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1037400 | /m/040f_6 | Sanctuary | William Faulkner | 1931 | {"/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | In May 1929, a lawyer named Horace Benbow, frustrated with his life, his spouse, and his stepdaughter, suddenly leaves his home in (fictional) Kinston, Mississippi, and sets out to hitchhike his way back to Jefferson, his hometown in Yoknapatawpha County, where his widowed sister Narcissa Sartoris lives with her son and her late husband's great-aunt (Miss Jenny). On the way to Jefferson, he stops for a drink of water near the "Old Frenchman" homestead, which is occupied by the bootlegger Lee Goodwin. Benbow encounters a sinister man called Popeye, an associate of Goodwin's, who brings him back to the Goodwin place, where he meets Goodwin, his common-law wife Ruby, and some other members of Goodwin's bootlegging operation. Later that night, Benbow catches a ride from Goodwin's place into Jefferson. He explains to his sister and Miss Jenny that he has left his wife, and then he moves back into his parents' house, which has been sitting vacant for years. Gowan Stevens, a young graduate of the University of Virginia, who proposed marriage to Narcissa (and was turned down), has a date with Temple Drake, a student at Ole Miss. Temple is something of a "fast girl" with a reputation among the town boys in Oxford; her name has been scrawled in the men's rooms at Ole Miss with allusions to her easy virtue. Her father is a well-known and powerful judge, so she comes from a world of money and high society. She is pretty, but shallow; simultaneously fascinated and repelled by sex and by basic human urges. After escorting Temple to a Friday-night dance in Oxford, Gowan plans to meet her the next morning at the train station, where she is supposed to join her classmates on a chaperoned excursion to a baseball game in Starkville; she is supposed to get off the train, escaping her chaperones, and ride to the game with Gowan instead. After he has dropped Temple off after the dance, Gowan, an alcoholic who claims he "learned to drink like a gentleman" in Virginia, offers some local town boys a ride into town. He gets them to help him obtain a quart of moonshine, which he magnanimously shares with them, apparently so that he can impress them with his capacity for liquor consumption. He gets extremely drunk and passes out by his car at the train station. The next morning, Gowan awakens with a massive hangover, to discover that he's just missed the Starkville train. He finishes off his jar of moonshine and speeds off to intercept the train, picking up Temple in the town of Taylor. On the way to Starkville, he decides to stop off at the Goodwin place for some more booze. Drunk already, he crashes his car into a tree which Popeye, apparently worried about a police raid, has felled across the road. Popeye and Tommy, who happen to be nearby when the accident happens, take Temple and Gowan, who are banged up but not seriously injured, back to the Goodwin place. Temple is terrified, both by Gowan's recklessness and drunkenness, and by the strange, menacing, lower-class milieu into which he has brought her. Immediately upon arriving at the Goodwin place, she meets Ruby, who warns her that it would be a good idea to leave the Goodwin place before nightfall. Gowan is given more liquor to drink by Tommy, a good-natured apparent "halfwit" who works for Goodwin and lives at the house. Night falls. Gowan is, yet again, crudely drunk, and Temple has not taken Ruby's advice and made herself scarce. Goodwin returns home and is less than happy to find Gowan and Temple there. He has brought Van, another member of his bootlegging crew, with him. All the men continue to drink; Van and Gowan argue and provoke each other, nearly coming to blows several times over the course of the evening. Van makes crude advances toward Temple, rousing in the drunken Gowan a sense that he, a would-be Virginia gentleman, needs to protect Temple's honor. Temple, out of her mind with apprehension, constantly runs in and out of the room where the men are drinking, despite Ruby's advice that she stay away from them, and despite Van's leering unwelcome advances. Temple ensconces herself in a bedroom. Van and Gowan come to blows; Van quickly knocks out the drunken Gowan. The men carry him into the room where Temple is cowering and throw him on the bed. They come in and out of the room several times and harass her. Finally, the men leave on a whisky run in the middle of the night. The next morning, Gowan awakens and slinks silently away from the house, abandoning Temple. Temple is still terrified the next morning, even though most of the men don't seem to be around. The good-natured Tommy hides her in a corn crib in the barn; Popeye soon discovers them there. He murders Tommy with a gunshot to the back of the head and then proceeds to rape Temple with a corncob. After he has raped her, he puts her in his car and drives to Memphis, where he has connections in the criminal underworld. Goodwin discovers the dead Tommy, and Ruby calls the police from a neighbor's house. The police arrest Goodwin, believing that it is he who has murdered Tommy. Goodwin is terrified of Popeye, so he tells the police nothing beyond a flat denial of guilt. Goodwin is brought to the jail in Jefferson. Benbow finds out about the matter and immediately takes on the task of Goodwin's legal defense, even though he knows that Goodwin cannot pay him. Benbow tries to let Ruby and her sickly infant child stay with him in his house in Jefferson, but his sister Narcissa, who is half-owner of the house with him, refuses to allow her to stay there, with or without Benbow. Ruby is known in town as a fallen woman with an illegitimate child, who "lives in sin" with whiskey-running Lee Goodwin; Narcissa finds the idea of her family name being gossiped about town in connection with a woman like Ruby completely unacceptable. In order to satisfy his sister's wishes and the prevailing societal mores in Jefferson, Benbow has no choice but to put Ruby and her son in a room at the hotel. Benbow, an idealist and strong believer in truth and justice, tries unsuccessfully to get Goodwin to tell the court about Popeye. Goodwin feels that Popeye is capable of killing him, even in jail; he also has faith in his innocence, so he refuses. Benbow soon finds out about Temple and her presence at Goodwin's place when Tommy was murdered (a fact which the Goodwins had originally been reluctant to share with Benbow). Benbow heads to Ole Miss to look for Temple. He discovers that she has left the school. On the train back to Jefferson, he runs into an unctuous state senator named Clarence Snopes, who tells him that he read in the newspaper that "Judge Drake's gal" Temple has been "sent up north" by her father. In reality, Temple is living in a room in a Memphis bawdy house owned by Miss Reba, an asthmatic widowed madam, who thinks highly of Popeye and is happy that he's finally chosen a paramour. Popeye keeps Temple there for him to come and visit whenever he feels like it. However, as he is impotent, he brings Red along and forces him and Temple to have sex while he watches. When Benbow returns from his trip to Oxford, he finds out that the owner of the hotel has buckled under the weight of steadily growing public disapproval and has kicked out Ruby and her child. Benbow tries again to convince Narcissa to let Ruby stay in the house they own, and again she refuses. He finds a place for Ruby to stay, outside of town, in a shack with a crazy lady who ekes out a wretched living as a fortuneteller. Clarence Snopes visits Miss Reba's brothel in Memphis and discovers that Temple is living there. He realizes that this information might be valuable to Benbow (who, Snopes remembers, was looking for Temple at her school) and also to Judge Drake (Temple's father). He offers to sell Benbow the information, hinting that he might sell it to "another party" if Benbow says no. After Benbow agrees to pay Snopes for the information, Snopes tells Benbow that he's seen Temple at Miss Reba's house in Memphis. Benbow immediately heads to Memphis and convinces Miss Reba to let him talk to Temple. Miss Reba imagines Ruby and the child left to fend for themselves if Goodwin is wrongly convicted, and is sympathetic to the Goodwins' plight, although she still admires and respects Popeye. Temple tells Benbow the story of her rape at Popeye's hands. Benbow, shaken, returns to Jefferson. Temple has become thoroughly corrupted by now. She bribes Minnie, Miss Reba's servant, to let her sneak out of the house for fifteen minutes. She makes a phone call from a nearby drugstore. She leaves the house again in the evening, only to find Popeye, who has had the house under surveillance, waiting outside in his car. He takes her to a roadhouse called The Grotto. Temple had arranged to meet Red, a popular young gangster, at this club. It becomes apparent that Temple has been having sex with Red, and that Popeye has been watching them. This evening, Popeye has planned a confrontation with Red to settle once and for all with whom Temple will remain. At the club, Temple drinks heavily and tries to have furtive sex with Red in a back room, but he spurns her advances for the moment. Two of Popeye's gangster friends frog-march her out of the club and drive her back to Miss Reba. Popeye kills Red. This turns Miss Reba against him. She tells some of her friends what has happened, hoping he will be captured and executed for Red's murder. Benbow writes to his wife, asking for a divorce. His sister Narcissa visits the District Attorney and tells him she wants Benbow to lose the case as soon as possible, so that he will cease his involvement in such a sordid affair. Once the DA assures her that Benbow's client will be convicted, she writes to Benbow's wife to tell her that he will soon be returning home. Senator Snopes arrives in town with a black eye, complaining that he was hit by a "Memphis jew [sic] lawyer" who wouldn't pay him a reasonable amount for the information he was offering. Benbow tries to get back in touch with Temple via Miss Reba, who tells him that Popeye and Temple are gone. The trial begins on the 20th of June. It goes badly for Goodwin, who continues to believe that Popeye will show up in Jefferson, at any moment, and kill him. On the second day of the trial, a Memphis lawyer shows up with Temple Drake in tow. She takes the stand and stuns the courtroom with shocking (and false) testimony that Goodwin (not Popeye) shot Tommy and then raped her. Even more shocking is the DA's revelation of a key piece of evidence: a bloodstained corn cob. It was with that corncob that Temple was raped (by Popeye, of course, who is impotent). After perjuring herself, Temple is led out of the courtroom by her father, Judge Drake. The jury finds Goodwin guilty after only eight minutes of deliberation. Benbow, devastated, is taken back to his sister's house. He wanders out of the house, distraught, in the evening, and goes back into town, where he sees Goodwin's dead body burning in a gasoline bonfire; he has been dragged out of jail, tortured and lynched by an angry mob. Benbow is recognized in the crowd, which speaks of lynching him, too. The next day, Benbow returns, defeated, to his wife. Popeye, ironically, is arrested and hanged for a crime he never committed, while he's on his way to Pensacola, Florida to visit his mother. Temple and her father make a final appearance in the Jardin du Luxembourg, having found sanctuary in Paris. See also Requiem for a Nun (1951), a play/novel sequel to Sanctuary. |
1038036 | /m/040j5k | Hotel | Arthur Hailey | null | {"/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | Peter McDermott: The main character is Mr. Peter McDermott; the general manager with a past. He is a graduate from Cornell University in Hotel Management and subsequently got a job in a hotel. However then he had been involved with a lady at time when he was supposed to be on duty. This gave Peter’s wife and the lady’s husband a reason to ask for a divorce. Getting involved was not a big thing for hotel to avoid but it had marked the headlines of newspaper so much, that he was dismissed from the job and was blacklisted. But Warren Trent, the head of St. Gregory Hotel, ignoring the past and considering the skill, hired him. The novel captures McDermott attempts to deal with several crises in the hotel which involve a range of other characters. The Hotel Finance Problem: The Hotel's unpayable and unrenewable mortgage is due on Friday, necessitating its sale. Curtis O'Keefe, the one who owns a large hotel chains plans to buy St. Gregory hotel in New Orleans as the O'Keefe chain did not have a hotel here. They had offered to pay the two million mortgages due and one million dollar and living accommodation to Warren Trent as well. However Warren did not want to lose the hotel which he had nurtured for so long. They decided upon Friday afternoon timeline to make a decision on the deal. Warren Trent meanwhile decided to mark a deal with Journey man Union who wanted to enter the hotel Industry for long but were not successful. This way Warren Trent could maintain an independence of the hotel and still have a say in the affairs of it. Journey man had decided to send two of his executives on Thursday to study the books of hotel and then decide before the Friday afternoon deadline decided between Warren Trent and Curtis O'Keefe. Royall Edwards of St. Gregory had been appointed by Warren Trent to work with the two officers, if required all night, so that they complete the whole of study. However upset with the denial of entry to Negro man in the hotel, which became the headline of newspapers, Journeyman Union broke the deal. Warren Trent had no option but to give in to Curtis O'Keefe. To his utmost surprise, a few minutes before Friday noon, the bank manager who had turned down refinancing of the hotel, came with an offer, that an Individual, whose name could not be disclosed then, would be paying the mortgage and buying the major shares of the Hotel. Warren Trent would be the chairman, though Warren knew that he would be just a figurehead but as it was a better offer, so he accepted. Christine and Albert Wells: Christine is the secretary to Warren Trent. Peter and Christine have a liking for each other. They share many things in common and feel they could be happy together. In hotel the elderly guest Mr. Albert Wells suffers a medical problems in his room. The hotel staff ist alert and quickly move him to another room. Christine took care of Albert Wells personally as he was the hotel guest. Marsha Preyscott: In another incident a group of teen-aged boys create a major incident that is aggravated by the fact that they are the sons of the local banker, car dealer, and other town notables. They attempt to rape Miss Prescott, the daughter of Mr. Prescott, a department store magnate, who is currently in Rome. However on listening her screams, Aloysius Royce, (a Negro and main help to Warren Trent who treats him like a son.) steps in and Marsha is able to escape then. Peter handles the situation and asks for a written apology from each of the boys involved in it. In said letters, villainous Bell Captain, Herbie Chandler is named as the one who made the incident possible. Because of his collusion in this, Chandler is threatened with firing on the spot, however, McDermott plans to take it to Mr. Trent, because of Chandler's years of employment. Chandler attempts to bribe the general manager, but fails, and is told to leave the office in a cold rage. Chandler plots some kind of revenge against McDermott, and he steps on Elevator #4. Marsha on the other hand falls in ‘love’ with Peter McDermott and proposes him for marriage. Peter finds it difficult to say no to her considering her affluence and beauty but finally says no as he knew that he liked Christine. However he overcomes his sense of guilt when he gets to know from Anna (Head maid servant of Marsha) that she is always the same and will be OK in some time and that Anna was not married. However, Marsha in framing a good background to convince Peter, had said that Anna had a very good life with her husband whom she had met only once before marriage, and it was not necessary to know a person for too long before to decide on marriage. The Dentist Convention: Hotel business gains a minimum from room rent but a bulk of its profit comes from the food, conventions held at its place. As a sequel to it, a major convention of dentists was supposed to be held in St. Gregory. Dr Ingram, President of convention had arrived and settled in his room. Then Mr. Nicholas, a Negro, arrived at the counter, showing a confirmed reservation. However the hotel policy did not allow Negros. Dr Ingram was quite disappointed at this and threatened the hotel authority that he would take the convention out of hotel, causing a major loss to hotel. When Peter discussed it with Warren he said, that after a few discussions this would be forgotten and the convention would be held and there was no need to worry. And after a few meetings the convention finally decided to stay though Mr. Ingram resigned from his post. Curtis O'Keefe and Dodo: Curtis O'Keefe, the one who owns a large hotel chains plans to buy St. Gregory hotel in New Orleans. He was there with Dodo, his girl friend. But it was time for Curtis to move on. He got a movie role for Dodo and thought to go to New York to meet his new girlfriend. When Warren told Curtis that he was not accepting Curtis' offer to sell the hotel, Curtis was very disappointed and in a fit of anger he told Dodo that he doesn’t want her any more. Dodo was upset, though somewhere she knew the truth already. She had to board her flight to Los Angeles and took elevator no 4, as she was about to move out of the hotel. Duke and Duchess of Croydon: In another instance the Duke and Duchess of Croydon are hiding out in the hotel from their responsibility for a gruesome hit-and-run accident which had been the highlight of the newspaper as the famous hit-and-run case. The Duke had gone to a night club and the Duchess reaches the club to find her husband. On their way back the Duke hits a woman and her daughter and both the woman and her daughter died. However, in the accident the headlight and the trim ring of the car were damaged. The Duke and Duchess arrived back at the hotel and try to find a way out, so that there is left a slightest print of them being involved in an accident. When the waiter arrived in the presidential suite with dinner, the Duchess intentionally hit the waiter so that her dress gets spoiled. The Duchess created a big issue over this, just to make her presence felt in hotel so that it can be interpreted that she was in the hotel. But the chief house officer Ogilvie gets hint of it and tries to blackmail the Duke and Duchess. They finally reach an agreement that Ogilvie would drive their Jaguar to Chicago and a total of twenty five thousand dollars would be paid to him. By the time the police identifies that the broken headlight and trim pieces would be identified as pieces of which car, Ogilvie would be out of New Orleans. The travel was supposedly on Thursday night at 1 am. Oglivie gets a written note from Duchess asking for permission to drive her car out of garage in case the garage officer asks for. The moment he was driving the car out of hotel, Peter was entering the hotel and they had eye contact, though Peter did not think much of it. However, recollecting all the events - a Jaguar being driven by Ogilvie which belonged to Duke and Duchess - the broken headlight of the Jaguar - the fuss created by Duchess on waiter - all established a link towards the involvement of the Duke and Duchess. Peter inquired from the garage officer and he informed that Ogilvie had a written note from the Duchess and so was allowed to drive the car away, but somehow the note got misplaced. Peter informed the police captain Yolles of the incident, but they could not prove it without any evidence. After working hard, the incinerator officer, responsible for garbage recycling, managed to find the note. When the note was produced before the Duchess, she frowned. The Duke then decided to admit his crime and decided to leave and stepped into elevator no 4 of the Hotel. Keycase Milne: A hotel thief operating in the St. Gregory. He managed to get keys of several rooms in hotel by using tricks, asking for other room number keys from the reception desk, using girls to obtain key for him and many other ways. When he saw the duke and duchess in hotel, he thought, if he could get the key of their room, it would be an excellent breakthrough. He managed to get the key from reception playing trickery, got a duplicate prepared and stole from duchess room her fifteen thousand dollars and jewellery. After obtaining so much of amount he decided to leave the hotel and boarded the elevator no 4. Climax: The meeting to take over the hotel scheduled at 11.30 am Friday was in place. Mr. Dempster from New York had arrived to tell who the boss was and it was Albert Wells, the hotel guest, whom Christine had taken care and thought of as not a rich man, had bought the hotel. To the utmost surprise of peter, Peter was appointed the Executive vice-President of St. Gregory and would be running the hotel with Dempster being the officiating president, the position Dempster had in all other hotels owned by Albert Wells. It was within the meeting itself that Christine came running and told that elevator number 4 met an accident and had a free fall. Dodo suffered a lot of injuries and was rushed to a hospital. It was then that Curtis realized how much he loved Dodo and got the best neurosurgeons for her. She was soon out of danger. The Duke was dead on the spot in the elevator. The duchess—still cold on hearing that, had no expression. The policeman, Captain Yolles, thought now the blame of hit-n-run could be easily moved on Duke as he was already dead and Duchess could save herself. Keycase managed to be safe and ran away from the country with all that money. Warren Trent was happy that he could retain his hotel being its chairman. Herbie Chandler, the evil bell captain, would be permanently paralyzed and would never work again. Aloysius Royce left the hotel to study law but not before he and McDermott drank together. |
1039302 | /m/040mph | Nightshade | Jack Butler | 1989 | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction"} | The story is set on Mars in the late 21st Century. It follows the exploits of the 400-year-old vampire John Shade, whose comfortable life in the Hellas crater on Mars is disrupted when he is forced to become part of a complex conspiracy to protect the Janglers, a sub-species of humans who have replaced parts of their brains with technology. Shade eventually becomes the leader of a collection of loners, losers, drop-outs and rebels, holding them together through unwitting charisma and a sense of personal vengeance against the government of Mars. As a vampire, Shade sometimes feels a lust for blood, though this only occurs once or twice a year - though the Need, as it is called, strikes several times during the course of the novel for reasons that are not fully explained. Shade also possesses increased strength and reflexes, a photographic memory, excellent mathematical knowledge, the ability to change his own shape and the power to "shift" into "high temporal", which tremendously enhances his speed. Shade has read Bram Stoker's Dracula and believes it to be "foolish in many details". |
1041055 | /m/040stt | A Man in Full | Tom Wolfe | 11/12/1998 | {"/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/05hgj": "Novel"} | As with Wolfe's other novels, A Man In Full features a number of point-of-view characters. These include Charles "Cap'm Charlie" Croker, a real estate mogul and member of Atlanta's high society who is suddenly facing bankruptcy; Martha Croker, his first wife, trying to maintain her social standing without her husband; Ray Peepgass, who is trying to illegally capitalize on Croker's fall; Roger "Too White" White II, a prominent black lawyer; and Conrad Hensley, a young man in prison who discovers Stoic philosophy. The novel begins with the characters learning of the rumored rape of a young white heiress by a black superstar athlete, Fareek "The Canon" Fanon. Though the incident itself is unimportant to the lives of the characters, the potential for the rumor to incite race riots in metropolitan Atlanta has a profound effect on all of their lives. Local politics and business interests become involved, including the president of the bank to which Croker is indebted, Roger Too White's former fraternity brother (now Mayor of Atlanta), and the entirety of 'respectable' Atlanta society. A Man In Full is written much in the style of Wolfe's other fictions, such as Bonfire of the Vanities and I Am Charlotte Simmons. |
1041118 | /m/040t1c | The Blackwater Lightship | Colm Tóibín | null | {"/m/05hgj": "Novel"} | The story is described from the viewpoint of Helen, a successful school principal living with her husband and two children in Ireland. She learns one day, that her brother Declan, who is homosexual, has been a sufferer of AIDS for years, and refused to tell her until then. He asks her to deliver their mother and grandmother the news. This presents a challenge to Helen as she has had minimal contact with either woman due to deeply buried conflicts relating to Helen's past and her father's sudden death when she was a child. As the three women meet again they are forced to overcome these struggles for Declan's sake. The novel follows the painful journey they must take in order to correct the misunderstanding that exists between them. |
1041136 | /m/040t48 | Forbidden Love | null | null | null | The novel centers on the life of Dalia, a young Muslim woman living in Amman, Jordan. When she falls in love with Michael, a young Catholic major in the British Army, she is forced to keep the relationship a secret and rely on her friend Norma to act as an intermediary. Although the lovers are only able to be alone together on a handful of occasions and Dalia's virginity remains intact, her father is so enraged when he hears of the affair from her older brother that he kills her two months after her twenty-sixth birthday. Khouri claimed that as a result, she had been forced to seek asylum in Queensland, Australia. |
1041160 | /m/040t6s | Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell | Susanna Clarke | 9/8/2004 | {"/m/0mz2": "Alternate history", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy", "/m/0hwxm": "Historical novel"} | The novel opens in autumn 1806 in northern England with The Learned Society of York Magicians, made up of "theoretical magicians" who believe that magic died out several hundred years earlier. The group is stunned to learn of a "practising magician", Mr Gilbert Norrell, who owns a large collection of "books of magic" he has spent years purchasing to keep out of the hands of others. Norrell proves his skill as a practical magician by making the statues in York Cathedral speak. John Childermass, Mr Norrell's long-time servant, convinces a member of the group, John Segundus, to write about the event for the London newspapers. Segundus's article generates considerable interest in Mr Norrell, who moves to London to revive practical English magic. He enters society with the help of two gentlemen about town and meets a Cabinet minister, Sir Walter Pole. To ingratiate himself, Mr Norrell attempts to recall Sir Walter's fiancée, Emma Wintertowne, from the dead. He summons a fairy—"the gentleman with thistle-down hair"—who strikes a bargain with Mr Norrell to restore Emma: half of her life will be spent with the fairy. After news spreads of Emma's resurrection and happy marriage to Sir Walter, magic becomes respectable and Mr Norrell performs various feats to aid the government in their ongoing war against Napoleon. While living in London, Mr Norrell encounters Vinculus, a street-magician, who relates a prophecy about a nameless slave and two magicians in England, but Norrell dismisses it. While travelling, Vinculus later meets Jonathan Strange, a young gentleman of property from Shropshire, and recites the same prophecy, prompting Strange to become a magician. Meanwhile, the gentleman with thistle-down hair takes a liking to Stephen Black, Sir Walter's capable black butler, and promises to make him a king. Emma (now Lady Pole) lapses into lassitude. She rarely speaks, and her attempts to communicate her situation are confounded by magic. No doctor can cure her, and Mr Norrell claims that her problems cannot be solved by magic. Without the knowledge of the other characters, each evening she and Stephen are forced to attend balls held by the gentleman with thistle-down hair in the Faerie kingdom of Lost-Hope, where they dance all night long. Volume II opens in Summer 1809 with Strange learning of Mr Norrell and travelling to London to meet him. They immediately clash over the importance of John Uskglass (the legendary Raven King) to English magic. Strange argues that "without the Raven King there would be no magic and no magicians" while Norrell retorts that the Raven King made war upon England and should be forgotten. Despite their differing opinions and temperaments, Strange becomes Norrell's pupil. Norrell, however, deliberately keeps some knowledge from Strange. Lady Pole and Strange's wife, Arabella, become friends; several times Lady Pole attempts to tell Arabella about her forced nights of dancing at the fairy's castle in Lost-Hope, but each time she tells an unrelated story. Arabella also meets the gentleman with thistle-down hair at the Poles', but she assumes he is simply a resident. Without her husband's knowledge, the fairy plots to enchant her, although Stephen Black continually attempts to dissuade him. The Stranges become a popular couple in London. The Cabinet ministers find Strange easier to deal with than Norrell, and they send him to assist the Duke of Wellington on his Peninsular Campaign. For over a year, Strange helps the army: he creates roads, moves towns, and makes dead men speak. After he returns, he fails to cure George III's madness, although Strange manages to save the king from becoming enchanted by the gentleman with thistle-down hair, who is determined to make Stephen a king. Strange then helps defeat Napoleon at the horrific Battle of Waterloo. Frustrated with being Norrell's pupil, Strange pens a scathing review of a book outlining Norrell's theories on modern magic; in particular, Strange challenges Norrell's views of the Raven King. The English public splits into "Norrellites" and "Strangites"; Norrell and Strange part company, although not without regret. Strange returns home and works on his own book, The History and Practice of English Magic. Arabella goes missing, then suddenly reappears, sick and weak. Three days later she dies. Volume III opens in January 1816 with Childermass experiencing strong magic that is not produced by either Norrell or Strange. At the same time, Lady Pole attempts to shoot Mr Norrell as he is returning home. Childermass takes the bullet himself but is not killed. Afterwards, Lady Pole is cared for in the country by John Segundus, who has an inkling of the magic surrounding her. During travels in the north, Stephen meets Vinculus, who recites his prophecy: "the nameless slave shall be a king in a strange country ... " Stephen believes it applies to him, but the gentleman with thistle-down hair argues that it applies to the Raven King. Strange settles in Venice and meets Flora Greysteel. They become fond of each other and Strange's friends believe he may marry again. However, after experimenting with dangerous magic that threatens his sanity in order to gain access to Faerie, he discovers that Arabella is alive and being held captive. Immediately after he discovers this, the gentleman with the thistledown hair curses him with Eternal Night, an eerie darkness that engulfs him and follows him wherever he goes. Thereafter, Strange's strenuous efforts to rescue her take their toll, and his letters to friends begin to appear crazed. On Strange's orders, Flora moves with her family to Padua and secludes herself inside her home, along with a mirror given to her by Strange. In England, the return of John Uskglass sparks a magical renaissance, but Norrell fails to grasp its significance. Strange returns and gives Childermass instructions which allow him to free Lady Pole from the fairy's enchantment. Strange, bringing "Eternal Night" with him, asks Norrell to help him undo Arabella's enchantment by summoning John Uskglass. Although they initially believe that they have succeeded, they later come to believe that their contact with John Uskglass was accidental. As a result of the imprecision of the fairy's curse, which was placed on "the English magician," Norrell is trapped along with Strange in the "Eternal Night," and they cannot move more than a certain distance from each other. They do succeed in sending Arabella to the mirror in Padua, where Flora is waiting for her. After the spells of the gentleman with thistle-down hair are broken, Stephen destroys him, and becomes the new king of Lost-Hope. Later Strange has a conversation with Arabella, making it unclear if he and Norrell are working to undo the eternal darkness they are both trapped in, and a vague hope that one day he will return to her. The final scene depicts the coming of age of English magic, in which a bar is filled with arguing Norrellites and Strangites. |
1041696 | /m/040w5r | The Last Don | Mario Puzo | null | {"/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/0c3351": "Suspense"} | The last plan of Don Domenico Clericuzio, an aging mafia boss, is to eventually make his family enter the legitimate world and melt into American society. Twenty-five years later, his grandson Dante and his grandnephew Cross (Croccifixio) make their way through life, and the eighty-year-old Don is half retired. Cross, who holds a majority share in a Las Vegas casino, is supposed to become the strong arm of the family. However, when he refuses to take part in the murder of an old friend, Dante is left to be the sole tough guy. Dante's greed for power and blood lead him to plan the elimination of his relatives, who are an obstacle to the desire to become as powerful as the old Don himself. Cross, who is aware of being on the black list, precedes Dante and catches him in a trap. Having acted against the family, he waits for the Don's vendetta, but, to his own surprise, his life is spared and he's only condemned to exile. The story concludes with the revelation that the Don had planned this outcome all along for the long term survival of the family. |
1042960 | /m/040_7f | Venice Preserv'd | Thomas Otway | null | null | The play concerns Jaffeir, a noble Venetian who has secretly married Belvidera, the daughter of a proud senator named Priuli, who has cut off her inheritance. Jaffeir is impoverished and is constantly rebuffed by Priuli. Jaffeir's friend Pierre, a foreign soldier, stokes Jaffeir's resentment and entices him into a plot against the Senate of Venice. Pierre's own reasons for plotting against the Senate revolve around a senator (a corrupt and foolish Antonio) paying for relations with Pierre's mistress, Aquillina. Despite Pierre's complaints, the Senate does nothing about it, explaining that Antonio has senatorial privilege. Pierre introduces Jaffeir to the conspirators, led by blood-thirsty Renault. To get their trust, he must put Belvidera in Renault's care as a hostage. In the night, Renault attempts to rape her, but she escapes to Jaffeir. Jaffeir then tells Belvidera about the plot against the Senate, and against her father. She devises a plan of her own. Jaffeir will reveal the conspiracy to the Senate and claim the lives of the conspirators as his reward. It is only after Belvidera informs him of the attempted rape that Jaffeir agrees to do this, but the Senate breaks its word and condemns all the conspirators to death. In remorse for betraying his friend and losing his honour (by betraying his oath to the conspirators), Jaffeir threatens to kill Belvidera, unless she can get a pardon for the conspirators. She does so, but the pardon arrives too late. Jaffeir visits Pierre at his execution. Pierre is crestfallen because he is sentenced to die a dishonourable death and not the death of a soldier. He forgives Jaffeir and whispers to him (unheard by the audience) to kill him honourably before he is executed. Jaffeir stabs his friend, Pierre, on the gallows, and as a form of atonement commits suicide. Belvidera then goes insane and dies. |
1044528 | /m/041398 | Doon | Ellis Weiner | 1984-11 | {"/m/0gf28": "Parody", "/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction"} | Within the Galactic Empire, a change of fief is occurring. Led by the verbose Baron Vladimir, House Hardchargin, the Great Big House given charge of Arruckus, has been displaced by Shaddap IV, the Padedbrah Emperor, in favor of the up-and-coming House Agamemnides, with Duke Lotto at its head. Arruckus is also known as "Doon", and is additionally known as the Dessert Planet. Covered entirely in sugars, it is a harsh unforgiving environment, where not an entree can be found; the natives live entirely on whatever they can import, produce from the sugars, or produce from soy protein (the native food experiments known as the Mahn t'Vani) Duke Lotto accepts the fief, aware that it may well be a death trap but also conscious of the importance of Arruckus's only export, the wide-spectrum intoxicant known as beer. Found naturally on Arruckus as a result of natural processes and nowhere else, it is the engine on which commerce runs; the Schlepping Guild, who has a monopoly on space travel in the Imperium, will not run without it. Who controls the beer controls commerce. But soon after arriving on Doon, with his heir and son Pall and his concubine the Lady Jazzica, an adept of the galaxy-spanning sisterhood of chefs and event planners known as the Boni Maroni, Duke Lotto and House Agamemnides fall victim to a scheme originated by Baron Vladimir Hardchargin and implemented by the Duke's own accountant Oyeah, who, without the Duke's knowledge, kept a secret second ledger. When the Emperor called for an audit of the fief, the duplicate ledger made it appear as though House Agamemnides had been cooking the books. In return for this act, Oyeah hoped the Baron would give him a start as a stand-up comic–which he did, but on the Imperial prison planet, Salacia Simplicissimus. Ruined, Duke Lotto's brief reign over Doon is ended and House Hardchargin is reinstated as fief-holders. Banished to the sugared wilderness, Pall (now head of House Agamemnides) and Lady Jazzica meet with and are eventually accepted by the planet's native population, the Freedmenmen, a process made easier by previous prophecy-seeding by the Missionaria Phonibalonica, via the Great Prophet Phyllis. Indeed, the natives are receptive to the fulfillment of the prophecies even after the revelation that Phyllis's decanonization resulted in her prophecies being discontinued sometime before. Pall, given the Freedmenmen name Assol and taking the secret name Mauve'Bib (after the purple napkin that all Freedmenmen wear about their necks) begins to ascend the power structure of the tribe (as well as the Freedmenmen girl Loni as his lover), realizing that he could use the Freedmenmen to return to a position of power, taking back not only Doon but the Imperium itself. He also realizes what the planet's Imperial Planetologist and liberal economist, Keynes, had puzzled out some time before: the rampaging Giant Pretzels (known as Schmai-gunug) actually produces the beer as a byproduct of its very life-cycle. The Lady Jazzica ascends to the status of Revved-Up Mother of Hootch Grabr, becoming known as Jazzica-of-the-Weirdness. During her ascension, while getting drunk on the beer, she realizes that she carries Lotto's daughter. Her intoxication opens her foetal daughter to the thousands of years of Boni Maroni culinary history; the result is Nailya-the-Truly-Weird, a toddler who spouts recipes as though she were an adult. During this time, he knowingly positions himself as the Kumquat Haagendasz (the result of a generations-long breeding program so secret that the Boni Maroni have actually forgotten the point) and the Mahdl-t, the long hoped-for Freedmenmen messiah, "he who will drive us to Paradise and Back", who will finally bring the entrees the Freedmenmen have hungered for. By this route, he assumes and consolidates his power over the natives, not only making them his allies, but his fanatic followers. Meanwhile, back in power, Baron Vladimir Hardchargin has his own problems. Converting the fief into the Shadvlad Rendezvous, the galaxy's premier lounge planet, is a relative success, even though the Freedmenmen remain a chronic problem and the Giant Pretzels remain at large. He is hungry for more success, though, and has plans to muscle out his silent partner (the Emperor) and play the Imperial House against the Boni Moroni, the Schlepping Guild, and the interstellar development cooperative NOAMCHOMSKI using his control of beer as leverage, thereby becoming the true power in the galaxy, and franchising the Shadvlad across the Imperium. Events come to a head when Pall Mauve'Bib, gone completely native and acquiring the "Eye of the Egad" (the telltale red-on-red eyes, indicating severe beer addiction) challenges the Baron to a bake-off, with a new ingredient: peanut butter, rendered from the naturally-occurring snack mix's peanuts, and debuting his secret weapon – a liqueur made from beer – Drambrewski. With the support of the Boni Moroni thereon, the promise of an assured supply of beer to the Schlepping Guild (who had been influenced to believe that the Hardchargins have been watering the beer, and are revealed to have the red-on-red eyes of beer addiction), and after dispatching the ShaNaNa-Baron Flip-Rotha Hardchargin in rankout (single insult-combat), Pall Mauve'Bib assumes Imperial control, banishing the Emperor's house to the prison plant Simplicissima Secundus, acquiring the hand of the Emperor's daughter Serutan in a marriage of convenience, and the Freedmenmen woman Loni as his concubine. |
1044676 | /m/0413xs | I Am the Cheese | Robert Cormier | null | {"/m/02n4kr": "Mystery", "/m/0dwly": "Children's literature", "/m/03mfnf": "Young adult literature", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | Protagonist Adam Farmer is biking from his home in the fictional town of Monument, Massachusetts (based on Cormier's home town of Leominster, Massachusetts). Interspersed with the story of his journey are memories of Adam's previous life with his parents, his love for prankster Amy Hertz, and the discovery that he is not who he seems to be. In the end we find out that Adam is just riding around his mental home and the characters on his trip are the people who work in the mental home. |
