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My core text, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, helps to answer my essential question in a few different ways. At the end of the book Snape takes over Malfoy’s role and kills Dumbledore. In the seventh and final book we learn that it was Dumbledore’s plan to have Snape kill him, so Snape could gain the full trust of Voldemort. As we read through the books, we start to see that Dumbledore represents logic, while Voldemort represents emotion and the ongoing battle is between logic and emotion. In the end, logic defeats emotion and we can learn that if we only go off of emotions, then that can lead us to make irrational decisions and potentially our demise.

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In the face of adversity, what causes some individuals to prevail while others fail?

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HARRY POTTER AND THE HALF-BLOOD PRINCE By J. K. Rowling. Illustrated by Mary GrandPré. 652 pp. Arthur A. Levine Books/Scholastic. $29.99.

LATE on an ink-black night in June in the Lebanese hill town of Zahle, a teenage boy sidled up to two travelers as they strolled along the bank of a river. In French-inflected English, he asked an urgent question: "Have you seen the new Harry Potter book?" Despite receiving a negative reply, he pressed on, "Have you heard what happens in it?" When the answer again was "no," he sighed in vexation. He had read the five other Potter books many times, he explained -- both in French and in English, which "takes longer, but it's better, because it's her words." "Her," even to a boy growing up in the Bekaa, meant She-Who-Must-Be-Read: J. K. Rowling, author of the cliffhanger chronicles of the young British wizard Harry Potter and his pals, Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley, from the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

The boy's inquiry did not produce the results he'd hoped for, but it may have settled a larger question: is there a book-loving child on the planet who isn't obsessed with Harry Potter? Um (or "er," as Harry would say), perhaps not. But, like other susceptible children (and grown-ups), who among them own 270 million copies of the first five books in the series, the Lebanese Potter fan had to wait until one minute past the witching hour of July 15, 2005, to satisfy his curiosity about what had befallen Harry since he battled the evil allies of Lord Voldemort (more prudently referred to as He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named) in "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix." What this young reader -- and everyone else -- will discover is that Rowling has succeeded in delivering another spellbinding fantasy set in her consummately well-imagined alternate reality.

These newest 652 pages -- far darker than those that preceded them -- are leavened with humor, romance and snappy dialogue, and freighted with secrets, deepening bonds, betrayals and brutal lessons, many of them coming from the sinister, Harry-hating Severus Snape, master of the dark arts. Up to now, Harry, while overcoming any number of harrowing trials, has managed to retain a trusting nature; but at 16, worsening circumstances force him to realize that even though he regards himself as "Dumbledore's man through and through," he must also be his own man. Dumbledore, headmaster of Hogwarts School and the only mature wizard who poses a real threat to the foul Lord Voldemort, cannot protect Harry forever -- nor can Harry be sure that he can protect himself.

Because Rowling's gift is not so much for language as for characterization and plotting, to reveal much of what happens would wreck the experience for future readers. Suffice it to say that this new volume culminates in a finish so scorchingly distressing that the reader closes the book quaking, knowing that out of these ashes, somehow, the phoenix of Rowling's fiction will rise again -- but worrying about how on earth Harry will cope until it does.

To read Rowling's novels as an adult is to sink into a half-remembered state of childhood rapture, the trance produced when you gobbled up fantasies for the first time. In the series's fourth volume, "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire," Dumbledore lets Harry stumble across the Pensieve, a collecting dish for excess memories. To extract a memory, a wizard holds a wand to his temple, draws a silvery strand of thought from his head and taps it into the basin. Any wizard who touches the swirling contents of the bowl drops into the visions it contains, reliving them as if he had been present at their inception. Dipping into the fiction that is Rowling's Pensieve, adult readers tumble into an eerie but familiar realm, containing not only Rowling's images of Harry but their own memories of books they loved when they were Harry's age and younger.

