Amazon.com ReviewSet in Manchester County, Virginia, 20 years before the Civil War began, Edward P. Jones's debut novel, The Known World, is a masterpiece of overlapping plot lines, time shifts, and heartbreaking details of life under slavery. Caldonia Townsend is an educated black slaveowner, the widow of a well-loved young farmer named Henry, whose parents had bought their own freedom, and then freed their son, only to watch him buy himself a slave as soon as he had saved enough money. Although a fair and gentle master by the standards of the day, Henry Townsend had learned from former master about the proper distance to keep from one's property. After his death, his slaves wonder if Caldonia will free them. When she fails to do so, but instead breaches the code that keeps them separate from her, a little piece of Manchester County begins to unravel. Impossible to rush through, The Known World is a complex, beautifully written novel with a large cast of characters, rewarding the patient reader with unexpected connections, some reaching into the present day. --Regina MarlerFrom Publishers WeeklyIn a crabbed, powerful follow-up to his National Book Award-nominated short story collection (Lost in the City), Jones explores an oft-neglected chapter of American history, the world of blacks who owned blacks in the antebellum South. His fictional examination of this unusual phenomenon starts with the dying 31-year-old Henry Townsend, a former slave-now master of 33 slaves of his own and more than 50 acres of land in Manchester County, Va.-worried about the fate of his holdings upon his early death. As a slave in his youth, Henry makes himself indispensable to his master, William Robbins. Even after Henry's parents purchase the family's freedom, Henry retains his allegiance to Robbins, who patronizes him when he sets up shop as a shoemaker and helps him buy his first slaves and his plantation. Jones's thorough knowledge of the legal and social intricacies of slaveholding allows him to paint a complex, often startling picture of life in the region. His richest characterizations-of Robbins and Henry-are particularly revealing. Though he is a cruel master to his slaves, Robbins is desperately in love with a black woman and feels as much fondness for Henry as for his own children; Henry, meanwhile, reads Milton, but beats his slaves as readily as Robbins does. Henry's wife, Caldonia, is not as disciplined as her husband, and when he dies, his worst fears are realized: the plantation falls into chaos. Jones's prose can be rather static and his phrasings ponderous, but his narrative achieves crushing momentum through sheer accumulation of detail, unusual historical insight and generous character writing.Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. SUMMARY:Set in Manchester County, Virginia, 20 years before the Civil War began, Edward P. Jones's debut novel, The Known World, is a masterpiece of overlapping plot lines, time shifts, and heartbreaking details of life under slavery. Caldonia Townsend is an educated black slaveowner, the widow of a well-loved young farmer named Henry, whose parents had bought their own freedom, and then freed their son, only to watch him buy himself a slave as soon as he had saved enough money. Although a fair and gentle master by the standards of the day, Henry Townsend had learned from former master about the proper distance to keep from one's property. After his death, his slaves wonder if Caldonia will free them. When she fails to do so, but instead breaches the code that keeps them separate from her, a little piece of Manchester County begins to unravel. Impossible to rush through, The Known World is a complex, beautifully written novel with a large cast of characters, rewarding the patient reader with unexpected connections, some reaching into the present day. --Regina Marler Views: 6
Product DescriptionThe seventh novel in the bestselling Torchwood range from BBC Books. Shopping for wedding gifts with your fiance is enjoyable, unless like Gwen you witness a Weevil massacre in the shopping centre. A trip to the zoo is a great day out, until a date goes tragically wrong and Ianto is badly injured by stolen alien tech. And Halloween is a day of fun and frights, before unspeakable monsters invade the streets of Cardiff and it's no longer a trick or a treat for the terrified population. Torchwood can control small groups of scavengers, but now someone has given large numbers of predators a season ticket to Earth! About the AuthorPeter Anghelides wrote the bestselling Another Life for the first series of Torchwood novels. He has written more than a dozen Doctor Who novels, short stories and audio plays. Views: 6
Houston, we have a problem! Phineas L. MacGuire (a.k.a. Mac) has a lot to learn about outer space if he's going to be the best scientist in the fourth grade. To get the knowledge he needs, Mac is determined to go to space camp, but his mom says he has to earn the money himself. Houston, we have another problem: a gigantic, slobbery dog named Lemon Drop. Mac can earn the money he needs by walking Mrs. McClosky's yellow Lab--but how will he survive the walks? Good thing Mac is a scientific genius with friends like Ben and Aretha. Together the three of them discover that Lemon Drop is no ordinary dog--in fact, the pup is a real-life "Lab"oratory. Views: 6
In this "delightful mash-up of Little House on the Prairie and The Spiderwick Chronicles" (SLJ), experience life on the prairie—with one fantastical twist! Louisa Brody's life on the Colorado prairie is not at all what she expected. Her dear Pa, accused of thievery, is locked thirty miles away in jail. She's living with the awful Smirches, her closest neighbors and the very family that accused her Pa of the horrendous crime. And now she's discovered one very cantankerous—and magical—secret beneath the hazel grove. With her life flipped upside-down, it's up to Louisa, her sassy friend Jessamine, and that cranky secret to save Pa from a guilty verdict.Ten bold illustrations from Erwin Madrid accompany seasoned storyteller Melissa Wiley's vibrant and enchanting tale of life on the prairie—with one magical twist. Views: 6
Will is a terrible
valet. Until he came to the house of war hero and respected MP Charles
Howard, he was more of a rich man's convenience than a valet. No one
predicts he will keep the position for long but Charles Howard is not at
all what Will expects. A reserved, insecure man who hides his pain from