1045304 | /m/0415vl | My Name is Legion | Roger Zelazny | null | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/0707q": "Short story"} | The protagonist of these stories was involved in the creation of a global computer network designed to give ultimate economic control by keeping track of all human activity. Just before the system went live, the hero expressed his concerns about the possible misuse of such power to his superior, who gave the hero the chance to destroy his personal data before it was to be entered into the system. In taking this step the hero becomes non-existent as far as the system is concerned. Using backdoors in the central network, the hero is able to create identities for himself as needed. With this freedom he sets himself up as a freelance investigator and problem solver. |
1046551 | /m/041932 | Carpathian Castle | Jules Verne | 1892 | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/03npn": "Horror", "/m/05hgj": "Novel"} | In the village of Werst in the Carpathian mountains of Transylvania (then part of Austria-Hungary), some mysterious things are occurring and the villagers believe that Chort (the devil) occupies the castle. A visitor of the region, Count Franz de Télek, is intrigued by the stories and decides to go to the castle and investigate and finds that the owner of the castle is Baron Rodolphe de Gortz, one of his acquaintances, as years ago, they were rivals for the affections of the celebrated Italian prima donna La Stilla. The Count thought that La Stilla was dead, but he sees her image and voice coming from the castle, but we later on find that it was only a holographic image. |
1047006 | /m/041b8r | He Died With A Felafel In His Hand | John Birmingham | 1994 | {"/m/027mvb9": "Biographical novel", "/m/02yq81": "Comic novel"} | While the book is not written in a linear fashion the order of houses (and house mates) John lives in is as follows: 1st Place - The Boulevade * Tom lived in the garage * Mel lived upstairs. Her boyfriend Warren moved in some time later. When they moved out, replaced by * Andy the Med Student (Dr Death) moved in Tom moved out and is replaced by * Derek the Bank Clerk 2nd Place * Tom and John got a new place * Derek the Bank Clerk (lived in a tent). Replaced by * Martin the Paranoid Wargamer. Lasted three weeks and was replaced by * Taylor the Taxi Driver 3rd Place - King Street * PJ * Milo * PJ moved out, replaced by * The 7 ft Nurse, replaced by * Ray, replaced by * Malcolm and his Charlie Brown bowls, replaced by * Victor the Rasta, replaced by * McGann the American in his mid 40’s with a fondness for prostitutes, replaced by * Taylor the Taxi Driver. Taylor at the time was having personal issues. He ambushed his fellow housemates with a toy gun after hiding for an hour. He told them if it was a real gun they would all be dead. John saw this as good reason to move out 4th Place - Duke Street (Brisbane) * Thunderbird Ron * Macgyver the Mushroom Farmer * Neal the Albino Moontanner * Howie (Neal’s friend) * Satomi Tiger (via Tim the invisible flatmate) * Brainthrust Leonard * Jabba the Hutt * Mick the English Backpacker * Colin and Stepan John moves out for reasons not made clear 5th Place - Melbourne * Stacey the Who Weekly fan John moves out when her loud sex sessions became too much to bear 6th Place - Fitzroy * Brain the Electrician * Greg the Gay School Teacher * AJ * Satvia who starts going out with John * Nigel moves into the house and moves in with Satvia As a result of the fallout from this new relationship Greg moves out and John follows suit 7th Place - Carlton * Ernie * Martin the Canadian Phd * Dave the Smoker moves in with his washerwoman girlfriend * Four other Daves move in After trying to freeze out the Daves from the house by cutting off the gas and electricity John gives in and moves to a loft in Fitzroy 8th Place - Fitzroy * Wendell the Londoner After Wendell’s threats to kill him, John moves out and sleeps round friends 9th Place - Auchenflower in Brisbane * Wayne the Santanic Vet * Danny (the Decoy) * Margot 10th Place – Brisbane Goth House (not clear how this move came about) * Kevin the Carpenter * The New Slovenian Art printer * Bald Goth who lived in the back * Luke the Musician All the goths run away after the bailiff came round to collect unpaid rent. John keeps the house on and in move * Dirk * Em the Banker (however at the start of the book it is stated that Emma moves in when Nina moves out) * Crazy Nina Nina move out to live with her friend Tanya * Tanya then moves in after Nina sleeps with her boyfriend The whole house up sticks and moves 11th Place * Dirk * Em the Banker * Tanya (possibly) * New Girl moves in to replace Nina but leaves because she is "diagnosed as schizo" * Taylor the Taxi Driver moves in The book then segues to 12th Place - Band house in Darlinghurst, Sydney * Hooper * Tammy * Jeremy moves in to escape his former psychotic housemate * Keith the drummer moves in downstairs 13th Place - Kippax street * Gina * Harry the Doctor, replaced by * Kim the Vet, replaced by * Melissa the Junkie (aka Rowan Corcoran), replaced by * Duffy the Computer Programmer, replaced by * The Dutch Guy who lasted 2 weeks, replaced by * Giovanna who lasted less than a week, replaced by * Mosman who no one ever saw, replaced by * Jimbo who moved in with one of the girls leaving his room free for * Veronica the Proto Hippy who was replaced by * Jonathan, replaced by * Downstairs Ivan * Uptight Martin moved in at the same time Downstairs Ivan and Uptight Martin move out within 3 days of each other and are replaced by * Paul the Quiet Journalist and * Homer the Air Traffic Controller * Yoko San moved in and last three weeks, replaced by * Jeffrey the junkie |
1047128 | /m/041bpp | Count Karlstein | Philip Pullman | null | {"/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/0dwly": "Children's literature", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | The novel is set in the fictional Swiss village of Karlstein in 1816. The evil Count Karlstein made a deal with Zamiel, the Demon Huntsman, in order to obtain his current wealth. The condition of the deal was that in ten years' time the huntsman will be presented with a human sacrifice on All Souls' Eve. The count has decided to offer his two young nieces, Lucy and Charlotte. His plan does not go as smoothly as he would have preferred. Hildi Kelmar, a castle maidservant, overhears his plan to sacrifice Lucy and Charlotte and tries to save them. The narrative shifts between the perspectives of a panoply of characters, including Hildi, Lucy, Charlotte, the girls' former teacher Miss Augusta Davenport, the inept coachman Max Grindoff, and a police report. Other characters that come to the aid of the girls, willingly or not, are Meister Haifisch, the Count's lawyer; Doctor Cadaverezzi, a fraudulent magician employing Max as an assistant, who takes Lucy in as a part of his act; Eliza, Miss Davenport's helper and Max's lover; Hildi's mother, a tavern owner; and Hildi's brother, Peter, a huntsman hiding from the law. After hiding the girls, avoiding the Count and his cronies (Arturo Snivelwurst, his cowardly manservant, and Frau Muller, the castle's head servant), and helping several other people, Hildi has no choice but to send her fugitive brother, armed with a single silver bullet, to rescue the girls from the distant hunting cabin. He uses the bullet before encountering Zamiel, but the Demon Huntsman spares the hunter and those he protects, taking the life of Karlstein instead. The following day, Peter wins a shooting contest and the title of Chief Ranger of the Forest, securing his freedom. Meister Haifisch arrives and announces that the true Count Karlstein is in fact the orphaned Max, who weds Eliza and raises Lucy and Charlotte. Finally, Miss Augusta and Doctor Cadaverezzi (whom she knows as Signor Rolipolio), old lovers, reunite and marry. |
1047922 | /m/025rpvx | Leucippe and Clitophon | Achilles Tatius | null | null | At the novel's start, the unnamed narrator is approached by a young man called Clitophon who is induced to talk of his adventures. In Clitophon's story, his cousin Leucippe travels to his home in Tyre, at which point he falls in love with her, despite his already being promised in marriage to his half-sister Calligone. He seeks the advice of another cousin (Kleinias), already experienced in love (this latter's young male lover dies shortly after). After a number of attempts to woo her, Clitophon wins Leucippe's love, but his marriage to Calligone is fast approaching. However, the marriage is averted when Kallisthenes, a young man from Byzantium who has heard of Leucippe's beauty, comes to Tyre to kidnap her, but by mistake kidnaps Calligone. Clitophon attempts to visit Leucippe at night in her room, but her mother is awakened by an ominous dream. Fearing reprisals, Clitophon and Leucippe elope together and leave Tyre on a ship (where they meet another unhappy lover, Menelaos, responsible for his own boyfriend's death). Unfortunately, their ship is wrecked during a storm. They come to Egypt and are captured by Nile delta bandits. Clitophon is rescued, but the bandits sentence Leucippe to be sacrificed. Clitophon witnesses this supposed sacrifice and goes to commit suicide on Leucippe's grave, but it in fact turns out that she is still alive, the sacrifice having been staged by his captured friends using theatrical props. The Egyptian army soon rescues the group, but the general leading them falls in love with Leucippe. Leucippe is stricken by a state of madness, the effect of a strange love potion given her by another rival, but is saved by an antidote given by the helpful stranger Chaireas. The bandits' camp is destroyed and the lovers and their friends make for Alexandria, but are again betrayed: Chaireas kidnaps Leucippe, taking her away on his boat. As Clitophon pursues them, Chaireas' men apparently chop off her head and throw her overboard. Clitophon, distraught, returns to Alexandria. Melite, a widowed lady from Ephesus, falls in love with him and convinces him to marry her. Clitophon refuses to consummate the marriage before they arrive in Ephesus. Once there, he discovers Leucippe, who is still alive, another woman having been decapitated in her stead. It turns out that Melite's husband Thersandros is also still alive; he returns home and attempts to both rape Leucippe and frame Clitophon for murder. Eventually, Clitophon's innocence is proven; Leucippe proves her virginity by entering the magical temple of Artemis; Leucippe's father (Sostratos) comes to Ephesus and reveals that Clitophon's father gives the lovers his blessing. Kallisthenes, Calligone's kidnapper, is also shown to have become a true and honest husband. The lovers can finally marry in Byzantium, Leucippe's town. |
1047924 | /m/02p3kbn | Daphnis and Chloe | Longus | null | null | Daphnis and Chloe is the story of a boy (Daphnis) and a girl (Chloe), each of whom is exposed at birth along with some identifying tokens. A goatherd named Lamon discovers Daphnis, and a shepherd called Dryas finds Chloe. Each decides to raise the child he finds as his own. Daphnis and Chloe grow up together, herding the flocks for their foster parents. They fall in love but, being naive, do not understand what is happening to them. Philetas, a wise old cowherd, explains to them what love is and tells them that the only cure is "kissing." They do this. Eventually, Lycaenion, a woman from the city, educates Daphnis in love-making. Daphnis, however, decides not to test his newly acquired skill on Chloe, because Lycaenion tells Daphnis that Chloe "will scream and cry and lie bleeding heavily [as if murdered]." |
1048130 | /m/041fnq | Autumn Visits | Sergey Lukyanenko | null | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction"} | Six forces: Love, Growth, Knowledge, Power, Strength, and Art. This world (actually, the whole action takes place in Russia and the Ukraine) lacks love; but the love this Envoy would bring the Kindness of fervent religion - leading to witch hunts and crusades. The Original for this Envoy is a female doctor, who has seen the consequences of love, kindness and compassion neglected in her patients dying without access to medicines and treatments. She believes her Envoy to be God, or a divine messenger, but appears rather blind to her other aspects. The force of Knowledge would create a better, more reasonable world, but is hampered by physical fraility, and always ends up subjugated by power. The Envoy of knowledge would change that, but his Original is an old scientist suffering from terminal cancer, who is intelligent and wise, but physically impotent. Knowledge remembers his past incarnations with clarity, unlike the other Envoys and can extrapolate the actions of the others much better. The force of Art is rarely able to take action, hampered by its own imagination of the consequences. When it does, however, the actions are impassioned, and the result is rarely savoury, like the actions of a certain painter Schicklgruber. Art is represented by a 'hack' writer, cranking out several fantasy and sci-fi novels a year for money. The novel implies that some of Lukyanenko's other books are actually written by the Original of this Envoy. Specifically, he makes numerous references to having written The Boy and the Darkness. Strength is the force that guarantees peace and security. A country with a strong army, without crime; a place to which warriors can prouodly come home. Strength's Envoy is a copy of an Army Colonel who fought in Afghanistan. He is Ukrainian, and is in the Ukrainian army, but seems to regard the countries as close kin, almost as one. This Envoy and his Original don't see eye-to-eye on their vision of the future, because the Original has lost faith in his cause, while the copy retains his belief. Power represents a strong state, claiming people's loyalty, guiding their lives, and focusing their strength on a single purpose, but also punishing individual action, turning people into a herd being driven by a stren and beloved shepherd. This force is represented by an ambitious and corrupt politician, seeking to ascend to presidency. The Envoy murders and supplants his Original as soon as he arrives, because "power can't be shared". The novel implies that the current state of the world is in part the result of Power winning the last contest; Joseph Stalin and Napoleon Bonaparte are both implied to have been an Envoys of Power. The forth of Growth represents progress and development, potential limited only by motivation. Unfortunately, Growth lacks direction, and has potential for both good and evil. Growth is, appropriately, represented by a teenager - a somewhat dour and cynical boy, who is implied to have lost his faith in the world. This Envoy and his Original begin to grow apart as the novel progresses, diverging, and even spending a lot of time away from each other, unlike most other Envoy/Original pairs. Unlike the other Envoys, Growth does not remember his past incarnations, as experience would defeat the purpose of growing. Although not mentioned as part of the six Forces, Darkness intervenes in the contest. Darkness is presented as ultimate freedom, even from the consequences of one's own actions. Darkness doesn't have an Envoy, but it still has a champion - a determined and driven professional hitman, whom Darkness empowers and directs to kill all the Envoys and their Originals. Although not part of this contest, the force of Light has intervened in past contests, and has won at least one. Jesus Christ is implied to have been a champion of Light. His death was a short-term loss but a long-term victory. |
1049941 | /m/041m21 | Black Sun | Edward Abbey | 1971 | {"/m/0hfjk": "Western", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/01qxvh": "Romance novel"} | The book is divided into three parts: In the forest; In the sun; and In the evening. One of the plot devices Abbey uses is to play with time. For example, while driving back from the rim and picking up Sandy's car, Abbey switches to a scene with Will at a bar watching Native Americans fighting. Or, after Sandy goes missing and Will and Larry fight, the reader gets a scene where Will and Sandy discuss Larry's upcoming visit. The first part opens with Will Gatlin, a ranger who lives in a cabin under a fire watch tower, going about his daily routine, which includes climbing the tower to make sure there are no forest fires in sight. He hears people approaching, including the voices of women. He heats up a pot of coffee and puts on a clean shirt. A man, whose name Will quickly forgets, introduces himself and the two young ladies, Gloria Hollenbeck and Sandy MacKenzie. They ask if they can climb to the top of the tower and take in the view. Will leads them, but only Sandy is able to keep up with his quick pace. They admire the view up top before the other two finally arrive. After some brief excitement over a dust cloud, they descend for some coffee. Art Ballentine arrives at Will's cabin one day to save Will from the desolation of his life. He urges Will to leave the forest, get a woman, get fat. He's a college professor driving through on his way to California with his wife, Elsie. He asks Will what is he doing with his life wasting it away alone looking for fires. Will answers he's staring at the sun. "Stare it out. Stand on this tower and stare at the sun until the sun goes ... black." They head back to the lodge that Art is staying at to have dinner with Elsie. However, Elsie wants no part of dinner with the two of them so they dine without her. Art offers his philosophy on women, admitting he sleeps with some of his female students. Will responds with no shock, thinking it was one of the perks of the job. Later Will is in town mailing a letter when Sandy comes up to him. He struggles to recall her but does (he was more taken with Gloria, the rodeo queen on their first meeting). Sandy tells him Gloria and the unnamed man have left, but she stayed behind. She just finished hiking the canyon by herself. Will tells he she shouldn't do that alone, because it could be dangerous. He offers to buy her a drink at the bar, she informs him she can't go in, she's only 19. Will admits to being 37. After a few moments of conversation Will realizes that Sandy is nervous. When the conversation is coming to a close, he said he has to return to fix his bachelor supper. At the same moment she offers to come with him and cook for him, and he invites her along. They go back to her place where Sandy cooks a meal of stuffed peppers. During the meal Will debates if he should take her to bed, believing she's willing. He decides she's in love, but not with him, and that she's probably a virgin. In the end, he decides to return to his cabin. Sandy asks him to join her on a flight to the other rim so she can retrieve her car from the hike she took. He says he would join her, if she can give him a couple of days notice. Then Sandy asks if he would like to kiss her. He says he would, and does. Will gets a letter from Art. Elsie has left him and has been replaced by a 29-year-old named Darnelle, who he absolutely no intention of marrying. The second part, In the Sun, opens with Will driving into town and spending 10 minutes in front of a gas station bathroom mirror trying to make himself look good all for a woman. He tries to remember the last time he did this for a girl, and can't recall when. He walks to her house where she is already waiting for him with a rucksack filled with supplies for a picnic. They embrace, kiss and then hop in the car and head toward the airport. During the car ride Sandy tells Will that she's engaged to a 23-year-old cadet in the Air Force, Lawrence J. Turner the Third. Will lets her know that he's not surprised and if she was looking for some sign he was disappointed in the news, there is none. They reach the airport where the pilot and one other passenger are already waiting. They pay their fares and climb aboard. Will's a nervous flyer, but Sandy loves it. She said she's taken some flying lessons and thinks she could fly this plane. During the flight Sandy can spot the trail she had hiked a week earlier and points it out. When the plane makes its first attempt at landing there is a cow and its calf in the middle of the runway. For a second both Will and Sandy believe they are going to die, but the pilot flies up to avoid them. Finally they are safely on the ground and hop on a bus to get to the trail head. Once there they find Sandy's car, make a stop at a coffee shop for breakfast and then begin the 300-plus mile trip around the canyon back to their starting spot. They stop for the picnic lunch that Sandy had promised Will for joining her on this trip. They drink a lot of wine and talk of many meaningless things. Will teaches her some Navajo words. They drive some more, then make another stop. Will offers Sandy more wine. She says "you're trying to get me drunk." Will says yes he is. She says "you're trying to seduce me." Will says yes he is. She then confesses to being a virgin, even though Will tells her he already figured that out and he forgives her for it. They go swimming in the river. For a moment, Sandy lets the current take her downriver, but Will gets excited and screams at her to stay away. She wonders why, and he points out there are rapids just around the bend and a current so strong she'd never be able to swim out of them. How long do they last? He says 300 miles, all the way through the canyon. They sleep on the beach but Sandy asks Will to wait, that she's still afraid. Art sends another letter to Will, this time to inform him Darnelle has left him and he's currently alone. But, fear not, for there are 50,000 in this city alone waiting to take her place. Will drives to spend a weekend with Rosalie, the woman he would have sex with on a semi-regular basis before Sandy entered his life. She has three children and a missing husband. Will tries to seduce her, but Rosie asks him will he marry her. When he says no, she goes to watch television. When Will still shows no interest in marriage, she gives in and says she might as well make love to him. After sex on the couch in front of the TV, Rosie falls asleep, Will carries her to her bed. Then he drinks another beer, gets dressed and leaves for the neighborhood bar. Will and Sandy are driving and she's talking about Larry, her fiance. Will shows no intention of getting jealous. She asks if there is a phone in the next town so she can call Larry. He points out there are rooms in the next town. He admits he wants to make love to her, sleep, then make love to her again. She says not yet. They drive on, even though both are very tired. She falls asleep and he has to gently wake her when they reach her home. He turns and leaves with her calling after him. She wants to know if he'll come if she calls. He says no, next time she must come to him. And bring a toothbrush. Will receives a letter from Lawrence J. Turner asking him to leave his fiancee alone. She had confessed to her fiance that she was growing fond of Will and that he was an older man. Larry promises to hold him responsible for whatever happens to Sandy. Sandy comes to Will, with her toothbrush. She admits to being scared, because she's never spent the night with a man before. He admits to being scared, because he's never spent the night with her before. He says the only remedy is for both of them to get a little drunk. They go to bed together that night. Will makes her breakfast in the nude, because he has ever intention of returning to bed to continue their lovemaking. Sandy worries that Larry won't marry her now, because she's no longer a virgin. Will says if Larry won't, he will. She asks if that's a proposal. He says sure. Will says he smells smoke and must climb the tower. He does, with Sandy, but there is no smoke to be seen. He reports in by radio, where they notice he's an hour late. They ask if he's drunk. Will says worse yet, he's in love. Another letter from Art, this one more philosophical than the rest. Darnelle has returned and wants him. He begs Will to write back, knowing he never will. Says he might drive out there and visit again. Will and Sandy go on a hike together, making love often and Will tells Sandy to take it easy on him, as he's an old man. Part three, In the Evening, opens with a letter to Will from Rosie. She thanks him for the check he sent and asks why she hasn't seen him in nearly a year. She, and the children, miss him and wish he would visit again. Will walks out of the lodge and spots a young man waiting for him. He knows immediately who it is. After a terse greeting, they go off to the side and Larry asks Will where is she? Will says he doesn't know. Sandy had left him a note saying that she wanted to be alone for a few days, and that's all he knew. Larry lets Will know that he doesn't believe him and that he thinks Will had something to do with Sandy going missing. Larry also said he had every intention of beating Will up, but now that he met him and discovered him a coward, he'd be too embarrassed to thrash him. Will insults him, so Larry does beat him up. Will refuses to fight back, and instead offers to buy Larry a drink. Going back in time Sandy talks about Larry's upcoming visit to her. He's been writing and calling her for months, with many of those calls and letters going unreturned. Will says he wants to marry Sandy, but she wonders if she can live in a cabin by a fire watch tower in the woods eating poached meat for the rest of her life. Sandy writes Will a note, saying that she needs to get away for a few days to figure things out. With Larry visiting on Sunday she realizes she must make a decision. Does she want to be with Larry, or Will? She wishes Will would help her with this choice more, but realizes it is something she has to figure out on her own. Sandy's car was spotted by a ranger near a trail, but has since gone. Will loads up supplies and notifies his boss, Wendell, that he's not going to be available for a while. Wendell pleads with him not to abandon his post, but Will refuses. He's going to search for Sandy. Larry had already tried this, and flying around looking for her. But he didn't know how to survive in the wild and he nearly killed himself. Now he just sits in Sandy's home, hoping that somehow she will return to him. And he also blames Will for whatever has happened to his fiancee. Will spends days hiking through the canyon, searching for Sandy. It's harsh terrain and tests even an experienced hand like himself. Larry would never survive this hike. Sandy may not have. At one point he sees a group of buzzards circling overhead. He climbs his way there, but finds only the body of a deer that had fallen from the cliff. Art writes that he has finally received a one-word letter from Will, and yes he will come. He asks about the terrible year they are having at the park this year, with the fires and the dead bodies. He asks if they ever found the body of that girl who went missing three years ago? Art spends the final week with Will at his job at the park. Winter is coming soon and there will be no need for anyone to keep watch. On the final day Will says he won't be coming back and isn't much troubled by that fact. As they leave, Will pulls over every now and again to cut down a tree with a power saw to block the road and keep people out. "Won't the snow do that," Art asks. Yes, Will says, but it's not snowing yet. They finally get to the end and close the gate that says road closed. They drive to a local coffee shop where Art flirts with a waitress named Claire. |
1051237 | /m/041qmv | The Sleepwalkers | Arthur Koestler | null | null | Koestler starts off the book by looking back into his childhood about his philosophy of the world. He states that when he looks at the world, he looks at it as how the Babylonians did. He goes on to talk about where the Babylonians and Egyptians left off and the Greeks took over philosophy. "Homer's world is another, more colourful oyster, a floating disc surrounded by Okeanus." A central theme of The Sleepwalkers is the changing relationship between faith and reason. Koestler explores how these seemingly contradictory threads existed harmoniously in many of the greatest intellectuals of the West. He illustrates that while the two are estranged today, in the past the most ground-breaking thinkers were often very spiritual. Another recurrent theme of this book is the breaking of paradigms in order to create new ones. People - scientists included - hold onto cherished old beliefs with such love and attachment that they refuse to see the wrong in their ideas and the truth in the ideas that are to replace them. "The conclusion he puts forward at the end of the book is that modern science is trying too hard to be rational. Scientists have been at their best when they allowed themselves to behave as "sleepwalkers," instead of trying too earnestly to ratiocinate." |
1052040 | /m/041srv | 3 Maccabees | null | null | null | The contents of the book have a legendary character, which scholars have not been able to tie to proven historical events, and it has all the appearances of a romance. According to the book, after Ptolemy's defeat of Antiochus III in 217 BC at the battle of Raphia, he visited Jerusalem and the Second Temple. However, he was miraculously prevented from entering the building. This led him to hate the Jews and upon his return to Alexandria, he rounded up the Jewish community there to put them to death in his hippodrome. However, Egyptian law required that the names of all those put to death be written down, and all the paper in Egypt was exhausted in attempting to do this, so that the Jews were able to escape. Ptolemy then attempted to have the Jews killed by crushing by elephant; however, due to various interventions by God, the Jews escaped this fate, despite the fact that the 500 elephants had been specially intoxicated to enrage them. Finally, the king was converted and bestowed favor upon the Jews, with this date being set as a Festival of Deliverance. |
1052081 | /m/041sy1 | 4 Maccabees | null | null | null | The work consists of a prologue and two main sections; the first advances the philosophical thesis while the second illustrates the points made using examples drawn from 2 Maccabees (principally, the martyrdom of Eleazer and the Maccabeean youths) under Antiochus IV Epiphanes. The last chapters concern the author's impressions drawn from these martyrdoms. The work thus appears to be an independent composition to 1 Maccabees and 2 Maccabees, merely drawing on their descriptions to support its thesis. It was composed originally in the Greek language, in what Stephen Westerholm of the Eastern / Greek Orthodox Bible calls "very fluently... and in a highly rhetorical and affected Greek style." |
1052204 | /m/041t8v | A Laodicean | Thomas Hardy | null | null | Paula Power inherits a medieval castle from her industrialist father who has purchased it from the aristocratic De Stancy family. She employs two architects, one local and one, George Somerset, newly qualified from London. Somerset represents modernity in the novel. In the village there is an amateur photographer, William Dare, who is the illegitimate son of Captain De Stancy, an impoverished scion of the family. Captain De Stancy represents a dream of medieval nobility to Paula. She is attracted to both men for their different virtues but William Dare decides to intervene to promote his father in her affections. He fakes the telegram and photograph to make it appear Somerset is leading a dissolute lifestyle. His subterfuge is discovered by Captain De Stancy's sister Charlotte who has befriended Paula. She decides to tell Paula the truth and Paula pursues Somerset to the continent where he has gone mistakenly believing Paula and the Captain to have been married. She finds him and they are reunited and marry. The castle burns down and Somerset proposes to build a modern house in its place. The last line has Paula summing up her dichotomy of mind between modernity and romantic medievalism, and thus the two men, also emphasising the title "a Laodicean" (someone indifferent or half-hearted) — "I wish my castle wasn't burnt; and I wish you were a De Stancy!" |
1052205 | /m/041t95 | Two on a Tower | Thomas Hardy | 1882 | {"/m/05hgj": "Novel"} | Two On A Tower is a tale of star-crossed love in which Hardy sets the emotional lives of his two lovers against the background of the stellar universe. The unhappily married Lady Constantine breaks all the rules of social decorum when she falls in love with Swithin St. Cleeve, an astronomer who is ten years her junior. Her husband's death leaves the lovers free to marry, but the discovery of a legacy forces them apart. This is Hardy's most complete treatment of the theme of love across the class and age divide and the fullest expression of his fascination with science and astronomy. |
1052213 | /m/041t9w | The Woodlanders | Thomas Hardy | 1887 | null | The story takes place in a small woodland village called Little Hintock, and concerns the efforts of an honest woodsman, Giles Winterborne, to marry his childhood sweetheart, Grace Melbury. Although they have been informally betrothed for some time, her father has made financial sacrifices to give his adored only child a superior education and no longer considers Giles good enough for her. When the new doctor – a well-born and handsome young man named Edred Fitzpiers – takes an interest in Grace, her father does all he can to make Grace forget Giles, and to encourage what he sees as a brilliant match. Grace has more awe than love for Fitzpiers, but marries him nonetheless. After the honeymoon, the couple take up residence in an unused wing of Melbury's house. Soon, however, Fitzpiers begins an affair with a rich widow named Mrs. Charmond, takes to treating Grace coldly, and finally deserts her one night after he accidentally reveals his true character to his father-in-law. Melbury tries to procure a divorce for his daughter so she can marry Giles after all, but in vain. When Fitzpiers quarrels with Mrs. Charmond and returns to Little Hintock to try to reconcile with his wife, she flees the house and turns to Giles for help. He is still convalescing from a dangerous illness, but nobly allows her to sleep in his hut during stormy weather, whilst he insists on sleeping outside. As a result, he dies. Grace later allows herself to be won back to the at least temporarily repentant Fitzpiers, thus sealing her fate as the wife of an unworthy man. No one is left to mourn Giles except a courageous peasant girl named Marty South, who all along has been the overlooked but perfect mate for him, and who has always loved him. |
1052338 | /m/041tn6 | 1 Esdras | null | null | null | *Septuagint and its derivative translations: = 1 Esdras *King James Version and many successive English translations: 1 Esdras *Vulgate and its derivative translations: 3 Esdras *Slavonic bible: 2 Esdras *Ethiopic bible: Ezra Kali |
1053614 | /m/041ym4 | The Third Policeman | Flann O'Brien | 1967 | {"/m/02n4kr": "Mystery", "/m/02yq81": "Comic novel", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | The Third Policeman is set in rural Ireland and is narrated by a dedicated amateur scholar of de Selby, a scientist and philosopher. The narrator, whose name we never learn, is orphaned at a young age. At boarding school, he discovers the work of de Selby and becomes a fanatically dedicated student of it. One night he breaks his leg under mysterious circumstances – "if you like, it was broken for me" – and he is ultimately fitted with a wooden leg to replace the original one. On returning to his family home, he meets and befriends John Divney who is in charge of the family farm and pub. Over the next few years, the narrator devotes himself to the study of de Selby's work and leaves Divney to run the family business. By the time the narrator is thirty, he has written what he believes to be the definitive critical work on de Selby, but does not have enough money to publish the work. Divney observes that Mathers, a local man, "is worth a packet of potato-meal" and eventually it dawns on the narrator that Divney plans to rob and kill Mathers. The narrator and Divney encounter Mathers one night on the road and Divney knocks Mathers down with a bicycle pump. The narrator, prompted by Divney, finishes Mathers off with a spade, and then notices that Divney has disappeared with Mathers's cash box. When Divney returns he refuses to reveal where the cash box is, and fends off the narrator's repeated inquiries. To ensure that Divney does not retrieve the box unobserved, the narrator becomes more and more inseparable from Divney, eventually sharing a bed with him: "the situation was a queer one and neither of us liked it". Three years pass, in which the previously amicable relationship between the narrator and Divney breaks down. Eventually Divney reveals that the box is hidden under the floorboards in Mathers's old house, and instructs the narrator to fetch it. The narrator follows Divney's instructions but just as he reaches for the box, "something happened":It was as if the daylight had changed with unnatural suddenness, as if the temperature of the evening had altered greatly in an instant or as if the air had become twice as rare or twice as dense as it had been in the winking of an eye; perhaps all of these and other things happened together for all my senses were bewildered all at once and could give me no explanation. The box has disappeared, and the narrator is perplexed to notice that Mathers is in the room with him. During a surreal conversation with the apparently deceased Mathers, the narrator hears another voice speaking to him which he realises is his soul: "For convenience I called him Joe." The narrator is bent on finding the cash box, and when Mathers tells him about a remarkable police barracks nearby he resolves to go to the barracks and enlist the help of the police in finding the box. On the way, he meets a one-legged bandit named Martin Finnucane, who threatens to kill him but who becomes his friend upon finding out that his potential victim is also one-legged. The narrator approaches the police barracks and is disturbed by its appearance:It looked as if it were painted like an advertisement on a board on the roadside and indeed very poorly painted. It looked completely false and unconvincing. Inside the barracks he meets two of the three policemen, Sergeant Pluck and Policeman MacCruiskeen, who speak largely in non sequitur and who are entirely obsessed with bicycles. There he is introduced to various peculiar or irrational concepts, artifacts, and locations, including a contraption that collects sound and converts it to light based on a theory regarding omnium, the fundamental energy of the universe; a vast underground chamber called 'Eternity,' where time stands still, mysterious numbers are devoutly recorded and worried about by the policemen; a box from which anything you desire can be produced; and an intricate carved chest containing a series of identical but smaller chests. The infinite nature of this last device causes the narrator great mental and spiritual discomfort. It is later discovered that Mathers has been found dead and eviscerated in a ditch. Joe suspects Martin Finnucane, but to the narrator's dismay he himself is charged with the crime because he is the most convenient suspect. He argues with Sergeant Pluck that since he is nameless, and therefore, as Pluck observed, "invisible to the law", he cannot be charged with anything. Pluck is surprised, but after he unsuccessfully attempts to guess the narrator's name he reasons that since the narrator is nameless he is not really a person, and can therefore be hanged without fear of repercussions:The particular death you die is not even a death (which is an inferior phenomenon at best) only an insanitary abstraction in the backyard[...]. The narrator calls on the help of Finnucane, but his rescue is thwarted by MacCruiskeen riding a bicycle painted an unknown colour which drives those who see it mad. He faces the gallows, but the two policemen are called away by dangerously high readings in the underground chamber. The following day he escapes from the barracks on a bicycle of unusual perfection. As he rides through the countryside, he passes Mathers's house and sees a light. Disturbed, he enters the house and finally meets the mysterious and reportedly all-powerful third policeman, Fox, who has the face of Mathers. Fox's secret police station is in the walls of Mathers's house. He tells the narrator that he is the architect of the readings in the underground chamber, which he alters for his amusement, thereby inadvertently saving the narrator's life. Fox goes on to tell the narrator that he found the cash box and has sent it to the narrator's home, where it is waiting for him. He also reveals that the box contains not money but omnium, which can become anything he desires. Divney can see the narrator, although the others cannot, and he has a heart attack from the shock. He shouts that the narrator was supposed to be dead, for the black box was not filled with money but a bomb and it exploded when the narrator reached for it. The narrator leaves Divney on the floor, apparently dying. Feeling "sad, empty and without a thought", the narrator leaves the house and walks away down the road. He soon approaches the police barracks, the book using exactly the same words to describe the barracks and the narrator's opinion of it that were used earlier, the story having circled around itself and restarted. This time, John Divney joins the narrator on the road; they neither look at nor speak to each other. They both enter the police station and are confronted by Sergeant Pluck, who repeats his earlier dialogue and ends the book with a reprise of his original greeting to the narrator:"Is it about a bicycle?" he asked. |
