title
stringlengths 1
220
| author
stringlengths 4
59
⌀ | pub_year
int64 398
2.01k
⌀ | summary
stringlengths 11
58k
|
|---|---|---|---|
The Long Night of the Grave | Charles L. Grant | null | The novel concerns mummies in the Connecticut town of Oxrun Station, a suburb of New York. |
Yellow Fog | Les Daniels | null | The novel concerns the vampire Don Sebastian in Victorian England. |
All Seated on the Ground | Connie Willis | 2,007 | The story follows Meg, a newspaper columnist who has joined a commission studying aliens that have landed on the Denver University campus. The aliens glare at everyone, and allow themselves to be led to various locations, but the commission has no idea how to communicate with them. Following an incident at a local mall during the Christmas shopping season, Meg and a school choir director team up to try to decipher the aliens' actions before they leave Earth. |
Enchanted Faces | null | 1,991 | Each of Bob Harman's sketches are of women from between the two World Wars. |
Swindle | Gordon Korman | null | In the beginning, Griffin, "The Man With the Plan", as his best friend Ben Slovak likes to call him, gets an idea to sleep in the old Rockford house scheduled for demolition. They then proceed to lie to their parents so they can go have a sleepover there before it gets demolished. They start snooping through the house and they come to a drawer; they open it to find an old Babe Ruth card. Wondering about it, they take it to a pawn shop owned by S. Wendell Palomino, nicknamed "Swindle"; they ask him how much Palomino would give them for the card. Palomino tells him the card is a replica and tricks them out for $120. Griffin’s parents are not doing well financially, due to Griffin’s dad's invention, a machine that picks fruit automatically named the SmartPick. Griffin also finds out his family is going to have to sell their house to move to a more reasonably priced neighborhood. If his family had to move, Griffin would have to leave his best friend Ben behind, and he also finds out the card was actually real, and that Palomino is going to sell it for millions. Griffin, with Ben's help, decides to make a plan to break into Palomino's store to get the card from the safe. They break into the shop by getting in a large crate. A man that works in the store, Tom Dufferin, carries the box inside. When the boys are securely inside the shop, they discover that the safe has disappeared. To break out of the store, Griffin and Ben climb the fence, and break the alarm code using a video recording of Dufferin, as he punches the code in after he closes the shop. After the failure, he had moved the card to his house. Griffin and Ben make another plan to break into the house and steal the card back. The only problem is that they need six sixth graders to help. They recruit four in all. Logan, an actor-to-be, takes care of the suspicious neighbor of Palomino’s. Pitch is a climber, and they need her to climb up and get in from the bathroom skylight. They need Savannah, an animal lover, to calm the guard dog down, and make Melissa take care of the security system so they can get in. Suddenly, Darren, a boy who is loved by Ben and Griffin, hears about the plan to break in and blackmails them into letting him join in on the plan for some of the money. They need Swindle to get out of his house so the plan can happen and, knowing Swindle is a stealer, Griffin and Ben buy him a ticket to a New York Rangers hockey game and they "accidentally" mail it to him, faking it as a birthday card. Everyone agrees to the plan, and so it begins. On the heist night, Pitch sprains her ankle; Ben falls asleep in a bush, and they almost ruin the entire heist. Then Darren tries to take the card for himself. Only thinking of the one guard dog, they get inside to find two. After they manage the affair, they find the safe, but the card isn't in there, so they look around the entire house until Griffin remembers from an interview where the reporter asked why the card was so cold. Griffin then ran to the freezer. However, something sets the security system on and the team hears the police coming. In shock Darren grabs the card and tries to run. When running outside, Darren loses grip and the card ends up in a tree. Griffin remembers his dad’s invention, the SmartPick, and runs home to get it. They manage to get the card and make a run for it. Luckily Griffin has a Plan B. Unfortunately; they get caught, since Pitch left the climbing harnesses. Later, Griffin goes to retrieve the card, but he is arrested by Detective Vizzini. Swindle doesn't want to press charges (so he can avoid an investigation so he won't risk getting in trouble when he cheated Griffin), and Winifred Rockford Bates, the last surviving member of the original Rockford family, gives the Babe Ruth baseball card to her youngest relative, Darren Vader. Ben had said earlier that Darren claimed to be related to the Rockfords. However, Griffin and Ben did not believe him donate the money, in total $974,000, making it the second most expensive collectible ever. They then have to give the card to the Cedarville Museum. In the end no one got any money from the heist, though all the talk about the heist caused Griffin's dad to have the SmartPick patented. After that, Griffin and his family do not have any more financial problems. As of 2009, a movie deal on Swindle and Schooled (another Gordon Korman book) was made public, although not many details have gone out. |
Night of the Hawk | null | null | After the Old Dog mission, one of the crew members - Dr. David Luger sacrificed himself to allow his comrades escape from the airbase at Anadyr. Although everyone thought he was dead, he is not. Years later, he is now a completely brainwashed Soviet aircraft designer working for an aircraft design bureau called Fisikous is Lithuania. His whereabouts are found about by the Americans while they are extracting a Lithuanian defector. Now, known to the Old Dog crew and the high-ranking officials in Whitehouse as Dr. Ozerov, Luger must be saved from the grips of the old KGB. Luger has been forced to work on a stealth bomber called Fisikous Fi-170 which rivals the EB-52 Megafortress he had developed in the States. Parallelly the former Soviet state of Belarus is planning to invade Lithuania. Its Military commander Gen. Voschanka plans a decisive attack and use their nuclear arsenal if necessary, to force Lithuania to surrender. The Americans learn of this move by intelligence gathering and mount a covert mission to stop Belarus from invading Lithuania. An air squadron with CH-53E Superstallions and AH-1 Cobra choppers is first sent to evacuate the citizens at the American Embassy in Lithuania, followed by an air assault to destroy Belarusian ground targets. Meanwhile, a special Marines team in V-22 Ospreys, along with Patrick McLanahan, Jon Ormack and Hal briggs arrive at the Fisikous institute which is now run over with Lithuanian soldiers, to save Dave Luger. After a V-22 crash, followed by fierce gun battles, Patrick, Luger, Ormack escape in the Fi-170. On their way, they destroy several Belarusian ground units and take out a MiG-29 fighter, after which they make their way to Scotland. The EB-52 Megafortresses are sent to aid the Lithuanian ground troops led by Maj. Dominikas Palcikas in defending their soil. They take out nuclear missiles bound for Lithuania, detonating one of them with an AIM-120 AMRAAM air-to-air missile, causing a small blast. Voschanka's entire command centre is taken out by the Russian Commonwealth forces, during which he is shot dead. The Belarusian troops finally withdraw after suffering heavy casualties. Luger finally reunites with the Old Dog crew at HAWC, amidst potential military investigations into his recent past. |
The Horror of Howling Hill | Colin Brake | null | Help the Doctor and Martha discover the truth behind the legend of Howling Hill, before the horror that stalks the night catches up with you. --> |
Second Skin | null | null | When you find yourself on a twenty-third century space station, you soon realise a dangerous alien parasite has taken over most of the people on board. Can you and the Doctor destroy it before it reaches Earth? |
The Dragon King | Trevor Baxendale | null | Your journey takes you to the planet Elanden, where people live side by side with dragons. But hunters from a neighbouring planet are attacking... Can you restore peace to these two clashing worlds? |
The Sorceress: The Secrets Of The Immortal Nicholas Flamel | Michael Scott | null | Flamel and Palamedes take the twins to Stonehenge, where they enlist the help of Gilgamesh. While the twins are adjusting to the powers Gilgamesh has taught them, Cernunnos returns with the Wild Hunt and attacks the twins and Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh is wounded by the Archon, but the twins use their newly found powers to protect the King. But what Nicholas Flamel withholds from the twins is that Gilgamesh the King is insane. Though he has no aura - and hence cannot use his powers - he can still pass on his knowledge to the awakened human twins. If Gilgamesh refuses to teach the twins, they will be unable to escape back to San Francisco using the Ley Lines and will be trapped in Dr. John Dee's city, his hometown of London, where he is at his strongest. Flamel uses Francis to enlist Palamedes, the Saracen Knight, to help them. Palamedes takes them to his home, a junkyard in London, and they manage to work together to contact Perenelle. Perenelle is trapped on Alcatraz with the friendly but untrustworthy spider elder, Areop-Enap, after narrowly escaping the Sphinx and defeating the Morrigan. Morrigan had been suppressed sufficiently by the Words of Power that resided on the island that her body was retaken by her two sisters, Macha and Badb. Perenelle also makes fleeting contact with Scathach and Joan of Arc by scrying. Areop-Enap and its spider army are then attacked by an onslaught of poisoned flies, killing most of the spiders and wounding Areop-Enap. Billy the Kid has joined forces with Machiavelli in an attempt to kill the sorceress, but Perenelle, aided by Macha and Badb, tricks the pair and steals their boat, travelling back to the mainland with her new ally, the Crow Goddess. Unfortunately, the Dark Elders have awakened an ancient being even more powerful and mysterious than them: an Archon. The Archon, named Cernunnos, is known as the Horned God and is the leader of a pack of wolf people called the Wild Hunt. Cernunnos, the Wild Hunt, and Dr Dee engage Shakespeare,the Gabriel Hounds, Palamedes, the twins, and Flamel in a vicious battle. While making their escape, Josh loses Clarent, and Dee grabs the sword, reuniting it with its twin, Excalibur. The two swords fuse together to make a new sword. They activate the ley lines at Stonehenge and are greeted by Perenelle at the other end. Meanwhile, Scathach and Joan of Arc try to get to Alcatraz to help Perenelle but are trapped in a prehistoric era by Machiavelli, who had deliberately set the trap to snare them. They do not know how to return to their time and must try to survive while they wait for Flamel and the others to find and rescue them. |
Fatal Terrain | null | 1,997 | Taiwanese politicians vote to declare independence from China in early June 1997 and the US immediately recognizes Taiwan as a sovereign state. However, Beijing does not take the declaration lightly and plans offensive operations to reimpose the one-China policy, with the initial swing led by the PLAN's deployment of the aircraft carrier Mao Zedong. Meanwhile, the US government authorizes a covert deployment of two EB-52 Megafortresses to patrol over the Taiwan Strait and keep watch on the situation. Lt General Bradley Elliott successfully reorganizes the survivors of the original Old Dog crew for the operation as part of a plan to pitch the Megafortress as new aircraft for the USAF. A stand-off between a Taiwanese Navy frigate and the Mao Zedong taskforce escalates as the Old Dog crew is forced to intervene. The battle opens an opportunity for the Chinese to wage an international public-relations campaign to paint the US and Taiwan as the aggressors. Chinese Admiral Sun Ji Guoming uses Sun Tzu's lessons on deception to give the campaign added leverage. His schemes include launching torpedoes against the Mao Zedong and frame the attack on the Taiwanese submarine Hai Hu shadowing it in Hong Kong harbor, disguising a ferry as a cruiser to provoke an attack by the Megafortress, and detonating a suitcase nuke on the USS Independence as it steams out of Japan for deployment to the Taiwan Strait. Sun uses the success of his deception operation to launch a massive air campaign against Taiwan, starting off with nuclear-tipped SAMs fired on Taiwanese F-16s attacking a naval base in Fujian province. The Chinese attacks on Taiwan - with nuclear weapons used on several of them - prompts the US to prepare its own strategic nuclear forces. The fallout from the events also affect the US leadership's confidence in Elliott's team while many countries in the Pacific Rim ban US warships from their waters. The US military tries to impound the Megafortress planes while in Guam, but Elliott's crew hijack one Megafortress and fly to a secret underground airbase outside Hualien, where a surviving Taiwanese Air Force F-16 unit welcomes them as the "new Flying Tigers." As Sun gloats over the success of his plan and expects the Taiwanese government's surrender, the joint US-Taiwan force starts attacking Chinese strategic assets deep in the mainland, which helps PLA commander Chin Po Zihong convince President Jiang Zemin to launch a ballistic missile at Andersen Air Force Base in the belief that it was the staging area for the attacks. Chin - who has been disgusted with Sun's tactics that do not require an actual invasion of Taiwan - orders an attack on the secret airbase after a patrol plane follows a flight of F-16s returning from another strike before being shot down. Elliott's team and the Taiwanese planes launch ahead of the Chinese assault. At the same time, the US Navy's carrier planes and the Air Force - which finally called off its strategic forces alert - savage the Chinese planes to help the Megafortress attack the Second Artillery Corps' missile silos. In the ensuing battle, the Megafortress suffers heavy damage while destroying many silos. Elliott orders McLanahan and the rest of the crew to eject while guiding the bomber for a kamikaze attack on the last DF-5 silo. The crew is captured by the Chinese, but are returned to the US after Sun surrenders to the Americans at Kadena Air Base and threatened to reveal the Chinese plan for recapturing Taiwan, causing Beijing to declare a ceasefire. The group - who expected jail time for going renegade - arrives at Dreamland, where President Martindale declares that it was reactivated and renamed in Elliott's honor. He also designates Eighth Air Force chief Gen Terrill Samson as base commander and McLanahan drives off contemplating an offer to be the base's operations director. |
The Unfortunates | B.S. Johnson | 1,969 | A sportswriter is sent to a small city (Nottingham) on an assignment, only to find himself confronted by ghosts from his past. As he attempts to report an association football match, memories of his friend, a tragic victim of cancer, haunt his mind. The city visited remains unnamed, however the novel contains an accurate description of Nottingham landmarks, its streetscape, and its environment in 1969, with additional recallings of 1959. The football ground in the novel is obviously Nottingham Forest's City Ground, from whence the fictional football club 'City' comes. |
Senselessness | Horacio Castellanos Moya | 2,004 | A sex-obsessed lush of a writer is employed by the Catholic Church to edit and tidy up a 1,100 page report on the army's massacre and torture of the indigenous villagers a decade earlier. The writer becomes mesmerized by the poetic phrases written by the indigenous people and becomes increasingly paranoid and frightened, not only by the spellbinding words he must read, but also by the murders and generals that run his country. The country, never named, is identifiable as Guatemala through the mention of two presidents, Vinicio Cerezo Arevalo and Efrain Rios Montt. |
Just in Case | Meg Rosoff | 2,006 | The book is set in Luton, Bedfordshire where fifteen-year-old David Case saves his younger brother from falling out of an open window. Scared by the experience, he starts to see danger everywhere, believes that Fate is stalking him, and decides to change his identity in order to escape his destiny. He changes his name to Justin, adopts a new wardrobe, seeks out new friends, acquires an imaginary dog, all in the hope of avoiding Fate. His new, moody, self-absorbed persona attracts attention, not all of it good, and Fate is not fooled at all. The title and David's adopted name Justin Case refer to his preparation phobia. |
The Frog King | Adam Davies | 2,002 | Harry Driscoll is an editorial assistant living in New York. He works for a major publishing house but is failing to make an impression by not taking his job seriously and constantly arriving at the office late and intoxicated. He is bitter, cynical and troubled but very charming, and the only thing he (secretly) cares about is his long suffering girlfriend - Evie. But he is unable to commit, be faithful or tell her he loves her and soon his self destructive actions will send his life into a rapid descent. |
The Magician Out of Manchuria | Charles G. Finney | null | The novel concerns the adventures of a hero who encounters a queen with remarkable talents. |
The Red Necklace | Sally Gardner | 2,007 | The story is principally set in and near Paris between 1789 and 1792. Yann Margoza, the protagonist, is a young traveling entertainer with the ability to read minds and throw his voice. When he gets older he finds that he can move objects with his mind (telekinesis). He meets Sido, the unwanted daughter of the cruel and foolish Marquis de Villeduval, and she helps Yann escape from the murderous Count Kalliovski, a menacing nobleman who holds the majority of the French aristocrats in the palm of his hand. He, too, has the power of telekinesis. After being educated in London, Yann returns years later to rescue Sido from the twin perils of the Terror and the Count's evil desire to have her as his bride. |
Focus | Arthur Miller | null | The novel is set in New York towards the end of the Second World War. Its protagonist is a Gentile named Newman, a personnel manager for a large company, who lives with his mother. Newman, though too timid to do much about them, shares the prejudices of his neighbor Fred, who is determined to deal with the "new element" in their neighborhood, particularly a Jewish candy store owner called Finkelstein. However, a new pair of glasses have an unfortunate effect on Newman, altering his appearance in such a way that he begins to be mistaken for a Jew. He hires a prospective secretary who his boss thinks is an assimilated Jew using a WASP-sounding fake name, and is told he will not get a promised promotion and be moved to an office where fewer people could see him. He is furious about being mistreated and quits; ironically, he later gets a new job at a company where the owner and much of the staff are actually Jewish. As antisemitism mounts throughout the city and the Christian Front organizes to turn general ill will into action, Newman marries a girl called Gertrude. She has seen antisemitism mobilized at close quarters before, when she lived with the ringleader of an organization that abused Jews in California (someone whose views that the U.S. will soon get rid of all Jews she notes without any editorial comment), and recognizes how risky a position Newman is in when his garbage can, as well as Finkelstein's, is turned over in the night. She has also been mistakenly identified as Jewish, and is angry at this...because she is a Christian and is disgusted that anyone would think she is Jewish, not because she thinks anti-Semitism is wrong and hateful. Newman's principles and character mean that he would prefer to stand aside while the persecution of Finkelstein continues – his own latent antisemitism tacitly endorses it, while his reticence makes it hard for him to participate. But, accidentally caught up as a victim, non-participation is not an option. An attempt by Newman to convince Fred and his collaborators of his allegiance to their cause by attending an antisemitic rally results only in his being again taken for a Jew, attacked and ejected. Approached afterwards by Finkelstein, Newman tries to politely sell Finkelstein on the idea of leaving the neighborhood and moving somewhere where he won't be threatened. Finkelstein forcefully tells Newman he won't move: the anti-Semitic forces want to take over the U.S. (confirming what Gertrude told him earlier) and their crusade against Jews don't make any sense in that context because Jews comprise a very small percentage of the population. Finally, Newman and Finkelstein are together attacked in the street by a gang of men, who they fight off. Newman realizes he cannot count on Gertrude and walks away from their marriage, later going to the police to report the attack. Asked by an officer "How many of you people live there?" he declines to correct the mistake, realizing that by accepting it he sets himself against those who have abused him, rather than against their intended targets. |
Tom Swift Among the Fire Fighters | Victor Appleton | 1,921 | While Tom and Ned Newton are reviewing financial records, a fire breaks out at the fireworks factory in town. Assisting the firemen, they rescue Josephus Baxter, Mr. Baxter is developing a new dye formula, and has hired out laboratory space at the factory. During the mayhem created by the fire and the rescue, Mr. Baxter loses the formula, but he is positive that the owners of the factory have stolen it. Tom feels pity on the man, and allows him use of the labs at the Swift Construction Company. While observing the blaze, Tom wonders that there is not a more efficient way to fight fire, especially having troubles with multi-storied buildings or skyscrapers. These thoughts lead him to develop a new fire suppressant chemical, and an air-borne system to deliver the new chemicals to the upper stories of skyscrapers. Tom also rescues a small boat in distress, with the aid of a naphtha launch. |
All the Sad Young Literary Men | null | null | Gessen's novel centers around the stories of three literary-minded friends: Keith, a Harvard-educated writer living in New York City; Sam, living in Boston and writing the "great Zionist epic"; and Mark, who is trying to complete a history dissertation on the Mensheviks at Syracuse University. |
Tom Swift and His Electric Locomotive | Victor Appleton | 1,922 | Richard Bartholomew, president of the Hendrickton and Pas Alos Railroad Company (H&PA) is under pressure to save his company from bankruptcy. If Mr. Bartholomew cannot come up with a means to compete with the Hendrickton & Western railroad, the H&PA will be doomed to failure. Mr. Bartholomew has contracted The Swift Construction Company to build a new electric locomotive which can travel at 2 miles per minute ( ). The catch is that the owner of the competing H&W railway, Montagne Lewis, is dishonest and will stop at nothing to prevent Mr. Bartholomew from succeeding. Hired thugs are under orders to destroy Tom's developments. Tom, and his friends Ned Newton and Mr. Damon, have several life-threatening encounters with these hired gunmen. |
Passage | Lois McMaster Bujold | 2,008 | Passage is the immediate sequel to Legacy in The Sharing Knife series. It takes farmer's daughter Fawn and Lakewalker maverick Dag back to her home farm as a first step on their 'honeymoon trip' to the Southern Sea, which is analogous to the Gulf of Mexico in The Sharing Knife series' alternate-world setting. At the farm they add the first of a considerable list of fellow-travelers: Fawn's older brother Whit. Once on their way again another odd companion is added by accident, quite literally, as Hod the charity-case helper of the teamster taking them to find flatboat passage on the Grace River (the Ohio River) gets his kneecap shattered by Dag's ill-tempered horse. This begins a series of events in each of which Dag's ground-working abilities are stretched past old limits, ground being the series setting's term for what might well be read as chi. Hod happens to owe much of his sloth and sly theft of edibles to a well-grown tapeworm, not suspected by his employer and only noticed in passing by Dag. But by his good curing works Dag has, as he feared, left himself open to an avalanche of farmer folk with ailments. He has, also, unwittingly beguiled Hod—Hod follows him, and wants more of Dag's ministrations. So there are dangers to the farmers he tries to cure, too. Much of the novel follows out his attempts to present what Lakewalkers do, how, and with what limitations, in ways that farmers should understand. This action violates long-standing Lakewalker secrecy about just these matters. Dag, in his effort to reduce a culture gap that has already led to violent misunderstandings, sees no choice but to risk apostasy. After he, with help from two other Lakewalkers, and many of the so-called farmers (in this book, the non-Lakewalkers mostly work with boats, not farms) defeats a renegade Lakewalker, who has been leading a group of murderers and robbers, Dag even demonstrates, for a group of farmers, the ceremony that turns a knife made from a bone from a deceased Lakewalker into a sharing knife. He also discovers how to remove a beguilement. The core of the novel is set on a flatboat, patterned on craft used in the middle 19th century to move goods downstream on America's navigable rivers, and large enough to need a crew of around eight (and with space for cargo, chickens, a goat, and Dag's horse). For the details of this pre-steamboat era Ms. Bujold has drawn from a number of histories and biographies, listed and annotated in an Author's Note page at the very end of the text. Like the rest of the series this is a romance, but one that rides on deeper questions of personal and social relationship, including those of leadership, honesty, caste relations and power. It also presents some clear moral choices, for those who were recruited to join the renegade Lakewalker. It ends with the motley crew, Lakewalkers and farmers, that has made its way to the mouth of the Gray River (the Mississippi River) having a picnic on the sands of the River's delta and considering the whens and hows of their return journey up-river. A fourth volume, The Sharing Knife: Horizon, published in January, 2009, completes the tetralogy. |
When the Sacred Ginmill Closes | Lawrence Block | 1,986 | It deals with an alcoholic detective who quit his job because he had shot a little girl while working for the New York Police Department. He frequents many bars such as Ms. Kitty's. There are three crimes that Scudder solves in this novel. First, there is a robbery of a safe at the Morrisey's, who support the IRA. Second there is a robbery of the real books that shows Skip's and Kasabian's tax evasion records. Third, there was a guy that murdered his wife. In the end, Bobby was the one that helped two actors rob the Morriseys and Skip. Skip turns Bobby in to the Morriseys to get a $10,000 reward. They later find the three people dead. Scudder gets a phone call from a depressed girlfriend of the man that killed his wife. She later kills herself and Scudder makes the evidence frame the guy. He thinks that it serves justice. |
