelers for the church. Led by the vibrant Louisa Pesel (and her dour assistant, Mrs. Biggins), the broderers' guild offers Violet a chance to make something beautiful and lasting in a world that has been dark and has cut off life at its knees for too long. In Chevalier’s novel, the embroidery circle becomes a metaphorical tapestry, threading all these women together. Soon Violet has not only joined the circle, but also made unexpected friends. Violet also discovers her own courage to try for love, a love her society would condemn, but in these days and in this author’s hands, all love is sacred. Synchronization costs. As thread context switch on modern CPUs can cost up to 1 million CPU cycles, [16] it makes writing efficient multithreading programs difficult. In particular, special attention has to be paid to avoid inter-thread synchronization from being too frequent. You’ll hear echoes of the estimable Barbara Pym as Violet’s heels clip across the cathedral’s inner close. Allusions to casual sex and lesbian passion notwithstanding, days are punctuated by cups of tea and people remain largely trapped by their manners. At one particularly stirring moment, instead of finding herself kissed, Violet is treated to a three-course meal, with custard on her apple crumble and cream in her coffee. “Afterwards she felt almost sated,” Chevalier deadpans. Meanwhile, on the wireless, news of Adolf Hitler’s election in Germany casts an ominous shadow.The visions of Winchester Cathedral came alive and of course I had to search out more of those, too, as well as bell ringing of which I knew little. Now I can understand the meaning behind “ringing a peal” over someone! The story is grounded in life as these characters would have seen it with no unbelievable hints of what was, unfortunately, to come. The growing concerns about Germany are touched on but just a bit in terms of what would have been heard on the wireless or read in newspapers. Tracy Chevalier centers A Single Thread around the majesty of the Cathedral in Winchester with its mighty presence and its abundant history. Winchester Cathedral becomes the focal point of what has occured in the past in its community and what is transpiring in early May of 1932.

D'altronde durante la guerra l'arte del ricamo veniva insegnata anche ai soldati convalescenti perché il ricamo ha un effetto terapeutico. Threads are sometimes implemented in userspace libraries, thus called user threads. The kernel is unaware of them, so they are managed and scheduled in userspace. Some implementations base their user threads on top of several kernel threads, to benefit from multi-processor machines ( M:N model). User threads as implemented by virtual machines are also called green threads. Fibers are an even lighter unit of scheduling which are cooperatively scheduled: a running fiber must explicitly " yield" to allow another fiber to run, which makes their implementation much easier than kernel or user threads. A fiber can be scheduled to run in any thread in the same process. This permits applications to gain performance improvements by managing scheduling themselves, instead of relying on the kernel scheduler (which may not be tuned for the application). Parallel programming environments such as OpenMP sometimes implement their tasks through fibers. [7] [8] Closely related to fibers are coroutines, with the distinction being that coroutines are a language-level construct, while fibers are a system-level construct.Simplified sharing and communication of threads: unlike processes, which require a message passing or shared memory mechanism to perform inter-process communication (IPC), threads can communicate through data, code and files they already share. Being untestable. In general, multithreaded programs are non-deterministic, and as a result, are untestable. In other words, a multithreaded program can easily have bugs which never manifest on a test system, manifesting only in production. [15] [14] This can be alleviated by restricting inter-thread communications to certain well-defined patterns (such as message-passing).

Violet’s and Louisa’s lives intersect on May 19, 1932, when Violet, a typist for Southern Counties Insurance, is on her way to buy a typewriter ribbon. Her dull job requires her to complete application forms to “insure someone’s life, house, automobile, boat…a meaningless, repetitive act that becomes a soothing meditation, lulling her into a state where she did not think; she simply was.” The next day at work she spied on the notice board a position for a typist in the regional Winchester office, which was doing well despite the depressed economy. Violet clutched her cup of tea and closed her eyes. Don’t sigh, she thought. When she opened them she went to see the manager. Violet was surprised that her life fitted into so few suitcases and boxes. When Violet Speedwell joins the Winchester Cathedral broderers it introduces her, and I suspect many other readers, to a new vocabulary: long-armed cross, rice, upright gobelin amongst others. It also allows the reader to encounter some fascinating characters such as the impressive Miss Pesel and the rather fearsome Mrs. Biggins. The observation that "a leader comfortable with her authority does not need to be strident" is entirely on point when it comes to the latter. With the author's customary insight, the relationships between the broderers, their petty prejudices and attitudes to those who, in their view, do not conform to social norms are laid bare. Something in the blurb for this book called to me. In the past few years, World War I has been the subject of many books and movies. The horrific loss of a generation of men deserves remembrance. But what about the women left alone, the “surplus women” who were left with little chance to marry and had to find ways to support themselves? Violet Speedwell seemed as if she wasn’t going to take being deemed superfluous, sitting down. At thirty-eight, Violet has swallowed down the bitterness of living with her stern widowed mother who needles Violet constantly. Nothing that Violet does will heal the negativity and resentment that flows constantly within her mother. Violet decides to leave Southhampton and make a break for Winchester. She secures a job as an insurance typist in a small firm. She barely has enough money to rent a small room and certainly not much for extras.Violet scoprì che ricamare non era poi così diverso da battere a macchina, però dava più soddisfazione. Una volta che ci avevi preso la mano, diventava perfino rilassante e potevi dimenticare ogni altro pensiero, concentrandoti unicamente su ciò che avevi davanti. La vita allora si riduceva a una sfilza di punti blu che s’intrecciavano sul canovaccio, uno sprazzo di rosso che pian piano diventava un fiore. Invece di redigere documenti per persone che non avrebbe mai conosciuto, Violet vedeva nascere sotto le sue dita figure dai colori vivaci. […]” A SINGLE THREAD takes place in the gap between two wars, with our characters still mourning the losses they faced in World War I as World War II looms unknowingly over their heads. Only Arthur appears to be aware that Hitler may soon rise to dangerous power. What challenges did the writer face in knowing more than her characters about the future? How does it feel, as a reader, knowing more than the characters? Having lived in Winchester, I can safely say this one is not entirely evocative of the city. There are a few interesting titbits in there – unorthodox inscriptions on gravestones and graffiti in the cathedral – but overall the setting serves no real purpose other than to support the potted history of broidery and bellringing.