1055983 | /m/0424c5 | Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith | Jon Krakauer | 2003 | {"/m/05h83": "Non-fiction"} | The book opens with news accounts of the 1984 murder of Brenda Lafferty and her infant daughter Erica. Brenda was married to the youngest Lafferty brother, Allen; older brothers Dan and Ron targeted their sister-in-law because they believed she was the reason Ron's wife left him (after refusing to allow him to marry a plural/second wife). Both men's extremism reached new heights when they became members of the School of the Prophets founded and led by Robert Crossfield. After joining the school, Ron claimed that God had sent him revelations - communication with God is a core belief of fundamentalist Mormonism as well as mainstream Mormonism . Ron showed the members of the School of Prophets a written "removal revelation" that allegedly called for the killing of Brenda and her baby. After other members of the school failed to honor Ron's removal revelation, the brothers quit the school. The murders were particularly cruel, with Dan claiming that he slit the victims' throats. However, at trial, Chip Carnes, who was riding in the get-away car, testified that Ron said he had killed Brenda and that Ron also thanked his brother for "doing the baby." After the murders, the police found the written "revelation" concerning Brenda and Erica. After the press widely reported that Ron had received a revelation to kill Brenda and Erica, the Lafferty brothers conducted a recorded press conference at which Ron pointed out that the "revelation" was not addressed to him, but to "Todd" [a drifter whom Ron had befriended while working in Wichita, Kansas] and that the revelation called only for "removal" of Brenda and her baby and did not use the word, "kill." These remarks of Ron denying he had received a revelation to kill Brenda and Erica were shown to the jury at Ron's trial. After opening with the Lafferty case, Krakauer goes into the history of Mormonism, starting with the early life of Mormon founder and prophet Joseph Smith, following his life from a criminal fraud trial to leading the first followers to Jackson County, Missouri and Nauvoo, Illinois. While violence seemed to follow the Mormons wherever they went, it wasn't necessarily the Mormons' doing, as Krakauer points out. Early Mormons faced severe religious persecution, due to their unorthodox beliefs, including polygamy, and their tendency to deal economically and personally only with other Mormons. This led to violent clashes between Mormons and non-Mormons, culminating in Smith's death on June 27, 1844 at the hands of a mob while he was jailed in Carthage, Illinois, awaiting trial for destroying the printing press of a local publication that painted him in a negative light. From Nauvoo, the Mormons trekked westward to modern-day Utah, led (after some controversy) by Smith's successor Brigham Young. Arriving in what they called Deseret, many Mormons believed they would be left alone by the federal government, as the territory was under Mexican rule at the time. This hope died soon after their arrival, when the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed on February 2, 1848, ending the Mexican-American War and ceding the land to the United States. Mormonism's problems weren't all external, as Smith's highly controversial revelation of plural marriage threatened to tear the faith in two. The Utah territory was a theocracy ruled by self-appointed governor, Brigham Young and was denied statehood for 50 years due to the practice of polygamy. Finally, on September 23, 1890 Wilford Woodruff, the fourth president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints officially banned the practice of polygamy after having received a revelation (visit) from God denouncing polygamy and Utah was granted statehood, in spite of the fact that polygamy remained to be a secret practice until the early 1900s. After the Woodruff "revelation," some members broke away from the mainstream church to form what eventually became the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS), the most popular group of fundamentalist Mormonism. The FLDS church allows — even encourages — polygamy. Constantly comparing the mainstream and fundamentalist forms of Mormonism, Krakauer examines events in the LDS history and compares them to modern day FLDS doctrine (or even less mainstream versions of Mormonism, such as the Crossfield School of the Prophets). One of these events is the Mountain Meadows massacre, in which Mormons, allegedly with the help of local Paiute Indians, rounded up the Baker-Fancher party of emigrants from Arkansas heading to California and murdered approximately 120 of them. While the Mormons went to great lengths to conceal any involvement in the massacre (including dressing as Paiute Indians and painting their faces in similar fashion), the only person successfully convicted in the affair was John D. Lee, a member of the LDS Church who was executed by the state in 1877 for his role in the crime. The book cites information gleaned from several interviews with Dan Lafferty and former and current members of the Crossfield School of the Prophets, as well as other fundamentalist Mormons. It also pulls from several books about the formation of Mormonism to tie the origins of the religion to the modern iterations of both The Church and the fundamentalists. |
1057288 | /m/04283r | West of Eden | Harry Harrison | 1984 | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/05hgj": "Novel", "/m/0mz2": "Alternate history", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | The story revolves around the eventual discovery of the American continents by the Yilané, who are searching for new resources and territories for colonization. Being reptiloid and cold-blooded, they target tropical and sub-tropical zones. Eventually, of course, they encounter the humanoids, whom they regard as barely sentient animals. Humans, in their turn, are xenophobically terrified of the Yilané. It is not long before a state of conflict exists between the two species. The central characters are Vaintè, an ambitious Yilané; Stallan, her vicious and obedient adjutant; and Kerrick, a "ustouzou" (the Yilané word for mammal) who is captured by the reptiloids as a boy, and raised as a Yilané. Kerrick eventually escapes to rejoin his own people, ultimately becoming a leader. Another notable Yilanè character is Enge, the leader of a faction of pacifist Yilané who reject the militaristic and violent attitudes of their culture. This group is violently opposed by most other Yilané, especially Vaintè. Enge befriends Kerrick, and acts as his teacher, while he lives with the Yilané. |
1058538 | /m/0466pgd | On a Pale Horse | Piers Anthony | 1983 | {"/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy", "/m/05hgj": "Novel"} | In the early 21st century, Zane is living a pathetic life without money or employment. When a magic gem merchant cheats Zane out of an opportunity for romance, Zane decides to take his own life. As he starts to pull the trigger, he sees the specter of Death (Thanatos) advancing on him. Startled, he pulls the gun from his own head and shoots Death right between the eyes. He is then visited by a woman who introduces herself as Fate, who insists that Zane must now assume the position of the man he has killed, since whoever kills Death must become the new Death. As Zane makes his way downstairs, he gets his first view of a pale limousine with the license plate reading "Mortis"...his Death Steed (Death rides a pale horse) who can assume the form of a pale boat, a plane, or a pale limousine, as well as the form of a pale horse. Fate then departs and leaves Zane in the care of Chronos, the Incarnation of Time, who then instructs Zane how to use his deathwatch, how Mortis changes form, how to use other instruments of the office, and exactly what his new duties are. This entails residing in Purgatory and visiting Earth to collect the souls of humans who are in a close balance of good and evil and cannot determine their eternal destination (Heaven or Hell) without help. In the course of learning the job, he discovers that his coming into the office of Death was not accidental, but was manipulated by a powerful magician (Cedric Kaftan Jr.). Despite being a mortal, this magician has strong ties to the other Incarnations from Purgatory and reveals to Zane that the Incarnation of Fate arranged Zane's destiny for the magician's purpose. There is a prophecy which states that Luna Kaftan, the magician's daughter, is destined to go into politics and thwart the schemes of Satan, the Incarnation of Evil. Luna Kaftan is thus a target for the forces of Hell and is in need of supernatural protection. The magician, who has done a great deal of research, feels that Zane is the best candidate for the Incarnation of Death to fall in love with Luna and thus want to protect her. The only way for the magician Kaftan to meet with Death without Satan's knowledge is to die with his soul in balance. The magician chooses to sacrifice his own life in order to introduce Zane to Luna and explain to Zane the circumstances which brought him into the office of Death. The dead magician's plans however seem to go awry. Due to manipulation by Satan, Luna is also destined to die before she can fulfill the prophecy. The magician had used too much black magic for his soul to be in balance. In order to bring it into balance before committing suicide, he has transferred the excess evil on his soul to Luna's soul, whom he has assumed to be innocent of evil. However, Luna has a burden of evil on her soul already, and her father's scheme has put her on the course to Hell. To correct this, she volunteers to switch places with one of Death's other clients. By sacrificing her own life to save another, she manages to balance the evil on her soul. Her actions play right into Satan's trap, who doesn't care whether she goes to Heaven or Hell, only that she dies and is no longer a threat to his plots. However, Zane has already fallen in love with Luna by this time, just like the magician had planned, and he refuses to take the soul of the woman he loves. Now the motives behind the magician's choice of Zane are made clear to him when the other four Incarnations (Time, Fate, War, and Nature) from Purgatory approach him and explain that they were all in on the plan. The previous Death could not be manipulated into betraying the duties of his office for love, so the Incarnations_of_Immortality decided to replace him with a young, stubborn man like Zane, who could. Because Luna's soul is next in the queue, Zane cannot take the souls of other mortals until he deals with hers. He refuses to do so, thereby going on strike and leaving dying mortals in agony, unable to be released by death. As this is not to Satan's advantage, he first tries to bribe Zane, then intimidate him into going back to work. Zane, however, has had a conversation with Gaea, the Incarnation of Nature, who has demonstrated to him the absolute power each Incarnation wields in its own sphere of influence. Zane eventually realizes that the office of Death is unassailable by Satan and that he cannot be harmed within the sphere of that office. As an Incarnation, Satan himself has a soul and is subject to Zane's dominion. The conflict ends in a draw and Satan has no choice but to admit defeat. With Satan's plot exposed, Purgatory changes Luna's destiny and she is free to return to life. Zane lifts his strike, and with Luna under his protection, Satan can no longer interfere with her fate through the means of death. |
1059600 | /m/042g0r | The Burning Bed | Faith McNulty | null | null | On the night of the fire, Hughes told her children to put their coats on and wait for her in the car. She then started the fire with gasoline poured around the bed Mickey Hughes was sleeping in. After the house had caught fire, Hughes drove with her (movie - three children) (actually two girls and one boy) to the local police station in order to confess. Hughes was tried in Lansing, Michigan, and found by a jury of her peers to be not guilty by reason of temporary insanity. Having turned the book into a made-for-television movie, Goldemberg's screenplay, The Burning Bed, premiered on NBC on October 8, 1984. The movie, directed by Robert Greenwald, starred Farrah Fawcett as Francine Hughes and Paul LeMat as Mickey Hughes. The movie was filmed in Rosharon, Texas. The house that served as the house of Farrah Fawcett's character still stands today. |
1060323 | /m/042hvm | The Stars Shine Down | Sidney Sheldon | 1992-10 | {"/m/01jfsb": "Thriller", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/01qxvh": "Romance novel", "/m/05hgj": "Novel"} | The novel tells the story of Lara Cameron, a successful real estate developer who came from a broken family in Nova Scotia. Lara's mother dies in childbirth and her Scottish father doesn't want her. Early in life, she learns to fend for herself and how to get her own way in a male-dominated world. After her father's death, Lara makes a deal with the owner of the boarding house to secure her first building in exchange for her body. Thrilled at her success, she moves to Chicago to start her real estate empire. Even though she encounters many problems, she is able to overcome them all and become one of America's most successful businesswomen, and receives the nickname, "Iron Butterfly." She falls in love with a talented pianist, Philip Alder, and marries him. She is on the verge of losing everything she has achieved as well as the one man she loves, but the Iron Butterfly miraculously recovers from all her shattered dreams and gains back all her hopes and the only man whom she ever truly loved. bg:Звездите над нас es:Escrito en las estrellas ne:द स्टारस् साइन डाउन pt:The Stars Shine Down |
1060361 | /m/042hz3 | Dombey and Son | Charles Dickens | 1848 | {"/m/05hgj": "Novel"} | The story concerns Paul Dombey, the wealthy owner of the shipping company of the book's title, whose dream is to have a son to continue his business. The book begins when his son is born, and Dombey's wife dies shortly after giving birth. Following the advice of Mrs Louisa Chick, his sister, Dombey employs a wet nurse named Mrs Richards (Toodle). Dombey already has a daughter, Florence, whom he neglects. One day, Mrs Richards, Florence and her maid, Susan Nipper, secretly pay a visit to Mrs Richard's house in Staggs's Gardens so that she can see her children. During this trip, Florence becomes separated and is kidnapped for a short time by Good Mrs Brown before being returned to the streets. She makes her way to Dombey and Son's offices in the City and is guided there by Walter Gay, an employee, who first introduces her to his uncle, the navigation instrument maker Solomon Gills, at his shop the Wooden Midshipman. The child, also named Paul, is weak and often ill, and does not socialize normally with others; adults call him "old fashioned". He is intensely fond of his elder sister, Florence, who is deliberately neglected by her father as irrelevant and a distraction. He is sent away to Brighton, first for his health, where he and Florence lodge with the ancient and acidic Mrs Pipchin, and then for his education to Dr and Mrs Blimber's school, where he and the other boys undergo both an intense and arduous education under the tutelage of Mr Feeder, B.A. and Cornelia Blimber. It is here that Paul is befriended by a fellow pupil, the amiable Mr Toots. Here, Paul's health declines even further in this 'great hothouse' and he finally dies, still only six years old. Dombey pushes his daughter away from him after the death of his son, while she futilely tries to earn his love. In the meantime, Walter, who works for Dombey and Son, is sent off to work in Barbados through the manipulations of the firm's manager, Mr James Carker, 'with his white teeth', who sees him as a potential rival through his association with Florence. His boat is reported lost and he is presumed drowned. Walter's uncle leaves to go in search of Walter, leaving his great friend Captain Edward Cuttle in charge of the Midshipman. Meanwhile, Florence is now left alone with few friends to keep her company. Dombey goes to Leamington Spa with a new friend, Major Joseph B. Bagstock. The Major deliberately sets out to befriend Dombey in order to spite his neighbour in Princess's Place, Miss Tox, who has turned cold towards him owing to her hopes - through her close friendship with Mrs Chick - of marrying Mr Dombey. At the spa, Dombey is introduced via the Major to Mrs Skewton and her widowed daughter, Mrs Edith Granger. It is here that he develops an affection for Edith, encouraged by both the Major and the avaricious mother. After they return to London, Dombey remarries, effectively 'buying' the beautiful but haughty Edith as she and her mother are in a poor financial state. The marriage is loveless; his wife despises Dombey for his overbearing pride and herself for being shallow and worthless. Her love for Florence initially prevents her from leaving, but finally she conspires with Mr Carker to ruin Dombey's public image by running away together to Dijon. They do so after her last final argument with Dombey in which he once again attempts to subdue her to his will. When he discovers that she has left him, he blames Florence for siding with her stepmother, striking her on the breast in his anger, and she is forced to run away from home. Highly distraught, she finally makes her way to The Midshipman where she lodges with Captain Cuttle as he attempts to restore her to health. They are visited frequently by Mr Toots and his prizefighter companion, the Chicken, since Mr Toots has been desperately in love with Florence since their time together in Brighton. Dombey sets out to find his wife. He is helped by Mrs Brown and her daughter, Alice, who, as it turns out, was a former lover of Mr Carker. After being transported as a convict for criminal activities, which Mr. Carker had involved her in, she is seeking her revenge against him now that she has returned to England. Going to Mrs Brown's house, Dombey overhears the conversation between Rob the Grinder - who is in the employment of Mr Carker - and the old woman as to the couple's whereabouts and sets off in pursuit. In the meantime, in Dijon, Mrs Dombey informs Carker that she sees him in no better a light than she sees Dombey, that she will not stay with him and she flees their apartment. Distraught, with both his financial and personal hopes lost, Carker flees from his former employer's pursuit. He seeks refuge back in England, but being greatly overwrought, accidentally falls under a train and is killed. After Carker's death, it is discovered that he had been running the firm far beyond its means. This information is gleaned by Carker's brother and sister, John and Harriet, from Mr Morfin, the assistant manager at Dombey and Son, who sets out to help John Carker. He often overheard the conversations between the two brothers in which James, the younger, often abused John, the older, who was just a lowly clerk and who is sacked by Dombey because of his filial relationship to the former manager. Meanwhile, back at the Midshipman, Walter reappears, having been saved by a passing ship after floating adrift with two other sailors on some wreckage. After some time, he and Florence are finally reunited - not as 'brother' and 'sister' but as lovers, and they marry prior to sailing for China on Walter's new ship. This is also the time when Sol Gills returns to the Midshipman. As he relates to his friends, he received news whilst in Barbados that a homeward-bound China trader had picked up Walter and so had returned to England immediately. He said he had sent letters whilst in the Caribbean to his friend Ned Cuttle c/o Mrs MacStinger at Cuttle's former lodgings, and the bemused Captain recounts how he fled the place, thus never receiving them. Florence and Walter depart and Sol Gills is entrusted with a letter, written by Walter to her father, pleading for him to be reconciled towards them both. A year passes and Alice Brown has slowly been dying despite the tender care of Harriet Carker. One night Alice's mother reveals that Alice herself is the illegitimate cousin of Edith Dombey (which accounts for their similarity in appearance when they both meet). In a chapter entitled 'Retribution', Dombey and Son goes bankrupt. Dombey retires to two rooms in his house and all its contents are put up for sale. Mrs Pipchin, for some time the housekeeper, dismisses all the servants and she herself returns to Brighton, to be replaced by Mrs Richards. Dombey spends his days sunk in gloom, seeing no-one and thinking only of his daughter:He thought of her as she had been that night when he and his bride came home. He thought of her as she had been in all the home events of the abandoned house. He thought, now, that of all around him, she alone had never changed. His boy had faded into dust, his proud wife had sunk into a polluted creature, his flatterer and friend had been transformed into the worst of villains, his riches had melted away, the very walls that sheltered him looked on him as a stranger; she alone had turned the same, mild gentle look upon him always. Yes, to the latest and the last. She had never changed to him - nor had he ever changed to her - and she was lost. However, one day Florence returns to the house with her son, Paul, and is lovingly reunited with her father. Dombey accompanies his daughter to her and Walter's house where he slowly starts to decline, cared for by Florence and also Susan Nipper, now Mrs Toots. They receive a visit from Edth's Cousin Feenix who takes Florence to Edith for one final time - Feenix sought Edith out in France and she returned to England under his protection. Edith gives Florence a letter, asking Dombey to forgive her her crime before her departure to the South of Italy with her elderly relative. As she says to Florence, 'I will try, then to forgive him his share of the blame. Let him try to forgive me mine!' The final chapter (LXII) sees Dombey now a white-haired old man, 'whose face bears heavy marks of care and suffering; but they are traces of a storm that has passed on for ever, and left a clear evening in its track'. Sol Gills and Ned Cuttle are now partners at the Midshipman, a source of great pride to the latter, and Mr and Mrs Toots announce the birth of their third daughter. Walter is doing well in business, having been appointed to a position of great confidence and trust, and Dombey is the proud grandfather of both a grandson and grand-daughter whom he dotes on, and the book ends with the highly moving lines:'Dear grandpapa, why do you cry when you kiss me?' He only answers, 'Little Florence! Little Florence!' and smooths away the curls that shade her earnest eyes. |
1062803 | /m/042qmf | The Forty Days of Musa Dagh | Franz Werfel | 1933 | {"/m/02p0szs": "Historical fiction", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/098tmk": "War novel", "/m/0hwxm": "Historical novel"} | Franz Werfel had first served as a corporal and telephone operator in the artillery corps of the Austro-Hungarian Army during the First World War on the Russian front and later as a propaganda writer for the Military Press Bureau (with Rainer Maria Rilke and others) in Vienna. His experience of the horrors he witnessed during the war as well as the banality of the civil and military bureaucracies served him well during the course of writing the book. His reason for writing the novel came as a result of a trip through Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon in the winter and spring of 1930, and is given in a prefatory note in the novel: This book was conceived in March of the year 1929 [sic], during the course of a stay in Damascus. The miserable sight of maimed and famished-looking refugee children, working in a carpet factory, gave me the final impulse to snatch the incomprehensible destiny of the Armenian people from the Hell of all that had taken place. The writing of the book followed between July 1932 and March 1933. Meanwhile, in November, on a lecture tour through German cities, the author selected Chapter 5 of Book One for public readings. It was read in its present form, based on the historic records of a conversation between Enver Pasha and Pastor Johannes Lepsius. Werfel does not mention here that the completely rewrote much of the novel in May 1933, responding to events in Nazi Germany, and kept revising it up until it was published. Later, speaking to reporters, Werfel elaborated: "The struggle of 5,000 people on Musa Dagh had so fascinated me that I wished to aid the Armenian people by writing about it and bringing it to the world." Werfel’s narrative style is omniscient as well as having a polyfocus in which he moves from character to character as well as being an overarching spectator. For that reason, the connection between the author’s consciousness and that of his characters can almost read seamlessly. This is evident as the novel opens in the spring of 1915, during the second year of the World War I. Gabriel Bagradian, a wealthy Armenian from Paris, has returned to his native village of Yoghonoluk, one of seven villages in Hatay province. His view is dominated by a familiar and looming presence in this paradisiac landscape—Musa Dagh, which means Mt. Moses in Armenian. He thinks about his return to settle the affairs of his dead older brother and entertains pleasant reveries of his childhood as well as more serious matters. Bagradian feels both proud and estranged from his Armenian roots, and Werfel develops this theme of estrangement throughout the novel and which is denoted with the book’s first sentence, a question: “How did I get here?” Bagradian also considers his French wife Juliette and their son Stephan and how they will adjust to their new environment given the state of war that now exists and prevents their return. Other important characters are introduced in Book One: Juliette, Stephan, and the many Armenian characters, chief among them the Gregorian head priest, Ter Haigasun, the local physician, Dr. Altouni, and the apothecary–polymath Krikor, and the Greek American journalist, Gonzague Maris—all characters drawn from Armenian survivors of the events of 1915 as well as from Werfel’s family, friends, acquaintances—and himself. Indeed, he informs several characters ranging from the idealized outsider–hero Gabriel Bagradian to self-parody (the schoolteacher Oskanian). Bagradian considers himself a loyal citizen of the Ottoman Empire, even a patriot, eschewing the more radical Armenian parties, such as the socialist Hunchaks. He had served as an artillery officer in the 1912 Balkan War and had been involved in the progressive wing of Turkish politics and had been a vocal Armenian supporter of the CUP and the Young Turk Revolution) of 1908. Being a reserve officer, Bagradian becomes suspicious when he is not called up. Learning that Turkish authorities have seized the internal passports of Armenian citizens further fuels his suspicions. So he goes to the district capital of Antakya (i.e., Antioch) to inquire about his military status. In a Turkish bath, he overhears a group of Turks, among them the district governor, the Kaimikam, discussing the central government’s plan to do something about its Armenian problem. Bagradian is alarmed by what he hears and the dangers given the history of atrocities committed on Armenians, whose rise as the empire’s chief professional and mercantile class has alarmed Turkish nationalists. The dangers that this poses to his family are all corroborated by an old friend of the Bagradian family, Agha Rifaat Bereket, a pious dervish, a Sufi Muslim ascetic who sees the Young Turks as apostates. Back in Yoghonoluk, Bagradian begins socialize with the Armenian community. His grandfather had a paternal relationship with the Armenian villages that dot the land around Musa Dagh, a role that Gabriel Bagradian assumes not to be a real leader but more to help his French wife acclimate to what could be a long exile in the Turkish Levant. Despite the rumors of arrests and deportations trickling in from Istanbul and other Ottoman cities, many of Musa Dagh’s Armenians remain unconcerned about the outside world. It is not until four refugees arrive in Yoghonoluk in late April that the full nature of what the Ottoman government is doing becomes clear, for the refugees bring news of the brutal suppression of an Armenian uprising in the city of Zeitun and the mass deportation that followed. In a long passage, Werfel tells the story of Zeitun and introduces three more important characters of the book, the Protestant pastor Aram Tomasian, his pregnant wife Hovsannah, his sister Iskuhi, as well as the quasi-feral orphan girl Sato and Kevork, a houseboy who had suffered brain damage as a child at the hands of the Turks. Iskuhi, too, is a victim of a more recent atrocity. Her left arm is paralyzed from fending off a rape attempt. Despite her deformity, the Armenian girl’s beauty and eyes attract Bagradian. The story the refugees tell causes Bagradian and the Armenians who live around Musa Dagh to seriously consider resisting the Ottomans. Bagradian steps forward to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the villages and looks to the natural defenses of Musa Dagh and its environs. Ter Haigasun becomes his ally in convincing the Armenian villagers of the peril that is coming. Book One also introduces the readers to the German Protestant missionary Johannes Lepsius, a real person, and his audience with Enver Pasha, the Ottoman War Minister, one of the Three Pashas, which also included Talaat Pasha and Djemal Pasha, the triumvirate that ruled the Ottoman Empire. The chapter, titled “Interlude of the Gods,” reveals the Turkish point of view vis-à-vis the Armenians and the West. Werfel intended his depiction, almost entirely drawn verbatim from Lepsius’s published account, to be both sympathetic and damning, especially when Enver consults with Talaat on the progress of the deportations. The remainder of Book One describes which Armenians decide on resistance and which on cooperating with the deportation order. Bagradian camps out with his family and friends on Musa Dagh to ensure that it is the right place to make a stand. Those who decide to resist dig up a secret cache of rifles left over from the revolution of 1908, when they were allies of the Young Turks—and the subsequent burial of their church bells so that these do not fall into Turkish hands. Eventually the Ottoman military police arrive, the dreaded saptiehs, led by the red-haired müdir. They instruct the Armenians to prepare for deportations—and then leave after beating Ter Haigasun and Bagradian. Instead, the 6,000 Armenians march with everything they can carry, their animals, and their weapons to a plateau on Musa Dagh. Bagradian hangs behind and observes the wailing women and the other graveyard folk—who represent the old ways and sympathetic magic of pagan Armenia—sacrifice a goat. Its meaning is propitious as well as cautionary. The chapter ends with Bagradian helping Krikor carry the last volumes of his magnificent if eclectic library to the Damlayik, the plateau where the Armenians have chosen as their refuge. Book Two opens during the high summer of 1915 and with the establishment of the Armenian encampment and defenses—the Town Enclosure, Three Tent Square, South Bastion, Dish Terrace, and other sites on Musa Dagh that become familiar placenames during the course of Werfel’s novel. A division of labor, too, is established as to who will fight, who will care for livestock, who will make guns and munitions, and so on. Indeed, a communal society is established despite the objections of the propertied class. The objective is to hold out long enough to attract the ships of the British and French navies that patrol the eastern Mediterranean in support of the Allied invasion of Gallipoli. Characters who will figure in the defense of the mountain also come into more relief, such as the loner and Ottoman Army deserter Sarkis Kilikian (who suffered the loss of his entire family during the pogrom-like Hamidian massacres) and the former drillmaster, Chaush Nurhan. Indeed, Musa Dagh is presented as a microcosm of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Armenian life as well as being a test not only of Bagradian’s leadership, but a test of his marriage and fatherhood. The Ottoman soldiers and saptiehs seriously underestimate the Armenians and their first engagement results in a Turkish rout. The victory forces the Turks to assemble a larger force—and it enhances Bagradian’s reputation as well as reconnects him to his people—and isolates him from Juliette and Stephan. Stephan, too, reconnects with his Armenian roots, but the difficulty he experiences because of his Westernized childhood makes the novel a coming-of-age story as well as a classic tale of love and war on the scale of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. He wants to be an authentic Armenian, like his rival Haik and other boys. To prove himself to them, Stephan organizes a raid on a fruit orchard to replenish the Armenians’ stores. And to prove himself to Iskuhi, for he is as much bewitched by her as his father, he leaves Musa Dagh to fetch back Iskuhi’s bible, left behind in his father’s deserted house. (A long passage left out of the first English translation.) Juliette apprehends the growing estrangement of her husband and son and seeks purpose and solace in nursing the Armenian wounded and her friendship with Gonzague Maris, which develops into a passionate affair. As the Turks resume their attacks, he tries to convince Juliette to abandon her family and the mountain. The battles include a heroic stand led by Kilikian as well as Stephan’s sniping attack on a Turkish gun emplacement. He and the other boys seize two cannons, a feat that forces the Turks to withdraw. Book Two features a traditional funeral for the Armenian dead, including the ceremonies of the wailing women, who assist in the birth Aram Tomasian’s son, a difficult delivery that is seen as ominous while conditions in the camp start to deteriorate—for the Armenian victories can only buy time. Jemal Pasha is introduced in Book Two and is portrayed as a resentful member of the triumvirate pathologically jealous of Enver. The relationship between Bagradian and Iskuhi also comes into focus as it is conducted openly but only consummated on a spiritual plane. Their love, however, is interrupted by a reinforced Ottoman attack, which is repelled. Bagradian, too, orders a massive forest fire to surround the Armenian encampment with a no-man’s land of fire, smoke, and open terrain. Book Two ends with Sato’s exposing Juliette and Gonzague making love, Juliette’s coming down with typhus, and Gonzague’s escape. Stephan, too, leaves the camp to accompany Haik on a mission to contact the American envoy in Antioch. The scene now changes to Istanbul and Johannes Lepsius’s meeting with members of a dervish order called the “Thieves of the Art.” It was important to Werfel to show that the Young Turks and the Three Pashas did not represent Turkish society as a whole. It was also important to show that even Enver was right on certain points in regard to the Western powers, which had exploited Turkey and treated it throughout the nineteenth century as a virtual colony. For this reason, most of the first chapter of Book Three is written as a dramatic dialogue during which Lepsius witnesses the Sufi whirling devotions and learns firsthand about the deep resentment against the West—especially Western “progress” as instituted by the Young Turks—and the atrocities in the concentration camps set up in the Mesopotamian desert for deported Armenians. He also encounters Bagradian’s friend, Agha Rifaat Bereket. The latter agrees to bring supplies to Musa Dagh purchased with funds collected by Lepsius in Germany. The episode ends with Lepsius witnessing Enver and Talaat being driven past in a limousine. When the car suffers two loud tire punctures, Lepsius at first thinks they have been assassinated (which foreshadows the real deaths of Talaat and Djemal Pasha by Armenian assassins). The chapter that follows resumes with Stephan and Haik. They encounter the inshaat taburi, the notorious forced labor details composed of Armenian draftees into the Ottoman Army, and travel through a swamp, where Stephan and Haik form a real friendship. It is cut short, however, when Stephan falls ill and is cared for by a Turkmen farmer, another of the righteous Muslims that Werfel represents in The Forty Days of Musa Dagh. Too sick to continue on the mission to Antioch, Stephan is returned to Yoghonoluk, which has been resettled by Muslim refugees from war zones of the Ottoman Empire. There, Stephan is discovered to be Bagradian’s son and a spy, and is brutally murdered. Stephan’s death causes Bagradian to withdraw for a time, during which Turkish soldiers capture the last of the Armenian livestock. This disaster opens up rifts in Musa Dagh’s society and resolve. Other setbacks follow. With the arrival of a seasoned Ottoman general from the Gallipoli front as well as reinforcements from the regular army, the Ottomans begin to tighten the noose around Musa Dagh. Meanwhile, Bagradian recovers from his grief to form guerrilla bands to disrupt the Ottoman advance and buy more time. But no ships have been sighted, and the various attempts to contact the Allies or to seek the diplomatic intercession of the United States, still a neutral power, or Turkey’s ally, Imperial Germany, come to naught. Bagradian derives strength—and comfort—from Iskuhi, who has volunteered to care for Juliette. Nevertheless, Iskuhi sees the end coming and the likelihood that their love entails dying together, not a life. When the Agha’s mission arrives, he finds the Armenians starving. He can do little, though since the red-haired müdir has confiscated most of the supplies intended for the Armenians as a humanitarian gesture despite the approval of Turkey’s highest religious authority. The camp, filled with smoke from the forest fires, inspires a vision in him that disturbingly anticipates the Holocaust and the death camps of World War II. The Armenian camp and resistance also faces its greatest challenge from within when criminal elements among the Ottoman Army deserters—who Bagradian allowed to help in Musa Dagh’s offense—go on a rampage. As Ter Haigasun prepares to celebrate a mass to ask for God’s help, the deserters set the altar on fire and the resulting conflagration destroys much of the Town Enclosure before the uprising is suppressed by Bagradian’s men. The Ottomans, seeing the fire, now prepare for the final assault. Oskanian leads a suicide cult for those who do not want to die given the Turks’ reputation for violent reprisals. The little teacher, however, refuses to jump off a cliff himself after fending off the last of his followers. Soon after, he discovers the large Red Cross distress flag the Armenians flew to attract Allied ships and sights the French cruiser Guichen in the fog. It had diverted course after its watch spotted the burning of the Armenian camp on Musa Dagh from out at sea. As Oskanian waves the flag, the warship begins shelling the coast. Soon more ships come. The Turks withdraw and the Armenians are rescued. Bagradian remains behind after ensuring that the people he led, Juliette, and Iskuhi are safely aboard the French and British ships. His reasons are complex and can be traced throughout the novel to the realization that he cannot leave and go into exile again in an internment camp in Port Said, Egypt. He thinks Iskuhi follows him back up Musa Dagh from the sea. On the way, he experiences a divine presence and confronts the cross on his son’s grave. He is followed, however, by a skirmishing party of Turkish troops. They approach in a crescent—which alludes to the battle formations of the Ottoman armies of the past—and kill Bagradian with a sniper’s headshot. |
1063412 | /m/042s44 | Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH | Robert C. O'Brien | 1971 | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/0dwly": "Children's literature", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | Mrs. Frisby's son, Timothy, is ill just as the farmer Mr. Fitzgibbon begins preparation for spring ploughing in the field where the Frisby family lives. Normally she would move her family, but Timothy would not survive the cold trip to their summer home. Mrs. Frisby obtains medicine from her friend Mr. Ages, the older white mouse. On the return journey, she saves the life of Jeremy, a young crow, from Dragon, the farmer's cat - the same cat who had killed her husband, Jonathan. Jeremy suggests she seek help in moving Timothy from an owl who dwells in the forest. Jeremy flies Mrs. Frisby to the owl's tree, but the owl says he can't help until he finds out that she is the widow of Jonathan Frisby. He suggests that Mrs. Frisby seek help from the rats who live in a rosebush near her. Mrs. Frisby discovers the rats have human-level intelligence, with a literate and mechanized society. They have technology such as elevators. They have tapped the electricity grid to provide lighting and heating, and have acquired other human skills, such as storing food for the winter. Their leader, Nicodemus, tells Mrs. Frisby of the rats' capture by scientists working for a laboratory located at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and the subsequent experiments that the humans performed on the rats, which increased the rats' intelligence to the point of being able to read, write, and operate complicated machines, as well as enhancing their longevity and strength. This increased intelligence and strength allowed them to escape from the NIMH laboratories and migrate to their present location. Jonathan Frisby and Mr. Ages were the only two survivors of a group of eight mice who had been part of the experiments at NIMH, and made the rats' escape possible. Out of respect for Jonathan, Nicodemus agrees to help Mrs. Frisby's family. The rats move her house to a location safe from the plough. The rats are preparing "The Plan," which is to abandon their lifestyle of dependence on humans, which some rats regard as theft, for a new, independent farming colony. Before Mrs. Frisby's arrival, a group of seven rats led by a rat named Jenner left the colony because they disagreed with "The Plan", and are presumed to have died in an accident at a nearby hardware store. This incident has attracted the attention of a group of men, who never identify themselves, and they have offered to exterminate the rat colony on Fitzgibbon's land free of charge for him. To move the house, the rats have to drug Dragon, the farmer's cat, as it is too dangerous to work in the open without any place to hide. However, Mr. Ages has a broken leg and cannot dash to Dragon's bowl to put in the drug. Since the other rats are too big to fit into the hole in the wall to enter the house, Mrs. Frisby volunteers to go. Unfortunately, she is caught by the family's son, Billy, who puts her in a cage. At night, Justin comes to save her and manages to get her out of the cage. They plan the house move. The successful house move allows the mouse family to remain while Timothy recovers before moving to their summer home. Mrs. Frisby overhears the Fitzgibbons discussing the men during her captivity and reports back to the rats. Thanks to her warning, the rats have time to plan their escape. |