Silver Tower | null | null | Armstrong Space Station known as the Silver Tower is the first military station built by the United States to defend against ballistic missiles. With its arsenal of Thor Anti-ballistic missiles and a Tactical High Energy Laser weapon called Skybolt, it is a fearsome military weapon in space. Along with its highly specialised crew of scientists and engineers, led by General Jason St. Michael it forms a vital "eye in the sky", to assist the US military on the battlefield. The Soviets have decided to invade Iran in order to gain control of the Persian Gulf. They mount a surprising lightning air attack on Iran and place their Aircraft Carrier flotilla near the Persian Gulf. The Americans send the USS Nimitz and her carrier battle group in response. They also have Silver Tower, the ace up their sleeve to watch over the carrier and provide real time view from space. The Soviets who are aware of Silver Tower use a powerful ground laser in an attempt to destroy or cripple the space station. But to the Soviet's surprise, the tower and its crew survive and continue to assist the Nimitz. Furious on their previous failed attempt, the Soviets send Elektron Spaceplanes to destroy the space station. This time, the station is massively crippled, but some of the crew members sacrifice their lives by manually launching the Thor missiles at one of the space planes, destroying it. The crippled space station is then evacuated to the Space Shuttle Enterprise. Meanwhile, the situation back on the ground gets tense, with F-14s and F-15s engaging in dogfights with Tu-22M bombers and Su-33s launched from the aircraft carriers and missile ships exchanging fire. Both sides suffer heavy casualties. However, the Americans succeed in keeping the Soviet carrier group out of the Persian Gulf. The survivors Jason St. Michael and Anne Page return to Silver Tower hoping to restart its systems, only to be met with another attack from the Elektron spaceplanes. However, they restore the Skybolt laser module and fire on the spaceplanes, vaporizing them. They then fire the laser on Soviet cruise missiles heading for the Nimitz group. In the end, even though the battle is not over, the Red Fleet is kept out of the Persian Gulf and Silver Tower is to be repaired and returned to operation. |
Albert Savarus | Honoré de Balzac | 1,842 | Rosalie is the only daughter of the Wattevilles, a distinguished family of Besançon. Her father is very timid and spends his time working on a lathe, while her mother is quite proud and domineering. Her mother is trying to encourage Rosalie to take an interest in M. de Soulas, who is a young fop. At a dinner party, the Abbe reports the spectacular success of a lawyer Savaron, who has settled quietly in the town. Rosalie takes an interest in the lawyer, who is good-looking, and gets her father to build a gazebo in the garden with the secret intent of being able to watch Savaron. Savaron is successful in several cases, and it becomes known that he has started a local literary journal. Rosalie persuades her father to subscribe, and reads a story obviously penned by Savaron. In Savaron's story, two young men are touring in Switzerland. From a boat on a lake, Rudolfe, one of the young men, becomes captivated by a girl he sees leaning out of a window in a house on the lakeside. He instantly decides to stop in the village, and makes enquiries. He is told that the girl is a young English girl staying with her grandfather who has come there for his health with a dumb girl as a servant. Rudolfe tries to obtain invitations and eventually creeps into the garden and overhears the two girls talking Italian. It emerges that they are Italian émigrés who are hiding in Switzerland. Furthermore, it turns out that the girl, Francesca, is married to the old man. Rudolfe befriends them and enters into a chaste love affair with the girl. They are in love and agree to wait until the old man dies to get married. News comes that their exile has been lifted and the Italians depart to Geneva, where Rudolfe is to meet them later. When he gets there, it turns out that Franscesca is a princess and her husband is a Duke. Rudolfe is invited to the house, and they swear undying love, before Rudolfe departs to make his name in the world. When Rosalie has read the story, she suspects it is the true story of Savaron, and becomes jealous. She tricks her servant into obtaining Savaron's correspondence, and after a letter to Leopold, finds letters to the Princess and confirms that the story is true. Savaron ries to make his name in the town and stands for elections. There is much complex politicking to obtain him the vote. Wrapped up in it is a law suit over M. de Watteville's land. Rosalie persuades her father to enlist the help of Savaron, but he refuses to come into the open about it until after the election, because of possible effects on the electorate. Suddenly just before the election, Savaron disappears and is never heard of again. Rosalie's mother tries to push the marriage with M. de Soulas but Rosalie is totally opposed. Thus they fall out and after the death of her father, Rosalie is left in very difficult circumstances. In response to Rosalie's taunt, her mother ends up marrying de Soulas herself. Rosalie seeks the aid of the Abbe to find Savaron, and confesses to him the awful secret she has hidden. It turns out not only did she intercept Savaron's mail and prevent it reaching him, but also substituted letters to the Princess. In particular she wrote that Savaron was to marry herself and so Savoron's disappearance is linked to the marriage of Francesca to another man shortly after the death of her old husband. Savaron is tracked down to a monastery where he has shut himself off from the world. Rosalie is still vindictive and tries to find Franscesca, delighting in telling her what happened and handing over the letters. Shortly afterwards Rosalie is horribly disfigured in a steamboat accident on the River Loire. |
Shadowland | Peter Straub | null | The story concerns two young boys, Tom Flanagan and Del Nightingale, who spend a summer with Del's uncle Coleman, who is one of the foremost magicians in the world. As time passes, however, Tom begins to suspect that what Coleman is teaching is not a series of harmless tricks, but is in fact real sorcery. |
La porte étroite | André Gide | null | The story is set in a French north coast town. Jerome and Alissa as 10-11 year olds make an implicit commitment of undying affection for each other. However, in reaction to her mother's infidelities and from an intense religious impression, Alissa develops a rejection of human love. Nevertheless, she is happy to enjoy Jerome's intellectual discussions and keeps him hanging on to her affection. Jerome thereby fails to recognise the real love of Alissa's sister Juliette who ends up making a fairly unsatisfactory marriage with someone else. Jerome believes he has a commitment of marriage from Alissa, but she gradually withdraws into greater religious intensity, rejects Jerome and refuses to see him. Eventually she dies from an unknown malady which is almost self-imposed. de:Die enge Pforte fr:La Porte étroite ja:狭き門 no:Den trange port pt:A porta estreita zh:窄門 |
The Case of the Stick | null | null | Damião (pronounced Dan-mi-an-o) is a young man who escapes from a seminary. Afraid that if he returns home, his father will force him to return to the seminary, he goes to ask help of Miss Rita (pronounced He-tah), a window and the lover of Damião's godfather, João Carneiro (pronounced Jo-an-o Ca-he-ney-roh). She agrees to help him, and he hides in her house, where she has a number of girls working for her. When Rita asks why he does not speak with his father, Damião tells Rita that his father does not listen to anyone. Rita suggests that he seek help from his godfather. At first, Damião resists, but eventually agrees, and João Carneiro is sent for. While they wait for João Carneiro at Rita's house, Damião tells jokes to the girls. One of them, a slave named Lucrécia (Lou-kreh-see-a), is distracted from her work. Seeing this, Rita threatens to beat Lucrécia with a stick, the usual punishment, if she does not finish her work. Feeling sympathy for the small scarred black girl Damião decides that if Lucrécia does not finish the work, he will try to protect her, but says nothing. João Carneiro arrives and Rita tries to convince him to intercede with Damião's father. She is insistent, and sends him off. Then she tells Damião to go eat dinner. Some local women come to Rita's house for coffee and conversation. After the women leave later in the day, Damião becomes increasingly nervous and, certain that if he remains at Rita's house, his father will find him and send him back to the seminary, decides to try to escape. Clad in a chasuble, he begs Rita for some plain clothing. Laughing, she tells him to relax, and that everything will turn out well. But soon a note from João arrives with the news that the father is unconvinced. Damião sees that Rita is his only hope. She takes a pen and paper and writes a note to João telling him that if he cannot convince the father, they will never see each other again. Then Rita goes to the collect the work from the girls. Seeing that Lucrécia has not finished her work, she takes Lucrécia by the ear and tells Damião to fetch the stick. He is torn between his desire to help the girl, who begs him for help, and his desire to escape the seminary, he feels remose, but gives Miss Rita the stick. pt:O Caso da Vara |
Métaphysique des tubes | Amélie Nothomb | 2,000 | The novel, apparently autobiographical, describes the world as discovered and seen by a three-year old child born in Japan to a Belgian family. It encompasses the themes of self-awareness, language acquisition, bilingualism, and developmental psychology. The Japanese believe that until the age of three, children, whether Japanese or not, are gods, each one an okosama, or "lord child." On their third birthday, they fall from grace and join the rest of the human race. The narrator of the novel has spent the first two and a half years of her life in a nearly vegetative state until she is jolted out of her plant-like, tube-like state, and gains a peculiar but complete awareness of the world around her. Most fascinating to the narrator is the discovery of water in oceans, seas, pools, puddles, streams, ponds, and, rain - one meaning of the Japanese character for her name and a symbol of her amphibious life. es:Metafísica de los tubos fr:Métaphysique des tubes nl:Métaphysique des tubes |
Irish Tiger | Andrew Greeley | 2,008 | ~Plot outline description~ --> <!-- |
Letters from Hell | Valdemar Adolph Thisted | null | The narrator, Otto, who has died in the prime of life, relates the torments and regrets that are a consequence of the self-centred and dissipated life he led in the world. He also describes the fates of other lost souls who inhabit Hell, concluding with the arrival in Hell of the narrator's mother. Some of the book's descriptions of Hell are reminiscent of Emanuel Swedenborg's Heaven and Hell. |
Bridge of Sighs | Richard Russo | 2,007 | The novel is set in small, fictional town in upstate New York called Thomaston. Like Empire Falls, the town is quickly deteriorating. The story is about Louis Charles ("Lucy") Lynch, his family, his wife, and his best friend. Sixty-year-old Lou Lynch has cheerfully spent his entire life in Thomaston, New York, married to the same woman, Sarah. He is the proprietor of three convenience stores. |
Mrs. God | Peter Straub | null | The novel concerns a professor who is researching the poems of his grandmother at an English manor. He finds himself drawn into a nightmarish landscape where he is pursued by dead babies. |
Free Baseball | null | null | The main character is Felix in story Free Baseball, by Sue Corbett. This adventure is about a boy and his love for the game of baseball. Felix is a Cuban boy who crossed borders by boat with his mother at the age of 3. When Felix enters a radio contest and wins two tickets to a local minor league baseball game his journey begins . Felix gets supposedly separated from his babysitter who took him to the game and decides to stowaway on the opposing team bus. He did this because the miracle, the opposing team, had a Cuban player on the team that might be able to tell Felix about his father, a famous baseball player on the Cuban national team that stayed back from crossing borders. Felix called his mom and told her he was staying over a friend’s house. Felix pretends to be the bat boy. |
Back to the Stone Age | Edgar Rice Burroughs | 1,937 | The story reveals the fate of Wilhelm von Horst, the lost member of the previous book’s outer world expedition to Pellucidar, which had been led by Jason Gridley and Tarzan to rescue Pellucidarian emperor David Innes from the Korsars. The action begins by recapping the incident in which Gridley, von Horst, and Tarzan’s Waziri warriors, led by Muviro, are caught up in and separated by a horde of saber-toothed tigers’ cooperative hunt. Now on his own, von Horst quickly becomes lost, links up again with the Waziri by accident, and gets lost again when he foolishly goes out hunting on his own. In the most powerful sequence in the book, von Horst becomes prey himself when a Trodon, or pterodactyl, carries him off to its nest in the crater of a dead volcano. The explorer is left poisoned and paralyzed together with other victims, all of them intended as a living larder to feed the creature’s young as its eggs hatch. Von Horst passes the time by getting to know a fellow paralytic, the native warrior Dangar of Sari, a member-tribe of Innes' empire. From him, the outer worlder gradually learns the Pellucidarian language. Fortunately for von Horst his clothing prevented him from receiving a full dose of venom, and he recovers from his paralysis in time to save Dangar from the next hatchling. Shooting the immature trodon, he makes a long strap from its hide, lasoos the parent on its next return, and after allowing it to fly off just past the lip of the crater, shoots it in turn. After securing the free end of the strap to the still paralyzed Dangar, he uses it to climb out of the trap, pulling his companion up after him. In the forest at the foot of the mountain he constructs a treehouse to serve them as a secure base while Dangar recovers. Subsequently von Horst rescues another native, Skruf of Basti, from a hyaenodon; Skruf is on a quest to kill a tarag (saber-toothed tiger), the head of which he needs as bride-price to secure a mate. As he knows the country, von Horst and Dangar accompany him once the latter has recovered. In due course they encounter the desired beast, from which Skruf hides in fear while his companions make the kill. Despite his cowardice Skruf takes the trophy, and the three continue on to the cliff-village of Basti. But once there he turns traitor, not only claiming the deed as his own but betraying his companions into slavery. Von Horst and Dangar are put to work with other slaves of Basti digging new caves into the cliff. Von Horst becomes enamored of La-ja of Lo-har, a fellow captive, and in defending her touches off a general slave revolt. He leads all the slaves to freedom, whereupon they separate to return to their native tribes. Von Horst elects to accompany La-ja to Lo-har rather than continue to Sari with Dangar. The plot of the novel continues to unfold in its pattern of liberty, capture and escape, with the protagonist’s goal imperceptibly altering from rejoining his outer world comrades to romance with La-ja. The feelings of the principals, while plain to the reader, are masked from their objects of affection by culturally-based misunderstanding, as is typical of Burroughs’ novels, postponing the ultimate resolution nearly to the end of the story. The initial path of von Horst and La-ja takes them through the ill-reputed Forest of Death. Within the forest are the labyrinthine caves of the Gorbuses, cannibalistic albinos who, in an eerie touch, are intimated to be murderers from the outer world, reincarnated in Pellucidar and consigned to this place as punishment. This is Burroughs’ sole nod toward the notion that his interior world might relate in any way to the concept of a subterranean hell. Falling prey to the Gorbuses, von Horst and La-ja are soon joined as captives by the Bastians Skruf and Frug, who have been trailing them. The four set aside their differences to effect their escape, but afterwards the Bastians betray the others’ trust, kidnapping La-ja. Von Horst pursues the kidnappers, incidentally coming to the aid of a tandor (mammoth) wounded by sharp stakes of bamboo, which, Androcles-like, he removes. He overtakes his quarry, but before matters can be settled, he and Frug are taken by the Mammoth Men, a native tribe utilizing mammoths as mounts; Skruf and La-ja elude the interlopers. Boarded on the family of a tribal warrior, von Horst once again commences plotting to escape, aided by dissatisfied locals, whose support he enlists, and the friendship of Thorek, a member of the tribe who had shared his earlier captivity in Basti. His opportunity comes when he and other prisoners are pitted against each other, sabertooths, and mammoths in a gladiatorial-like contest. One of the mammoths proves to be Old White, the beast he had aided previously; joining forces, they survive the melee and make a successful break for freedom. Once again von Horst happens on Skruf and La-ja, intervening as they are attacked by the Ganaks, or bison-men. While able to kill a few of these he ultimately falls captive to them, this time in the company of La-ja. Their escape is aided by Old White, after which they are separated again, but von Horst falls in with another from La-ja’s country, Gaj, a fellow former-prisoner of the Mammoth Men. Gaj’s guidance enables him to follow La-ja to Lo-har. There he saves her from Gaz, an unwanted suitor, and he and La-ja finally acknowledge their love for each other. Their union results in him becoming chief of Lo-har, his new bride being the daughter of the Lo-harians’ former ruler Brun, who is absent searching for her. The remaining plot threads are tied up by the arrival of a party from Sari led by David Innes, accompanied by Brun. Innes, it turns out, has taken up the pledge of Jason Gridley at the end of the previous book to rescue the missing von Horst—Gridley himself, anti-climatically, is revealed to have let himself be persuaded by other members of the expedition from the outer world to leave Pellucidar with them instead. Von Horst declines Innes’ offer take him back to Sari and what passes for civilization in the inner world, electing to remain in Lo-har with La-ja. |
The Face in the Abyss | A. Merritt | 1,931 | The novel concerns American mining engineer Nicholas Graydon. While searching for lost Inca treasure in South America, he encounters Suarra, handmaiden to the Snake Mother of Yu-Atlanchi. She leads Graydon to an abyss where Nimir, the Lord of Evil is imprisoned in a face of gold. While Graydon's companions are transformed by the face into globules of gold on account of their greed, he is saved by Suarra and the Snake Mother whom he joins in their struggle against Nimir. |
Honorine | Honoré de Balzac | null | Maurice is a Consul at Genes, a Mediterranean town where he has married Onorina the daughter of the only wealthy man into the town, although it seems he was originally extremely reluctant to get married. They are having a dinner party with guests from Paris, and Maurice recounts some of his history. When Maurice was young, he became secretary to Count Octave. The count was very good to him but seemed very sad and mysterious as if hiding some past misfortune. Eventually Maurice discovers that he had been married, but his wife had left him. She, Honorine, had been brought up with him from a very early age, having been adopted by his parents, and they were devoted to each other. They had become married almost as a matter of course. However after a few months she just disappeared. Octave then discovered she had gone off with an adventurer who had abandoned her, pregnant. She had the child but lived full of remorse, and resisted all attempts of Octave to get in touch with her. Octave is still devoted to her and secretly helps her in her business of flower arranging. However she still refuses to have anything to do with him. The Count therefore gets Maurice to act as a go between, arranging for him to occupy the house next to her, and pose as a misogynistic flower breeder. Eventually Maurice makes contact and indirectly puts the Count’s case. Honorine is still too overcome with remorse and shame. Eventually however she agrees to see the count, and then goes back to live with him. Maurice has to leave the Count’s company because of the part he played and that is why he became consul. Two years after, he heard of the death of Honorine, and soon after was visited by the Count who had grown old before his time, and who died shortly after departing. The story is full of discussion about the meaning of relationships and Maurice acts throughout as interpreter for the two parties. There is also the implication that he had in fact fallen in love with Honorine himself, which is why he avoided marriage initially. |
La Fausse Maîtresse | Honoré de Balzac | null | Clemintine is a descendent of rich and noble families whose wealth has been dissipated. She married Count Laginski a Polish immigrant who is quite prosperous. They are a happy couple well set up in an attractive house. Clementine discovers that Adam has a friend who is acting as steward and general manager, a handsome young man who has kept in the background. Adam and Thaddee had served together in the army and were close friends, although Thaddee was poor, but very capable. He was devoted to Adam, and had volunteered to look after Adam’s affairs since he was worried that Adam and his wife would dissipate their fortune. Clementine insists that Thaddee join in their various social activities and finds him attractive. Thaddee falls in love with Clementine, but his devotion to his friends puts him in complete anguish. When Clementine tries to find out more about him, he invents a secret mistress who is a girl in the circus called Malaga. Having done this, he has to make the story true, and tracks down Malaga and sets her up as if he were his mistress. However he does no more apart from paying for her keep, but upsets Clementine by carrying on with her and occasionally having to borrow money. In time, Thaddee believes Clementine is capable of looking after the finances, and claims that to get Malaga out of his mind he is leaving Paris and going into the army again. Nothing more is heard of him, until one night, when an infamous rake tries to seduce Clementine, taking her away in his carriage. A figure grabs Clementine and sets her on the right track in her own carriage. It is Paz, who has never left Paris but has kept in the background looking after his friends. It is revealed that the invention of Malaga as his imaginary mistress was a ploy to discourage Clementine from taking an interest in him, thereby preserving his friendship with Adam. It is not quite clear whether Adam had had an affair with Malaga which Paz had to keep quiet. |
Sea Change | Robert B. Parker | 2,006 | In his grittiest investigation to date, Jesse Stone hunts for the killer of a woman whose body washes up on shore. The woman turns out to be Florence “Flo” Horvath, of Miami, Florida. She was pushed off a boat, then run over; knocking her unconscious and causing her to drown. The investigation comes to a halt shortly after she is identified, until Jesse acquires a tape of Flo having sex with two men at the same time. He also discovers that Flo rented a boat before she was murdered, but that it was returned to the wrong place. During the investigation he is led to the yacht “The Lady Jane.” He questions the yacht owner Harrison Darnell, and the other occupants, who of course all deny knowing Flo. In an attempt to get more information, Jesse sneaks onto the yacht and finds a stack of sex tapes. He takes one and reviews it, and although it is sexual in nature, he does not find anything criminal. Later seventeen-year old Cathleen Holten comes to Chief Stone with accusations of rape. She claims that a man took her onto his yacht, The Lady Jane, forces her to strip for his friends and then rapes her in his cabin. Although, Jesse does not believe her, and the rape later proves to be consensual sex, he uses this opportunity to get a warrant and search the yacht. Having been there before he goes right for the video tapes and confiscates them. While reviewing them with Molly, she recognizes her daughter’s fifteen year old friend as one of the sex partners. Although Jesse now has the yacht owner for statutory rape, he continues to investigate, determined to get the murderer. However in the end he does have him and another man arrested for statutory rape. He next finds one of the men in Flo’s sex tape and discovers that the men in the tape were brothers. He reveals that it was Flo’s sisters that made the tape. He next interviews Flo’s sisters, twins Claudia and Corless. They tell Jesse they learned of Flo’s death from their friend Kimmie Young. They also tell him that they made the tape to make Flo’s boyfriend, Harrison Darnell, jealous. Jesse strikes up a partnership with Miami detective Kelly Cruz, and has her interview Flo’s parents and Kimmie. Although Flo’s parents seem harmless, Kimmie tells Cruz that she had no idea that Flo was dead. She later tells Cruz that Flo’s father raped her when she was fifteen and routinely had sex with all three of his daughters. Kelly Cruz also interviews Darnell’s private pilot and discovers that he flew her to Boston a few days before her murder. Finally Chief Stone discovers through Flo’s father's E-ZPass that he drove to Boston the week that she was murdered, although he denies the trip. After discovering this, Jesse flies down to Miami where he and Kelly Cruz confront him about the trip. His wife, in a drunken rage, accuses him of murdering their daughter and he confesses. Jesse later speculates that Flo’s father had her rent a boat, pushed her off of it, then returns it to the first place he sees, explaining why it had been returned to the wrong place. He responds that he did indeed argue with her on the boat, and push her off, but that she simply drowned unbeknownst to him. After he discovered she had died he denied the trip all together fearing that he would be accused of murder. Jesse later asks the twins why they said they learned of Flo’s death from Kimmie, because had they not said that he may have never suspected their father. They claim to not remember saying Kimmie. Jesse speculates that they may have subconsciously wanted their father caught. The twins also reveal that the sex tape was not made for Flo’s boyfriend, but for their father. It is this tape that causes him to fly into a jealous rage and drive up to Boston to murder her. Having all seen the tape, it causes the twins and their mother all to suspect that he murdered Flo. |
Maigret in Exile | Georges Simenon | null | The mysterious moves of bureaucrats have exiled Maigret to a small town in the coast of Normandy where it rains all the time and there is nothing to do except for playing billiards in the local pub and sniff the gel that the local inspector lathers into his hair. Then an old woman shows up with a story about a body in the house of a judge in the fishing village of l'Aiguillon and things get interesting. A young woman with a mysterious ailment (something to do with being over-sexed but Simenon never explains what exactly is wrong with her), a young man with a temper, a hotel waitress with a secret, and an ex-judge with taste and style. |
Khasakkinte Itihasam | O. V. Vijayan | null | Khasakkinte Itihasam does not have a single narrative plot. It is crafted in the form of the spiritual journey of an under-graduate dropout, Ravi, plagued by the guilt of an illicit affair he had with his stepmother. Ravi abandons a bright academic career and a research offer from Princeton University. He deserts his lover Padma and leaves on a long pilgrimage, which finally brings him to the small hamlet of Khasak near Palakkad. At Khasak, he starts a single-teacher school as part of the District Board’s education initiative. The novel begins with Ravi’s arrival at Khasak and his encounters with its people, Allappicha Mollakka, Appukkili, Shivaraman Nair, Madhavan Nair, Kuppuvachan, Maimoona, Khaliyar, Aliyar, and the students of his school like Kunhamina, Karuvu, Unipparadi, Kochusuhara and others. After some years, his lover Padma calls on him and Ravi decides to leave Khasak. He commits suicide through snakebite while waiting for a bus at Koomankavu. The novel has no story-line per se. It recounts the numerous encounters of Khasak from a spiritual and philosophical bent of mind. Through these encounters, Vijayan narrates numerous stories, myths and superstitions cherished in Khasak. He places them in opposition to the scientific and rational world outside, which is now making inroads into the hamlet through Ravi's single-teacher school. The irony of the interface between these two worlds occupies a substantial space in the novel. Through the myths and stories, Vijayan also explores similar encounters of the past recounted by the people of Khasak, enabling him to have a distinctly unique view of cultural encounters across time and space. |
