In the Land of Marvels
Title | In the Land of Marvels PDF eBook |
Author | Paola Bertucci |
Publisher | JHU Press |
Pages | 179 |
Release | 2023-10-17 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 142144710X |
"This book explores the early advent of electricity as a pivotal phenomenon in the cultivation of popular cultural scientific interest"--
Land of Marvels
Title | Land of Marvels PDF eBook |
Author | Barry Unsworth |
Publisher | Nan A. Talese |
Pages | 306 |
Release | 2009-01-06 |
Genre | Fiction |
ISBN | 0385529473 |
Barry Unsworth, a writer with an “almost magical capacity for literary time travel” (New York Times Book Review) has the extraordinary ability to re-create the past and make it relevant to contemporary readers. In Land of Marvels, a thriller set in 1914, he brings to life the schemes and double-dealings of Western nations grappling for a foothold in Mesopotamia (now Iraq) in the dying days of the Ottoman Empire. Somerville, a British archaeologist, is excavating a long-buried Assyrian palace. The site lies directly in the path of a new railroad to Baghdad, and he watches nervously as the construction progresses, threatening to destroy his discovery. The expedition party includes Somerville’s beautiful, bored wife, Edith; Patricia, a smart young graduate student; and Jehar, an Arab man-of-all-duties whose subservient manner belies his intelligence and ambitions. Posing as an archaeologist, an American geologist from an oil company arrives one day and insinuates himself into the group. But he’s not the only one working undercover to stake a claim on Iraq’s rich oil fields. Historical fiction at its finest, Land of Marvels opens a window on the past and reveals its lasting impact.
The Book of Marvels and Travels
Title | The Book of Marvels and Travels PDF eBook |
Author | Sir John Mandeville |
Publisher | Oxford University Press, USA |
Pages | 225 |
Release | 2012-09-13 |
Genre | Biography & Autobiography |
ISBN | 0199600600 |
In his Book of Marvels and Travels, Sir John Mandeville describes a journey from Europe to Jerusalem and on into Asia, and the many wonderful and monstrous peoples and practices in the East. A captivating blend of fact and fantasy, Mandeville's Book is newly translated in an edition that brings us closer to Mandeville's worldview.
Church of Marvels
Title | Church of Marvels PDF eBook |
Author | Leslie Parry |
Publisher | HarperCollins |
Pages | 223 |
Release | 2015-05-05 |
Genre | Fiction |
ISBN | 0062367579 |
A ravishing first novel, set in vibrant, tumultuous turn-of-the-century New York City, where the lives of four outsiders become entwined, bringing irrevocable change to them all. New York, 1895. Sylvan Threadgill, a night soiler cleaning out the privies behind the tenement houses, finds an abandoned newborn baby in the muck. An orphan himself, Sylvan rescues the child, determined to find where she belongs. Odile Church and her beautiful sister, Belle, were raised amid the applause and magical pageantry of The Church of Marvels, their mother’s spectacular Coney Island sideshow. But the Church has burnt to the ground, their mother dead in its ashes. Now Belle, the family’s star, has vanished into the bowels of Manhattan, leaving Odile alone and desperate to find her. A young woman named Alphie awakens to find herself trapped across the river in Blackwell’s Lunatic Asylum—sure that her imprisonment is a ruse by her husband’s vile, overbearing mother. On the ward she meets another young woman of ethereal beauty who does not speak, a girl with an extraordinary talent that might save them both. As these strangers’ lives become increasingly connected, their stories and secrets unfold. Moving from the Coney Island seashore to the tenement-studded streets of the Lower East Side, a spectacular human circus to a brutal, terrifying asylum, Church of Marvels takes readers back to turn-of-the-century New York—a city of hardship and dreams, love and loneliness, hope and danger. In magnetic, luminous prose, Leslie Parry offers a richly atmospheric vision of the past in a narrative of astonishing beauty, full of wondrous enchantments, a marvelous debut that will leave readers breathless.
Marvels and Mysteries of the World Around Us
Title | Marvels and Mysteries of the World Around Us PDF eBook |
Author | Reader'S Digest |
Publisher | |
Pages | 344 |
Release | 1972 |
Genre | |
ISBN | 9780393214192 |
The Marvels of the World
Title | The Marvels of the World PDF eBook |
Author | Rebecca Bushnell |
Publisher | University of Pennsylvania Press |
Pages | 377 |
Release | 2021-03-12 |
Genre | Literary Collections |
ISBN | 0812297814 |
Long before the Romantics embraced nature, people in the West saw the human and nonhuman worlds as both intimately interdependent and violently antagonistic. With its peerless selection of ninety-eight original sources concerned with the natural world and humankind's place within it, The Marvels of the World offers a corrective to the still-prevalent tendency to dismiss premodern attitudes toward nature as simple or univocal. Gathering together medical texts, herbals, and how-to books, as well as scientific, religious, philosophical, and poetic works dating from antiquity to the dawn of the Enlightenment, the anthology explores both mainstream and unconventional thinking about the natural world. Its seven parts focus on philosophy and science; plants; animals; weather and climate; ways of inhabiting the land; gardens and gardening; and European encounters with the wider world. Each section and each of the book's selections is prefaced with a helpful introduction by volume editor Rebecca Bushnell that weaves connections among these compelling pieces of the past. The early writers collected here wrote with extraordinary openness about ways of coexisting with the nonhuman forces that shaped them, Bushnell demonstrates, even as they sought to control and exploit their environment. Taken as a whole, The Marvels of the World reveals how many of these early writers cared as much about the natural world as we do today.
City of Marvels
Title | City of Marvels PDF eBook |
Author | Eduardo Mendoza |
Publisher | |
Pages | 418 |
Release | 1990 |
Genre | |
ISBN | 9780002710374 |