1063803 | /m/042t60 | Vathek | William Thomas Beckford | null | {"/m/039vk": "Gothic fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy"} | The novel chronicles the fall from power of the Caliph Vathek (a fictionalized version of the historical Al-Wathiq), who renounces Islam and engages with his mother, Carathis, in a series of licentious and deplorable activities designed to gain him supernatural powers. At the end of the novel, instead of attaining these powers, Vathek descends into a hell ruled by the demon Eblis where he is doomed to wander endlessly and speechlessly. Vathek, the ninth Caliph of the Abassides, ascended to the throne at an early age. He is a majestic figure, terrible in anger (one glance of his flashing eye can make “the wretch on whom it was fixed instantly [fall] backwards and sometimes [expire]”), and addicted to the pleasures of the flesh. He is intensely thirsty for knowledge and often invites scholars to converse with him. If he fails to convince the scholar of his points of view, he attempts a bribe; if this does not work, he sends the scholar to prison. In order to better study astronomy, he builds an observation tower with 1,500 steps. A hideous stranger arrives in town, claiming to be a merchant from India selling precious goods. Vathek buys glowing swords with letters on them from the merchant, and invites the merchant to dinner. When the merchant does not respond to Vathek's questions, Vathek looks at him with his "evil eye," but this has no effect, so Vathek imprisons him. The next day, he discovers that the merchant has escaped and his prison guards are dead. The people begin to call Vathek crazy. His mother, Carathis, tells him that the merchant was “the one talked about in the prophecy”, and Vathek admits that he should have treated the stranger kindly. Vathek wants to decipher the messages on his new sabers, offers a reward to anyone who can help him, and punishes those who fail. After several scholars fail, one elderly man succeeds: the swords say "We were made where everything is well made; we are the least of the wonders of a place where all is wonderful and deserving, the sight of the first potentate on earth." But the next morning, the message has changed: the sword now says “Woe to the rash mortal who seeks to know that of which he should remain ignorant, and to undertake that which surpasses his power”. The old man flees before Vathek can punish him. However, Vathek realizes that the writing on the swords really did change. Vathek then develops an insatiable thirst and often goes to a place near a high mountain to drink from one of four fountains there, kneeling at the edge of the fountain to drink. One day he hears a voice telling him to “not assimilate thyself to a dog”. It was the voice of the merchant who had sold him the swords, Giaour. Giaour cures his thirst with a potion and the two men return to Samarah. Vathek returns to immersing himself in the pleasures of the flesh, and begins to fear that Giaour, who is now popular at Court, will seduce one of his wives. Some mornings later, Carathis reads a message in the stars foretelling a great evil to befall Vathek and his vizir Morakanabad; she advises him to ask Giaour about the drugs he used in the potion. When Vathek confronts him, Giaour only laughs, so Vathek gets angry and kicks him. Giaour is transformed into a ball and Vathek compels everyone in the palace to kick it, even the resistant Carathis and Morakanabad. Then Vathek has the whole town kick the ball-shaped merchant into a remote valley. Vathek stays in the area and eventually hears Giaour's voice telling him that if he will worship Giaour and the jinns of the earth, and renounce the teachings of Islam, he will bring Vathek to “the palace of the subterrain fire” (22) where Soliman Ben Daoud controls the talismans that rule over the world. Vathek agrees, and proceeds with the ritual that Giaour demands: to sacrifice fifty of the city's children. In return, Vathek will receive a key of great power. Vathek holds a "competition" among the children of the nobles of Samarah, declaring that the winners will receive "endless favors." As the children approach Vathek for the competition, he throws them inside an ebony portal to be sacrificed. Once this is finished, Giaour makes the portal disappear. The Samaran citizens see Vathek alone and accuse him of having sacrificed their children to Giaour, and form a mob to kill Vathek. Carathis pleads with Morakanabad to help save Vathek's life; the vizier complies, and calms the crowd down. Vathek wonders when his reward will come, and Carathis says that he must fulfill his end of the pact and sacrifice to the Jinn of the earth. Carathis helps him prepare the sacrifice: she and her son climb to the top of the tower and mix oils to create an explosion of light. The people, presuming that the tower is on fire, rush up the stairs to save Vathek from being burnt to death. Instead, Carathis sacrifices them to the Jinn. Carathis performs another ritual and learns that for Vathek to claim his reward, he must go to Istakhar. Vathek goes away with his wives and servants, leaving the city in the care of Morakanabad and Carathis. A week after he leaves, his caravan is attacked by carnivorous animals. The soldiers panic and accidentally set the area on fire; Vathek and his wives must flee. Still, they continue on their way. They reach steep mountains where the Islamic dwarves dwell. They invite Vathek to rest with them, possibly in the hopes of converting him back to Islam. Vathek sees a message his mother left for him: “Beware of old doctors and their puny messengers of but one cubit high: distrust their pious frauds; and, instead of eating their melons, impale on a spit the bearers of them. Should thou be so fool as to visit them, the portal to the subterranean place will shut in thy face” (53). Vathek becomes angry and claims that he has followed Giaour’s instructions long enough. He stays with the dwarves, meets their Emir, named Fakreddin, and Emir's beautiful daughter Nouronihar. Vathek wants to marry her, but she is already promised to her effeminate cousin Gulchenrouz, whom she loves and who loves her back. Vathek thinks she should be with a "real" man and arranges for Babalouk to kidnap Gulchenrouz. The Emir, finding of the attempted seduction, asks Vathek to kill him, as he has seen “the prophet’s vice-regent violate the laws of hospitality." But Nouronihar prevents Vathek from killing her father and Gulchenrouz escapes. The Emir and his servants then meet and they develop a plan to safeguard Nouronihar and Gulchenrouz, by drugging them and place them in a hidden valley by a lake where Vathek cannot find them. The plan succeeds temporarily - the two are drugged, brought to the valley, and convinced on their awakening that they have died and are in purgatory. Nouronihar, however, grows curious about her surroundings and ascends to find out what lies beyond the valley. There she meets Vathek, who is mourning for her supposed death. Both realize that her 'death' has been a sham. Vathek then orders Nouronihar to marry him, she abandons Gulchenrouz, and the Emir abandons hope. Meanwhile, in Samarah, Carathis can discover no news of her son from reading the stars. She conjures the spirits of a graveyard to perform a spell that makes her appear in front of Vathek, who is bathing with Nouronihar. She tells him he is wasting his time with Nouronihar and has broken one of the rules of Giaour's contract. She asks him to drown Nouronihar, but Vathek refuses, because he intends to make her his Queen. Carathis then decides to sacrifice Gulchenrouz, but before she can catch him, Gulchenrouz jumps into the arms of a Genie who protects him. That night, Carathis hears that Motavakel, Vathek's brother, is planning to lead a revolt against Morakanabad. Carathis tells Vathek that he has distinguished himself by breaking the laws of hospitality by ‘seducing’ the Emir’s daughter after sharing his bread, and that if he can commit one more crime along the way he shall enter Soliman’s gates triumphant. Vathek continues on his journey, reaches Rocnabad, and degrades and humiliates its citizens for his own pleasure. A Genie asks Mohammed for permission to try to save Vathek from his eternal damnation. He takes the form of a shepherd who plays the flute to make men realize their sins. The shepherd asks Vathek if he is done sinning, warns Vathek about Eblis, ruler of Hell, and asks Vathek to return home, destroy his tower, disown Carathis, and preach Islam. Vathek's pride wins out, and he tells the shepherd that he will continue on his quest for power, and values his mother more than life itself or God's mercy. Vathek's servants desert him; Nouronihar becomes immensely prideful. Finally, Vathek reaches Istakhar, where he finds more swords with writing on them, which says "Thou hast violated the conditions of my parchment, and deserve to be sent back, but in favor to thy companion, and as the meed for what thou hast done to obtain it, Eblis permitted that the portal of this place will receive thee” (108). Giaour opens the gates with a golden key, and Vathek and Nouronihar step through into a place of gold where Genies of both sexes dance lasciviously. Giaour leads them to Eblis, who tells them that they may enjoy whatever his empire holds. Vathek asks to be taken to the talismans that govern the world. There, Soliman tells Vathek that he had once been a great king, but was seduced by a Jinn and received the power to make everyone in the world do his bidding. But because of this, he is destined to suffer in hell for a finite tho vast period - until the waterfall he is sitting beside, stops. This eventual end to his punishment is due to his piety in the earlier part of his reign. The other inmates must suffer the fire in their hearts for all eternity. Vathek asks Giaour to release him, saying he will relinquish all he was offered, but Giaour refuses. He tells Vathek to enjoy his omnipotence while it lasts, for in a few days he will be tormented. Vathek and Nouronihar become increasingly discontented with the palace of flames. Vathek orders an Ifreet to fetch Carathis from the castle. When she arrives, he warns her of what happens to those who enter Eblis' domain, but Carathis takes the talismans of earthly power from Soliman regardless. She gathers the Jinns and tries to overthrow one of the Solimans, but Eblis decrees "It is time." Carathis, Vathek, Nouronihar, and the other denizens of hell lose "the most precious gift granted by heaven - HOPE" (119). They begin to feel eternal remorse for their crimes, their hearts burning with literal eternal fire. “Such was, and should be, the punishment of unrestrained passion and atrocious deeds! Such shall be the chastisement of that blind curiosity, which would transgress those bounds the wisdom the Creator has prescribed to human knowledge; and such the dreadful disappointment of that restless ambition, which, aiming at discoveries reserved for beings of a supernatural order, perceives not, through its infatuated pride, that the condition of man upon earth is to be – humble and ignorant.” |
1063805 | /m/04jplff | Requiem for a Dream | Hubert Selby, Jr. | 1978 | {"/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | This story follows the lives of Harry, Marion, Tyrone, and Sara, who are all searching for the key to their dreams, and in the process, they get flung into a devastating life of addiction. Harry and Marion are in love and want to open their own business; their friend Tyrone wants to escape life in the ghetto. To achieve these dreams, they buy a large amount of heroin, planning to get rich by selling it. Sara is Harry’s lonely, widowed mother. Sara’s dream is to be on television, and when a phone call from a casting company gets her hopes up, she spends the next few months on diet pills to lose weight. She becomes addicted and soon develops amphetamine psychosis, eventually ending up in a mental institution and undergoes electroconvulsive therapy. Harry, Marion and Tyrone, meanwhile, become addicted to their own product. Harry and Tyrone end up in jail, where Harry's infected arm is amputated. Marion, left alone, begins a life of prostitution to support her addiction. |
1064385 | /m/042vzk | On The Black Hill | Bruce Chatwin | 1982 | {"/m/05hgj": "Novel"} | The novel's setting is the border of Herefordshire, in England, and either Brecknockshire, or Radnorshire, in Wales (there are Black Hills near both). In the early pages we are told the border runs through the very farmhouse: One of the windows looked out over the green fields of England: the other looked back into Wales... Culturally the central characters are Welshmen, with the surname Jones. The story is told through the technique of flashback, and portrays the lives of twin brothers, Lewis and Benjamin Jones, on their isolated upland farm called The Vision. The twins develop a bond that is shown throughout the novel as very special. Lewis is portrayed as the stronger or dominant twin, whereas Benjamin is the more intuitive one, both in appearance and in the tasks which he does around the house. He seems to be constantly drawn to his mother's side while she is alive. Lewis is the one who wants to break free but Benjamin is forced into the army at the time of the Great War. His efforts are frustrated by his family ties and the indefinable, unbreakable tie to the land. Chatwin also tells the reader of the brutality involved in farming at the time in this area. Amos, the father of the two twins, shows how his day-to-day job has brutalised his once caring and loving attitude, and we see this later in the novel when he hits his wife Mary on the temple with the book she is reading - Wuthering Heights. A jealous man, Amos attacks his wife with the very material that shows her intelligence; he feels threatened by this, feeling that the man is supposed to be the head of the family in all things, and he feels anger because of his limited education. On the Black Hill is a novel which portrays themes such as unrequited love, sexual repression and confusion, social, religious and cultural repression, hate and the historic social values of that era, as is shown when Amos finds out that his daughter Rebecca has become pregnant by an Irishman. His religious fanaticism, social pressure, economic forces and an inability to express love results in him throwing her out of the household, and she is not mentioned in the novel again until the latter part. |
1066922 | /m/0431bb | Travels With Charley: In Search of America | John Steinbeck | 1962 | {"/m/04z2hx": "Travel literature"} | Steinbeck began the book by describing his lifelong wanderlust and his preparations to travel the country again, after 25 years. He was 58 years old in 1960 and nearing the end of his career, but he felt that he "was writing of something [he] did not know about, and it seemed to [him] that in a so-called writer this is criminal" (p. 6). He had a truck fitted with a custom camper-shell for his journey and planned on leaving after Labor Day from his home in Sag Harbor, Long Island New York. He takes along his dog Charley, with whom he uses to have mental conversations as a device for exploring his thoughts. Steinbeck delayed his trip slightly due to Hurricane Donna which made a direct hit on Long Island. Steinbeck's exploits in saving his boat during the middle of the hurricane foreshadow his fearless, or even reckless, state of mind to dive into the unknown. Steinbeck began his trip by traveling by ferry from Long Island to Connecticut, passing the Naval Submarine Base New London where many of the new nuclear submarines were stationed. He talked to a sailor stationed on a sub who enjoyed being on them because "they offer all kinds of – future" (22). Steinbeck credited uncertainty about the future to rapid technological and political changes. He mentioned the wastefulness of American cities and society, and the large amount of waste as a result of everything being "packaged". He had a conversation with a man. The two concluded that a combination of fear and uncertainty over the future limited their discussion over the election. Steinbeck enjoyed learning about people through local morning radio programs, although he noted that: "If Teen Angel is top of the list in Maine, it is the top of the list in Montana" (35), showing the ubiquity of culture brought on by mass media technologies. Steinbeck next took US Highway 1 to Maine. On the way he noted a similarity among the "summer" stores, which were all closed for the winter. Antique shops that bordered a lot of the roads up North, sold old "junk" that Steinbeck would have bought if he thought he had room for it, noting that he had more junk at home than most stores. He stopped at a little restaurant just outside the town of Bangor where he learned that other people's attitudes can greatly affect your own attitude. Steinbeck then went to Deer Isle, Maine, to visit his friend and former literary agent, who now lived there. His friend always raved about Deer Isle, but could never describe exactly what about it that was so captivating. While driving to Deer Isle, Steinbeck stopped and asked for directions. He later learned not to ask for directions in Maine because locals don't like to talk to tourists and tend to give them incorrect information. When Steinbeck arrived at the house where he was supposed to stay, he met a terse cat and ate the best lobster he had ever tasted, fresh from the local waters. Next, he went to northern Maine, where he spent the night in a field alongside a group of French-speaking migrant potato pickers from Canada, with whom he shared some French vintage. Steinbeck's descriptions of the workers was sympathetic and even romanticized, a clear nod to his works such as The Grapes of Wrath which made him famous. Steinbeck next traveled to Niagara Falls and some Midwestern cities. Before reaching those destinations, he took a detour and discussed his dislike of the government. He said that the government makes a person feel small because it doesn't matter what you say, if it's not on paper and certified by an official, the government doesn't care. As he traveled on, he described how wherever he went people's attitudes and beliefs changed. All states differ by how people may talk to one another or treat other people. For example, as he drove through Ohio, Michigan, and Illinois, there was a marked increase in the population from state to state. The small villages he had initially seen were now growing into big cities and the roads, such as the U.S. 90, were filled with traffic. Also, everywhere he went, people's views changed. For example, when he went to New England, he saw that people there spoke tersely and usually waited for the newcomer to come up to him and initiate conversation. However, in Midwestern cities, people were more outgoing and were willing to come right up to him. He explained how strangers talked freely without caution as a sense of longing for something new and being somewhere other than the place they were. They were so used to their everyday life that when someone new came to town, they were eager to explore new information and imagine new places. It was as if a new change had entered their life every time someone from out of town came into their state. Traveling further, Steinbeck discovered that technology was advancing so quickly as to give Americans more and more instant gratification. For example, Steinbeck was intrigued by mobile homes. Mobile homes showed a new way of living for America, reflecting the attitude that if you don't like a given place, you should be able to pick up and leave. Steinbeck also discussed this change in America when he traveled through cities of great production such as Youngstown, Cleveland, Akron, Toledo, Pontiac, Flint, South Bend, and Gary. He compared what he saw to the Ufizzi in Florence and the Louvre in Paris. Steinbeck traveled across Wisconsin towards North Dakota. He traveled along U.S. Highway 10 through St. Paul on an 'Evacuation Route,' "a road designed by fear" (p. 129). This instance introduced one of Steinbeck's many realizations about American society: the fact that it is driven by fear. Once through St. Paul, he went to Sauk Centre, the birthplace of writer Sinclair Lewis, but was disheartened to talk to locals at a restaurant who had no understanding of who Lewis was. Upon visiting Sauk Centre, he lamented at being forced to leave behind the wondrous W.P.A Guides To The States. Stopping at a diner for directions, Steinbeck realized that our American society is oblivious to its surroundings, life and culture. Steinbeck mentioned that Americans have put "cleanliness first at the expense of taste" (141) (as he travels through Fargo, North Dakota), and that the mentality of our nation has grown bland. Allowing his thoughts to slip back to his time in Minnesota, he lamented, "It looks as though the natural contentiousness of people has died" (142) referring to the political ignorance that society seemed to cling to, bringing before our eyes the lack of risk our once-rebellious nation now embraces. Throughout the section, Steinbeck uses simple, symbolic entities he encounters in his travels to express his views of the mindset of the country. For instance, at one point he speaks of a rafter of turkey, and after casting criticism and ridicule at the source of Thanksgiving dinner, ends the string of insults with an unexpected transition to American life. He states, "And suddenly I thought of that valley of the turkeys and wondered how I could have the gall to think turkeys stupid. Indeed, they have an advantage over us. They are good to eat."(129) "I am in love with Montana," said Steinbeck. He explained it as a place unaffected by television; a place with kind, laid-back individuals. "It seemed to me that the frantic bustle of America was not in Montana (158)." He went to the battlefield of Little Big Horn. He traveled through the "Injun Country" and thought of an author who wrote a novel about war against the Nez Perce tribes. Steinbeck and Charley then traveled to Yellowstone National Park, a place that "is no more representative of America than Disneyland." Here, the gentle and non-confrontational Charley showed a side of himself Steinbeck had never seen: Charley's canine instincts caused him to go crazy barking at a bear in the road. They next visited the Great Divide in the Rocky Mountains. He imagined American explorers Lewis and Clark and early French explorers and wondered whether or not those men were impressed with what they found in America. Steinbeck then visited Seattle, Washington and California. Steinbeck grew up in the Salinas Valley region of California, so much of the narrative is his revisit of the area, seeing its changes and progression, particularly the population growth. Steinbeck reflected on seeing the Columbia River how Lewis and Clark must have felt when coming west. After this, he noted the changes the west had undergone since then (p. 180): "It was only as I approached Seattle that the unbelievable change became apparent... I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction." (181) Rocinante, Steinbeck's truck, then had a flat tire on a remote back road and in his retelling of the unfortunate event, he wrote, "It was obvious that the other tire might go at any minute, and it was Sunday and it was raining and it was Oregon." (185) Though the specialized tires were hard to come by, the problem was resolved in mere hours by the unexpected generosity of a gas station attendant. The episode, occurring to the wealthy Steinbeck in an enormously well-equipped and self-contained camper, is a send-up of similar desperate scenes in The Grapes of Wrath; but the episode seemed to mean something beyond comedy to the author anyway. Steinbeck then visited the giant redwood trees and ancient Sequoia trees that he had come to appreciate and adore in his lifetime. He said, "The vainest, most slap-happy and irreverent of men, in the presence of redwoods, goes under a spell of wonder and respect." (189) When Charley refuses to urinate on the trees (a "salute" for a dog, as Steinbeck remarks), Steinbeck opines: "'If I thought he did it out of spite or to make a joke,' I said to myself, 'I'd kill him out of hand.'" (193) He then visited a bar from his youth where he met and caught up with many friends, learning that a lot of regulars and childhood chums had died (many names from previous novels are mentioned and seen, or suggested to be, real people). He then seemed to say goodbye to his hometown, on pages 205 to 208, for the last time, and making an allusion to a book by Thomas Wolfe You Can't Go Home Again. He then concluded with, "I printed once more on my eyes, south, west, and north, and then we hurried away from the permanent and changeless past where my mother is always shooting a wildcat and my father is always burning his name with his love." (208). Steinbeck then made his way through Texas, which he came to dread. Steinbeck felt that "people either passionately love or passionately hate Texas," referring to people who are just passersby like himself. He mentioned a book by Edna Ferber about a tiny group of rich Texans, and related it to his own experience with a family similar to the one in the book at his Texas Thanksgiving. He elaborated more on his Thanksgiving and then went on to talk about the black and white relations in the south compared to the relations in the north and in his hometown of Salinas, California, sharing the theory of "separate but equal' (248). Steinbeck wrote about the desegregation of schools and how there was a change in the north. In the southern states, such as Texas, he discussed about how when people are not proud of something they have been involved in, that they don't like to welcome witnesses, because they believe the witnesses may be the ones causing all the trouble. During his journey through Texas, he stayed in Amarillo, where his faithful dog companion, Charley, became ill and stayed in a veterinary hospital for a couple of days. Steinbeck then realized what it would be like to travel without his companion. Steinbeck then discussed his ideas of a strong "difference between an American and the Americans" (243). He referred to previous experiences where people have described Americans badly and then turned to him in telling him that he/she was not speaking about him, but the others. If true, then he assumed it is true with every other country's people such as the British, or the Frenchman and the French. So even though he dreaded to see and hear the events of his travels through Texas, he took a lot from it. Steinbeck was drawn to the "distortion of normal life" (249) and left Texas in search of the so-called "Cheerleaders"(256) who were protesting the integration of black children in a school in New Orleans. Before he reached the city, Steinbeck welcomed in the "singing language of Acadia" (252) while recalling the memory of an old friend, Dr. St. Martin, who healed children and Cajuns. Upon entering New Orleans, Steinbeck encountered the racism of the South and soon found that racism was not only towards blacks, but also towards Jews, "It's the goddamn New York Jews cause all the trouble" (254). Steinbeck then experienced the "bestial and filthy" (256) show that the Cheerleaders put on while the black children entered school. The applause and praise of the crowd brought Steinbeck to realize that there were no thoughtful people like his old friends Lyle Saxon and Roark Bradford, in the city and that they had "left New Orleans misrepresented to the world" (259). After the incident, Steinbeck no longer desired to visit some of his favorite places, like Galatoire's Restaurant, fearing more racially divided ideals. In search of a secluded place, he sat beside the "Father of Waters", or Mississippi River, and encountered a man who looked similar to Greco San Pablo. They ate together and talked of Lewis Carroll and the famous "queer" (261) 1845 tombstone inscription of Robert John Creswell (Alas that one whose darnthly joy had often to trust in heaven should canty thus sudden to from all its hopes benivens and though thy love for off remore that dealt the dog pest thou left to prove thy sufferings while below). After giving a ride to a wary black man, an angry black student, and a racist white man, Steinbeck concluded that Southern people were afraid to change their way of life, just as were the Cockney children of London (who he believed were unsettled when the regularity of the London Blitz bombing came to an end), and that most people of the South will retain this fear of change, despite the Gandhi-inspired works of Martin Luther King. To declare his own position, Steinbeck tells the story of a family of blacks known to him during his Salinas childhood, the Coopers. Mr Cooper was hard-working, honest, thrifty, respectable, the Cooper sons academically and artistically gifted. In other words, they represented an antithesis of the calumnies Steinbeck had heard during his Southern travels. Steinbeck's journey concludes with his jamming Rocinante across a busy New York street, during a failed attempt at making a U-turn. As he says to a traffic policeman, 'Officer, I've driven this thing all over the country – mountains, plains, deserts. And now I'm back in my own town, where I live – and I'm lost.' |
1067390 | /m/0432k8 | Imzadi | null | 8/1/1992 | {"/m/050z5g": "Chivalric romance", "/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/01qxvh": "Romance novel"} | Seventy-three-year-old Admiral William Riker is a bitter, lonely man in a slow downward spiral following the death forty years earlier of Deanna Troi, who died of undetermined causes during a peacekeeping conference with an enemy race, the Sindareen. Riker, now the commander of an unimportant starbase, is summoned to Betazed as Deanna's mother, Lwaxana Troi, lies dying. While going through Lwaxana's possessions after her death, Riker is reminded of how he and Deanna originally met and began their relationship on Betazed. In a lengthy flashback, it is revealed that Will and Deanna met when Will was stationed on Betazed between assignments, and while there attended a wedding at which Deanna was maid of honor. Will was instantly attracted to her and began to pursue her, though she initially rebuffed his advances, feeling that he was only interested in her physical attributes, and that he preferred quick, thrilling encounters over meaningful emotional intimacy. Over a series of meetings, however, they began to grow closer, as Will encouraged Deanna to embrace impulsive feelings and Deanna encouraged Will to explore his more spiritual side. While visiting her favorite museum, Deanna was kidnapped by a Sindareen raiding party, and Riker's Starfleet security force shot down their small craft in the jungle. Riker tracked them down and killed the only surviving captor, leaving Deanna and him alone together. In the jungle, they consummated their relationship, and Deanna told Will for the first time that they are "Imzadi." However, after their return from the jungle, Lwaxana's violent objections to their relationship and Deanna's seeming compliance led Riker to drunkenly fall into bed with another woman. Deanna discovered them together when she appeared at his living quarters, having planned to tell him she had decided to defy her mother's wishes. Deanna and Will decided not to pursue a relationship and Riker left the planet shortly thereafter, not to meet Deanna again until they were both assigned to the Enterprise-D. In the future timeline, Commodore Data, now in command of the Enterprise-F, tells Riker that scientists studying the Guardian of Forever have discovered that Deanna's death was a focal point in time, causing the creation of a parallel timeline; his intention is to comfort Riker with the idea that Deanna lives on in another universe. Struck with a new suspicion, Admiral Riker has an autopsy performed on Deanna's corpse and discovers that she had been murdered via a poison that did not exist at the time she died. Deducing that someone had gone back in time to murder her and deliberately alter the timeline, Admiral Riker travels to the Guardian of Forever and goes back to the time of the Sindareen peace conference on the Enterprise-D, a short while before Deanna's death. He gives Commander Riker the antidote to the poison, and Riker administers it to Deanna. Her death is thus prevented, but Admiral Riker does not immediately return to his timeline, indicating that the danger to her is not yet past. Commodore Data has also pursued Admiral Riker through the Guardian, feeling it is his duty to preserve the timeline by any means. He disables Commander Data and impersonates him, taking Deanna away from the peace conference with the intention of killing her. Admiral Riker realizes Data may try this, so he locates Commander Data and with him confronts Commodore Data, and they fight. As the peace conference attendees look on, Deanna finally becomes familiar enough with the representatives from the Sindareen (a race difficult to read empathically without sufficient exposure) to determine that they are deceiving everyone, and have no real peaceful intentions; the peace conference is only an attempt to stall for time so that their race can become more powerful. One of the Sindareen delegates is actually from the future, and had decided to go back in time and kill Deanna to prevent this discovery. When Deanna announces that the Sindareen are behaving duplicitously, everyone from the future returns to the proper timeline, and the Guardian of Forever intones that "All is as it was." Data is chagrined that no one thought to ask whether Admiral Riker was correct about the timeline being altered. Now that the timeline has been restored, Admiral Riker has no way of knowing what awaits him in the restored future, but it is implied that his Imzadi is alive and waiting for him. |
1069701 | /m/0438_v | Spring Snow | Yukio Mishima | 1966 | {"/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/05hgj": "Novel"} | The novel is set in the early years of the Taishō period, and is about the relationship between Kiyoaki Matsugae, the son of a rising nouveau-riche family, and Satoko Ayakura, the daughter of an aristocratic family fallen on hard times. Shigekuni Honda, a schoolfriend of Kiyoaki's, is the main witness to the events. The novel's themes centre on the conflicts in Japanese society caused by westernization in the early 20th century. The main action stretches from October 1912 to March 1914. Kiyoaki's family originated in Kagoshima, where his dead grandfather, the former Marquis, is still revered. The family now lives in grand style near Tokyo, with wealth acquired very recently. The novel opens with images from Kiyoaki's childhood, in the years after the Russo-Japanese War: including a torchlight procession witnessed by Honda, a photograph of memorial services at Tokuri Temple on 26 June 1904, a lyrical description of the Matsugae estate near Shibuya, a visit by Emperor Meiji, and an account of Kiyoaki's role as a page for Princess Kasuga during New Year's Festivities at the Imperial Palace. We are introduced to his mother and grandmother, to Shigeyuki Iinuma, his hostile tutor, and to the serious Honda, a friend from the Peers School. On Sunday, 27 October 1912, the 18-year-old Kiyoaki and Honda are talking on an island in the ornamental lake on the estate when they see Kiyoaki's mother, her maids, and two guests: Satoko Ayakura, the 20-year-old daughter of a count, and her great-aunt, the Abbess of Gesshu. The Ayakura family is one of twenty-eight of the rank of Urin, and they live in Azabu. Kiyoaki is aware that Satoko has a crush on him, and pretends indifference to her. Shortly after they all meet, there is a bad omen: they see a dead black dog at the top of a high waterfall. The Abbess offers to pray for it. Satoko insists on picking flowers for the dog with Kiyoaki. While Satoko is alone with Kiyoaki, she blurts out: "Kiyo, what would you do if all of a sudden I weren't here any more?" He is discomfited by the inexplicable question, and resents the fact that she has startled him with it. Back at the house, the Abbess delivers a sermon on the doctrine of Yuishiki or the consciousness-only theory of Hosso Buddhism, telling the parable of Yuan Hsiao, the man who, in pitch darkness, drank from a skull by accident. She argues the significance of an object is bestowed by the observer. Ten days later, on 6 November, Kiyoaki has dinner with his parents; they discuss his otachimachi (divination ritual), that had been held on 17 August 1909, and mention that Satoko has just rejected an offer of marriage. This explains her mysterious question. Kiyoaki and his father play billiards, then go for a stroll that reminds Kiyoaki of his father's former womanising. The marquis tries to persuade him to go with him to a brothel and he walks away in disgust. Later he cannot sleep, resolving to take revenge on Satoko for deliberately perplexing him. We are shown Kiyoaki's bedroom: a screen bearing poems of Han Shan, and a carved jade parrot. We can also see that Kiyoaki has three moles in a row on the left side of his torso, a fact that becomes important in later books. In December, two princes arrive from Siam to study at the Peers School, and are given rooms by the Matsugaes. They are Prince Pattanadid (a younger brother of the new king, Rama VI) and his cousin, Prince Kridsada (a grandson of Rama IV), nicknamed "Chao P." and "Kri", respectively. Chao P is deeply in love with Kri's sister, Princess Chantrapa ("Ying Chan"), and wears an emerald ring she gave him as a present. They ask Kiyoaki if he has a sweetheart and he names Satoko, although he has just sent her a "wildly insulting letter" the day before, in which he claims falsely that he has recently visited a brothel for the first time and has lost all respect for women, including her. To save the situation, he telephones Satoko and makes her promise to burn any letter she receives from him. Chapter 7 describes Honda's stuffy household, and includes his musings on the Laws of Manu, which he has been required to study, and an anecdote about a second cousin, Fusako, who was caught making a pass at him at a family gathering. The two princes meet Satoko at the Imperial Theatre in Tokyo. She is courteous, and Kiyoaki concludes that she has burnt the letter. Chapter 9 portrays Shigeyuki Iinuma, a reactionary 23-year-old from Kagoshima, who has been Kiyoaki's tutor for the last six years. He bemoans his ineffectiveness, and the decadent state of Japan, while worshipping at the Matsugae family's shrine. Shortly after the new year, Kiyoaki reveals to him that he knows of his affair with a maid, Miné, and blackmails him into concealing his own trysts with Satoko. Satoko's maid, old Tadeshina, promises to help. In Chapter 11, we are given an extract from Kiyoaki's dream-diary which predicts events in later books. One day in February, Satoko's parents travel to Kyoto to see a sick relative; taking advantage of this, she persuades Kiyoaki to skip school and join her on a rickshaw ride through the snow. They kiss for the first time. When they pass the parade ground of the Azabu 3rd Regiment he has a vision of thousands of ghostly soldiers standing upon it, reproducing the scene in the photograph described in Chapter 1. Miles away, Honda has a similar premonitory shudder, seeing his friend's empty desk in the schoolroom. The next morning, they meet very early in the school grounds and have a long conversation in which Honda expresses his conviction of the reality of fate and inevitability. In Chapter 14, it is revealed that Kiyoaki has rewarded Iinuma for his cooperation by giving him the key to the library so that the tutor can have sex with Miné there secretly. Iinuma hates him for this but accepts the arrangement. Satoko writes her first love letter, and Kiyoaki, torn between his morbid pride and his genuine passion for her, finally replies to it sincerely. On 6 April 1913, the Marquis Matsugae holds a cherry blossom viewing party for his friend Prince (Haruhisa) Toin, inviting only Satoko and her parents, the two princes, and Baron Shinkawa and his wife. The guests are depicted as ludicrously half-Westernised. During a private moment, Satoko and Kiyoaki embrace, but suddenly Satoko turns away and spurns him, calling him childish. Infuriated, Kiyoaki tells Iinuma what has happened, and the tutor responds with a story which makes him realise that Satoko did indeed read the letter she was supposed to burn. He concludes that she has been leading him on all along in order to humiliate him. Breaking off all contact, he eventually burns a letter from her in front of Iinuma. Towards the end of April, the Marquis tells Kiyoaki that Satoko is being considered as a wife for Prince Toin's third son. Kiyoaki responds with indifference. The Marquis then announces to his son's surprise that Iinuma is to be dismissed: the affair with Miné has been discovered. The same night, Kiyoaki has another predictive dream. In early May, Satoko visits the Toinnomiya villa by the sea and meets Prince Harunori. Formal proposals quickly follow by mail. Kiyoaki is filled with satisfaction to see Satoko, Tadeshina and Iinuma drift out of his life; and he takes pride in his lack of emotion when Iinuma tearfully takes his leave, later comparing his own ultra-correct conduct with the elegant progress of a beetle on his window-sill. The absence of Iinuma makes that year's omiyasama festival, commemorating Kiyoaki's grandfather, more perfunctory than ever. In the meantime, the Thai princes have moved from the Matsugae household to private dormitories on the grounds of the Peers School. Chao P. asks Kiyoaki to return him his emerald ring from the marquis's safe-keeping; he has not received a letter from Ying Chan in months, and is pining for her. Kiyoaki tears up the one last letter he receives from Satoko. One day, his mother leaves for the Ayakura villa in order to congratulate the family, casually informing him that the marriage to Prince Harunori will now definitely go ahead. All of a sudden he feels emotionally shattered, and spends the next few hours in a daze. This is the turning point of the novel. He takes a rickshaw to the Ayakura villa, and, making sure his mother has left, sends for Tadeshina. Astonished, she takes him to an obscure boarding-house in Kasumicho where he threatens to show Satoko's last letter (which he tore up) to Prince Toin if she does not arrange a meeting. Three days later, he returns to the boarding-house and encounters Satoko; they make love; to Tadeshina's despair, he demands another encounter. Kiyoaki goes directly to Honda and gives a full account of everything that has happened. His friend is amazed, but supportive; not long afterwards, a visit to the district court solidifies his decision not to involve himself in the drama of other people's lives. At this time, Chao P loses his emerald ring at the Peers School. Kri insists that it has been stolen, but the prefect forces the pair to search through 200 square yards of grass in the rain. This incident prompts them to leave the school. The Marquis Matsugae, fearing that they will leave Japan with unpleasant memories, asks them not to return to Siam immediately but to join his family at their holiday villa at Kamakura for the summer. It is there that the subject of reincarnation is brought up for the first time, in conversations between Kri, Chao P, Honda and Kiyoaki. The liaison between Kiyoaki and Satoko is maintained by Honda, who arranges for a Ford Model T to transport Satoko between Tokyo and Kamakura in secret. Kiyoaki has a third major prophetic dream. The Thai princes receive a letter informing them of the death of Ying Chan. Devastated, they return to Siam a week later. Tadeshina learns from the Matsugaes' steward that Kiyoaki does not possess Satoko's last letter, but continues to cover for them. In October, she realises that Satoko is pregnant, a fact they both hide from Kiyoaki. At the restaurant of the Mitsukoshi department store, they inform him that there can be no further contact. Kiyoaki and Honda, while discussing this, stumble across another bad omen: a dead mole on the path in front of them. Kiyoaki picks it up and throws it in a pond. After a long period of no news, Kiyoaki is summoned to the billiard-room by his father. Tadeshina has attempted suicide, leaving a confidential note to the Marquis revealing the affair to him. At first, the Marquis talks calmly, but when Kiyoaki is unapologetic he beats his son with his billiard-cue. Kiyoaki is rescued by his grandmother; the household immediately starts to focus on limiting the damage. Count Ayakura is strongly tempted to punish Tadeshina, but she knows too much about his secret resentment of the upstart Matsugaes, and he cannot afford to give her any encouragement to reveal it—in particular, the instruction he gave her (in 1905) that Satoko should lose her virginity before any bridegroom chosen by the Marquis should touch her. The Marquis Matsugae meets Count Ayakura and they arrange an abortion for Satoko in Osaka. On the way back to Tokyo, Satoko and her mother stop at the Gesshu Temple to see the Abbess. Satoko slips away and hides from her mother, who later discovers that she has cut off her hair and resolved to become a nun. The Abbess, who suspects that a plot against the Emperor is unfolding, hopes to thwart it by shielding Satoko. Baffled as to what to do, the weak-willed Countess returns to Tokyo for help. But neither the Count nor the Marquis succeed at removing Satoko from the convent. The betrothal is cancelled with a forged medical certificate, backdated a month, declaring Satoko to be mentally ill. In February 1914, Honda gives Kiyoaki money to travel to the convent in an effort to meet Satoko. He turns up at the front door repeatedly but is always rebuffed, and his health declines as he forces himself to trudge through the snow from the inn in Obitoke to the convent and back again as a form of penance. Eventually Honda comes looking for him after receiving a telegram, and is shocked to see how ill he is; concluding that a meeting with Satoko is vital, he goes to the convent alone on February 27, but the Abbess firmly refuses to allow any such meeting, and on the same night Honda and Kiyoaki leave for Tokyo. During the train journey, the deathly sick Kiyoaki tells Honda: "Just now I had a dream. I'll see you again. I know it. Beneath the falls." He has written a note to his mother, asking her to give Honda his dream-diary. Two days after his return, on 2 March 1914, Kiyoaki dies at the age of 20. |