Resident Evil: City of the Dead | S. D. Perry | 1,999 | The narrative follows Leon S. Kennedy fighting the mutated William Birkin for most of the story, while Claire Redfield fights the Tyrant. The book downplays most of the puzzle-solving elements from the game and focuses more on the interaction between the characters. There are also added scenes in the book involving the supporting characters such as Ada Wong, Annette Birkin, Sherry Birkin, and Police Chief Brian Irons. The ending is slightly altered, in which the survivors of S.T.A.R.S. Exeter, characters featured in Caliban Cove (including Rebecca Chambers, pick up Leon, Claire, and Sherry, as opposed to the "walk into the sunrise" ending featured in the game. Due to City of the Dead being written before the release of Resident Evil 3: Nemesis the book has some contradictions. For example, in the beginning of the book, Jill Valentine leaves Raccoon with Chris Redfield and Barry Burton to infiltrate Umbrella's HQ in Europe. In the game series, however, Jill has to fight her way out of Raccoon, Chris has already skipped town, and Barry comes back to help Jill escape at the end. fa:رزیدنت ایول: شهر مرده pt:City of the Dead it:La città dei morti (Perry) |
The Twelve and the Genii | Pauline Clarke | 1,962 | Max is an eight-year-old boy whose family has just moved into an old farmhouse in Yorkshire. He discovers some old toy soldiers in the attic and is surprised and delighted to find that they come to life. The soldiers, known as the Twelves, or the Young Men, have different personalities; they are brave, intelligent and very independent, not to mention argumentative. They adopt Max as one of their Genii, or protective spirits, and he begins to spend most of his time watching and thinking about them. He learns from the local parson that they once belonged to the Brontës, who wrote stories about their adventures. When his older sister Jane discovers the secret, she becomes as keen on the soldiers as Max is. The local newspaper publishes a letter about the Brontë wooden soldiers, from an American professor offering £5,000 (at the time a small fortune) to anyone who finds them. Max and Jane's older brother Philip believes the Morley soldiers may be the Brontë ones, and impulsively writes to the professor about them — only to deeply regret his act when he too discovers the truth. The soldiers learn that they are in danger of being taken to America and disappear in the night. The children have some anxious moments before they discover that the soldiers have determined to return to their original home in Haworth, now a museum dedicated to the Brontës. Their march across the countryside is fraught with peril, but they finally reach safe haven with the protection of the Genii. |
Street of Shadows | Michael Reaves | null | The story features characters from the Medstar Duology, which was published in 2004. <!- |
Harris and Me | Gary Paulsen | 1,993 | Harris and Me is a story, told in the first person, about a boy whose alcoholic parents send him away to spend each summer with family relatives. One summer he is sent to stay with the Larsons, farmers in a remote area of Minnesota. The story focuses around the humorous events of a city boy learning to live on a farm with Harris. According to the author, Gary Paulsen, this story is based on his own life. |
Millennium Falcon | James Luceno | null | Much of the novel delves into the long and exciting history of the Millennium Falcon, as it had been called many names and had many intriguing adventures, from the time it came off the assembly line almost like a wild animal, to when it became the magnet in attracting the adventures of the great Han Solo. In 19 BBY, during the Clone Wars' Battle of Coruscant, the Falcon had undergone the name of Stellar Envoy under the captaining of Tobb Jadak and his copilot Reeze Duurmun. Jadak and Duurmun had acted as conspirators as part of a plot to overthrow Supreme Chancellor Palpatine as leader of the Old Republic. Their mission failed when an erratic hyperspace jump landed the Envoy into an accident that killed Duurmun and landed Jadak in a coma that lasted for more than sixty years. By 43 ABY, two years after the end of the Second Galactic Civil War, Jadak awakens, having barely aged since his time in the coma. And with the help of ne'er-do-well Flitcher Poste, they work their way forward in time from 19 BBY in order to find out what happened to the Stellar Envoy. Meanwhile, the Solos discover a mysterious object aboard the Millennium Falcon, and they decide to go on a fact-finding mission in order to discern the Falcons origins. They work their way back in time from when Lando Calrissian first owned the ship until they eventually cross paths with Jadak and Poste. Jadak reveals that the mysterious object in the Solos' hands will lead them to a treasure on the world of Tandun III, which was meant to overthrow Palpatine. On their heels is Lestra Oxic, a mysterious businessman who wants the treasure. When all of these parties arrive on Tandun III, they find that the planet has undergone an apocalypse thanks to the Yuuzhan Vong invasion that was wrought upon it years earlier. They discover the treasure, but it turns out to be a fake. Oxic then hires Jadak and Poste to help him find the real treasure just as the Solos escape with the other parties from a collapsing Tandun III. They all make it out in time and the planet explodes with no one dead. The novel ends with Luke Skywalker calling the Solos to come back to Coruscant because Galactic Alliance Chief of State Natasi Daala had Luke arrested for lack of action in defeating Jacen Solo in the first place during the Second Galactic Civil War. And so the Millennium Falcon flies back to Coruscant, another journey for the centenarian freighter. |
Bad Business | Robert B. Parker | 2,004 | Spenser is hired by a wealthy woman, Marlene Cowley, to gather evidence on her husband's infidelity. While following the husband, Trent, one evening and finding him meeting his mistress, Spenser discovers that she too is being followed by another private detective. Things get even stranger when Spenser discovers that Marlene Cowley is also being followed by a third P.I. Eventually, Trent winds up dead as Spenser is waiting to follow him outside his place of business, Kinergy, where he is CFO. The investigation picks up steam as Spenser tries to solve the murder. More people end up dead and the other two P.I.s Spenser ran into disappear. The story involves corporate corruption and an accounting scandal that only a detective as determined as Spenser can unravel. Several Spenser-verse reappearing characters are featured in this book including Hawk, Vinnie Morris, Susan Silverman and Pearl, their dog. |
The Teahouse of the August Moon | John Patrick | null | In the aftermath of World War II, the island of Okinawa was occupied by the American military. Captain Fisby, a young army officer, is transferred to a tiny Okinawa island town called Tobiki by his Commanding Officer Colonel Purdy. Fisby is tasked with the job of implementing “Plan B”. The plan calls for teaching the natives all things American and the first step for Capt. Fisby is to establish a democratically elected Mayor, Chief of Agriculture, Chief of Police and President of the Ladies League for Democratic Action. Plan “B” also calls for the building of a schoolhouse (Pentagon shaped), democracy lessons and establishing capitalism through means left up to the good Captain’s judgment. A local Tobiki native, Sakini by name, is assigned to act as Fisby’s interpreter. Sakini, a Puck-like character, attempts to acquaint Fisby with the local customs as well as guide the audiences through the play providing both historical and cultural framework through his asides and monologues. After receiving many gifts from the villagers, including a geisha named Lotus Blossom, Fisby tries to find local products on which to build his capitalist endeavor. He is discouraged when the villagers can’t find a market for their handmade products, items like getas (wooden sandals), lacquered bowls, cricket cages, and casas (straw hats). He is also frustrated when the newly elected democratic government votes to build a teahouse for geisha Lotus Blossom with the building supplies designated for his Pentagon shaped school. Through the villagers, Captain Fisby starts to see the beauty of preserving their culture and a slower way of life. He agrees to build the teahouse (Chaya) and even lands on a moneymaking product – sweet potato brandy. Soon the Cooperative Brewing Company of Tobiki is churning out liquor by the gallon and selling it to all the neighboring military bases. The gala opening of the teahouse is the moment when Colonel Purdy decides to make his progress inspection and finds Captain Fisby serenading the villagers in his bathrobe with a rendition of She’ll be Coming Round the Mountain. He is in danger of court martial and reprimanded for misusing government supplies, selling liquor and "not turning the villagers into Americans fast enough". Col. Purdy orders the destruction of all the stills and the teahouse. Sakini and the villagers outsmart the Colonel and only pretend to destroy everything, instead they hide everything “quick as the dickens”. Their foresight proves fortuitous when Purdy learns that Congress is about to use Tobiki as a model for the success of Plan B. The villagers rebuild the teahouse on stage, and even offer a cup to Col. Purdy in a gesture of goodwill. Like all great comedies, in the end, all is forgiven. The village returns to the rich life they once knew (plus a teahouse, export industry and geishas), Fisby is touted a hero, and Purdy, we hope will get a brigadier general’s star for his wife Grace after all. Teahouse of the August Moon is a comedy whose laughs come from the inability of the American characters to understand Tobiki culture and tradition. However, it is not just a story of culture clash. Through the character of Fisby we see acceptance and the beauty of making peace with oneself somewhere between ambition and limitations. We also learn, like Fisby, that sometimes the better life is had by taking a “step backward in the right direction.” |
Under the Dome | Stephen King | 2,009 | Shortly before noon on Saturday October 21 of an unspecified year after 2012 (evident by mention of a faded bumper sticker for Barack Obama's successful 2012 re-election campaign), the small Maine town of Chester's Mill is abruptly and gruesomely separated from the outside world by an invisible, semipermeable barrier of unknown origin. The immediate appearance of the barrier causes a number of injuries and fatalities, and traps former Army Captain Dale "Barbie" Barbara—who is trying to leave Chester's Mill—inside the town. Police Chief Howard "Duke" Perkins is soon killed when his pacemaker explodes after getting too close to the barrier. This removes the last significant opposition to James "Big Jim" Rennie, used car salesman and the town's Second Selectman. Big Jim exerts significant influence within Chester's Mill, and seizes the opportunity to use the barrier as part of a power play to take over the town. Big Jim appoints one of his cronies, the incompetent Peter Randolph, as the new Police Chief. He also begins expanding the ranks of the Chester's Mill Police with questionable candidates, including his son, Junior Rennie, and his friends. Junior has frequent migraines caused by an as-yet undiscovered brain tumor which has also begun affecting his mental state; unbeknownst to Big Jim, Junior was in the process of beating and strangling a girl to death when the barrier appeared, and has killed another girl by the time Rennie places him on the police force. Elsewhere in Chester's Mill, Julia Shumway, the editor of the local newspaper, is phoned by Colonel James O. Cox, who has her carry a message to Barbie to contact him. When he does, Cox requests that Barbie act as the government's liaison in an effort to bring down the Dome, as it has come to be known. Because of Barbie's talents as a former bomb factory hunter, Cox gives him the task of locating the source, which is believed to be inside the Dome. Cox is also able to foresee the small town political ramifications of such a situation. By virtue of a Presidential order, Barbie is reinstated in the US Military and promoted to full Colonel. Barbie is also presented with a decree granting him authority over the township. However, smalltown politics being what they are, this action is not well received by Big Jim and his misguided band of renegade police officers. As Big Jim covertly encourages and orchestrates unease and panic among the town to build up his grab for power, Barbie, Julia and a number of other townspeople attempt to stop things from spiraling out of control. After crossing Rennie's path on several occasions, Barbie is framed and arrested for 4 murders. He is accused of killing Reverend Lester Coggins, who laundered money for Rennie's large-scale methamphetamine operation, and Duke's widow Brenda Perkins, who were both murdered by Big Jim. While Barbie is in jail other residents track the source of the Dome to an abandoned farm, and the device is strongly indicated to be extraterrestrial in origin. The restrictions issued by Rennie become more severe and the police force grows more abusive, galvanizing the town and eventually leading some residents to break Barbie out of jail, killing Junior seconds before he can murder Barbie. The semi-organized resistance flees to the abandoned farm, where multiple people touch the strange object and experience visions. They not only conclude that the device was put in place by extraterrestrial "leatherheads" (so named for their appearance), but that specifically they are juveniles who have set up the Dome as a cruel form of entertainment, a sort of ant farm used to capture sentient beings and allow their captors to view everything that happens inside. On an organized "Visitors Day"—when people outside the Dome can meet at its edge with people within—Big Jim sends Randolph and a detachment of police to take back control of his former meth operation from Phil "Chef" Bushey, who is stopping Rennie from covering up the operation as well as hoarding the more than four-hundred tanks of propane stored there. Many are killed in the ensuing gunfight and Chef, who is mortally wounded, detonates a plastic explosive device he has placed in the meth production facility. The ensuing explosion, combined with the propane and meth-making chemicals, unleashes a toxic firestorm. More than a thousand of the town's residents are quickly incinerated on national television, leaving alive only the twenty-six survivors at the abandoned barn, an orphaned farm boy hiding in a potato cellar, and Big Jim and his informal aide-de-camp, Carter Thibodeau, in the town's fallout shelter. Big Jim and Thibodeau eventually turn on each other; Big Jim stabs and disembowels Thibodeau, only to die several hours later when hallucinations of the dead send him fleeing into the now-toxic environment outside. The survivors at the barn begin to slowly asphyxiate, despite efforts by the Army to force clean air through the walls of the Dome. Barbie and Julia go to the control device to beg their captors to release them. Julia is able to make contact with a single female leatherhead, no longer accompanied by her friends and thus not caught up in their peer pressure. After repeatedly expressing that they are real sentient beings with real "little lives", and by sharing a painful childhood incident with the adolescent alien, Julia convinces the leatherhead to have pity on them. The Dome raises up slowly and vanishes, allowing the toxic air to dissipate and finally freeing the town of Chester's Mill. |
The Promise of Eden | Eric Durchholz | 1,999 | The Promise of Eden tells the story of a young boy, Gregory Coleman, who lives in the small town of New Harmony, Indiana. He is raised less by his largely indifferent parents than by a seemingly kind spirit who masquerades as his imaginary playmate named Anna. Anna teaches Gregory about life and love, while secretly preparing him for a journey she needs him to take to a mysterious world called Ibscaca. Anna is further aided by Joseph, an enigmatic hermit with mysterious ties to the small town. At first Gregory accepts Anna at face value, but as Gregory ages and matures he begins to question Anna's true nature and motives. The fates of both Gregory and Anna are further complicated by the malevolent intentions of Sylvie, a 200-year-old poltergeist which also inhabits the Coleman household. Sylvie is a decidedly evil entity with aspirations of becoming a goddess. While Anna and Sylvie often find it necessary to work together, their relationship is not one of friendship and trust, and their ultimate goals are not the same. As Gregory continues to grow up, he begins to devote less time to Anna. He also begins to develop and explore his sexuality, beginning a relationship with a boy his own age named Jason. Anna, who at first encouraged Gregory to develop other friendships outside their own, begins to see that his new social life is jeopardizing her plans. When Anna's true plans for Gregory are finally revealed, the decisions he makes have a dramatic impact on both Gregory's own world, and that of Ibscaca. |
The Weakness | K. A. Applegate | 1,999 | During a failed attempt to assassinate Visser Three using cheetah morphs, the Animorphs learn that the Council of Thirteen has sent an inspector to check up on the progress of the invasion of Earth. Seeing an opportunity to discredit Visser Three politically, Rachel devises a plan to terrorize local businesses run by known Controllers. With Jake out of town, Rachel is temporarily elected to lead the Animorphs, much to Marco's disdain. The Animorphs spend the day putting Rachel's plan into action. Their first raid occurs at a news station, where a tour is being given to a group of people. An elderly man is shocked by the sight of wild animals destroying the news room and falls down. During a break in the operation, Rachel and Cassie see a news report covering the first raid and learn that the man who fell down has died of a heart attack. Rachel pushes the Animorphs for one last raid at the Community Center, and opts to go in with everyone morphed as polar bears. The others are hesitant since they have lost the element of surprise and the Community Center is a Yeerk stronghold, but Rachel remains insistent. The raid goes badly after Visser Three and the inspector, a Garatron-Controller, join the fight. Having all morphed the same animal and therefore having no versatility, the Animorphs are forced to withdraw, but Cassie is captured before she can get out. The remaining Animorphs return to Cassie's barn. Rachel, devastated by her leadership failure, attempts to pass the responsibility to Marco, who berates her for her show-off attitude seen throughout the day. Marco declines, saying that any attempt to rescue Cassie is Rachel's responsibility. With less than an hour to save Cassie, Rachel comes up with a plan to get them into the Yeerk pool. Rachel, Marco, and a human-morphed Tobias and Ax assemble at Morgan Airport, where they jump the fence and hijack a private jet belonging to Phillip Morris USA. After putting the plane on a collision course with a vacant building that is known to harbor a large entrance for Bug fighters to access the Yeerk pool complex, the Animorphs bail out of the plane in their various bird-of-prey morphs and fly into the Yeerk pool. Rachel is the first to arrive, where she and Cassie are forced to engage several Hork-Bajir-Controllers. The fighting is quickly halted by Visser Three, however, when he challenges the Garatron-inspector to defeat the "Andalite Bandits" for himself. The inspector reluctantly accepts and engages Rachel and Cassie. They struggle to hold their ground against the incredibly fast Garatron-Controller until Tobias and Ax arrive, carrying Marco in cobra-morph. Marco manages to fatally bite the inspector and the Animorphs make their escape. Visser Three makes no effort to stop them and mocks the inspector as he slowly dies from the venom. Rachel visits the family of the man who died during the raid on the news station. After offering her condolences, she quickly leaves and finds Jake waiting for her in the driveway. Rachel tells Jake that she "screwed up", but Jake retorts that she didn't get anyone killed and that is all that matters. Rachel tells Jake to never go away again. |
Cats of the Clans | Erin Hunter | 2,008 | In the introductory chapter, "Three Lost Travelers", the kits Mosskit, Adderkit and Blossomkit have somehow walked from StarClan to Rock's home under the earth. Rock tells the three that they did not live long enough to learn about their Clanmates. He says he will answer their questions "about the cats you left behind." Rock describes himself as "the keeper of the world beneath the one your former Clanmates walk." The remainder of the book consists of Rock's stories about each Clan, and various cats (or a group of cats) within the Clan. Rock describes major events in the cat's life, and often comments on why the cat is special or acted as he/she did. There are also stories about a few cats from the Tribe of Rushing Water, SkyClan, and BloodClan in addition to some loners and kittypets. Although Rock, as the narrator, claims neutrality, the book does not treat each Clan equally, devoting more space to ThunderClan cats and being highly critical of one of the other Clans. This is to be expected since readers get to know more of the ThunderClan cats from series than those from the other Clans. |
Grey Star the Wizard | Joe Dever | 1,985 | The series plays for the most part at the tip of south-eastern Magnamund, in the land then known as the Shadakine Empire. A tyrant called Shasarak the Wytch-King has subjugated the people and with the help of seven Shadaki Wytches is ruling with an iron fist. The Shianti, members of a mystical race, wish to help, but because of their exile on the Isle of Lorn they are forced to remain neutral in the conflict. However, one night the situation changes when a storm wrecks a vessel near the island, with a human infant being the only survivor. In this child the Shianti see a chance to help the people of Magnamund without breaking their vow to Ishir, and they raise the boy in the arts of magic, giving him the name Grey Star: the star as the symbol of hope, and grey for the white-grey streak the boy has in his dark hair. Once his training is complete, Grey Star is sent out to retrieve the Moonstone, an ancient Shianti artefact, from the Daziarn, for only with its power can Shasarak be defeated. The first book of the series details Grey Stars travel to the Shadakine Empire and his desperate attempt to find a guide to lead him to the Shadow Gate. |
Windfall | Desmond Bagley | 1,982 | This is a novel about the source of a mysterious 40 million pound legacy. The main benefactor was a small college in the remote Rift Valley in Kenya. The heirs were the South African man Dirk Hendricks and the unknown, recently discovered, descendant, Henry Hendrix from California. Max Stafford, security consultant, is suspicious of Henry being an impostor and the violent reaction to his arrival in Kenya points to a sinister and far-reaching conspiracy far beyond mere greed. |
Five Get into a Fix | Enid Blyton | 1,958 | The novel begins with the four and their dog Timmy, having the worst Christmas holidays ever with coughs and colds at Julian’s house. To recover Julian’s mother sends them to a farmhouse, in the Welsh mountains during the last week of their holiday. The Five had nearly reached their destination, when they get lost in the dark and drive up a dead-end driveway leading to a large and strange old building called "Old Towers" on the top of the lonely hill. They think of asking for directions but seeing the building and grounds being protected by huge gates and snarling dogs, they hurriedly depart. However, while going down the slope their car feels heavier than before, as if someone/something is pulling it back. Finally, they reach the farmhouse where they meet Mrs. Jones, the owner of the farmhouse. The next morning when the five come down for breakfast they meet Mrs. Jones son, Morgan. They find Morgan to be as strong as ten elephants, his voice can be heard from miles away and his seven dogs are as furious as him. When the five go for a walk that day Timmy gets bitten by three savage farm dogs which prompts George to resolve to leave the next day. Leaving George, Anne and Timmy in the farm house, the boys spend the day at a hut on the hills. On the way back,they meet a wild little girl in rags, Aily with her dog named Dai and her lamb, Fanny. Aily is a shepherd’s daughter. Mrs. Jones however dislikes Aily and asks Julian AND Dick to stay away from her. Julian and Dick share their experience with George and Anne and they decided to spend their holidays at the hut instead of the farm. They enjoy their day at the hut, but at night strange sounds and vibrations come from the "Old Towers". Next day they decide to meet the caretaker of old towers who tells them that no one lives there. But at night they come across people at the old towers which turns them suspicious about the whole affair. The Five decide to seek the help of Aily as she roamed about the hills and perhaps to the Old Towers too. Aily slowly becomes friends with the Five and gives them information about how the owner of old towers lives with many other people.Once when she had spotted the owner dropping a piece of paper out of a window, Aily had picked it up but as she didn’t know how to read or write, she didn't know what to do with it. She hands it over to the five and to their astonishment the note reads “I’m kidnapped in my own house. Please call the police”. On reading this they think of rescuing the owner, but Aily refuses to take them to the old towers. On seeking Morgan's help, he snatchs the note from them and tells them not to interfere with this. Thus, Aily agrees to take them to the old towers. She takes them to a pothole which led to a tunnel leading to the old towers. They met the owner and asked her why she was kidnapped she said that there was a very precious metal with magnetic properties beneath the hill. While getting out of there they spot Morgan and the shepherd on a rescue mission. But all are spotted by the kidnappers, Morgan calls to his dogs who help in the rescue. When all of them return to the farm they find a party being arranged as it is Morgan’s birthday. |
