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La vallée des bannis | null | 1,989 | In La vallée des bannis, carried away by a furious torrent during their passage through Touboutt-Chan (from the previous story La frousse aux trousses), Spirou and Fantasio regain consciousness in the hostile environment of the "Valley of Banishment", their destination. Fantasio is soon infected by a mosquito carrying a virus, making him act extremely crazy. He runs off into the wild, and Spirou is forced to begin exploration of the area with only Spip as a companion. Spirou discovers the tragic destiny of the first people exiled in the valley, and while searching for other survivors and a way leading out of the valley, seeks a way to secure Fantasio's return and cure his state of madness. <!-- |
Spirou à Moscou | null | 1,990 | Moments before their departure on holiday to the tropics, Spirou and Fantasio are taken by the DST for the KGB which needs them. Moscow is being terrorised by the mysterious 'White Prince of the Russian Mafia', Tanaziof. According to the KGB's information this man is an old enemy of the two heroes. In Moscow, Spirou and Fantasio discover that Tanaziof is none other than Zantafio, Fantasio's evil cousin. Zantafio's inept second-in-command, Nikita Vlalarlev, tries to assassinate the two heroes but fails. Zantafio is planning to abduct the body of Lenin and to ask the Russian government for a huge ransom for its return. Spirou and Fantasio succeed in thwarting these plans. Zantafio manages to escape. <!-- |
Duel in the Sun | null | 2,006 | The early part of the book describes the preparations that Beardsley and Salazar underwent before the marathon, along with many other aspects of the men's running backgrounds and personal lives. There are three concurrent story lines: Beardsley's life, Salazar's life, and the marathon itself. It is revealed early on that Salazar, who was already a renowned distance runner in the late 1970s and early '80's, was the favorite to win Boston. Beardsley, described as a small-town farmboy, is clearly the underdog. But as the race progresses and the stories of the two men's lives are developed in greater detail, it becomes clear that both men will have a chance at winning the Boston Marathon, generally considered to be the most prestigious in the world. The story gradually becomes an intense contest between Beardsley and Salazar as they leave the rest of the runners behind during the latter part of the marathon. The title comes from the two men's shadows cast by the hot sun onto the pavement as they run "in each other's pockets" during the final miles of the race, and anticipation builds as to who will win the "duel." The shadow is also featured prominently on the cover of the first edition as part of the title. After the race, the lives of both runners spiral downhill. The book describes in detail Salazar's depression and compromised immune system, and Beardsley's industrial accident and drug addiction. |
Love Tricks | null | null | Infortunio is in love with Selina — but she is set to marry the elderly Rufaldo. The frustrated Infortunio loses his sanity, and wanders through the countryside. Selina, however, discovers that she does love Infortunio — but only on the eve of her wedding day. She disguises herself as a shepherd and runs away to the forest. Antonio, her brother, pretends to search for her; but he actually disguises himself in her wedding gown and takes her place in the wedding ceremony. His motive for this strange act? — Antonio is in love with Hilaria, Rufaldo's daughter; but Rufaldo wants Hilaria to marry the wealthy fool Bubulcus. Antonio-as-Selina knocks down "her husband" Rufaldo, and ridicules and humiliates him in public. Bubulcus pretends to have slain Antonio in a duel; he is arrested for this, since Antonio has disappeared (at least to the other characters, who cannot penetrate his disguise) and is believed dead. Meanwhile, in the forest, the disguised Selina is living with a household of shepherds — which includes her long-lost sister Felice, who likewise ran away to escape an unwanted marriage. Infortunio, still mad, stumbles upon them, and Felice cures him by restoring Selina to him. Gasparo, Felice's past love, also shows up (with his servant Gorgon), and recognizes both Felice and Selina, who in turn are amazed to learn that Selina is thought to be still in the city (the effect of Antonio's disguise). A group from the city that includes Cornelio, the father of Antonio and the sisters, and Rufaldo, comes to view the shepherds' rustic sports; discoveries and reconciliations follow. The play ends with three happy couples: Infortunio and Selina, Antonio and Hilaria, and Gasparo and Felice. Interspersed with this main plot are several comic episodes, most notably the "school of complement" material, and also the comedy of Jenkin, Jocarello, and Gorgon. In the school of compliment scene in Act III, Gasparo and Gorgon (as master and usher) teach a group of pupils to speak the kind of elaborate language associated with courtly behavior — though perhaps more typical of books of compliment and courtship than of actual courtiers. ("The Cupidinian fires burn in my breast..." is one sample of their eloquence.) As the pupils are rehearsing en masse, the mad Infortunio stumbles upon the scene, and mistakes the students for the damned souls of Hell. He knocks down the first man he encounters; and the others, intimidated, play along with his delusion and explain what led to their damnations. At least one critic has regarded this satire as "the best part of the play," though "unrelated to the main plot." |
The Long Winter | Samuel Youd | 1,940 | On a hot August day in 1880, at the Ingalls homestead in Dakota Territory, Laura offers to help Pa stack hay to feed their stock in the winter. As they work, Laura notices a muskrat den in the nearby Big Slough. Upon inspecting the den, Pa notes that the walls are the thickest he has ever seen, and fears the upcoming winter will be a hard one. In mid-October, the Ingalls wake to an unusually early blizzard howling around their poorly insulated claim shanty. Soon afterward, Pa receives another warning from an unexpected source: an old Native American man comes to the general store in town to warn the white settlers that there will be seven months of blizzards. Pa decides to move the family into his store building in town for the winter. In town, Laura attends school with her younger sister, Carrie, until the weather becomes too unpredictable to permit them to walk to and from the school building, and coal too scarce to keep the school heated. Blizzard after blizzard sweeps through the town over the next few months. Food and fuel become scarce and expensive, as the town depends on trains to bring supplies but the frequent blizzards prevent the trains from getting through. Eventually, the railroad company suspends all efforts to dig out the trains that are snowed in at Tracy, stranding the town until spring. With no more coal or wood, the family learns to use twisted hay for fuel. For weeks, the Ingalls subsist on potatoes and coarse brown bread made from wheat ground in their coffee mill. As even this meager food runs out, Laura's future husband Almanzo Wilder and his friend Cap Garland hear rumors that a settler raised wheat at a claim twenty miles from town. They risk their lives to bring sixty bushels of wheat to the starving townspeople – enough to last the rest of the winter. As predicted, the blizzards continue for seven months. Finally, the spring thaw comes and trains begin running again, bringing the Ingalls their long-delayed Christmas barrel from Reverend Alden, containing clothes, presents, and a Christmas turkey. With the long winter finally over, the family enjoys Christmas dinner in May. |
Mind's Eye | Paul Fleischman | null | The main character, Courtney, is a very unlucky girl. Her father walked out on her mom and her when she was little. Adding to that, her mom remarried a real jerk. To make matters worse, her mom died leaving Courtney alone with her stepfather. To put the icing on the cake, a riding accident paralyzes her. Finally, to put the cherry on the icing, she is sent to a nursing home. There she meets an old lady named Elva, and another named May, who suffers from Alzheimers. She repeats what she says three times. For Example: "I think my dance dance dance lessons were cancelled". Elva made a promise to go to Italy to her husband before he died, and since she is too weak to go, she is backed into a corner. She had to take an imaginary trip. She procrastinated and now is unable to do it on her own since she cannot use her eyes to see the maps of Italy. But now, Courtney can help her. They go on a mind's eye trip and finish it. In the end, Elva passes away. |
The Mind Parasites | Colin Wilson | 1,967 | The story is about Professor Gilbert Austin's conflict with the Tsathogguans, invisible mind parasites that menace the most brilliant people on earth. |
The London Merchant | George Lillo | null | ;Act I Sarah Millwood, a London prostitute, schemes to find some innocent young man "who, having never injured women, [would] apprehend no injury from them" (I.iii) to seduce and exploit for money. She observes young George Barnwell in town, and she invites him to her house for supper. At supper she seduces him with irresistible flattery, and he succumbs to her wiles. ;Act II Upon returning home the next morning, George feels he has betrayed Thorowgood by disobeying his curfew. The guilt he feels from disobeying the rules of the house, as well as the guilt he feels from his fornication with Millwood, leaves George tormented. His guilt is compounded by the loyalty of his friend Trueman. Soon, Millwood visits George at his place of work. When she discovers he no longer wants anything to do with her, she begins to sense her money-making scheme has come to an end. She quickly thinks of a lie to tell George to keep her plan going. She tells George that the man who provides her with housing somehow found out about their tryst and is now evicting her because of it. This evokes new feelings of guilt from George, and he is prompted to steal a large sum of money from his employer's funds to give to her to amend the situation. ;Act III After giving her the money, George feels unworthy of his kind master, Thorowgood, so he runs away and leaves a note for Trueman confessing his crime. Having no place to go, he turns to Millwood for help. At first she refuses him since his employer's money is no longer at his disposal, but she quickly remembers that he has previously mentioned a rich uncle. She again convinces George that she truly does love him, and concocts a scheme for him to rob his uncle. George objects saying that his uncle will recognize him as his nephew; Millwood answers that the only way, then, will be to also murder his uncle. In a fit of passion, George runs off to commit the robbery and murder. He finds his Uncle Barnwell alone, and as he approaches, George veils his face and attacks his uncle with a knife. As he lies dying, Uncle Barnwell prays both for his nephew and his murderer, not knowing that they are the same. Overcome with sorrow, George reveals himself to his uncle, and before he dies, Uncle Barnwell forgives his murderous nephew. ;Act IV George returns to Millwood's home upset, trembling, and with bloody hands. Upon realizing that he did not take any money or property, Millwood sends for the police and has George arrested for murder. Two of Millwood's servants, Lucy and Blunt, who were aware of the plan from the beginning, have her arrested as well. Both George and Millwood are sentenced to death. ;Act V Despite all that has transpired, George is visited by Thorowgood and Trueman in his prison cell. They console and forgive him. Thorowgood provides for his spiritual needs by arranging a visit from a clergyman. In the end, George is truly repentant for his sins and is at peace with himself, his friends, and God. |
Last Man Standing | David Baldacci | null | Web London and the FBI's super-elite Hostage Rescue Team are sent down an alley for a surprise attack on a drug dealer's lair. As they move with stealth precision towards the target, they are surprised to see a boy in the dark alley. When the kid sees them, he utters the queer words "Damn to hell" and cackles. Uncharacteristically, this kid unnerves Web. But he proceeds with his team, working on getting his pulse beat to sixty-four and visualizing the next moments, as the team gets in position for the signal to move to "green." When the Tactical Operations Center radios to give the go ahead for the final move to the front door, Web freezes. It isn't fear or runaway nerves; Web has been doing this far too long for that. And yet, even with every muscle straining all he can manage to do is to take a few faltering steps and fall down on his gun. At five seconds to impact, Web lays helpless as he watches the Charlie team proceed and then one by one fall to the ground, all dead in seconds. Ironically, Web is the only one alive. For a HRT guy, out-surviving team members is a personal hell, nothing to be grateful about. The other FBI guys are suspicious and, even worse, distrust him to go out on mission. He can't bear the silent accusations of the widows and fatherless children who'd just as soon trade him for their lost loved one. And the press is having its usual field day, only this time it is his story they are exaggerating and manipulating. In a single moment Web London goes from hero to pariah. Web needs to understand what happened in that alley, specifically who set up his team for an ambush. This job is his life; he needs to prove his innocence to gain the trust back from the guys and for himself. There is no room in his job for less than absolute perfection and bravery. A good HRT guy does not freeze and let their team be killed without them. Web begins a two-pronged investigation, one external to seek whoever set Charlie up and one internal where he signs on with psychiatrist, Claire Daniels. The key for both investigations seems to be the boy in the alley. After Charlie team was killed, Web still struggled with trying to move. When he saw the boy start to run directly into the line of fire, Web managed to yell at him to stop and slithered himself over to the boy. He gives the boy his hat and a note, warning of the ambush, for the boy to deliver to the reserve unit that TOC is sending in. But somehow, the FBI loses the boy before they have a chance to talk to him. Missing also is the undercover agent that provided the information on the drug lair. Meanwhile, a judge, a prosecutor, and a defense counsel are killed in three separate and apparent unrelated incidents. When Web sees this in the newspaper, he makes the connection between those deaths and Charlie team's ambush. He knows that it is the same group who caused half his face to be torn off during a hostage rescue mission. David Canfield was the only hostage from that mission which died mere feet from Web. Web had given this boy hope and the boy had died while looking at Web, Web carries guilt rom this operation. Web London is not the only one who's wondering about the ambush. Francis Westbrook, a giant of a man whose moniker is the apt "Big F," is the leader of a small drug empire. The building that HRT was taking, is in his territory, but its not a place that he's ever used, nor does he run a business on the scale that would warrant that kind of attention. The missing boy is Westbrook's brother and he'll do anything, including giving up his entire business, to get that kid back. Notwithstanding his concern for his brother, he's alert to the fact that he's got a traitor in his top echelon. Last Man Standing is a complex psychological thriller in which the suspicions run rampant as to who set up Charlie team. At the center of this novel is a team of alpha males in which Baldacci reveals the characteristics of the type of guy that would want to do this poor paying job that boasts a motto of "Speed, surprise and violence of action." These are the good guys in a world with a lot of bad guys and they would just as soon be unemployed but the bad guys won't let them. And even though they might have love affairs with their weapons, they are earnest about trying not to use them. That said, they never fire warning shots. And they keep a hell of a lot of weapons on hand. These guys are heroes, and although they are part of the FBI, they keep their distance. After all, it is the FBI that makes the judgment call that sends them into action, so when there is a screw up, as there was in Waco, the blame tends to go directly to HRT. Web London as the epitome of the HRT guy is a strong, loyal friend especially to his team members and their families. He, naturally, has issues dealing with his own issues. Yet, in this instance, he is unusually motivated to continue his therapy since he's the one that really wants to know what happened. As much as Baldacci paints HRT as real American heroes, by delving into this psychological side of the story he also points out the character deficiencies that cause these men to go through the most grueling training and then to subject themselves to the greatest danger. It also fills out this multi-layered plot. |
Cry of Morning | Brian Cleeve | 1,971 | The novel is set in the Republic of Ireland during the period of economic expansion that took place in the 1960s when Seán Lemass was Taoiseach. The narrative is concerned with an attempt by property developer, Francis O'Rourke, to erect a new office block in the centre of Dublin. The site is occupied by a slum dwelling whose occupants are about to be evicted in order to make way for the new development. Pitted against O'Rourke is a determined coalition of interests opposed to his plans. As the story unfolds, Cleeve highlights examples of corruption in Irish political and business life at that time. |
The Kindly Ones | Jonathan Littell | 2,006 | The book is a fictional autobiography, describing the life of Maximilien Aue, a former officer in the SS who, decades later, tells the story of a crucial part of his life when he was an active member of the forces of the Third Reich. In the book, Aue accepts responsibility for his actions in massacres of the Jews, but most of the time he feels more like an observer than a direct participant. Aue starts the war as a member of an Einsatzgruppe in Ukraine, during which he participates in the Babi Yar massacre. He is then sent to the Battle of Stalingrad, but survives. After a convalescence period in Berlin and a visit to France, he is designated for a managerial role for the concentration camps and visits both the Auschwitz and Belzec extermination camps. He is present during the Battle of Berlin, Nazi Germany's last stand. By the end of the story, he leaves Germany unscathed. Throughout the book Aue meets several famous Nazis, including Adolf Eichmann, Heinrich Himmler, and Adolf Hitler. The book is divided into seven chapters, each named after a baroque dance, following the sequence of a Bach Suite. The narrative of each chapter is influenced by the rhythm of each dance. ;« Toccata »: In this introduction, we are introduced to the narrator and discover how he has ended up in France after the war. He is the director of a lace factory, has a wife, children, and grandchildren, though he has no real affection for his family and continues his homosexual encounters when he travels on business. He hints of an incestuous love, which we learn later was for his twin sister. He explains that he has decided to write about his experiences during the war for his own benefit and not as an attempt to justify himself, even though he insists that it took all kinds of men, good and bad, to make up the SS. He closes the introduction by saying, "I live, I do what is possible, it is the same for everyone, I am a man like the others, I am a man like you. Come along, I tell you, I am like you." ;« Allemande I & II »: Aue describes his life as a member of one of the Einsatzgruppen death squads in Ukraine, particularly in the Crimea and in the Caucasus. He describes in detail the open air massacres of Jews and Bolsheviks behind the front lines (one of the massacres described is the Babi Yar Massacre in Kiev, 1941). Although he seems to become increasingly indifferent to the atrocities he is witnessing, he begins to experience daily bouts of vomiting and suffers a mental breakdown. After taking sick leave, he returns to his unit to discover that a hostile superior officer has arranged that he be transferred to the front line at Stalingrad in 1942. ;« Courante » : Aue thus takes part in the last days of the battle of Stalingrad. As with the massacres, he is the soldier observer; the narrator rather than the combatant. In the midst of the chaos, violence, and starvation, he manages to have a discussion with a Russian political commissar POW about the similarities between the Nazi and the Bolshevik world views, and once again is able to indicate his intellectual support for Nazi ideas. He is seriously wounded in the head and is miraculously evacuated just before the German surrender in February 1943. ;« Sarabande »: Convalescing in Berlin, Aue is awarded the Iron Cross 1st Class, by Heinrich Himmler himself, for his heroic action at Stalingrad. While still on sick leave, he decides to visit his mother and stepfather in Antibes, in Italian-occupied France. Apparently, while he is in a deep sleep, his mother and stepfather are brutally murdered. Max flees from the house without notifying anybody and returns to Berlin. ;« Menuet en rondeaux »: Aue is transferred to the Federal Ministry of the Interior, headed by Himmler, where he plays a managerial role for the concentration camps. He struggles to improve the living conditions of those prisoners selected to work in the factories as slave laborers, in order to improve their productivity. The reader meets top Nazi bureaucrats organizing the implentation of the Final Solution (i.e., Adolf Eichmann, Rudolf Höß, and Himmler) and is given a glimpse of extermination camps (i.e., Auschwitz and Belzec); he also spends some time in Budapest, just when preparations are being made for transporting Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz. The reader witnesses the tug-of-war between those who are concerned with war production (Albert Speer) and those who are doggedly trying to implement the Final Solution. It is during this period that two SS police officers from the Kripo, who are investigating the murders of his mother and stepfather, begin to visit him regularly. Like the Furies, they hound and torment him with their questions, which indicate their suspicions about his role in the crime. ;« Air »: Max visits his sister and brother-in-law's empty house in Pomerania. There, he engages in a veritable autoerotic orgy particularly fueled by fantasy images of his twin sister. The two SS police officers follow his trail to the house, but he manages to hide from them. ;« Gigue »: Max travels back to Berlin through enemy Soviet lines with his friend Thomas, who has come to rescue him. Thomas is trying to impersonate a French laborer, knowing that his high SS rank is sure to get him killed if he is caught by Soviet forces. In Berlin, Max and Thomas find many of their colleagues preparing for escape in the chaos of the last days of the Third Reich. Aue meets and is decorated by Hitler in the Führerbunker. During the decoration ceremony, Aue inexplicably bites Hitler's nose, drawing blood and the wrath of Hitler's men, yet he manages to escape through the Berlin U-Bahn subway tunnels, only to encounter his police pursuers again. Though their case has been repeatedly thrown out of court, they're unwilling to accept defeat and prepare to execute him. Barely escaping their clutches when the Russians storm the tunnels and kill one of the policemen, Aue wanders aimlessly for a while in the streets of war-torn Berlin before deciding to make a break for it. Making his way through the heavily shelled Berlin Zoo, he's yet again faced by the surviving policeman. However, his friend Thomas kills the last policeman, only to himself be killed by Aue, who steals from him the papers and uniform of a French conscripted worker. We know from the beginning of the book that Aue's multilingualism will allow him to escape back to France with a new identity as a returning Frenchman. The fact that he has managed to survive so many close calls and to escape successfully leads him to end the book with the statement: "The Kindly Ones were on to me." But in the end, all is not explicitly laid out for the reader; for Littell, in the words of one reviewer, "excels in the unsaid." |
The Secrets of Vesuvius | Caroline Lawrence | 2,001 | The story begins as Flavia, Jonathan, Nubia, and Lupus are playing in the Tyrrhenian sea, Flavia sets out to find Vulcan, who told Pliny of the riddle pointing to great treasure. Eventually, she and her friends solve the riddle, making out the word Asine, Latin for 'jackass'. She tried to find Vulcan from a local blacksmith, and used the codeword 'Asine', but to little avail. Meanwhile, Aristo gives Miriam a sparrow, the traditional symbol of love. Soon, Flavia finds Vulcan, and tried calling him a jackass while he was drinking water. She finds out Vulcan is a clubfoot orphan, and feels horrible. Vulcan gives Miriam, who is in love, a bracelet. At the forum, a Christian warns everyone of doom and desolation. The children find out that Clio, a girl, had been following them. Her parents, Tascius and Rectina, had adopted her and many other girls, after losing their own son. They all go to the Vulcanalia, but everything goes wrong, and Flavia fails to tell Clio's parents that Vulcan may be their lost son. Flavia finds out that 'Asine' is really a codeword for their illegal faith, Christianity. Tascius thinks Vulcan is really Pliny's son. Soon, the sparrow dies and birds rain from the air. Everyone finds out that Miriam is in love with Flavia's uncle, Gaius. Everyone is surprised except Nubia, who figured it out earlier. Jonathan's father, Mordecai, fears that his son's dreams of Jerusalem, the strange events, and everything going wrong, all point to the fact that the Christian was right, him being one also. They figure that a volcano is going to erupt, and they figure it is Vesuvius. They call over Pliny for a meal, and Flavia figures that Vulcan is really Tascius' son. Pliny did not know that Vesuvius was a volcano. Mordecai proposes that everyone leave, but his daughter Miriam objects. They warn everyone of the volcano. While Rectina and Clio are in Herculaneum, and everyone else is in Stabia, it erupts. Miriam's hair is set on fire by the ashes from the volcano, but Mordecai puts it out. They find Gaius half-dead buried under ash, but Ferox, a wolf, saves him. Meanwhile, Moredecai, a doctor, tries to save everyone. Pliny sets out to save Rectina, but fails. Tascius confesses how he had abandoned Vulcan. Lupus warns Pliny of Vulcan in a boat. Pliny dies near Pompeii due to sulphur. Water is scarce, and pyroclastic flows bury cities, but the children survive the volcano. |