1073546 | /m/043mj5 | The Sigma Protocol | Robert Ludlum | 10/30/2001 | {"/m/01jfsb": "Thriller"} | Ben Hartman is vacationing in Switzerland when he meets his old school buddy Jimmy Cavanaugh - who tries to kill him. As he dodges assassins, mysterious tails, and police while searching for a safe place to hide, he finds his twin brother, Peter, who was thought to have died in an airplane crash several years earlier. Peter describes an international corporation which was formed in the last days of World War II, composed of financiers, influential members of large corporations, and Nazi brass. He gives Ben a photo of some of the leaders, only to find out that their father was a member. Soon, Peter is killed by a sniper, and Ben escapes with his life again. He later meets up with Liesel (Peter's girlfriend). Meanwhile, United States Department of Justice Agent Anna Navarro is recruited by a secretive group within the DoJ to investigate the deaths of a list of influential men around the world who have been dying mysteriously. Her probes turn up false leads, possible coverups, and dead ends, until she finds out that the men have been poisoned, using the same obscure toxin. Following the leads, she finds that the men she had been assigned to investigate are part of an international group of financiers and business moguls. She soon finds out that she has been reported "off the reservation", and the attempts begin on her life as well. Through their own distinct investigative means, the two protagonists discover more about the shadowy group, which is called Sigma. It is learned that Sigma has grown from a simple attempt to plunder the Nazi treasury and stabilize the industrial and financial state of the world in the wake of the war, to a political and financial machine which controls as many as 75% of the world's leading companies, and has enough covert political clout to directly influence the outcome of the likes of Presidential elections. Sigma also helped some of the Nazi war criminals, including Nazi doctor Gerhard Lenz, evade capture. Protagonists Hartman and Navarro eventually meet and form an alliance, since both are being hunted by Sigma assassins. Through their concerted efforts, they discover that Sigma is experiencing an internal struggle. The founders, who are dead or dying, believe that Sigma should disband, as it had played its role in the world; they're called the angeli rebelli, and are being hunted by the new Sigma leadership. That new leadership, an apparently philanthropic doctor named Jürgen Lenz, son of Sigma founding member Gerhard Lenz, has decided on a new direction for the group, and is determined to eliminate any internal opposition. Navarro is kidnapped by Lenz, and Hartman tracks them to an old castle in the Austrian Alps. Successfully infiltrating the castle, he discovers Sigma's new direction: age reversal. Lenz had found a way to reverse human aging based largely WW2 era experimentation on children with premature aging also known as Progeria, and he had been treating some of the world's elite to reverse their aging as well. Lenz was his own first successful experiment, for his real name is Gerhard - he is the Nazi doctor and a founding member of Sigma. After killing Lenz, Hartman and Navarro escape in a helicopter, while the castle is destroyed by an avalanche. The book is based on the Bilderberg Group and the myths and mysteries surrounding it. |
1074034 | /m/043nlj | The Keepers of the House | Shirley Ann Grau | null | {"/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/05hgj": "Novel"} | The first William Howland did not return home to Tennessee on his way back from the War of 1812. Instead, he settled on a hill in rural Alabama, overlooking a small river. He was later killed in an Indian raid, but since then, a descendant of William Howland, most often a male named William, lived in the house and dominated affairs in Madison City and Wade County, which sprang up around Howland's original settlement. The fifth William Howland was the last man bearing the name to live in the house. His wife died young, leaving him with a young daughter, Abigail, and an infant son, William, who died just a year after his mother. Abigail married an English professor, who abandoned her with a child, Abigail, when he went off to fight in World War II. When she died, William Howland was left to take care of his granddaughter, also Abigail. He also brought Margaret, a new African American housekeeper to the house to live with him. Throughout the county, she was known as his mistress, and the mother of his other children. What no one knew, however, was that William had secretly married Margaret to ensure that the children were legitimate. Once their children came of age, William Howland and Margaret sent them north, so that they could pursue lives as Whites. The secret of the marriage came out only after the younger Abigail was married to John Tolliver, an up-and-coming politician, who was running for governor. In the turbulent racist atmosphere of the South, Tolliver aligned himself with the Klan and came out with racist statements against Blacks. This enfuriated Robert Howland, the eldest son of William and Margaret, who was living in obscurity in Seattle. He releases the news to the story of his origins to the press, crippling Tolliver's campaign. Tolliver, who regards Abigail as a trophy wife, declares that their marriage is over and heads north to his family. Both William Howland and Margaret are dead, but a mob gathers to vent its anger about the mixed marriage on Abigail and the Howland house. They kill the livestock and set fire to the barn, but Abigail succeeds in driving them away from the house with her grandfather's shotguns. At the end of the book, Abigail takes her revenge on the people of Madison City. Over the past generations, her family had come to own most of the county, making her one of the richest people in the state. Over the course of a single day, she takes revenge on the locals for betraying her grandfather by shutting down the hotel and bringing most of the local economy to ruin. Once she has done that, she places a call to Robert, with the intention of informing his new family that his mother was Black. |
1074427 | /m/043pnf | Half Past Human | T. J. Bass | 1971 | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/05hgj": "Novel"} | Bass' future Earth is an environment in which the sum of the biota serves as its food chain. Human science has created the four-toed Nebish, a pallid, short-lived and highly programmable humanoid who has had the elements that do not facilitate an underground Hive existence (aggression, curiosity, etc.) bred out of it. The five-toed humans (called buckeyes) wander the biofarms that keep the trillions of Earth's Nebish population fed. All animals other than man are extinct, so meat comes from other humans (and the occasional rat). The conflict between the Hives and the roving bands of five-toed original Humans, who are reduced to savagery and hunted like vermin by Hive Security, forms the backdrop of this novel. Something strange is happening, as the primitive buckeyes are showing signs of a purpose whose goal is unclear and probably dangerous to the balance of the Hive. There seems to be a third party stirring the pot, campaigning in a relentlessly successful battle with the computer minds that keep this "brave new world" in balance. Agendas beyond the ken of their protagonists begin to come into play, and an epic battle between the Four- and the Five-toed is looming. |
1074708 | /m/043qcn | L'Atlantide | Pierre Benoit | 1920 | {"/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy"} | It is 1896 in the Sahara. Two officers, André de Saint-Avit and Jean Morhange investigate the disappearance of their fellow officers. While doing so, they are drugged and kidnapped by a Tarqui warrior, the procurer for the monstrous Queen Antinea. Antinea, descendant of the rulers of Atlantis, has a cave wall with the 120 niches carved into it, one for each of her lovers. Only 53 have been filled; when all 120 have been filled, Antinea will sit atop a throne in the center of the cave and rest forever. Saint-Avit is unable to resist Antinea's charms. By her will, he murders the asexual Morhange. Ultimately, he is able to escape and get out of the desert alive. |
1075934 | /m/043tnl | Strandloper | Alan Garner | 1996-05 | {"/m/0hwxm": "Historical novel"} | Buckley was convicted on a trumped-up charge of trespass in 1803 and transported to Australia, where he escapes, only to collapse from exhaustion in the outback on the grave of an Aboriginal shaman. He is discovered by aborigines, who regard him as the reincarnation of Murrangurk the shaman, an idea reinforced by Will's epilepsy. Will learns their language and ways, and fits perfectly the role of their healer and holy man. Thirty years later he intervenes to prevent the slaughter of a group of English soldiers and is granted a pardon. He returns to his native Cheshire, where in a closing sequence he dances Aborigine style across his home land, fulfilled and transformed. |
1078398 | /m/04426f | The Canary Murder Case | S. S. Van Dine | null | {"/m/02n4kr": "Mystery", "/m/028v3": "Detective fiction", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/0c3351": "Suspense"} | The beautiful Margaret Odell, famous Broadway beauty and ex-Follies girl known as "The Canary", is found murdered in her apartment. She has a number of men in her life, ranging from high society to gangsters, and more than one man visited her apartment on the night she dies. It is Philo Vance's characteristic erudition that leads him to a key clue that allows him to penetrate a very clever alibi and reveal the killer. "The strangeness, the daring, the seeming impenetrability of the crime marked it as one of the most singular and astonishing cases in New York's police annals; and had it not been for Philo Vance's participation in its solution, I firmly believe it would have remained one of the great unsolved mysteries of this country." |
1078424 | /m/04429x | The Bishop Murder Case | S. S. Van Dine | null | {"/m/02n4kr": "Mystery", "/m/05hgj": "Novel", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/0c3351": "Suspense"} | The story involves a series of murders taking place in a wealthy neighborhood of New York. The first murder, of a Mr. Joseph Cochrane Robin who is found pierced by an arrow, is accompanied by a note signed "The Bishop" with an extract from the nursery rhyme Who Killed Cock Robin. This crime takes place at the home of an elderly physicist with a beautiful young ward and a private archery range. District Attorney Markham finds the circumstances so unusual that he asks his friend Philo Vance to advise upon the psychological aspects of the crime. Further murders connected with the family and neighbours of the physicist are accompanied with similar extracts from Mother Goose, such as the case of Johnny Sprigg, "who was shot through the middle of his wig, wig, wig." Midway through the book, an elderly woman confesses to the crimes, but this possibility is discounted by the police for physical reasons and by Philo Vance for psychological ones. The kidnapping and confinement of a little Miss Moffatt is luckily discovered by Vance and the police before the child suffocates in the closet in which she has been locked. Vance finally realizes the significance of one character's pointed reference to The Pretenders, a play written by Henrik Ibsen. Bishop Arnesson of Oslo was a prominent character in Ibsen's play. Vance arranges a spectacular finale in which the criminal is poisoned by a glass of liqueur which that person prepared for another suspect. |
1078455 | /m/0442g7 | The Kennel Murder Case | S. S. Van Dine | null | {"/m/02n4kr": "Mystery", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/0c3351": "Suspense"} | ~Plot outline description |
1078468 | /m/0442jb | The Kidnap Murder Case | S. S. Van Dine | null | {"/m/02n4kr": "Mystery", "/m/028v3": "Detective fiction"} | A member of the wealthy Kenting family is kidnapped, and Philo Vance's suspicions lead him to the victim's home, the "Purple House" on New York's 86th Street. A mysterious ransom note and the family collection of gems both play a part in the plot, which ends with the murderer's suicide with the connivance of Vance. "To be sure, the motive for the crime, or, I should say, crimes, was the sordid one of monetary gain ... through Vance's determination and fearlessness, through his keen insight into human nature and his amazing flair for the ramifications of human psychology, he was able to penetrate beyond the seemingly conclusive manifestations of the case." |
1078856 | /m/0443s_ | Bouvard et Pécuchet | Gustave Flaubert | 1881 | {"/m/05hgj": "Novel"} | Bouvard et Pécuchet details the adventures of two Parisian copy-clerks, François Denys Bartholomée Bouvard and Juste Romain Cyrille Pécuchet, of the same age and nearly identical temperament. They meet one hot summer day in 1838 by the canal Saint-Martin and form an instant, symbiotic friendship. When Bouvard inherits a sizable fortune, the two decide to move to the countryside. They find a property near the town of Chavignolles in Normandy, between Caen and Falaise, and west of Rouen. Their search for intellectual stimulation leads them, over the course of years, to flounder through almost every branch of knowledge. Flaubert uses their quest to expose the hidden weaknesses of the sciences and arts, as nearly every project Bouvard and Pécuchet set their minds on comes to grief. Their endeavours are interleaved with the story of their deteriorating relations with the local villagers; and the Revolution of 1848 is the occasion for much despondent discussion. The manuscript breaks off near the end of the novel. According to one set of Flaubert's notes, the townsfolk, enraged by Bouvard and Pécuchet's antics, try to force them out of the area, or have them committed. Disgusted with the world in general, Bouvard and Pécuchet ultimately decide to "return to copying as before" (copier comme autrefois), giving up their intellectual boundering. The work ends with their eager preparations to construct a two-seated desk on which to write. http://garethlong.net/bouvardAndPecuchet/bouvardAndPecuchet.html This was originally intended to be followed by a large sample of what they copy out: possibly a sottisier (anthology of stupid quotations), the Dictionary of Received Ideas (encyclopedia of commonplace notions), or a combination of both. |
1079926 | /m/0447gx | Advise and Consent: A Novel of Washington Politics | Allen Drury | 7/11/1959 | {"/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/05hgj": "Novel"} | A U.S. President names a new Secretary of State to promote rapprochement with the U.S.S.R. Nominee Robert Leffingwell, the darling of the liberals, is viewed by many conservative senators as an appeaser. Others have doubts about his character. The nomination proceeds smoothly until a minor bureaucrat named Gelman tells the subcommittee handling the confirmation nomination that he and Leffingwell were in a Communist cell when in college along with James Morton.The subcommittee deems Gelman's testimony far-fetched, and the chairman, Senator Anderson, is about to send the nomination to the full Foreign Relations Committee when a member of the President's staff calls Anderson to tell him that he once was known as "James Morton". Anderson holds open his subcommittee hearings, which enrages the President. The President orders Majority Leader Munson to get Anderson to move the nomination by enticement or threat. Munson cannot find a way to threaten Anderson. Anderson is a Mormon and has a wife and child. While in Hawaii on R&R late in World War II, he had a month-long love affair with another man. Anderson has been struggling with his homosexual orientation throughout his life. His maid, cleaning out is attic, gives him a picture of the two men taken in Hawaii in a sealed and forgotten envelope. Anderson's wife Mabel has occasionally complained that she does not feel loved in their marriage. While driving to the Capitol, he picks up Associate Supreme Court Justice Davis, a supporter of Leffingwell's nomination. As Anderson drops Davis off at the Supreme Court, the envelope with the picture falls from the car. Davis finds it and, unable to bring himself to use the evidence, delivers it to Munson, who scolds Davis for suggesting blackmail but keeps the photograph. The next evening at the White House, the President learns that Anderson knows Leffingwell was in a Communist cell with Morton. The President decides to get James Morton out of town and proceed with the nomination. Anderson vehemently objects, stating that the honorable thing to do is to withdraw the nomination. Anderson leaves. The President, alerted earlier by Davis to the existence of the photo, takes it from a reluctant Munson and gives it to Senator Van Ackerman, an enemy of Anderson. Van Ackerman and his allies begin a whispering campaign about Anderson. Confronted by his wife, Anderson admits his homosexual past. She reacts badly, leaving Anderson feeling more alone than ever. He receives a phone call from the man with whom he had the affair, who admits that he sold his story to someone because he needed the money. The next morning, the editor of the Washington Post visits Anderson with a copy of a column detailing the affair. The editor tears it up in front of Anderson, saying that no Washington newspaper will publish it, but warns that someone else will publish it soon. That afternoon, feeling trapped and alone, Anderson decides there is only one way to maintain his honor and dignity. He writes a letter to his best friend and mentor, Senator Orrin Knox, explains what has happened, returns to his office in the Senate Office Building, and shoots himself in the head. Senator Anderson's death turns the majority of the Senate against the President and the Majority Leader. Senator Knox becomes the de facto leader of the opposition, and vows to defeat the Leffingwell nomination. The Senate unanimously censures Van Ackerman for contributing to Senator Anderson's death. Senator Munson makes a speech linking Anderson's death to the Leffingwell nomination and resigns as majority leader. The President summons Knox, a two-time presidential candidate, to the White House and promises to back him for the party's nomination next year if he will allow the Leffingwell nomination to go through. Knox dares him to put this promise in writing, and the President does. The President also tells Knox that the Soviets have just launched a manned mission to the moon and that he needs a Secretary of State who can deal with the Soviets. Knox discusses the President's promise of support with his colleagues and his wife, but decides to oppose the Leffingwell nomination. The Soviet cosmonauts address the world via radio and claim the moon for the Soviet Union. The Soviet Premier then invites the President to Geneva for a summit meeting. The U.S. launches its own moon mission and the President gives a speech asserting that no one owns the moon. Despite his misgivings, he will meet the Soviet leader in Geneva. The Senate votes on the Leffingwell nomination and defeats it by a vote of 74-24. Following the vote, the President dies of a heart attack and Vice President Hudson becomes President. President Hudson addresses a joint session of Congress after the late President's funeral, saying he will not be a candidate for his party's nomination next year, that he will honor the late President's promise to go to Geneva, and that he will nominate Orrin Knox as Secretary of State. Knox is promptly confirmed, and President Hudson leaves for Switzerland. |
1080292 | /m/0448j3 | Two Concepts of Liberty | Isaiah Berlin | null | null | Positive liberty may be understood as self-mastery; and includes one's having a role in choosing who governs the society of which one is a part. Berlin traced positive liberty from Aristotle's definition of citizenship, which is historically derived from the social role of the freemen of classical Athens: it was, Berlin argued, the liberty in choosing their government granted to citizens, and extolled, most famously, by Pericles. Berlin granted that both concepts of liberty represent valid human ideals, and that both forms of liberty are necessary in any free and civilised society. :"liberty in the negative sense involves an answer to the question: 'What is the area within which the subject — a person or group of persons — is or should be left to do or be what he is able to do or be, without interference by other persons'." For Berlin, negative liberty represents a different, and sometimes contradictory, understanding of the concept of liberty, which needs to be carefully distinguished. Its later proponents (such as Tocqueville, Constant, Montesquieu, John Locke, David Hume and John Stuart Mill, who accepted Chrysippus' understanding of self-determination) insisted that constraint and discipline were the antithesis of liberty and so were (and are) less prone to confusing liberty and constraint in the manner of rationalists and the philosophical harbingers of totalitarianism. This concept of negative liberty, Berlin argued, constitutes an alternative, and sometimes even opposed, concept to positive liberty, and one often closer to the intuitive modern usage of the word. Berlin notes that historically positive liberty has proven particularly susceptible to rhetorical abuse; especially from the 18th century onwards, it has either been paternalistically re-drawn from the third-person, or conflated with the concept of negative liberty and thus disguised underlying value-conflicts. Berlin contended that under the influence of Plato, Aristotle, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant and G. W. F. Hegel, modern political thinkers often conflated positive liberty with rational action, based upon a rational knowledge to which, it is argued, only a certain elite or social group has access. This rationalist conflation was open to political abuses, which encroached on negative liberty, when such interpretations of positive liberty were, in the nineteenth century, used to defend nationalism, paternalism, social engineering, historicism, and collective rational control over human destiny. Berlin argued that, following this line of thought, demands for freedom paradoxically could become demands for forms of collective control and discipline – those deemed necessary for the "self-mastery" or "self-determination" of nations, classes, democratic communities, and even humanity as a whole. There is thus an elective affinity, for Berlin, between positive liberty, when it is rhetorically conflated with goals imposed from the third-person that the individual is told they "should" rationally desire, and the justifications for political totalitarianism, which contrary to value-pluralism, presupposed that values exist in Pythagorean harmony. Berlin did not argue that the concept of positive liberty should be rejected — on the contrary, he recognised it as one human value among many, and one necessary to any free society. He argued that positive liberty was a genuine and valuable version of liberty, so long as it was identified with the autonomy of individuals, and not with the achievement of goals that individuals 'ought to' 'rationally' desire. Berlin argued, rather, that these differing concepts showed the plurality, and incompatibility of human values, and the need to analytically distinguish and trade-off between, rather than conflate, them. Thus, Berlin offers in his "Two Concepts of Liberty" essay, "Where it is to be drawn is a matter of argument, indeed of haggling. Men are largely interdependent, and no man's activity is so completely private as never to obstruct the lives of others in any way. 'Freedom for the pike is death for the minnows'; the liberty of some must depend on the restraint of others. Freedom for an Oxford don, others have been known to add, is a very different thing from freedom for an Egyptian peasant." |
1080979 | /m/044bg5 | The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles | Julie Andrews | 1974 | {"/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy", "/m/0dwly": "Children's literature"} | Three siblings, Ben, Tom, and Lindy Potter, meet Professor Savant while visiting the zoo one rainy day. On Halloween, Lindy is the only brave one to knock on the spookiest house on the block, which happens to belong to the Professor, and the three become more acquainted with him. After a second meeting, they begin spending time at the Professor's house, where he introduces them to games of concentration and observation. He reveals that there is a magic land called Whangdoodleland that can only be reached through the imagination, and that he is training them to accompany him there. Whangdoodleland is the home of the last Whangdoodle that lived in the world. Once the Whangdoodle, and other creatures that are now considered imaginary, lived in our world. However, fearing that people were losing their imaginations in the pursuit of power and greed, the Whangdoodle created a magic and peaceful world over which he reigns. The professor and the children explore this world. Each time the children return, they venture farther and farther into Whangdoodleland, intending to reach the palace where the Last Whangdoodle resides. However, the Whangdoodle's Prime Minister, the "Oily Prock", does not want them to disturb His Highness, and sets up a number of traps, both in Whangdoodleland and the real world to prevent this meeting. He enlists the marvelous and funny creatures of the land in his effort, including the High Behind Splintercat, the Sidewinders, the Oinck, the Gazooks, the Tree Squeaks, and the Swamp Gaboons. The children use their imaginations, intelligence, and the friendship of another denizen, the Whiffle Bird to outwit the traps. The kids meet the last Whangdoodle. He wants a girl Whangdoodle who is exactly like him so he won't be lonely.The story ends when the professor makes that wish come true. |
1081361 | /m/044c17 | Tribes of Redwall Otters | Brian Jacques | 2002 | {"/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | This booklet about otters features trivia questions, a giant poster, profiles of many of the otter characters that are featured in the series, and the much anticipated recipe for Shrimp and Hotroot Soup. The book offers insight into the culture and history of otters, listing important otter characters and customs from the series. It was illustrated by Jonathan Walker. |
1083373 | /m/044jzr | 'Art' | Yasmina Reza | null | null | Set in Paris, the story revolves around three friends—Serge, Marc and Yvan—who find their previously solid 15-year friendship on shaky ground when Serge buys an expensive painting. The canvas is white, with a few white lines. Serge is proud of his 200,000 franc acquisition fully expecting the approval of his friends. Marc scornfully describes it as "a piece of white shit," but is it the painting that offends him, or the uncharacteristic independence-of-thought that the purchase reveals in Serge? For the insecure Yvan, burdened by the problems of his impending doom (wedding) and his dissatisfaction at his job as a stationery salesman, their friendship is his sanctuary...but his attempts at peace-making backfire. Eager to please he laughs about the painting with Marc but tells Serge he likes it. Pulled into the disagreement, his vacillations fuel the blazing row. Lines are drawn and they square off over the canvas, using it as an excuse to relentlessly batter one another over various failures. As their arguments become less theoretical and more personal, they border on destroying their friendship. |
1084436 | /m/044mnq | The Old Man of Lochnagar | null | null | null | The story starts with Prince Charles entertaining some bored children at Balmoral. He tells them about an old man who, in search of peace and quiet (and a hot bath), has made his way to a remote cave at Lochnagar. He comes across a cave and, dragging a bathtub inside, claims the place as his own. The old man makes a lot of noise and mentions that his neighbours used to complain about the banging and noise coming from his home late at night. He chats to an animal he names Maudie, the original occupant of the cave, while setting up the apparatus for running his long awaited bath. Finally, all is ready and the Old Man appears in his tartan dressing gown, ready to step in to the bath. But, as he jumps in, he realises that the water is freezing and his squeals echo round the loch. He tells Maudie that he will have to wait for a bath until he has found a way of heating the water, and pulls the plug on his full bath. Unknown to the Old Man, his cave is near the underground home of the Gorn, a clan of Scottish pixies, who are responsible for pushing up the spring flowers in Scotland. The Gorn King is an inventor, and has created a curious device (which looks and sounds like a set of bagpipes) which reduces full grown flowers back to seeds. The seed will turn back in to a flower when it gets wet and the Gorn Queen and Princess declare that the King has changed the way everyone will work from now on. However, as they are discussing this, a flood pours down unexpectedly from above. When the Old Man emptied his bath, the water followed his complicated arrangements of pipes and in to the Gorn's underground workshops, ruining the flowers and flooding out the workers. The Princess and her younger brother end up being washed away from their parents and come out of a tree stump alone and wet. They look up to find a 'giant', tending to a huge pot over a roaring fire and the young Prince fears that they will be made in to soup. In fact the 'giant' is the Old Man, who has found a way to heat his bath by lighting a huge fire underneath it. As he waits, still in his tartan dressing gown, he is suddenly hit by the Gorn King's device, which has been picked up by the young Princess. He immediately shrinks to the size of a pixie and is taken away by the Prince and Princess, to see what his bathwater has done to their home. At first, he thinks he is having a strange dream, and so he appears callously unconcerned at the devastation, stating only that "I've never dreamed in colour before". This delusion lasts until he falls down a hole, hitting his head. As he exclaims at the pain in his head, it dawns on the Old Man that since you can't feel pain in a dream, what he's seen must be real and the damage is his fault. The Prince and Princess take the Old Man back outside but, to their shock, the whole world seems to be on fire. The fire underneath the Old Man's bath has spread and is threatening the countryside. The Old Man offers to help, but he needs to be bigger before he can do anything. The Princess is reluctant to help the Old Man, but she relents and tells him that he needs to 'get watered'. With the help of Maudie, the Old Man is catapulted in to his bath and returns to normal size. He pulls the plug again, flooding the area and putting out the fire, while protecting the pixies' underground home from further damage. The Old Man has learned that his actions affect others and that he must think of the consequences. The story ends with the Gorn sharing a huge bath with the Old Man, complete with water wheels and boats. When he is finished, the Old Man drains his bath using more of his special plumbing skills to reuse the water to reactivate the magic seeds and causing flowers to pop up all around. The story closes on the Old Man of Lochnagar and returns to Balmoral and Prince Charles. The children tell him that it was a good story, but that's all, just a story. Charles replies that you never really know, and lifts a set of bagpipes from his desk and begins to play. After a few notes, the Prince is affected in the same way as the Old Man, shrinking to a tiny size and suggesting that his story was inspired by true events. The children he has been entertaining then race off through the house to find the bathtub, to restore the Prince to his rightful size. |
1084647 | /m/044n1b | The Royal Family | Edna Ferber | null | null | ; Characters * Julie Cavendish - Fanny's daughter * Tony Cavendish - Fanny's son * Gwen Cavendish - Fanny's granddaughter * Herbert Dean - Fanny's brother * Kitty Dean - Fanny's sister-in-law * Fanny Cavendish - Cavendish Family Matriarch * Oscar Wolfe - Cavendish Family's Long-time Agent * Gilmore Marshall - Julie's Love Interest * Perry Stewart - Gwen's Fiancee The story is a parody of the Barrymore family actors, with particular aim taken at John Barrymore and Ethel Barrymore. The character Tony Cavendish, a heavy-drinking womanizer, represents John Barrymore. Julie Cavendish is the prima donna Broadway star Ethel Barrymore. Ethel Barrymore was offended and her critical comments were quoted by the press; however John Barrymore saw the production in Los Angeles and was amused, and congratulated Fredric March on his performance as Tony Cavendish. (Otto Kruger had played the role on Broadway.) |
1085154 | /m/044p9c | The Line of Beauty | Alan Hollinghurst | 2004 | {"/m/04tkhfk": "Gay Themed", "/m/065q54": "LGBT literature", "/m/0cgx58": "Gay novel", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/0hwxm": "Historical novel"} | Set in Britain in the early to mid-1980s, the story surrounds the young gay protagonist, Nick Guest, who has come down from Oxford with a first in English and is to begin graduate studies at University College London. The novel begins in the summer of 1983, shortly after Thatcher's landslide victory in the Parliamentary election of that year. Nick moves into the luxurious London home of the wealthy Fedden family. The son of the house, Toby, is his Oxford University classmate and best friend, and Nick's stay is meant to last for a short time while Toby and his parents - Rachel, the daughter of a wealthy Jewish family, and Gerald, a successful businessman and just-elected Tory MP - are on holiday in France. Left at home with Nick is the Feddens' daughter, Cat, who is bipolar and whom the Feddens are reluctant to leave on her own. Nick helps Cat through a minor crisis, and when her parents return they suggest he stay on indefinitely, since Cat has become attached to him and Toby is getting a place of his own. As a permanent member of the Feddens' household, Nick experiences for the first time the world of the British upper class, observing them from his own middle-class background. Nick remains a guest in the Fedden home until he is expelled at the end of the novel. Nick has his first romance with a black council worker, Leo, but a later relationship with Wani, the son of a rich Lebanese businessman, illuminates the materialism and ruthlessness of 1980s Thatcherite Britain. The book explores the tension between Nick's intimate relationship with the Feddens, in whose parties and holidays he participates, and the realities of his sexuality and gay life, which the Feddens accept only to the extent of never mentioning it. It explores themes of hypocrisy, homosexuality, madness and wealth, with the emerging AIDS crisis forming a backdrop to the book's conclusion. |
1085364 | /m/044pzd | The Smoke Ring | Larry Niven | 1987 | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/05hgj": "Novel"} | This book takes place about fifteen years after the end of the original story, when survivors of the Dalton-Quinn tree, a few Carther States jungle dwellers, and two London Tree Citizens have settled on a new tree. This 'Citizen's Tree' has become a stable community which some believe may be too small to survive in the long run. Kendy, the recorded personality of a citizen of "The State" who exists in the computer of the original space-ship that colonized the Smoke Ring, has become impatient. He decides to re-establish contact with Citizen's Tree. Kendy manipulates a group into making contact with "The Admiralty", a neighboring civilization at Gold's L4 Lagrange Point (which they refer to as "the Clump"). The group explores this more advanced civilization with a mixture of wonder and trepidation. Although much of the story is a sort of "travelogue" exploring the Smoke Ring and the technology used in the unique environment, The Smoke Ring does spend more time on story and character development than The Integral Trees. One of the drivers for the story follows the latest operator of "the silver suit", the Citizen's Tree's working spacesuit. Few are capable of operating the suit due to its size, as most humans in the Smoke Ring have evolved to be much too tall to fit into it. The job goes to the occasionally born "dwarves" who are, in fact, humans of normal (for Earth) height and build. A major sub-plot develops around the latest silver suit operator's attempts to infiltrate The Admiralty to gain information, and The Admiralty's near obsession with capturing the Citizen's Tree's spacesuit. This story gives much more notice to the story of Kendy and the original mission. The chain of events that led to the colonization of the Smoke Ring through a "mutiny" on the ship is explored. After retrieving the crew's own records of the events, Kendy realizes that the crew had not mutinied at all, and that he had forced them off the ship, believing this to be in keeping with his orders from Earth. This was apparently blocked from his memory, and he suffers a form of breakdown when he learns (or re-learns) the truth. |
1085604 | /m/044qmk | Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand | Samuel R. Delany | 1984 | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction"} | The novel takes place in a far future in which human societies have developed divergently on some 6000 planets. Many of these worlds are shared with intelligent nonhumans, although only one alien species (the mysterious Xlv) also possesses faster-than-light travel. In an attempt to find a stable defense against the planet destroying phenomenon known as "cultural fugue" (a state of terminal runaway of cultural and technological complexity that destroys all life on a world via a singularity), many human worlds are aligned with one of two broad factions, one generally permissive (the Sygn) and one generally conservative (the Family) by today's standards. The story opens on the planet Rhyonon. Korga, a tall, misfit youth, undergoes the "RAT" (Radical Anxiety Termination) procedure, a form of psychosurgery which makes him a passive slave, after which he is known as Rat Korga. After he has lived under a number of masters, Rat's world is destroyed by a conflagration. This is later explained to be the result of cultural fugue, though the explanation is far from conclusive, especially since Xlv spacecraft were present in the Rhyonon system when the disaster occurred. Because he is deep inside a mine shaft at the time, Rat Korga survives (though badly injured), the only known being to ever survive cultural fugue. The action then moves to Velm, a Sygn-aligned world that humanity shares with its native three-sexed intelligent species, the evelm, and where sexual relationships take many forms—monogamous, promiscuous, anonymous, and interspecies. Resident Marq Dyeth, an "industrial diplomat" who helps manage the transfer of technology between different societies, is informed that Rat Korga is his perfect sexual match by a former connection in the powerful and mysterious WEB. Equipping him with a prosthesis (the rings of Vondramach Okk) that restores the initiative he lost due to the RAT procedure, the WEB sends Rat Korga to Velm under the pretext that he is a student, and he and Marq begin a romantic affair. They go on an unusual hunting expedition and return to a dinner party which becomes chaotic due to the presence of the Thants and planetwide interest in the survivor. The Thants are humans of another world who were friends of the Dyeths until deciding to align themselves with the Family, which has promised them the position of "focus unit" on another world, Nepiy, making them effectively rulers of that planet. Soon after, Rat Korga must leave Velm and be permanently separated from Marq (their pairing having been an alien cultural experiment) because their interaction was creating a threat of cultural fugue. |
