John Dos Passos, the distinguished American novelist and historian has been personally interested in Brazil for the last fifteen years. He first visited the country in 1948, and returned again in 1956 and 1962. This book, which is based on his experiences in Brazil, presents the people and landscapes of a young country on the move. Here you will find several extraordinary reports on Brasilia, first in the planning stage, second in the wildly frantic period when it was a half-finished group of buildings, and, finally, as it appeared to Mr. Dos Passos in the summer of 1962 when it was at last beginning to function as a city. Here, too, is the story of Brazil's great road building program designed to unify the country, and of the political battles in this enormous country which totters on the verge of a Communist takeover.From traveling the length and breadth of the land and from interviewing all kinds of people: politicians like Carlos Lacerda and religious leaders like Bishop Sales, Mr. Dos Passos has been able to transmit some of the flavor of the most important of Latin American nations.Mr. Dos Passos himself is of Portuguese descent, and he speaks Portuguese as well as Spanish. He begins this readable and fascinating book with a much needed short sketch of the history of Brazil and how the Portuguese tradition differs from the Spanish in South America. Views: 147
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. Views: 147
Ten magnificent full-color plates complement Stevenson\'s action-packed sequel to Kidnapped, as David Balfour struggles to exonerate James Stewart, becomes a captive, and romances Catriona Drummond. Views: 147
What happens when the dad you don't know suddenly invades your life? Views: 147
SUMMARY:
a selection from CHAPTER ONE: On the ground, new blades of grass sprang up in chlorophyll coats. On the trees, tongues of green protruded from boughs and branches, wrapping them about - soon the place would look like an imbecile Earthchild's attempt to draw Christmas trees - as spring again set spur to the growing things in the southern hemisphere of Dapdrof. Not that nature was more amiable on Dapdrof than elsewhere. Even as she sent the warmer winds over the southern hemisphere, she was sousing most of the northern in an ice-bearing monsoon. Propped on G-crutches, old Aylmer Ainson stood at his door, scratching his scalp very leisurely and staring at the budding trees. Even the slenderest outmost twig shook very little, for all that a stiffish breeze blew. This leaden effect was caused by gravity; twigs, like everything else on Dapdrof. weighed three times as much as they did on Earth. Ainson was long accustomed to the phenomenon. His body had grown round-shouldered and hollow-chested accustoming him to it. His brain had grown a little round-shouldered in the process. Fortunately he was not afflicted with the craving to recapture the past that strikes down so many humans even before they reach middle age. The sight of infant green leaves woke in him only the vaguest nostalgia, roused in him only the faintest recollection that his childhood had been passed among foliage more responsive to April's zephyrs - zephyrs, moreover, a hundred light years away. He was free to stand in the doorway and enjoy man's richest luxury, a blank mind. Idly, he watched Quequo. the female utod, as she trod between her salad beds and under the ammp trees to launch her body into the bolstering mud. The ammp trees were evergreen, unlike the rest of the trees in Ainson's enclosure. Resting in the foliage on the crest of them were big four-winged white birds, which decided to take off as Ainson looked at them, fluttering up like immense butterflies and splashing their shadows across the house as they passed. But the house was already splashed with their shadows. Obeying the urge to create a work of art that visited them perhaps only once in a century, Ainson's friends had broken the white of his walls with a scatterbrained scattering of silhouetted wings and bodies, urging upwards. The lively movement of this pattern seemed to make the low-eaved house rise against gravity; but that was appearance only, for this spring found the neoplastic rooftree sagging and the supporting walls considerably buckled at the knees. This was the fortieth spring Ainson had seen flow across his patch of Dapdrof. Even the ripe stench from the mid-denstead now savoured only of home. As he breathed it in, his grorg or parasite-eater scratched his head for him; reaching up, Ainson returned the compliment and tickled the lizard-like creature's cranium. He guessed what the grorg really wanted, but at that hour, with only one of the suns up, it was too chilly to join Snok Snok Karn and Quequo Kifful with their grorgs for a wallow in the mire. "I'm cold standing out here. I am going inside to lie down," he called to Snok Snok in the utodian tongue. The young utod looked up and extended two of his limbs in a sign of understanding. That was gratifying. Even after forty years* study, Ainson found the utodian language full of conundrums. He had not been sure that he had not said. "The stream is cold and I am going inside to cook it." Catching the right whistling inflected scream was not easy: he had only one sound orifice to Snok Snok's eight. He swung his crutches and went in. "His speech is growing less distinct than it was," Quequo remarked. "We had difficulty enough teaching him to communicate. He is not an efficient mechanism, this manlegs. You may have noticed that he is moving more slowly than he did." Views: 147