Lammas Night | Katherine Kurtz | 1,983 | Lammas Night tells the story of a group of English witches who act to save their country from Nazi attack during World War II. Woven within the story of their efforts are the visions and fragmented memories of one male witch, who gradually comes to realize his role in an ancient cycle of royal death, reincarnation, and sacrifice. |
The Dark | John McGahern | 1,965 | The novel is set in Ireland's rural north-west, and it focuses on an adolescent and his emerging sexuality, as seen through the lens of the strained and complex relationship he has with his father, Mahoney. |
Mankind in Transition | null | null | He describes human evolutionary history as a step function of punctuated equilibrium, with long periods of stability interrupted with short periods of transition. He argues that humans are now in a period of transition from a stable agricultural society through a transitional industrial and/or information society becoming a stable automated society. Each stable society has its own social organization. The animal society has a dominant male and everyone else; the tribal society has a chief, a medicine man, hunters and everyone else. The peasant society has a nobility, overseers and peasants in the food production category which also has a military category, a religious category, tradesmen and craftsmen. The transitional industrial society features top executives, managers and workers in many categories. The technological evolution beginning in the tribal society had hand tools; the peasant society featured a plow, a domesticated animal on dedicated farm land plus a wide range of artifacts and tools; the transition to the industrial society began in England with the steam engine, textile machines and later it was the tractor that forced the peasants off the land and into the cities. Machines and computers dominate production in the industrial society. It is predicted that in the automated society all production will be controlled by computers. The forcing elements in the transition has been productivity. During periods of stability, productivity changes very little from year to year. But in a transitional period as we are experiencing, productivity changes every year. When productivity can no longer increase, we will be completely automated. He asserts that mankind will develop a stable automated society. Mankind will also evolve into a new biological species in colonies living in distant star systems. The automated society will be one where everyone will have just about everything they want without physical effort. Everyone will be rich in today's terms. |
The Cage | S. M. Stirling | 2,002 | The book covers time that Tom Abraham, an Englishman, spent in the US Army during the Vietnam War. It describes how he served as an officer in the 1st Cavalry Unit and was captured by the Vietcong, before escaping and finding his unit again. The book is divided into four sections, the first is about his time in England, the second is his time in America, the third is his time fighting in the Vietnam War and the final section is about his capture and treatment by his captors. After the war he claimed to have suffered post-traumatic stress and after being arrested by the police suffered a breakdown. |
In Times Like These | Zee Edgell | 1,991 | Main character Pavana Leslie is returning to Belize following a vacation in the United States to take up a post at the Women's Department- and walks right into trouble. Belize is in turmoil following the announcement of a possible plan to end the claim to Belizean territory by Guatemala by working out an agreement between the two countries. Unfortunately, Belizeans have rejected this agreement wholesale. Worse yet, the man in charge of convincing them, Cabinet member Alex Abrams, was a former boyfriend of Pavana's and the father of her twins Lisa and Eric, and is being pressured by another former friend and leader of the resistance movement, Stoner Bennett, to denounce the agreement. Pavana must deal with her past relations with Bennett and Abrams in London and the decision that changed her life, her present troubles with coworkers at the Department who keep introducing politics to the equation, and her future: a relationship with the divorced Julian Carlisle, a development aid worker. When tragedy strikes, Pavana must draw on all her resources to come up with a solution- to Belize's problems and her own. |
The Far Hills | Brian Cleeve | 1,952 | The novel focuses on the McDonald family, who live a hand-to-mouth existence following their abandonment by paterfamilias, the feckless Rory McDonald. Into their lives comes Brendan Courtney O’Brien, scion of a wealthy Irish family, who has fallen in love with the eldest of the McDonald children, Erika. Despite his background, Brendan has even less money than the McDonalds. As the black sheep of his family, he has lived a peripatetic life and scrapes a living buying and selling on the black market. Through Brendan's eyes we meet a succession of apparently aimless losers who hang around the decrepit hair-dressing salon which is the McDonald's only source of income. Erika's younger brother, Jimmy, is something of a rebel, always getting into trouble. Eventually, his desperate mother sends him to a boarding school from which he escapes at the first opportunity. He wanders the byroads of rural Ireland before being recaptured. Soon, Brendan and Erika's wedding takes place, followed by a reception in McDonald's salon. As Brendan surveys the guests, all relatives or friends of his new bride, he imagines how his own estranged family would see them. Brendan and Erika set up home in a boarding house run by a malicious old landlady. In a bid to escape the grinding poverty in which they languish, the young couple join a travelling circus. Erika becomes a fortune-teller and Brendan sells small bottles of perfume to which he has added astrological predictions. Meanwhile, young Jimmy has run away again and, serendipitously, ends up in the same circus in which his sister and brother-in-law are working. The three meet just as Jimmy is about to receive retribution from a hot-dog man whose wares he has stolen. Brendan rescues him and all three return to Dublin. Erika's mother has sold the hairdressing salon and is about to leave for England with her younger son. Brendan and Erika decide to join her, with Jimmy in tow. The novel ends just as their ship is leaving the dockside. However, one of the party is missing. Jimmy has decided to stay in Ireland and, as the ship sails out into Dublin Bay, he watches from the pier before turning to find his own destiny somewhere in "the far hills". |
Off for the Sweet Hereafter | T. R. Pearson | null | Raeford Benton Lynch, nephew to the bald Jeeter, is a cipher, remarkable only for being gangly and horse-faced. On a whim, he accepts a job "digging holes" for Mr. Claude Ellwyn Overhill, who drives a motley assortment of riff-raff around the south, disinterring and relocating the denizens of graveyards that had to be moved to make room for development. Benton Lynch meets Jane Elizabeth Firesheets when he and Mr. Overhill's crew disinter her grandmomma. Jane Elizabeth, for some inscrutable reason, takes a fancy to Benton Lynch, beguiling him with her "milky white parts" and "plum colored parts." Trouble comes in the form of Jimmy, a petty criminal whose renegade nature lures Jane Elizabeth Firesheets away from Benton Lynch. In order to prove that he is as dangerous and ambitious—and thus as alluring—as Jimmy, Benton Lynch takes to holding up convenience stores and sending clippings about the crimes to Jane Elizabeth Firesheets. This wins her affections away from Jimmy, but has an unintended side effect: Jane Elizabeth Firesheets pictures herself as Bonnie to Benton Lynch's Clyde, and insists that the two take off on a crime spree that ends in the shooting of an elderly store clerk. |
Beneath the Moors | Brian Lumley | 1,974 | Professor Ewart Masters convalesces at the home of his nephew, after an automobile accident. There he discovers the existence of an ancient Cimmerian city beneath the Yorkshire moors. He proceeds to have dream adventures in the realms of the Great Old Ones. |
Breakpoint | Richard A. Clarke | 2,007 | A series of explosions occur at seemingly unimportant sites in the United States. These sites happen to be the locations where transatlantic cables from Europe and Asia reach the U.S. essentially cutting the U.S. off from the world, at least via the Internet. The attacks are immediately blamed on the Chinese. Two investigators are sent to investigate the incidents, with this assumption in mind. The investigators soon uncover an underground science of genomics and nanotech working on human-computer integration. |
Callista | John Henry Cardinal Newman | null | Callista is set in the mid-3rd century in the city of Sicca Veneria in the Roman province of Africa. It deals with the persecution of the Christians community under Emperor Decius. The main character of the novel is Callista, a young and beautiful Greek girl, who has just arrived from Greece with her brother Aristo. She is a gifted young woman, yet she is unhappy with her life. Another main character is the troubled young Christian Agellius, who wants to marry Callista. He is torn between his faith and his brother (Juba), his mother Gurta, a pagan witch, and his pagan uncle Jucundus, who all want to bring him away from the Christian faith. Agellius soon meets the mysterious Christian priest Caecilius (later identified as St. Cyprian of Carthage), who becomes a father figure for him and strengthens his faith again. After a terrible plague of locusts, popular rage against Christians breaks out and persecution starts once again. Agellius has to flee from the surroundings of Sicca Veneria. At the same time, Callista sees herself drawn more and more strongly to Christianity. When she is compelled to offer incense to the pagan gods, she has to make a dramatic choice, which finally leads her into the Catholic Church and then to martyrdom. |
Born to Exile | Phyllis Eisenstein | 1,978 | Born to Exile concerns the adventures of a wandering minstrel called Alaric, who possesses the otherwise unknown ability to teleport. The novel details his journey to uncover the secrets of his own past and the true nature of his mysterious ability. For eight weary months, Alaric the minstrel trudged the lonely road of exile. Born with preternatural powers, the infant Alaric had been found by foster parents abandoned on a hillside, newborn and naked, with a bloody, severed hand clutching his ankles. Older and with those powers on full display, he suddenly found himself rejected by his foster family, branded a witch-child. Alaric now wanders the world as a solitary wayfarer, with a knapsack, a few clothes, and a lute his only possessions. On this journey, he encounters the craggy towers and shining spires of a distant castle, like some gleaming vision in one his songs. Within, Alaric is accepted as court minstrel but becomes embroiled in palace intrigue that involves Medron, the court magician, and the King's daughter, Princess Solinde. Subsequently, he journey's to the sinister Inn of the Black Swan and then to a superstition-ensorcelled village. There, Alaric is restored to his supernatural antecedents, known as the Lords of All Power. |
Vigilant | James Alan Gardner | 1,999 | Faye Smallwood is an inhabitant of a colony planet named Demoth. The vast majority of the inhabitants of Demoth belong to a race or species called the Oolom; they are a genetically-engineered offshoot of the Divians, an alien species that features in several novels in the series. The Oolom were engineered to function like the flying squirrels of Earth: with lightweight bodies and long flaps of skin descending from their arms, they can glide through the air and rise on warm thermal currents. Demoth is also occupied by about half a million humans, who have settled on the planet over the previous five decades to run the mining operations. (The air-loving Oolom react negatively to underground environments, and the ore deposits are now too diffuse for robot mining.) When Faye Smallwood was fifteen years old, the Oolom population was devastated by a contagious disease called pteromic paralysis; the majority of the population died lingering deaths, before a cure was discovered by Dr. Henry Smallwood, Faye's father. A hero to the Oolom, Dr. Smallwood lived to enjoy that status for only a year, before he died in a mining accident. His daughter had to grow up through a troubled adolescence, which she eventually overcame by entering into a group marriage with seven other people. By the time she turns forty, Faye decides to fulfill a drive left over from her girlhood during the plague: she becomes a member of the Vigil, a planetary organization of ombudsmen who supervise the activities of the Demoth government on all levels, from the local to the global. After seven years of training, she undergoes the mushor, which entails the implantation of a neurological "link seed" in her brain. (It's called a link seed because it sprouts tendrils that wind through the brain like roots, linking the subject's mind to a global computer array called the world soul.) Faye's first assignment as a proctor of the Vigil, in the year 2454, is a modest job overseeing local administration in a coastal city; but the assignment suddenly turns serious when android assassins inexplicably begin murdering members of the Vigil. Faye's partner is killed, and Faye survives only through the incomprehensible intervention of a swirl of light and energy that protects her, and her alone. Faye is suddenly a focus of attention for many interested parties — including members of the Outward Fleet of the Technocracy, who have recognized the swirling energies around Faye as a version of the "pocket universe" technology that allows their ships to evade the light-speed barrier in interstellar travel. Faye's personal pocket universe behaves in ways that appear to violate the laws of physics as understood in the Technocracy; two ruthless members of the Fleet are determined to understand the phenomenon, and are even ready to pull Faye's mind apart to do so. The Fleet's involvement also draws the attention of Admiral Festina Ramos, the heroine of Expendable and the continuing character in the League of Peoples series. With a new ally in Admiral Ramos as well as formidable new enemies, Faye has to unravel the mystery of the proctors' murders and the energy swirling around her. The search takes her deep underground where the Ooloms never go, and three thousand years back into her planet's long-forgotten and violent history, among some very exotic alien species. She learns that the pteromic paralysis that devastated the Ooloms a generation earlier was an artificial nanotechnology-based bio-weapon, which has now evolved to attack both Divians and humans. If it escapes, the disease will devastate whole populations before a cure can be found. Faye and Festina are stuck with the dangerous job of preventing the catastrophe. Gardner utilizes the advantage that all science fiction writers enjoy, though not all exploit: he creates alien species and alien beings who are more intelligent and more interesting than humans. Faye Smallwood, the human protagonist of the book, pales in comparison to her Oolom colleague Tic. He is smarter and more eloquent than she is ("I should be asymptotic to apothesis"), and he is both funny and sharp-witted. "But don't mind me — us old codgers always use sexual harassment to put women at their ease. People think it's so adorable, we can get away with murder. And speaking of murder, what did you say that got Chappalar killed?" |
The Sentinel | Jeffrey Konvitz | null | Alison Parker, a beautiful but troubled fashion model moves into a gorgeous New York City brownstone house that has been divided into apartments. The house is inhabited on the top floor by Father Francis Matthew Halloran, a reclusive blind Catholic priest who spends all of his time sitting at his open window. Alison is romantically involved with Michael Farmer, a private lawyer and former prosecutor. It soon becomes apparent that Alison's life is beset for a number of reasons. She had a horrible relationship with her recently deceased father, and has narrowly survived at least one suicide attempt. Michael himself is under suspicion in the death of his former wife. A determined New York City Police Department detective named Gatz is sure that Michael murdered his wife, and soon comes to suspect Alison as well. Hoping to leave her problems behind her, Alison finds that they've worsened. She suffers sleep loss, horrible nightmares involving her father and soon begins to find herself suffering blinding headaches. Looking for some distraction, she tries to ingratiate herself with the building's other occupants - but finds that they are bizarrely eccentric and obnoxious. Alison complains about her neighbors to the building's real estate agent. The agent is confused, telling a shocked Alison that there are no neighbors - besides for herself and Fr. Halloran, no one else lives there. Looking for answers, Michael breaks into a records archive of the Catholic Church. Researching the past of Fr. Halloran, Michael learns that the man has none. Rather Halloran's life "began", to the day, that another man's life apparently came to an end, leading Michael to believe that the two men are one and the same. He also finds similar records for a woman, a nun named Sister Therese who is to reside in Alison's building. Michael soon concludes that Sister Therese is actually the woman that Alison is meant to become. Rushing to Alison's building, he confronts the blind priest, only to be killed. Returning to the building, her headaches returned and her skin beginning to desiccate, Alison finds Michael seemingly unhurt. He reveals that he is actually dead and also damned for killing his wife. He also explains that the house is actually positioned over the gateway between our world and Hell and that there must be gatekeeper to protect the world from the denizens of the underworld. Until now, that gatekeeper, or sentinel, had been Father Halloran, but Alison is now expected to succeed him. Her troubled past, especially her suicide attempt, make her the appropriate choice. The inhabitants of Hell are actually her fellow "neighbors", and they know that they have one chance to escape the abyss - pressuring Alison to complete her suicide. At the last minute, Father Halloran appears and saves Alison, driving the "neighbors" back to hell. The book ends with Alison becoming the new sentinel. A sequel titled The Guardian followed. |
The Deluge Drivers | Alan Dean Foster | 1,987 | After resigning himself to perhaps being trapped on Tran-Ky-Ky for the rest of his life, Ethan Fortune learns that scientists at the outpost of Brass Monkey have detected a steady warming in the planet’s atmosphere. This has caused something not seen in generations on the planet: open water on the ice oceans of Tran-Ky-Ky. Taking the giant icerigger Slanderscree with a crew of Tran to investigate, Fortune learns that the warming of the oceans isn’t an accidental or natural event. |
The Unbeheaded King | L. Sprague de Camp | null | In this sequel to The Clocks of Iraz, ex-king Jorian of Xylar and Dr. Karadur flee the revolt-stricken city of Iraz in the bathtub of its lately deceased monarch Ishbahar, borne through the air by Gorax, an invisible demon in the service of Karadur. In accordance with the doctor's previous promise, the demon flies them to Xylar to rescue Jorian's favorite wife Estrildis, imprisoned there by the kingdom's authorities in the hope of enticing Jorian, whom they intend to execute, back into their power. The plan miscarries, and the demon is barely able to spirit the hapless rescuers off to the neighboring city-state of Othomae, where it deposits them, tub and all, in the park of the Grand Duke. There they are promptly arrested for trespassing. Effecting their release takes some time, largely because their sadistic jailer Maltho, who bears a grudge against Jorian from a previous acquaintance, balks their efforts to send word of their plight to friends outside. Finally free, they attempt to accumulate resources for another attempt to recover Estrildis; difficult, since Jorian must remain in hiding from the Xylarians. Ultimately, eschewing heroics, he hires Abacarus, a sorcerous colleague of Karadur to do the job, again by means of a demonic servant. To his dismay, the demon Ruakh returns with the wrong woman, Estrildis' attendant Margalit. He is further from his goal than ever, and now mired in a lawsuit over fulfillment of the contract to boot! Disenchanted with magical shortcuts, Jorian contacts his family in Kortoli and commissions his younger brother Kerin to reconnoiter Xylar. Kerin returns with word that Thevatas, one of Estrildis' guards is susceptible to bribery, and Jorian and Karadur accordingly return to Xylar in the guise of Mulvanians (traveling entertainers similar to Gypsies), where the subverted guard delivers Estrildis in return for the crown of Xylar, which Jorian had hidden after his initial escape from execution. But now Jorian discovers Estrildis had taken a lover in his absence and doesn't want to be rescued! Soft-hearted, Jorian surrenders her to her lover Corineus and takes up with Margalit instead, of whom he has grown fond in the interim. (As was manifestly clear long before this moment, the resourceful, practical and level-headed Margalit is a far more suitable mate for Jorian than the emotional Estrildis.) A Xylarian judge Jorian has taken hostage weds him to his new love, who is then able to free the cursed spirit of Lorc, a baronial ghost who has aided them. Beset by both bandits and pursuing Xylarians, the party makes its escape to Othomae again. In a postscript, Jorian has returned to Kortoli with his new wife and joined the family clockmaking firm; there he learns that a revolution in Xylar has overthrown the regicidal regime, and he is at last out of danger from his former subjects. In fact, he is now their national hero, and they want him back on an (unthreatened) throne - an offer he politely declines. This last scene is in fact the only one in the Jorian sequence showing the hero in his homeland of Kortoli - though the readers have gained a though acquaintance with it though the folk tales told by him and embedded in various books. |
Necropolis | Basil Copper | 1,980 | The novel is set in Victorian England. Clyde Beatty, a private investigator, is hired by Angela Meredith to investigate her father's death. His investigations lead him to a nursing home in Surrey, directed by the sinister Dr. Horace Couchman. After an autopsy reveals the murder of Miss Meredith's father, Dr. Couchman flees to London leading Beatty eventually to the eerie Brockwood Cemetery and a criminal conspiracy involving millions of pounds worth of gold bullion. |
The Third Grave | David F. Case | 1,981 | The novel is the story of a young Egyptologist, Thomas Ashley, who, while on an archeological expedition, discovers ancient Egyptian secrets of resurrection and immortality. Accompanied by the beautiful Arabella Cunningaham, the two are menaced by a horror spawned by an ancient curse. |
Kai Lung Unrolls His Mat | Ernest Bramah | 1,928 | Kai Lung adventures usually serve as mere excuses to bring up side stories along the way, which typically take up the better part of a Kai Lung book. However, this is one of the few books that has a purposeful main narrative as well as intriguing side stories. Kai Lung comes home one day to meet his wife, but finds everything in a state of disarray. An elderly neighbour tells him that the village has been devastated by Ming Shu. Kai Lung goes in the direction of Ming Shu. Along the way, he meets barbarians, a poor farmer named Thang, a bandless captain in the city of Chi-U, and finally (disguised as Mang-hi, a foreigner from the land of Kham) Ming Shu himself. =====Wan and the Remarkable Shrub===== A sage, finding sleep to be an unwelcome obstruction to his pursuit of enlightenment, cuts off his eyelids and throws them away. At the spot where his eyelids land grows a shrub whose leaves look like his eyelids. Later, during a famine, the shrub is rediscovered and used to make a potion that soon becomes famous enough to catch the attention of the emperor, who subsequently bestows great honors on Wan. =====Wong Tsoi and the Merchant Teen King's Thumb===== A case of two people with the same fingerprints creates difficulties which are resolved by the mandarin Wong Tsoi. =====Tong So, the Averter of Calamities===== A ring of thieves realizes that its members don't need to take the trouble to steal to make a living, if they exact a tribute from everyone in the town in return for a promise not to give them any trouble. =====Lin Ho and the Treasure of Fang-tso===== Lin Ho, an ugly boy, is orphaned and sent to live with his rich uncle, who employs him as a slave. Lin Ho has been taught to do the best he can and not worry about the reaction to his actions, so he accepts this lot stoically. Then, one day, his uncle decides to get rid of him by sending him to make an offering at a shrine, giving him a lunch that contains a poisoned onion. At the foot of the hill containing the shrine, Lin Ho meets a proud warrior named Lam-Kwong, who, on the pretense that one cannot speak to the gods with onion breath, takes his onion, devours it greedily, and then dies—but not before killing Lin Ho with a stone directed at his head. Lin Ho goes to heaven, but the beings there are not quite ready to receive him, and so, as a reward for the virtuous life he has led so far, he is allowed to reënter his body. However, once he comes back to earth, he sees his own body lying beside that of Lam-Kwong, and decides that it would be much nicer to inhabit the forbidding body of a warrior than to resume his original post. This, however, poses a problem, for now he needs to work out what is expected of him… =====Kin Weng and the Miraculous Tusk===== The apprentice to an ivory-carver, who works diligently but without much reward, wanders into the woods one day, and sees a tree, a pagoda, and a young woman, all of perfect proportion… Some years later, Kai Lung tells a story to an unwilling listener, a suitor of one of his daughters. At an early mythical period of imagined history, a young man redeems his word to cut a crescent off the moon, in order to win a young lady's hand. Kai Lung is informed by his neighbors that he has received official honorable recognition, though he is displeased when he discovers it is for rumored skills he does not possess, rather than for his real accomplishments. The last scion of a deposed dynasty overthrows a corrupt monarch and finds happiness, and a prophecy comes true, though not in the expected way. |