the public, Charlie--as Will secretly thinks of him--believes that no
one, especially his pretty valet, would want him. Will longs to convince
him otherwise but even if Charlie were the type to dally with a
servant, Will is a valet, a man, with a scandalous past, and Charlie is a
famous figure.In a late Victorian England where cars exist, if
only for the rich, and telephones are a symbol of wealth, a progressive
spirit has led to the appearance of acceptance. But though certain laws
have been repealed it doesn't mean people's attitudes have changed or
that class differences don't still exist. Will is content to serve his
gentleman with no expectations of anything more. He only wants his
master to be happy. Will makes Charlie smile but master and servant is
all they can ever be, or is it
Views: 6
School's out for the end of the world.Anna and the Apocalypse is a horror comedy about a teenager who faces down a zombie apocalypse with a little help from her friends.Anna Shepherd is a straight-A student with a lot going on under the surface: she's struggling with her mom's death, total friend drama, and the fallout from wasting her time on a very attractive boy. She's looking forward to skipping town after graduation—but then a zombie apocalypse majorly disrupts the holidays season. It's going to be very hard to graduate high school without a brain.To save the day, Anna, her friends, and her frenemies will have to journey straight to the heart of one of the most dangerous places ever known, a place famous for its horror, terror, and pain...high school.This novel is inspired by the musical feature film, Anna and the Apocalypse. Views: 6
On the sweltering summer night of July 16, 1918, in the Siberian city of Ekaterinburg, a group of assassins led an unsuspecting Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, his wife, the Tsarina Alexandra, the desperately ill Tsarevich, and their four beautiful daughters, Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia, into a basement room where they were shot and then bayoneted to death.This is the story of those murders, which ended three hundred years of Romanov rule and set their stamp on an era of state-orchestrated terror and brutal repression.The Last Days of the Romanovs counts down to the last, tense hours of the family’s lives, stripping away the over-romanticized versions of previous accounts. The story focuses on the family inside the Ipatiev House, capturing the oppressive atmosphere and the dynamics of a group—the Romanovs, their servants, and guards—thrown together by extraordinary events. Marshaling overlooked evidence from key witnesses such as the British consul to Ekaterinburg, Sir Thomas Preston, American and British travelers in Siberia, and the now-forgotten American journalist Herman Bernstein, Helen Rappaport gives a brilliant account of the political forces swirling through the remote Urals town. She conveys the tension of the watching world: the Kaiser of Germany and George V, King of England—both, like Alexandra, grandchildren of Queen Victoria—their nations locked in combat as the First World War drew to its bitter end. And she draws on recent releases from the Russian archives to challenge the view that the deaths were a unilateral act by a maverick group of the Ekaterinburg Bolsheviks, identifying a chain of command that stretches directly, she believes, to Moscow—and to Lenin himself.Telling the story in a compellingly new and dramatic way, The Last Days of the Romanovs brings those final tragic days vividly alive against the backdrop of Russia in turmoil, on the brink of a devastating civil war.From Publishers WeeklySynthesizing a variety of sources, British historian Rappaport (Joseph Stalin) details the Romanovs last two weeks, imprisoned in a cramped private house in Ekaterinburg, a violently anti-czarist industrial city in the Ural Mountains where Nicholas II; his wife, Alexandra; and their five children were executed on July 17, 1918. The czars rescue was a low priority for the Allies, and several escape plots by Russian monarchists came to naught. A lax guard was replaced by a rigorous new regime on July 4, headed by Yakov Yurovsky, whose familys impoverished Siberian exile had fueled his burning hatred for the imperial family, and his ruthless assistant and surrogate son, Grigory Nikulin. How the last czar and his family died was one of Russias best-kept secrets for decades, and Rappaport spares none of the gory details of the panicked bloodbath (it took an entire clip of bullets to finish off the czarevitch because an undergarment sewn with jewels protected the boys torso) and botched burial of the corpses. Although parts of the Romanov saga are familiar and Rappaports sympathy for the czar often seems naïve, this is an absorbing, lucid and authoritative work. 16 pages of photos. (Feb. 3) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From BooklistSince the end of the Soviet Union, details about the murder of the Russian royal family in 1918 have emerged and inspired several accounts of the killings. Author Rappaport, a talented British writer of narrative history, telescopes the post-abdication story of the Romanovs into the two weeks preceding their deaths, during which the final elements of decision in Moscow and execution in the Siberian city of Ekaterinburg fell into place. As storyteller, Rappaport skillfully contrasts the ignorance of the family members of their impending doom with the preparations of the Bolsheviks on the scene. She renders astute personality portraits of the seven members of the family, noting especially the beauty of the daughters that, to a degree, underlies popular interest in and horror about what happened to the Romanovs. Such sentimentality was alien to Bolsheviks waging class war, however, and Rappaport describes the chain of command from Lenin to the firing squad with responsibility-fixing emphasis. Unavoidably ghastly in her last pages, Rappaport, whose research included visits to the murder and burial sites, has produced an emotionally powerful work of history. --Gilbert Taylor Views: 6
Guitarist Clay “Jet” Smith has enjoyed playing the field, and he has no plans to settle down anytime soon. He's not meeting his obligations, because he’s too busy having fun. He hires Emily Brinkman to be his personal assistant, and he quickly finds a fire burning in his belly for her, but she is unimpressed. Can Clay persuade Emily to try him out, not just for one night, but for all time? Views: 6