That legion of honor might include classics like Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain, C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia, P. L. Travers's Mary Poppins books, Roald Dahl's "James and the Giant Peach" and E. Nesbit's "Phoenix and the Carpet" -- whose young heroes "were not particularly handsome, nor were they extra clever, nor extraordinarily good. But they were not bad sorts on the whole; in fact, they were rather like you." Then there are the outright fantasies, one-offs like "The Witch Family," by Eleanor Estes, as well as L. Frank Baum's numerous Oz books -- which, when they first began appearing in 1900, were also an international sensation. When Baum went on an Egyptian tour in 1906, he met a child who had carried "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" while traveling by camel across the desert. But never before has a children's series created a following on the order of Harry's.

The young readers whose minds are being imprinted at this moment with Harry's adventures have many contemporary rivals for their attention. There is Philip Pullman's engrossing trilogy, "His Dark Materials," whose first volume predates Harry, and Jonathan Stroud's yet-to-be-concluded Bartimaeus Trilogy. On the lighter side there are the humorously dark fables of Lemony Snicket (a k a Daniel Handler). All these books are popular; but why is it Harry alone who prompts warehouses to hire security details to guard new releases? A definite answer cannot be given -- you'd have to ask the collective unconscious. But perhaps part of the mysterious hold Rowling exercises over her readership comes from the fact that her fantasy world looks so much like home.

The wizard population she has invented coexists in her imagination with an England that you can chart on a map; indeed, child-friendly employees at London's King's Cross rail station posted a sign for Platform 9 3/4 (the one Harry, Ron and Hermione enter to board the Hogwarts Express) on a brick wall so Potterphiles could have their pictures taken beneath it. The Weasleys' uproarious dinner table resembles one you would find in any happy family, even if magic knives chop the potatoes. And the world of Hogwarts resembles the world of anybody's school days, with the same rivalries, insecurities, academic pressures . . . and terrors.

The first four volumes of the series, written before 2000, gave children a thrilling escape into fantasy. But the last two, written after Sept. 11, 2001, provide the opposite release: an escape from a reality that can now seem scarier than the prison of Azkaban. At the outset of "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince," we learn that Voldemort is on the march, that his henchmen are wreaking havoc not only in the wizarding world but in England proper -- snapping bridges in two, whipping up hurricanes and filling the air with a ghastly mist. The Minister of Magic visits the prime minister to warn that dark forces are spreading across the land, including the dementors, the life-sucking guardians of Azkaban. "Didn't you tell me they're the creatures that drain hope and happiness out of people?" the prime minister asks. "That's right," is the reply. "And they're breeding. That's what's causing all this mist."

King's Cross station is now also linked to the suicide bombers who attacked London earlier this month. At a time when everyday life is increasingly charged with dark and deadly deeds, the temptation to believe that a good wizard is coming of age, a wizard who may vanquish the greatest evildoer, holds even more attraction. Give 'em hell, Harry! And now the wait for Volume 7 begins.

Liesl Schillinger is an arts editor at The New Yorker and a regular contributor to the Book Review.

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'Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince': Her Dark Materials (Published 2005)

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HARRY POTTER AND THE HALF-BLOOD PRINCE By J. K. Rowling. Illustrated by Mary GrandPré. 652 pp. Arthur A. Levine Books/Scholastic. $29.99. LATE on an ink-black night in June in the Lebanese hill town of Zahle, a teenage boy sidled up to two travelers as they strolled along the bank of a river.

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Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Book 6)

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Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Book 6) [Rowling, J. K., GrandPré, Mary] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Book 6)

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Alex Honnold is the only person to ever free-solo El Capitan, a 3000 foot slab of sheer granite in California's Yosemite National Park. To free-solo is to climb without a rope or any protective gear. Less than 1% of rock climbers even attempt free soloing because it is so dangerous. Alex had been contemplating the idea of El Capitan for years before attempting it because even he thought it was crazy. In the face of adversity, he succeed and managed to climb El Capitan in just under 4 hours, which is even more impressive considering the fact that it takes most climbing days to scale the iconic wall. One of the many things that made him so successful was his level of preparation. It took him years to memorize each and every move to insure when it was time, he would not hesitate.