Why Paint Cats | Burton Silver | 1,994 | Why Paint Cats describes the practice of "cat painting", the decorating of cats with paint. |
A Tale of a Tub | Ben Jonson | null | The plot, which unfolds on St. Valentine's Day, concerns the inept attempts of a variety of suitors to win the hand of Audrey Turfe, the daughter of a Middlesex constable. To break Audrey's engagement to John Clay the tilemaker, Squire Tub, a romantic rival, has the man falsely accused of theft. As Constable Turfe pursues the innocent man, yet another suitor, Justice Preamble, plays a comparable ruse against Squire Tub. All told, Audrey is chased after by four separate suitors, and apparently she has no particular preference among them. (She hesitates to accept Squire Tub, however, because of the social gap between them: "He's too fine for me, and has a Lady / Tub to his mother.") Amid the disorder, Pol-Marten, Lady Tub's usher, marries Audrey before the others realize it. Their marriage is celebrated with a wedding masque, also titled "A Tale of a Tub," which retells the story of the play. (In the colloquial usage of the time, a "tale of a tub" is the same as "a cock and bull story.") Jonson, here as often elsewhere in his plays, borrows elements from the Classical plays of Aristophanes and Plautus. The play was published with a motto from Catullus: Inficeto est inficetior rure. |
Sacred Games | Vikram Chandra | 2,006 | Sacred Games combines the ambition of a 19th-century social novel with a cops-and-Bhais detective thriller. (Bhai is a Hindi slang term for gangster.) As sprawling as the heat-drenched city it richly portrays, Sacred Games delves into many emotionally charged worlds of contemporary India, in particular the spidery links between organized crime, local politics and Indian espionage that lie below the shimmering surfaces of its economic renaissance. Money and corruption form the golden thread. In interweaving narratives and voices, Sacred Games takes on even larger themes, from the wrenching violence of the 1947 partition of India to the specter of nuclear terrorism. |
The Brimstone Wedding | Ruth Rendell | 1,996 | Jenny Warden, a care-assistant in a retirement home, is in a loveless marriage, and has a lover. She befriends Stella Newland, a resident with cancer. Stella slowly reveals to Jenny the events of her own life, which in some ways parallels Jenny's. Stella gives Jenny the keys to a house that Stella owns, and the intrigue and their relationship deepens. |
No Night is Too Long | Ruth Rendell | 1,994 | Set in Alaska and Suffolk, this story is written in three first-person narrations, the first and longest of which is the memoir-confession of Tim Cornish. Tim, a would-be novelist of twenty-four, has just received his master's degree. He travels to Alaska for a nature-exploration cruise with his somewhat older male lover, Ivo, a paleontologist who will be lecturing during the cruise. Tim has been living with and supported by Ivo, but, since Ivo's recent declaration of love, Tim has tired of him. Ashore in Juneau while Ivo is elsewhere, Tim meets Isabel, an unhappily married, somewhat older woman, with whom Tim immediately falls in love, and he promises to meet her in Seattle in ten days after breaking up with Ivo (who he pretends is a woman). When Tim tells Ivo their relationship is over, Ivo refuses to accept it. On an excursion to an uninhabited island, the two men tussle; Tim strikes Ivo, who then strikes his head against a tree and moves no more. Leaving Ivo for dead, Tim flees the island and rejoins the cruise, saying nothing of what has happened. He helps himself to the cash and credit card Ivo left behind and flies to Seattle, hoping to find Isabel, but his guilt causes him to abandon that plan and he returns to the UK, where he settles into an unchallenging job in his hometown and lives alone in his parents' house. As there has been no word of a police inquiry, no report of the finding of Ivo's body, Tim seems to have committed the perfect crime, though he is increasingly haunted by what he has done, believing he sees Ivo everywhere. Then he begins to receive a series of anonymous letters, each of which describes the island ordeal--and rescue--of a castaway. Someone knows what he did. Isabel's own brief memoir, in the form of a letter of sorts to Ivo, and a concluding letter to his wife by a schoolboy friend of Tim's who becomes Tim's solicitor, complete the book, which explores questions of sexual identity, fidelity, and guilt. |
Asta's Book | Ruth Rendell | 1,993 | This is set in the 1990s, with flashbacks to 1905 via Asta's diary. Asta and her husband Rasmus have come to east London from Denmark with their two sons. With Rasmus constantly away on business, Asta keeps loneliness and isolation at bay by writing her diary. These diaries, published over seventy years later, reveal themselves to be more than a mere journal, for they seem to hold the key to an unsolved murder, to the quest for a missing child and to the enigma surrounding Asta's daughter, Swanny. It falls to Asta's granddaughter Ann to unearth the buried secrets of nearly a century before. |
Gallowglass | Ruth Rendell | 1,990 | When Sandor snatches Joe from the path of a London tube train, he makes it clear that Joe's life now belongs to him. Sandor begins to tell him a mysterious story and teaches Joe that he is a "gallowglass", the servant of a chief. Sandor comes from a wealthy home and is highly educated. Joe, longing for a friend, falls under his spell. Some years earlier, Sandor had taken part in the kidnapping of a former model, Nina. He now plans to kidnap her again so that they can live together. At present, Nina lives in a heavily-guarded residence with her husband and many servants. Eventually, Joe's colourful stepsister, Tilly, is also dragged into the plot. However, things don't turn out as Sandor had planned. Most of the story is seen through Joe's eyes, but Paul Garnet, Nina's driver, also tells part of the tale. |
A Dark-Adapted Eye | Ruth Rendell | 1,986 | Largely set during World War II, the story is told by Faith Severn, who at the prompting of a true-crime writer recounts her memories of her aunt, the prim, fastidious, and snobbish Vera Hillyard. Vera's life is initially centred on her beautiful younger sister, Eden, even to the exclusion of her own son, Francis, with whom she has a poor relationship. Later, Vera has a second son, Jamie, to whom she is intensely devoted, while Eden marries the scion of a wealthy family. When Eden is unable to have children with her husband, she begins to demand custody of Jamie, who she claims is being poorly raised by Vera. To the bewilderment and shock of the rest of the family, the custody battle escalates to violent levels, leading to tragedy and a series of disturbing revelations. |
The Darkling | David Kesterton | 1,982 | Set in the distant future, a young tribesman, Maradek searches for his father, Afurad. In the course of this search, he helps to foil the forces that threaten the world's destruction. |
The Centurion's Empire | Sean McMullen | null | The Roman centurion Vitellan enters into multiple periods of hibernation through a concotion developed from snow-dwelling insects. He 'emerges' into various periods throughout history, many times assisting the locals in defending themselves from outside threats. Unfortunately Vitellan is not doing so well, the artificial suspension is severely injuring him. The novel continues into the future, where several organizations vie for the control of Vitellan. fr:L'Empire du centurion |
Glass Dragons | Sean McMullen | 2,004 | The use of the weapon in the first book has led to storms that sweep the planet and make travel by sea nearly impossible. A group of magicians thinks it has the way to stop the storms: Dragonwall, a device that will drain the storms' energy. But when Dragonwall's true purpose is discovered, it's up to the priestess to destroy it by any means necessary. Meanwhile, the world has a new vampire, looked after by the old one and an unlikely genius who travels with a fallen courtier. All of them, plus a motley crew of soldiers and a sorceress (who wants nothing more than good food and pleasant company) must help the priestess destroy Dragonwall before it's too late. |
The Miocene Arrow | Sean McMullen | 2,000 | In isolated pockets of what used to be America, humans fight stylized duels in small, biodiesel-powered airplanes. In a land where chivalry and honor are everything, what happens when rebels from Australia, enamored of the amazing technology held by the Americans, hatch a plot to bring some of it back to their homes? |
Eyes of the Calculor | Sean McMullen | 2,001 | Mirrorsun, which orbits earth and prevents electrical machines from functioning, had been defunct for some time. However, when it comes back to life with a vengeance, the new Highliber must reform the Calculor, a large computer whose components are human beings. At the same time, Americans are working with an underground group to bring their airplanes and weapons to Australia. Can the Highliber and the Overmayor of Rochester, the capital of Australia, stop the American technology from destroying their way of life? |
The Law | Frédéric Bastiat | 1,850 | God has freely given us the gift that includes all others. This gift is life—physical, intellectual, and spiritual life. But life cannot maintain itself alone. The Creator of life has entrusted us with the responsibility of preserving, developing, and perfecting it. That we may do so, He has provided us with a collection of marvelous faculties, and He has put us in the midst of a variety of natural resources. By the application of our faculties to these natural resources we convert them into products and use them. This process is necessary so that life may run its appointed course. Life, faculties, production—in other words, individuality, liberty, property—these are man. And despite the cunning of artful political leaders, these three gifts from God precede all human legislation and are superior to it. What then, is law? It is the collective organization of the individual right to defend oneself, one's liberty, and one's property. Each of us has a natural right from God to defend his person, his liberty, and his property. Since each of us has the right to use force to defend his person, his liberty, and his property, then it follows that a group of men have the right to organize and support a common force to protect these rights constantly. Thus the principle of collective right—its reason for existing, its lawfulness—is based on individual right. The common force that wields this collective right cannot logically have any other purpose or any other mission than that for which it acts as a substitute. Thus, since an individual cannot lawfully use arbitrary force against the person, liberty, or property of another individual, then, for the same reason, the common force cannot arbitrarily destroy or confiscate the person, liberty, or property of an individual. Such a perversion of force would be in both cases contrary to our premise. Force has been given to us to defend our own individual rights. Who will dare to say that our Creator has endowed us with force to infringe upon the equal rights of our brothers? Since no individual can lawfully use force to infringe upon the rights of others, does it not logically follow that the same principle also applies to the common force that is nothing more than the organized combination of the individual forces? It is not true that the legislature has absolute power over our persons and property. The existence of persons and property preceded the existence of the legislature, and its function is only to guarantee their safety. It is not true that the function of law is to regulate our consciences, our ideas, our wills, our education, our opinions, our work, our trade, our talents, our pleasures. The function of law is to protect the free exercise of these rights, and to prevent any person from interfering with the free exercise of these same rights by any other person. Since law necessarily requires the use of force, its proper domain is only in the areas where the use of force is proper—that is, the administration of justice. Every individual has the right to use force for self-defense, but for nothing else. For this reason, collective force—which is only the organized combination of the individual forces—can lawfully be used for the same purpose, and it should not be used for any other purpose. Law is solely the collection of the individual right of self-defense, which existed before law was formalized. A government that confined itself accordingly would be most simple, economical, limited, non-oppressive, just, and enduring. If law did nothing more than punish all oppression and plunder, society would be so tranquil and prosperous that political questions would lose most of their importance, thus creating a more civil and unified society. The constant political upheaval would cease, as men would know that government is no more responsible for natural suffering and recession, which are inseparable from humanity, as it is for changes of temperature. Alas, two entirely different influences—greed and false philanthropy—use law to destroy its own objective. Greed: Human nature impels man to satisfy his desires with the least possible expenditure of effort, which often requires his satisfaction at the expense of others. Law makers often shape law to plunder the people and benefit themselves. The rebelling plundered classes then attempt either to stop legal plunder or to share in it. Legal plunder forces citizens to choose between their moral sense and their respect for the law and eliminates the correlation between justice and law. False philanthropy: Under the pretexts of organization, regulation, protection, and encouragement, law takes property from one person and gives it to another. Socialists do not consider the law sufficient that it should guarantee to every citizen the free and inoffensive use of his faculties for physical, intellectual, and moral self-improvement. Instead, they demand the law directly to extend welfare, education, and morality throughout the nation. Whenever wealth is taken from its owner without his consent, by force or by fraud, property is violated. This act is exactly what law is supposed to suppress, not facilitate. The perversion of law—that it may violate property rather than protect it—causes everyone to want to participate in the making of law, either to protect himself against plunder or to use it for plunder, thereby creating a perpetual source of hatred and discord. There are two kinds of plunder—legal and illegal, the first of which systematically threatens society, the second of which does not because the law punishes it. Sometimes, the law places judges, police, and prisons at the service of the plunderers and treats the victim—when he defends himself, his liberty, or his property—as the criminal. How is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply: see if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime. Even in the United States, law has become the instrument of criminal activity. This country limits the law to its proper domain more than any other nation; however, there are two issues that endanger the Peace: slavery and tariffs, the former being a violation of liberty, the latter a violation of property. The effective implementation of law requires the use of force, therefore, the proper function of law cannot extend beyond the proper function of force—to stop men from harming others. Can law—which necessarily requires the use of force—rationally be used for anything except protecting the rights of everyone? To do so would pervert it and turn might against right. The law's organization of justice (by force) excludes the idea of passing legislation with the force of law to subsidize or regulate any human activity—be it labor, charity, agriculture, commerce, industry, education, or religion. Either law upholds justice or provides for the needs of some at the forced expense of others: by fulfilling the latter purpose, it abolishes the former. Socialists seek to obliterate the distinction between government and society. Consequentially, every time we object to a given government activity, the socialists allege that we object to its being done at all, and we are therefore selfish and unpatriotic citizens. To the contrary: we, the liberals, reject the charity, education, and organization that we are forced to pay for. We do not reject natural charity, education, and organization. To socialist intellectuals, the relationship between the people and the legislator is the same relationship between the clay and the potter. Socialists envision a utopian society of which they would be the wise leaders. They find ideological support among legislators whom, for the most part, assume themselves to be better than the people and the peoples' saviors from their own stupidity: "He who would dare to undertake the political creation of a people ought to believe that he can, in a manner of speaking, transform human nature, transform each individual . . . into a mere part of a greater whole from which the individual will henceforth receive his life and being" (Rousseau). "Impartiality in law consists of two things: the establishing of equality in wealth and equality in dignity among citizens" (Condillac). Oh, writers! Remember that this clay, which you so arbitrarily dispose of, are men! They are your equals! They are intelligent and free like yourselves! They, too, have received from God the faculty to observe, to plan, to think, and to judge for themselves! What is liberty? Is it not the union of all liberties? Is not liberty the freedom of every person to make full use of his faculties, provided he does not harm others? Socialists think of liberty as the power to use and develop one's faculties. It follows that, in the socialist view, citizens have the right to education and work. Society, which owes everyone education and work, must honor the peoples' right by action of the state. From whom will the state take the resources necessary to generate education and work? The tendency of mankind toward liberty is largely thwarted by men who desire to force mankind to docilely bear the yoke of public welfare: "The function of government is to direct the physical and moral powers of the nation toward the end for which the commonwealth has come into being" (Robespierre). "To govern is to increase and spread morality, education, and happiness" (Napoleon). According to Billaud-Varennes, the people should have no prejudices except those authorized by the legislature. Ah, you miserable creatures! You who think you are so great! You who judge humanity to be so small! You who wish to reform everything! Why don't you reform yourselves? The task would be sufficient. As long as the notion prevails that government is the nation's guide and driving force, every aspect of society depends upon government. Government, therefore, bears the gratitude or blame for the state of the nation's virtue, equality, and prosperity. Is it surprising, then, that every cause of malcontent increases the danger of yet another revolution in France? And what liberties should the legislature permit us to keep? Liberty of association? (No, people would be intolerant toward each other). Liberty of conscience? (No, people would become atheists). Liberty of education? (No, parents would teach their children immoralities and falsehoods). Liberty of labor? (No, that would mean competitive markets, which mean oppression and chaos). Liberty of trade? (No, then we would buy from other nations thereby ruining our own economy). Clearly, the socialists cannot permit persons any liberty because they believe that mankind naturally tends toward degradation and disaster. Surely, without drive and guidance from government, we will cease to associate with each other, to help each other, to protect each other, our children, and ourselves, to love and honor our unfortunate brothers, and to strive to improve ourselves to the best of our abilities. Thus, the legislature must make plans to save us from ourselves. When the candidate campaigns, he speaks of the people as wise, moral, mature, and informed. But when he is elected—ah! then indeed does his tone change—the people are returned to passiveness and unconsciousness. Now it is for him to direct, to propel, and to organize. Mankind has only to submit. But, since the legislature defends the peoples' right to vote so passionately, how can the people possibly be as self-destructive as the same legislature indicates? The claims of these organizers raise another question: if the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe themselves to be made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind? The proposition that law should extend wealth and happiness to everyone is the road to serfdom that will inevitably result in legislation being the battlefield of the utopias and greed of everyone. Socialism and communism are the same plant in different stages of growth. Once the law has exceeded its proper limits, where will you stop it? Where will it stop itself? Only under a law of justice will mankind achieve God's design for the peaceful and prosperous progress of humanity. The solution to the temporal problems of humanity is to be found in liberty. And are not the more peaceful and prosperous nations those in which people may act more freely within the limits of right, and law, that is, force, is used for little (or, ideally, nothing) more than the administration of justice? Once, a traveler arrived among a tribe of savages, where a child had just been born. A crowd of soothsayers, magicians, and quacks, armed with rings, hooks, and cords, surrounded the child. One said: "This child will never smell the perfume of the peace pipe unless I stretch his nostrils." Another said: "He will never be able to hear unless I draw his earlobes down to his shoulders." A third said: "He will never see the sunshine unless I slant his eyes." Another said: "He will never stand upright unless I bend his legs." A fifth said: "He will never learn to think unless I flatten his skull." "Stop," cried the traveler. "What God does is well done. Do not claim to know more than he. God has given organs to this frail creature; let them develop and grow strong by exercise, use, and experience." God has provided us with social as well as physical faculties. These social organs are so constituted that they will develop themselves harmoniously in the clean air of liberty. Away, then, with quacks and organizers! Away with their rings, chains, hooks, and pincers! Away with their artificial systems! And now that the legislators and socialists have so futilely inflicted so many systems upon society, may they finally end where they should have begun: may they reject all systems and try liberty, for liberty is an acknowledgment of faith in God and his works. |
