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	The Sharpe Companion: A Historical and Military Guide to Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe Novels 1777-1808: The Early Years (Richard Sharpe Series) Mark Adkin 0060738146 May 2005 Paperback ·
Book Description Named "the direct heir to Patrick O'Brian" by The Economist, Bernard Cornwell is the undisputed master of historical battle fi ction, and for more than twenty years, his Richard Sharpe series has thrilled millions of readers worldwide on both the page and on television. Now author Mark Adkin, a major in the British army, has created this indispensable guide covering Sharpe's early career, from his beginnings as an illiterate private fighting on the battlefields of India to his legendary command of the Light Company. A treasure not only for fans of the series but also for anyone interested in nineteenth-century warfare, The Sharpe Companion includes: A chapter devoted to each Sharpe book Glossary of characters, both real and fictional Illustrations and photographs Maps of every battle and...


	Seven Pillars of Wisdom : A Triumph T.E. Lawrence 0385418957 June 1, 1991 Paperback ·
Book Review This is the exciting and highly literate story of the real Lawrence of Arabia, as written by Lawrence himself, who helped unify Arab factions against the occupying Turkish army, circa World War I. Lawrence has a novelist's eye for detail, a poet's command of the language, an adventurer's heart, a soldier's great story, and his memory and intellect are at least as good as all those. Lawrence describes the famous guerrilla raids, and train bombings you know from the movie, but also tells of the Arab people and politics with great penetration. Moreover, he is witty, always aware of the ethical tightrope that the English walked in the Middle East and always willing to include himself in his own withering insight. Book Description The monumental work that assured T.E. Lawrence's place...


	Fifteen Centuries of Children's Literature Jane Bingham 0313221642 Dec 1980 Hardcover ·
Review “This is a work of meticulous scholarship, detailed in content, succinct in style and format. Each chapter covers a particular time period and opens with sections on historical background, development of books, and treatment of children; the annotated chronology for the period follows...Highly recommended for children's literature research and reference collections.”–Library Journal “Covering fifteen centuries of children's literature in less than 600 pages seems a formidable task but Bingham and Scholt have taken the challenge and completed it successfully. From the oral literature of the Celts to Lois Lenski, the authors have given the reader an in-depth look at literature that has been given to children in Britain and America in these past fifteeen centuries. ... [This book] is an an excellent...


	Vanity Fair (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) William Makepeace Thackeray 1593083653 September 2005 Hardcover ·



	Defining the World : The Extraordinary Story of Dr Johnson's Dictionary Henry Hitchings 0374113025 October 19, 2005 Hardcover ·
From Publishers Weekly For the 250th anniversary of Dr. Samuel Johnson's most famous achievement, Hitchings's charming philology-as-biography shows Johnson to be no mere compiler of words but, as he himself put it, "a writer of dictionaries." Authoritative dictionaries for French and Italian were compiled by official academies, but English's first proper dictionary fell to a university dropout and failed provincial schoolmaster turned Grub Street hack—long before he became the Great Cham. The work began as a purely commercial venture at the suggestion of a bookseller-publisher, Johnson labored under less than ideal conditions, assisted only by a group of eclectic and eccentric amanuenses, and burdened by his wife's declining health and his own melancholia. In the end, his four-volume, 20-pound opus defined more than 42,773 common...


	Vanity Fair (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) William Makepeace Thackeray 1593080719 December 2003 Paperback ·
Book Description “I think I could be a good woman, if I had five thousand a year,” observes beautiful and clever Becky Sharp, one of the wickedest—and most appealing—women in all of literature. Becky is just one of the many fascinating figures that populate William Makepeace Thackeray’s novel Vanity Fair, a wonderfully satirical panorama of upper-middle-class life and manners in London at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Scorned for her lack of money and breeding, Becky must use all her wit, charm and considerable sex appeal to escape her drab destiny as a governess. From London’s ballrooms to the battlefields of Waterloo, the bewitching Becky works her wiles on a gallery of memorable characters, including her lecherous employer, Sir Pitt, his rich sister, Miss Crawley, and...