Beauty: A Retelling of the Story of Beauty and the Beast | Robin McKinley | 1,978 | Beauty is the youngest of three daughters of a wealthy merchant, Roderick Huston. Her given name is Honour, but she said that she'd rather be called "Beauty". The nickname has stuck since then. As she grows older, she feels increasingly ill-named as her sisters, Grace and Hope, become lovelier and more socially adept. Soon Grace becomes engaged to one of her father's ship captains, Robert Tucker, and Hope later beomes engaged to a blacksmith named Gervain Woodhouse. Robert's ship becomes lost at sea only a few months after the engagement along with all of Huston's other ships. Destitute, the family relocates to a town in the north near to Gervain's home town to begin afresh, a journey that takes nearly two months. Their lives begin to take a turn for the better as the city-bred family adapt to their new lives, and Hope and Gervain are later married and have two children. Almost a year later, they receive news of one of Huston's ships arriving back into port. Huston prepares to make the long journey alone to sell the ship's cargo. Before he leaves he asks his daughters if they want any gifts; Grace and Hope jokingly request expensive gifts, while Beauty asks only for a rose cutting or seeds for the garden. Huston returns home sooner than everyone expects with a beautiful rose, looking much worse for wear. Once he regains his strength, he tells everyone that on his return from town, he was caught in a blizzard a few miles from home and lost his way in the forest, stumbling across a mysterious castle as he and his mount came to the end of their strength. Huston was given shelter for the night and waited on by invisible servants. As he left the next day he found a beautiful garden and plucked one rose to bring home to Beauty. The owner of the castle, a great beast, appeared before him furious for the theft and ready to kill him for his crime. Huston begged for his life, pleading that he had daughters to return to. The Beast decided to let him go if he returned in one month with one of his daughters, assuring him that she would not be harmed and live safely with him in his castle. Despite her family's pleas, Beauty insists that she be the one to go in her father's place. As the months pass, Beauty comes to enjoy living in the castle. There are only two problems: she misses her family and every night the Beast asks her to marry him. Every night she answers no, but as they become close, Beauty feels bad for hurting the Beast even though she cannot bring herself to do what he asks. One night, the Beast again proposes marriage and Beauty states that she cannot marry him but hates constantly refusing him. Later, Beauty asks when she will be allowed to return home. The Beast reveals to her that he cannot let her go because he can't live without her. Upon hearing this, Beauty goes into shock and faints. She awakens in the arms of the Beast and flees to her room, too terrified to listen when he tries to tell her that she unconsciously refused to let go of him when he caught her. Beauty's dreams of her family become even more vivid and detailed than before and her senses becomes more acute and attuned to her new world. The Beast reveals that he sends the dreams to her to comfort her and that her way of seeing things has changed because of her sensitivity and because she has adapted to and accepted the magic that surrounds her. He also shows her a magic mirror that allows her to see her family. Through the mirror, Beauty sees Grace make the decision to accept a proposal of marriage from the local minister; however, she still loves Robert. Beauty wonders what has happened to Robert, and immediately the mirror shows her that Robert is alive and has only recently returned despite his ship being almost completely wrecked. Beauty begs to see her family one last time to tell Grace the news, promising to return in a week and stay with the Beast forever afterwards. The Beast reluctantly allows her to go, hinting that he will not be able to live without her if she does not return in time. Beauty's family is overjoyed at her return though disheartened to hear that she will only stay with them for a short time. Beauty tells her family about her time in the castle and convinces them that the Beast is not the monster that they have feared. She also tells Grace that Robert is alive, and arrangements are begun to have Robert brought to the Huston home. During the days without the Beast, Beauty begins to recognize how she truly feels about the Beast, proclaiming him to be even dearer to her than her family. When Beauty stays a day longer than planned at her family's behest she dreams that the Beast has died in her absence. She tries to return to the Beast but gets lost in the woods. After finding her way back Beauty discovers the Beast nearly dead, but is able to revive him. Realizing how close she came to losing him, Beauty confesses her love for the Beast and tells him that she will marry him. In an instant the enchantment on the Beast and the castle is broken. The Beast is returned to his handsome human form, explaining to the astonished Beauty about how his family had been cursed by the local magician for being arrogant and over-sealously pious, but because their piety was actually so strong, the curse was delayed intil a descendant mis-stepped and that he was the one who fell. He tells her that the spell could be broken only if a woman agreed to marry him despite his appearance. But Beauty then becomes self conscious and begins refusing to marry the Beast until he shows her her reflection in a mirror, revealing how she has blossomed into a true beauty. Beauty is reunited with her family and the novel ends with Beauty and her prince walking out to meet everyone, excited to start their new life together |
Peter the Great's Negro | Aleksandr Pushkin | 1,837 | The novel opens with a picture of morals and manners of the French society of the first quarter of 18th century; with the Negro's life in Paris, his success in French society, and his love affair with a French countess. But "summoned both by Peter and by his own vague sense of duty" Ibrahim returns to Russia. The following chapters, full of historical color and antiquarianism, sketch the different strata of the Russian society: ball at the Winter Palace and boyars' dinner at the boyar Gavrila Rzhevsky's place. The latter is interrupted by the arrival of the Tsar, who wants to marry Ibrahim to the Gavrila's daughter, Natalia. |
Doomsday Plus Twelve | null | null | In 1988, an incident in Saudi Arabia touches off World War III between the United States of America and the Soviet Union. Things get out of hand and nuclear weapons are used. American deaths number 120 million. The effects of EMP, ozone, and epidemics (California was dusted with anthrax) are depicted. Twelve years later people living in a rural Oregon have survived with their only contact with the outside world coming from Japanese merchants who have built a base near them. They are later, however, visited by representatives from San Diego, one of the few American cities to survive the war. The visitors preach their plan to restore the United States by driving out the Japanese with a nuclear submarine that survived the war and ask for volunteers to join their army. Most people are not interested in their message but when the militants launch an attack on the Japanese merchant base it inspires a trek to San Diego led by a charismatic young girl to peacefully protest their actions. On the way they meet various groups of survivors: a gang of Hells Angels bikers who join up with them, monks living in a still functioning observatory, and refugees in the desert living in abandoned military vehicles. When they arrive in San Diego they find the city in ruins (the missile that was supposed to hit exploded in the ocean causing a tsunami that destroyed the city). They peacefully march into the base discovering that the militants were too afraid of their own soldiers to provide them with ammo and the nuclear submarine they boasted about had long since sunk to the ocean floor. |
Drakon | S. M. Stirling | 1,996 | Set centuries since the last war between the Domination and the Alliance, the Domination has conquered the Earth and the solar system, while the Alliance survivors have fled to the Alpha-Centauri star system where they have started a new civilization called the United States of Samothrace. The two societies have traded technology and skirmished some, focusing most of their efforts on colonizing all new habitable worlds they discover. Space combat is rare since faster-than-light travel is impossible. Combat only occurs when colonists from both sides reach the same world, an incident that happened only once. (Stirling later said the Samothracians won due to their superior ship .) The Draka continue their enslaving any new intelligent species they discover, using genetic engineering to produce a meek and submissive version of it. |
This Rough Magic | null | null | Actress Lucy Waring leaves London to join her married sister Phyllida Forli in Corfu where the Forli family own three houses—two of them modern. One is occupied by the Forlis, the other rented out to Godfrey Manning who is taking photographs for a coffee table style book. The third, the much older Castello, is rented to actor Julian Gale and his son Max who is a musician. Julian Gale has two godchildren, twins Spiro and Miranda, who work in the Forli's houses. The idyllic scene is shattered when Spiro is reported drowned after falling overboard while out at night sailing in Godfrey Manning's boat. One theme running through the book is the idea that Corfu is the setting for The Tempest. Another theme is that of a dolphin which will approach humans. The book was serialised in the British magazine Woman's Journal. Julian Gale and the play Tiger, Tiger (with a different author) are also mentioned in The Wind Off the Small Isles (1968) by the same author. |
In Odd We Trust | Dean Koontz | 2,008 | In Odd We Trust serves as a prequel to the first Odd Thomas novel. The ghost of a young boy appears to Odd, and he embarks on a quest to bring justice to the boy's killer so that his ghost can move on. Odd's friend, the Chief of Police Wyatt Porter, shares some details of the case, and informs him that the boy's babysitter is the one that discovered the body. The babysitter turns out to be Sherry Sheldon, a childhood friend of Odd's girlfriend and soulmate, Stormy Llewellyn. Sherry relates that a stalker has been leaving her disturbing notes for several months, and believes this stalker may be the murderer. Odd and Stormy resolve to catch the stalker before he kills again. Odd asks the ghost of the little boy to help him find his killer, and Joey leads him to a street corner, where he sees a suspicious man. The man flees when Odd tries to address him. Odd gives chase, but loses his quarry when he trips over a lawn gnome. Four neighborhood children are believed to be targets, as they have each received a note from the killer. Chief Porter assigns police escorts to each of the houses, and Odd and Stormy decide to spend the night with Sherry at the house where she is babysitting a girl named Angelica. The policeman on stakeout at the house finds an empty car containing a mutilated mannequin, and from this Odd deduces that the killer is nearby, taunting them. He throws open the doors of a nearby van, and discovers the man he chased earlier. He and Odd trade veiled threats, but when Stormy shows up with a gun, the man drives off. Chief Porter traces the van's license plates to a man named Kyle Bernshaw, and gives Odd the resulting address. Odd and Stormy break into Bernshaw's house, to find giant piles of magazines (from which his mysterious notes have been cut and glued together), and a note to Odd, revealing that this was a trap. Odd turns to find himself cornered by a vicious dog, from which he is saved at the last minute by Joey's ghost. Odd and Stormy race back to the house where they left Sherry, only to find out that Angelica's parents have fired her and she has left. Odd realizes that Sherry, not one of the four children under police protection, was the target all along. The two borrow a car and, using Odd's psychic magnetism (an ability that draws him to a person if he concentrates on them while traveling), they locate Bernshaw in an abandoned slaughterhouse. Odd fights him, with limited success, until Stormy shoots him in the leg, and Odd is able to subdue him. They free Sherry from the trunk of Bernshaw's car. The killer is taken into custody, but refuses to confess, insisting that he will be given a chance to escape, as he has made a deal with the devil and everything he wants always comes to him. He threatens to reveal Odd's identity and abilities to the world, bringing a storm of media attention, one of the very things Odd fears most. Odd lies and pretends that he, too, has sold his soul to the devil for his powers, but just as he begins to make headway with taking Bernshaw into his confidence, a guard collapses and the killer is able to grab the guard's gun. He fires, but the bullet ricochets off a chair Odd is holding. The bullet kills Bernshaw. Angelica's parents re-hire Sherry, and the story ends with Odd and Stormy musing on the happy ending they have managed. |
The Inventors | Alexander Gordon Smith | 2,007 | Nate is at home, about to test his latest invention - a machine that can dress humans, like in cartoons. However, the invention goes wrong and ruins his room, upsetting his parents. Nate goes to his best friend Cat's house, to test their latest invention, the Bully Blow - also known as Pergophosphaticus III - a goo-like substance that causes whoever eats it to turn blue. They test it on the school bully by putting some in her chocolate brownie, but it is confiscated by the Headmaster, who turns blue when he eats it. Rather than getting Nate and Cat into trouble, he asks them to take part in Ebenezer Saint's competition. They have under a week to invent something so good that Saint's company, Saint Solutions, will take it on. The winners will be given a year-long scholarship at Saint Solutions, working with Ebenezer himself. After many failed attempts at making Facial-Recognition Glasses, they decide to use the Bully Blow, now in the form of a helmet for the army, allowing the wearer to blend in with the surroundings by turning the appropriate color. Saint loves their invention, and they, along with the other winners, are taken to Saint Solutions. At Saint Solutions, they soon realise that Saint is reluctant to let them leave. He wants to create a nuclear bomb to wipe out the world and start again. However, the kids escape, but Nate and Cat stay behind to stop his bombs from being sent out. They use an EMP Cat hid on the bombs to detonate them early, with the duo just managing to escape before the compound is destroyed, along with Saint. In an epilogue, it is revealed that Saint's memory was saved onto a computer, which downloads his mind into a robotic body. As his memories come back, the robotic Saint heads for the exit. |
Becoming Naomi León | Pam Muñoz Ryan | 2,005 | Naomi and Owen Soledad León are the children of Santiago Zamora León, a Mexican fisherman and craver, and Terri Lynn, a troubled American woman who lost her parents in a car accident when she was a teenager, making them half American-half Mexican, with Naomi taking the Mexican side and Owen taking the American side. The family live in Puerto Escondido, Mexico, however Santiago and Terri Lynn had a lot of arguments, which is thinning their marriage. When Naomi was four and Owen was one, and when Santiago was fishing, Terri Lynn went shopping in Tijuana when she supposed to look after Naomi and Owen, leaving the kids to baby sit themselves at a motel. No one could find Terri Lynn for days and a hurricane suddenly hit after she left. Naomi and Owen were rescued by Santiago and taken to a church, where Santiago left them in the care of the church's priests to move his boat, but he got lost a sea on the way and was rescued over a week later. Meanwhile Terri Lynn returned and took the kids to Lemon Tree, California, where she once lived with her widowed grandmother, Mary Outlaw. After arriving at her apartment, Terri Lynn told her that she couldn't handle two kids by herself, especially with one of them deformed (Owen) and left the kids with Mary so she could find her life, and never returned, forcing Mary to raise the children on her own. Soon after Mary took the kids to live in the Avacado Acres Trailer Rancho trailer park so Owen would have room to be a "wild monkey". Mary became attached to the kids and feared of losing them as she enrolled them in school and got doctors for them when Terri Lynn didn't return. Seven years later, Naomi, now eleven years old and now known as Naomi Soledad León Outlaw, has a lot to deal with, such as having the "funniest last name in the universe" for one. Then there are her clothes (sewn in polyester by Gram), her difficulty speaking up, and her status at school as "nobody special". She also doesn't remember her parents but knows that her father is Mexican and her mother is American, and still has scars from her mother's abandonment years before and also thinks that her father never wanted her and Owen, who is now eight and is still physically deformed. She and Owen still live with Mary, who is now known as Gram, in Lemon Tree, California in the trailer Baby Beluga (named by Gram) and in the trailer park consumed with the three things Naomi's good at, soap carving, worrying, and making lists. Naomi and Owen's life with Gram and their loving neighbors in Lemon Tree is happy and peaceful, despite being 'left-overs', until the day Terri Lynn, who now renamed herself Skyla Jones, suddenly reappears after the seven years of being gone. With her arrival, she starts to stir up all sorts of questions. Naomi and Owen are both thrilled on her arrival and they try to get to know her, and Naomi had many questions for her sudden return, along with the sadness that Skyla wasn't anywhere near the mothers that she had imagined. During their mother's stay, Skyla is buying things for Naomi and Gram and never gets anything for Owen, and her mood has been changing mysteriously, which confuses only Naomi. Also what confused Naomi more is Skyla insulting her every time she speaks quietly and ordering her to talk louder. Also Gram seemed to always be angry with Skyla, and she fears that something might go wrong, which adds more confusion to Naomi, along with the thought that Gram is hiding something, but she very little knew that things were going to take turns from the thrilling to the worse. Gram later tells her and Owen the truth, but they don't really know the truth, until the day of the conference where Skyla promised to come and meet Naomi's new school friend, Blanca, who came from Atascadero, California and was full Mexican, but she didn't. That day Naomi realized that her mother is really an alcoholic and that her father really wanted her and Owen but Skyla didn't let him keep them. On Thanksgiving Day, Skyla's boyfriend, Clive, comes over for the holiday. However things went bad when Skyla and Clive tell Naomi since Clive was moving to Las Vegas because of his job, that they decided that she was a perfect friend for his daughter, Elizabeth, who Clive renamed Sapphire. Gram doesn't allow it which seems to anger Clive, and things went more worse when Clive takes one of Naomi's soap carvings and uses it to wash his hands, which made Naomi upset that one of her precious cravings was destroyed, but before things went more worse Owen played checkers with the neighbors, which he always won at. When Skyla played, he let her win some. However when she found out, her mood changes and she orders him to play like he means it, which Owen did and he won a game, which angers Skyla, causing her to insult him about his deformities and his love for wearing tape across his shirt, saying he didn't 'look' smart. However after Clive played with him and lost three games, he thought that his deformities can be used for getting money in gambling, which angers Gram and the neighbors. When Clive and Skyla are about to leave, Naomi notices beer in the back seat of their car, which made her question if Skyla was going to drink again. Skyla, knowing that Naomi saw it, tells her to mind her own business before they leave, leaving Naomi increasingly confused. After going back to school on Monday, Naomi tells Blanca about what happened, and with that Blanca, now worried about the frightening mood swings and threats Skyla makes to Naomi and Owen, tells Naomi that she needs to wake up before something bad happens, since Naomi didn't know for sure if Skyla was really going to drink the beer, but Blanca informed her that Skyla wouldn't have told her to mind her own business if the beer was just for Clive. However Naomi kept refusing Blanca's information to tell Gram, saying that she had enough worries right now, and won't tell her unless she knew for sure. Three days later Owen's regular check-up at the doctor's was coming up, and Skyla volunteered to take Owen since Gram had to help one of her neighbors, Fabiola, with a bride's wedding gown, and she promised Gram that everything will end well. At the doctor's, things take a turn for the worse when Skyla's mood swings again and she thought of Owen as a "Blem" when the doctors told her that he was going to be an FLK (Funny Looking Kid) for a few more years, and she was furious that they couldn't do anything else about him for now. When they got back to Baby Beluga, Skyla suddenly becomes more infuriated and tells Naomi that Clive's job finally came through in Las Vegas, and she was coming with them, but Naomi knew that the only two reasons that they want to take her is because they only wanted her to be a babysitter for Sapphire, and get welfare from having her. Naomi, knowing that her mother was drinking again, refuses to go with her by telling her about her past mistakes, what kind of harm she caused, and the good things Gram did for Owen and her unlike Skyla, which greatly angers Skyla that she slaps Naomi across the face in front of Owen, and she threatens Naomi that if she didn't come with her to Las Vegas, something bad would happen to Gram on account of her. Horrified, and now thinking that Skyla would hurt or kill Gram, Naomi successfully managed to get herself and Owen away from her and they immediately go to tell Gram. Skyla follows to claim Naomi and even though she thinks she has the right to take Naomi because she is her mother, Gram tells Skyla that she would fight for Naomi, telling her that she would go to the end of the earth to protect Naomi, even if it meant going to court, and get the rightful guardianship over her and Owen. Skyla however doesn't take in what Gram said and threatens her that if Naomi's things weren't packed and she wasn't ready in a few days, she would arrive with a police officer, believing that the police will never believe her grandmother's story. Then Skyla informs Gram that Naomi didn't belong to her, and she was her daughter before she leaves, leaving both Naomi and Owen terrified after they realized Skyla's true nature: an abusive and unstable alcoholic mother who only wanted to claim Naomi, but not Owen because of his deformed appearance. Realizing that the law was on Skyla's side and determined of saving Naomi and Owen, Gram takes the kids on a whirl-wind journey accompanied by their neighbors Fabiola and Bernardo Morales (who were also there when Skyla threatened to take Naomi) to the city of Oaxaca, Mexico and stay with the Morales's relatives. There they go on a quest in which Naomi is determined to find their father Santiago, whom Owen and Naomi have not seen in many years. During their stay Owen becomes friends with Fabiola's niece's son, Rubén, and the two were rarely seen apart. Naomi even thought of Rubén's mother, Graciela, as her mother, because of her kindness and her desire to find her life with Rubén after the divorce with her husband, rather than be away from him to find her life like Skyla. They ask many people if they knew a man named Santiago Zamora León, which to Naomi's despair they don't, but she keeps believing that he will come, since he always came to carve in the Night of the Radishes competition. The group participate in the Las Posadas and the Night of the Radishes competition, where the men have Naomi carve a lion. After winning the competition in second place, Santiago shows up, but when he sees Gram, Owen, and Naomi, he runs off, and Naomi runs after him after Gram told her it was him. Unable to catch up with him, the downcast Naomi goes back to Gram and kept asking why Santiago ran. Later that night Santiago returned, and Owen and Naomi have a tearful and joyful moment with him, with Naomi explaining the situation. The next day, Gram tells Naomi and Owen that they had to leave because of court, and Naomi asks Santiago if he could move with them, but he told her that he has to stay where he lives in Mexico because of his job. After Naomi promises to come visit him he told her 'Be brave, Naomi León' before they leave. When they go to court, Naomi, remembering what her father told her, tells the judge everything from the beginning: after Gram was widowed, Naomi and Owen's life with her, when Skyla came back after seven years of abandonment and always ignored Owen because of his appearance, the incidents at teachers' conferences, Thanksgiving Day, and at Children's Hospital, when Skyla slapped and threatened Naomi, and when she went to Mexico and found her father. After telling the whole court that she wants to live with Gram and Owen because she belonged in Lemon Tree, she loved Gram, Owen, Blanca, and her school, and she didn't want to go with Skyla because of the reasons she explained, the judge grants full guardianship to Gram, since she didn't want to separate relatives who have lived together all their lives, especially if there are loving and responsible relatives, like Gram and Santiago as she pointed out, despite Skyla trying to lie to the judge that Naomi was making up stories in order to get her. After the happy trio return to live their peaceful life in Lemon Tree with Gram saying that Skyla might try to take them back to court someday. Naomi is then reunited with Blanca when she goes to back to school, and after school that day she tells Naomi that her voice is louder. In the epilogue, Naomi narrates that nothing much as changed and she (Naomi) was different. Naomi supposed that she and Owen might long for Skyla a little, and they wondered what it could have been like if she had been different. Gram said it wasn't likely if Skyla would come visit them, but Naomi wouldn't mind. Naomi also narrates the time she found her father, who loved her and Owen without being nearby and tells the reader to imagine all that love floating in the air, waiting to land on someone's life. She says next that even though they found their parents, their lives were with Gram. In Mexico while Santiago was teaching her about the magic, Naomi saw it worked on people as well. She refers Skyla as 'a mother with a cat's claws,' (due to her troubled life and the violence she did on Naomi and Owen), next she refers Santiago as 'a father with a lion's heart', (because of his possession of exceptional courage and fortitude), referring Gram as 'a great-grandmother with a bird's protective-outstretched wings',(due to her protectiveness of Naomi and Owen) and referring herself as 'a mouse with a lioness voice' (as revealed near the epilogue). Naomi then realized she was becoming 'who she was meant to be', a mouse with a lioness' voice and the Naomi Soledad León Outlaw of her wildest dreams. |
Angel of Grozny: Inside Chechnya | Åsne Seierstad | 2,008 | Angel of Grozny attempts to give an accessible and impartial account of the complicated historical and political forces at play in the Chechen conflict whilst also describing her encounters with combatants and civilians on both sides. The book features an account of her meeting with Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov. As well as trying to understand the mindset of the Chechen and Russian people, one of the books key themes is the exposure of corruption in the process of reconstructing Chechnya. The Angel of Grozny of the book's title is a Chechen woman Hadijat Gatayeva who has turned their home into an orphanage for street children of the war. |