From Time to Time | Jack Finney | null | At the end of Time and Again, Morley had prevented the meeting of the parents of the founder of the time travel Project, Dr. Danziger, and ensured that Dr. Danziger would not be born, and that the Project would not occur. But Major Ruben Prien of the Project still has residual memories of what would have happened. He is able to put the pieces together. He finds another time traveller, more or less stranded in the present (the 1970s) by Morley's actions. The time traveller is able to go to the point where Morley had altered time, and prevent Morley's actions. The original timeline, with the Project, is now back in place. Morley has settled down in the 1880s, married Julia, and works as a graphic artist. He is, however, vaguely dissatisfied with his life. Morley, knowing that he was unable to stop the Project, eventually returns to the 1970s to see what might be going on with the Project, which has in fact become moribund. Prien soon realizes that Morley is back, and arranges a meeting with him. Prien persuades Morley that it might be possible to prevent World War I, and Morley travels back in time to the year 1911. Not only does he do it to head off the devastating war, as in the original novel, he has a personal desire to travel in time. His motive to visit the spring of 1911 is to see the brief-lived vaudeville act, "Tessie and Ted", who, we finally learn, are Morley's great aunt—and the father who died when Morley was only two years old. He sees them, but foregoes any interaction with them. His primary purpose in visiting 1911 is to find the mysterious "Z", a confidential agent of President Taft whose quiet trip to Europe would have assured peace and prevented the World War, had Z not vanished from the scene, after getting the written assurances he needed, but before returning home. Once Z is found, Morely can do whatever is required to prevent Z from vanishing. Morley soon is enveloped in the blissful world of 1911 New York, seemingly meeting at every turn a woman he calls the "Jotta Girl." Morley is able to eavesdrop on a clandestine meeting between Z and Theodore Roosevelt, and finally realizes that Z is Major Archibald Butt (an actual historical character), military aide to both Presidents Roosevelt and Taft, whom Morley has already met in the society of this New York. He tries to get close to Butt, but is frustrated by the Jotta Girl, whom Morley belatedly realizes is an agent of Dr. Danziger, original head of the Project and opponent to Prien. Danziger, who opposes changing the past for any purpose, has figured out who Z was, and has sent the Jotta Girl to interfere with Morley. However, Morley does not realize this until Butt is off to Europe on the R.M.S. Mauretania, seemingly ending any chance Morley might have to try to ensure that Butt completes his mission. His purpose frustrated, Morley returns to report to Prien in the 1970s. It is his intent then to return to Julia in the 1880s, feeling nothing further can be done. Independently of Morley, Prien has learned that Butt was Z, and knows why Z vanished, his mission incomplete. Butt sailed on the Titanic and did not survive. At first, Morley refuses to make another attempt to complete his mission. He is motivated to try again when Prien informs him that Morley's and Julia's son, Willy, will die in World War I, killed in action. Morley returns to 1911 and travels to Belfast, where the Titanic is under construction. Seeing no way to sabotage the vessel's construction (which would cause Butt to take another ship), Morley has little choice but to await the ship's completion and sail on her himself, having carefully planned to be near one of the lifeboats where men were permitted to board. Aboard, he meets Butt, who spurns Morley's offer to tell him how to get off the ship safely once the iceberg strikes. Butt will not leave a vessel on which women and children may die (and, according to some accounts, did act in a heroic manner during the sinking). The Jotta Girl is also aboard, and after Captain Smith fails to take Morley's warning seriously, agrees to help Morley. They distract the helmsman, setting the ship onto a new course. That course is the one which impacts the iceberg and sinks the ship. Had they taken no action, the ship would have missed. Butt's mission fails with his death. The war will happen, and the only hope Morley has for Willy is that forewarned with the information about the day he is to die, that he will survive. In an epilogue, Morley has returned to 1887, or, by now, 1888. He is emotionally torn up not only by his responsibility for the ship's loss, but also by his attraction to the Jotta Girl, who presumably survived and returned to the 1970s. As the book concludes, he and Julia are laying in supplies for what Morley knows will be the Blizzard of 1888. |
The Beaver Coat | Gerhart Hauptmann | 1,893 | Mother Wolff is a rather resolute cleaning lady. She is married to a somewhat clumsy and timid ship carpenter by the name of Julius Wolff. The story begins as she comes home with an illegally poached roebuck, where her daughter Leontine is waiting for her. Leontine has fled her service to the pensioner Krüger because she was told in the late hours of the night to bring a pile of wood into the stable. Mother Wolff, constantly considerate of her own reputation, wants to send her daughter back. But as she learns that the work concerns a "beautiful dry club", she allows Leontine to stay the night with the intention of acquiring the wood herself. While she sells the roebuck that she claims she discovered dead to a sailor on the river Spree named Wulkow, her youngest daughter Adelheid exlains that Mr. Krüger was recently given a valuable beaver coat from his wife. Wulkow then exclaims that he would without question pay sixty Taler for such a fur coat. Mother Wolff quickly realises that with this sum of money she could pay off a large part of her debt. She thus decides to steal the coat in order to sell it to Wulkow. After the theft, Krüger reports to the police that his wood and his coat have been stolen. However, the head official of Wehrhahn feels only annoyed by this complaint. He is only interested in uncovering, "sinister people and elements that are politically outlawed or hostile to the crown or aristocracy." Given this, Krüger strives to have the private tutor Dr. Fleischer arrested for Lèse majesté. The doctor receives around twenty various newspaper and meets regularly with free thinking literary figures. Although the head official has on several occasions not given any attention to Krüger, he decides to come once again in order to carry out his plan. This time, however, Mother Wolff is also present. She cleverly wards off any suspicion towards her, however. The comedy ends, without the theft ever being solved. In his tragicomedy The Red Cock (), which was first performed in 1901, Hauptmann continues several themes prevalent in the Beaver Coat. |
Make Love! The Bruce Campbell Way | Bruce Campbell | 2,005 | Make Love! The Bruce Campbell Way begins with an excerpt from an email that Bruce Campbell received from Barry Neville from St. Martin's Press in regard to a book, Walk this Way, that he was attempting to write. The email expresses the publisher's disinterest in that book, but a desire for Campbell to work on a different project. Upon calling Barry Neville, Bruce is presented with the idea of writing a relationship book. Bruce feels he cannot approach the concept, since he does not see himself as an authority on the subject and feels his editor has a false impression of his mastery of relationships. He is contacted by his acting agent, Barry, about a potential role in a Richard Gere/Renée Zellweger romantic comedy entitled Let's Make Love, written by Kevin Jarre, directed by Mike Nichols and produced by Robert Evans. Bruce jumps to the conclusion that the role is a small, insignificant part, but he finds out that his role is in fact a large part as the wise-cracking doorman. Bruce ends up going to New York and auditioning for the role. Bruce ends up getting the role despite the fact he was not the first, second or last choice; others considered included Johnny Depp, John Cusack, Billy Campbell, Gary Sinise, John Malkovich and Robert Patrick. From this point on, Bruce tries to do research for his role. He first tries being a doorman at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, where he has an encounter with Colin Powell that does not end well. Make Love! The Bruce Campbell Way continues to follow Bruce Campbell through his trials and tribulations with the movie. He goes to a gentleman's club, supposedly to learn how to be a true Southern gentleman, but instead finds it to be no more than a strip club and ends up getting shot for portraying himself as someone else while there. Bruce also makes a trip out to see a friend about relationships, but finds his friend to be nothing more than a sleaze who takes advantage of his clients. By the end of the book, Bruce is fighting to keep his role and seeing Let's Make Love sliding from an A-List movie to a B-List movie supposedly due to the B-Movie actor curse caused by Bruce Campbell. |
The House of the Wolf | Basil Copper | 1,983 | The story, a Victorian thriller, involves Professor John Coleridge, who is a guest at Castle Homolky, situated above the tiny Hungarian village of Lugos. While staying at the castle, a huge black wolf is discovered with preternatural powers. When the beast is at last killed with silver bullets, it is found to be part man and part wolf. |
Who Made Stevie Crye? | Michael Bishop | 1,984 | The story concerns Mary Stevenson Crye, a newly widowed housewife, who turns to freelance writing to provide for her family. Her typewriter, which is demonically possessed, involves her in a series of occult experiences, including with her dead husband, among other things. |
Lovecraft's Book | Richard A. Lupoff | 1,985 | The story concerns an offer made to H. P. Lovecraft by a fascist sympathizer, George Sylvester Viereck. His offer is to have Lovecraft write a political tract in the nature of an American Mein Kampf. In return, Viereck promises the publication of a volume of Lovecraft's stories. |
Thrice Upon a Time | James P. Hogan | 1,980 | It is December 2009. Murdoch Ross and his friend Lee Francis Walker visit Murdoch's grandfather, Sir Charles Ross, in his castle in Storbannon, Scotland. Sir Charles is a Nobel Prize winner for his work in particle physics — more specifically the isolation of free quarks. In this novel, when a nucleon decays into three quarks, the first two quarks appear immediately, while the third quark appears only a brief moment later, on the order of a a few millionths of an "yoctosecond". A widely-accepted theory is that the original decay produces two quarks and also a third unknown particle, dubbed the quason. This is subsequently transformed into a third quark. However, Sir Charles offeres a different, radical explanation: all three of the quarks are created at once, but the first two are propagated back in time. Charles dubs the energy which had allowed the propagation through time as tau waves. Although his theory is seemingly valid and consistent, the physicists of his time refuse to accept it because of its implications — namely the failure of some of the physical laws of conservation. Sir Charles then retreats to his family's castle in Scotland to continue his research in private. There, he succeeds in building a time machine capable of sending messages to the future and the past. When the two young men arrive, Sir Charles takes them down into the basement, where the machine is found. As they enter the basement, a computer attached to the machine produces data on a sheet of paper, which Sir Charles hides from the other men. He asks Murdoch to type in a six-character random message into the computer. Sir Charles next activates his machine and transmits the message one minute back in time. Finally, he shows the paper printed out previously, and Murdoch and Lee are amazed: the printout contained exactly the same random characters that Murdoch typed, and these were printed before Murdoch had typed them in. After Murdoch and Lee have gotten over their initial amazement, they decide to experiment with the machine. Murdoch tries to fool the machine into creating a causality paradox, by deliberately receiving a message from the future, and not sending the message back at the due time. Suddenly, the entire system turns bizarre, and they are flooded with messages from all over the ten-minute range of the machine. Then they abruptly turn off the machine and leave. While outside, Murdoch and Lee talk about the implications of the machine's existence and how the space-time continuum could allow for time travel without introducing a paradox. They formulate theories similar to the many-worlds interpretation, finally deciding that none of the theories they discus fit their previous observations. The next day, Ted Cartland, a friend of Charles and a former Royal Air Force officer, arrives to examine the machine he had helped build. They repeat the experiment, and Ted is bewildered as well. Ted, however, has a trick up his sleeve. He writes a computer program to do what Murdoch had done the day before, to remove the human element from the experiment. The machine picks up an unexpected message, telling the experimenters that a glass jar had been broken. True enough, Lee was on the verge of accidentally pushing a jar off a shelf. However, they are unable to contact their future selves with the broken jar, since they apparently no longer exist. Sir Charles decides that upon sending the message back, the copies of themselves in the future had changed their past and thus had been erased from existence. The altered timeline, with its unbroken jar, overwrote the old one rather like recording over an old TV program on a videotape. Thus causality had been preserved. The fear of being erased chills them, and so they quickly disable the machine again. As time goes by, they establish an experimental protocol, and they set up automated tests to gain more information about the physics behind the machine. The machine is upgraded to allow for more data throughput and a tiem range of about 24 hours. Murdoch also meets a young woman named Anne Patterson when she trips over Sir Charles's kitten while she was out shopping in Kingussie. They immediately fall in love. It turns out later that she is a physician in the new fusion reactor in Burghead. Elizabeth Muir, another close friend of Sir Charles, works there as well, and he invites her to his castle to investigate the peculiar machine. The (fictional) European Fusion Consortium (EFC) has commissioned a large thermonuclear fusion reactor in Burghead to compete with the technologies located in the United States and the Soviet Union. The colossal energy obtained from fusion meant that huge amounts of power might someday be available at low costs. All three parties used inertial confinement technology, with the EFC opting to use ion beams. During this time, Murdoch and Lee get to tour the large Burghead facility through Elizabeth, who is a principal physicist there, and Murdoch builds a relationship with Anne. One day, the reactor, still in the testing phases of power production, is shut down when apparent erosion is detected in the fusion chamber. Two days before, the team at Storbannon had experienced an apparent failure in its time machine, with Lee asserting that the failure had to be due to interference. Their time machine then suddenly resumes operation again, and they elect to ignore the problem. Shortly after the incident, strange events start occurring around the world, with so-called bugophants (a blend of bug and elephant) drilling tiny, long, straight holes through a myriad of objects, from human bodies to telescope mirrors. Finally, the team finds out the cause of the erosion in the Burghead plant, the interference with the machine, and the bugophants themselves: the repeated fusion tests at the plant had, over the course of two days, had produced some two million microscopic black holes, which then tunnelled through the basement of the plant and concentrated around the core of the Earth. As the black holes annihilated matter, they emitted tau waves and caused interference even before the reactor tests. Although conventional theory stated that black holes could not form from the comparatively low pressure produced in the reactor, and small black holes could not survive long anyway, the conventional theory had failed to take into account the existence of tau waves and their effects. Lee suddenly goes into spasms and loses consciousness during a dinner with Murdoch and Anne. He is rushed to a local hospital, and then she is transferred to a special unit created to deal with a new outbreak, which had apparently affected him and several others in Burghead. While the rest of the team is away, Murdoch finds that the machine is about to be swamped with interference, and may soon be unusable. He decides to take matters into his own hands and transmit a message far back into the past to remedy the situation. To get around the 24 hour limit of the machine, he asks Anne, who had learned machine code programming at her university, to write a program that would repeatedly bootstrap itself back in time until it reached the date desired. Anne complies, despite her deep misgivings. They manage to send the message, knowing they will be reset into the new timeline, and that anything could be different. Their selves in the past receive the message, and they act on it immediately. They have no choice but to tell the bewildered managing committee at Burghead of their findings, including revealing their time machine. Given the necessary investigations, the thermonuclear reactor is shut down indefinitely. And although neither Murdoch nor Anne is aware of it, the flood of tau particles accompanying the message upset delicate quantum probabilities. She did not trip over the kitten and then begin a relationship with Murdoch. In the new timeline, word of the time machine spreads to the EFC headquarters in Brussels and to other places. Lee turns ill in the castle one day and suddenly collapses. As a doctor, Anne contacts Murdoch, who is away, and suggests that Lee has succumbed to a new outbreak of a disease, apparently a version of multiple sclerosis, but progressing much faster, taking only a few weeks rather than years, and also very deadly. Murdoch pressures Anne to reveal more information about the outbreak, which appears to be highly classified. Anne does not know much, either. However, Murdoch finds out that a distinguished medical specialist, Sir Giles Fennimore, has arrived from London to investigate the outbreak. He learns that the disease is somehow connected to the West Coast of the United States, where Lee had been residing in September 2009, and his suspicions are raised further. Ted and Elizabeth help Murdoch investigate. After interrogating Ralph Courtney, chairman at the Burghead facility, and a chance meeting by Ted with a young R.A.F. pilot, they eventually find out (Ted knowing much of this from his previous R.A.F. experience) that Anglo-American authorities had wished to establish an advanced laboratory for potentially dangerous research into viruses, genetic manipulation, and similar subjects. Naturally, this project stirred up a large controversy over public fears of containment failures and contamination and was eventually scrapped. However, the possible scientific advancements offered were simply too great to pass up. Thus a satellite, the QX-37, was constructed and launched into outer space, purporting to be an astronomical observatory. The QX-37 continued the experiments secretly. In August 2009, the satellite passed right through the path of the Perseids meteor shower, and it was hit by a meteor. It broke up and disintegrated into the Earth's atmosphere. After the breakup and fallout, to prevent public panic, the entire effort was tightly classified and codenamed Centurion. Again, surpassing the odds, a single mutant strain of multiple sclerosis survives on its way back to the Earth, and infects the entire population of the West Coast, with an incubation period of nine months. It was during this time that Lee was infected, since he was on the West Coast at the time. The West Coast of the United States is one of the most densely populated areas on the planet, and soon thousands of people start reporting symptoms and being hospitalized. The new strain is named omnisclerosis Californians. A vaccine is announced and vaccinations begin in California. However they are stopped after 811 of the people treated die from neurological disorders triggered by one of the production batches, which had not been manufactured properly. Even though the vaccine worked, members of the public would not trust it anymore, and there are now left with no defense against the virus. The members of the team decide to contact Fennimore through the Minister of Advanced Technology and Science Graham Cuthrie. Although he is initially skeptical, he is convinced of the machine's authenticity after a demonstration. They propose a pilot test: instead of changing many months of history, they offer to reset the events leading to the vaccine mishaps that had caused Fennimore much distress, five days ago. Cuthrie reluctantly agrees. He is asked to prepare a comprehensive document detailing the manufacturing problem, with additional measures taken to ensure its authenticity. In the new reset timeline, the faulty vaccine batch is retracted and the 811 deaths do not occur. Fennimore becomes a spokesman for the team, convincing world governments to take action. It is decided that the information needed to produce and distribute the vaccine will be sent back several months in time, as well as other current events, to help their past selves to make better decisions. The message is sent to the afternoon of January 16, 2010, from July 28, 2010, shortly after the message about the black holes is received. The message is split up into two parts, a header announcing the message, and then the message body itself to arrive an hour later, to allow the team to attach more computer memory to the machine for the message to be received completely. That very day, in this third iteration of the timeline, Murdoch and Lee go out shopping in Kingussie, and a certain young woman named Anne trips over Sir Charles's kitten... This is the origin of the story's title, Thrice Upon A Time. |
Lafcadio: The Lion Who Shot Back | Shel Silverstein | 1,963 | A young lion is living in the jungle. On a night, when all the lions are sleeping, they awaken to hear a gunshot. All the lions run away except for one named Grmmff, who is the protagonist of the story. He is confused about why the other lions are running away, until an old lion tells him that hunters are coming. He does not know what a hunter is, but thinks that he likes the sound of the word "hunters," so he stops running and hides in the tall grass. The hunters pass by wearing red caps and carrying funny sticks that make loud noises (obviously guns). The lion likes their looks, so when a hunter passes, he stands up, says hello, and tries to make friends with the hunter. This offends the hunter's sense of the proper relationship between lion and hunter, and the hunter says he will shoot Grmmff. When the hunter finds, however, that he has not loaded his rifle, Lafcadio decides he does not like the hunter after all, and eats him up, red cap and all. He tries to eat up the gun and the bullets, but he cannot chew them. He brings them to the other lions. The old lion says to throw them away, but the young lion shoots the gun with his tail. The lions initially run away. They are angry with the young lion when they discover that he is the one shooting. However, the young lion likes shooting the gun so much that he practices to become the best shot in the whole world. A year later, another man comes walking through the jungle, the young lion wants to shoot him. However he is revealed that the man is a circus man. Finchfinger, the circus man, persuades the reluctant lion to come with him to the circus with the promise of marshmallows. They arrive in the city, which is not at all like the jungle. There are "tall square things" (buildings) and "things that look like hippopotamuses that move very fast with people inside them" (cars). The lion goes into the hotel and goes up and down the elevator many times. He then meets Uncle Shelby, (obviously Shel Silverstein, as he tells the story) goes to the barbershop, gets his paws shined, his claws manicured and a free haircut. He has dinner, and eats lots of marshmallow dishes, then finally eats his napkin for dessert. He wears a marshmallow suit, but it gets ironed and it melts all over him. He goes back to the hotel and stays up very late singing the "marshmallow song:" <poem> Marshmallows Marshmallows Marching Marshing Mellow Malling Mallows Marshing Fellows Marshy-Murshy- </poem> The young lion's name is changed to Lafcadio the Great. The next morning, there is a big parade for him. Lafcadio goes into the tent, shoots six bottles off the table, a hundred balloons off the ceiling, a marshmallow off everybody's head including some monkeys, shoots 12,322 of the Ace of Spades (but misses once), shoots in many different ways, and then joins the circus. He shoots for many different governments, becomes rich and very famous and signs six autographs at once. He then becomes more like a man, standing on his back paws, wearing clothes, playing golf and tennis, going swimming and diving, painting pictures (despite being unable to draw a straight line), doing exercises, going skating, and attempting to learn to ride a bicycle. He goes to the beach at Cannes, sings, plays the guitar, bowls and seldom says "GRAUGRRR" except on very special occasions. He writes his autobiography, becomes a clothes lion, and becomes very happy, rich and famous. But suddenly, Lafcadio is crying because he is tired of what he has, and wants something new. Uncle Shelby asks if he has gone up and down the elevator a few times or eaten marshmallows, but that is old stuff. Then Finchfinger gets the idea to take Lafcadio on a hunting trip in Africa. Uncle Shelby cannot come because he has to water his philodendron plant. So Lafcadio, along with Finchfinger and some other hunters, goes back to Africa and begins hunting lions. A very old lion realizes that Lafcadio is a lion too and comes up to him. Lafcadio remembers that he was a lion, and that he still is a lion. All the lions want him to come back and be a lion with them, but the hunters also want Lafcadio to stay a hunter. Lafcadio cannot make up his mind and says that he does not want to do either and that he does not think that he belongs anywhere. He puts down his gun and walks away, not knowing where he's going and not knowing what's happening to him. Lafcadio has not been heard from since. |