1085770 | /m/044r03 | Valley of the Squinting Windows | Brinsley MacNamara | 1918 | {"/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/05hgj": "Novel"} | It told a story of rural life, the power of gossip, public perception which people attempted to present of the family and individual, and of an inward-looking society, similar to the Keeping up with the Joneses theme. The stir created by the book caused the author's schoolmaster father, James, to be boycotted, and eventually he had to emigrate; the author himself never returned to the area. The novel resulted in a high-profile court case by those who thought that they had been described. Hostility against the book led to its burning. MacNamara's novel has been reprinted several times, particularly when interest in the topic re-emerges. Valley of the squinting windows has become a colloquial term, particularly in Ireland, for a society obsessed with providing neighbours and peers with a good perception of one's personal matters. |
1086476 | /m/044sjl | Stone of Tears | Terry Goodkind | 9/15/1995 | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/03qfd": "High fantasy"} | After the death of Darken Rahl, Richard is afflicted by a series of painful headaches. He also learns from Shota of his lineage as the bastard son of Darken Rahl and the grandson (on his mother's side) of Zeddicus Zu'l Zorander. After having mastered the Wizard's First Rule, Richard learns that the opening of the boxes of Orden has torn the veil between the world of the living and the underworld and thus, he has made a grave mistake; the violation of the Wizard's Second Rule, namely, that "The greatest harm can result from the best intentions". He also learns that only he can close the veil, and if he doesn't the whole world will be in the hands of the Keeper. Richard gets a visit from three Sisters of the Light (Sister Grace, Elizabeth and Verna), who inform him that his headaches are caused by the awakening of the gift within him and are fatal and unstoppable, unless Richard receives magical training. The Sisters tell him that he must go with them and wear a Rada'Han, a magical collar, in order to control his headaches and the gift. They also explain that they will offer him their help three times, and if he refuses each time, the Sisters will not be able to help him ever again. Despite this warning, Richard declines to use the collar (and thereby the help of the Sisters) when Sister Grace offers it to him. After asking for the forgiveness of her fellow Sisters, she kills herself. As the two remaining Sisters tell Richard of the second reason for wearing the collar; so that they can control him. He refuses the collar a second time and tries to prevent the second Sister, Elizabeth, from killing herself. In the riot the third sister, Sister Verna, manages to stick a knife in Sister Elizabeth's back. Seeking guidance on how to repair the veil, Richard and Kahlan request another "gathering"; which involves turning to the "ancestors' spirits" for help in the spirit house of the Mud People. But instead of being able to speak to the spirits Richard and Kahlan are sent down to the underworld and are placed face-to-face with Darken Rahl. He explains that Richard has brought him back through the veil by calling "a gathering of ancestors' spirits." Thus Rahl, as Richard's ancestor, is sent back to the world of the living. Richard has thereby violated the second rule again. This allows Rahl to continue his task of bringing the The Keeper into the world. Rahl touches Richard with the Keeper's mark, making him unconscious and lets Kahlan know that Richard is only minutes away from death. The two of them are sent back to the spirit house from the underworld. As Kahlan desperately tries to save Richard, a glowing spirit emerges in the spirit house. It is the spirit of Denna, who tells Kahlan that she has to force Richard into wearing the collar, and that if he doesn't, the headaches will kill him and everything will be lost. Denna also tells Kahlan in detail about the agonizing torture, pain, and madness, that has been inflicted upon Richard's mind. Denna then puts her hand on Richard's mark and takes his place, and is sent down to the underworld and the Keeper. As the third and final Sister returns, Kahlan tells Richard that he has to put on the collar. When he tries to explain his reluctance, Kahlan makes Richard believe that the only way to prove his love for her is to wear it. Richard reluctantly agrees to wear the collar and reveals to Kahlan that the third reason for wearing the collar is to inflict pain on the wearer. Richard has misinterpreted Kahlan's intentions, and believes that she no longer loves him. He leaves, telling her merely to find Zedd. Devastated, Richard submits to the remaining Sister, and leaves with her to go to the Palace of Prophets. Richard travels with Sister Verna to the Palace of the Prophets, which is located in the Old World. The Sisters see their job as spreading knowledge of the The Creator to the world through the training of wizards. Before reaching the palace, Richard is forced into a battle with thirty Baka Ban Mana blademasters. It is their job it is to teach the Seeker to dance with the spirits by using the Sword of Truth's magic to access the collective knowledge of all previous users of the sword. Be a feather, not a rock. Float on the wind of the storm is the first tactical advice he receives from the Sword's magic. During his stay at the palace Richard comes to terms with the fact that he has the gift of magic. He discovers he is a War Wizard: one who has the gift of both additive and subtractive magic. Later, he learns from Nathan Rahl, another wizard in the Palace of the Prophets, that he is the first to be born with such power in three thousand years. It is revealed that the Prelate brought Richard to the Palace to flush out the Sisters of the Dark, a secret society within the Sisters of the Light dedicated to the task of unleashing the Keeper into the world of the living. As the Prelate herself says, "When your house is overrun with rats the only thing you can do is bring in a cat. This cat sees us all as rats. Maybe with good reason." Richard also finds out that it was the Prelate and Nathan that helped Richard's stepfather, George Cypher, retrieve The Book of Counted Shadows, which contains instructions on how to correctly open the Boxes of Orden. Richard also realizes belatedly that the Palace of the Prophets is the trap in time foretold by Shota the witch woman; the palace is spelled so that those within its walls age at a much slower rate. Nathan Rahl himself is close to one thousand years old. Kahlan embarks on a long trek back to her home of Aydindril along with three Mud People. Along the way they come across a sacked city, Ebinissia, with the inhabitants' corpses filling the streets and the surrounding countryside. Kahlan and the three mud people race to catch up with a band of some five thousand troops that are trailing the enemy which sacked Ebinissia. She is shocked to realize that these soldiers are all younger than expected. She assumes command of this youthful army and begins to strategize tactics for taking on the much larger army of what she now knows to be The Imperial Order. After months of imprisonment, Richard escapes and races to stop a prophecy from coming to pass. Namely, the one he received in the Valley of the Lost: Of all there were, but a single one born of the magic to bring forth truth will remain alive when the shadow's threat is lifted. Therefore comes the greater darkness of the dead. For there to be a chance at life's bond, this one in white must be offered to her people, to bring their joy and good cheer. The prophecy speaks of the beheading of his beloved Kahlan, whom he now realizes was only trying to help him by sending him with the Sisters. Only by fulfilling the prophecy can Richard close the veil and thwart Darken Rahl, casting the Keeper back into the underworld with the eponymous Stone of Tears. After Richard returns the Stone of Tears to the underworld and once again defeats Darken Rahl and the Keeper, he rushes to Aydindril to find Kahlan. Upon finding Kahlan has already been executed, Richard kills all the councillors who sentenced Kahlan to death. He is unaware that Zedd has cast a death spell to make all believe that Kahlan is dead. Denna's spirit visited the both of them and they were reunited in a place between worlds. |
1087753 | /m/044wvf | A Wind in the Door | Madeleine L'Engle | 1/1/1973 | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/0dwly": "Children's literature", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/03mfnf": "Young adult literature", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | Meg Murry is worried about her brother Charles Wallace, a 6-year-old genius who is bullied at school by the other children. The new principal of the elementary school is the former high school principal, Mr. Jenkins, who often disciplined Meg, and who Meg is sure has a grudge against her whole family. Meg tries to enlist Jenkins's help in protecting her brother, but is unsuccessful. On top of this, Meg discovers that Charles Wallace has a progressive disease which is leaving him short of breath. Their mother, a microbiologist, suspects it may have something to do with his mitochondria and the (fictional) "farandolae" that live within them. One afternoon, Charles Wallace tells Meg he saw a "drive of dragons" in the vegetable garden in their back yard. Meg goes out with him to investigate, but all they find is a pile of very odd feathers. Later, Meg has a frightening encounter with something that looks like Mr. Jenkins. Meg, Charles Wallace, and Calvin O'Keefe discover that Charles Wallace's drive of dragons is a single creature named Proginoskes. Progo, as he is quickly nicknamed, insists on being called "a cherubim" instead of a cherub because he is "practically plural," having a multitude of wings and eyes. The children also encounter a tall robed being named Blajeny, who informs them that he is a Teacher, and that they and Proginoskes have all been called to his class. They also encounter a snake that lives in their wall, Louise the Larger, who is also a Teacher. Meg learns that the galaxy is threatened by beings called Echthroi, who seek to erase the entire universe by un-Naming things. She soon has to save Mr. Jenkins from this fate, by Naming him. Part of the task is to distinguish the real Mr. Jenkins from two Echthroi doubles, but it also means that she must look past her personal grudge, find the goodness in Mr. Jenkins, and let herself love him. The characters then learn that Echthroi are destroying Charles Wallace's farandolae. They travel inside one of his mitochondria, which is named Yadah, and turn the tide by convincing a larval farandola to take root and accept its role as a mature fara, against the urgings of an Echthros. In the process, Meg is nearly "Xed,"(unnamed) and Mr. Jenkins is invaded by his Echthros doubles. Proginoskes sacrifices himself to "fill in" the emptiness of the Echthroi, Charles Wallace's life is saved, and everything returns to normal. |
1088216 | /m/044y1d | The Long Patrol | Brian Jacques | 1997 | {"/m/0dwly": "Children's literature", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | Tamello De Fformelo Tussock (or Tammo), a young hare who lives at Camp Tussock, longs to be part of the Long Patrol at Salamandastron. However, his father, Cornspurrey De Fformelo Tussock, will not hear of it. He believes that his son is too young to join up. Against her husband's wishes, Tammo's mother, Mem Divinia, prepares for him to leave during the night with Russa Nodrey, a wandering squirrel who is a friend of the family. The two then set off to find the Long Patrol. Along the way, they encounter the ferrets Skulka and Gromal. They do eventually meet up with the Long Patrol, but Russa is killed saving a baby badger, who is named Russano by one of the hares, Rockjaw Grang, in Russa's honor. Meanwhile, Gormad Tunn, the rat leader of the Rapscallion army has been dying from mortal wounds. The Rapscallions are in fear of Cregga Rose Eyes, the ruler of Salamandastron. Tunn's two sons, Byral Fleetclaw and Damug Warfang, fight to the death to determine who will be the new commander of the Rapscallions. Damug kills Byral through treachery and takes over control of the army, which he commands to move inland. At Redwall Abbey, the inhabitants discover that the south wall is mysteriously sinking into the ground. Foremole Diggum and his crew believe the best thing to do is to knock the wall down and re-build it. During the night, a storm brings a tree down on the wall, making the moles' job easier but also leaving the Abbey open to attack. The broken wall reveals a well, which turns out to be part of the ancient castle Kotir. Abbess Tansy, Friar Butty, Shad the Gatekeeper, Giygas, and Craklyn the Recorder investigate below. After a harrowing journey, they find the treasure of Verdauga Greeneyes, the long-dead lord of Kotir. The Long Patrol goes to Redwall, hoping to inform the denizens about the threat posed by Damug. At the abbey, the spirit of Martin the Warrior appears to Tammo, instructing him to go in the company of the hare Midge Manycoats to Damug's camp. Disguised as a vermin seer, Midge advises Damug not to attack the vulnerable abbey directly, but suggests an alternate place and time instead, buying the defenders precious time to prepare themselves. When the hare Rockjaw Grang is killed by the Rapscallions, Cregga's dreams direct her to the ridge where Midge has directed the battle to occur. Meanwhile, the Redwallers have gathered all the allies they can find, and with the Long Patrol, they battle a losing effort against the rat hordes. At a crucial point in the battle when it seems Damug might win, Lady Cregga Rose Eyes appears with the rest of the Salamandastron hares. She seizes Damug and strangles him, but he hacks at her eyes, blinding her in the process. The hares and Redwallers are eventually victorious, and the treasure brought back from Kotir by the Friar Butty is melted down into medals for the creatures that fought in battle. The ridge is named The Ridge of a Thousand after the vermin horde that lost all thousand of their number. In the end, Tammo marries the beautiful Pasque Valerian, the healer of the Long Patrol, and travels to Salamandastron. Cregga remains at Redwall Abbey as the new Badger Mother, and Russano, later on, journeys to Salamandastron, with Russa's hardwood stick as his weapon. He will turn out to be one of the only Badger Lords never to be possessed by the Bloodwrath. |
1088486 | /m/04jpfwy | Netherland | Joseph O'Neill | 2008-05 | {"/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | For while the protagonist, Hans van den Broek, chooses cricket as his refuge, there's a lot more going on here than the "sport of gentlemen". Hans is an immigrant — Dutch-born and now residing in Manhattan, with his wife and young son. He's desperate to fit in and goes through the whole rigmarole of gaining his US drivers' license, if only to become that little bit more embedded in the culture. Connecting with people who play cricket in New York is yet another way he can "connect", albeit with an immigrant underclass. And, tellingly, the one man with whom he forges a tentative friendship, Chuck Ramkissoon, winds up being pulled out of a New York canal with his hands tied behind his back. |
1088681 | /m/044zmw | The Gadget Maker | null | null | null | The novel traces the life of Stanley Brack, captivated by model aircraft as a child. He enters MIT, and in a memorable scene, is interviewed by the head of the School of Aeronautical Engineering, a legendary German aerodynamicist. His main concern is unexpected. "From your hair and general coloring," he said slowly, "I thought you might perhaps be Jewish." Brack reassures him that he and both his parents are Baptists and of Scots-Irish descent. "We have to be careful," the professor confides; "The aircraft industry is one of the few they haven't managed to take over yet," and congratulates Stanley on his acceptance into the course. The incident turns out to be one of many in which Brack swallows any thought of protest and goes along to get along. After graduation, he joins Amcraft, the Amalgamated Aircraft Corporation, in Los Angeles. It is a manufacturer of aircraft components that is just about to unveil its first complete airplane, a transport. The company is run personally by Dave Humbler, "president, founder of the company, chief engineer—big wheel number one. Real nice guy, Dave," a colleague explains. (Resemblances can be seen to the Douglas Aircraft Company.) Brack rises through the ranks and grows with the company. After the war Amcraft acquires the services of Gunther Rausch, "a spoil of war" and a rocket expert from Peenemünde. His presence gives the company an edge in picking up missile work. Rausch is brilliant but arrogant and Brack detests him. Nevertheless, as the book draws to a climax, he makes common cause with him in an effort to perfect a guided missile. Brack is the project manager, and the project is in trouble and behind schedule. He pressures a friend and colleague into conducting some dangerous rocket tests with Rausch. Rausch is tense and jittery and gives coworkers an impression that he is concealing personal inexperience in conducting such tests. There is an explosion, and Brack's friend Sim suffers terrible injuries: physical and chemical burns and lung damage that leaves him close to death. Brack's fiancée, a witness, tells Brack that Rausch was panicky during the test and "never stopped fiddling with the switches... he was like some hot-head whose car won't start but who keeps on turning the ignition switch." She thinks Rausch could have caused the explosion (a concern which ultimately turns out to be unfounded). Brack furiously argues with Rausch, then debates with his superior about the project's future and who should lead it. Brack convinces his superior to let him continue as leader. As the discussion closes, his superior says "Okay, it's all settled." But he adds "One other thing—I'm firing the girl." Brack's protest sticks in his throat; "ashamed, he looked at his feet, and then he nodded." The book closes with Brack and Rausch standing together literally arm in arm, watching the conclusion of a successful missile test. "Did you see it, Gunther?" Brack says. "Yah," breaths Rausch, "Just like a star. A shooting star." "And we made it," says Brack, proudly, as the tale ends. The New York Times reviewer says that "the question arises... whether Brack is to be regarded as an all-wool idealist pursuing heroically his destiny despite any and all distractions tossed in his way. Or is he a less desirable type, possessed of the ability to abandon all pretense to ethical conduct in his ambitious pursuit after self-advancement?" Although the Times calls it an "absorbing narrative," to a modern reader much of the interest lies, not in the broad story outline, but in the dozens of little details and circumstantial touches which bring times, places, and situations—not well documented elsewhere—to life. |
1088788 | /m/044_15 | Orley Farm | Anthony Trollope | 1861 | {"/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/01qxvh": "Romance novel"} | When Joseph Mason of Groby Park, Yorkshire, died, he left his estate to his family. A codicil to his will, however, left Orley Farm (near London) to his much younger second wife and infant son. The will and the codicil were in her handwriting, and there were three witnesses, one of whom was no longer alive. A bitterly fought court case confirmed the codicil. Twenty years pass. Lady Mason lives at Orley Farm with her adult son, Lucius. Samuel Dockwrath, a tenant, is asked to leave by Lucius, who wants to try new intensive farming methods. Aggrieved, and knowing of the original case (John Kenneby, one of the codicil witnesses, had been an unsuccessful suitor of his wife Miriam Usbech), Dockwrath investigates and finds a second deed signed by the same witnesses on the same date, though they can remember signing only one. He travels to Groby Park in Yorkshire, where Joseph Mason the younger lives with his comically parsimonious wife, and persuades Mason to have Lady Mason prosecuted for forgery. The prosecution fails, but Lady Mason later confesses privately that she committed the forgery, and is prompted by conscience to give up the estate. There are various subplots. The main one deals with a slowly unfolding romance between Felix Graham (a young and relatively poor barrister without family) and Madeline Staveley, daughter of Judge Stavely of Noningsby. Graham has a long-standing engagement to the penniless Mary Snow, whom he supports and educates while she is being “moulded” to be his wife. Between the Staveleys at Alston and Orley Farm at Hamworth lies the Cleve, where Sir Peregrine Orme lives with his daughter-in-law, Mrs. Orme, and grandson, Peregrine. Sir Peregrine falls in love with Lady Mason and is briefly engaged to her, but she calls off the match when she realises the seriousness of the court case. Meanwhile, Mr. Furnival, another barrister, befriends Lady Mason, arousing the jealousy of his wife. His daughter, Sophia, has a brief relationship with Augustus Stavely and a brief engagement to Lucius Mason. Eventually Furnival and his wife are reconciled, and Sophia's engagement is dropped. Sophia is portrayed as an intelligent woman who writes comically skillful letters. |
1088794 | /m/044_26 | The Big Time | Fritz Leiber | null | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/098tmk": "War novel"} | The storyline involves two factions, both capable of time travel, engaged in long-term war with each other. Their method of battle involves changing the outcome of events throughout history. The two opposing groups are nicknamed the Spiders and the Snakes. Their soldiers are recruited from various places and times: Cretan Amazons, Roman legionnaires, Hussars, Wehrmacht Landsers, American GIs, Space Commandos, and soldiers from the armies of Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, and Stalin and may find themselves fighting side-by-side or on opposing sides. Likewise medical staff and entertainers are inducted into the temporal war to provide rest and relaxation for weary combatants. The soldiers do not know how the war began or if it has an end. They also do not know the true form or identity of the Spiders or the Snakes. No one knows how those nicknames were chosen, or whether they are in any way accurate. The action of the story occurs in a rest and relaxation base between the changing time lanes. The plot has the form of a locked room mystery. |
1089665 | /m/0451g9 | The Last Juror | John Grisham | 2004 | {"/m/02n4kr": "Mystery", "/m/05hgj": "Novel", "/m/0c3351": "Suspense"} | In 1970, the first person narrator, a 23-year-old college drop-out by the name of Willie Traynor, comes to Clanton, Mississippi for an internship at the local newspaper, The Ford County Times. However the editor, Wilson Caudle, drives the newspaper into bankruptcy through years of mismanagement. Willie decides to buy the paper spontaneously for fifty-thousand dollars, through money from his wealthy grandmother, and becomes the editor and owner of The Ford County Times. Shortly after this, a member of the notorious and scandalous Padgitt family brutally rapes and kills a young widow named Rhoda Kassellaw. The murderer, Danny Padgitt, is tried in front of a jury and is found guilty. Prior to being sentenced, Danny threatens to kill each of the jury members, should they convict him. Although they do find him guilty, the jury cannot decide whether to send him to life in prison or to Death Row, so Danny is sentenced to life in prison at the Mississippi State Penitentiary. After only nine years in prison, Danny Padgitt is paroled and returns to Clanton. Immediately, two jury members are killed and one is nearly killed by a bomb. Jury member and close friend of Willie, Miss Callie Ruffin, reveals that the recent victims were the jurors who were against sentencing Danny to Death Row. Callie Ruffin is black, and was the first black on a jury trying a white criminal in Ford County. With her husband, she has a family of highly accomplished adult children, who live outside of Mississippi. Convinced that Danny is exacting his revenge, as promised, the judge of Clanton issues an arrest for Danny Padgitt. At Padgitt's trial, the former lover of Rhoda Kassellaw, Hank Hooten, guns down Danny Padgitt in the courtroom by positioning himself on the balcony. Willie later discovers that the assassin is also a schizophrenic and would often hear the voices of the victim's children in his head, convincing him to murder Danny and the three jurors who voted against his conviction to Death Row. After nine years of ownership, Willie sells The Ford County Times for 1.5 million dollars. Soon after, Callie Ruffin dies of a heart attack, and the book ends with Willie writing her obituary. |
1090476 | /m/04548d | Harpist in the Wind | Patricia A. McKillip | 1979 | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/0dwly": "Children's literature", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | Morgon of Hed and Raederle of An set out to discover the answers to the questions: Who are the shape changers who pursue them?, and Where is the High One, the source of the land law binding the realm together? Along the way they are helped by the wizards of the realm, recently released from the bonds in which Ghisteslwchlohm had held them by Morgon, and by the land heirs/rulers. After confronting Ghisteslwchlohm in the city of Lungold, where the wizard once had ruled, Morgon is imprisoned by the shape changers within Erlenstar Mountain, as they don't want to kill him. They, the exiled Earth Masters, need him to reach the High One, who prevents them from exercising full power. He escapes with the help of Raederle and someone who is later revealed to be the High One in disguise. Seeking refuge in the far north, he begins to learn the land law of each kingdom. Once he has partially learned all of the land law does Morgon discover that the High One had journeyed with him as Deth and the wizard Yrth; the High One tells Morgon at the top of Wind Plain that he (Morgon) is the High One's land heir. When the High One is killed by Ghisteslwchlohm, now possessed by the shape changers, with Morgon's three-starred sword, Morgon learns to shape and/or bind the winds to overcome the Earth Masters and bring peace to the land; he truly is the High One's heir. In the trilogy, land law resides with the land ruler of each of the kingdoms within the realm. Land rulers are ostensibly aware of all of the entities within their kingdom. They can sense, each creature, each plant, each rock. The High One, in McKillip's creation, seems to have the same relationship with the entire realm, as he started to bind all of the land law when he sensed that the Earth Master Eriel began to gather power for her own ends. When the land law passes on, the land heir suddenly becomes aware of everything in his or her kingdom, or in the entire realm. |
1090535 | /m/0454d_ | Islandia | Austin Tappan Wright | 1942 | null | While an undergraduate at Harvard, John Lang becomes friends with an Islandian fellow-student named Dorn, and decides to learn the Islandian language (of which there are very few speakers outside Islandia). Once he has graduated, his uncle, a prominent businessman, arranges his appointment as American consul to Islandia, based primarily on his ability to speak the language. Gradually John Lang learns that his tacit mission as American consul is to do whatever is necessary to increase American trade opportunities in Islandia. He does not undertake this mission right away, preferring to take a little time first to get to know the country and the people. John Lang meets and falls in love with Dorn's sister, Dorna. They spend some time together alone, which John finds unnerving at first, since they are not chaperoned. When Dorna comes to understand John's feelings, she tells him that she does not love him in return in that way (though he wonders whether she means "cannot", or "will not"). She accepts the hand of the King instead, a handsome young man who has been courting her for some time. One of the culminations of the plot is the decision by the people of Islandia to reject the aggressive overtures of the Great Powers for unrestricted trade and immigration, choosing instead to maintain their tradition of isolation. As this political struggle comes to a head, John Lang follows his conscience and sides with the Islandians, to the great disappointment of many American businessmen who were looking forward to new lucrative trade opportunities, including John Lang's uncle. Near the end of the novel, John Lang is allowed to become a citizen of Islandia as a reward for heroism in an attack by a neighboring group. By this point he has fallen in love with an American friend with whom he has maintained steady correspondence. They decide to marry, and when she arrives in Islandia she, too, is granted citizenship. |
1090537 | /m/0454fb | Gardens of the Moon | Steven Erikson | 4/1/1999 | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | The sequence details the various struggles for power on a world dominated by the Malazan Empire. It is notable for the use of high magic, and unusual plot structure.. Gardens of the Moon centres around the Imperial campaign to conquer the city of Darujhistan. The novel opens in the 96th year of the Malazan Empire, during the final year of the Emperor Kellanved. A young boy named Ganoes Paran witnesses the sacking of the Mouse Quarter of Malaz City. Paran wants to be a soldier when he grows older. Commander Whiskeyjack disapproves, as does Claw leader Surly (Laseen). Erikson skips seven years from the Prologue, during which time the Emperor and his ally, Dancer, have been assassinated and supplanted by his chief of the secret police. Empress Laseen now rules with the aid of the "Claw," a shadowy group of assassins whose function is to further her ambitions. The story opens several years into a series of wars by the Malazan Empire to conquer the continent of Genabackis. The Malazan 2nd Army under High Fist Dujek has been besieging the city of Pale, one of only two Free Cities left in the Malazans' path in Genabackis, for several years. Pale is holding out thanks to an alliance with the powerful Anomander Rake, Lord of Moon's Spawn (a floating fortress), leader of the non-human Tiste Andii. Pale finally falls when Rake withdraws his fortress following a fierce battle. Even then, the Empire suffers severe losses, including the near total destruction of a legendary infantry unit in its 2nd army, The Bridgeburners. Several characters speculate that someone higher up within the Empire may be engineering the elimination of various people who were loyal to the late Emperor. The Empire then turns its attention to the other remaining Free City, Darujhistan. The few dozen surviving members of the Bridgeburners, led by Sergeant Whiskeyjack, are sent to try and undermine the city from within. Once there they attempt fruitlessly to contact the city's assassin's guild, in the hope of hiring their betrayal. Adjunct Lorn, a high ranking representative of the Empress, is sent to uncover something in the hills east of Darujhistan, in the company of a Tlan Imass, a member of another species that once dominated the world before humans. Meanwhile Tattersail, one of the few mages to survive the Battle of Pale, and Captain Paran head toward the city to determine the reason for the increased involvement of several gods and other magical forces in the campaign. At the same time, Anomander Rake offers his alliance to the true rulers of Darujhistan, a secretive cabal of mages; while a group of con-artists and underworld figures within the city work to oppose members of the civic government who are considering capitulating to the Empire. The plots collide when Adjunct Lorn releases a Jaghut Tyrant, a massively powerful being from thousands of years ago, with the aim of either damaging Anomander Rake seriously or forcing him to withdraw from the city. A substantial subplot involves a young Bridgeburner recruit named Sorry, who is in fact possessed by The Rope, patron of assassins. When Paran and Rake negotiate his withdrawal from the war, she is freed and falls in with Crokus, a young Daru thief. As the novel ends Crokus, a Bridgeburner named Fiddler and the Bridgeburner assassin Kalam volunteer to take the former Sorry (now called Apsalar) back to her homeland of Itko Kan and they depart (their story continues in Deadhouse Gates). Meanwhile, Dujek and Whiskeyjack lead the 2nd Army into rebellion against Laseen's increasingly monstrous rule. Now called Onearm's Host, the 2nd Army calls for a truce with the Tiste Andii and the Crimson Guard, a mercenary army that has been working against the Empire. Dujek is also concerned about the declaration of Holy War called by the Pannion Seer, whose empire is advancing from the south-east of Genabackis. Darujhistan has evaded conquest by the Malazan Empire, for now, but may be in danger from this new threat. Elsewhere, it is confirmed that Seven Cities has begun a mass-uprising against the Empire. These and other plot developments are continued in the third novel, Memories of Ice. |
1091502 | /m/0457ln | General Prologue | Geoffrey Chaucer | null | null | The frame story of the poem, as set out in the 858 lines of Middle English which make up the general prologue, is of a religious pilgrimage. The narrator, "Geoffrey Chaucer", is in The Tabard in Southwark, where he meets a group of "sundry folk" who are all on the way to Canterbury, the site of the shrine of Saint Thomas Beckett. The setting is April, and the prologue starts by singing the praises of that month whose rains and warm western wind restore life and fertility to the earth and its inhabitants. This abundance of life, the narrator says, prompts people to go on pilgrimages; in England, the goal of such pilgrimages is the shrine of Thomas Beckett. The narrator falls in with a group of pilgrims, and the largest part of the prologue is taken up by a description of them; Chaucer seeks to describe their 'condition', their 'array', and their social 'degree': :To telle yow al the condicioun, :Of ech of hem, so as it semed me, :And whiche they weren, and of what degree, :And eek in what array that they were inne, :And at a knyght than wol I first bigynne. The pilgrims include a knight, his son a squire, the knight's yeoman, a prioress accompanied by a second nun and the nun's priest, a monk, a friar, a merchant, a clerk, a sergeant of law, a franklin, a haberdasher, a carpenter, a weaver, a dyer, a tapestry weaver, a cook, a shipman, a doctor of physic, a wife of Bath, a parson, his brother a plowman, a miller, a manciple, a reeve, a summoner, a pardoner, the host (a man called Harry Bailly), and a portrait of Chaucer himself. At the end of the section, the Host proposes the story-telling contest: each pilgrim will tell two stories on the way to Canterbury and two on the way back. Whoever tells the best story, with "the best sentence and moost solaas" (line 798) is to be given a free meal. |
1092478 | /m/045b5g | Schismatrix | Bruce Sterling | 1985-06 | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction"} | The main character, Abélard Lindsay, is born in the ancient lunar colony Mare Serenitatis Circumlunar Corporate Republic, into a family of aristocratic Mechanists, but after being sent to the Shaper’s Ring Council, he receives specialized and experimental diplomatic training and gives his loyalty to the Shapers' cause. He, his best friend and fellow Shaper protege Philip Constantine and the beautiful and passionate Preservationist Vera Kelland lead an insurgency against the rulers of the republic, who use Mechanist technology to prolong their lives. The three of them influence the younger generation towards the Shapers' cause in their pursuit of Preservationism, a movement devoted to the preservation of earth-bound human culture. Kelland and Lindsay agree to kill themselves as a political statement, but Lindsay reneges on his suicide pact after Kelland is dead. Constantine attempts to kill Lindsay but instead kills a Mechanist, creating a scandal. Constantine is allowed to remain in the Republic because his knowledge is needed to keep the Republic's environment from self-destructing but Lindsay is exiled to the Mare Tranquilitatis Circumlunar People's Zaibatsu. This lunar colony, which collapsed due to an environmental crisis, has become a refuge for "sundogs", criminals, dissidents and wanderers. There he meets Kitsune, a woman modified by the Shapers to be an ideal prostitute. Apparently a servant of the Geisha Bank, a powerful money center, she in fact rules the bank through the remotely operated body of her now brain-dead predecessor. In his months on the Zaibatsu, Lindsay uses his diplomatic talents to organize a complex fraud involving a fictitious theatrical event and befriends an old Mechanist, Fyodor Ryumin. However, eventually the fraud takes on a life of its own, and the new-formed Kabuki Intrasolar becomes a legitimate artistic and business venture. Lindsay can't remain to enjoy the profits, though: Constantine has in the meantime overthrown the Corporate Republic's government. Constantine has abandoned Preservationism to become a Shaper militant, and sends an assassin to present a stark choice: become Constantine's pawn or be killed by the assassin. Lindsay manages to escape with a group of Mechanist pirates, in the process aiding Kitsune to take power of the Geisha Bank openly. Lindsay joins a ship called the Red Consensus, which doubles as the nation-state of the Fortuna Miners' Democracy, after the failure of the previously independent asteroid-mining Mechanist cartel. The FMD, financed by more wealthy Mechanists cartels, annexes the asteroid Esairs XII, home to the Mavrides family, a small shaper clan. Lindsay meets Nora Mavrides, a fellow diplomat. Nora informs Abélard that the subjects of the diplomatic training are in disgrace due to the high incidents of treason and defection from their ranks. The two of them work to promote peaceful coexistence between the Shaper militants and the Mechanist pirates, but after several months of conflict, espionage, murders and sabotages, open fighting breaks out. Mavrides and Lindsay, now lovers, eventually murder their companions to save one another. Before the asteroid's life-support systems shut down after the battle, the alien Investors arrive. Peace finally comes to the Schismatrix after the aliens arrive. The alien Investors are obsessed with trade and wealth, and at first encourage humanity to focus on business instead of war. Trade flourishes and the Shapers and Mechanists put their differences aside. Lindsay and Mavrides become powerful Shaper leaders, thanks to their early contact with the Investors. The Investor Peace does not last forever, though, and tensions between Shapers and Mechanists eventually start to rise when the Investors play the factions against one another. Ultimately Philip Constantine rises to power and takes control of the Ring Council, ousting Mavride's and Lindsay's pro-détente faction. Lindsay runs away from what he sees as a hopeless battle, but Nora decides to stay in the Rings, where they had built their lives and family, to fight Constantine and his militant government. Lindsay escapes to the Mechanist cartels in the asteroid belt, where Kitsune has again secretly taken power. There Lindsay works ceaselessly for decades to bring about the détente he believes will reunite him with Mavrides. Using a recording of an Investor's ship queen involved in some taboo activities to blackmail the alien, Lindsay contributes to the creation of Czarina-Kluster, neither Shaper nor Mechanist, which quickly becomes one of the richest and most powerful states in the solar system. Lindsay's partner, Wellspring, plans to use the colony to promote his post-humanist ideology, while Lindsay himself seeks to bring Nora to the new colony. However, Constantine discovers Mavride's plan to defect and forces her to kill herself. Consumed with hatred, Lindsay for the first time confronts his former friend directly, arranging a duel with him using an ancient alien artifact called the Arena. While Lindsay wins, the Arena leaves both him and Constantine catatonic. Years after the duel, Lindsay wakes up on his old home, now renamed the Neotenic Cultural Republic. Constantine's militant Shaperism has been replaced by a Preservationist government, dedicated to remaining a cultural preserve where normal, unmodified human life is preserved. As part of the treatment that restored Lindsay's mind, his original Shaper diplomatic training has been removed. Having returned to a Preservationist world, and now restored to a fully human state, Lindsay decides to break with his past and embrace new dreams. He becomes a post-humanist and returns to Czarina-Kluster to work with Wellspring's 'Lifesiders' clique. In the years during Lindsays' catatonia, the expansion of settlements throughout the solar system has seen an economy in huge surplus; with abundant wealth, expensive and prolonged terraforming efforts are first being considered. While Wellspring seeks to terraform Mars, Lindsay attempts to create an abyssal ecology on Europa. Constantine's Shaper family has been disgraced by Constantine's defeat, and Lindsay manages to convert them to his cause, even Constantine's "daughter" Vera (created from DNA taken from Vera Kelland decades before). As time goes on, eventually Czarina-Kluster, in its turn, faces social collapse. With his Lifesiders faction's research still in its infancy, Lindsay and Vera Constantine secretly break the Interdict and bring back samples of Earth's abyssal life, providing the breakthroughs that make the Europa project a success. As the Lifesiders transform themselves into fish-like forms capable of survival in Europa's oceans, Lindsay visits the now-cured Philip Constantine. Constantine believes that Lindsay will never see Europa, that he will leave in the end rather than see his cause through to fruition, just as he always had. He also reveals that Vera Constantine's DNA comes as much from Lindsay as Vera Kelland. Philip reconciles with Abélard, then commits suicide. When Lindsay returns to Europa, he finds that Philip is right—he can't bring himself to undergo the transformation. At that moment, an alien Presence, who had followed Vera Constantine since her mission in an alien embassy, reveals itself. The being explains that it has been devoted to exploring and exulting in the variety of experiences of the universe, and invites Lindsay to join it. Lindsay accepts and is transformed into a bodiless form, to explore the infinite mysteries of the universe for eternity. |