Soul Mountain | Gao Xingjian | 1,990 | The first of the two characters to be introduced is "You". He is described as a local tourist---"not that sort of tourist" but a backpacking one "wearing strong sensible sports shoes and a backpack with shoulder straps". He seeks out the elusive Lingshan, a sacred mountain. "You" has long lived in the city, but yearns for a rural existence from the past He shuns the idea of settling for "a peaceful and stable existence" where one wants to "find a not-too-demanding sort of a job, stay in a mediocre position, become a husband and a father, set up a comfortable home, put money in the bank and add to it every month so there'll be something for old age and a little left over for the next generation". "You" meets up with another wanderer, a troubled and emotional "She". And so "You"'s journey also becomes a journey into an erotic relationship. "You" also travels inwards as he explores his powers as a storyteller. Later in "You"'s story, "She" departs "as if in a story, as if in a dream". Meanwhile, "I" is a writer and academic who travels to Sichuan after having been misdiagnosed of a terminal lung cancer. He wants to take a break and start looking for an "authentic life" -- meaning the opposite of that of the state's concept of real life. The characters' sense of humanity is revealed during their quest. "I" realizes that he still craves the warmth of human society, despite its anxieties. "Soul Mountain" is essentially a two-part novel featuring two main characters -- known only as "You" and "I" who turn out to be alter egos of the same persona. The "You" character occupies the odd-numbered chapters 1-31 and the even-numbered chapters from 32-80, while the "I" character's includes even-numbered chapters 2-30 and odd-numbered chapters 33-81. (The idea that they are two sides of the same character is revealed in Chapter 52). |
Les Mystères de Marseille | Émile Zola | 1,895 | Les Mystères de Marseille recounts the love of Philippe Cayol, poor, untitled, republican, and of young Blanche de Cazalis, the niece of De Cazalis, a millionaire, politician and all-powerful in Marseilles. Philippe's brother, Marius devotes himself to protecting the two lovers – and the child Blanche gave birth to before entering a convent – from the anger of De Cazalis. fr:Les Mystères de Marseille it:I misteri di Marsiglia |
La mécanique du cœur | null | 2,007 | The book opens in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1874. Little Jack is born on the coldest day ever, which causes his heart to be frozen solid, requiring a replacement: the midwife, Docteur Madeleine, grafts a cuckoo clock to his heart of flesh and blood. |
Feast of Souls | Celia S. Friedman | 2,007 | In this fantasy, the first of a new trilogy, the world's magic comes at a terrible cost: a witch's own finite life force, which drains away with each spell. The sole exceptions are the nearly immortal Magisters, who secretly tap a more murderous fuel for their power. No woman has ever found its source, until young Kamala, hardened by life as a child whore, insists on an apprenticeship and secretly becomes an unheard-of female Magister. Meanwhile, Prince Andovan, third son of the avaricious King Danton, is expiring from the baffling Wasting disease, which can only be caused by a Magister. When the enraged king banishes his right-hand Magister, the mysterious and sinister Kostas takes his place, much to the dismay of Andovan's mother, Queen Gwenofar. As an ancient, monstrous power stirs and threatens to drag the world toward a dark age, Kamala and Andovan find their fates entwined. |
Fire in the Mist | Holly Lisle | 1,992 | Fire in the Mist is the story of Faia Rissedote, who as the story begins is a shepherd from a small village. Faia returns from tending her sheep to find everyone in her village dead from the plague. In her anguish, she loses control of her magic and destroys the entire village. This act is felt even in the far away town of Ariss, where staff of the university that exists there to train mages travel to the village to see what happened. They find Faia and bring her back to their university. Faia does not fit in there, as she is a much stronger mage but has little control; the other mage students either don't believe in her power or dislike her for being from a humble background. She does meet and sleep with a young mage, which is expressly forbidden as sex is supposed to be harmful to magical talent. A series of murders occur; primarily targeting young mages with potential. The women at the university believe it to be the work of the men, as the murders resemble a much earlier legend which implicated the men. Faia's body is taken over by the spirit of the murderer, who it turns out was actually a woman (and is the same person from the legend) and proceeds to start killing the mages of the university. Faia defeats the murderer by surprising her with the fact that she (the murderer, in Faia's body) is pregnant, and regains her body. She escapes the university, the staff of which still bear a grudge against her, in spite of explanations, and begins to travel. |
Thorns | Robert Silverberg | 1,967 | Humanity has colonized the solar system and moved outward to begin exploring the far reaches of the galaxy. An interplanetary audience follows real-life stories of triumph and tragedy presented to them by Duncan Chalk, a media mogul with apparently limitless resources. Chalk, unknown to all around him, is a kind of psychic vampire who draws sustenance from the emotions of others, particularly those of pain and trauma. Though he enjoys playing his inner circle of assistants against each other as a sort of daily snack, Chalk's true nourishment comes from the dramas he orchestrates for his audience. Chalk's latest drama involves the pairing of Minner Burris, a space explorer who was captured and surgically altered by aliens on the planet Manipool, and Lona Kelvin, a 17-year-old girl who donated eggs for a fertility experiment that produced a hundred babies. Burris, whose freakish appearance draws attention whenever he ventures out in public, has withdrawn into seclusion and bitterness. Kelvin, whose brief fame as the virgin mother of an army of children has begun to fade, has twice attempted suicide because she has not been allowed to adopt or even see any of her offspring. Chalk promises Burris a full round of surgery and treatment to restore his human appearance, and offers Kelvin a chance to adopt one of her babies, if the two agree to come together for an all-expenses paid tour of the solar system. At first the two wounded subjects enjoy each other's company and even become lovers. Kelvin's empathy and compassion are stirred by Burris's plight, and Burris enjoys playing masculine protector and guide to the naive teenager. The affection soon curdles into irritation, hostility and even hatred—all of which provide a psychic feast for Chalk. The two finally break off after a particularly vicious fight, which Chalk uses as a pretext to void the agreement. He does, however, try to keep them on the hook by dangling new offers: for example, he asks Kelvin to befriend David Melangio, a childlike man whose feats of memory and calculation are his only means of meeting a world that has already subjected him to overwhelming traumas. Kelvin erupts in rage and is carried off by Chalk's assistants. Burris, meanwhile, has a sexual fling with Elise, the widow of an astronaut who accompanied Burris on the Manipool landing, and who died from the surgical alterations performed by the aliens. Elise is both aroused and repulsed by Burris' body, and the sadomasochistic nature of her attraction eventually alienates Burris. His withdrawal causes her to commit suicide in a particularly grisly fashion. Burris, deeply shaken, returns to Earth. He has realized that Chalk's promise was empty, and that such help may no longer even be possible—the changes wrought by the Manipool aliens appear irreversible. What's more, the surgery that turned him into a monster has also "improved" his body in unexpected ways that Burris has come to appreciate. With the inadvertent help of Melangio, who during a typically bland chat lets slip some information that gives them clues into Chalk's true nature, Kelvin and Burris confront the media baron in his office. They expose the full, unfiltered core of their mutual pain to Chalk, who is overwhelmed and finally killed by the intensity of the emotional flood. As the novel ends, Burris has convinced Kelvin to join him in a trip back to Manipool, where they will confront the aliens and, presumably, undergo alterations that take them beyond humanity. |
Madam, Will You Talk? | null | null | Charity Selborne is on holiday in Provence with her friend, and former colleague, Louise. Before her marriage to Johnny Selborne they both taught at the same school in the West Midlands. Charity is now a widow; her husband's plane was shot down in France during the War. She is staying at the same hotel as David Shelley and his stepmother, Loraine Bristol. Mrs. Bristol has taken David to France from England. David's father, Richard Byron, an antique dealer, who has been accused of murder, is pursuing his son across France. Also staying at the hotel are John Marsden who is English and reads T. S. Eliot at breakfast and Paul Véry, who is French. Both have parts to play in subsequent events. |
My Brother Michael | Mary Stewart | null | Camilla Haven has recently broken her engagement to Philip and is holidaying on her own in Greece. She is sitting in a cafe in Athens writing to Elizabeth, who would have been with Camilla but for a broken leg, when a man appears with a message about a hired car for Delphi. Camilla hasn't requested it, but no one else claims the car. She wants to visit Delphi, but was doubtful about being able to afford it. She's told that it is a matter of "life and death" and that the deposit has been paid. So, after leaving her hotel address with the café's proprietor, she drives the car to Delphi herself. On the way she meets Simon Lester. Simon is in Greece to learn more about the death of his brother Michael during the Second World War. |
Airs Above the Ground | Mary Stewart | null | Vanessa March is married to Lewis, who works for the Sales Department of Pan-European Chemicals. Having tea with her mother's schoolfriend Carmel Lacy at Harrods, she learns that Lewis, whom she believes to be in Stockholm on business, appears in a newsreel story about a circus fire in Austria. Carmel, assuming Vanessa will be joining Lewis in Austria, asks her to accompany her seventeen-year-old son Timothy, who wants to visit his divorced father in Vienna. Seeing the newsreel for herself, Vanessa sees Lewis in Austria — with his arm around a blonde girl. When she receives a message from Lewis postmarked Stockholm, Vanessa immediately agrees to travel to Austria, unaware that by doing so she is endangering her husband and herself. The story is set against a backdrop of circus life, stolen goods, international smuggling, and an old mystery involving the disappearance of a famed Lipizzaner stallion and his groom. |
The Wind Off the Small Isles | null | null | Perdita works for children's writer Cora Gresham as secretary and personal assistant. Cora is writing about pirates on the Barbary Coast and wants to visit the Canary Islands. After hearing Perdita's description of the various islands, Cora decides on Lanzarote. Only two days after arriving there, Cora decides she wants to buy a house. While driving around the island they reach Playa Blanca and Cora sees just the house she is looking for. She sends Perdita to ask who owns it. Perdita, after getting no answer at the front door, meets Michael in the grounds who is supervising building work. There is a mention of Julian Gale from Stewart's earlier novel, This Rough Magic. |
Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia | Elizabeth Gilbert | 2,006 | At 32 years old, Elizabeth Gilbert was educated, had a home, a husband, and a successful career as a writer. However, she was unhappy in her marriage and often spent the night sleeping on her bathroom floor. After separating from her husband and initiating a divorce, which he contested, she embarked on a rebound relationship which continued for some time but did not work out, leaving her devastated and alone. Afterwards, while writing an article on yoga vacations in Bali, Gilbert met a ninth-generation medicine man who told her she would one day come back and study with him. After finalizing her difficult divorce, Gilbert spent the next year traveling around the world. The trip was paid for in advance with a book deal from the publisher. She spent four months in Italy, eating and enjoying life ("Eat"). She spent three months in India, finding her spirituality ("Pray"). She ended the year in Bali, Indonesia, looking for "balance" of the two and found love ("Love") in the form of a dashing Brazilian factory owner. |
Geography Club | Brent Hartinger | 2,003 | Russel Middlebrook is homosexual and feels isolated and alone from the rest of the people in his high school. His two best friends (Gunnar and Min) are not aware of his sexuality. Russel feels sexual attractions towards many 'jocks' in his school, especially when they are getting changed in gym, and particularly Kevin Land. In the cafeteria, the jocks play a cruel prank on the 'school outcast', Brian Bund, causing Russel to feel sympathetic towards Brian. That night, he is on a gay internet chat room when he speaks to another person from his school who is also gay. They agree to meet up, where Russel finds out Kevin is homosexual. After a brief period of awkwardness, Russel and Kevin become friends, with their sexuality in common. Russel decides to tell Min, one of his friends. Min then responds by telling him that she is a lesbian, then changing her mind to bisexual. Russel decides to organise a meeting in the local pizza shop, with all the gay people in the school. Russel, Min, Therese, Kevin and Ike attend this meeting, where they have a lively discussion. They therefore decide to start up the 'Geography Club' where homosexuals can meet, naming it such in the view that nobody would want to attend 'such a boring club'. The meetings of the club go well. Later, Russel decides to join the baseball team, mainly to get closer to Kevin. After winning a school game, he becomes a school hero, and friends with all the 'jocks'. Meanwhile, Gunnar (Russel's friend) persuades him to attend a 'double date' with him. The pair go to the cinema with Kimberley and Trish. However Russel thinks Kimberley is only going out with Gunnar to give Trish a chance to go out with himself. Despite his previous persuasion methods, Gunnar asks Russel to come on another date. This time they go dancing. Trish and Russel go for a drive, with Russel getting increasingly awkward. When they stop the car, Trish tries to have sex with Russel, with Russel turning her down saying that he is a virgin and wants his first time to be special. Trish accepts this, but Russel fears this is not the last he will hear about the issue. Russel is distressed about this date, and decides to call Kevin when he gets home. They meet up, talk and then kiss, much to the delight of Russel who has been infatuated with Kevin for a long time. It is then suggested that Russel and Kevin engage in sexual activity, though it is never made clear. Meanwhile, Geography Club sees trouble when Belinda turns up, who actually wants to study Geography. This causes panic in the club, because the rules state they have to let anyone join, so many think it means the end to the club. In a later meeting, Belinda overheads one of the characters saying that it is a gay club. She later informs the group that she also has problems (her mother's alcoholism) and therefore should be allowed in the group. The Geography Club allow her in. A teacher publishes an article in the school paper, discouraging homophobia. In the article the teacher writes that she spoke to a homosexual student in the school recently. This causes gossip in the school, with many people trying to find out who the 'gay kid' is. Many think it is Brian Bund. Min therefore wants to let Brian in the club so he has friends. They decide to hold a vote, which Russel feels split on, because if he votes to let Brian in, he would offend Kevin (who is now his boyfriend) but if he votes not to let him in the club, he would offend Min. He votes on Kevin's side, upsetting Min. Russel experiences an incident when to members of the baseball team bully Brian Bund. Russel joins in, to impress his new friends. However, unknown to Russel, Min witnesses this and gets very angry with him. On Russel's third and final double date with Trish, Kimberley and Gunnar they go to a beach house, where Kimberley drinks a lot of alcohol. Russel decides he wants to leave, against Gunnar's will. Russel leaves the beach house and calls Kevin who picks him up. In revenge, Gunnar puts in an application for a 'Gay Straight Alliance' club, under Russel's name. This causes the school to believe Russel to be gay. Many members of the baseball team therefore bully him homophobically, with Kevin joining in, in an effort not to lose respect with his friends. Brian Bund puts the application under his name, reverting the school's attitude back to Brian being the 'gay kid' meaning Russel is out of danger. In a second vote, Russel votes to allow Brian into the club, making him friends with Min once again. Kevin wants to get back together with Russel, now he is popular again. However Russel breaks up with him, saying he wasn't who he thought he was. Russel informs Gunnar of his sexuality, however Gunnar already knew, pointing out that the fact that Russel loved Disney musicals was an indication. The story ends with Russel abandoning his popularity by becoming friends with Brian Bund, and with the formation of 'Gay Straight Alliance', consisting of Russel, Min, Gunnar, Brian and others. Hartinger later adapted his novel into a play, The Geography Club. |
A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier | Ishmael Beah | 2,007 | The book starts with Ishmael Beah, his older brother Junior, and their friend Talloi traveling from their village of Mogbwemo to Mattru Jong in order to perform in a talent show. Ishmael, Junior, and their friend dance and sing rap music. Thinking they would return the following day, they tell no one of their leaving. During their stay in Mattru Jong with Gibrilla, Khalilou, and Kaloko, the RUF attacks. The three are able to flee the village without the rebels' following them. They decide to head back home. On the way, it turns out that their village was also captured by the RUF. According to an old man who was sitting outside the village, most of the people had fled to a village on the Sierra Leone coast. Ishmael, Junior, and their friend decide to travel there in order to locate their families. On their, they encounter multiple other villages. They are accepted into another village on the grounds that they help with the farming. After months, the village is attacked. Caught by surprise, Ishmael, Junior, and their friend split up and run into the swamps. It is unknown what happens to his friends afterwards. Ishmael roams around the wilderness by himself for a while, until he meets up with another group of traveling boys whom he recognizes from his home village. The boys then travel together to another village on the coast. Many refugees fled to this village because the Sierra Leone Armed Forces occupied it. In search of safety, the group of boys and Ishmael go to that village, but soon leave. Ishmael then learns from a woman from his hometown that Junior, his younger brother Ibrahim, and his parents are safe in another village with many others from Mattru Jong. Just before they reach the village, the boys meet a man named Gasemu whom Ishmael knew from Mattru Jong. Gasemu tells them that Ishmael's family are indeed safe in the village, and ask the boys to help him carry bananas back to that village. However, moments before they reach the town, it is attacked by the RUF. Although their bodies are not found among the dead or in the burning house where they lived, Ishmael assumes that his family is dead. Devastated, and believing that Gasemu is to blame for his not being able to see his family on time, Ishmael attacks Gasemu but is stopped by the other boys. They are then chased into the forest by remaining RUF soldiers, and Gasemu dies from being shot, leaving Ishmael more saddened. The boys then settle into another village protected by the army. After many uneventful days, the lieutenant in charge of the troops in the village announced that the RUF was beginning to assault the village. The lieutenant said that in order for the people to survive, they must contribute to the war effort by enlisting in the army; escape was not an option. By doing this, the lieutenant secures many child soldiers, the weapon of choice for both the RUF and the Sierra Leone Armed Forces. Ishmael becomes a junior lieutenant for his skill in executing prisoners of war and is put in charge of a small group of other child soldiers. As a child soldier, Ishmael is exposed to extreme violence and drug usage. The drugs he used are described in the book as “brown brown”, “white pills”, and marijuana. In January 1996, during one of the roll calls, a group of men wearing UNICEF shirts round up several boys and takes them to a shelter in Sierra Leone's capital, Freetown, where they and several other child soldiers are to be rehabilitated. However, the children cause much trouble for the volunteer staffers at the facility, with Ishmael experiencing symptoms of drug withdrawal as well as troubling memories of his time as a child soldier. Despite the violence caused by the children, one of the staffers, Nurse Esther, becomes interested in Ishmael, learning about his childhood love of rap music and purchasing him a rap cassette and Walkman, when she takes Ishmael and his friend Alhaji to the city. It is through this connection and his numerous counseling experiences with Esther that Ishmael eventually turns away from his violent self and starts to heal from his mental wounds. Eventually, Ishmael becomes adopted by his Uncle Tommy in the city and settles down with him and his family on the outskirts of Freetown. It is during this time that Ishmael is chosen to speak to the United Nations (UN) in New York City about his experiences as a child soldier and the other problems plaguing his country. While at the UN meeting, Ishmael met several other children who were also experiencing problems in their countries. There were 57 children present at the meeting, and each told his story to the UN. Ishmael also meets Laura Simms, his chaperone, who is a storyteller and his future foster mother. In 1996, when Ishmael returns to Sierra Leone, Freetown is invaded by a combination of the RUF and the Sierra Leonean government army, causing many civilian deaths, including the death of Uncle Tommy from malady. Believing that he can no longer stay in Freetown for fear of either becoming a soldier again or of being killed by his former army friends if he refused, Ishmael decides to get in contact with Laura Simms. He then escapes Sierra Leone and crosses the border into Guinea, where he eventually makes his way to the United States and his new life abroad. |
Something Else | Kathryn Cave | 1,994 | Something Else (the name of the protagonist) is excluded from everything because he looks different. He does not play the same games, eat the same food or draw the same pictures. Then one day Something turns up and wants to be friends. However, Something Else does not want to be friends with this creature as he believes that they are not the same and he refuses to eat sandwiches with 'Urgy stuff' in them. He sends Something away and then suddenly realizes that he acts like all the other people who always sent him away. Eventually Something Else and Something become best friends. |
Freedom Summer | Deborah Wiles | 2,002 | The set is in Mississippi during the summer of 1964, a summer of desegregation in the South, the book is about two best friends. John Henry is black and Joe is white. They do everything together, such as swimming in a creek. They cannot swim in the town pool together because blacks are not allowed to use the public swimming pool. Joe is then told that a law has been passed that blacks can do everything that whites can do. He is really excited because this means that he can go to the town pool tomorrow with John Henry. The boys are more excited than ever before but when they arrive at the town pool the following day, they are in shock because the town pool has been closed. The entire pool has been filled with black sticky disgusting tar as white people would rather close down the entire pool instead of sharing it with black people. They did not want these people to have their own lives so they turned them down. No voting for them. The boys are heavily disappointed and the book ends with the two boys entering a grocery store which was previously for whites only. |
Cold Skin | null | 2,002 | The novel chronicles the stay of an unnamed weather official on a remote island in the south Atlantic close to the Antarctic Circle. |
The Developers | null | 2,005 | A team of web developers in Michigan's Upper Peninsula build a city-based social networking website for a small community. The system becomes a big hit, but the team is then asked to build something much larger: an Internet portal that will be monitored in Big Brother fashion by the United States government. While the group mulls its options, the members become engrossed in personal issues. Matt Severson, the owner of The Developers, is constantly chasing after Katy Terrill, a Developer and recent divorcee. Drew Davis, an original co-founder of the group, spends much of his free time as a world-renowned bingo caller. The youngest Developer, Kevin Gentry, often confuses his feelings of love for women with his appetite for fast food. Lastly, Sarina Metcalfe appears to have a fetish for Richard Simmons, while often wearing skimpy clothing during runs in subzero temperatures. |
The Wicked Son | David Mamet | null | In the Passover Seder, four different sons ask a question. The wicked son asks, "What does this ritual mean to you?", in essence separating himself from the group by sarcastically and scornfully declaring that the ritual has no personal meaning for him. In a series of related essays, Mamet uses this concept of the wicked son as a symbol of the atheistic or agnostic self-hating Jew in Western society. Mamet gives his own personal, unapologetic explanation of Israel’s situation. He declares that “The Jewish State has offered the Arab world peace since 1948; it has received war, and slaughter, and the rhetoric of annihilation.” He notes that “It is a country, and like any country, will make mistakes.” Yet as Mamet sees it, Israel is “not by proof, but by the mere process of indictment, excluded from the family of humankind.” Unlike more familiar defenses such as those by Alan Dershowitz in The Case for Israel, Mamet focuses on what he sees as the anti-Semitic psychology and underlying double standards of attacks on Israel. He sees the media portrayal of Israel as “a modern instance of the blood libel - that Jews delight in the blood of others.” For example, he writes: “The everyday announcements of the so-called ‘cycle of violence’ in Israel are race slander, a pro-forma reminder of the availability of the Jews as an object of disgust.” He sees antisemitism in “the inability to assign to Israelis a basic humanity…the happy assignment of wicked motives to the Israeli soldier.” He underlines the double standard of antisemitism: “…’reprisals’…’retaliation’…the very words are revelatory, for such actions by the United States are known as ‘defense’…” Mamet goes on to analyze what happens when Jews abandon loyalty to their religion and tradition in order, as he sees it, to find acceptance in Israel-bashing liberal society. "It is the sin of the spies, a ‘coward generation’ with a ‘lack of belief in God.’ People have a drive to worship something, and will fill the void left by rejecting God by worshipping sports, celebrities, ‘wealth, fame, status, sex, physical fitness, good works, human perfectibility.” (p62) In the lavish bar mitzvah, Mamet sees the sin of the golden calf: "in the absence of God, lapsed Jews worship Man, power, gold. It is self-worship, the idolatry of human power." “Our own enclave, the Jews, exists, in truth, in learning, containing wisdom, solace, tradition, and mutual support.” "Secular Jews reject their birthright of ‘connection to the Divine.’" “(Our religion) is a gift from God – what greater joy than to support it, to devote ourselves to it, and to enjoy it?” |