The Good Guy | Dean Koontz | 2,007 | Timothy Carrier is an unassuming stonemason who, while having a beer at his regular bar, is accidentally mistaken for a hitman by a stranger who hands him an envelope containing $10,000 and a photo of the intended victim, a writer named Linda Paquette. The real killer arrives soon afterwards, and Tim manages to bluff him by pretending to be the client, saying he's had second thoughts, and is cancelling the hit while giving the killer the $10,000 as a "no-kill fee". Tim covertly follows the killer outside, and is shocked when the killer places a roof-mounted police light on top of his car before driving off; implying the hitman is a cop. Tim tracks down Linda and flees. He phones his old Marine buddy Pete, who's a homicide detective, and asks him to trace the plates of the killer's car. Tim and Linda barely manage to stay one step ahead of the killer, and they begin to suspect that he has almost unlimited access to cell phones, financial transactions and GPS tracking; implying that he is working for someone very powerful. As Tim manages to foil the killer again and again, Linda begins to suspect that Tim is more than just a mason. The supremely confident/psychotic killer isn't deterred, but appears to become increasingly unstable as the chase continues. Over time, Tim and Linda develop feelings for one another. Linda confesses to Tim about her haunting childhood; her parents, former preschool teachers, were unjustly accused of committing horrific sexual crimes to their students, including their daughter. Linda was separated from her parents, as both of them had to go to jail and eventually die. The killer finally tires of chasing Tim, and instead goes to Tim's house and kidnaps Tim's Mom, and then calls Tim to set up a trade for Linda. During the call Tim's Mom covertly lets Tim know they're still at her house(the hitman implied they were far away). Tim and Pete rush home to save Tim's Mom and kill the hitman. FBI agents raid the house and begin to clean up the mess. However, before they enter the house, Tim and Pete see them coming, and being suspicious, Tim calls his neighbor across the street and asks him to covertly videotape the agents. As the clean up proceeds the lead agent reveals that the hitman had actually been working for an American politician who's part of a shadowy conspiracy to take over the American government from the inside. Two and a half years earlier, an aide of that politician had lunch with a member of a terrorist organization. In that restaurant, the owner snapped several pictures of his regular customers, catching the aide and terrorist in the background. Later on, the terrorist was recognized as member of a terrorist organization, while the politician became popular and was being talked about as the next president, plus the pictures surfaced on the restaurant's website. Fearful that this relationship with a known terrorist organization would become known, the conspiracy, in the spirit of thoroughness, sent the hitman to kill the customers who were in the pictures; Linda Paquette being one of them. Before leaving, the lead agent politely apologizes for causing so much trouble, but makes it clear to Tim that if any of them ever say anything about what happened, Tim and everyone he loved would be killed, and it would be made to look like a murder/suicide because of Tim suffering from PTSD. Moments later, Pete shows Linda the story about Tim winning the Medal of Honor for saving numerous civilians during his experiences as a Marine. Tim takes the video to the current American president and explains what he knows about the shadowy group of government insiders. The story ends with Tim and Linda marrying and the conspiracy falling apart; there are multiple arrests and suicides. |
A Solitary Blue | Cynthia Voigt | 1,983 | Jeff Greene is a second grade student who comes home one day to find his mother, Melody, has left. Jeff's father "the professor," is a reserved man and keeps to daily routines. Trying not to be a burden to his father, when Jeff feels sick he makes light of it until he is seriously unwell with a chest infection. After many years without any contact from his mother, she asks him to visit her in her family's home in Charleston, South Carolina for the summer. He connects with Melody and has a wonderful time, the first one since Melody left. After his visit, he writes letters to Melody on the first day of every month even though she never writes back. For Christmas he sends Melody a beautiful scarf but receives nothing from her in return. Jeff convinces himself to excuse her for ignoring him so he can keep loving her. On his second summer visit, Melody doesn't spend much time with Jeff. She has a boyfriend and is never at home for more than a day. Jeff's second summer with his mother is very different from his first one, and by the end of it, Jeff is forced to see that Melody doesn't really care about him. Jeff is heartbroken and withdraws himself. Melody and Jeff have a huge fight.' He begins to fail his classes and doesn't open up to anyone about his feelings. He becomes so withdrawn his father becomes convinced he is on drugs but finds out the truth and decides to make a change for Jeff's good, moving to Crisfield. Jeff makes some friends and gets his life back on track, taking an interest in schoolwork and learning to play the guitar. He learns to accept himself, and starts to build a real relationship with his father. After a year in Crisfield, Jeff meets the Tillermans and becomes good friends with Dicey, whom he attracts with his music. Finally, Jeff becomes able to put his mother behind him and bond with his father. |
CHERUB: Man Vs. Beast | Robert Muchamore | 2,006 | The book starts with a 14 year old boy called Andy Pierce witnessing his mother getting assaulted by two masked men who are working for the Animal Freedom Militia. The book then skips to Kerry being annoyed by her boyfriend, James. James goes into his room and he is met by his sister Lauren. She asks him to help her and her best friend Bethany to sneak into the basic training compound to give Bethany's brother, Jake, and Lauren's crush, Rat, some food. James refuses but Lauren blackmails him by threatening to tell Kerry about him cheating on her during a mission a year before. James joins the girls on the mission to get the food to the trainees. All goes fine but Mac watches them on the back up CCTV and they get caught. James is not punished for being blackmailed and he, Lauren and Kyle and sent on a mission to bring down the AFM (Animal Freedom Militia). Lauren is stuck with the ex-con while he meets up with his old animal rights protest group. They get invited to rescuing dozens of dogs from the compound which were supposed to be sold onto the testing company. All goes well in the rescue, but the rescuers were overwhelmed because many more dogs were rescued than they thought. This chapter ends with Lauren saving a puppy from getting run over by Zara's car. They end up keeping the dog in the chairwoman's house. Lauren always visits the puppy, who was called Meatball (due to Lauren being a vegetarian). Together James, Lauren and Kyle succeed in their mission and return home. On the mission Lauren becomes a vegetarian and at the end James puts meat in her bag on the plane to annoy her. Zara Asker becomes chairman succeeding Dr. McAfferty who retires. |
The Innocent | Ian McEwan | 1,990 | The novel takes place in 1955-56 Berlin at the beginning of the Cold War and centres on the joint CIA/MI6 operation to build a tunnel from the American sector of Berlin into the Russian sector to tap the phone lines of the Soviet High Command. Leonard Marnham is a 25-year-old Englishman who sets up and repairs the tape recorders used in the tunnel. He falls in love with Maria Eckdorf, a 30-year-old divorced German. The story revolves around their relationship and Leonard's role in the operation. |
The Spinal Cord Perception | null | null | David Rivers, a 24-year-old substitute teacher (most likely with anti-social personality disorder) begins the story by moving back to Georgia after spending several months in California fleeing from an undisclosed incident involving a classroom full of children. As the story progresses, we learn that David suffers from visions of a treacherous black creature he calls the Llapasllaly. During these visions terrible things occur, namely the death of his childhood friend, girlfriend and parents among other things. As David becomes increasingly disenchanted with his life in California, his depression culminates with the discovery of his girlfriend's unfaithfulness. After witnessing the Llapasllaly kill her, David returns to his hometown in Georgia and takes another substitute teaching job. He soon meets a woman named Samantha, whom he falls in love with and proposes to. His dark visions seem to subside. Things take a turn for the worse however when David realizes Samantha has a Llapasllaly of her own (who she calls Amelia) and who takes the form of an eating disorder. At the time of this discovery a police investigation into the killing of David's Californian girlfriend finds David in Georgia where a detective issues a warrant for his arrest, believing him to be responsible for the killing. David flees police as Samantha is taken to the hospital for treatment after collapsing. Returning to the elementary school that was the home of the incident that forced David to move to California, David attempts to prove the Llapasllaly's existence by revealing it to a classroom full of special education students. The plan backfires when the Llapasllaly kills a child with downs syndrome. As David leaves the school, a taxi carrying Samantha arrives and the couple run to reunite before the police car arriving at the scene crashes into Samantha and kills her. David manages to escape the police temporarily and returns to the trailer he was living in. He has a final vision in which the Llapasllaly invites him to commit suicide with sleeping pills. In the final moments before the police arrive to arrest him, David realizes the Llapasllaly exists only in his mind and that the option to live or die is up to him and not the creature. |
The Holy Sinner | Thomas Mann | 1,951 | The story begins in Rome, with the monk Clemens announcing the ringing of bells throughout the city. Clemens, moved by the "spirit of storytelling" (a term used often in many of Mann's later works) [incorrect, define "many"], introduces the reader to the events which led up to the ringing of the bells, i.e. Gregory's arrival in Rome and coronation as Pope. In Flanders duke Grimald, seventeen years a widower, is pressing his daughter Sibylla to marry in order to forge an alliance with a neighboring kingdom. Sibylla, attracted only to her brother Wiligis, spurns the duke's wishes. After the duke's death brother and sister become lovers, and Sibylla learns that she is with child by her brother Wiligis. Considering suicide out of shame for what they have done, the brother and sister turn to their loyal counsellor, the knight Eisengrein. Eisengrein suggests that Wiligis take up the Crusade as a means of atoning for his sins, and after the couple's child is born he further suggests that they set the infant adrift on a raft. Sibylla and Wiligis, though at first distrusting Eisengrein's advice, in the end decide that there is nothing else they can do. Wiligis sets out, and is killed before he even reaches Messina. Sibylla gives her newborn to the North Sea, where she assumes it perishes. The raft carrying the infant is found by two fishermen in the English Channel, and these two take the raft, the infant, and a tablet Sibylla placed within the raft back to the island where they live. Upon their return the two fishermen are intercepted by Gregory, the Abbot of the monastery Agonia Dei. Gregory reads the tablet and understands the importance of the child. He then agrees to pay one of the fishermen a set sum every month if the fisherman will raise the child as his own. The fisherman, astounded by the handsome sum the priest is offering, accepts the proposal. Years later the infant has grown into a young man. Out of fondness the Abbot has named him Gregory, and it looks as if the young man will join the monastery and remain among the brothers for the rest of his life. Unfortunately the younger Gregory gets into a fistfight with his adopted brother, and it is at this point that he learns the secret of his origins, which were up to that point kept from him. The Abbot takes the younger Gregory into his cell and shows him the tablet from the raft, and the young man learns that his mother and father were also sister and brother. Stunned by the revelation, the younger Gregory resolves to seek out his parents in order to alleviate the suffering he assumes they must feel. Gregory sets out for the continent with the Abbot's blessing, and later becomes the champion of his mother's city in the "Wooing War" which ensued after a jilted suitor for his mother's affections decided to resort to military force. Gregory defeats the suitor and - unbeknownst to him - takes his mother's hand in marriage. After the two marry they bear a daughter. Several years later Gregory's mother discover's the tablet, still in his possession, and realizes that she has married and born children by her own son. Gregory and Sibylla, dismayed by the realization of what they have done, decide on a life of severe penance as a means of expunging their guilt. Gregory becomes a hermit, living on a rocky promontory within a lake. Sibylla devotes her life to the care of lepers, and refuses to have their second daughter christened. 17 years pass. In a dispute over succession Rome finds itself without a Pope. At this time two of the bishops are visited by a vision of a bleeding lamb. The lamb instructs them where to look for the next Pope, and the two bishops set out immediately to find Gregory. After a long journey they find him, shrunken to the size of a hedgehog, living on the rock in the middle of the lake. Afterwards they take him back to the opposite shore and he is miraculously restored to the Gregory of seventeen years ago. At Gregory's arrival in Rome the bells of city ring out of their own accord, announcing the presence of the next Holy Roman Pontiff. Gregory goes on to become one of the wisest popes in history, and he is regarded throughout Christendom as the savior of the faith. The book closes with a meeting between Gregory and his mother. Sibylla, not aware that Pope Gregory is her son, goes to Rome to confess her sinful life and ask for pardon. Gregory, recognizing her instantly, offers this pardon freely. Mother/wife and son/husband forgive one another, and Gregory finds a place for both his mother and one of his sisters within the Church. In the act of forgiveness each realizes, as the monk Clemens goes on to state, that though they were sinners they were able to rise above the baser elements within their own natures. -- the author is re-telling an existent medieval text of the Catholic Church that was made as instructive in morality, and blankly balancing the events through the medium of the sarcastic narrator and his ability to lucidly illustrate the most absurd behavior with no detectable opinion as to how the reader should judge it. this book is basically the "easy" short form of the joseph tetrology. the "moral of the story" is that the reader is made aware of the ideas of medieval Christianity, and in fact even modern Christianity in a form so direct and "modern" that their reaction, as wildly as it may therefore variate is increasingly accurate and might teach them of common "humanist" themes that overreach the story-tellers intentional-fake trickery. cs:Vyvolený (Thomas Mann) de:Der Erwählte it:L'eletto hu:A kiválasztott (Thomas Mann) |
Lord Kelvin's Machine | James Blaylock | 1,992 | In Victorian London, Alice, the wife of scientist-explorer Langdon St. Ives, is murdered by his arch-nemesis, the hunchback Dr. Ignacio Narbondo. St. Ives and his valet, Hasbro, pursue Narbondo across Norway, contesting Narbondo's plot to destroy the earth and, later, efforts to revivify Narbondo's apparently frozen corpse. In the process St. Ives gains access to a powerful device created by Lord Kelvin, which allows St. Ives to travel through time. Note that the plot description of this book as described in S. T. Joshi's Sixty Years of Arkham House is wrong. |
Special Assignments: The Further Adventures of Erast Fandorin | Boris Akunin | 1,999 | Moscow, 1886. Four years after the events depicted in The Death of Achilles, Fandorin is still serving as the Deputy for Special Assignments to Moscow governor Prince Dolgurukoi. He is cohabitating with the Countess Addy, a married woman. After a gentleman con man named Momos, who goes by the alias "The Jack of Spades", dupes the Prince as part of a hundred-thousand ruble swindle, Fandorin is called in to apprehend him. Fandorin takes on as his investigative assistant a meek young policeman named Anisii Tulipov, and together Fandorin and Tulipov try to apprehend Momos and his beautiful lady accomplice, Mimi. Fandorin sniffs out and shuts down a fraudulent lottery being run by the Jack, but Momos and Mimi escape. Momos in turn tricks Fandorin's Japanese manservant, Masa, into letting him steal all of Countess Addy's baggage. An angry Fandorin vows revenge on Momos and sets up a sting where he poses as an Indian prince in possession of a large emerald. Momos and Mimi again escape, but not before Mimi and Tulipov have a romantic encounter. Momos sends back all of Addy's baggage in an effort to relieve the pressure from Fandorin. Fandorin subsequently sends Addy back to her husband. Momos decides to flee Moscow to avoid a determined Fandorin, but changes his mind after a chance encounter with Samson Eropkin, a thoroughly corrupt, criminal Moscow official. Momos decides to rob Eropkin, but the con goes horribly wrong. Momos and Mimi wind up captured by Eropkin, who is on the verge of murdering them both when Fandorin arrives and saves them. Eropkin is arrested for his crimes. Fandorin lets Momos go for lack of evidence and from a desire to save his boss, Prince Dolgurukoi, embarrassment. Mimi, on the other hand, faces trial for her involvement in the fraudulent lottery. She appears to be headed for prison and exile in Siberia—and Tulipov, who has fallen in love, dreams of marrying her after she is released from jail—when Momos, disguised as a lawyer, defends Mimi in court and blackmails the judge into dropping the charges. Tulipov watches Mimi and Momos leave the courthouse, not realising until it is too late that Momos is the lawyer, and he watches disconsolately as the Jack of Spades takes the woman of his dreams away. The tone of the novella is lightly comic, making a sharp contrast to the second novella, The Decorator. Moscow, 1889. Holy Week, before Easter. In Moscow, a prostitute is brutally murdered and mutilated. Fandorin believes the murderer is Jack the Ripper, the English murderer who killed a series of prostitutes in London the year before. Early in the novel, the point of view shifts to that of the murderer, who describes his crimes and calls himself The Decorator, believing he makes ugly women beautiful. The rest of the story is periodically interrupted with the thoughts of The Decorator. Court Counsellor Izhitsin, an investigative rival of Fandorin's, supervises the exhumation of corpses from the Bozhedomka graveyard, with Fandorin's assistant, Tulipov, accompanying. While at the cemetery, Tulipov befriends Pakhomenko, the genial Ukrainian cemetery watchman. The coroner, Dr. Zakharov, identifies four more bodies as being victims of the Moscow ripper. Tulipov reports these findings to Fandorin, whose new girlfriend, Angelina, a devout Russian Orthodox woman, lives with Fandorin regardless. Angelina's origins are described in the short story "The Scarpea of the Baskakovs" from the Jade Rosary Beads collection. Fandorin checks the records of people who have travelled from London to Moscow in recent months and have medical training, and comes up with two likely suspects: Nesvitskaya the midwife, and Stenich the male nurse, who were kicked out of medical school seven years ago. Shortly after this, Fandorin receives a gruesome package in the mail: a human ear. Tulipov surreptitiously interviews the two suspects. Fandorin travels back to the morgue and matches the severed ear with one of the dead prostitutes. Fandorin challenges Zakharov, who won't tell him anything but instead tells him the guilty party will be at a reunion party of former medical students he's going to that night. Fandorin learns that the party's host, a businessman named Burylin, was thrown out of medical school for being part of a group of pranksters that got into trouble at school seven years ago. Stenich was also part of this group, as was Zakharov, who was trained as a coroner instead of being expelled. Their leader, Sotsky, was sent to prison, and died. It is eventually revealed that Sotsky and the rest were disciplined for accidentally killing a prostitute. Fandorin arrests Burylin after he confesses to sending Fandorin the ear as a prank. Tulipov is assigned to work with Izhitsin, who believes the murderer must be a Tatar or Jewish butcher, and has rounded up a group of suspects he plans to torture. Tulipov tells him of the three suspects Fandorin has found, and Izhitsin has an idea for an experiment: shock the three suspects by taking them to the morgue and showing them the bodies and seeing who confesses. No one does. In the street, Tulipov accidentally runs into Fandorin, who is working undercover as a pimp. Fandorin learns of Izhitsin's stunt with the bodies and goes to confront him, only to find out that the Decorator has murdered him. Count Tolstoy, the Minister for Internal Affairs, arrives from St. Petersburg on Good Friday and threatens to fire Prince Dolgurukoi if the killer is not caught by Easter. Tulipov goes back to the graveyard to interview the people who attended Izhitsin's experiment, and, in a sudden fit of inspiration, believes he's figured out who the killer is. While Tulipov is pursuing his theory, the Decorator arrives at his apartment and kills his sister Sonya. Fandorin is informed of this, and is then given a deathbed report from Tulipov, who believed the killer was Zakharov and had gone to Zakharov's office at the graveyard to observe him—only to run into the Decorator, who attacked and mortally wounded him. Fandorin, enraged over the murder of his assistant, goes to the graveyard and finds Zakharov missing, but interviews the watchman Pakhomenko. He receives a phone call from Zakharov, who says he is innocent and will tell Fandorin everything if Fandorin and Masa meet him at a hotel. Meanwhile, the Decorator goes to Fandorin's house, intending to kill Angelina. He is surprised and subdued by Fandorin and Masa, who did not go to the hotel rendezvous. The killer is revealed to be Pakhomenko, the friendly graveyard watchman—whose true identity is Sotsky, the leader of the group of medical school pranksters seven years ago. Fandorin determines to kill Sotsky himself, right there in his house, but is interrupted by Angelina when she arrives home. Fandorin settles for an impromptu trial with Angelina as judge. Fandorin then reveals that Sotsky did not die in prison, but escaped and emigrated to London before returning to Moscow and getting a job at the cemetery from his old friend Zakharov. Sotsky then killed Zakharov and impersonated him in the phone call to lure Fandorin away and leave Angelina unprotected. Sotsky admits to his crimes and Angelina finds him guilty. Fandorin then takes him outside and shoots him in the yard. After he returns, Angelina tells him she is leaving him to become a nun, because she believes she inhibits Fandorin in his work. Fandorin is devastated, but she insists. As the Easter bells sound, she tells him "It's all right. Do you hear? Christ is risen." |
The Higher Power of Lucky | Susan Patron | 2,006 | The novel features Lucky, a 10-year-old girl who lives in a small town called Hard Pan (population 43) in the California desert with her two friends Lincoln, who is an avid knot tyer and expected by his mother to be the president when he grows up, and Miles, a five year old whose favorite book is "Are You My Mother?" by P.D. Eastman. After her mother died two years ago from being electrocuted, her father called upon his first ex-wife, Brigitte, to come to the United States from France to take care of Lucky. Lucky fears that Brigitte is tired of being her guardian and of their life in Hard Pan. When she discovers Brigette's suitcase and passport lying out, she becomes convinced that Brigitte will abandon her and return to France. This anxiety prompts Lucky to seek help from her "Higher Power", a notion she gets from eavesdropping at her town's 12-step meetings. After discovering three "signs" to leave, she runs away with her dog, HMS Beagle, during a sandstorm. Outside of town, however, she finds Miles, lost and injured in the storm, and takes him with her. They take shelter in the dugouts near an abandoned mine and wait out the storm. They are soon joined by Lincoln, who tells them that the rest of the town is looking for them, and will be there shortly. Before she leaves the dugouts, she casts her mother's ashes out in the wind in a makeshift memorial service with the townsfolk. Brigitte takes Lucky home and explains the papers Lucky had found in Brigitte's suitcase were actually to legally adopt Lucky, and reveals her plans to open a restaurant in Hard Pan. |
Flotsam | David Wiesner | null | This book has no words, but is told in pictures. A boy is at the beach and finds an old camera. He takes the film to get it developed, and sees photos of fantastical undersea cities and inventions. The last picture is the most interesting, though: it's of a girl, who is holding a photo of a child, who is holding a photo of a child, who is holding a photo of a child, and so on. The boy figures out that he is one in a long line of photographers who have found this camera. He takes a picture of himself holding this photo and tosses the camera back into the ocean; it is carried across the ocean by a variety of fish and sea life, until it again washes ashore and another child finds it. |