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Morgan Wallen is currently one of the biggest names in country music, but he has faced a lot of setbacks in the past year. In the beginning of 2021, he was filmed using a racial slur and was immediately cancelled by society. However, since then, he has turned his career around and recently won Country Male Vocalist at the 2022 Billboards Awards. He has released 3 new singles in the past month that have all made the charts. His 2021 album: Dangerous The Double Album has spent the most weeks at #1 on the Billboard Country Album Charts surpassing both Luke Combs and Shania Twains albums. He has sent out a number of apologies and since the controversy, has turned into one of the most successful country artists today. He could have done a number of things but he chose to rise above his horrible mistakes and prove to everyone why he should remain at the top of the country charts.

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Joanne Rowling was born on 31st July 1965 at Yate General Hospital near Bristol, and grew up in Gloucestershire in England and in Chepstow, Gwent, in south-east Wales.

Her father, Peter, was an aircraft engineer at the Rolls Royce factory in Bristol and her mother, Anne, was a science technician in the Chemistry department at Wyedean Comprehensive, where Jo herself went to school. Anne was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis when Jo was a teenager and died in 1990, before the Harry Potter books were published. Jo also has a younger sister, Di.

The young Jo grew up surrounded by books. "I lived for books,'' she has said. "I was your basic common-or-garden bookworm, complete with freckles and National Health spectacles."
Photography Debra Hurford Brown © J.K. Rowling
Jo wanted to be a writer from an early age. She wrote her first book at the age of six - a story about a rabbit, called 'Rabbit'. At just eleven, she wrote her first novel - about seven cursed diamonds and the people who owned them.

Jo studied at Exeter University, where she read so widely outside her French and Classics syllabus that she clocked up a fine of £50 for overdue books at the University library. Her knowledge of Classics would one day come in handy for creating the spells in the Harry Potter series, some of which are based on Latin.

Her course included a year in Paris. "I lived in Paris for a year as a student," Jo tweeted after the 2015 terrorist attacks there. "It's one of my favourite places on earth."

After her degree, she moved to London and worked in a series of jobs, including one as a researcher at Amnesty International. "There in my little office I read hastily scribbled letters smuggled out of totalitarian regimes by men and women who were risking imprisonment to inform the outside world of what was happening to them." She said later. "My small participation in that process was one of the most humbling and inspiring experiences of my life."

Jo conceived the idea of Harry Potter in 1990 while sitting on a delayed train from Manchester to London King's Cross. Over the next five years, she began to map out all seven books of the series. She wrote mostly in longhand and gradually built up a mass of notes, many of which were scribbled on odd scraps of paper.

Taking her notes with her, she moved to northern Portugal to teach English as a foreign language, married Jorge Arantes in 1992 and had a daughter, Jessica, in 1993. When the marriage ended later that year, she returned to the UK to live in Edinburgh, with Jessica and a suitcase containing the first three chapters of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.

In Edinburgh, Jo trained as a teacher and began teaching in the city's schools, but she continued to write in every spare moment.

Having completed the full manuscript, she sent the first three chapters to a number of literary agents, one of whom wrote back asking to see the rest of it. She says it was "the best letter I had ever received in my life."

The book was first published by Bloomsbury Children's Books in June 1997, under the name J.K. Rowling.

The "K" stands for Kathleen, her paternal grandmother's name. It was added at her publisher's request, who thought a book by an obviously female author might not appeal to the target audience of young boys.

The book was published in the US by Scholastic under a different title (again at the publisher's request), Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, in 1998. Six further titles followed in the Harry Potter series, each achieving record-breaking success.

In 2001, the film adaptation of the first book was released by Warner Bros., and was followed by six more book adaptations, concluding with the release of the eighth film, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, in 2011.