	Wide Sargasso Sea: A Novel (Norton Paperback Fiction) Jean Rhys 0393308804 August 19, 1992 Paperback ·
Book Review In 1966 Jean Rhys reemerged after a long silence with a novel called Wide Sargasso Sea. Rhys had enjoyed minor literary success in the 1920s and '30s with a series of evocative novels featuring women protagonists adrift in Europe, verging on poverty, hoping to be saved by men. By the '40s, however, her work was out of fashion, too sad for a world at war. And Rhys herself was often too sad for the world--she was suicidal, alcoholic, troubled by a vast loneliness. She was also a great writer, despite her powerful self-destructive impulses. Wide Sargasso Sea is the story of Antoinette Cosway, a Creole heiress who grew up in the West Indies on a decaying plantation. When she comes of age she is married off to an Englishman, and he takes her away from the only place she has known--a house with a garden where "the paths were...


	The Prince and the Pauper (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Mark Twain 1593082185 December 2004 Paperback ·



	Captain Blood (Penguin Classics) Rafael Sabatini, Gary Hoppenstand (Introduction) 0142180106 December 31, 2002 Paperback ·
From Library Journal This title is immediately recognizable as the basis for Michael Curtiz's 1935 film starring Errol Flynn. At the time of its 1922 debut, however, the book was a smash hit and was followed up with additional adventures of swashbuckler Peter Blood in numerous sequels. A salty dose of high-seas adventure for all fiction collections, this is the most affordable edition currently available.Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Paperback edition. Norman Mailer Glorious . . . I never enjoyed a novel more than Captain Blood. See all Editorial Reviews


	The Moonstone (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Wilkie Collins 159308322X August 2005 Paperback ·



	Desertion : A Novel Abdulrazak Gurnah 0375423540 July 26, 2005 Hardcover ·
From Publishers Weekly Against the backdrop of colonial Africa, Booker-nominated Gurnah (By the Sea; Paradise) crafts a dense, decade-straddling story of cross-cultural love and its repercussions in his seventh novel, which begins in Zanzibar in 1899. After Somali guides abandon him in the desert, English orientalist Martin Pearce is rescued and cared for by Indian Muslims, Hassalani and his sister, Rehana, until a government official finds him. Martin is a sympathetic hero, somehow more enlightened than the European colonialists, for whom racism is endemic. When he returns to thank Hassalani for sheltering him, he falls for the beautiful Rehana, and they begin a transgressive affair. The narrative then leaps forward to the late 1950s (just before Zanzibar's independence from colonial rule) to follow the lives of two brothers: Rashid,...


	Utopia (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Thomas More 1593083696 November 2005 Hardcover ·



	The Raj Quartet: The Jewel in the Crown/the Day of the Scorpion/the Towers of Silence/a Division of the Spoils Paul Scott 0688042120 ·



	Utopia (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Thomas More 1593082444 May 2005 Paperback ·



	George Washington, Spymaster : How the Americans Outspied the British and Won the Revolutionary War Thomas B. Allen 0792251261 January 1, 2004 Hardcover ·
From School Library Journal Grade 6-9-Codes and ciphers, invisible ink and secret messages, spies and counterspies! Covert operations win the Revolutionary War under mastermind Washington in this intriguing take on early American history. Allen presents the facts with a gleeful edge, clearly enjoying his subject and writing with vigor. The author relates the main events of the Revolution chronologically, consistently revealing the shadowy role of intelligence and counterintelligence. Members of the Culper Ring, the "mole" in the Sons of Liberty, and daring women worked as spies, fighting on the secret front where Patriots and Tories looked and sounded alike. Washington's role as spymaster adds a fascinating and fresh perspective on the life of this revered founding father who did far more than cross the Delaware. This small-format book...


	Wuthering Heights Emily Bronte 0486292568 September 1996 Paperback ·
From School Library Journal Grade 8 Up-British actor Martin Shaw reads this shortened version of the classic Emily Bronte novel. His easily-understood accent is appropriate and helps to set the mood. Shaw reads at a very steady pace, pausing effectively for emphasis or when his character might be thinking. Usually calm and gentle, his voice can resonate with anger or other emotion when necessary. There is some differentiation in pitch to emphasize male vs. female speech, but it is not exaggerated or overdone. The abridgement retains Bronte's words linking speech or narration sometimes from one page to another. It provides students with an easier way to become familiar with the story and get a feel for her style. Teachers could use this presentation to introduce the novel or to entice students to read it on their own.Claudia Moore, W.T....