Seth Material | null | null | The core teachings of the Seth Material are based on the principle that consciousness creates matter, and that each individual creates his or her own reality through thoughts, beliefs and expectations, and that the "point of power" through which the individual can effect change is in the present moment. The Seth Material discusses a wide range of metaphysical concepts, including the nature of God, referred to in the Material as "All That Is" and sometimes "The Multidimensional God" (who takes its form in many parallel or probable universes); the nature of physical reality; the purpose of life and the nature of good and evil; the purpose of suffering; parallel lives and transpersonal realms. According to the Seth Material, the entire self or "entity" is a gestalt consisting of the inner self, various selves that the entity has assumed through past existences (physical and non-physical), plus all the currently incarnated selves, and all their probable counterparts, and reincarnation is included as a core principle. Wouter Hanegraaff, Professor of History of Hermetic Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam, states that Roberts' views (when speaking as Seth) on the nature of the self have been influential to other new age authors (some of whom use the term "Higher Self" to refer to the same concept), and that Roberts' terminology has been adopted by some of those authors. Hanegraaff states that Seth uses various terms to refer to the concept of the "Self", including "entity", "whole self", "gestalt", and "(over)soul". The Seth Material says that all individuals create their own circumstances and experiences within the shared earthly environment, similar to the doctrine of responsibility assumption. This concept is expressed in the phrase "you create your own reality", which may have originated with the Seth readings. The inner self is responsible for the construction and maintenance of the individual's physical body and immediate physical environment, and the unfolding of events is determined by the expectations, attitudes and beliefs of the outer ego, that portion of the self that human beings know as themselves. The books discuss the idea that the physical environment is constructed and maintained by the inner selves of the individual occupants (including the animals). The inner selves project, en masse, a pattern for physical reality which is then filled with energy, as needed, by each individual. All events are also produced in the same manner. |
The Last Victim | Jason Moss | null | In 1994, Moss was an 18-year-old college student at UNLV. While studying for his honors thesis, he established relationships with John Wayne Gacy, Richard Ramirez, Henry Lee Lucas, Jeffrey Dahmer, and Charles Manson. He obtained samples of correspondence from and interviews with these men. Moss researched what would interest his subject the most and then cast himself in the role of disciple, admirer, surrogate, or potential victim. In his book he mentioned that he was interested in a career with the FBI; he reasoned that gaining the trust of a serial killer, possibly learning more about their stated crimes or unsolved murders, was a way to distinguish himself as a job candidate. Moss forged the strongest relationship with Gacy; letters led to regular Sunday morning phone calls, during which Gacy trumpeted his innocence even as he gave Moss a guided tour of his world. In the book, Moss tells the story of his correspondence and eventual meeting with Gacy shortly before Gacy was executed. According to the viewpoint informing the title of this book, Moss became Gacy's "last victim" after a face to face meeting in prison, in essence being overpowered by a manipulative, depraved sociopath. Moss felt that this misadventure allowed him to understand how a killer's mind works in not only controlling the vulnerable but also in terms of how to break them. Jason Moss committed suicide in June 2006 |
The Greek Who Stole Christmas | Anthony Horowitz | 2,007 | The Greek Who Stole Christmas is a short Diamond brothers story by Anthony Horowitz. At a place at Christmas is fast approaching and once again Tim Diamond and his younger brother Nick are flat broke. So when they are hired to investigate an anonymous death threat made to world-famous Greek pop singer and movie actress Minerva, they jump at the chance to earn some extra money.her hotel, they learn that the death threat may have something to do with a cancelled concert that was meant to benefit a society called overweight Albanian Kids (OAK). Minerva's husband, Harold Chase, is especially worried since Minerva will be appearing in public the following day, having been booked to turn on the Regent Street Christmas lights. A box of crackers is sent to the room with a death threat inside. Tim and Nick are shocked to hear that Minerva hates Christmas and everything about it, but agree to be at the event to protect her. At Regent Street the next day, someone fires two shots. In the ensuing commotion, Tim accidentally turns on the lights, spoiling the ceremony. However, now that they are on, Harold easily spots someone on one of the rooftops, holding what looks like a gun. Nick rushes to the rooftop via the store below, but only hears the supposed assassin say "I d-d-didn't..." before he runs away. Chase fires Tim. Then Nick explains that Chase wanted to kill Minerva due to her hatred of Christmas. He faked the death threat and to avoid suspicion, hired a private detective (Tim), while at the same time making sure that he was dumb and half-witted. Then, he paid Parker to go up on the rooftops, but fired some blanks from his pocket. Then, he killed Parker since he knew he was working as the Harrods Santa, Nick realises Tim's card fell out of his pocket during the fight. He took his place, and began waiting till Minerva would visit, then he would give her the bomb. In the end, Nick and Tim get paid ten thousand pounds, and buy plane tickets to Australia so they can visit their parents. |
Two to the Fifth | Piers Anthony | 2,008 | According to Pier Anthony's newsletter,"Two to the Fifth" is "the story of Cyrus Cyborg, a playwright who is considered a catch by several of the lovely actresses in his plays. The Princess Rhythm, age twelve, confesses to having a crush on him. He refuses to take that seriously; she's a child. Bad mistake; she's also a Sorceress. Never antagonize a Sorceress of any age. She enchants herself to be ten years older, grabs him, and hauls him into a love spring. Gives one heroic ellipsis... And reverts to her normal age after an hour, leaving him hopelessly in love with a woman who won't exist for another decade. But the stork, having received the signal, brings her a baby. There are reasons for the dread Adult Conspiracy that children don't necessarily appreciate. Then it gets complicated. Even when unapproachably young—Cyrus naturally honors the Adult Conspiracy throughout—and with a daughter who can't be explained to others, the princess proves to be a dangerously jealous lover, and Cyrus is constantly wary. Aside from this incidental interaction, there is the challenge of Ragna Roc, who means to take over Xanth in a dramatic final battle, or destroy it. He does have the power. The three princesses together, their magic cubed, take him on in the finale without any certainty of winning." |
Criminal Conversation | null | null | Sarah Welles, 34, a private school English teacher, is happily married to Assistant District Attorney Michael Welles, Organized Crime, Manhattan. Michael Welles is chasing suspected Mafia-connected businessman Andrew Faviola, 28, son of jailed don Anthony and himself pushing to establish a new territory by the creation of "moon rock," a brand of cocaine and opium with far-reaching interests. Sarah meets Andrew Faviola while she is on holiday in the Caribbean. Little does she know that after he saves her pre-teen daughter from drowning, he will come after her next--or that their trysts at his apartment are being taped by Michael (her husband) in an effort to gain criminal evidence of Andrew's mafia activities. When Michael realises that the "unknown blonde" is his wife, their marriage and relationship is under threat. |
Destiny of Souls | null | null | In his second book, and through his groundbreaking research into the afterlife, Michael Newton has documented the more indepth results of his clinical work in spiritual hypnotherapy. These are presented in a form of case studies and uncover the hidden aspects of the spirit world, and provide a better understanding of the incredible sense of order within the afterlife. |
The She Spot | Lisa Chen | 2,008 | The She Spot focuses on the impact of women on social change. The book focuses on the influence women have had on the world, as well as on volunteering. The book incorporates several case studies, polls, and the potential for women to be underrepresented in these polls and studies. The She Spot also covers the potential mis-representation in marketing towards women. |
Beyond the Gap | Harry Turtledove | 2,007 | When a gap opens in the glacier, Count Hamnet Thyssen and Ulric Skakki are dispatched by Emperor Sighvat II of Raumsdalia to explore the other side. Together with Earl Eyvind Torfin and a wizard, Audun Gilli, they team up with Trasamund, a chieftain of the nomadic, mammoth-herding Bizogot nation. Crossing through the gap, the explorers discover that a powerful tribal confederation, who call themselves "the Rulers," are preparing to burst through the gap and seize the lands to the south for their own. |
The Dolphins of Laurentum | Caroline Lawrence | 2,003 | October, AD 79: Flavia Gemina and her friends Nubia, Jonathan, and Lupus, are enjoying dinner together at Flavia’s home, when a bedraggled stranger stumbles through the front door. To Flavia’s horror, the man is her own father, Geminus, who has been shipwrecked and severely injured. With the aid of Jonathan’s father, Dr. Mordecai, Marcus makes a gradual recovery. But more bad news arrives: not only has her father’s ship been lost with all hands and its cargo, Marcus’s bank announces that it is calling in the loan on the ship immediately, or else they will seize his house and property. Flavia’s uncle Gaius convinces the bank to give them one extra week, but no longer. Everyone is suddenly in need of money: Gaius doesn’t feel able to marry Jonathan’s sister, Miriam, after his farm was lost in the eruption of Vesuvius; Nubia is shocked to recognize her elder brother, Tarhaqo, among a group of slaves being sold in the market; Lupus is enraged to learn that his hated enemy, the slave dealer Venalicius, has bribed his way out of prison. Lupus wants to hire an assassin, but the man names an impossible price for his services. The family’s dismal mood is lifted by the arrival of a young stranger: Pliny the Younger, the nephew of Admiral Pliny, who has just inherited his uncle’s property. Remembering their friendship with his uncle before his death, and keen to hear their accounts of his last days, Pliny invites Marcus to his villa in Laurentum to recuperate, including the children, Miriam, and the children’s teacher Aristo. Mordecai endorses the suggestion gratefully, while Gaius remains behind in Ostia to sort out the financial mess. When the family arrives at Laurentum, they are delighted to meet Phrixus, Admiral Pliny’s slave, who has just received his freedom. Over dinner, the family play music and tell stories to entertain each other, and Marcus, with coaxing, tells of how he was shipwrecked. As he regrets the loss of his cargo, Pliny muses about the treasures lost under the sea, mentioning that there is a shipwreck visible under the water, just off the coast from the villa. It was rumored to be carrying a cargo of gold, but it is sunk too deep for any of the local fisherman to reach it. Elated, Lupus reveals to the others that he is Greek in origin, born on the island of Symi, and, like his father before him, is a trained diver. With his instruction, the others equip a boat to take to the wreck site. During his first dive, he manages to reach the wreck, something no other local has managed to do, though he considers himself out of practice. Pliny insists on having a celebratory feast on the beach. That night, the four friends are enchanted to see phosphorescent plankton lighting up the beach, and when they all jump into the ocean, find themselves swimming with dolphins. Aristo is cajoled to tell several Greek myths having to do with dolphins during their lessons, including the stories of Arion and Delphinus, and of Poseidon and Amphitrite. With practice, Lupus makes several dives of increasing duration, managing to reach the wreck several times, but unable to retrieve any of the amphorae he finds inside. With Aristo’s help, Jonathan designs a float rope to attach to the vessels, but everyone becomes alarmed when Lupus begins showing signs of pressure sickness. Aristo orders him to rest before his next dive, but Lupus becomes sullen and obsessed with retrieving the treasure, even snubbing his friends when they want to play music or go swimming with the dolphins again. On his last dive, Lupus is attacked by an octopus inside the wreck, losing his lifeline. He fights off the octopus, but loses consciousness underwater. A friendly dolphin nudges him to the surface, and Jonathan is able to revive him with artificial respiration. When they return to the villa, Aristo misconstrues an exchange between Miriam and Pliny, and the two men begin fighting over her. Furious, Miriam tells them to stop and runs off by herself. Then Gaius arrives at the farm with grave news: the “assassin” that Lupus tried to hire was in fact an agent of the local magistrate, Bato, who deliberately named an impossible sum to prevent Lupus from trying to hire him. Gaius is now worried that Lupus is obsessed with finding enough money to have Venalicius killed, so much that he will injure or kill himself diving to the wreck. When Flavia and the others wonder why Lupus hates Venalicius so much, Gaius has a startling document to show them: last month, Mordecai was in jail on a wrongful charge (during The Assassins of Rome). Venalicius was his cellmate, and narrated a confession that Mordecai wrote down: Venalicius’s real name is Phillippos, Lupus’s uncle. When he was a boy on Symi, he was abused and laughed at because of his ugliness, except by one girl, Melissa. Because he was a good diver, Phillippos wanted to find a pearl for Melissa being so nice to him, but ended up rupturing one of his eyes from pressure sickness. Now even uglier, he was even more abused by his father, who later sold him as a slave. Years later, Phillippos returned to the island, now free, and a rich and ruthless slave dealer. He was enraged to find that his handsome younger brother had married Melissa, and killed him. Melissa’s son yelled that he would tell on his uncle, and Phillippos grabbed the boy and cut his tongue out, telling Melissa that the boy would die if anyone followed him. He then sailed away, and the boy escaped when the ship reached Ostia. Lupus has overheard Gaius’s reading, and adds one detail: Venalicius had told him that his mother was also dead; now knowing that this isn’t true, Lupus realizes she may be alive somewhere. Now more determined than ever to retrieve the treasure, Lupus sneaks out of the villa and hires one of the fishermen to take him to the wreck. When he gets there, he is shocked to see Dr. Mordecai and Venalicius together. Venalicius dives into the water, and Mordecai yells at Lupus to stop, Venalicius is trying to help them. Ignoring this, Lupus dives and races his uncle to the wreck. Once there, Lupus sees the octopus attacking his uncle. Somewhat to his own surprise, Lupus stabs the octopus and drives it away. When Venalicius is brought up, he begins to suffer terrible pains, as he has made many more dives that day than is safe. Lupus realizes his uncle is dying; before he does, he begs his nephew to forgive him. Lupus does, reluctantly, and agrees to perform the last rites. The treasure is never recovered, but the family’s problems are still solved: Flavia secretly sells her most prized possession, a kylix she received from Publius Pollius Felix (in "The Pirates of Pompeii") to Pliny in exchange for enough money to anonymously pay off her father’s loan; Pliny makes Gaius tenant on one of his farms, so he can afford to marry Miriam; and Mordecai informs Lupus that, before he died, Venalicius accepted Christian baptism and willed all of his money and possessions to his nephew, including his ship. Lupus makes Marcus the new captain of his ship (re-christened the Delphina), and agrees to carry out his uncle’s dying wish of rescuing all the children he abducted and sold into slavery. The only one saddened is Nubia, who learns that her brother was sold to a gladiator school in Capua. The next morning, Flavia, Jonathan, and Nubia read a note left by Lupus telling what little he remembers from that terrible night: after his uncle’s ship left Symi, some of the other sailors had to stop the bleeding in his mouth by cauterizing the stub of his tongue: "I opened my mouth because I thought that it couldn’t hurt any worse than it already did. But I was wrong.” They look up and are heartened to see Lupus out at sea, lifted of the burden of his hate, and taking a carefree ride on a dolphin. |
Knot Gneiss | Piers Anthony | 2,010 | This is about Jumper's friend Wenda Woodwife, who has a nymphly front but no back, being hollow from behind, who speaks with the forest dialect: "I wood knot dew that to yew." She has to transport a boulder made of petrified reverse wood that naturally terrifies (petrifies) everyone else. She has to put together a group of six or more and starts out her journey asking help from her best friend Jumper, King of the Spiders |
Wide Awake | David Levithan | null | * 9/11. * The Greater Depression (aka The Debt, Deficit, and Fuel Depression) transpired when, after the American government began spending more and landed itself further in debt, foreign countries started asking for repayment: prices started inflating rapidly, causing a depression even greater than that of the 1930s. * The Andreas Quake occurred on 3/12 and helped to inspire the Jesus Revolution (see below). * Hurricane Wanda occurred on 7/23 and also helped to inspire the Jesus Revolution. * The Reign of Fear began when the President decided to end the Greater Depression by launching The War to End All Wars, which led to the tragic events of 4/5, unexplained to readers. The Decent party was established, and members created the Denial Education program. The Opus Dei Trials took place. * The Prada Riots took place when The War to End All Wars proved ineffective, and citizens began to protest that some people remained rich while the rest were yet struggling. * Worldwide Health Care has been established to combat the monopoly of drug companies over whole dying nations. * The Jesus Revolution, described by critic Wayne Hoffman, author of Hard, as "Levithan's most ingenious creation", is a Christian movement promoting Jesus Christ as a messenger who preached love and peace as opposed to violence and intolerance. It encourages many of the young faithful to vote, and is thus decisive in turning the election in Stein's favour. * AIDS is a thing of the past. * The United States Supreme Court has affirmed the civil rights of homosexuals, including marriage. The novel opens with the revelation that the United States has just elected into power Abe Stein, its first openly gay (and Jewish) president. Alongside running mate Alice Martinez, Stein won a tight race by the mere margin of 1,000 Kansas votes, signalling a watershed for progressive politics, which take the limelight for the first time in decades. Although the lives of American homosexuals are drastically improved even before Stein's election, and the country is in the main far more liberal, it remains divided along acute political lines: as Hoffman notes, "the pendulum has merely swung slightly to the left, thanks to voters fed up with economic inequality, ongoing health crises and a politically motivated 'War to End All Wars' against 'extremists everywhere.'" The novel's focus, however, is on the personal impact of the election on a teenager named Duncan, who is also Jewish and openly gay. Although too young to vote, he is a strong supporter of Stein; thus, when the conservative governor demands a recount, and Stein's followers are prevailed upon to gather in support, he finds himself in a dilemma between his parents, who want him to stay home, and his politically passionate boyfriend, who demands that he stand up for what he believes in. |
Immortality | Milan Kundera | null | The novel begins with a woman's wave to her swim instructor: "She walked around the pool toward the exit. She passed the lifeguard, and after she had gone some three or four steps beyond him, she turned her head, smiled, and waved to him. At that instant I felt a pang in my heart! That smile and that gesture belonged to a twenty-year-old girl! Her arm rose with bewitching ease. It was as if she were playfully tossing a brightly colored ball to her lover. That smile and that gesture had charm and elegance, while the face and the body no longer had any charm. It was the charm of a gesture drowning in the charmlessness of the body. But the woman, though she must of course have realized that she was no longer beautiful, forgot that for the moment. There is a certain part of all of us that lives outside of time. Perhaps we become aware of our age only at exceptional moments and most of the time we are ageless. In any case, the instant she turned, smiled, and waved to the young lifeguard (who couldn’t control himself and burst out laughing), she was unaware of her age. The essence of her charm, independent of time, revealed itself for a second in that gesture and dazzled me. I was strangely moved. And then the word Agnes entered my mind. Agnes. I had never known a woman by that name." Divided into seven parts, Immortality centers on Agnes, her sister Laura and her husband Paul. Part One: the Face establishes these characters. Part Two: Immortality depicts Goethe's fraught relationship with Bettina, a young woman who aspires to create a place for herself in the pantheon of history by controlling Goethe's legacy after his death. Part Three: Fighting returns to Agnes and Laura, detailing the deteriorating state of Laura's relationship with Bernard Bertrand. Part Four: Homo Sentamentalis chronicles Goethe's afterlife and postmortem friendship with Ernest Hemingway. Part Five: Chance sees Agnes' death, and intersects these fictional events with Kundera's seemingly autobiographical account of a conversation with Professor Avenarius. Part Six: the Dial introduces a new character, Rubens, who had an affair with Agnes years prior to the onset of the main events in the plot. Part Seven: the Celebration concludes the novel in the same health club where Kundera first observed the inspirational wave gesture. |
Dawkins vs. Gould | Kim Sterelny | 2,001 | In the introductory chapter the author points out that there have been many conflicts in biology. Still, few have been as public or as polemical as the one between Dawkins and Gould. Dawkins sees evolution as a competition between gene lineages, where organisms are vehicles for those genes. Gould, a paleontologist in the tradition of George Gaylord Simpson, has a different perspective. For example, he sees chance as very important, and views organisms as being more important than genes. Their broader world views also differ, for instance they have very different beliefs about the relationship between religion and science. This begins with a discussion on genes and gene lineages (chapter 2). Dawkins' view on the nature of evolution, as outlined in The Selfish Gene, has genes as the units of selection, both in the first replicators and in more complex organisms, where alliances of genes are formed (and sometimes broken). He then discusses in chapter 3, Dawkins' view of heritability, with genes as difference makers that satisfy replicator principles and have phenotypic power, increasing the likelihood of phenotypic expression, depending on environmental context. In chapter 4, he discusses aspects of genomes and genetic replication, using various examples. He notes that in a story about magpie aggression, "Dawkins' story will be about genes and vehicles", whereas Gould and others will describe it in terms of phenotypic fitness. (p. 39) He discusses ways in which genes "lever their way into the next generation", including genes that are loners, or 'Outlaws', and which promote their own replication at the expense of other genes in their organism's genome. He then discusses the role of extended phenotypes, in which genotypes that influence their environment further increase the likelihood of replication (chapter 4). Chapter 5 explores selfish genes and the selection within the animal kingdom of cooperation as opposed to altruism, levels of selection, and the evolution of evolvability itself. Sterelny notes that on the issue of high-level selection, "Dawkins and Gould are less sharp than they once were." (p. 65) In chapter 6, Sterelny notes that "despite the heat of some recent rhetoric, the same is true of the role of selection in generating evolutionary change", (p. 67) and naive adaptationism. "Everyone accepts that many characteristics of organisms are not the direct result of selection", as in the example of redness of blood, which is a by-product of its oxygen-carrying properties. (p. 70) Numerous general truths are uncontroversial "though their application to particular cases may be. Nor is there disagreement between Gould and Dawkins on core cases", such as echolocation in bats, which "everyone agrees is an adaptation". (p. 71) They do however differ on the relative role of selection and variation. For example, they have different emphases on development. Developmental constraints are fundamental to Gould's approach. Dawkins gives this less weight, and has been more interested in enhanced possibilities open to lineages as a result of developmental revolutions. For example, the evolution of segmentation increases variation possibilities. He discusses this in Climbing Mount Improbable, and "returns to similar themes at the end of The Ancestor's Tale: major transitions in evolution are developmental transitions, transitions that make new variants possible, and hence new adaptive complexes possible". (pp. 77–78) "Gould, on the other hand, is inclined to bet that the array of possibilities open to a lineage is tightly restricted, often to minor variants of its current state." (p. 78) Gould sees morphological stability as "probably explained by constraints on the supply of variation to selection". (p. 78) But whereas in his earlier work Gould considered variation supply as a brake on evolutionary change, in The Structure of Evolutionary Theory he carefully notes that it can also enhance possibilities for change. "So while both Dawkins and Gould recognise the central role of developmental biology in an explanation of evolutionary change, they make different bets as to what the role will be. Gould but not Dawkins thinks that one of these roles is as a brake", damping down change possibilities. (p. 78) Another difference is Dawkins conception of evolutionary biology's central problem as the explanation of adaptive complexity, whereas Gould has largely focused on the existence of large-scale patterns in the history of life that are not explained by natural selection. "A further disagreement concerns the existence and importance of these patterns", (p. 79) which leads on to Part III. In discussing Gould's perspective, Sterelny begins with two fundamental distinctions that Gould saw between his viewpoint and that of the Dawkins camp. Firstly, Gould thought that gene selectionists misrepresent the role of genes in microevolution, ascribing a causal role in evolution, rather than by-product record of evolutionary change. Moreover, evolutionary biologists have often neglected non-selective