J.K. Rowling has also written two small companion volumes, which appear as the titles of Harry's school books within the novels. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them and Quidditch Through the Ages were published in March 2001 in aid of Comic Relief. In December 2008, a third companion volume, The Tales of Beedle the Bard was published in aid of her international children's charity, Lumos.

In 2012, J.K. Rowling's digital company Pottermore was launched, which became Wizarding World Digital in 2019. Pottermore Publishing continues to be the global digital publisher of Harry Potter, Fantastic Beasts and the Wizarding World.

Also in 2012, J.K. Rowling published her first novel for adults, The Casual Vacancy (Little, Brown), which has now been translated into 44 languages and was adapted for TV by the BBC in 2015.

Under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith, J.K. Rowling also writes crime novels, featuring private detective Cormoran Strike. The first of these, The Cuckoo's Calling, was published to critical acclaim in 2013, at first without its author's true identity being known. The Silkworm followed in 2014, Career of Evil in 2015, Lethal White in 2018, Troubled Blood in 2020 and The Ink Black Heart in 2022. The series has also been adapted for television by the BBC and HBO.

J.K. Rowling's 2008 Harvard commencement speech was published in 2015 as an illustrated book, Very Good Lives: The Fringe Benefits of Failure and the Importance of Imagination (Sphere), and sold in aid of Lumos and university-wide financial aid at Harvard.

In 2016, J.K. Rowling collaborated with playwright Jack Thorne and director John Tiffany on an original new story for the stage. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Parts One and Two opened in London and is now playing in multiple locations around the world. The script book was published (Little, Brown) to mark the play's opening in July 2016, and instantly topped the bestseller lists.

Also in 2016, J.K. Rowling made her screenwriting debut with the film Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, a further extension of the Wizarding World, which was released to critical acclaim in November 2016. This was the first in a series of new adventures featuring Magizoologist Newt Scamander and set before the time of Harry Potter. The second film, Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, was released in 2018 and the third, Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore was released in 2022.

The screenplays were published to coincide with each film release: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them The Original Screenplay (2016), Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald The Original Screenplay (2018) and Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore The Complete Screenplay (2022).

In May 2020, J.K. Rowling's fairy tale for younger children, The Ickabog, was serialised for free online for children during the Covid-19 pandemic in the summer of 2020, and is now published as a book illustrated by children, with her royalties going to charities supporting vulnerable groups affected by the pandemic.

Her latest children's novel The Christmas Pig, a standalone adventure story about a boy's love for his most treasured thing and how far he will go to find it, is out now.

J.K. Rowling has been married to Dr Neil Murray since 2001. They live in Edinburgh with their son, David (born 2003) and daughter, Mackenzie (born 2005).

Honours & Awards

J.K. Rowling has received many honours and awards, including:

Companion of Honour, for services to literature and philanthropy, 2017
PEN America Literary Service Award, 2016
Freedom of the City of London, 2012
Hans Christian Andersen Award, Denmark, 2010
Chevalier de la Legion d'Honneur: France, 2009
Lifetime Achievement Award, British Book Awards, 2008
South Bank Show Award for Outstanding Achievement, 2008
James Joyce Award, University College Dublin, 2008
The Edinburgh Award, 2008
Commencement Day Speaker, Harvard University, USA, 2008
Blue Peter Gold Badge, 2007
WH Smith Fiction Award, 2004
Prince of Asturias Award for Concord, Spain, 2003
Order of the British Empire (OBE), 2001
Children's Book of the Year, British Book Awards, 1998 and 1999
Booksellers Association Author of the Year, 1998 and 1999

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Joanne Rowling was born on 31st July 1965 at Yate General Hospital near Bristol, and grew up in Gloucestershire in England and in Chepstow, Gwent, in south-east Wales. Her father, Peter, was an aircraft engineer at the Rolls Royce factory in Bristol and her mother, Anne, was a science technician in the Chemistry department at [...]