So Far from the Bamboo Grove | Yoko Kawashima Watkins | 1,994 | The story begins with Yoko Kawashima (and her mother, brother and sister) living in Nanam, a city in northern Korea. When Korea becomes dangerous, Yoko and her family must return to Japan, hiding from both the Japanese military and the Koreans. Her brother, Hideyo, also tries to flee but he is separated from his family because he tried out for the army and purposefully failed the written test because he decided last minute he didn't want to go to war. As a punishment, he has to serve at an ammunition factory for six days a week, which is why he is separate from his family when the Kawashima's have to leave. The family experiences a difficult journey as they make their way to Seoul and to Pusan to take a ferry to Japan. When Yoko, her sister Ko, and her mother reach Fukuoka, they travel to Kyoto, as the mother had family there. She then leaves for Aomori to seek help from their grandparents. She returns to Yoko and her sister bringing sad news that both of their grandparents are dead. The mother dies on the same day, leaving Yoko and Ko waiting for the eventual return of their brother, Hideyo. Yoko's essay is later published in a newspaper, and their old friend Corporal Matsumura seeks out Yoko, asking if she is the same girl. Hideyo faints at the doorstep of a Korean family. Luckily for him, his life was spared and the family allow him to stay. The family sadly bids Hideyo farewell and he finally reaches Pusan where he finds the message that Yoko had left him. After sailing across to Japan, he sees scriptures of his name and Yoko and Ko's address. While asking directions from a local, he is spotted by Yoko and they are reunited. |
Frau Jenny Treibel | null | null | The primary subject of the novel revolves around two Berlin families. One is the upper-class Treibel family consisting of the Councillor of commerce and his wife, Frau Jenny, as well as their sons Otto and Leopold. The other family is that of Professor Wilibald Schmidt and his daughter Corinna. The families have a connection that has already existed for decades. Many years ago, when Wilibald was still a student, he was also the secret admirer of Jenny, who at that time was the daughter of Willibald's landlord. The landlord was the proprietor of a small basement shop. Willibald even went so far as to write a poem to Jenny in which he pronounced his love for her, though he failed to achieve the desired effect. The poem itself was of a modest literary achievement, but due to the young student's overwhelming sentimentality at the time, Jenny continues to bring the poem up in conversation quite often. Wilibald would like to see his daughter Corinna marry her cousin Marcell, a promising future archaeologist. Unfortunately, however, Marcell can not bring himself to propose to her. In any case, the intelligent and independent Corinna has other plans for herself. She wants to break out of the rather mediocre world of a secondary school teacher's household. She finds the social life with the wives of the other teachers quite boring and her father's correction of pupils school work offers little variation. Thus Corinna sets herself to marrying Leopold Treibel. To her social position and material prosperity seem to be an adequate guarantee for a happy future. Thus she uses any means possible in order to lure the kind but easily influenced Leopold into her trap. She uses all the charm and wit that she can manage and two dinner parties and an outing later she achieves her goal. They enter into a secret engagement. When Jenny finds out about the engagement, she is furious and makes it clear to Corinna that she does not want it to go ahead. Leopold, who is a shy and timid young man, promises Corinna that he will stand up to his mother and that the two shall be wed. Unfortunately he is not able to keep his word and when Corinna realises this, she breaks off the engagement. The novel ends with Corinna and Marcell's wedding and the reader is led to believe that Leopold marries Hildegard Munk (whom Jenny didn't really want as a daughter in law but had to make do with, so that Leopold wouldn't move down in class, i.e. by marrying Corinna) de:Frau Jenny Treibel fr:Madame Jenny Treibel nl:Frau Jenny Treibel |
Flight of the Old Dog | Dale Brown | 1,987 | Set in November to December 1987 (December 1988 in Night of the Hawk), Flight of the Old Dog is the story of a secret highly modified B-52 bomber flying into Russia on an impromptu strike mission. The book begins with a B-52 crew during a military exercise in Idaho. Not long after, the Americans discover the existence of a Soviet ground-based laser in the Kamchatka Peninsula. Although Moscow insists that the system does not violate existing strategic accords such as the ABM Treaty, their frequent use of the laser in striking vital US assets challenges Washington's patience before the UN. Meanwhile, Gen. Bradley Elliott, commander of the High Technology Aerospace Weapons Center (HAWC; also known as Dreamland), tests a unique B-52 bomber with the help of several young crewmembers. Called the EB-52 Megafortress (named Old Dog), the plane is being eyed as a new strategic escort for SAC forces. The technology tested in the plane is later adapted and fitted into two B-1 bombers that are sent to attack the Soviet laser after it destroys an American space defense satellite. The B-1 mission is intercepted by the Soviets, but the aircraft are not shot down. At the same time, terrorists attack HAWC, forcing Elliott and the Old Dog crew to launch immediately. The crew push ahead with the B-1s' mission after they realize that they are the only remaining hope for destroying the laser. After faking a crash outside Seattle and forcing a KC-10 crew in Shemya to refuel them , the Old Dog enters Soviet airspace and engages PVO fighters before and after destroying the laser. With a number of crew members injured, and the aircraft damaged and leaking fuel, the crew realize that they no longer have enough fuel to return safely to the United States. They set down at Anadyr, a little-used Russian airfield to steal enough fuel for their journey home. Surprised in the act of refueling by Soviet forces, one of the crew sacrifices himself to allow the plane to take off. Despite considerable damage to both crew and aircraft and a final attack by a Soviet fighter, the Old Dog is able to make it home safely. |
The Falling Torch | Algis Budrys | null | The novel is about a group of freedom fighters who attempt the nearly hopeless task of liberating planet Earth from the grip of a race of alien invaders. The story has obvious overtones of freeing the author's homeland (Lithuania) from its Soviet occupiers. |
Across Five Aprils | Irene Hunt | 1,964 | From Jasper County, Illinois, Jethro Creightonn lives on a farm just before the Civil War. The youngest child, he is busily helping tend his family's farm. However, when his schoolmaster and good friend, Shadrach Yale, returns from Newton with the news that the war has begun, Jethro’s world is turned upside-down. Jethro has three brothers, Bill, John and Tom, and his cousin Eb, most of them eager to join the fight. Jethro must struggle with the split between them, as three join the Union Army but Bill joins the Confederacy. Later on, Jethro's good friend and sister Jenny's boyfriend, Shad also joins the Union Army. John's wife Nancy and their two young sons live with the Creighton's during the war. Jenny is in love with Shad, but her father will not approve of the marriage because he thinks she is too young. As the war heats up, so do the tensions among the townspeople around Jethro. A gang of men led by Guy Wortman are angered by the fact that one of Jethro’s brothers, Bill, joined the Confederate cause. Eventually, Jethro's father suffers from a heart attack, leaving Jethro with the task of becoming the head of the house. The spotlight is set on the hardships of war on a family. One day Jethro travels to Newton, and, while shopping, overhears the men talking about how evil his brother is. While Jethro is riding back; however, he is warned that the men are up to no good. Dave Burdow, father of the young man responsible for Jethro's sister Mary's death prior to the events of the story, ends up saving Jethro's life and driving the troublemakers off. However, the trouble is far from over. After a few months, the men are at it again. They sabotage the family’s property by burning down the family's barn and contaminating the water in the well. Jethro is given little time to concentrate on this when he finds out that his brother Tom was killed and that cousin Eb left the Union Army. He now must face the hard decision of whether or not he should help his deserter cousin. He writes a letter to President Lincoln for help and begins to look up to him as a father during the crisis. President Lincoln replies, telling him that he is already working on a program to accept all willing deserters back into the Union with little punishment. Soon after, the family learns that Shad has been wounded and is staying in a hospital, being taken care of by his aunt. Jenny goes to take care of him, and after finally receiving her father's blessing, she and Shad get married. Shad gets better, the war ends, and he, Jenny, John, and Eb return to the Mossing farm. However, at the end of the war, just when the family is reunited safely, Jethro learns that the president has been shot. He runs off but is found by Shad who tells him that he and Jenny are going to college, and that they will take Jethro with them. It is in these turbulent times that Jethro has grown from an innocent boy into a young man. |
Man of Earth | Algis Budrys | 1,958 | In Man of Earth, Allen Sibley is a businessman who is about to be indicted for bribery of a public official. Desperate to escape prison, he pays a fortune to the mysterious Doncaster Corporation for a new identity (and a new body and personality to go with it). However, Doncaster tricks him, sending him as an unwilling emigrant to the extraterrestrial colony on planet Pluto. Although it has been terraformed into a pleasant enough abode, Pluto is thoroughly neglected by a narcissistic Earth, and only ne'er-do-wells and misfits settle it. Sibley, with no marketable skills, is drafted into the Plutonian army, which is building an anomalously large war machine. His new commanding persona makes him swiftly rise in rank, and he soon concludes that Pluto intends to invade and plunder its neglectful mother planet. Instead, Doncaster suddenly reveals that the Pluto colony was created by them as a stepping-stone to the stars, and that Earth will be left to go rancid, while "new men", like the rebuilt Sibley, conquer the universe. |
Dragonfly | Frederic S. Durbin | 1,999 | Ten-year-old Bridget Ann (nicknamed "Dragonfly") lives in her Uncle Henry's funeral parlor. Uncle Henry summons Mothkin, a hunter, to investigate strange things happening in the basement as Hallowe'en approaches. In the basement, Dragonfly and Mothkin discover a doorway to a spooky underground world, known as Harvest Moon, which is ruled by an evil despot, Samuel Hain. Dragonfly is separated from Mothkin and meets up with a werewolf named Sylva who protects her from Hain. Eventually, she reunites with Mothkin for a final battle with Hain. |
The Immortals | James Gunn | 1,996 | When a cure for AIDS turns out to be more virulent than the disease, the U.S. establishes quarantine camps in the desert southwest. Michael Barris, a TV producer, masquerades as one of the infected and travels to the camps in search of his son. He finds horrific conditions, and learns that the so-called quarantine camps are death camps where the infected are gathered, purposefully brutalized, and ultimately cremated alive, their ashes bulldozed into the desert sand. Barris's son escapes the camp before the cycle of immolation, carrying the evidence he needs to expose the governmental mis-information campaign. |
The Bird in a Cage | null | null | The Duke of Mantua plans to marry off his daughter Eugenia to the ruler of Florence; to do so, he shuts Eugenia in a tower and banishes her noble suitor Philenzo. But Philenzo returns in disguise, and brags to the court that he can succeed in any task the Duke assigns him — if the Duke grants him the financial resources necessary. The Duke (in the best fairy-tale tradition), sets Philenzo the task of gaining access to the princess Eugenia in her sequestered tower; the Duke considers the matter as something of a joke, but also a good opportunity to test the soundness of his security. Philenzo is allowed a month for the task, and a blank check on the Duke's treasure house. And of course, the penalty for failure is death. Philenzo tries bribes, which do not work. Facing the apparent failure of his effort, Philenzo decides that he can at least relieve the poor debtors in the Duke's dungeons. One of the debtors, however, provides Philenzo with a new strategy for reaching the princess. The Duke in presented with a large and elaborate cage full of rare birds; and the Duke sends the present to Eugenia. When she opens it, Philenzo steps out from concealment in the central pillar of the apparatus. Thus the title of the play applies to both Eugenia and Philenzo (as it does, in another sense, to the dedicatee, the imprisoned Prynne). The next day the still-disguised Philenzo informs the Duke that he has succeeded in his task. Eugenia, brought to the court for confirmation, supports Philenzo's claim — and asks that she be allowed to marry the clever stranger. The Duke is outraged at her request; to marry a stranger of no birth is worse than marrying Philenzo. Philenzo doffs his disguise, revealing his true identity; but the unyielding Duke orders him executed. Seemingly in the knick of time, a letter arrives from the Duke of Florence, who has heard of the matter of Eugenia and Philenzo and renounces any interest in the arranged match. Florence's letter advises Mantua to let the young lovers marry, and Mantua decides to make the best of a bad bargain. When Philenzo in summoned back, however, it is learned that the condemned man poisoned himself on the way to execution; his corpse is brought in as proof. When the "dead" Philenzo overhears that he and Eugenia were to be allowed to marry, he returns to life. |
Slaughter City | Naomi Wallace | null | The play was inspired by a number of labor-related incidents including the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911 and the 1993 strike at the Fischer's meat packing plant in Louisville, Kentucky. The drama follows the lives of a group of workers who work at a modern day plant. While work gets tougher and more dangerous, their wages are being cut, and benefits reduced. Into the fray walks Cod, a strange young man who tries to inspire them to action. But Cod has his own secrets, which include once being a scab, and is in a long term battle with the cool Sausage Man, a battle whose outcome will affect them all in deadly ways. The play is divided into two acts and moves back and forth (and sometimes seemingly sideways) through time. Love, desire and friendship between these workers is disrupted, and transformed by the political pressures swirling around them. And the boss is beginning to make strange noises, just when his assistant has had enough. The live stage performance rights are licensed by Broadway Play Publishing Inc. |
The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century | null | null | Published in German, the book focuses on the controversial notion that Western civilization is deeply marked by the influence of the Teutonic peoples. Chamberlain grouped all European peoples—not just Germans, but Celts, Slavs, Greeks, and Latins—into the "Aryan race", a race built on the ancient Proto-Indo-European culture. At the helm of the Aryan race, and, indeed, all races, were the Nordic or Teutonic peoples. Chamberlain's book focused on the claim that the Teutonic peoples were the heirs to the empires of Greece and Rome, something which Charlemagne and some of his successors also believed. He argued that when the Germanic tribes destroyed the Roman Empire, Jews and other non-Europeans already dominated it. The Germans, therefore, saved Western civilization from Semitic domination. Chamberlain's thoughts were influenced by the writings of Arthur de Gobineau who had argued the superiority of the "Aryan race". This term was increasingly being used to describe Caucasian or European peoples, as opposed to Jews, who were conceptualised as "infusing Near Eastern poison into the European body politic". For Chamberlain the concept of an Aryan race was not simply defined by ethno-linguistic origins. It was also an abstract ideal of a racial elite (see Racism). The Aryan, or 'noble' race was always in the process of creation as superior peoples supplanted inferior ones in evolutionary struggles for survival. Building somewhat on the theories of de Gobineau and Georges Vacher de Lapouge, Chamberlain developed a relatively complex theory relating racial origins, physical features and cultural traits. According to Chamberlain, the modern Jew (Homo judaeica) mixes some of the features of the Hittite (H. syriaca) - notably the "Jewish nose", retreating chin, great cunning and fondness for usury and of the true Semite - the Bedouin Arab (H. arabicus), in particular the dolichocephalic (long and narrow) skull, the thick-set body, and a tendency to be anti-intellectual and destructive. According to this theory, the product of this miscegenation was compromised by the great differences between these two stocks: Chamberlain also considered the Berbers from North Africa as belonging to the Aryan race. Chamberlain (who had graduate training in biology), rejected Darwinism, evolution and social Darwinism and instead emphasized "gestalt" which he said derived from Goethe. Chamberlain said that Darwinism was the most abominable and misguided doctrine of the day. Chamberlain used an old biblical notion of the ethnic make up of Galilee to argue that while Jesus may have been Jewish by religion, he was probably not Jewish by race. During the inter-war period, certain pro-Nazi theologians developed these ideas as part of the manufacture of an Aryan Jesus. |
The Long Tomorrow | Leigh Brackett | 1,955 | In the aftermath of a devastating nuclear war, Americans have come to blame technology for the disaster, and far from seeking to recover what was destroyed, are actively opposed to any such attempt. Religious sects which even before the war opposed modern technology and avoided its use in their daily life have adjusted to the post-apocalypse situation far more easily than anyone else, and feeling themselves vindicated have come to dominate the post-war society. They gained an enormous number of new members, though those families which had been such before the war are honoured and privileged, their special status indicated by slightly different clothing. All the pre-war American cities have been destroyed in the war, and their re-construction is expressly forbidden. The US Constitution has been amended to now disallow the presence of more than a thousand residents or the existence of more than two hundred buildings per square mile anywhere in the United States. Len Colter and his cousin Esau are adolescent members of the New Mennonite community of Piper's Run. Against their fathers' wishes, the boys attend a preaching where a trader named Soames is accused and stoned to death for his apparent involvement with a forbidden bastion of technology known as Bartorstown. Though sickened by the stoning and harshly punished by their fathers, Len and Esau are fascinated by the idea of a community that secretly still holds and harnesses the forbidden technologies. Len's grandmother, a little girl at the time of the destruction, sparks his interest in the technological past with her stories of big, brightly lit cities and little boxes with moving pictures. Despite even harsher punishment after being caught with a simple radio previously stolen from Soames' wagon, Esau and Len become determined to find their way to the fabled Bartorstown and leave Piper's Run in search of it. |
Down There on a Visit | Christopher Isherwood | 1,962 | Throughout the novel Isherwood is a character of extremes. At times he pursues physical pleasure, relentlessly devoting himself to all kinds of debauchery. Yet he also interrupts these binges with discipline, by learning German or regularly meditating. Somehow, his abandon never leads to personal disaster. The second section of the novel contains a scene that figuratively illustrates Isherwood's life as recounted in "Down..." Isherwood is visiting an island where a crew of inane Greeks blast rock for the foundations of a mansion. He observes that: Despite all their experience, they seem to have no idea how much dynamite they should use. It is always too little or too much. We become completely indifferent to their yells of warning, followed by an absurd little firecracker pop. And then, just when you're least expecting it, there will be a stunning explosion which shakes the whole island and sends big rocks spinning through the air... A couple of times things have been smashed, but no one has been hurt, so far. So it is with Isherwood. Despite his experience, he never seems to know how to live his life. He often makes mistakes, such as his neglect of Mr. Lancaster, Waldemar, Dee-Ann, and Paul. But somehow he becomes wealthy, works at his leisure, and even avoids fighting in World War II. The reader is led to believe that no one has been hurt, so far. |
The Cleansing | John D. Harvey | 2,002 | The book tells the story of an American Indian wolf god, Wanata, who comes to earth to hold humanity accountable for its abuse of nature. In Alaska, freelance journalist Savannah Channing investigates the story of a rampaging wolf pack that is systematically destroying villages. She arrives to find that the problem is worse than she expected and that the military and a brutal bounty hunter have been employed. Wanata is changed into mortal human form by an Indian Shaman's magic and is forced to interact with those he was sent to punish. The paths of Wanata and Channing cross in a spine-chilling conclusion. |
The Babylon Game | Katherine Roberts | 2,002 | It is the year 539 B.C. Inside the city of Babylon, known as the Gateway of God, is Tia, the adopted daughter of a perfume maker. She is picking herbs in the sacred Amytis garden. Next to the garden is a portion of the double defense wall surrounding the city. Tia soon discovered what is between the two walls; Sirrush, otherwise known as dragons. Fearing for the dragon's health, she leaves them food. A touch from the dragons grants Tia great magical powers, enough to threaten or save Babylon. These will be needed, as far in the plains the Persian king Cyrus the Great, plans to capture Babylon. The secret of its salvation might just lie in the hanging gardens themselves. |
The Dawkins Delusion? | Alister McGrath | 2,007 | McGrath criticizes Dawkins for what he perceives to be "a dogmatic conviction" to "a religious fundamentalism which refuses to allow its ideas to be examined or challenged." He objects to Dawkins' assertion that faith is a juvenile delusion, arguing that numerous reasonable persons chose to convert as adults. He cites himself and Antony Flew as two specific examples. Like Dawkins, McGrath rejects William Paley's Watchmaker analogy as specious. To express his true feelings on the subject of Irreducible complexity, McGrath instead cites the work of Richard Swinburne, remarking that the capacity of science to explain itself requires its own explanation – and that the most economical and reliable account of this explanatory capacity lies in the notion of the monotheistic God of Christianity. When considering the subject of Aquinas' Quinque viae, to which Dawkins devotes considerable attention, McGrath interprets the theologian's arguments as an affirmation of a set of internally consistent beliefs rather than as an attempt to formulate a set of irrefutable proofs. McGrath proceeds to address whether religion specifically conflicts with science. He points to Gould's supposition of Non-overlapping magisteria, or NOMA, as evidence that Darwinism is as compatible with theism as it is with atheism. With additional reference to the works of Sir Martin Rees, Denis Noble, and others, McGrath advocates a modified version of NOMA which he terms "overlapping magisteria". He posits that Science and Religion co-exist as equally valid explanations for two partially overlapping spheres of existence, where the former concerns itself primarily with the temporal, and the latter concerns itself primarily with the spiritual, but where both can occasionally intertwine. McGrath strives to confirm his position by suggesting that a significant minority of scientists are also theists, pointing specifically to Owen Gingerich, Francis Collins and Paul Davies as examples. McGrath criticizes Dawkins' proposals that religion is both an evolutionary by-product and a memetic virus. McGrath examines Dawkins' use of Russell's teapot analogy as well as the basics of Dawkins' theory of Memetics. McGrath criticizes Dawkins for referencing Frazer's The Golden Bough as an authority on anthropology, as he considers the work to be more of "a highly impressionistic early work" than a serious text. McGrath also points to Dawkins' lack of training in Psychology as indicative of an inability to address the most important questions of faith. Quoting Dawkins' description of the Old Testament God as "a petty, unjust ... capriciously malevolent bully", McGrath counters that he does not believe in such a god and knows no one personally who does. Setting aside Dawkins' remarks, McGrath instead points to Jesus and the New Testament as superior examples of the true nature of Christianity. "Jesus", McGrath argues, "...was the object, not the agent, of violence". McGrath suggests that "far from endorsing 'out-group hostility', Jesus commanded an ethic of 'out-group affirmation' and Christians may certainly be accused of failing to live up to this command. But it is there, right at the heart of the Christian ethic". He believes that Dawkins is right when he argues that it is necessary to critique religion, and right to demand that there be an external criterion for interpreting texts; but argues that Dawkins appears unaware that religions and their texts possess internal means of reform and renewal, and that Dawkins seems to be unaware of the symbolism of several of the Bible passages which he quotes. McGrath cites the works of numerous authors, including Kenneth I. Pargament, Harold G. Koenig, and Terry Eagleton, to demonstrate how closely he feels religious faith to be tied to well-being. The Dawkins Delusion? concludes with the suggestion that belief in God has "rebounded", that Dawkins' work is more theatre than scholarship, and that The God Delusion denotes little more than "panic" on the part of non-believers. |