possibilities when formulating hypotheses about microevolutionary change. For example, contemporary sex differences in human males and females need not be adaptations, but could be evolutionary vestiges of a greater sexual dimorphism in ancestral species. But Gould's main target is 'extrapolationism', concerning the relationship between evolutionary processes occurring within species and those of large-scale life histories. In this view, the evolution of species lineages is an aggregate of events at the local population scale, with major changes being the additive result of minor changes over successive generations. While not disputing the relevance of this, Gould argued that it is not the whole truth. "Indeed, it is not much of an exaggeration to say that Gould's professional life has been one long campaign against the idea that this history of life is nothing but the long, long accumulation of local events." (p. 86) Sterelny offers four highlights to illustrate this. Firstly, punctuated equilibrium, in which new species arise by a split in a parental species, followed by geologically rapid speciation of one or both of the fragments. A period of stasis then occurs until the species either becomes extinct or splits again. Gould argued that punctuated equilibrium challenges the gradual change expected by extrapolationists. In the case of Hominid evolution, and the evolutionary trend of marked increase in brain size. To Gould, this trend was the result of species sorting, in which species with relatively larger brains were more likely to appear, or to survive. Secondly, in his Natural History writings, Gould often argued that the history of life was profoundly affected by mass extinctions caused by environmental catastrophes such as an asteroid impact causing the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, which wiped out pterosaurs, large marine reptiles and non-avian dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Such a mass extinction would be sudden at not just the larger geological time-scale, but also the more ephemeral ecological one. "The properties that are visible to selection and evolution in local populations—the extent to which an organism is suited to life here and now" become irrelevant to survival prospects in mass extinction times. "Survival or extinction in mass extinction episodes determines the large-scale shape of the tree of life". Massive culling of synapsids at the end of the Permian "gave the dinosaurs their chance. The death of the dinosaurs opened the door for the radiation of mammals." (p. 89) Thirdly, in Wonderful Life, Gould describes the Burgess Shale fauna, which is known in detail due to fortuitous preservation of both hard and soft tissue around 505 million years ago. Gould argues that the Burgess Shale fauna demonstrate both diversity of species and disparity of body plans. He accepts that diversity has probably increased over the last few million years, but argues that disparity of animal life peaked early in evolutionary history, with very little disparity generated since the Cambrian, and profound conservatism in surviving lineages. For example, despite diversity in beetle species their body plans follow the same general pattern. He argues that survival has been contingent, and that if the tape of life was replayed from the earliest Cambrian, with small alterations in the initial conditions, a different set of survivors may have evolved. Fourth, in The Spread of Excellence, "Gould argues that evolutionary trends are not the scaled-up consequences of competitive interactions among organisms." (p. 90) For example, morphological changes in horses are not the cumulative result of the competitive success of horses better adapted to grazing. "Rather, Gould argues that this trend is really a change in the spread of variation within the horse lineage", which used to be species rich with a wide range of lifestyles and sizes. "But only a very few species survived, and those few happen to be largish horses. The average horse is larger now only because almost all horse species went extinct, and the few survivors happened to be somewhat atypical", and there is no evolutionary 'trend' towards increased size. (p. 91) Similarly with complexity. While complexity has increased over time, it is misleading to see this simply as a trend towards increased complexity, from simple organisms such as bacteria to complex organisms such as us. Rather, the distance from the least to the most complex living organism has increased. "The real phenomenon to be explained is this increase in variation rather than an upward trend in average complexity. There is, Gould argues, no such trend." (p. 92) Sterelny notes two issues arising from consideration of Gould's case against extrapolationism. "Are the patterns in life's history that he claims to detect real? And do these patterns really show the existence of evolutionary mechanisms other than those operating at the scale of local populations?" (p. 92) Sterelny then outlines in chapter 8 Gould and Eldredge's punctuated equilibrium hypothesis. They argued that the appearance of stability in species evolution is not a mere effect of the gappiness and imperfection of the fossil record. Rather, it is the result of discontinuous tempos of change in the process of speciation and the deployment of species in geological time. Sterelny notes that this hypothesis has been misunderstood in two important ways. First, in some early discussions of the idea, the contrast between geological and ecological time was blurred, with Gould and Eldredge interpreted as claiming that species originate more or less overnight in a single step. However, Gould and Eldredge were referring to geological time, in which speciation taking 50,000 years would seem instantaneous relative to a species existence over millions of years. A second misunderstanding relates to further evolutionary change following speciation. They are not claiming that there is no generational change at all. "Lineages do change. But the change between generations does not accumulate. Instead, over time, the species wobbles about its phenotypic mean. Jonathan Weiner's The Beak of the Finch describes this very process." (p. 96) Sterelny notes that despite the fact that the fossil record represents, for several reasons, a biased sample, "the consensus seems to be shifting Gould's way: the punctuated equilibrium pattern is common, perhaps even predominant". Yet even if stasis is common "why suppose that this is bad news for the extrapolationist orthodoxy?" (p. 97) He notes that "the problem is not stasis but speciation. How can events in a local population generate a new species?" (p. 98) In discussing this issue, he notes "any solution to the speciation problem will take us beyond events in local populations observable on human timescales", and "it is likely that whatever explains the occasional transformation of a population into a species will rely on large-scale but rare climatic, biological, geographic or geological events; events which isolate populations until local change is entrenched". (p. 99) He notes that speciation is not just the accumulation of events in a local population, but dependent on the population's embeddedness into a larger whole. "There is a break with a strong version of extrapolationism, but it is not a radical break. Dawkins could, should, and probably would accept it; in The Ancestor's Tale, he has an inclusive view of speciation mechanisms." (p. 100) Thus, while "Gould somewhat overstates the adherence of orthodoxy to strict extrapolationism", punctuated equilibrium is more important than some of the more "ungenerous treatment" that has been meted out. (pp. 100–101) In chapter 9, Sterelny discusses mass extinction, and notes Gould's hypothesis that mass extinctions are more frequent, rapid, intense and different in their effects than has been supposed. (p. 108) Moreover, Gould argues that during such extinctions, there are evolutionary principles that would enable the prediction of winners and losers. "The game has rules. But they are different rules from those of normal times ... Species survival is not random, but the properties on which survival depends are not adaptations to the danger mass extinction threatens. If a meteor impact caused a nuclear winter, then the ability to lie dormant would have improved your chances. But dormancy is not an adaptation to the danger of meteor impacts." (p. 110) Similarly, "species with broad geographical ranges, species with broad habitat tolerances, species whose lifecycle does not tie them too closely to a particular type of community all would have had a better chance of making it", (p. 110) and this amounts to species selection. However as Gould concedes, there are no well-worked-out case studies. "In short, Gould's case for the importance of mass extinction depends on the view that there is a qualitative difference between mass extinction and background extinction, and that major groups have disappeared that would otherwise have survived". (p. 113) A plausible but difficult to prove claim, as is the claim that mass extinction regimes are species selection regimes. In chapter 10, Sterelny discusses the fossil evidence of Cambrian fauna, and how this provides the basis for Gould's challenge to gradualistic orthodoxy. About 543 million years ago, at the base of the Cambrian, the Ediacaran fauna, characterised by small shelly fossils, fossilised tracks, and burrows, apparently disappeared. From available evidence, diversity of fauna was very limited at the beginning of the Cambrian Period. "By the middle of the Cambrian, about 520 million years ago, animal life was rich and diverse", (p. 116) as demonstrated by the Maotianshan Shales fossils, in Chengjiang, China, which "are as spectacular as the Burgess Shale fauna, and significantly older." (p. 116) "Thus the fossil record seems to show that most of the major animal groups appeared simultaneously. In the 'Cambrian explosion', we find segmented worms, velvet worms, starfish and their allies, molluscs (bivalves, snails, squid and their relatives), sponges, brachiopods and other shelled animals appearing all at once, with their basic organisation, organ systems and sensory mechanisms already operational." (p. 116) "This explosive evolutionary radiation of the Cambrian seems to be unique. Plants seem to have arisen somewhat more gradually ... nor was there a similar radiation when animals invaded the land ... the colonisation of the land saw no new ways of making an animal." (p. 117) Despite adaptations, the basic body plans remain recognisable. One possibility is that the 'Cambrian explosion' is "an illusion generated by the failure of earlier Precambrian fossils to survive to our times," (p. 117) that there is a long history of hidden evolution preceding the appearance of multi-celled animals in the fossil record. "This remains a live option. There are fossil embryos of animals from China dating to about 570 million years ago", (p. 120) and there are many animal lineages for which there is no fossil record, possibly due to being small and soft-bodied, so leaving no detectable traces. Certainly Precambrian animal life is evidenced by the Ediacaran fossils, but the relationship between fauna from these two periods remains unclear. Gould was inclined to support the view that the Ediacaran fauna became wholly extinct prior to the Cambrian, thus were not Cambrian ancestors, "hence their existence does not extend the timeframe of animal evolution into the Precambrian". (p. 120) However, the development of methods of calibrating rates of change in DNA sequences has given the ability to estimate the last common ancestor of various lineages. It also allows the obtaining of molecular clock dates for lineages without a fossil record, which shows that zero-fossil phyla are also ancient. Such information comes with important caveats in relation to methodology, including the underlying assumptions of each method. "However, even the youngest dates from molecular clocks place the origins of the deepest branches in the tree of animal life—where the sponges and jellyfish branch off from the other early animals—over 600 million years ago, and so quite deep in the Precambrian." (p. 125) Gould accepted this, but noted that this does not negate the Cambrian Explosion. Molecular clocks date origins, while fossils date geographical spread and morphology. Molecular clock data cannot decide between gradual morphological change and rapid evolutionary bursts after initial species divergence. "Moreover, Gould argues that the fossil record supports the model in which the lineage splits much earlier than the distinctive morphologies evolve. For that explains why we find no Precambrian proto-arthropod fossils. In short, the 'hidden history' hypothesis remains an open option, but so does Gould's guess that the Cambrian explosion was genuinely explosive rather than an illusion generated by incomplete preservation." (pp. 125–126) Of relevance to the explosive radiation hypothesis are the findings from the Cambrian sites: the Burgess (~505 myr), the Chengjiang (~522 myr), and the Sirius Passet formation in Greenland, which is dated at about 518 million years Before Present. Sterelny describes the distinction between disparity and diversity, and then explores Gould's claim that since the Cambrian, diversity has increased, but disparity has decreased. Since the Cambrian, not just species within phyla, but whole phyla themselves have become extinct. The major subdivisions of animal life are phyla, each of which is a distinctive way of building an animal. Gould's claim is that "the Cambrian phylum count was larger, maybe much larger, than the contemporary count. No new phyla have appeared, and many have gone. That count, in turn, is a reasonable measure of disparity. So Cambrian disparity was considerably larger than current disparity. The history of animal life is not a history of gradually increasing differentiation. It is a history of exuberant initial proliferation followed by much loss; perhaps sudden loss." (p. 129) Gould doubted that selection played much role in either the early burst of disparity, the post-Cambrian conservativeness of evolution, or the roster of loss and survival. To Gould, there is a conservative pattern of history indicated by a reduction in disparity as measured by both the lack of new body plans and the lack of any major modifications of old ones. Given that evolution in general has not ceased in the past 500 million years, this poses a number of questions. However, Dawkins and more so his former student Mark Ridley think Gould's basic claim about history's pattern is incorrect. Central to Ridley's approach is cladistics, in which the purpose of biological systematics is to discover and represent genealogical relationships between species. Biological classifications are thus evolutionary genealogies, where only monophyletic groups (e.g. genera, families, orders, classes, phyla) are recognised and named. To cladists, similarity and dissimilarity are not objective features of the living world; they are products of human perceptions. Thus, whereas some morphological and physiological differences are more salient to us, and more striking or surprising, this is a fact about us, not the history of life. Conversely, genealogical reconstructions—who is related to whom—are objective facts independent of the observer's perception. Sterelny discusses how both cladists and Dawkins think that Gould overestimates Cambrian disparity, and he notes that while the distinction between disparity and diversity is very plausible, in the absence of a good account of the nature of disparity, and objective measures, "the existence of Gould's puzzling pattern remains conjectural". (p. 141) Finally, in chapter 11, Sterelny discusses the "evolutionary escalator", or the tendency over time for life on earth to show a progressive increase both in compexity and adaptivity. While Gould does not outright reject this, he thinks it is a misleading way to think about the history of life. As above, with the example of horses, Gould argues that there has been no directional trend, but rather, a massive extinction in the horse lineage, with the surviving remnants happening to be largish grazers. So the appearance of a trend is generated by a reduction in heterogeneity. "A trend which is hostage to one switch between life and death is no trend at all." (p. 146) At the scale of complexity, the same applies. "What we think of as a progressive increase in complexity is a change in the difference between the least and the most complex organism. It is a change in the spread of complexity." (p. 146) Life starts in the simplest form that the constraints of chemistry and physics will allow, with bacteria probably close to that limit. "So life starts at the minimum level of complexity. Since even now nearly everything that is alive is a bacterium, for the most part life has stayed that way." (p. 146) But occasionally life builds a lineage that becomes more complex over time. There are no global evolutionary mechanisms that either prevent more complex organisms evolving from simpler ones, or that make it more likely to occur. Complexity tends to drift up because the point of life's origin is close to the physical lower bound. Such complex creatures are relatively less than bacteria, which still dominate life, but the difference between the simplest and most complex organisms tends to become greater over time. So the increased range is wholly undirected. Displayed as a frequency distribution curve or histogram, the shape would be skewed to the right (i.e. positively skewed), with the mode near the left. Over time, the range would increase as average complexity drifts upwards. But the mode would remain at left, with the curve spreading to the right, because there is a wall imposed by the laws of the physical sciences to the left, but not to the right. To Gould, this upward drift in complexity is not the same as directional progress. 'Replaying the tape' of life's history would not guarantee the same outcomes, especially as mass extinction events make history utterly unpredictable. Conversely, Dawkins and Simon Conway Morris think that the course of evolutionary history is more predictable than does Gould. They argue that "convergent evolution is such a ubiquitous feature of evolution that the broad outline of evolution is highly predictable. Evolutionary pathways are constrained by both opportunity and possibility. There are not many ways of building working organisms, and so we can predict that evolution will move along this small set of pathways. Many of the most distinctive features of living systems have evolved more than once. Some of them (like eyes) have evolved many times." (p. 149) Also, Dawkins thinks that evolution is progressive, not in an anthropocentric sense, but because over time life is becoming better adapted, although not in every aspect, as when local conditions change and organisms must move or readapt. "There is no reason to suppose that there is any arrow of overall improvement here." (p. 150) However, Dawkins thinks that relationships between organisms and their enemies, such as predator-prey, or parasite-host relationships, are locked into a permanent arms race, and such lineages generate progressive change. "Both predator and prey will become absolutely more efficient in hunting and avoiding hunters, though their relative success with respect to one another may not change at all over time." (p. 151) Thus progress is real though partial and intermittent. "Partial because it is generated only when selective regimes are both directional and stable: selecting for the same kind of phenotypic change over long periods, as in arms races ... intermittent because every arms race will ultimately be disrupted by large-scale environmental changes." (p. 151) However, while they were in progress, each lineage was objectively improving. To Sterelny, Gould overstates his case, and "there is more to the history of life's complexity than a gradual increase in variance". (p. 151) He cites the 1995 work The Major Transitions in Evolution by John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry, in which life's history involves a series of major transitions and hence inherent directionality, with each transition facilitating possibilities for the evolution of more complex organisms. Dawkins pursues a similar, though less detailed, argument* in discussing the evolution of evolvability, in which a series of 'watershed events' make new life forms possible. These watersheds in evolvability comprise the evolution of sex, of multi-celled life together with a life cycle that takes large organisms through a single-celled reproduction stage, and the evolution of a modular mode of the development and construction of bodies. "Segmentation, for Dawkins, is a special case of modularity; of building a creature out of relatively discrete chunks. For once a chunk has been invented by evolution, it can be modified or redeployed without stuffing up the rest of the organism." (p. 152) While Gould too is interested in evolvability, the crucial difference between Gould's view, and that of Maynard Smith, Szathmary and Dawkins, is in how they see the spread of complexity. To Gould, complexity drifts upward, having a lower boundary or wall to the left, "but no upper bound, and these features of complexity are fixed by biochemistry, not the course of evolutionary history". (p. 153) Maynard Smith and Szathmary consider that evolutionary history has had upper bounds, or walls to the right. For example, until eukaryotic life evolved, there was an upper bound of complexity set by the intrinsic limits on the size and structural complexity of prokaryotes, and for "perhaps 2 billion years, bacterial evolution was confined between these two limits." (p. 153) Similarly, until a series of evolutionary innovations facilitated the evolution of multi-celled organisms, eukaryotic complexity was set by the limits on a single eukaryotic cell. "Maynard Smith and Szathmary argue that social existence, too, has evolutionary preconditions. Until these are met, a wall remains to the right." (p. 153) Whereas to Gould, there are unchanging boundaries set by physics and chemistry, Maynard Smith, Szathmary and Dawkins view evolution as irreversibly transforming these boundaries. "The eukaryotic cell, sexual reproduction and cellular differentiation all change the nature of evolutionary possibility. These possibilities have changed over time in a direction that increases the maximum attainable complexity. In short, over time the rules of evolution change." (pp. 153–154) So evolvability has changed, with developmental mechanisms determining the variation available to selection. Gould claims that bacteria dominate every age, including this one.* They are the world's most numerous organisms, have the most disparate metabolic pathways, and may constitute most of the world's biomass. "All this is true and important", with Dawkins making similar observations.* "But it is not the whole truth. We live in an age in which many biological structures are now possible that were once not possible. That too is true, and important." (p. 153) In Chapter 12, Sterelny notes that "Dawkins and his allies really do have a different conception of evolution from that embraced by Eldredge, Lewontin and other collaborators of Gould", but that this does not explain the undercurrent of hostility generated in the debate, as illustrated by a series of exchanges in the New York Review of Books. But the issues pertain mostly to matters internal to evolutionary theory, and apart from banal psychological explanations pertaining to human reaction to public criticism, Sterelny thinks that at core is their different attitudes to science itself. To Dawkins, science is not just a light in the dark, but "by far our best, and perhaps our only, light." (p. 158) While not infallible, the natural sciences are society's one great engine for producing objective knowledge about the world, not just one knowledge system among many, and certainly not a socially constructed reflection of contemporary dominant ideology. Dawkins accepts that science cannot say what we should accept and reject, "but does not think of values as a special kind of fact that can be studied non-scientifically", notwithstanding that values are a kind of fact that anthropologists can and do study. "Least of all does he think religion has any special authority on values." (p. 158) Gould's perspective is more ambiguous, in which some important questions are outside the scope of science, falling into the domain of religion. "On this issue, Dawkins' views are simple. He is an atheist. Theisms of all varieties are just bad ideas about how the world works, and science can prove that those ideas are bad. What is worse, as he sees it, these bad ideas have mostly had socially unfortunate consequences." (pp. 158–159) In contrast, Gould thought theism is irrelevant to religion. "He interprets religion as a system of moral belief. Its essential feature is that it makes moral claims on how we ought to live. In Gould's view, science is irrelevant to moral claims. Science and religion are concerned with independent domains." (p. 159) Sterelny considers Gould's views on religion "doubly strange". (p. 159) First, various religions make innumerable factual claims about the history of the world and how it works, and those claims are often the basis of moral injunctions. Second, Gould's conception of ethics seems strange. "Does he think that there are genuine ethical truths? Is there genuine moral knowledge?" (p. 159) Recent ethical thinking has two approaches to this question, with perhaps the main contemporary argument being the 'expressivist' view that moral claims express the speaker's attitude towards some act or individual. In this view "when, for instance, I call someone a scumbag, I do not describe a particular moral property of that person. Rather, I express my distaste for that person and their doings." (pp. 159–160) The main alternative is 'naturalism', in which moral claims are based on facts, albeit complex, about human welfare. Gould seems to deny both options. "If 'expressivism' is right, there is no independent domain of moral knowledge to which religion contributes", with moral utterances reflecting not objective features of the world, but attitudes and opinions of the speakers. Conversely, "if naturalism is right, science is central to morality. For it discovers conditions under which we prosper." (p. 159) Gould thinks that there are important domains of human understanding where science has no role, and moreover he is skeptical about science's role within its 'proper' domain. Nevertheless, he rejects extreme versions of postmodern relativism. Evolution is an objective fact, containing objective facts, and those facts are not just aspects of a Western creation myth reflecting the dominant ideology, or an element of the current paleontological paradigm. "So to some extent Gould shares with Dawkins the view that science delivers objective knowledge about the world as it is." (p. 161) But while science reflects objective evidence and is not a mere socio-cultural construction "Gould argues that science is very deeply influenced by the cultural and social matrix in which it develops", (p. 161) with many of his writings illustrating the influence of social context on science, and its ultimate sensitivity to evidence. These writings "began as reflections on natural history; they ended as reflections on the history of natural history". (p. 161) Gould's Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle (first published in 1987) "locates the development of our conception of deep history in its cultural and intellectual context without any suggestion that that cultural context perverted the development of geology", whereas "in Wonderful Life, Gould argued that the Burgess Shale fauna were misunderstood because they were interpreted through the ideology of their discoverer". (p. 162) The Mismeasure of Man is Gould's most famous work on the themes of socio-cultural interests leading to bad science, pseudo-science, racist and sexist