	Henry I (The English Monarchs Series) C. Warren Hollister, Amanda Clark Frost (Editor) 0300098294 September 1, 2003 Paperback ·
From Publishers Weekly Henry I (who reigned over England and Normandy from 1100 to 1135) is remembered primarily for "Conan's Leap," when he heaved the treacherous Conan Pilatus from a tower, and for his death from an alleged surfeit of lampreys. He deserves better from history, and Hollister's magisterial biography, 40 years in the making, accords him fuller regard. Begun in 1962, the long-delayed manuscript perished in a 1990 fire. Hollister began reconstructing the book but died in 1997, before its completion. Frost, his former Ph.D. student, finished the job. They persuasively cast Henry (youngest of William the Conqueror's three sons) as a major English monarch. Left no land by his father, Henry outwitted one brother; the other one died in a hunting accident. King at 31, Henry I rebuilt baronial alliances, established a charter...


	Emma Jane Austen 0486406482 March 1999 Paperback ·
Book Review Of all Jane Austen's heroines, Emma Woodhouse is the most flawed, the most infuriating, and, in the end, the most endearing. Pride and Prejudice's Lizzie Bennet has more wit and sparkle; Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey more imagination; and Sense and Sensibility's Elinor Dashwood certainly more sense--but Emma is lovable precisely because she is so imperfect. Austen only completed six novels in her lifetime, of which five feature young women whose chances for making a good marriage depend greatly on financial issues, and whose prospects if they fail are rather grim. Emma is the exception: "Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or...


	The Diary of Samuel Pepys (Modern Library) Samuel Pepys, et al 0679642218 June 26, 2001 Hardcover ·
From AudioFile Pepys's candid diaries are important for what they tell us about life in Restoration London, AND delightful reading, for the author had a lively mind, a keen eye, and a strong personality. Abridger Pearson Phillips has chosen the excerpts well for this volume. With admirable vigor, narrator Michael Maloney tries to give a sense of Pepys's development over the tumultuous decade that the secret journals cover. But he seems distracted, as if struggling with the seventeenth-century diction, and comes off a bit flat and awkward. Y.R. © AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to the Audio CD edition. Review "Pepys led a full, varied and voraciously-enjoyed life and clearly took pleasure in setting...


	The Eyre Affair: A Thursday Next Novel Jasper Fforde 0142001805 February 2003 Paperback ·
Book Review Penzler Pick, January 2002: When I first heard the premise of this unique mystery, I doubted that a first-time author could pull off a complicated caper involving so many assumptions, not the least of which is a complete suspension of disbelief. Jasper Fforde is not only up to the task, he exceeds all expectations. Imagine this. Great Britain in 1985 is close to being a police state. The Crimean War has dragged on for more than 130 years and Wales is self-governing. The only recognizable thing about this England is her citizens' enduring love of literature. And the Third Most Wanted criminal, Acheron Hades, is stealing characters from England's cherished literary heritage and holding them for ransom. Bibliophiles will be enchanted, but not surprised, to learn that stealing a character from a book only...


	Shakespeare: A Life Park Honan 0198117922 ·
From Publishers Weekly So little evidence of Shakespeare's life exists that biographers have had to resort to sometimes far-fetched guesswork to flesh out a vivid chronicle of his days. Many of them would benefit from the healthy dose of common sense evident in Honan's latest critical study. As a leading biographer of Robert Browning and Jane Austen, Honan brings a sensible eye to the Sisyphean task of sifting through what is now called the "Shakespeare Industry." Synthesizing documentary material on Renaissance England with the latest scholarship?be it Helen Vendler on the sonnets or Leeds Barroll on politics and plague in Elizabethan London?Honan attempts to link, perhaps a little too closely, the Bard's life experiences with his literary representations. In an examination of Shakespeare's schooling, Honan refutes the oft-cited...