Hugo Chesterman has been sentenced to death for murdering a policeman. What is his story and will an appeal be successful? For the young, and pretty, Daisy Bland it all started when she literally bumped into Hugo Chesterman and fell madly in love. She gives up her job to lead a topsy turvy existence, reliant financially upon Hugo's success as a "commission agent". Her trust in Hugo, and in his acquaintances, mean that she is slow to pick up clues on what is happening around her. They terminate the lease on their Maida Vale rooms and take a holiday at the seaside. After losing a nest egg set aside for the baby, Hugo's need to make amends leads him into a new venture that ends in his downfall. Distraught at their circumstances, and with a baby on the way, Daisy rallies round to take on a purposefulness and strong impetus to save Hugo. Views: 147
Geejay - a striking ginger tom with a thirst for adventure - takes matters into his own paws when he discovers a little boy next door who isn't allowed to play outside because of his allergies... Views: 146
In post-Blitz London, humanity's last hope of defeating a powerful magician's insidious plans lies with a ghost trapped in a surreal city of the dead During World War II, soon after Ms. Lester Furnival married her beloved Richard, she died in an accident. Now she wanders the dark and lonely streets with her friend Evelyn. An empty mirror image of the London she once knew, the city is a place where time has lost its rules and structure, and where Lester can catch heartbreaking glimpses of the world she left behind. But all is not well in the realm of the living. The other London has fallen under the sway of the magus Simon Leclerc, a master of black magic and necromancy who would sacrifice the soul of his own daughter in the pursuit of ultimate power. With her widowed husband entangled in the sorcerer's toxic web along with an enigmatic artist who can paint only the truth, Lester must somehow thwart Leclerc's malevolent plan if she is to find... Views: 146
First love, sexual awakening, murder, cowardice, vengeance and forgiveness . . . these are the powerful ingredients for Steven Herrick's gutsiest book yet; a page-turning read for teenage boys and girls; a story about father-son relationships and the many ways of being a man. Cowards don't always hide. Sometimes they're so gutless they need to stand out.'Eddie doesn't want to be in school, he wants to work in the mine. But his dad won't go down the coal pits and he won't let his sons go either. Nothing much happens in Burruga, except for fights at the pub. Then one Friday night a girl is found dead by the river, and every man in the town comes under suspicion. Eddie is drawn into secrets and a bitter struggle for revenge.Steven Herrick deftly reveals a cast of vivid characters in this chilling story of malice, power, and the courage to forgive. A riveting new YA novel from the author of By the River and other popular, award-winning books. Views: 146
A ribald tale from Britain's best-love Science Fiction writer.Available for the first time in eBook. The Cretan Teat is a bawdy novel, telling the extraordinary tale a Byzantine painting of the Virgin Mary breastfeeding the infant Jesus.This false icon gets adopted by the people – and so becomes instrumental in the downfall of mankind.This is a story where the narrator – the author – is regularly caught with his trousers down.It is at once funny and important, a post-modern text reminiscent of Pirandello, where sexcapades brush shoulders with the end of the world. Views: 145
The General of the Dead Army is a moving and timely meditation on war and its consequences by the winner of the inaugural Man Booker International Prize, available again in paperback. Twenty years after World War II, an Italian general—armed with maps, measurements, and dental records—is sent to Albania to recover the remains of his country’s fallen soldiers. A quarrelsome priest joins him, and in rain and sleet they dig up the Albanian countryside—once a battlefield, now a graveyard—checking teeth and dog tags, assembling a dead army in pine-box uniforms. In addition to the brutal weather, they also battle the hostility of the Albanians working for them. This may be an errand of mercy for the general, but the chance to humiliate their one-time conquerors offers the Albanians a welcome vengeance. Fighting the hopelessness of his undertaking, the general finds his movements shadowed by a German general on the same gruesome mission for his own country. In a terrible crescendo at a wedding, the Italian general must answer for the crimes of his country and all countries that have invaded this land of eagles, seeking to destroy its people. Enthralling and poignant, The General of the Dead Army is an elegy for the young people of every country who are sent abroad to die in battle.** Views: 145
One of the best-known experimental novels of the 1960s, Beautiful Losers is Leonard Cohen' s most defiant and uninhibited work. As imagined by Cohen, hell is an apartment in Montreal, where a bereaved and lust-tormented narrator reconstructs his relations with the dead. In that hell two men and a woman twine impossibly and betray one another again and again. Memory blurs into blasphemous sexual fantasy—and redemption takes the form of an Iroquois saint and virgin who has been dead for 300 years but still has the power to save even the most degraded of her suitors. First published in 1966, Beautiful Losers demonstrates that its author is not only a superb songwriter but also a novelist of visionary power. Funny, harrowing, and fiercely moving, it is a classic erotic tragedy, incandescent in its prose and exhilarating for its risky union of sexuality and faith. Views: 145