science, where "a particular ideological context led to a warped and distorted appreciation of the evidence on human difference". (p. 162) Thus, "one sharp contrast between Dawkins and Gould is on the application of science in general, and evolutionary biology in particular, to our species". (p. 162) Yet paradoxically, Dawkins' most systematic writings on human evolution explore the differences between human evolution and that of most other organisms, in which humans pass on their values through ideas and skills which Dawkins calls memes. To Dawkins, ideas are often like pathogens or parasites, replicating throughout human populations, sometimes quite virulently, with evangelical religion being a salient example. Doubts about the reliability and accuracy of idea replication suggest Dawkins' own view of cultural evolution may not work. But his general approach has gained some popularity, as illustrated by works which explore the interaction between cultural and biological evolution, such as Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd's Not By Genes Alone,. as well as Eytan Avital and Eva Jablonka's Animal Traditions. "So though Dawkins approaches human behaviour using different tools to those of standard sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists, he is fully committed to the idea that we can understand ourselves only in an evolutionary framework." (pp. 164–165) This contrasts with Gould. While "Of course" he accepts that humans are an evolved species, "Everything that Gould does not like in contemporary evolutionary thinking comes together in human sociobiology and its descendant, evolutionary psychology. The result has been a twenty-year campaign of savage polemic against evolutionary theories of human behaviour. Gould hates sociobiology". And "It is true that some evolutionary psychology does seem simple-minded," such as Randy Thornhill's "unconvincing" attempt to argue that a tendency towards rape is an evolutionary adaptation. (p. 165) However, contemporary evolutionary psychologists, and especially biological anthropologists, have accepted the need for caution in testing adaptationist hypotheses. (p. 165) However, even the most disciplined sociobiological approaches reflect different approaches to evolution to that exemplified by Gould. They "tend not to emphasise the importance of development and history in imposing constraints on adaptation, the problems in translating microevolutionary change into species-level change, the role of contingency and mass extinction in reshaping evolving lineages, or the importance of paleobiology to evolutionary biology", (p. 166) which likely played a part in Gould's hostility. But Sterelny suspects more most of all, Gould thought "these ideas are dangerous and ill-motivated as well as wrong. They smack of hubris, of science moving beyond its proper domain, and incautiously at that". Conversely, to Dawkins, knowledge of evolutionary underpinnings to human behaviour is potentially liberating, and "might even help us to escape the poisoned chalice of religion". (p. 166) Finally, in chapter 13, Sterelny summarises the fundamental contrasts between the views of Dawkins and Gould. In Dawkins' argument, selection acts on lineages of replicators, which are mostly but not exclusively genes. Ideas and skills are the replicators in animals capable of social learning, and "the earliest replicators were certainly not genes". (p. 167) Genetic competition occurs through vehicle-building alliances, with selection dependent on repeatable influences on those vehicles. Other genetic replication strategies include Outlaws, the prospects of which are enhanced at the expense of vehicle adaptiveness. And extended phenotype genes advantageously enhance their environment. The vehicles of Dawkins replicators need not be individuals, but can also be groups, although animal cooperation is not sufficient to claim group selection. Evolution's central explanatory imperative is the existence of complex adaptation, which can only be explained by natural selection. This complex adaptation evolves gradually, with occasional replication errors resulting in large but survivable phenotypic change. Humans are unusual species in that they are vehicles for memes as well as genes, although humans are not exempt from evolutionary biological explanations. Extrapolationism is a sound working theory, with most evolutionary patterns the result of microevolutionary change over vast geological time. Major animal lineages are the result of ordinary speciation processes, although possibility-expanding changes may result in some form of lineage-level selection. In contrast, Gould sees selection as usually acting on organisms in a local population, although in theory and practice, it can occur at many levels, with change at one level often affecting future options at other levels. Selection can occur at the group level, with some species lineages having characteristics which make extinction less likely, or speciation more likely. And while rare, selection can occur on genes within an organism. While selection is important, and requires understanding, it is just one of many factors explaining microevolutionary events and macroevolutionary patterns. Further, complex adaptations are but one phenomenon explanations in evolutionary biology. Extrapolationism is not a good theory, with large-scale patterns in the history of life not explainable by extrapolating from measurable events in local populations. Evolutionary biology needs a theory of variation, explaining the effect of variation supply on change potentiality. While humans are evolved animals, attempts to explain human behaviour using techniques from evolutionary biology have largely failed, "vitiated by one-sided understanding of evolutionary biology. They have often been biologically naive." (p. 170) Sterelny notes that these debates remain alive and developing, with no final abjudication possible as yet. "But we can say something about how the argument has developed." (p. 170) He claims that "the idea that gene-selectionist views of evolution are tacitly dependent on reductionism and genetic determinism is a mistake. Dawkins and the other gene selectionists do not think that nothing happens in evolution but changes in gene frequency." (p. 170) They do not deny the significance of the organism or phenotype, which they see as vehicles of selection, or 'survival machines', which interact with other survival machines and with the environment in ways replication of the genes whose vehicles they are. But there are other replication-enhancing strategies apart from organism construction. Extended phenotypes, as exemplified by parasitic species, are common and important, with probably all parasitic gene pools including "genes whose adaptive effects are on host organisms." (p. 171) And "the outlaw count is unknown, but it is growing all the time", and may transpire to be more common than thought. Sterelny notes that "gene selectionism is not determinism. No gene selectionist thinks that there is typically a simple relationship between carrying a particular gene and having a particular phenotype". While they exist, such as the sickle-cell haemoglobin gene, they are the exception not the rule. Gene-selectionist ideas are compatible with context dependence of gene action, but they do assume some reasonable regular relationship between a specific gene in an organism's genotype, and some aspect of the organism's phenotypic expression. They assume that within gene lineages, the effect on their vehicles will be fairly similar. "So while gene selectionists are not genetic determinists, they are making a bet on developmental biology. When revitalised to reoccurring features of context, gene action will turn out to be fairly systematic. There is no reason to suppose that this hunch is false, but it is not known to be true." (p. 172) Developmental biology is relevant to this debate in another important way: "The role of selection in evolution. Gould is betting that when the facts of developmental biology are in, it will turn out that the evolutionary possibilities of most lineages are highly constrained", with some characteristics "frozen" into their respective lineages. "They are developmentally entrenched. That is, these basic organisational features are connected in development to most aspects of the organism's phenotype, and that makes them hard to change." (p. 172) And "since variation in these frozen-in features is unlikely, selection is not likely to be important in explaining their persistence", (p. 173) and Gould thinks 'frozen accidents' are important in explanations of evolutionary patterns found in the fossil record. Conversely, Dawkins thinks that over time, selection can alter the range of a lineage's evolutionary possibilities. "So he thinks both that selection has a larger range of variation with which to work, and that when patterns do exist over long periods ... selection will have played a stabilising role." (p. 173) The integration of evolution and development "is the hottest of hot topics in contemporary evolutionary theory, and this issue is still most certainly open". In discussing the effects of mutations, Sterelny's "best current guess is that developmental biology probably does generate biases in the variation that is available to selection, and hence that evolutionary trajectories will often depend both on selection and these biases in supply" (173), vindicating Gould's view that developmental biology is crucial to explaining evolutionary patterns. (p. 174) "But it is harder to see how to resolve some of Gould's other claims about the large-scale history of life. Despite the plausibility of the distinction between disparity and diversity, we are not close to constructing a good account of disparity and its measurement". (p. 174) Further, convergent evolution belies the unpredictability that Gould supposes. However, "most examples of convergence are not independent of evolutionary experiments. For they concern lineages with an enormous amount of shared history, and hence shared developmental potential", as in "the standard example of streamlining in marine reptiles, sharks, pelagic bony fish like the tuna, and dolphins". (p. 175) Further, "the scale is not large enough. The fact that eyes have often evolved does not show that had, say, the earliest chordates succumbed to a bit of bad luck (and become extinct), then vertebrate-like organisms wold have evolved again." (p. 175) Moreover, Gould's main concern is not with adaptive complexes, which are the source of the above, oft-cited examples, "but with body plans—basic ways of assembling organisms." Sterelny thinks that "we have to score Gould's contingency claims as: 'Don't know; and at this stage don't know how to find out'". (p. 175) Gould seems right that mass extinctions played a role in shaping evolutionary history, and "is probably rignt that extinction works by different rules n mass extinction regimes". (p. 176) Some ideas are difficult to asses, such as whether mass extinctions filter out the features of species or of individuals comprising species. It is also difficult to tell the how fundamental is the disagreement between Gould and Dawkins on this. But Sterelny's bet is that Gould may be right in thinking that survival or extinction in mass extinction depends on species properties. "However, it has proved hard to find really clear, empirically well-founded examples to back up this hunch." (p. 176) It was once thought that sexual reproduction was maintained by species selection, which Sterelny outlines. He notes however that "this idea has recently fallen on hard times", with new individual-based ideas being developed. Further, species-level maintenance of sexual reproduction "has a problem: sex does not always promote evolvability", breaking up as well as creating advantageous gene combinations. (p. 177) "So it has been hard to find really convincing examples of species-level properties that are built by species-level selection. The problem is to find: (i) traits that are aspects of species, not the organisms making up the species; (ii) traits that are relevant to extinction and survival; and (iii) traits that are transmitted to daughter species, granddaughter species and so forth". And "transmission to daughter species is especially problematic". (p. 177) In the end, Sterelny states his own views are much closer to Dawkins than to Gould's, especially regarding microevolution—change within local populations. "But macroevolution is not just microevolution scaled up. Gould's paleontological perspective offers real insights into mass extinction and its consequences, and, perhaps, the nature of species and speciation". And Gould is right to expand the explanatory agenda of evolutionary biology to include large-scale patterns in life's history. "So, Dawkins is right about evolution on local scales, but maybe Gould is right about the relationship between events on a local scale, and those on the vast scale of paleontological time." (p. 178) The Suggested Reading section for each chapter is an extension of the chapter, aimed at pointing the reader in the direction of material that may assist their understanding of the issues under discussion. This section of Sterelny's book contains, chapter by chapter, a comprehensive list of recommended reading, covering all of the main publications by Dawkins, Gould, and their respective proponents, along with many lesser known publications by them, with accompanying commentary on either the authors, the publications, or both. Also, the readability of the various publications, and the relevance of the publications to the issues under discussion, as well as the relationship of the publications to each other, such as authors responding to each other through their publications, or supporting the stance of other authors, etc. He also tries to further clarify some points in the process. |
Kanakalata | null | null | The plot of the novel centres round two pairs of lovers: Dhananjay and Kanakalata whose love-at-first-sight culminates in marriage after overcoming the hurdle of dowry dispute, Rajendra and a child-widow named Uma whose passion and love for each other remain unfulfilled with Uma's death and Rajendra renouncing the world and turning into a sanyasi. The plot is in fact an indictment of the evils of dowry system in rural aristocratic society and the predicament of the child-widows who were condemned into a life of anguish and suffering. The novelist's zeal for social reforms is clearly evident in the language and plot-structure of the novel. The novel also portrays a realistic image of the typical landscape and lifestyle of rural Orissa in the early decades of the twentieth century. |
The Outlaws of Sherwood | Robin McKinley | null | Robin is on his way to meet his friends Marian, a noblewoman, and Much, the miller's son, at the Nottingham Fair. Robin serves as a king's forester in Sherwood forest and fletches arrows to make enough income to keep his holding. Robin is just a mediocre archer - his father Robert was much better, and Robin feels he doesn't live up to his father's legacy. On his way, Robin is accosted by some of the other foresters. An archery contest ensues between Robin and one of the foresters, Tom Moody, and Robin miraculously wins. As he is walking away, one of the foresters shoots an arrow at Robin that nearly kills him. Without thinking, Robin shoots at arrow at Tom Moody's leg, but it instead hits his heart and kills him. Robin runs away and hides in the forest until Much and Marian find him. Much hides Robin in his father's barn at the mill, and Marian steals Robin's father's longbow for him from Robin's house. Much thinks that Robin should hide in Sherwood Forest and gather a band of men with him as an idealistic resistance to the tyrannous sheriff of Nottingham. Robin disagrees, not wanting to put others in danger, but is overruled when Much begins to hold meetings in his house with other disgruntled members of the community. Robin finds a place in the woods, which later earns the name Greentree, for the outlaws’ camp. Marian assists the effort by procuring green fabric for clothing. The band grows, and they live by killing the king’s deer with arrows they make themselves. They also begin to rob the rich who pass through the forest to assist the local families. Many members join the band, including the huge man Little John, who killed a man coming to arrest him for the debt he owed on his farm, and Will Scarlet, a cheerful nobleman, as well as several female members and families. Will soon receives troubling news that his younger sister has locked herself in her room rather than wed a Norman baron, but Robin refuses to help, thinking the effort too dangerous and not worthwhile. Soon a young minstrel named Alan-a-dale seeks their help. His beloved, Marjorie, is to wed a baron, and he wants to rescue her. Despite Robin’s misgivings, the band agrees. They seek out Will’s friend Friar Tuck to perform the wedding ceremony and show up at the chapel on Marjorie’s wedding day, where Marjorie marries Alan instead of the original groom, the disgruntled baron. Meanwhile, Little John and others rob the baron’s house. Following the wedding, Alan and Marjorie join Robin’s band. Robin’s band soon after takes on a mysterious young man named Cecil, who Robin suspects was once an aristocrat because he avoids Will and Marian, who frequently visits the outlaws, as they are people who possibly once knew him in his former life. He is assigned to Little John for training. Robin soon hears word that Sir Richard of the Lea, a man who was very kind to him when Robin was a king’s forester, is about to lose his property due to debts racked up by bailing his troublesome son out of trouble. The son was sent off to fight with King Richard in the Holy Lands, but Sir Richard will lose his castle. Robin and his men gather up the riches “collected” from those who pass through their forest and head off to Sir Richard’s castle the day it is to be turned over to its new owner. The only reason the outlaws are not all killed is because Marian is present and negotiated on Robin’s behalf. Her suitor, Nigel, is jealous of the way that Robin and Marian act towards each other, and Robin and Nigel even get into a fight that Robin wins. Though Sir Richard is grateful, Robin’s worries increase because he realizes the sheriff of Nottingham has even greater cause to hate him because Robin made him appear foolish. The day before the Nottingham fair, a year after Robin became an outlaw, Cecil is discovered to be a girl, and Will recognizes her as his sister, Cecily, who had hid in her room so she wouldn’t have to be married. They make up, and Cecily is allowed to stay in the band. Marian brings Robin news of an archery contest at the fair with a prize of a golden arrow – it is obviously a trap for Robin. Robin does not go, but Cecily and Little John go in disguise to see what happens. They watch an archer win the contest, who everyone believes to be Robin Hood. However, Little John and Cecily realize that the man is actually Marian in disguise. Guy of Gisbourne, a mercenary hired by the sheriff of Nottingham, attacks Marian, thinking she is Robin. Cecily and Little John, with the help some traveling performers, spirit Marian away to Friar Tuck’s hideout in the forest. Marian has a deep wound to the stomach. Little John runs to get Robin back at Greentree, who recklessly runs to Tuck’s place as fast as he can. He and Marian talk, and for the first time, he tells her he loves her. He also asks her to marry him, and is slightly relieved when Tuck thinks Marian will recover. Soon after, Guy of Gisbourne and his men find Tuck’s hideout, believing he is hiding an injured Robin. Robin and his band attack Guy’s men, and though they are heavily outnumbered and sustain many injuries, they manage to defeat them. However, several members of their band die in the effort. During the battle, Marjorie runs to get help from Sir Richard, who arrives the next morning and takes the outlaws back to his castle to keep them safe from the sherrif. The sheriff is furious that Sir Richard is hiding the outlaws, and both he and Sir Richard send word to King Richard the Lionheart, who has just returned from captivity in a German prison. During their stay, Little John and Cecily profess their love for one another, and the outlaws begin to recover from their wounds. After some days, King Richard shows up at Sir Richard’s castle unannounced. He makes all the outlaws swear fealty to him, and then discusses their fates. He tells them that every able-bodied one of them must go to fight in the Holy Lands against the Saracens for their punishment. He offers the injured ones a chance to stay in England, but they all wish to go with Robin to the Holy Lands. Since Sir Richard’s son died in the war, the king makes Robin the heir to Sir Richard’s lands and will allow Robin and Marian to marry before the band must leave for the Holy Lands. The book closes with a toast to health, victory, the king’s mercy, and comrades. |
The Seven Who Were Hanged | Leonid Andreyev | 1,909 | The Seven Who Were Hanged depicts the fates of five leftist revolutionaries foiled in their attack and two common peasants who have received death sentences. These condemned men are awaiting their executions by hanging. In prison, each of the prisoners deals with his fate in his own way. |
The Fools in Town are on Our Side | Ross Thomas | null | The novel is set around the time of its publication and follows Lucifer Clarence Dye, freshly exposed as a US intelligence agent following a bungled operation in Singapore (where a Chinese operative Dye had been trying to recruit instead died of a freak heart attack during a routine polygraph test.) Having just been released from a three-month term in a Singaporean jail in exchange for an official US apology (and a large bribe), Dye is cashiered by the small, independent agency Section 2 and is immediately offered a job by an eccentric young man, Victor Orcutt. A self-proclaimed genius, Orcutt has decided to address the then-topical challenge of urban decay; however, his immodestly named "Orcutt's First Law" states that "Before things get better, they must get much worse." Dye's assignment is, therefore, to "corrupt me a city." The city in question is Swankerton, a fictional settlement on the Texas Gulf Coast where Victor Orcutt Associates has been hired to aid the election of a "Reform" slate to city offices. Swankerton hardly needs corrupting, being practically afloat on a cesspool of vice and depravity already; the "Reform" poobahs are if anything worse than the current leadership, which is knee-deep in drugs, gambling, whores, and worse, and is backed by a New Orleans mob boss, Giuseppe "Joe Lucky" Lucarelli. Nevertheless, Dye and Orcutt's other operative, semi-disgraced ex-police chief Homer Necessary, dive right in. Alternating chapters flash back to Dye's past: his childhood as the ward of Tante Katerine, White Russian madam of Shanghai's best whorehouse, his adoption by Gorman Smalldane, war correspondent, and their internment by the Japanese, his marriage to the daughter of the head of Section 2 and his subsequent recruitment, and the violent rape and murder of his wife during an attempt by an enemy organization to coerce information out of his father-in-law. The rest of the main story deals with Dye's budding romance with Orcutt's assistant, the ex-prostitute Carol Thackerty, his meteoric ascent through the rotten power structure of Swankerton, and his conflict with Ramsey Lynch (née Mongomery Vicker,) the New Orleans mob's representative in Swankerton and brother of Gerald Vicker, whom Dye had caused to be dismissed from Section 2 on suspicion of spying for China while Vicker was his subordinate at its Hong Kong station. After his efforts begin to draw attention, Dye is ordered out of the limelight by his former employers, a request he places himself in additional danger by refusing. |
Rose in Bloom | null | null | The story begins when Rose returns home from a long trip to Europe. Everyone has changed. As a joke, Rose lines up her seven cousins to take a long look at them, just as they did with her when they first met. The youngest accidentally mentions that the aunts want Rose to marry one of her cousins to keep her fortune in the family. Rose is very indignant, for she has decided ideas about what her future holds. From the beginning, she declares that she can manage her property well on her own and that she will focus on philanthropic work. Charlie has already decided she is marked out for him, with the approval of his mother. Phebe also comes home no longer the servant that Rose "adopted" but as a young lady with a cultured singing ability. Rose challenges anyone who would look down on "her Phebe", and she is readily accepted as part of the Campbell clan until Archie falls in love with her: the family feel that Archie would be marrying beneath himself. Phebe's pride and debt to the family make her wish to prove herself before she will accept Archie; so she leaves the Campbells' home and sets off to make a name for herself as a singer, to try to earn the respect of her adopted family. After some time at home, Rose has her "coming out" into society, much to her Uncle Alec's chagrin. She promises to try high society for only three months. During that time, her cousin Charlie falls in love with her and tries in various ways to woo her. Rose begins to give in to his charm, but he derails the budding romance by coming to her house, late one night, very drunk. This ruins all her respect for him and she sees how unprincipled he really is. After the three months are up, Rose begins to focus on her philanthropic projects and convinces Charlie to try to refrain from alcohol and other frivolous things, in order to win her love and respect. She tries to help Charlie overcome his bad habits with the help of her uncle, but fails. Charlie does all he can to win her heart, but in the end he succumbs, hindered by his own weak will and his constant need for acceptance by his friends. Being spoilt by his mother meant he never learned to say "no", even to himself, and his lack of discipline proves fatal: Charlie's life ends tragically in an alcohol-induced accident on the eve of his voyage to see his father and restore his good character. Although Rose never was in love with Charlie, she did have hope that he would return a better man and that they might see what relationship could develop. Several months after Charlie's death, Rose finds out that another cousin, Mac, is now in love with her. At first, never thought of him as anything but "the worm", she refuses his love; but she does declare the deepest respect for him. This gives Mac hope, and he goes to medical school, willing to work and wait for her. She finds his devotion touching, and she begins to see him clearly for the first time, realizing that Mac is the "hero" she has been looking for. He is exactly suited to her tastes and has become a man in the noblest sense of the word. He also settles a joke with her by publishing a small book of poetry to wide critical success, earning her respect even more deeply. It is his absence that shows her how much she cares for him. While Rose is discovering her heart, Steve and a minor character, Kitty, engage to marry. This creates a new sensation in the family, and Kitty begins to look to Rose for sisterly guidance. Rose encourages her to improve her silly mind, and Kitty is a very willing pupil. Rose continues to wait for Mac's return but reaches a crisis when Uncle Alec becomes very sick while visiting Mac; Phebe nurses him back from the brink of death, at personal peril, and returns him to the anxious Campbells to be greeted as a triumphant member of the family, sealing her own engagement with Archie with everyone's blessing. This homecoming is completed for Rose when she is reunited with Mac and finally declares her own sentiments. The book closes with three very happy couples, and much hope for their felicity. |
Subsets and Splits
No saved queries yet
Save your SQL queries to embed, download, and access them later. Queries will appear here once saved.