Ernest J. Gaines5.0 A Lesson Before Dying, is set in a small Cajun community in the late 1940s. Jefferson, a young black man, is an unwitting party to a liquor store shoot out in which three men are killed; the only survivor, he is convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Grant Wiggins, who left his hometown for the university, has returned to the plantation school to teach. As he struggles with his decision whether to stay or escape to another state, his aunt and Jefferson's godmother persuade him to visit Jefferson in his cell and impart his learning and his pride to Jefferson before his death. In the end, the two men forge a bond as they both come to understand the simple heroism of resisting—and defying—the expected.
Rikki Ducornet0.0 Made speechless by her eccentric father, the beautiful Etheria is traded for a piece of precious jade. Memory, her sister, tells her story, that of a childhood enlivened by Lewis Carroll and an orangutan named Dr. Johnson and envenomed by the pernicious courtship of Radulph Tubbs, Queen Victoria's own Dragon of Industry. The novel travels from Oxford to Egypt where one million ibis mummies wait to be transformed into fertilizer, where Baconfield the architect will cause a pyramid to collapse, and where a scorned and bloated hunger artist who speaks in tongues will plot a bloody revenge. The fourth element in a tetralogy of novels - Earth (The Stain), Fire (Entering Fire), Water (The Fountains of Neptune) and Air - The Jade Cabinet is both a riveting novel and a reflection on the nature of memory and desire, language and power. Following the novel is an afterword, "Waking to Eden, " in which Ducornet reflects on the sources for her writing and on the quartet of novels completed by The Jade Cabinet.
Фрэнсис Шервуд0.0 The story of Mary Wollstonecraft, a pioneer feminist and author of the radical classic A Vindication of the Rights of Women, is an impassioned, beautifully written portrait of a remarkable 18th-century woman with 20th-century sensibilities--historical fiction at its most gripping and convincing. Author reading tour. Radio news features.
Bobbie Ann Mason0.0 Set in the apocalyptic atmosphere of 1900--a time when many Americans were looking for signs foretelling the end of the world--Feather Crowns is the story of a young woman who unintentionally creates a national sensation. A farm wife living near the small town of Hopewell, Kentucky, Christianna Wheeler gives birth to the first recorded set of quintuplets in North America.
Christie is suddenly thrown into a swirling storm of public attention. Thousands of strangers descend on her home, all wanting too see and touch the "miracle babies." One visitor crawls right in through the window! The fate of the babies and the bizarre events that follow their births propel Christie and her husband far from home, on a journey that exposes them to the turbulent pageant of life at the beginning of the modern era.
Richly detailed and poignant, Feather Crowns focuses on one woman but opens out ultimately into the chronicle of a time and a people. Written in Bobbie Ann Mason's taut yet lyrical prose, the novel ranges from a peaceful farming community to a fire-and-brimstone revival camp, from seamy traveling shows to the hushed precincts of the nation's capital. Moving through the center of it all is Christie, a charming, headstrong, loving woman who struggles heroically to come to terms with the extraordinary events of her long life.
Feather Crowns is an American parable of profound resonance. Spellbindingly readable, it is a novel of classic stature destined to confirm Bobbie Ann Mason as one of America's most important writers.
Энни Прул4.0 Незадачливый журналист после семейной трагедии возвращается из Нью-Йорка на о. Ньюфаундленд, землю своих предков. Трагикомичная романтическая история о нескольких поколениях ньюфаундлендских поселенцев - клане Куойлов, - полная жутких семейных тайн, грустного юмора и лиризма. Пулитцеровская премия за 1994 год.
Алан Ломакс0.0 A self-described “song-hunter,” the folklorist Alan Lomax traveled the Mississippi Delta in the 1930’s and ‘40s, armed with primitive recording equipment and a keen love of the Delta’s music heritage. Crisscrossing the towns and hamlets where the blues began, Lomax gave voice to such greats as Leadbelly, Fred MacDowell, Muddy Waters, and many others, all of whom made their debut recordings with him.
The Land Where the Blues Began is Lomax’s “stingingly well-written cornbread-and-moonshine odyssey” (Kirkus Reviews) through America’s musical heartland. Through candid conversations with bluesmen and vivid, firsthand accounts of the landscape where their music was born, Lomax’s “discerning reconstructions . . . give life to a domain most of us can never know . . . one that summons us with an oddly familiar sensation of reverence and dread” (The New York Times Book Review). The Land Where the Blues Began captures the irrepressible energy of soul of people who changed American musical history.