1093821 | /m/045fvg | The City of Ember | Jeanne DuPrau | null | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/0dwly": "Children's literature", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/03mfnf": "Young adult literature", "/m/0hc1z": "Apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | Unidentified architects, referred to as "The Builders", designed an underground city with supplies for its inhabitants to survive for 200 years. During that time, the Earth would be dangerous (because of a war) and later uninhabitable for an unspecified reason, although the book's prequel, The Prophet Of Yonwood'', points at that reason being a devastating nuclear war. After completion of the city, the Builders give the first mayor of the city a locked box that was to be passed down from one mayor to the next. Unknown to the mayors who were to pass it down the line, the box was set to open after 200 years and provide instructions to the city's inhabitants on how to return to the surface. For several generations, the box is faithfully passed down from one mayor to the next until the seventh mayor who, hoping that the box might contain a cure for the deadly cough that was infecting many citizens of the city at the time, takes the box home and tries to break it open. He fails, and dies before he is able to return the box to its rightful place, or inform anyone else of its importance. The story moves forward to the year 245 where the town is running out of supplies and the massive generator that provides the light and power for the city is on its last legs. At a graduation ceremony where young people are assigned their jobs, Lina Mayfleet is unfortunately assigned the job of “Pipeworks Laborer", while Doon Harrow has to be a “Messenger.” Both are unhappy with their assignments, and decide to switch jobs. At home, Lina's grandmother finds an old piece of paper she salvaged from inside a box. Unknown to her, it is the box that was passed from mayor to mayor. Currently, many people referred to as the "believers" believe that the Builders would come back and guide the citizens of Ember out of the city. Lina attempts to decipher the letter, but her little sister, Poppy, has chewed on it and the letter has holes and is ripped. Finally, she asks Doon and other people to help her reconstruct the letter. After much trial and error they realize it's instructions from the builders on how to exit the city, trying to find the exit. Soon, they find an underground river, where they discover boats meant to be used by the community. They go on a wild boat ride and when the boat finally stops, they find an old journal explaining the history of Ember. The Builders decided to protect 100 adults and 100 children to ensure that the human race would survive. After they find the journal they are faced with a very steep climb that takes hours, but when they get to the top they discover the outside world, and through a series of events they find a cave leading to a cliff that shows the city miles below. In a scene reminiscent of Plato's Allegory of the Cave, they are shocked when they see the dim, glimmering lights of the city beneath them; they never knew they were living underground. They throw a rock with instructions tied to it down to the city in hope that the people of Ember will escape. The novel ends with Mrs. Murdo, Lina's guardian (or Loris Harrow in the movie) finding the note. |
1095679 | /m/045lxf | Earthworks | Brian Aldiss | 1965 | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction"} | The novel is set in a world of environmental catastrophe and extreme socio-economic inequality. Outside crowded cities controlled by a police state, a class of wealthy and powerful "Farmers" exploit a rural prison labor population and hunt down subversive "Travellers" who have broken free of social controls. The novel is considered influential as both "Travellers" and the idea of the Earthwork have become part of public life in Britain. |
1096080 | /m/045nbh | The Great American Novel | Philip Roth | null | {"/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/05hgj": "Novel"} | The novel concerns the Patriot League, a fictional American baseball league, and the national Communist conspiracy to eliminate its history because it has become a fully open communist organization. |
1096466 | /m/045pbq | Heir to the Empire | Timothy Zahn | null | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | Gilad Pellaeon, captain of the Imperial Star Destroyer Chimaera, receives word that an information raid on the Obroa-skai system was successful. A retaliatory strike by an Obroa-skai task force is easily defeated by Pellaeon's superior, Grand Admiral Thrawn. On Coruscant, Obi-Wan Kenobi approaches Luke Skywalker in his sleep to say farewell, sending Luke into depression. Leia Organa Solo, three months pregnant with twins, senses Luke's depression and sends C-3PO to speak with him. On Tatooine, Han Solo and Chewbacca offer legal work to Dravis and his smuggler allies in an attempt to solve the New Republic's shortage on cargo ships; Borsk Fey'lya, a New Republic council member and native Bothan, dismisses this gesture as futile. On Myrkr, smuggler Talon Karrde and his subordinate, Mara Jade, help Thrawn and Pellaeon obtain several creatures called ysalamiri. Afterward, the Chimaera travels to the Emperor's storehouse on Wayland. On the planet, Thrawn and Pellaeon encounter Joruus C'Baoth, the guardian of the storehouse. The ysalamiri that Thrawn brought with him prevents C'Baoth from using the Force within a short radius; with little choice, C'Baoth offers his services in exchange for two prospective students: Luke and Leia. Thrawn sends a group of Noghri to capture Luke and Leia on Bimmisaari, but the attempt fails. After the failed mission, Thrawn convinces C'baoth to seek Luke while the Empire focuses on capturing Leia. Han decides to suspend negotiations with the Bimmisarri leaders and return to Coruscant; Admiral Ackbar, commander in chief of the New Republic fleet, agrees with Han's decision, while Fey'lya feels that the departure will generate negative attention. Meanwhile, Thrawn launches his first offensive: a series of hit-and-run attacks into New Republic territory. After another failed kidnapping on Bpfaash, Han and Leia decide it might be best to keep a low profile; they decide to visit Lando Calrissian on Nkllon. Noghri aliens once again attempt to capture Leia. On Dagobah, Luke discovers a metal cylinder and decides to bring it to Lando for investigation. When the protagonists meet on Nkllon to visit Lando, 51 of his mole miners are stolen by the Empire. Hoping to elude the Noghri, Leia and Chewbacca visit Chewbacca's homeworld, Kashyyyk. Han and Lando discuss plans to pay a visit to Talon Karrde as part of Han's earlier mission to obtain cargo ships from smugglers. The Chimaera intercepts a message coming from the Millennium Falcon in Leia's voice, but Thrawn knows it is merely a recording; through logical reasoning, he determines that Han and Lando are the only ones aboard, and adjusts his plans accordingly. Thrawn nearly captures Luke in a space ambush; Luke escapes but becomes stranded in his X-Wing with R2-D2 until the Wild Karrde discovers them. Luke guesses that the Wild Karrde is either a smuggler, a pirate, or a disguised warship. Still, he takes his chances and goes aboard as he has no other option. Luke wakes up and realizes that he is no longer on the freighter. When he finally wakes up, he notices Mara Jade is in the room with him. Luke and Karrde discuss exactly what Karrde's intentions are for Luke. Karrde is undecided as to what he wants to do with Luke. Han uses C-3PO to transmit a message to Coruscant in Leia's voice. Han interprets the message to mean that Fey'lya is gathering forces to possibly push Ackbar out of the New Republic Council. In the meantime, Han and Lando leave the Falcon to meet with a fellow smuggler who is supposed to tell them the location of Talon Karrde's operations. Karrde alerts Mara to the two visitors on their way in: Han Solo and Lando Calrissian. Since he is still holding Luke as a hostage, he tells Mara to move him into a storage area so that neither Han nor Lando notice anything suspicious when they arrive. Karrde has the meeting with Han and Lando and is intrigued by the New Republic's offer. When Thrawn hails Karrde, he says he needs more ysalamiri and wants to have a talk. He tells Karrde that he is in the market for some new warships. Not long after Luke and R2's escape, they notice that Mara is not far behind them. Thrawn insists on sending stormtroopers to aid in a search and rescue mission. Karrde discovers that Han and Lando know about the Imperial visit to Myrkr. They sneak out to the storage sheds to snoop on the prisoner that Karrde is reportedly holding. When they get to the storage room Luke was in, they notice that the door opener was tampered with. In the middle of the night on Kashyyyk, an awake Leia is attacked by a Noghri alien. She successfully defends herself but then the alien stops his attack. Chewbacca and Ralrracheen burst into the room immediately and Leia tells them not to kill the alien. Using her lightsaber she disables their ship so they are forced to leave. As they get closer to the edge of the forest, Luke and Mara fight off predatory creatures. Mara decides to stop for the night and is then swiftly attacked by another predatory creature. Luke tries to scare it off but the tactic does not work. He manages to grab his lightsaber from Mara and he attacks the creature and kills it. On board the Chimaera, Pallaeon confirms that there are 112 transient warships available at the Sluis Van Shipyards. They activate the cloaking shield and set the decoyed freighter toward Sluis Van for their attack. Threepio alerts Lando to the message that Luke has just sent to him. Aves is about to blow the rescue plan by beginning the attack, and Lando threatens him with a blaster. As Han and Luke make their way across the archway, Luke signals to R2 to propel his lightsaber toward him. The New Republic's X-wing fleet, Rogue Squadron, is at the Sluis Van Shipyards. Wedge Antilles notices a bulk freighter passing through without an escort. The battle has begun and the New Republic is unprepared. The Falcon makes its approach at the start of the battle. Immediately they join the fray. Han knows that the Empire has come to steal ships. He watches the battle unfold in disbelief as he notices many Imperial Star Destroyers are around. He decides to destroy the ships rather than letting the Empire get them. After that, Leia calls Han from Coruscant to tell him that Admiral Ackbar has been arrested on charges of treason. |
1096467 | /m/045pc2 | Dark Force Rising | Timothy Zahn | null | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/0dwly": "Children's literature", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | The book continues some time after the events of Heir to the Empire. Prior to the Clone Wars, the Old Republic had constructed a fleet of 200 Dreadnaughts (huge forerunners to Imperial Star Destroyers) that were highly automated. This reduced their crew complement from 16,000 to 2,000 without diminishing their firepower. The flagship of this fleet was the Katana and hence became known as the Katana fleet. Unfortunately, a virus infected the crews of the entire fleet and drove them insane. The madness caused the crews to "slave" the controls of all ships in the fleet to the Katana and send them all into hyperspace. The fleet was never seen again until veteran smuggler Talon Karrde discovers it through a lucky accident several years before the events of the first movie. Now having full access to Emperor Palpatine's private storehouse on the planet Wayland, Imperial Navy Grand Admiral Thrawn presses his advantage to marshal more forces for the battle against the New Republic. When his forces capture one of Karrde's colleagues who also knew where the fleet was, he assembles a clone army from the storehouse to take over the fleet. Han Solo and Lando Calrissian try to recruit former Republic Senator Garm bel Iblis to join the fight against the Empire. However, the two face stern opposition from him because he fell out with Mon Mothma in the early stages of the Rebellion and waged his own private war against the Empire. They also discover that Bel Iblis' fleet also has Katana warships. Elsewhere, Jedi Master Joruus C’baoth uses the Force to summon Luke Skywalker. Luke responds to the summons and begins instruction with C’baoth on the planet Jomark. However, the presence of Mara Jade complicates things further, especially when it is revealed that she was a former agent of the Emperor. Admiral Ackbar is later exonerated of the treason charges filed against him. With Noghri captive Khabarakh in tow, Leia, R2D2, C3PO, and Chewbacca travel to Khabarakh's home planet of Honoghr. She learns of the Empire's deception of the Noghri and convinces them to support the New Republic. After escaping C'baoth, Luke rejoins Lando and Han in securing the Katana fleet against Thrawn's troops. However, over the course of the battle, they find out that Thrawn has captured all but 15 of the Dreadnaughts. Jade is also knocked out during the fight when her fighter is shot down. |
1096847 | /m/045qg_ | The Celestine Prophecy | James Redfield | 1993 | {"/m/037mh8": "Philosophy", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/03rllnc": "Inspirational", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | The book discusses various psychological and spiritual ideas that are rooted in many ancient Eastern Traditions, such as opening to new possibilities can help an individual to establish a connection with the Divine. The main character of the novel undertakes a journey to find and understand a series of nine spiritual insights on an ancient manuscript in Peru. The book is a first-person narrative of spiritual awakening. The narrator is in a transitional period of his life, and begins to notice instances of synchronicity, which is the belief that coincidences have a meaning personal to those who experience them. The story opens with the male narrator becoming reacquainted with an old female friend, who tells him about the Insights, which are contained in a manuscript dating to 600 BC, which has been only recently translated. After this encounter leaves him curious, he decides to go to Peru. On the airplane, he meets a historian who also happens to be interested in the manuscript. As well, he learns that powerful figures within the Peruvian government and the Catholic Church are opposed to the dissemination of the Insights. This is dramatically illustrated when police try to arrest and then shoot the historian soon after his arrival. The narrator then learns the Insights, one by one, often experiencing the Insight before actually reading the text, while being pursued by forces of the Church and the Peruvian government. In the end, he succeeds in learning the first nine Insights and returns to the United States, with a promise of a Tenth Insight soon to be revealed. The Insights are given only through summaries and illustrated by events in the plot. The text of no complete Insight is given, which the narrator claims is for brevity's sake; he notes that the 'partial translation' of the Ninth Insight was 20 typewritten pages in length. In the novel, the Maya civilization left ruins in Peru where the manuscript was found, whereupon the Incas took up residence in the abandoned Maya cities after the Maya had reached an "energy vibration level" which made them cross a barrier into a completely spiritual reality. |
1097030 | /m/045r0k | The Locked Room | Per Wahlöö | 1972 | {"/m/0lsxr": "Crime Fiction"} | The Locked Room has two plots running simultaneously. Larsson and Kollberg are extremely reluctantly part of a special task force that needs to solve a spree of bank robberies. Martin Beck is given a pity job after recovering from being shot at the conclusion of The Abominable Man; he needs to solve a classic situation of the genre: the locked room mystery. The incompetence of the Swedish police force has spread to the point that all three detectives are severely hindered in their work. One criminal walks free for a heinous crime he did commit, then gets to do hard time for a crime he did not. |
1097220 | /m/045rp1 | Castaways of the Flying Dutchman | Brian Jacques | 2001 | {"/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy"} | The story starts by vaguely introducing a fourteen-year-old nameless boy, who at the beginning has no parents and is a mute. He is apparently running away from his life as an abused orphan, and accidentally slips on the Flying Dutchman as a stowaway. He is found, and made to work with the cook, Petros, an antagonistic character who abuses him. Petros names the boy Neb, which is short for Nebuchadnezzar. One day, while the crew is off drinking in the port town of Esbjerg, a dog wanders onto the ship and is befriended by Neb. He names the dog Denmark, after the country he found the dog in. They strike up an immediate friendship. Den hides under sacks until it is safe to come out. The cruel, wild, and fearsome Captain Vanderdecken steers his ship on a long voyage to get emeralds from a dealer across the ocean, supposedly in Asia. The ship sails to the tip of South America, the treacherous Cape Horn, and unsuccessfully attempts to pass three times. After the third attempt, Captain Vanderdecken curses the Lord for smiting him, and an angel descends from heaven and curses the ship to sail the seas for eternity. The angel, however, realizes Nebuchadnezzar and Denmark are not part of the motley, now undead crew, and throws them overboard. He blesses them, telling them to walk the earth forever, wise and forever young, to give kindness and guidance wherever they go. They later wash up on shore and find that they are able to communicate by thought. They are found and taken in by a kind-hearted shepherd named Luis who grows fond of them, but does not ask about their past. After spending several years with him, Luis dies in a storm, trying to save an ewe. The angel appears in a dream telling them that they must move on at the sound of a bell, which they hear jingling on the neck of a sheep walking by. Neb and Den, young but ageless, must leave. The story picks up many years later. Both characters have changed their names (by reversing them); Neb is now Ben and Den is Ned. It is apparent that they have lived with each other for several centuries. One day, they get on a train without knowing where they are going, and end up getting off at the village of Chapelvale. They meet a lady named Mrs. Winn as well as a boy named Alex and a girl named Amy. The children warn them about the Grange Gang, a group of local bullies. The gang leader, Wilf, takes an immediate disliking to Ben. Together Ben, Ned, Amy, Alex, and Mrs. Winn go on a treasure hunt to save the town, which is about to be converted into a limestone quarry and cement factory. They team up with an old ship's carpenter named John (who is at first believed to be a mad man), a milkman named Will, and Will's family. They follow a series of clues written by Mrs. Winn's ancestor, who was believed to have been given the deeds to the town. One clue leads to a treasure (which is a Byzantine artifact) and another clue and continues that way until three treasures and clues have been found. The last clue, of course, is the hardest and is the last thing that may show them the location of the deeds to Chapelvale. The deeds to the village are found and Mrs. Winn is able to claim Chapelvale as her property so that it can be saved. However, the angel appears once again and informs Ben and Ned that they must leave Chapelvale and their friends at the sound of a bell. Jon finds a bell in the Almshouse and becomes excited about the discovery. He and Will decide to try the bell out. Ben and Ned run as fast as they can to escape the sound, but it is too loud, and they must leave. |
1097311 | /m/045s0b | City of Golden Shadow | Tad Williams | 12/5/1996 | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | The first character introduced is a man called Paul Jonas, apparently an infantryman on the Western Front of the First World War. In what he at first believes to be a dream or hallucination, he meets a woman with wings, who gives him a feather. He wakes from the experience to find himself back in the trenches, but realises the experience was not a dream when he discovers the feather. Two of his comrades, Finch and Mullet, begin express doubts about his sanity. Eventually, Paul runs off into no-man's land. There, he finds the bird-woman, but Finch and Mullet have pursued him, and they have been transformed into monstrous shapes: Mullet is grossly fat and Finch has no eyes. Paul flees in terror and falls through a hole in space. He discovers himself in a place similar to the chess-land in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, where he is caught in the battle between the red and the white, as well as hunted by Finch and Mullet. He escapes with a young boy he met at an inn, whose name is Gally. They find themselves on Mars, which is inhabited by creatures who demand a sacrifice of a princess from the planet Venus each year. He recognizes the chosen woman as the winged woman he met earlier, although he cannot remember when he met her: his memory does not even extend to his time in the chess-land. With the help of other men from Earth, he rescues the princess, then flees from the angry Martians. He sees Mullet and Finch again, however, and tries to escape in a hijacked airship. He loses control of the airship, and finds himself in a conservatory with a harp, which shrinks to a size that it can fit in his palm. Mullet and Finch confront him, demanding that he give them the harp, but he refuses and appears again on the airship, which is hurtling towards the ground. Transported to yet another world, he is rescued from a frozen river by a group of Neanderthals, and a voice comes from the harp, telling him that friends will search for him on the river. The story moves to the late 21st century. The most significant technological change is the wide availability of virtual reality interfaces among all parts of society, so that the internet has been replaced by "the Net," a vast network of online VR environments. In Durban, a VR programming instructor named Irene "Renie" Sulaweyo is teaching a Kalahari Bushman named !Xabbu how to create such environments, while providing for her family, who are her alcoholic father Long Joseph and her ten-year-old brother Stephen. Stephen spends much of his time online, and frequently joins his friends in escapades to forbidden areas of the net. When he somehow ends up in a coma after visiting a forbidden club, she and !Xabbu decide to investigate. Inside the club, they discover a number of very unsavoury entertainments, and are very nearly trapped by the managers. Their most bizarre and horrifying discovery is a very powerful hypnotic entity, which Renie nearly dies trying to escape from. Convinced that the club is set up to damage the minds of children, as it has done to Stephen, she resolves to stop the people responsible. She finds an unusual and large piece of code, in the form of a golden diamond, on her machine, and consults her friend and mentor, Dr. Susan van Bleeck, about it. As they examine it, it erupts into an image of a golden city, then disappears. Renie's difficulties multiply, as it becomes clear that her investigations have earned her powerful enemies: she is stood down from her job and unknown persons set fire to her family's apartment complex. Finally, van Bleeck is brutally assaulted, and dies after leaving Renie and !Xabbu with three names: Martine Desroubins, Blue Dog Anchorite, and Bolivar Atasco. The first two are hackers that agree to help them find the golden city, which is in a mysterious network called "Otherland," while the third is an anthropologist and archaeologist whose expertise is pre-Columbian Latin America. Blue Dog Anchorite reveals himself to be Murat Sagar Singh, a retired programmer who worked on the security system for Otherland, and whose colleagues on the same project have been dying in unusual circumstances. He also reveals that Otherland was commissioned by a secret organisation called "The Grail Brotherhood," and that Atasco, who oversaw the security project for Otherland, was an important member of that organisation. Renie, !Xabbu, Martine and Singh plan to break into Otherland; Renie and !Xabbu, along with Long Joseph and van Bleeck's assistant Jeremiah Dako, travel to Wasps' Nest, a mothballed military base in the Drakensberg mountains, where there is equipment allowing Renie and !Xabbu to stay connected to the Net for extended periods. Preparations completed, they hack into Otherland, but Singh is confronted and killed by the security system; he is later found dead in his room from a heart attack. Renie, !Xabbu and Martine manage to enter Otherland, and make their way to the golden city, which is called Temilún. There, they meet the God-King, who reveals himself to be Atasco. In suburban California, a terminally-ill teenager named Orlando Gardiner has become the most celebrated warrior in the online Middle Country, a VR MMORPG based on swords-and-sorcery. However, while playing the game, he is distracted by a vision of a golden city and killed by a low-level monster. With the help of his friend, Sam Fredericks, he begins to investigate. Their investigations lead to TreeHouse, an online fringe community, and to Melchior, a code name used by Singh and others. Following the trail, they are mysteriously taken to a beach on a river. Across the river, they can see the golden city. They build a raft to cross the river, but are stopped by the police and taken to the palace of the God-King. On an army base in North Carolina, the young girl Christabel Sorensen becomes friends with Mr. Sellars, a mysterious old man living on the base. She is unaware that he is under house arrest, and her father, a senior military security officer, is in charge of guarding him. She helps him to escape from his house into a network of tunnels lying underneath the base. The Grail Brotherhood emerges as a small number of the world's wealthiest and most powerful people who have formed an exclusive society. Otherland is their private network, where many of them own numerous simulation worlds (others being leased out for very large sums), and they intend to use it for even more mysterious purposes. They meet in a simulation based on ancient Egypt, where their leader, Felix Jongleur, appears as Osiris and obliges other members to present themselves as various Egyptian deities. Jongleur commissions an employee, John Dread, to carry out a task referred to as the "Sky God Project." Dread promises to accomplish his mission, although it is not stated what exactly he must do. Renie, !Xabbu, Martine, Orlando, Fredericks and four other people in similar situations find themselves imprisoned in a virtual reality world so complex that it rivals reality. There, they meet Atasco and his wife, and learn that Atasco, though formerly a member of the Grail Brotherhood, has been uninvolved for some time (though he has been permitted to retain his simulation world), and is now secretly opposing the Brotherhood's plans. They meet the enigmatic Mr. Sellars, who tells them that the network is somehow built from the minds of catatonic children worldwide, and he calls upon the small group of adventurers to stop the Grail Brotherhood. Before they can get their questions answered, however, the meeting descends into chaos. Unknown to any of those gathered, Dread and a team of expert assassins have attacked the Atascos' island home in Colombia, and Bolivar and his wife are suddenly murdered. Sellars gives the adventurers some brief instructions: they are to search along the river for Paul Jonas, who is at large within Otherland's many simulation worlds, then he too vanishes. Even as the adventurers flee Temilún, Dread, with the help of criminal hacker Dulcie Anwin, hijacks the simulation body of one of their party. The group sails down the river, hoping to find the answers that will enable them to free the children from Otherland's hold. |
1097522 | /m/045slt | Thuvia, Maid of Mars | Edgar Rice Burroughs | 1920 | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/0dwly": "Children's literature", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/02n4kr": "Mystery", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/0c3351": "Suspense"} | Carthoris is madly in love with Thuvia. This love was foreshadowed at the end of the previous novel. Unfortunately Thuvia is promised to Kulan Tith, Jeddak of Kaol. On Barsoom nothing can break an engagement between a man and woman except death, although the new suitor may not cause that death. Thus it is that Thuvia will have none of him. This situation leaves Carthoris in a predicament. As Thuvia suffers the common Burroughsian heroine's fate of being kidnapped and in need of rescue, Carthoris' goal is abetted by circumstances. Thus he sets out to find the love of his life. His craft is sabotaged and he finds himself deep in the undiscovered south of Barsoom, in the ruins of ancient Aanthor. Thuvia's kidnappers, the Dusar, have taken her there as well, and Carthoris is just in time to spot Thuvia and her kidnappers under assault by a green man of the hordes of Torquas. Carthoris leaps to her rescue in the style of his father. The rescue takes Carthoris and his love to ancient Lothar, home of an ancient fair-skinned human race gifted with the ability to create lifelike phantasms from pure thought. They habitually use large numbers of phantom bowmen paired with real and phantom banths (Barsoomian lions) to defend themselves from the hordes of Torquas. The kidnapping of Thuvia is done in such a way that Carthoris is blamed. This ignites a war between the red nations of Barsoom. Carthoris must try to be back in time with Thuvia to stop the war from breaking loose. Carthoris wonders if his love will ever be requited by the promised Thuvia. |
1101696 | /m/046309 | The Science of Discworld III: Darwin's Watch | null | 2005 | {"/m/0mz2": "Alternate history"} | In the Discworld story the wizards learn that, once again, the history of Roundworld has changed, resulting in humans failing to leave Earth before the Extinction Level Event shown in the earlier books. They discover that the difference from established history was that Charles Darwin wrote a book called Theology of Species, which described how evolution must be controlled by a Creator. This was generally accepted by both religious figures and conservative scientists, and led to a certain stagnation of thought, preventing the eventual invention of the space elevator. When the wizards try to correct this, the potential futures of Roundworld go mad. The possibility of Darwin ever writing the book becomes zero, with most futures featuring his death in seemingly improbable ways. The wizards eventually deduce that Roundworld has caught the attention of the Auditors of Reality, who approve of a universe which runs on unthinking rules, and disapprove of humans, who try to make it more like the Discworld. Unlike the elven invasion in The Globe, which suppressed our creativity unthinkingly, this is a deliberate attempt to prevent humans escaping Earth. While attempting to maintain a timeline where The Origin was written, the wizards inadvertently take Darwin to the Discworld. There they discover that his line of thought was disrupted by the Disc's God of Evolution, leading to Theology. After defeating the Auditors the wizards manage to correct this, by explaining the situation to Darwin. Since Darwin then wishes to forget the whole thing, they are ethically able to grant his request. |
1101747 | /m/04634y | Five Little Pigs | Agatha Christie | null | {"/m/0lsxr": "Crime Fiction", "/m/02n4kr": "Mystery", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/0c3351": "Suspense"} | Carla is engaged to be married but she is afraid that the fact that her mother killed her father will poison her husband's love for her, as he may fear that she has inherited a murderous tendency. Carla also remembers her mother would never lie to her to hide an unpleasant truth and her mother had told her she was innocent through a letter. That is enough for Carla but she wants Poirot to convince her fiance. Carla's father, painter Amyas Crale, was poisoned with coniine, which had been extracted from poison hemlock by Meredith Blake but subsequently apparently stolen from him by Carla's mother, Caroline Crale. Caroline confessed to stealing the poison, claiming she had intended to use it to commit suicide. The poison ended up, however, in a glass from which Amyas had drunk cold beer, after complaining that 'everything tastes foul today.' Both the glass and the bottle of cold beer had been brought to him by Caroline. Her motive was clear: Amyas's young model and latest mistress, Elsa Greer, claimed he was planning to divorce Caroline and marry her instead. This was a new development; though Amyas had frequently had mistresses and affairs, he had never before shown any sign of wanting to leave Caroline. Poirot labels the five alternative suspects “the five little pigs”: they comprise Phillip Blake ("went to the market"); Philip's brother, Meredith Blake ("stayed at home"); Elsa Greer (now Lady Dittisham, "had roast beef"); Cecilia Williams, the governess ("had none"); and Angela Warren, Caroline’s younger half-sister ("went 'Wee! Wee! Wee!' all the way home"). As Poirot learns from speaking to them during the first half of the novel, none of the quintet has an obvious motive, and while their views of the original case differ in some respects there is no immediate reason to suppose that the verdict in the case was wrong. The differences are subtle. Phillip Blake’s hostility to Caroline is overt enough to draw suspicion. Meredith Blake mistrusts him, and has a very much more sympathetic view of her. Elsa seems emotionally stunted, as though her original passion for Amyas has left her prematurely devoid of emotion, except for hatred for Caroline Crale. Cecilia, the governess, gives some insight into both Caroline and Angela, but claims to have definite reason for believing Caroline guilty. Finally, Angela believes her sister to be innocent, but a letter that Caroline wrote to her after the murder contains no protestation of innocence, and makes Poirot doubt Caroline's innocence for perhaps the first time. In the second half of the novel, Poirot considers five accounts of the case that he has asked the suspects to write for him. These establish the succession of events on the day of the murder, and establish a small number of facts that are important to the solution of the puzzle. In the first place, there is a degree of circumstantial evidence incriminating Angela. Secondly, Cecilia has seen Caroline frantically wiping fingerprints off the bottle of beer as she waited by Amyas's dead body. Thirdly, there was a conversation between Caroline and Amyas, apparently about Amyas 'seeing to her packing' for Angela's return to school. Fourthly, Elsa overheard a heated argument between Caroline and Amyas in which he swore that he would divorce her and Caroline said bitterly, "you and your women." In the denouement, Poirot reveals the main emotional undercurrents of the story. Philip Blake has loved Caroline but his rejection by her has turned this to hatred. Meredith Blake, wearied by his long affection for Caroline, has formed an attachment to Elsa, also unreciprocated. These are mere red herrings, though. Putting together the case that would incriminate Angela (she had the opportunity to steal the poison on the morning of the crime, she had previously put salt in Amyas's glass as a prank and she was seen fiddling with the bottle of beer before Caroline took it down to him; she was very angry with Amyas), he demonstrates that Caroline herself would have thought that Angela was guilty. Her letter to Angela did not speak of innocence, because Caroline believed Angela knew for a fact that she (Caroline) was innocent. This explains why, if Caroline was innocent, she made no move to defend herself in court. Moreover, many years ago Caroline had hit Angela with a crowbar in a jealous rage, which had left a permanent disfiguring scar on Angela's face. Caroline had always felt deeply guilty about this and therefore felt that, by taking the blame for what she thought was Angela's crime, she could earn redemption. Caroline's actions, however, actually prove her innocence. By wiping the fingerprints off the bottle, she showed that she believed that the poison had been placed in it, rather than in the glass. Moreover, as she was seen handling the bottle there was no reason to remove her own fingerprints; she can only have been removing those of a third party. Angela, however, was not guilty. All the evidence incriminating Angela can be explained by the fact that she had stolen valerian from Meredith's laboratory that morning in preparation for playing another prank on Amyas. (As she had described the theft of the valerian in the future tense Poirot realised Angela had never carried out the act; she had completely forgotten she had stolen the valerian on the morning of that fateful day). The true murderer was Elsa. Far from being about to finish with Caroline, Amyas was entirely focused on completing his portrait of Elsa. Because Elsa was young she did not realize she was just another mistress, to be left as soon as she was painted. She took Amyas's promise 'to leave my wife' seriously. Amyas went along with this notion, to the short-term distress of his wife, so Elsa wouldn't leave before the painting was finished. Thus the half overheard 'see to her packing' did not refer to Angela's packing (why should Amyas do her packing with a wife and governess to see to such 'woman's work'?), but to sending Elsa packing. Caroline, reassured that Amyas had no intention of leaving her, was distressed at such cruelty to Elsa. She remonstrated with Amyas on a second occasion. Though Elsa falsely reported the gist of this conversation, she did mention that Caroline had said to Amyas 'you and your women', showing Poirot that in fact Elsa was in the same category as all of Amyas's other, discarded mistresses. After a disillusioned and betrayed Elsa overheard this conversation, she recalled seeing Caroline help herself to the coniine the day before and, under the pretence of fetching a cardigan, stole some of that poison by drawing it off with a fountain pen filler. She poisoned Amyas in the first, warm beer, and was then pleased to find that Caroline implicated herself still more seriously by bringing him another. (When Caroline brought Amyas a beer and he exclaimed that everything tastes foul today,' this not only showed that he had already had a drink before the one Caroline brought him, but he had had one which had tasted foul as well.) Amyas's last moments are spent working on his painting of Elsa, while she sits posing for it. In the beginning he does not realize he has been poisoned, but as he gradually weakens he apparently realizes it, because Meredith sees him give the painting a "malevolent glare". Poirot notes the unusual vitality in the face of the portrait and says, "It is a very remarkable picture. It is the picture of a murderess painted by her victim – it is the picture of a girl watching her lover die." Poirot's explanation solves the case to the satisfaction of Carla and, most importantly, her fiancé. But, as Elsa forces him to admit, it cannot be proven. Poirot states that, although his chances of getting a conviction are slim, he does not intend to simply leave her to her rich, privileged life. Privately, however, she confides the full measure of her defeat. Caroline, having earned redemption, went uncomplainingly to prison, where she died soon after. Elsa has always felt that the husband and wife somehow escaped her, and her life has been empty since. The last paragraph of the novel underlines this defeat. “The chauffeur held open the door of the car. Lady Dittisham got in and the chauffeur wrapped the fur rug around her knees.” |
1103865 | /m/0468m1 | Seventh Son | Orson Scott Card | 1987 | {"/m/0mz2": "Alternate history", "/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | Alvin's family is migrating west. When they try to cross the Hatrack River, an unknown force tries to stop the as-yet-unborn Alvin being born - since Alvin would be the seventh son of a seventh son, therefore possessing incredible powers as a Maker. The force sends a tree down the river to crush the wagon the pregnant Mrs. Miller is riding in. Her son Vigor diverts the tree, but is mortally wounded in the act. Because a seventh son must be born while the other six are alive, Vigor desperately clings to life until Alvin is born. Help is dispatched at the insistence of five-year-old "torch" (a person who, among other things, can see the life forces of people and under certain conditions, their myriad alternate futures) Peggy Guester, who sees Alvin and Alvin's possible future as a Maker. As the years pass, Alvin avoids numerous attempts an unknown force to kill him, often helped by the intervention of a mysterious protector. Alvin's father, a non-believer in God, believes that a water spirit is trying to kill Alvin. When Alvin is seven, a new Reverend, named Thrower, arrives in town, trying to build a church. Alvin's father refuses to help, but Mrs. Miller has all of her sons work on building the church. When the ridgebeam is being place onto the church in construction, it shivers and breaks, seemingly about to fall on Alvin. However, mid-air, it breaks in two, and misses Alvin - yet another example of Alvin's close-to-death experiences. When Alvin goes home, he provokes one of his sisters by poking her, so they get revenge on Alvin by putting needles into his night gown. Alvin avenges himself by using his knack to send cockroaches after his sisters. The plan works, Alvin winning a victory over his sisters. However, afterwards, he has a vision he dubs Shining Man, who makes him promise only to use his knack for good. When Alvin is ten, "Taleswapper" (William Blake) a traveling storyteller who arrives in the town Alvin's parents have founded. After stopping by Alvin's brother-in-law's house (who directs Taleswapper to the Miller house), he visits the church, where he notices that the altar has been touched upon by an evil entity. Reverend Thrower kicks him out, and Taleswapper goes to the Miller's, where his timely intervention stops Mr. Miller from killing Alvin. Taleswapper is welcomed in. Taleswapper helps to put a name to the unknown force that tries to stop Alvin from realizing his true powers as a Maker: the Unmaker. Meanwhile, the Reverend Philadelphia Thrower becomes a tool of the Unmaker - who was the evil force that touched the altar. Soon the Miller family goes to a quarry to cut out a millstone. Here Alvin's knack is revealed - single-handedly he cut the millstone through hard rock. During the night, Taleswapper and Mr. Miller guard the millstone. Mr. Miller tells Taleswapper a story about how a force is trying to use him to kill Alvin - revealing the reason why Mr. Miller was about to kill Alvin when Taleswapper first arrived. Taleswapper advises Mr. Miller to send Alvin away to someplace where he may be safe. The next day the millstone is taken home. The Unmaker finally manages to injure Alvin, by making a millstone fall on him. Taleswapper encourages him to heal himself. Alvin does so, but finds that a part of his bone he cannot heal alone, and Alvin falls into a time of bad health. He realizes that he might need outside help to heal himself. Reverend Thrower (acting as a surgeon) attempts to kill him, but finds himself unable to by a mysterious force. Alvin heals himself (with the aid of his brother Measure, who performs the surgery). Alvin contracted as an apprentice to a blacksmith in the town on the Hatrack River where he was born. Taleswapper meets up with Peggy. It is revealed that she, using her torch powers and Alvin's birth caul, had protected Alvin all his years, and the Unmaker was only able to hurt Alvin with the millstone because Alvin himself overrode her powers that tried to save him. The book's sequel, second in the tales of Alvin's life, is Red Prophet. |