The Amazon Temple Quest | Katherine Roberts | 2,002 | Lysippe, an Amazon princess, is suffering. Her tribe has vanished and her sister has been badly wounded. The Gryphon Stone can help, but the evil Alchemist, who has taken Lysippe as his slave, is after it also. With the help of her friend Hero, who has also been enslaved, they seek sanctuary in the Temple of Artemis. There, Lysippe makes new friends and enemies. While her sister Tanis is being healed, Lysippe stays in the temple, but she sometimes ventures out resulting in finding a nymph named Smyrna. As Smyrna instructs Lysippe in Amazon ways, Lysippe is formulating a plan to rid of the Alchemist and finally be free again. |
The Mausoleum Murder | Katherine Roberts | 2,003 | In the beginning of the story, Alexis' home Halicarnassos is at war with Macedon. As the war rages on Alexis' stepmother still wants to make the pilgrimage to the river. Alexis has the gift to turn statues that have enough gold on them into real people. This gift gets him into trouble as his stepmother has the spirit of the old king who wants to reclaim his land. Alexis meets the princess and turns her fabled chimea to life and it rampages through the city attacking all who are known as their enemies. Alexis then goes to the river and reverses his gift and is shocked when his father and his best friend are still real when all of the other statues have turned back to stone. |
The Olympic Conspiracy | Katherine Roberts | 2,004 | The story is about the young Sosi. Sosi has a curse, that makes him half-snake. At each full moon, he is able to "shed his skin" and adopt the look of anyone he wants. When his brother, Theron, is injured, Sosi uses his curse to take his place in the Olympic games so that Theron won't be disqualified. Although his brother Theron is nasty to him, Sosi wants to find out about his curse at Olympia, and redeem himself in his family's eyes. However, Sosi uncovers a terrorist plot at the Games. Boys competing in the Games, the favourites to win (including Theron), are all being targeted by the mysterious Warriors of Ahriman. Sosi soon discovers that the Warriors are targeting those that are sent dreams by the goddess of victory, Nike, who has manifested herself in the form of a priestess to oversee the Games. When the priestess reveals herself, it is up to Sosi and his friends to make sure that the ones who she sent victory dreams win their events. However, when three out of the four she picked lose, she becomes extremely weak. The Warrior of Ahriman reveals his plan to sacrifice Nike to arise an army from the dead, Sosi has to embrace his curse. He turns into a snake, and calls Zeus to bring his thunderbolt down on the Warrior, just like his past incarnation, Sosipolis, did 36 years ago. When the Warrior is defeated, fears arise that Soksi will go to the same fate as Sosipolis and be unable to change back from a snake. However, when Theron admits to everyone how much he loves his little brother (when Sosi's own mother cannot bring herself to) Sosi transforms back into his human self. |
Spellfall | Katherine Roberts | 2,000 | The story concerns a 12 year old girl named Natalie who is kidnapped by a wizard named Hawk who needs her to join his spellclave (group of bonded spellmages) to receive the Power of Thirteen and invade Earthaven (an enchanted realm) to get revenge on the Spell Lords that banished him for breaking a treaty. |
The Jane Austen Book Club | Karen Joy Fowler | 2,004 | The novel takes place over the course of several months in a contemporary university town in California's Central Valley near Sacramento. Each of the six chapters is dedicated to one of the six book club members as well as one of Austen's six works. In turn, each of Austen's novels parallels the individual characters' experiences with relationships and love. |
Is Religion Dangerous? | null | null | In the Introduction: What is religion? Ward begins "Is religion dangerous? Does it do more harm than good? Is it a force for evil, even 'the root of all evil'? - the title of a short British television series presented by Richard Dawkins. Ward states his view that the assertion that religion does more harm than good ignores "the available evidence from history, from psychology and sociology, and from philosophy" and suggests that proponents of this view "refuse to investigate the question in a properly rigorous way, and substitute rhetoric for analysis". He suggests that it is impossible to give a satisfactory universal definition of religion, and that early opponents of religion such as Edward Taylor, James Frazer and Émile Durkheim were indulging in "scholarly fantazising" about forms of primitive religion which were refuted by more rigorous studies such as Theories of Primitive Religion by Evans-Pritchard. "unfortunately some writers have not yet realised this" such as Daniel Dennett in Breaking the Spell who "does not seem to realise that the spell was broken as long ago as 1884 when E. P. Taylor was appointed to a Readership in Anthropology at Oxford University." In Chapter 1. The Causes of Violence he suggests that "It is not religion that causes intolerance. It is intolerance that uses religion" that "The leaders of such movements [are] using moral and religious language as a cloak for evil and irreligious ends" and that "religions are not the causes of evil, but they do naturally share in the general moral state of the societies in which they exist" In Chapter 2. The corruptibility of all things human he suggests that any organised human activity can be corrupted, and that the corruptions of religion, although highly regrettable, are less harmful that the corruptions of secular ideologies (the excesses of the Nazis, Leninists and Maoists all claimed the support of science). In addition the great religions have within themselves a powerful critique of corruption. In Chapter 3. Religion and war he suggests that "it is not religion that causes Islamic terrorism. It is a version of Islam that has been corrupted by ...Marxist-Leninism" and that Al Qaida is based on a demonstrably incorrect interpretation of Islam. He further suggests that wars fought in the name of some interpretations of Christianity have also been based on distortions. In Chapter 4. Faith and reason he claims that the statement "the only reasonable beliefs are those that can be confirmed by the methods of science, by public observation, measurement and experiment" is self-refuting He contrasts four worldviews: Common Sense, Materialism, Idealism and Christian Theism, and suggests that there are serious problems with Common Sense (science shows that things are often not in fact as they seem at all) and Materialism ("quantum physics seems to dissolve matter entirely", and "consciousness and the contents of consciousness resist translation into purely physical terms... and if ... truth, beauty and goodness ... are things that really exist ... then Materialism will not match our experience at all".) He suggests that "many attacks on religion are based on the belief that idealism is false. There is no spiritual dimension to reality... to make matters worse, thinkers like Richard Dawkins hold that...religious views are based on "blind faith"". But, he asks, "Has Dawkins never read any philosophy?... Does he really think that Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, Kant and Hegel were all unthinking simpletons?" "Looking around my philosopher colleagues in Britain, virtually all of whom I know at least from their published work, I would say that very few of them are materialists... the point is that religious views are underpinned by highly sophisticated philosophical arguments". He discusses the contestability of worldviews and suggests some criteria on what makes a worldview reasonable: # Clarity and precision in stating the beliefs, ideally arranged in order of logical dependence so that one can tell which are the truly basic beliefs # Comparison with other worldviews # Testing the adequacy of the worldview to the widest range of data, whether they are experiences or other beliefs In Chapter 5. Life after death he suggests that it is rational, and not harmful, to believe in life after death. In Ch 6. Morality and the Bible he suggests that "even for the most conservative Christian, moral rules found in the Bible should not be taken out of context" and that "far from being considered dangerous, religious morality is widely considered to be a valuable resource for moral thinking in the modern world" In Ch 7. Morality and Faith he explains how his own journey from Atheism when he was a philosopher teaching at Glasgow University was strongly influenced by the need to have a philosophically coherent justification for morality. In Ch. 8. The Enlightenment, liberal thought and religion he suggests that the history of Europe from the 16th to the 20th Centuries was not one of "beneficial liberation from fear and superstition" but "an age of increasingly aggressive nationalism culminating in two world wars ... barbarism did not decrease. In the twentieth century it reached heights never previously imagined" and that religiously inspired individuals took a leading role in many benficial developments. He suggests that "it was religion, and not secular thought, that propounded the view that nature is founded on a deep rationality" and defends liberalism and pluralism in religious thought which he attributes to the rise of Protestantism and contrasts with what he considers the illiberal attitudes of Richard Dawkins and Enlightenment thinkers like Hume who sought to make reason the slave of passions In Ch 9. Does religion do more harm than good in personal life? Ward quotes data from David Myers citing surveys by Gallup, the National Opinion Research Centre and the Pew Organisation which conclude that spiritually committed people are twice as likely to report being "very happy" than the least religiously committed people. He reports an analysis of over 200 social studies that "high religiousness predicts a rather lower risk of depression and drug abuse and fewer suicide attempts, and more reports of satisfaction with life and a sense of well-being" and a review of 498 studies published in peer-reviewed journals that "concluded that a large majority of these studies showed a positive correlation between religious commitment and higher levels of perceived well-being and self-esteem, and lower levels of hypertension, depression and clinical delinquency, and similar results from the Handbook of Religion and Mental Health. He cites surveys suggesting a strong link between faith and altruism. He cites extensive studies to show that there is little or no evidence that religion ever causes mental disorders and that overall religion is a positive contributor to mental health. He specifically addresses and rebuts the claim that religious belief is a delusion. He quotes the definition in the Oxford Companion to Mind as "a fixed, idiosyncratic belief, unusual in the culture to which the person belongs" suggesting that "most great philosophers have believed in God" and that the many religious people who exhibit a high degree of rational ability ... and who can produce a reasonable and coherent defense of their beliefs" refute the idea that belief in God is a delusion - whether or not it may be mistaken. He also analyses and rejects the idea that Faith is a brain malfunction, quoting Gerald Edelman "The evolutionary assumption [that consciousness conferred fitness].. implies that consciousness is efficacious - that is, it is not an epiphenomenon"p 177 quoting Edelman's Bright Air, Brilliant Fire and suggests that, if consciousness can apprehend truth and cause action, so can faith. In Ch 10. What good has religion done? Ward suggests that, although harm has been done in the name of religion, the same is true of politics and science, that religion can "be used to inspire heroic love and commitment. The world would be much poorer without Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Mother Teresa.. Bach ... St Francis, Siddartha Gautama Jesus" and Manchester United F.C. . He cites many positive contributions made by Judaism, Christianity (he cites in particular founding hospitals, hospices, schools and universities, great works of art, the investigation into the world as the creation of one wise and rational God that gave birth to modern science, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and the Red Cross) and Islam and suggests that "there is plenty of room for common social action in mercy and hospitality between Christians and Muslims, and it is imperative that such commonalities are promoted". He concludes by stating that Religion "is the compassionate heart of what might otherwise seem to be a cold and heartless world." |
Time Cat: The Remarkable Journeys of Jason And Gareth | Lloyd Alexander | 1,963 | Jason learns that his cat, Gareth, is able to talk and has the power to travel to nine different points in world history (his "nine lives"). Jason convinces Gareth to take him along and their adventures begin where cats are considered in divine, Ancient Egypt in the year 2700 BC. Subsequently they visit Rome, where they are taken in by the Old Cats of Ceasar. There, they are kidnapped to a village where Cerdric Longtooth, the chieftain of the village tries to burn him but his wife objects. Later on, the villagers find out about Gareth. They refer to Gareth as a "Catamountain." Jason takes this opportunity to pretend to be the beholder of the supposedly Ferocious beast. They later on become friends with the village and leave after another catamountain arrives. This time, with kittens. Britain (55 BC), Ireland (AD 411), Japan (998), Italy (1468), Peru (1555), the Isle of Man (1588), Germany (1600), and America (1775). After nine episodes they return home. Gareth says he will never again speak to Jason, and he forbids Jason ever to mention their travels to anyone. It is not difficult for Jason to obey, since he doubts that anyone would believe his story. However, he has acquired an ankh pendant as a memento and he uses it to communicate with Gareth without talking. |
Stones in His Pockets | Marie Jones | null | The drama is set in a rural town in County Kerry Ireland that is overrun by a Hollywood film crew. The story centers on Charlie Conlon and Jake Quinn, who, like much of the town, are employed as extras for the filming. Much of the comedy of the play is derived from the efforts of the production crew to create the proper "Irish feel", a romanticized notion that often conflicts with the reality of daily life, and that it calls upon the cast of two to perform all 15 characters (men and women), often switching gender and voice with swift dexterity and the absolute bare minimum of costume changes - a hat here, a jacket there. The key point in the play is when a local teenager commits suicide, by drowning himself with stones in his pockets, after he is humiliated by one of the film stars. The set design, by Jack Kirwan, is also simple - a backcloth depicting the cloudy sky above the Blasket Islands, a row of shoes (symbolising the myriad characters) and a trunk, a box, and two tiny stools. The lighting design was originally by James C. Mcfetridge and this design was used in both the London West End and the Broadway versions of the shows. |
The Young Admiral | James Shirley | null | The play tells the story of Vittori, admiral to Cesario, prince of Naples. Both Vittori and Cesario are competitors for the hand of Cassandra; on her account Cesario breaks off his intended marriage with Rosinda, princess of Sicily. In response to this insult, the Sicilians attack Naples. Cesario sends Vittori to command his fleet in defense, hoping his admiral will be killed – but Vittori is, as his name suggests, victorious. The Admiral, however, finds that the city gates are closed to him on his return, and that his prince is conspiring against him. Vittori flees with his father and Cassandra; but the father, Alphonso, is captured by the Neapolitans, while Vittori and Cassandra are shipwrecked and captured by the Sicilian forces. The King of Sicily, preparing to lay siege Naples, offers to spare Cassandra's life if Vittori joins his forces; and Vittori agrees. Yet he learns that his father will be beheaded if he keeps to his bargain with the King; the choice between the lives of his father and his love is a typical tragicomic dilemma. Cesario, however, is drawn to the Sicilian camp by a letter from Cassandra, and there he too is captured. The Sicilian princess Rosinda counters by surrendering to the Neapolitans, which forces the arrangement of a peace treaty. Vittori and Cassandra marry, as do Cesario and Rosinda. The play's mandatory comic subplot features Rosinda's cowardly servant Pazzorello. |
A Struggle for Rome | Felix Dahn | null | After the death of Theodoric the Great his successors try to maintain his legacy: an independent Ostrogothic Kingdom. They are opposed by the Byzantine Empire, ruled by emperor Justinian I. It is he who tries to restore the Roman Empire to its state before the Migration Period from his residence in Constantinople, which requires the capture of the Italian Peninsula and specifically Rome. The Ostrogoths Witiges, Totila and Teia succeed Theodoric the Great as king of the Ostrogoths, in that order and theirs is the task to defend their empire. They are assisted by Theodoric's faithful armourer Hildebrand. The names of the chapters in the book follow the chronology of the Gothic kings. Meanwhile, a (fictional) Roman prefect of the Cethegus clan, has his own agenda to rebuild the empire. He represents the majority of the population as a former citizen of the Western Roman Empire. He too tries to get rid of the Goths but is at the same time determined to keep the Byzantines out of "his Italy". In the end, the Byzantines outlast both the Ostrogoths and Cethegus and reclaim Italy. Cethegus dies in a duel with the (at that time) king Teia. The struggle for Rome ends in the battle of Mons Lactarius near Mount Vesuvius, where the Ostrogoths make their last stand defending a narrow pass (a scene reminiscent of the battle of Thermopylae) and, once defeated, are led back north to the island of Thule where their roots lie by a kindred Northern European people. The book recounts the struggle of the Ostrogoth state in Italy with the Byzantine Empire and describes their doom. The main motif of the book is stated in the poem at its end: Make way, you people, for our stride. | We are the last of the Goths. | We do not carry a crown with us, | We carry but a corpse. [ ... ]. This corpse belongs to their late and last king Teia who, throughout the story, symbolises the tragedy of his people's downfall from the moment of Theodoric the Great's death. During the reign of German emperor William II the book was interpreted as criticism on decadence and after World War I it was interpreted, in retrospect, as a prediction for the fall of the German Empire. Besides a plot that is both colourful and rich of intrigue, the novel focuses on the actual struggle for control over Ancient Rome and specifically on the acts of heroism and heroic deaths therein. For this fact it was quickly considered a novel for boys in the in 1871 newly founded German Empire; the book was continuously handed over from the previous generation of adolescents to the next until the 1940s. Dahn, being a historian, incorporated many historical details into the story. However, he was also able to create new characters if he felt the need for them (e.g. Cethegus). The following groups are essential to the story. The beginning of the story focusses on Theodoric the Great's envisioned heir, his grandson Athalaric. Being underage, his mother Amalasuntha reigns in his stead. When Athalaric dies prematurely, hope for a great leader à la Theodoric is lost. Amalasuntha envisions a merger with the Byzantine Empire, much to the dismay of the Ostrogothic people, who consider her as a traitor (an important motif throughout the book). Theodoric's old but hardy armourer Hildebrand arranges an alliance to be made between him, Vitiges, Totila and Teia to save their kingdom. Vitiges is a wise, mature man, who has to sacrifice his happy marriage with Rauthgundis to marry Amalasuntha's daughter Matasuntha. Totila is portrayed as a charismatic young man, who (like Theodoric) wishes to combine Roman civilisation with Gothic strength. This is symbolised in his relationship with the Italian Valeria. Teia is a dark, dejected man, who envisions the demise of the kingdom. Even though he knows this demise to be predestined, he adopts the Germanic philosophy to face fate with courage, in order to be well remembered. The reason for his pessimistic view lies also in a tragedy that cost the life of his fiancée. The nature of this tragedy is kept a secret throughout most of the book. As the story unravels each of these three men become king against their will, in their unsuccessful struggle to save the kingdom. Not so much the Emperor Justinian I and his scheming wife Theodora, but his marshals Belisarius and Narses shape the campaigns for the reconquest of the Italian Peninsula. Belisarius has already conquered the Vandals and is determined to bestow the same fate upon the Ostrogoths but fails to do so. Whereupon Narses, a shrewd strategist, does not waste the opportunity to subdue the Ostrogoths. Throughout the military campaigns, historian Procopius is present to record the progression. He is in fact the main source of the Gothic War (535–552) and thus the main source for Felix Dahn to write this novel. Procopius' work Secret History is loosely interwoven as a subplot about Theodora scheming and cheating on Justinian I. The most interesting Roman character is the firm and cunning narcissist Cethegus. He, as opposed to most characters, is not a historical figure, but the patrician family to which he belongs is historical. He opposes both the Ostrogoths and the imperial Byzantines and strives to rebuild the Western Roman Empire, but never reveals his true motives to others, while plotting to achieve his goal and corrupting the relationship between the Ostrogoths and the Byzantines, except for his fellow conspirators. The conspirators are mainly members of patrician families that lost their influence under Gothic rule. Accordingly, they have names like Scavola and Albinus. Another person of lesser importance is Pope Silverius, who is also involved in the conspiracy. This book has been turned into two films, produced by Robert Siodmak, starring (amongst others) Orson Welles: * Kampf um Rom I (1968) * Kampf um Rom II - Der Verrat (1969) * Internet Movie Database * * Ein Kampf um Rom in the context of conservative nationalistic literature (in German) * The German text at the German Gutenberg project * The German text at buecherquelle.com * * * * Ein Kampf um Rom (PDF; reprint of the 1888 edition in the Arno-Schmidt-Referenz library of GASL) |
Le Thermozéro | Hergé | 1,958 | On a rainy day, Haddock, Tintin and Calculus have a car accident with a German they previously had words a few minutes before. Tintin, ready to help people, draws him out of his car and covers him with his coat. Surprisingly, many people try to put the man in their own car before the ambulance arrives. He hides an object in Tintin's coat without anyone's knowledge. Finally, the ambulance arrives and everyone goes home. Back at the hotel, Calculus decides to bring Tintin's coat to the laundry. A few days later, Tintin and the Captain discover that everyone present at the accident has been burgled. Apparently, the people behind all this are looking for an item that previously belonged to the victim. The next day, Haddock is kidnapped and the message for the ransom is "Haddock for the item". A meeting is set in Berlin. Though unaware of what the item is, the heroes travel to Germany to get Haddock back. With a case in his hand, Tintin meets the kidnappers. A few minutes later they are all jailed, as Tintin's case carried a transmitter. Back in Marlinspike, Calculus discovers the item (an explosive that functions in spaces without oxygen) cannot work as one ingredient is missing. |