Winner of the 1993 National Critics Circle Award for nonfiction, The Land Where the Blues Began is now available in a handsome new paperback edition.
Russ Rymer0.0 The compelling story of a young woman's emergence into the world after spending her first 13 years strapped to a chair, and her rescue and exploitation by scientists hoping to gain new insight into language acquisition.
Джордж Шаллер0.0 Dependent on a shrinking supply of bamboo, hunted mercilessly for its pelt, and hostage to profiteering schemes once in captivity, the panda is on the brink of extinction. Here, acclaimed naturalist George Schaller uses his great evocative powers, and the insight gained by four and a half years in the forests of the Wolong and Tangjiahe panda reserves, to document the plight of these mysterious creatures and to awaken the human compassion urgently needed to save them.
"No scientist is better at letting the rest of us in on just how the natural world works; no poet sees the world with greater clarity or writes about it with more grace. . . . Anyone who genuinely cares for wildlife cannot help being grateful to Schaller—both for his efforts to understand the panda and for the candor with which he reports what has gone so badly wrong in the struggle to save it from extinction."—Geoffrey C. Ward, New York Times Book Review
"Schaller's book is a unique mix of natural history and the politics of conservation, and it makes for compelling reading. . . . Having been in giant panda country myself, I found some of the descriptions of the animals and habitats breathtaking. Schaller describes the daily routines and personalities of the giant pandas he studied (as well as their fates thereafter) as though they were his blood relatives. . . . Schaller's brilliant presentation of the complexities of conservation makes his book a milestone for the conservation movement."—Devra G. Kleiman, Washington Post Book World
"George Schaller's most soulful work, written in journal style with many asides about a creature who evolved only two to three million years ago (about the same time as humans). . . . Here, conservation biology confronts an evil that grinds against hope and shatters the planet's diversity. Written with hope."—Whole Earth Catalog
"A nicely crafted blend of wildlife observation and political-cultural analysis. . . . The Last Panda is a sad chronicle of our failure, so far, to stem the decline of the animal that may be the most beloved on the planet."—Donald Dale Jackson, Smithsonian
Розмари Махони0.0 Written with the art of a skilled fiction writer whose ear for Irish bluster is pitch-perfect, Whoredom in Kimmage tells the tale of contemporary Irish women through a series of brilliantly animated scenes that take the reader from Dillon's tiny pub in rural Corofin to the heart of Dublin. This beguiling account of Irish life transcends that nation's small shores through the power of Mahoney's great storytelling gifts.
Before the phenomena of Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes, and Thomas Cahill's How the Irish Saved Civilization, Rosemary Mahoney traveled to Ireland in response to the growing feeling that changes were taking place, and that those changes directly involved women. Her ideas are animated in brilliantly crafted scenes, taking the reader from Dillon's tiny pub in Corofin to a lesbian pub in Dublin, from a Legion of Mary meeting to a classroom full of boisterous schoolgirls determined to drive their teacher, S'ta Keatin', over the edge. Here, too, are scenes with Ireland's first woman president, Mary Robinson, and the country's preeminent woman poet, Eavan Boland. But most memorable, and perhaps most prescient of the recent enchantment with literature about the Emerald Isle, are Mahoney's pitch-perfect ear for Irish bluster and warmth, her eye for detail, and people so real and unforgettable you'd think they were having a cup of tea with you.
Дэвид Ремник4.3 18 августа 1991 года на улицах Москвы появились танки. Начался августовский путч, после провала которого всем станет очевидно – Советский Cоюз трещит по швам и дни его сочтены. Дэвид Ремник к тому моменту уже четыре года работал журналистом The Washington Post в Москве и был в эпицентре всех судьбоносных событий этого драматичного периода. Перестройка, гласность, чернобыльская катастрофа, реабилитация классической русской литературы, раскопки в Катыни, "правый поворот", свободная пресса. Свой рассказ о крушении последней в мире империи Ремник строит на судебных показаниях и личных беседах, на засекреченных документах сталинской эпохи и воспоминаниях участников событий, на интервью и, конечно, собственных наблюдениях. Как иностранный журналист он имел уникальную возможность заходить и в кабинеты самых высокопоставленных лиц государства, и на кухни к диссидентам и правозащитникам.
