Genre Other. Page - 363
Description
Voodoo Planet is the third in a series of novels featuring the adventures of Dane Thorson and the spaceship Solar Queen, written in the 1950s by Andre Norton under her male pseudonym, Andrew North. In this installment, Dane and his shipmates land on the safari planet Khatka, settled by African refugees of an atomic race war on Earth. They soon face off with a witch doctor seeking to take over the planet.
This short work was originally published as a double title paperback by Ace Books in 1959 along with a reprint of Plague Ship, the second novel in the series. Norton followed it with a sequel ten years later and then co-authored a revival of the series in the 1990s.
Description
Giovanna and Costantino Ledda are a happily married young Sardinian couple living a contented village existence with their small child and extended family. But after Costantino is wrongly convicted of murdering his uncle and imprisoned, the now‐impoverished Giovanna reluctantly divorces him under a newly enacted divorce law and marries Brontu Dejas, a wealthy but cruel drunkard who has always coveted her. While enduring a slave’s existence within this new marriage as well as the community’s derision of her as the “wife with two husbands,” the broken Giovanna is unexpectedly reunited with an embittered Costantino after his exoneration and early release from prison, and the two resume their now‐illicit relationship.
An exploration of hypocrisy, expiation, and the human disruption of a supernatural order that remorselessly reasserts itself, After the Divorce is set in an insular society of ancient, religious roots grappling with the intrusion of modern, secular social mores and is among the earliest of the serious works on which Grazia Deledda’s literary reputation is based. Deledda—the first Italian woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature—critiqued the social norms of her native Sardinia through verismo depictions of the struggles of the lower classes, into which she wove elements of her own personal tragedies.
Description
Eminent Victorians consists of four short biographies by Lytton Strachey of Victorians who were famous in their day: Cardinal Manning, a powerful cleric; Florence Nightingale, founder of modern nursing; Thomas Arnold, founder of the modern-day English public school style; and General Gordon, a popular officer of the British Army.
In Strachey’s day, these people were considered heroes and paragons of Victorian morality and ethics. But instead of lengthy, glowing biographies, Strachey opts for short, witty, and biting biographies that skewer their subjects. All of the subjects are portrayed with their human flaws and moral contradictions on full display, implicitly knocking down the sanctimonious visions of these former heroes (perhaps with the exception of Nightingale, who, while portrayed as an often-cold and mercilessly-driven taskmistress, nevertheless escaped with her reputation enhanced).
The biographies are not only interesting for their wit, humor, and readability, but because of the windows they open to the issues of the age. Manning’s biography occurs against the backdrop of a time of upheaval in the English Catholic church, with concepts like Papal Infallability entering the picture; Nightingale’s biography shines light on the appalling conditions of war; Arnold’s biography is a lens on the development of formal education and schools; and Gordon’s biography reveals England as an empire growing more unsteady, whose ability to influence and control faraway lands is not as certain as it might think.
Eminent Victorians took six years to write and was met with glowing reviews on its publication. It made Strachey famous and cemented his name in the list of top-tier biographers.
Description
His Last Bow: Some Reminiscences of Sherlock Holmes is the fourth collection of Sherlock Holmes stories published by Arthur Conan Doyles. It begins with a preface by Dr. John Watson, supposedly written in 1917, assuring the reader that Holmes is still alive but living in quiet retirement in Sussex.
This collection contains the well-known stories “The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans,” in which Holmes has to track down stolen plans for a new kind of submarine; and “The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot” in which a Cornish family is found one morning driven mad or dead, with expressions of horror on their faces. The titular story “His Last Bow” is set on the very eve of the outbreak of the First World War, and involves Holmes and Watson coming out of retirement to defeat a German spy.
Description
Benjamin Disraeli was a remarkable historical figure. Born into a Jewish family, he converted to Anglican Christianity as a child. He is now almost certainly most famous for his political career. Becoming a member of the British Parliament at the age of 33, he initially rose to prominence within the Conservative (“Tory”) party because of his clashes with the then Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel. Rising to lead the Conservative Party, Disraeli became Prime Minister for a short period in 1868, and then for an extended period between 1874 and 1880. He became friendly with Queen Victoria and was appointed Earl of Beaconsfield by her in 1876.
However, Disraeli was much more than a politician. He wrote both political treatises and no less than seventeen novels during his lifetime, of which Sybil, or The Two Nations is now among the best regarded. The “Two Nations” of the subtitle refer to the divisions in Britain between the rich and the poor, each of whom might as well be living in a different country from the other. In the novel, Disraeli highlights the terrible living conditions of the poor and the shocking injustices of how they were treated by most employers and land-owners. He contrasts this with the frivolous, pampered lifestyles of the aristocracy. He covers the rise of the Chartist movement, which was demanding universal manhood suffrage—the right for all adult men to vote, regardless of whether they owned property—and other reforms to enable working men a voice in the government of the country. (Female suffrage was to come much later). The upheavals of the time led to the development of the People’s Charter and a massive petition with millions of signatures being presented to Parliament. However the Parliament of the time refused to even consider the petition, triggering violent protests in Birmingham and elsewhere. All of this is well covered and explained in the novel.