1103880 | /m/0468p6 | Rose Madder | Stephen King | null | {"/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy"} | In the prologue, which takes place in 1985, Rose Daniels's husband, Norman, beats her while she is four months pregnant, causing her to suffer a miscarriage. Rose briefly considers leaving Norman but dismisses the idea: Norman is a policeman, and is excellent at finding people. Norman also has a violent temper and was recently accused of assaulting an African-American woman named Wendy Yarrow. The subsequent lawsuit and Internal Affairs investigation has made him even more volatile. Nine years later, when Rose is making the bed, she notices a drop of blood on the sheet from her nose the night before; Norman had punched her in the face for spilling iced tea on him. Rose realizes that she has passively suffered through Norman's abuse for fourteen years and that if she continues to put up with it, he may well eventually kill her. Rose reluctantly decides to leave Norman, departing from her unidentified city on a bus, with their bank card. Once Norman realizes Rose's flight, he resolves to hunt her down. Rose arrives in Midwestern city, disoriented and afraid. When she arrives at the bus station, she meets a man named Peter Slowik, who guides her to a women's shelter. There, she quickly makes several friends and, with the help of the shelter's director, gets an apartment and a job as a hotel housekeeper. Rose decides to pawn her engagement ring, only to learn that it is absolutely worthless. However, she notices a painting of a woman in a rose madder gown and immediately falls in love with it. She trades her ring for the painting, which has no artist's signature. Outside, a stranger asks her to read a passage from a novel, and is so impressed that he offers her a job recording audio books. Then, Bill Steiner, the nice gentleman who owns the pawnshop, asks her for a date; the two begin a relationship. Rose discovers that that the painting seems to periodically change, and is eventually able to travel through it. On the other side, she encounters a woman called Dorcas, who resembles Wendy Yarrow, as well as the woman in the rose-madder gown. Rose refers to her as "Rose Madder" because of her gown and her evident insanity. Rose Madder asks Rosie to rescue her baby from an underground labyrinth inhabited by a one-eyed bull called Erinyes. Rose does so, and Rose Madder promises to repay her. Rose returns to her world and puts the strange incident at the back of her mind. bg:Роуз Мадър de:Das Bild (Roman) es:El retrato de Rose Madder fr:Rose Madder it:Rose Madder he:רוז מאדר hu:A két Rose ja:ローズ・マダー pl:Rose Madder pt:Rose Madder ro:Rose Madder (roman) ru:Роза Марена fi:Naisen raivo sv:Rasande Rose tr:Çılgınlığın Ötesi |
1104876 | /m/046cc7 | Rupert of Hentzau | Anthony Hope | null | {"/m/01qxvh": "Romance novel", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/08sdrw": "Adventure novel"} | The story is set within a framing narrative told by a supporting character from The Prisoner of Zenda. The frame implies that the events related in both books took place in the late 1870s and early 1880s. This story commences three years after the conclusion of Zenda, and deals with the same fictional country somewhere in Germanic Middle Europe, the kingdom of Ruritania. Most of the same characters recur: Rudolf Elphberg, the dissolute absolute monarch of Ruritania; Rudolf Rassendyll, the English gentleman who had acted as his political decoy, being his distant cousin and look alike; Flavia, the princess, now queen; Rupert of Hentzau, the dashing well-born villain; Fritz von Tarlenheim, the loyal courtier. Queen Flavia, dutifully but unhappily married to her cousin Rudolf V, writes to her true love Rudolf Rassendyll. The letter is carried by von Tarlenheim to be delivered by hand, but it is stolen by the exiled Rupert of Hentzau, who sees in it a chance to return to favour by informing the pathologically jealous and paranoid King. Rassendyll returns to Ruritania to aid the Queen, but is once more forced to impersonate the King after Rupert shoots Rudolf V. In turn, Rassendyll kills Rupert, but is assassinated in the hour of triumph by one of Rupert's henchmen—and thus is spared the crisis of conscience over whether or not to continue the royal deception for years. He is buried as the King in a state funeral, and Flavia reigns on alone, the last of the Elphberg dynasty. |
1105276 | /m/046dqs | Tono-Bungay | H. G. Wells | 1909 | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/05hgj": "Novel"} | Tono-Bungay is narrated by George Ponderevo, who is persuaded by his uncle to help develop the business of selling Tono-Bungay, a patent medicine created by his ambitious uncle Edward. George devotes seven years to organizing the production and manufacture of a product which he believes to be "a damned swindle." He then quits day-to-day involvement with the enterprise in favor of aeronautics, but remains associated with his uncle Edward and his affairs. His uncle becomes a financier of the first order and is on the verge of achieving social as well as economic dominance when his business empire collapses. George tries to rescue his uncle's failing finances by stealing quantities of a radioactive compound called "quap" from an island on the coast of West Africa, but the expedition is unsuccessful. His nephew engineers his uncle's escape from England in an experimental aircraft he has built, but the ruined entrepreneur turned financier catches pneumonia on the flight and dies in a French village near Bordeaux, despite George's efforts to save him. The novel ends with George finding a new occupation: designing destroyers for the highest bidder. |
1105686 | /m/046ftj | Eaters of the Dead | Michael Crichton | 1976-03 | {"/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/02p0szs": "Historical fiction", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/0hwxm": "Historical novel", "/m/0c3351": "Suspense"} | The novel is set in the 10th century. The Caliph of Baghdad Al-Muqtadir (Arabic: المقتدر بالله) sends his ambassador, Ahmad ibn Fadlan (Arabic احمد بن فضلان), to the king of the Volga Bulgars. He never arrives but is instead captured by a group of Vikings. This group is sent on a hero's quest to the north. Ahmad ibn Fadlan is taken along, as the thirteenth member of their group, to bring good luck. There they battle with the 'mist-monsters', or 'wendol', a relict group of Neanderthals who go to battle wearing bear skins like the berserkers found in the original Beowulf story. Eaters of the Dead is narrated as a scientific commentary on an old manuscript. The narrator describes how the story told is a composite of extant commentaries and translations of the works of the original story teller. There are several references during the narration to a possible change or mistranslation of the original story by later copiers. The story is told by several different voices: the editor/narrator, the translators of the script and the original author, ibn Fadlan, as well as his descriptions of stories told by others. A sense of authenticity is supported by occasional explanatory footnotes with references to a mixture of factual and fictitious sources. |
1106189 | /m/046h31 | The Lyre of Orpheus | Robertson Davies | null | {"/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | In The Lyre of Orpheus, the executors of the will of Francis Cornish (the subject of What's Bred in the Bone) find themselves at the head of the "Cornish Foundation". The executors, Simon Darcourt, Arthur Cornish, and Maria Cornish, are called upon to decide what projects deserve funding. They decide that a hitherto-unfinished opera by E.T.A. Hoffmann will be staged at Stratford, Ontario; to this end, they hire a brilliant young composition student, Hulda Schnakenburg, to complete the opera as the work necessary to qualify her for a PhD., while Darcourt is charged with the completion of the libretto, which James Planché had attempted to write. The opera to be completed is King Arthur or the Magnanimous Cuckold. The story follows the writing and then production of the opera, and the plot of the story arcs in a way that parallels the legend of King Arthur, and in particular the triangle of King Arthur, his queen, Guenevere, and Lancelot. Geraint Powell, an actor who serves on the Board of the Cornish Foundation, fathers a child by Maria Cornish, forcing Arthur Cornish to choose between a generous or vindictive response. The Lyre of Orpheus explores not only the world of early eighteenth century opera, but also follows Darcourt's research into the life of the benefactor and artist, Francis Cornish, leading to a discovery that forces Darcourt to conclude that a painting previously attributed to an unknown fifteenth century painter was in fact the work of Francis Cornish himself. This painting, entitled The Wedding at Cana featuring the portraits of many of the people who appeared as characters from Blairlogie, the fictional town in Ontario that was the setting of the second book of the trilogy, What's Bred in the Bone. A further plotline involves the sexual and artistic flowering of PhD candidate Hulda Schnakenburg ("Schnak") under the hand of Gunilla Dahl-Soot, a distinguished Swedish musicologist who serves as Schnak's academic advisor and becomes her lover. The book explores a number of themes, including the pursuit of life beyond the ordinary or comfortable routine and which is exemplified in the artistic quest to produce the opera or in Darcourt's quest to uncover the truth behind the painting of The Wedding at Cana The theme of marriage is examined through the relationship between Arthur and Maria Cornish, a relationship that must withstand the test of infidelity And the modern approach to relationships is mocked in the dysfunctional common-law marriage of two minor characters who present themselves in Toronto to monitor and record the production of the opera from start to finish. As often happens in Davies' novels, all is not simple; for example, the ghost of Hoffman, trapped in limbo as a result of the unsatisfactory state of his artistic work, attends and comments on the proceedings. Nor is all peaceful among the characters, as they react to Powell's seduction of Maria Cornish, Dahl-Soot's seduction of Schnak, and the inevitable tensions created by the effort to mount an operatic production. |
1106246 | /m/046h9y | The Clan of the Cave Bear | Jean M. Auel | null | {"/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy", "/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/0hwxm": "Historical novel"} | A five-year old Cro-Magnon girl is orphaned and left homeless by an earthquake that destroys her family's camp. She wanders aimlessly, naked and unable to feed herself, for several days. Having been attacked and nearly killed by a cave lion and suffering from starvation, exhaustion, and infection of her wounds, she collapses, on the verge of death. The narrative switches to a group of Neanderthal people, the "Clan", whose cave was destroyed in the earthquake and who are searching for a new home. The medicine woman of the group, Iza, discovers the girl and asks permission from Brun, the head of the Clan, to help the ailing child, despite the child being clearly a member of "the Others", the distrusted antagonists of the Clan. The child is adopted by Iza and her brother Creb. Creb is this group's "Mog-ur" or shaman, despite being deformed as a result of the difficult birth resulting from his abnormally large head and the later loss of an arm and leg after being attacked by a cave bear. The clan call her Ayla, because they can't pronounce her name. Immediately after Iza begins to help her, the clan discovers a huge, beautiful cave; many of the people begin to regard Ayla as lucky, especially since good fortune continues to come their way as she lives among them. In Auel's books, the Neanderthal possess only limited vocal apparatus and rarely speak, but have a highly-developed sign language. They do not laugh or even smile, and they do not cry; when Ayla weeps, Iza thinks she has an eye disease. Ayla's different thought processes lead her to break important Clan customs, particularly the taboo against females handling weapons. She is self-willed and spirited, but tries hard to fit in with the Neanderthals, although she has to learn everything first-hand; she does not possess the ancestral memories of the Clan which enable them to do certain tasks after being shown only once. Her main antagonist is Broud, son of the leader, an egomaniac who feels that she takes credit and attention away from him. As the two mature, the hatred between them festers. When they are young adults, Broud rapes Ayla, but she becomes pregnant, and rejoices in the birth of a son. The book ends with Creb's death, Broud's succession to the leadership, and his banishment of Ayla, who sets off to find other people of her own kind. She is not allowed to take her son with her. The separation haunts her with guilt and grief for the rest of the series. |
1106316 | /m/046hl5 | The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People's History of Ancient Rome | Michael Parenti | null | null | Parenti notes that history is biased towards powerful interests because only the wealthy (or those funded by the wealthy) had the free time to engage in research and writing. Parenti itemizes various ancient writers with a conservative orientation. Also, since most ancient writings have been lost, few opposing views survive into modern times. The writings that have survived favor the elite. In more recent times, Edward Gibbon is presented as a typical "eighteenth-century English gentleman ... in the upper strata of ... society." In contrast, the satirist Juvenal "offers a glimpse of the empire as it really was, a system of rapacious expropriation."(p. 18) Various other historians are criticized including Theodor Mommsen. Parenti states that current scholars perpetuate the bias that favors an aristocratic interpretation of history. Some historians will differ with Parenti's approach. First, Gibbon famously argued that the reigns of the so-called Five Good Emperors, Nerva through Marcus Aurelius, was the period in which humanity was most content in all of history. Gibbon thus found human happiness in the Imperial system that Caesar influenced and not in the pre-Caesar Republic. Second, it is of note that Juvenal lived and wrote in the Rome of the Caesars, in a society transformed by Caesar and his descendants. Juvenal was not criticizing the by-gone Republic that Caesar had helped to destroy but rather the Empire, the system in fact inaugurated by Caesar. Finally, Mommsen's writing may have been influenced by the politics of his era but he was a German nationalist in an era when "Germany" did not exist, being instead a group of aristocratic fiefdoms. Mommsen was therefore prone to be critical of aristocrats. Parenti also ignores the links drawn in the 19th century between Caesarism and Bonapartism, and critics of Napoleon III often compared him to Caesar, especially after he wrote a book praising Caesar. "Rome's social pyramid" has many slaves (servi) at the bottom with "a step above ... propertyless proletariat[s]" (proletarii).(p. 27) Slumlords operated crowded tenement apartments that were prone to fire, epidemic disease (such as typhoid and typhus), structural collapse, and high crime rates.(p. 29) However, "looming over the toiling multitudes were a few thousand multimillionaires"(p. 30) with an "officer class of equites or equestrians" and "at the very apex ... the nobilitas, an aristocratic oligarchy."(p. 31) Parenti argues against various opinions that he regards as misconceptions: for example, he states the frequency of slaves being freed (manumission) should not be exaggerated; manumission was often expensive and only achieved at old age (when the slave wasn't productive anymore) and didn't include the slave's wife and his children. Next, the formation and nature of the Roman Republic is described. Early in Roman history, "a succession of Etruscan kings reigned ... [with] exploitative rule"(p. 45) and was overthrown after which the Roman people had an aversion to monarchy. Instead, Rome had a Senate elected by the upper class with executive power held by a pair of consuls. The consuls had one-year terms and were subject to the veto of the other. Poor Romans could elect tribunes which were government bodies consulted by the Senate; tribunes had the power to veto legislation but not to propose legislation. Tribunes were elected by open ballot and, thus, this limited measure of democracy was corrupted by vote buying. So the Roman Republic was an environment of corruption and partial democracy. Then, Parenti presents the reader with an overview of the political scene: :In the second century B.C., the senatorial nobles began to divide into two groups, the larger being the self-designated as the optimates ("best men"), who were devoted to upholding the prerogatives of the well-born. ... The smaller faction within the nobility, styled the populares or "demagogues" by their opponents, were reformers who sided with the common people on various issues. Julius Caesar is considered the leading popularis and the last in a line extending from 133 BC to 44 BC(p.54-55). Some historians would claim that the populares were by no means necessarily the minority, as denoted by the success of Marius, Cinna and Caesar. Parenti uncritically assumes that the populares were earnestly interested in the plight of the common man while the optimates were avaricious. A more nuanced approach would have been more accurate, see the treatment of the optimate Drusus below. Parenti lists a number of Populares, noting that almost all of them were assassinated. The list includes: *Tiberius Gracchus *Gaius Gracchus *the second Marcus Fulvius Flaccus *Marcus Livius Drusus *Publius Sulpicius Rufus *Cornelius Cinna *Gaius Marius *Lucius Appuleius Saturninus *Cnaeus Sicinius *Quintus Sertorius *Gaius Servilius Glaucia *Sergius Catiline *Publius Clodius Pulcher *Julius Caesar However, Marcus Livius Drusus is considered by some historians to have been an Optimatis (see, for example: Ward, Heichelheim and Yeo, A History of the Roman People, 3rd ed., page 164). Parenti argues strongly against the favorable view of Cicero held by most historians. While admitting Cicero's chief fame as an orator, Parenti presents Cicero as a hypocrite, a sycophant, and a devious flatterer as well as noting abuse of power. Often, in his public speeches, Cicero would accept the goals of the populares or praise an opponent while, in private letters, he bitterly complained. In particular, Cicero's prosecution of Catiline for a supposed conspiracy is presented as a witch-hunt and Parenti notes nine suspicious flaws in Cicero's accusations.(p. 107-111) Most seriously, he states that Cicero's self-aggrandizing prosecution led to several executions as well as a military campaign against a legion of impoverished Roman veterans. (p. 93) This chapter summarizes the life and career of Julius Caesar. Parenti is critical of most of the ancient sources, except for Caesar's writings and those of his supporters. Parenti also says Sulla encouraged the growth of large estates in the Roman countryside (p. 79). Parenti lists Caesar's measures to relieve poverty; some measures are outright grants to the poor but most are programs to put the plebs to productive work. Also, several measures are taken to curb corruption practices of the wealthy as well as to levy some luxury taxes. Then Parenti turns to debt relief and contrasts "two theories about why people fall deeply in debt."(p. 151) :The first says that persons burdened with high rents, extortionate taxes, and low income are often unable to earn enough or keep enough of what they earn. So they are forced to borrow on their future labor, hoping that things will take a favorable turn. But the interested parties who underpay, overchange, and overtax them today are just as relentless tomorrow. So debtors must borrow more, with an ever larger portion of their eanings going to interest payments ... eventually assumes ruinous proportions, forcing debtors to sell their small holdings and sometimes even themselvs or their children into servitude. Such has been the plight of destitude populations through history even to this day. The creditor class is more just a dependent variable in all this. Its monopolization of capital and labor markets, its squeeze on prices and wages, its gouging of rents are the very things that create penury and debt.(p.151-152) In the second theory, debtors are lazy and free spenders. However, Parenti states this model doesn't apply to the poor but rather to the spoiled children of the upper class: :who live in a grand style, cultivate the magical art of borrowing forever while paying back never, as did Caesar himself during his early career. Such seemingly limitless credit is more apt to be extended to persons of venerable heritage, since their career prospects are considered good. ... They treat fiscal temperance as tantamount to miserliness, and parade their profligacy as a generosity of spirit.(p.152) In any case, Caesar's debt relief was aimed at "the laboring masses, not the dissolute few."(p. 153) Also, Parenti states that: :Caesar was the first Roman ruler to grant the city's substantial Jewish population the right to practice Judaism ... That he has consorted with such a marginalized element as the Jewish proletariat must have been taken by the optimates as confirmations of their worst presentiments about his loathsome leveling tendencies.(p.153-154) Then, Parenti firmly argues against the accusation that Caesar was responsible for the burning of the Library of Alexandria. (See Library of Alexandria for a detailed treatment of this issue.) Instead, Parenti states that the library: :was in fact brought to ruination by a throng of Christ worshipers, lead by the bishop Theophilus in A.D. 391. This was a time when the ascendant Christian church was shutting down the ancient academies and destroying libraries and books throughout the empire as part of its totalistic war against pagan culture.(p.155) In an unusual measure, Caesar also proposed a cap on total wealth when: :In 49 B.C., he attempted to enforce a law that limited private holdings at 15,000 drachmas in silver or gold, thereby leaving no one in possession of immeasurably large fortunes.(p.164) |
1106630 | /m/046jh7 | The Ill-Made Knight | T. H. White | 1940 | {"/m/014dfn": "Speculative fiction", "/m/01hmnh": "Fantasy"} | Much of The Ill-Made Knight takes place in the fabled Camelot. The Ill-Made Knight is based around the adventures, perils and mistakes of Sir Lancelot. Lancelot, despite being the bravest of the knights, is ugly, and ape-like, so that he calls himself the Chevalier mal fet - "The Ill-Made Knight". As a child, Lancelot loved King Arthur and spent his entire childhood training to be a knight of the round table. When he arrives and becomes one of Arthur's knights, he also becomes the king's close friend. This causes some tension, as he is jealous of Arthur's new wife Guinevere. In order to please her husband, Guinevere tries to befriend Lancelot and the two eventually fall in love. T.H. White's version of the tale elaborates greatly on the passionate love of Lancelot and Guinevere. Suspense is provided by the tension between Lancelot's friendship for King Arthur and his love for and affair with the queen. This affair leads inevitably to the breaking of the Round Table and sets up the tragedy that is to follow in the concluding book of the tetralogy - The Candle in the Wind. Lancelot leaves Camelot to aid people in need. Along the way, he meets a woman who begs him to climb a tree and rescue her husband's escaped falcon. After he removes his armor and does so, the husband appears and reveals that he only wanted Lancelot to remove his armor so that he can kill the knight. Despite being at a disadvantage, Lancelot manages to kill the man and tells the wife "Stop crying. Your husband was a fool and you are a bore. I'm not sorry" (though he reflects that he is). Later, he comes across a man attempting to murder his wife for adultery. Lancelot attempts to protect the woman (who denies the charges) by riding in between the two; however the man manages to cut off his wife's head. The man then throws himself at Lancelot's feet and asks for mercy to avoid being killed. It was revealed later that the man was punished by being charged to take his wife's head to the Pope and ask for forgiveness. Finally, Lancelot comes to a town where the inhabitants beg him to rescue a young woman named Elaine, who is trapped in a tower. The tower is full of steam and she is forced to sit in a tub of boiling water. He manages to save her and her father has him spend the night. That night, the servants and Elaine devise a plan in which the servants get Lancelot drunk and trick him into thinking Guinevere is in the house. When he awakens in the morning, he discovers that he actually slept with Elaine. Furious at the loss of his virginity (which he believes also cost him the ability to work miracles) and frightened at the thought that Elaine might have a baby, he leaves. He later confesses the affair to Guinevere, who forgives him. They later discover that Elaine did have a baby, which she named Galahad (Lancelot's real name). She brings the baby to Camelot to show to Lancelot and together they spend time with Galahad. Guinevere is furious at this (as she asked Lancelot not to do that) and Lancelot goes mad and runs from the castle. He is later found by Elaine's father (2 years later)(who does not recognize him) and is kept as a fool until Elaine recognizes him and cares for him. He lives with Elaine for some time, but then returns to Camelot. When Galahad grows older, he is brought to Camelot as well, to be knighted. The Ill-Made Knight also deals with the quest for the Holy Grail. Arthur notices that the drop in crime has caused the Knights of the Round Table to fall back into their old habits (especially Gawaine, Agravaine, and Mordred, who found their mother in bed with one of Sir Pellinore's sons and murdered both in a fit of rage). In order to give the Knights a new goal, he sends them to find the Holy Grail. The quest ends when Sir Galahad, Sir Percival, Sir Bors, and Sir Pellinore's daughter find the grail. Sir Lancelot apparently saw the four in a room, with the Grail, an old man, and several other knights; however he was unable to enter the room himself (when he tried he was knocked out). One of the knights returned with the news that the Grail could not be brought to England and as a result Sir Galahad and the other knight brought it to Babylon (and neither of them could return to England as well). Sir Pellinore's daughter died when she allowed her blood to be taken to cure a dying princess. Later on, Elaine commits suicide after Lancelot tells her that he will not return to stay with her permanently. The book ends with Lancelot performing a miracle, which is a miracle in and of itself due to the fact that he is not a virgin (which had been the requirement for being able to do so). |
1106914 | /m/046kh2 | Boonville | Robert Mailer Anderson | 11/1/2001 | {"/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | The book tells the story of a man named John Gibson, as he breaks up with his girlfriend and leaves Miami, Florida to move to the small town of Boonville, California. The book portrays the town in a lightly comical manner, bringing to life a number of colorful Mendocino County stereotypes including hippies, rednecks, feminists, and commercial marijuana cultivation. |
1107288 | /m/046ldp | Song of Solomon | Toni Morrison | 1977 | {"/m/02xlf": "Fiction"} | Morrison's protagonist, Macon "Milkman" Dead III, derives his nickname from the fact that he was breastfed during childhood (Macon's age can be inferred as he was wearing pants with elastic instead of a diaper, and that he later forgets the event, suggesting he was still rather young). Milkman's father's employee, Freddie, happens to see him through the window being breastfed by his mother. He quickly gains a reputation for being a "Momma's boy" in direct contrast to his (future) best friend, Guitar, who is motherless and fatherless. Milkman has two sisters, "First Corinthians" and "Magdelene called Lena." The daughters of the family are named by putting a pin in the Bible, while the eldest son is named after his father. The first Macon Dead's name was the result of an administrative error when Milkman's grandfather had to register subsequent to the end of slavery. Milkman's mother (Ruth Foster Dead) is the daughter of the town's only black doctor; she makes her husband feel inadequate, and it is clear she idolized her father, Doctor Foster, to the point of obsession. After her father dies, her husband claims to have found her in bed with the dead body, sucking his fingers. Ruth later tells Milkman that she was kneeling at her father's bedside kissing the only part of him that remained unaffected by the illness from which he died. These conflicting stories expose the problems between his parents and show Milkman that "truth" is difficult or impossible to obtain. Macon (Jr.) is often violently aggressive towards Ruth because he believes that she was involved sexually with her father and loved her father more than her own husband. On one occasion, Milkman punches his father after he strikes Milkman's mother, exposing the growing rift between father and son. In contrast, Macon Dead Jr.'s sister, Pilate, is seen as nurturing—an Earth Mother character. Born without a navel, she is a somewhat mystical character. It is strongly implied that she is Divine—a female Christ-in spite of her name. Macon (Jr.) has not spoken to his sister for years and does not think highly of her. She, like Macon, has had to fend for herself from an early age after their father's murder, but she has dealt with her past in a different way than Macon, who has embraced money as the way to show his love for his father. Pilate has a daughter, Reba, and a granddaughter named Hagar. Hagar falls desperately and obsessively in love with Milkman, and is unable to cope with his rejection, attempting to kill him at least six times. Hagar is not the only character who attempts to kill Milkman. Guitar, Milkman's erstwhile best friend, tries to kill Milkman more than once after incorrectly suspecting that Milkman has cheated him out of hidden gold, a fortune he planned to use to help his Seven Days group fund their revenge killings in response to killings of blacks. Searching for the gold near the old family farm in Pennsylvania, Milkman stops at the rotting Butler Mansion, former home of the people who killed his ancestor to claim the farm. Here he meets Circe, an almost supernaturally old ex-slave of the Butlers. She tells Milkman of his family history and this leads him to the town of Shalimar. There he learns his great-grandfather Solomon was said to have escaped slavery by flying back to Africa, leaving behind twenty-one children and his wife Ryna, who goes crazy with loss. Returning home, he learns that Hagar has died of a broken heart. He accompanies Pilate back to Shalimar, where she is accidentally shot and killed by Guitar, who had intended to kill Milkman. At the end of the novel, Milkman leaps towards Guitar. This leap is ambiguous, it is not explicitly stated that either or both is killed. However it brings the novel full circle from the suicidal "flight" of Robert Smith, the insurance agent, to Milkman's "flight" in which he learns to fly like Pilate. |
1112746 | /m/0472k4 | Roadside Picnic | Boris Strugatsky | null | {"/m/06n90": "Science Fiction"} | The novel is set in a post-visitation world where there are now six Zones known on Earth (each zone is approximately five square miles/kilometers in size) which are still full of unexplained phenomena and where strange happenings have briefly occurred, assumed to have been visitations by aliens. World governments and the UN try to keep tight control over them to prevent leakage of artifacts from the Zones, fearful of unforeseen consequences. A subculture of stalkers, thieves going into the Zones to get the artifacts, evolves around the Zones. The novel is set in and around a specific Zone in Harmont, a town in a fictitious Commonwealth country, and follows the main protagonist over an eight year period. The introduction is a live radio interview with Dr. Pilman who is credited with the discovery that the six Visitation Zones' locations weren't random. He explains it so: "Imagine that you spin a huge globe and you start firing bullets into it. The bullet holes would lie on the surface in a smooth curve. The whole point (is that) all six Visitation Zones are situated on the surface of our planet as though someone had taken six shots at Earth from a pistol located somewhere along the Earth-Deneb line. Deneb is the alpha star in Cygnus." The story revolves around Redrick "Red" Schuhart, a tough and experienced stalker who regularly enters the Zone illegally at night in search for valuable artifacts - "swag"- for profit. Trying to clean up his act, he becomes employed as a lab assistant at the International Institute, which studies the Zone. To help the career of his boss, whom he considers a friend, he goes into the Zone with him on an official expedition to recover a unique artifact (a full "empty"), which leads to his friend's death later on. This comes as a heavy shock when the news reaches Redrick, heavily drunk in a bar, and he blames himself for his friend's fate. While at the bar, a police force enters looking for any stalkers about. Redrick is forced to use a "howler" to make a hasty getaway. Red's girlfriend Guta is pregnant and decides to keep the baby no matter what. It is widely rumored that frequent incursions into the Zone by stalkers carry a high risk of mutations in their children. They decide to marry. Redrick helps a fellow stalker named Burbridge the Buzzard to get out of the Zone after the latter loses his legs to a substance known as "hell slime". Later on he confronts Burbridge's daughter who gets angry at Redrick because he saved her father from death. Guta has given birth to a beautiful, happy and intelligent daughter, fully normal save for the short and light full body hair. They call her lovingly, Monkey. Redrick's dead father comes home from the cemetery, now situated inside the Zone, as copies of other deceased are now slowly returning to their homes too. As she grows up, Redrick's daughter seems to resemble a monkey more and more, becomes reclusive while barely talking to anyone anymore, screaming strange screams at night together with Redrick's father. Redrick is arrested, but escapes, and before he is recaptured contacts a mysterious buyer with an offer of a small porcelain container of "witches' jelly" which he'd smuggled out previously. Redrick asks that the proceeds from the sale be sent to Guta. Red's old friend Richard Noonan (a supply contractor with offices inside The Institute), is revealed as a covert operative of an unnamed, presumably governmental, secret organization working hard to stop the contraband flow of artifacts from the Zone. Content he's almost succeeded in his multi-year assignment, he is confronted by his boss, who reveals to him the flow is stronger than ever, and is tasked with finding who is responsible and how they achieve it. Redrick is released from jail and makes a secret deal with Burbridge. Guta is depressed because recent medical examinations of her daughter indicate that she is no longer human. It is implied that the weekend picnics-for-tourists business set up by Burbridge are a cover for the new generation of stalkers to learn and go into the zone. They jokingly refer to the setup as "Sunday school". Red goes into the Zone one last time in order to reach the wish-granting "Golden Sphere". He has a map, given to him by Burbridge, whose son joins him on the expedition. Red knows one of them will have to die in order for the other to reach the sphere, to deactivate a phenomenon known as "meatgrinder", and keeps this a secret from his companion. After they get to the location surviving many obstacles, the young man rushes towards the sphere shouting out his wishes only to be savagely dispatched by the meatgrinder phenomenon. Spent and disillusioned, Red looks back on his broken life struggling to find meaning and hope, hoping the Sphere will find something good in his heart - it is the hidden wish that it grants, supposedly - and in the end can't think of anything other than repeating the now dead youngster's words: "HAPPINESS FOR EVERYBODY, FREE, AND NO ONE WILL GO AWAY UNSATISFIED!". Another translation of the wish from the original Russian "СЧАСТЬЕ ДЛЯ ВСЕХ, ДАРОМ, И ПУСТЬ НИКТО НЕ УЙДЕТ ОБИЖЕННЫЙ!" is "A Gift of Happiness for Everyone, So No One (Leaves)/(Passes Away) Feeling (Left Out)/(Offended By Life)." |
1114779 | /m/0478bz | White Teeth | Zadie Smith | 1/27/2000 | {"/m/02xlf": "Fiction", "/m/05hgj": "Novel"} | It's New Year's Day 1975 at the beginning of the novel, and we are introduced to Archie Jones, a 47-year-old man whose disturbed Italian wife has just walked out on him. Archie is attempting to commit suicide by gassing himself in his car, when a chance interruption causes him to change his mind. Filled with a fresh enthusiasm for life, Archie flips a coin and finds his way into the aftermath of a New Year's Eve party. There he meets the much-younger Clara, a Jamaican woman whose mother is a devout Jehovah's Witness. They are soon married and have a daughter, Irie, who grows up to be intelligent but with low self-confidence. Samad, who has emigrated to Britain after World War II, has married Alsana. Alsana is also much younger than he is, and their union is the product of a traditional arranged marriage. They have twin boys, Magid and Millat, who are the same age as Irie. The marriage is quite rocky, as their devotion to Islam in an English life is troublesome. Samad is continually tormented by what he sees as the effects of this cultural conflict upon his own moral character and sends 10-year-old Magid to Bangladesh in the hope that he will grow up properly under the teachings of Islam. From then on, the lives of the two boys follow very different paths. Ironically, Magid becomes an atheist and devotes his life to science (a grave disappointment to Samad). Whereas Millat, despite his earlier womanizing and drinking, eventually becomes an angry fundamentalist and part of a Muslim brotherhood known as the Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation (or KEVIN). The lives of the Jones and Iqbal families intertwine with that of the Chalfens, a Jewish-Catholic family of Cambridge educated intellectuals. The father, Marcus Chalfen, is a brilliant but socially inept geneticist working on a controversial 'FutureMouse' project. The mother, Joyce Chalfen, is a part-time housewife with an often entirely misguided desire to mother and 'heal' Millat. Although they wish to be thought of as intellectual liberals, the Chalfens often demonstrate complete cultural ignorance and a blindness to the changes happening in their own family. Later on in the story, Clara's mother, a strict Jehovah's Witness, becomes involved along with Clara's ex-boyfriend when Irie runs away from home. Returned from Bangladesh, Magid works as Marcus' research assistant, while Millat is befriended by the Chalfens. To some extent the family provides a safe haven as they (believe themselves to) accept and understand the turbulent lives of Magid and Millat. However, this sympathy comes at the expense of their own son, Josh, whose difficulties are ignored by his parents as he, too, begins to rebel against his background. The strands of the narrative grow closer as Millat and KEVIN, Josh and a radical animal rights group (FATE), and Clara's mother (Hortense) and her religious connections all begin to oppose FutureMouse as an evil interference with their own beliefs and plan to stop it. Irie, who has been working for Marcus, briefly succeeds in her long-hidden attraction to Millat but is rejected under his KEVIN-inspired beliefs. Irie believes that Millat cannot love her, for he has always been 'the second son' both symbolically and literally; Millat was born two minutes after Magid. After losing her virginity to Millat, she makes Magid the 'second son' for a change by sleeping with him right after. This causes her to become pregnant, and she is left unsure of the father of her child, as the brothers are identical twins. Extraordinary consequences result as the seemingly divergent stories of the main characters coalesce in a stunning finale—the unveiling of FutureMouse, the revelatory actions of the warring groups, and of a long-kept secret from Samad and Archie's past. |
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