Judith | Brian Cleeve | 1,978 | It is 1799 and eighteen-year-old Judith Mortimer lives with her widowed father, Jonathan, on their farm in Essex. Jonathan Mortimer has devoted his adult life, and most of his money, to writing and publishing lengthy treatises on various subjects close to his heart. None has found favour with the reading public and, consequently, he and his daughter are close to penury. Several years earlier, Mortimer suffered a stroke and is confined to bed where he works on his latest project, A Treatise on Just Government. Meanwhile, his increasingly desperate daughter tries to find ways to keep the small household, including two servants, financially viable. She has entered into an agreement with a band of local smugglers to allow them use the farm's outhouses to store their merchandise. In return, the smugglers pay her ten to fifteen guineas each time they use the farm for their illegal purposes. Jonathan Mortimer is first cousin to a local earl and powerful landowner to whom he is in considerable debt. The debt arises from a legal dispute concerning their mutual grandfather's will. The earl wishes to buy the Mortimers' farm, which adjoins his own larger estate, and thereby clear their indebtedness to him. Under the proposed arrangement, Jonathan Mortimer will be allowed to live out his remaining days on the farm. Furthermore, the earl offers to give Judith a generous dowry so that she can marry. However, the catch is that she must marry the odious Mr. Massingham. She refuses the offer Robert Barnabas, son of the smugglers' leader, is in love with Judith and, during one of his nocturnal visits to the farm, he makes his feelings clear. Judith's emotions are thrown into turmoil by the handsome young man's directness. She learns that he was studying to be a doctor but abandoned it under pressure from his father to join the family 'business'. Now, as his love for Judith brings meaning to his life, he resolves to turn away from smuggling and complete his medical training. Not long after her refusal of the earl's offer, Judith's father dies. At the same time, news of her involvement with the smugglers reaches the local militia. She is forced to flee to London with Evergreen, an orphan gypsy girl whom she has taken into her care. There, the two young women unwittingly fall into the clutches of Mrs. Ware, who runs an 'academy' for young girls. Ostensibly set up to teach its occupants how to be ladies, Mrs. Ware's academy is, in reality, a high class brothel. Robert Barnabas pursues Judith to London and rescues her from Mrs. Ware's establishment. However, Massingham, furious and humiliated at Judith's refusal of his proposal of marriage, has also come to London seeking revenge. Together with his henchmen, he seizes Judith in the street and brings her to a lunatic asylum. There she is incarcerated for months in appalling conditions, naked and shackled in a cold cell. Massingham pays the asylum keeper to hold Judith until he feels she has learned her lesson. Eventually she is released onto the streets of London, her sanity barely intact and with nowhere to go. She is 'adopted' by a street urchin who takes her back to his filthy hovel. Each day she is forced by her new companion to beg on the streets. After several more months of dreadful hardship, Judith is taken in by a kindly young Christian woman, Miss Westmoreland. Slowly Judith begins to recover her mental and physical health and a strong bond of friendship forms between the two women. Through Judith, Miss Westmoreland learns of the appalling conditions in which London's poor live. She resolves to set up an orphanage and hospital to care for abandoned children. The two women raise the necessary funds and advertise for a doctor to run their new enterprise. One of the applicants is the now-qualified Dr. Robert Barnabas. Reunited at last, Barnabas and Judith are soon married. They return to Essex to live on the Mortimer farm. It transpires that the dispute over her great-grandfather's will has been settled in her favour and the farm is now hers. |
The Separation | K. A. Applegate | 1,999 | On a field trip to the beach, Rachel is exploring tide pools when she loses an earring in the water. Wishing to get it back she comes across a starfish, acquires it, and morphs into it, retrieving the earring. Unfortunately, before she can demorph, a child chops her in half. Thanks to the regenerative properties of starfish, Rachel does not die; instead, in the shock of being sliced in two, both halves demorph, resulting in two Rachels - Mean Rachel and Nice Rachel. Mean Rachel is violent, aggressive, and despises all forms of "weakness" - weakness including most feelings, and any attitudes towards enemies other than homicidal hatred. She is totally incapable of planning ahead, making her useless in anything other than a direct combat situation, and believes that she is always right. This leads her to try to kill Marco and Jake, and take control of the Animorphs. In contrast, Nice Rachel is totally passive, easily frightened, and is too scared to morph. She cannot fight, making herself a liability in battle, although she is good at making plans. Both Rachels are actively dangerous towards the secrecy and long-term survival of the Animorphs, and the rest of the Animorphs must find a way to combine them back into Normal Rachel. Jake convinces Nice Rachel to come with him to follow a Yeerk truck. It turns out to be a trap, and Jake and Nice Rachel are put in boxes to await the arrival of Visser Three. Mean Rachel follows them in an attempt to kill Jake and Nice Rachel. Jake pretends to be dead, forcing Mean and Nice Rachel to work together in order to escape the trap. Nice Rachel makes the plan and Mean Rachel actually does it, flying into Visser Three's ear canal while morphed and threatening to demorph, killing both of them. All three escape unharmed. After they escape safely, Nice and Mean Rachel finally realize that they need to be together to work well and Erek King helps make them back into one whole Rachel again by morphing into each other while touching. After Rachel is returned to normal, she realises that it is both sides of her personality that make her who she is, and vows to try not to become either of the two. *The anti-morphing ray is first talked about, but not yet seen. *Rachel gains introspective into her own personality and tendencies. |
Die Feuerzangenbowle | Heinrich Spoerl | 1,933 | The title refers to the Feuerzangenbowle punch consumed by a group of gentlemen in the opening scene. While exchanging nostalgic stories about their schooldays, the successful young writer Dr. Johannes Pfeiffer realizes he missed out on something because he was taught at home and never attended school. He decides to make up for it by masquerading as a student at a small town high school and quickly gains a reputation as a prankster. Together with his classmates, he torments his professors Crey, Bömmel and Headmaster Knauer with adolescent mischief. His girlfriend Marion unsuccessfully tries to persuade him to give up his foolish charade. Eventually, he falls in love with the headmaster’s daughter and discloses his identity after provoking the teachers into expelling him from school. |
Rewind | William Sleator | null | The main character is Peter, an 11-year-old boy. The stage is first set at his funeral, where he recalls that he was killed by his neighbor's car. Then he hears a mysterious voice. It tells Peter that he has a chance to go back to any moment before his death and alter the events, therefore preventing the catastrophe. He attempts to save himself by putting sugar in the car that was destined to kill him. However, a taxi hits him instead. Luckily, he is given another chance. He tries again by trying to impress his parents, preventing the quarrel that drove him out. Unfortunately, he dies yet again by a truck. Against all odds he is given one last chance. This time, he changes his strategy. With his knowledge of the future, he manages to save himself. He goes back 4 weeks and starts to be nice to his parents. Eventually they start to like him. He always dies after doing his puppet show so when he does it this time the family likes it. |
House of Sand and Fog | Andre Dubus | 1,999 | The novel begins by introducing Massoud Behrani, a former colonel exiled from Iran after the Iranian Revolution. Because his background is military rather than professional, he has not been able to establish a career in the US and works as a trash collector and convenience store clerk. With savings, he pays the rent on an expensive apartment for his family and for an elegant wedding for his daughter, and his fellow, more successful Iranian exiles do not know that he holds low-skilled jobs. Meanwhile, Kathy Nicolo, a former drug addict who is still recovering from her husband abruptly leaving her, has been evicted from her home, long owned by her family, because of unpaid taxes the county wrongfully claimed she owed. When the house is placed for auction, Behrani seizes the opportunity and purchases it. He bets his son's entire college fund, planning to renovate the house and then resell it for much more than he originally paid as a first step on the way to establishing himself in real-estate investment. He moves his family from their apartment into the house. Meanwhile, when Kathy moves out, she meets Deputy Lester Burdon. They go through the system, hiring a lawyer to fight Kathy's wrongful eviction, but although the County admits the error, Behrani insists that he will not return the house unless he's paid what it's worth, not merely the low sum he paid at auction. In desperation, Kathy goes to the house and attempts to commit suicide twice, first trying to shoot herself and then overdosing on pills. The Behranis manage to stop her both times and she is put in a bedroom to rest. Lester breaks into the house and locks the Behranis in their bathroom at gunpoint until they agree to return the house to Kathy. When Lester takes the Behranis to the county office, Behrani's son, Esmail, retrieves the gun and is shot by authorities. When Behrani finds out in the hospital that his son has died, he is overcome with grief and rage at both Lester and Kathy. He returns to the house to find Kathy still there and attempts to strangle her. Believing Kathy to be dead, he dons his Army uniform and suffocates both himself and his wife, who had been asleep in the bedroom. Kathy and Lester are arrested and await trial. In the novel's final scene, Kathy, unable to speak after her final encounter with Behrani, mimes a request for one more cigarette. |
The Cat Who Could Read Backwards | Lilian Jackson Braun | 1,966 | Jim Qwilleran is attempting to get his life back on track, starting with a new job; his old acquaintance, Arch Riker, is taking a chance. Qwilleran became known as a journalist for covering crime, but his new job at the Flux is hardly so glamorous: he's working on the art beat. The paper's resident art critic is the reclusive and decidedly unpopular one-handed man named George Bonifield Mountclemens III. Qwill visits Mountclemens and meets Koko, a male Siamese cat who appears to be able to read, but only backwards. Qwilleran rents a room from Mountclemens and starts to take care of Koko, who has rather delicate taste in eating. Mountclemens adores some local artists and despises others. One of the former is a young woman, Zoe Lambreth, whose husband owns the Lambreth Gallery, which showcases her works among others, including Scrano, and Zoe's protégé, Nino. Mountclemens has an argument with Noel Farhar, the director of an art museum; the museum lost a million-dollar deal after a bad review from Mountclemens, and as a result Farhar is retiring. One evening, Qwill is relaxing in the Press Club with his friend, the Flux photographer Odd Bunsen, when Bunsen is paged: there's been a murder at the Lambreth Gallery. Specifically, it's the owner, Earl Lambreth, and the gallery was left in disarray, with paintings destroyed and furniture tossed about. Qwill notices that a Ghirotto painting, or rather half of one, is missing; intact, the painting of a ballerina and monkey would be worth $150,000, but Lambreth's half, the ballerina, has disappeared. Qwill attempts to comfort the attractive widow Lambreth, who is being protected and cared for by a friend named Butchy, also an artist and a teacher. A dagger goes missing from the art museum. Mountclemens, just returned from a trip, does not seem very interested in Earl's death. As an art writer, Qwill goes to a "happening" featuring Nino. Nino's creations are made from things that people throw away, things that have meaning to him that others may not necessarily understand. The show ends disastrously, when one of Nino's creations is knocked from its scaffolding, and Nino falls to his death attempting to save it. Qwill has more theories than real sympathy for the recently deceased. Nino didn't like Earl Lambreth. Butchy didn't like the friendship between Zoe and Nino. Could Butchy have pushed Nino to his death? Meanwhile, the dagger and the Ghirotto are both found. Defeated in possible conspiracy theories, Qwill returns home to Koko. Koko leads Qwill upstairs to Mountclemens' flat, where they find Mountclemens lying dead at the bottom of his fire escape. Qwill continues to take care of the Siamese, and the next day, Koko leads him upstairs to retrieve his blue cushion and his favorite "mousie" toy. In the course of searching for the "mousie", Qwill finds Mountclemens' stash of paintings, which includes a half-painting of a monkey. It is the match to the Ghirotto ballerina that Earl Lambreth owned. Mountclemens had offered to buy Earl's half from him, not letting on that he owned the other half. However, Earl had something else Mountclemens wanted, or rather someone—Zoe had been leading the critic on by flirting with him in order to stay in his good graces. Mountclemens might have killed Earl, but his name is on the airline's list of passengers, and Qwill believes this proves he was out of town. Zoe interrupts Qwill's contemplation, and he invites her to the Press Club for lunch. At the Press Club, Zoe gives credence to Qwill's theories. She tells him Mountclemens owned the Lambreth Gallery, and Earl had been maintaining two sets of books, one real and one falsified. Earl had threatened to expose Mountclemens in order to stop his relationship with Zoe. This would have put Mountclemens in jail. Zoe believes Mountclemens killed Earl, and had someone fly under his name to provide himself with an alibi. Returning to the apartment, Qwill is in a quiet mood. Could Zoe have killed Mountclemens? She didn't seem unhappy to see the art critic dead. Koko leads Qwill to the old apartment again, where he knocks a knife off the counter. In the broom closet is a flashlight, but why wasn't there one by Mountclemens' body? Unless in being one handed, Mountclemens chose a knife over a flashlight? Yet he wasn't wearing his false hand, and the art critic was vain enough to wear it if he had an assignation with Zoe. Koko growls at the door of the abandoned studio, and Qwill enters to find that several of the paintings have vanished, and the remaining ones are highly valuable Scranos. As Koko runs his nose over the signature backwards (ONARCS), the painter Qwill knew as Narx entered. Narx reached for the knife lying on the table, but Koko deflects his attack by leaping upon him and Qwill hits Narx with the flashlight. Back at the Press Club, Qwill recounted the adventure, pointing out that Narx drew robotic drawings that resembled himself, and was clearly also O. Narx since the paintings' texture was so similar. Koko's reading the signature backwards merely confirmed this. Though Mountclemens could no longer paint or draw when he lost his hand, he could still instruct others, and Scrano had painted for him.In the art critic's last review, he said there would be no more art coming from Scrano which led Qwill to think that Mountclemens had intended on killing him, but Narx killed Mountclemens. Once Scrano woke up, he confirmed Qwill's story. Qwill had, however, guessed wrong about Butchy and Zoe. Butchy had tried to save Nino and hurt herself in the process. Zoe had had murderous intent but never followed up on it. Upon his return to the apartment, Qwill asked Koko: Had it been all a coincidence, when Koko led him up to the closet with the monkey painting was it simply for a lost toy? Koko gave the man no answers, just removed an itch with a hind paw and a contented look. |
The Cat Who Ate Danish Modern | Lilian Jackson Braun | 1,967 | Qwilleran, a reporter for the Daily Fluxion, and Koko, his Siamese cat with strange talents, are settling into Qwill's newest assignment—a magazine specializing in interior decorating. His first assignment leads him to David Lyke and his partner, Starkweather. David introduces him to George Tait and his Swiss wife, who had paid him to decorate their home in Muddy Swamp, an ultra rich neighborhood. George Tait is a collector of jade and he enthusiastically allows Odd Bunsen, a photographer, to take pictures of them. A day after the article comes out, the Tait mansion is robbed and Mrs. Tait is dead of a heart attack. On the other hand, Qwill meets David's clientele and his decorator friends, including rich banker Harry Noyton and his ex-wife, Natalie. He is traveling to Europe so he offers to rent out his apartment to Qwill. He moves into his expensive apartment, but Koko starts eating fabric off the expensive furniture. Also, he bites Alacoque Wright, the new lady in Qwill's life. He also finds that Harry Noyton knew Mrs. Tait and that he is in Denmark. He suspected sabotage by the Morning Rampage when a house he covers for his second assignment gets raided. For his third article, he published David Lyke's apartment but he is found dead by Koko and Odd Bunsen. He suspected the Japanese chef since David Lyke had Japan's national treasures. He finally meet David's ex-friend and rival, John Baker, who tells him that David was an orphan who was a self made interior decorator. However, he also charmed the ladies and talked bad about his friends. When Qwill finally reads the Tait file and looks closely at a picture Koko licks, the pieces fall into place. *Tait made some really bad business decisions and so, he was near bankruptcy. *His jades were insured and he could get a lot of money if they were stolen *Mrs. Tait's family were scientists and needed funding for new products *David was murdered by Natalie Noyton since she assumed he would marry her after she got a divorce. When he didn't, she committed homicide-suicide. *Mrs Tait had asked Harry Noyton to invests in her family before her death When Qwill arrives at Tait's, to pick up Yumyum,an orphan siamese, he finds the jades in a secret compartment of a shelf. George Tait is not happy and tried to smash his skull in. Koko trips him and saves Q's life. |
The Catalogue of the Universe | Margaret Mahy | 1,985 | Angela May wakes in her bedroom to find her mother, Dido, in the garden trimming the grass using a scythe. Angela calls out to her mother and asks her to share the story of how she and her father met, and her subsequent birth. Dido shares the story of how she was in love with a married man, and he with her, but he could not leave his family. However, Dido did not want to be left with nothing, so became pregnant with Angela. Angela asks if Dido would want to be with him now, but her mother dismisses the notion. Meanwhile at Tycho's house his family receive a phone call from his sister Africa, who has had a fight with her husband and wishes to leave him. However before the family have a chance to go collect her, she rings up having changed her mind. Richard, Tycho's brother, teases Tycho about his “girlfriend” Angela but Tycho insists they are just friends. Angela does indeed come to see Tycho that morning, under the pretence of him offering her a lift to a school event. Angela wishes to play truant but Tycho refuses. After they have finished, Angela insists the two go somewhere because she has something important to show Tycho. She takes him to an expensive cafe where they wait, though Angela will not tell Tycho what for. Eventually a man enters the establishment and Tycho immediately notices the resemblance between him and Angela - his is in fact Roland Chase, Angela's father, and owner of a large company. Angela stands up and her father, previously unaware she was there, catches sight of her. He does not look pleased. Angela decides to go and see Roland Chase and confront him. Tycho tries to dissuade her, but eventually agrees to drive her there and wait for her. Her father sees her waiting for him, and takes her into his office. However the meeting does not go well. Roland Chase implies that she may not even be his daughter, as her mother had been involved with many men. He has never thought about her and never given the family any money, even though Dido had claimed he had. it also turns out that he is not married and has no official children. Whilst Angela is there, Roland Chase's mother (and Angela's biological grandmother) bursts into the office, insisting on seeing her son. Roland introduces the two, and the grandmother seems interested in learning more about Angela. It turns out the two share the same name. Angela is still upset and angry, and leaves. Angela calls her mother at work and tells her what has happened. Angela is extremely angry and tells her mother to drive her car off the dangerous road that the two live on. Tycho finds her in a telephone box. She refuses to tell him what has happened, and so Tycho gives her some money and leaves her be. Tycho returns home, where he uses the excuse of wanting to see the occultation of two of Jupiter's moons to get out of going to his sister's for a party that evening. After they have left, he calls Dido, but Angela has not returned yet. He later receives a call from Richard telling him that his father was taken ill, and the family would be staying the night at Africa's. After hanging up, Tycho turns to find Angela in his house, looking a mess. She tells him how after the meeting with her father, she wanted to do something to make her feel degraded. She went to a rough bar, where she had a man buy her several Fallen Angel cocktails. Leaving the bar she went with him to the river bank intending to have sex with him, but she changed her mind and ran off through the river. Angela then reveals to Tycho that she is a virgin, something that not many people would think about her. They discuss why she had kept this a secret, and she said she liked having something about herself other people did not know. Tycho sends her to go and phone her mother, but on the way to Angela sees a present that she had bought Tycho on the table. It is her own t-shirt bearing the legend "The Ionians Rule". This is her way of telling Tycho that she wishes to be with him, and the two spend the night together. In the morning the two remember they had not called Dido and are unable to get a response when they try. They decide to walk to Angela's house, as Tycho does not have the car and no buses run on a Sunday. As they are walking up the road they see a car veer off the bridge and down the slope and Angela believes this may be her mother's car. They run off down the slope to investigate. However the vehicle was actually that of Angela's neighbours Phil and Jerry Cherry. Phil had been thrown clear, but Jerry was trapped inside the vehicle. Tycho manages to get Jerry clear, but only just, and the car explodes. Dido then arrives and an ambulance soon follows. Tycho, who received burns when saving Jerry, is taken to hospital as well, and Angela leaves with her mother. Arriving home, Tycho finds that his sister Africa and her child are there. She has been having an affair and has now left her husband. A reporter turns up at the door, and suddenly the family realise Tycho is actually injured, and want to know what has happened. At home, Angela receives a phone call from her paternal grandmother, who wishes to get to know her better, but Angela is not interested. Dido tells Angela that her grandmother had actually given her money to have an abortion, which Dido had instead used to buy things for a newborn. Tycho comes to visit her and Angela asks him not to tell Dido about their relationship, but the way the two behave makes it obvious. |
The Man Within | Graham Greene | null | The story begins with Andrews fleeing his fellow smugglers after a battle with the customs officials that ended with one of the customs officials dead. He stumbles upon an isolated cottage which is the home of Elizabeth. The man whom she lived with has recently died. Andrews helps protect Elizabeth from the neighbors who consider her to be a woman of loose moral character (the novel is silent about whether their view is justified or not). After encountering Carlyon, the head of the smugglers, in the fog, Andrews returns to the cottage where Elizabeth persuades him that he should testify at the trial of the smugglers at the Assizes in Lewes. Andrews travels to Lewes and gives his testimony in court despite being scorned by the other witnesses for the prosecution as a Judas figure. The trial ends with the smugglers being acquitted and their pledging to revenge themselves on Andrews by hurting Elizabeth. Andrews returns to Elizabeth's cottage, tells her of the danger. She sends him to the well to fetch water, and while he is gone, he discovers that one of the smugglers has come to the cottage. He runs to get help, but when he returns, he discovers that Elizabeth has been killed by one of his fellow smugglers and Carlyon is sitting waiting for him. After realizing that the only way to betray his father is to hurt himself, Andrews tells Carlyon to leave and that he will take the blame for Elizabeth's death. |
The Sea Hunters: True Adventures With Famous Shipwrecks | Clive Cussler | null | In 1978 adventure novelist Clive Cussler funded and participated in an attempt to find John Paul Jones's famous Revolutionary warship, the USS Bonhomme Richard. The expedition was not successful, however, it eventually led to the formation of a nonprofit organization named after the fictional agency in his novels, the National Underwater and Marine Agency and dedicated to the discovery of famous shipwrecks around the world. In The Sea Hunters, Cussler documents the search for nine famous shipwrecks while also offering dramatized imaginings on the events that led up to the loss of the ship. To date, the group's most successful find is the discovery of the final resting place of the Confederate submarine Hunley, detailed in Part 6. The Hunley was later raised and is currently undergoing restoration in the hopes that it will later be available for public view. |
The Sea Hunters II: Diving the World's Seas for Famous Shipwrecks | Clive Cussler | null | Adventure novelist Clive Cussler follows up on the success of his first nonfiction book The Sea Hunters: True Adventures With Famous Shipwrecks which documented the formation of his nonprofit organization named after the fictional agency in his novels, the National Underwater and Marine Agency which is dedicated to the discovery of famous shipwrecks around the world. This volume documents the search for the final resting places of fourteen additional ships or other historical sunken artifacts not documented in the first work. Unlike the first book, this volume documents searches for ships that Cussler's group has found, and searches that were ultimately unsuccessful. As in the first work, preceding the details of the search is a fictionalized imagining of the events that led to the loss of the ship. |
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