Sybil is rather disjointed in structure as it ranges over these different topics, but the main plot revolves around Egremont, the younger son of a nobleman, who encounters some of the leaders of the workers’ movement and in particular Walter Gerard, one of the most respected of these leaders, whom Egremont befriends while concealing his real name and social position. During visits to Gerard under an assumed name, Egremont falls for the beautiful and saintly Sybil, Gerard’s daughter, but she rejects him when his true identity is exposed. Sybil subsequently undergoes many difficult trials as the people’s movement develops and comes into conflict with the authorities.
Description
Born in 1842, Camille Flammarion was a French astronomer who wrote many popular books about science and astronomy, together with a number of novels which we would now consider to be science fiction. He was a contemporary of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, though his works never achieved their level of popularity.
Omega: The Last Days of the World is an English translation of Flammarion’s novel La Fin du Monde, published in 1893. The book’s fictional premise is the discovery of a comet on a collision course with the Earth in the 25th century. However, this is mostly a pretext on which Flammarion can hang his interesting scientific speculations about how the world will end, together with philosophical thoughts about war and religion. Much of the scientific description he uses in the book, while accurately representing the knowledge and thinking of his time, has today been superseded by modern discoveries. For example, we now know the source of the Sun’s energy to be nuclear fusion rather than being due to gravitational contraction and the constant infall of meteorites.
When talking about the ills of society, however, Flammarion could well be talking about today’s world. For example, he excoriates the vast waste of society’s resources on war, and demonstrates how much more productive each nation’s economy would be without it. He also depicts the media of his future world as having been entirely taken over by commercial interests, publishing only what will excite the greatest number of readers rather than serving the public interest.
Omega ranges over a vast period of time, from prehistory through to millions of years in the future when mankind has been reduced to the last two doomed individuals. Nevertheless, the book ends on a hopeful and inspiring note.
Description
Arsène Lupin’s attempted robbery of the deputy Daubrecq has gone horribly wrong, leaving behind a murdered man and two of his accomplices in the hands of the police. Now he finds himself pulled into an ever more conspiratorial spiral as he attempts to gain leverage over the people who can free his men. Set before the events of the preceding 813, this again portrays Lupin in a much different light to the earlier books. At times almost coming to despair, this story shows him grappling with his personal morals whilst trying to do the best for those closest to him.
The story was originally serialised in Le Journal in 1912, before being published as a novel in both the original French and this English translation by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos in 1913.
Description
The Prince and the Pauper remains one of Twain’s more popular novels, having been adapted many times for the stage, screen, and elsewhere. When Tom Canty, a young pauper in London, meets Prince Edward, the two switch clothes and assume the other’s identity. Tom then learns the life of royalty, while the true prince discovers the troubles of commoners.
As usual, Twain delivers both humor and social commentary in abundance. Although aimed at children, Pauper provides moral and social criticism of topics like the justice system and inequality, and deals with themes which appeal to readers of all ages.
Description
Ardalyon Borisitch Peredonov believes himself better than his job as a teacher, and hopes that the Princess will be able to promote him to the position of Inspector. Unfortunately for him his connection to the Princess is through his fiancée Varvara, and she has her own plans. With little sign of the desired position his life of petty cruelty escalates, even as his grip on reality begins to break apart and his paranoia manifests itself in hallucinations of a shadowy creature.
Finished in 1907, The Little Demon (alternatively translated as The Petty Demon) is Fyodor Sologub’s most famous novel, and received both popular and critical attention on its publication despite its less-than-favorable depictions of provincial Russian life. Its portrayal of Peredonov as a paranoid character simultaneously both banal and bereft of goodness is an essay on the Russian concept of poshlost; a theme that makes an appearance in many other Russian novels, not least Chichikov in Gogol’s Dead Souls. This translation (primarily by John Cournos) was published in 1916, and includes a preface by Sologub for the English-speaking reader.
Description
Whether it’s the benefits of taking it slow and steady (“The Tortoise and the Hare”), the necessity of invention (“The Crow and the Pitcher”), or the problems of cognitive dissonance (“The Fox and the Grapes”), Aesop has a fable for every occasion. Aesop lived in Greece in the 6th century BCE, far enough in the past that it’s become impossible to ascribe all these fables to him. Some were certainly retellings of older myths, some share their roots in collections of fables from India and further afield, and many were added well after his time. However, they all share a certain quality of prose that marks them out as belonging to the collection regardless of authorship. It’s that quality, combined with their insight into the human character, that has meant that they’ve stood the test of time for twenty-five centuries.
This collection is the 1912 translation by V. S. Vernon Jones, comprising two hundred and eighty-four of the fables.