Land Of Marvels

Author : Barry Unsworth
Publisher : Nan A. Talese
ISBN 13 : 0385529473
Total Pages : 306 pages
Book Rating : 4.71/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Land of Marvels written by Barry Unsworth and published by Nan A. Talese. This book was released on 2009-01-06 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Paola Bertucci
Publisher : JHU Press
ISBN 13 : 1421447118
Total Pages : 157 pages
Book Rating : 4.17/5 ( download)

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Download or read book In the Land of Marvels written by Paola Bertucci and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2023-10-17 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How a journey through Italy casts light on secrets, stereotypes, and the manipulation of information in eighteenth-century science. In 1749, the celebrated French physicist Jean-Antoine Nollet set out on a journey through Italy to solve an international controversy over the medical uses of electricity. At the end of his nine-month tour, he published a highly influential account of his philosophical battle with his Italian counterparts, discrediting them as misguided devotees of the marvelous. Paola Bertucci's In the Land of Marvels brilliantly reveals the mysteries of Nollet's journey, uncovering a subterranean world of secretive and ambitious intelligence gathering masked as scientific inquiry. The advent of electricity was a pivotal phenomenon not only in the history of physical experimentation, but also in the cultivation of popular scientific interest. Nollet's journey was supposedly inspired by the need to investigate, and subsequently report on, claims of the use of electrified "medicated tubes" by their Italian inventor Gianfrancesco Pivati. Motivated by economic interests in the silk industry, Nollet's journey was in fact an undercover mission commissioned by the French state to discover the secrets of Italian silk manufacture and possibly supplant its international success. The event that sparked the medical controversy—the unusual cure of a bishop—was a complete fabrication. Bertucci insightfully contrasts published accounts of the event with private documents and discusses how eighteenth-century scientists published fictional events and results to bolster their careers, ultimately leading to long-lasting misrepresentations of scientific practice and enduring stereotypes. In the Land of Marvels reveals the constellation of historical actors, from reputed physicists to travel writers and electrical amateurs, who manipulated information to gain authority and prestige.

Author : Theodor Vernaleken
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 376 pages
Book Rating : 4.25/5 ( download)

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Download or read book In the Land of Marvels written by Theodor Vernaleken and published by . This book was released on 1884 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Eric Dregni
Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
ISBN 13 : 9781452904931
Total Pages : 368 pages
Book Rating : 4.36/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Minnesota Marvels written by Eric Dregni and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : John Mandeville
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0191629103
Total Pages : 224 pages
Book Rating : 4.05/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Book of Marvels and Travels written by John Mandeville and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-09-13 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Another island in the Great Ocean has many sinful and malevolent women, who have precious gems in their eyes.' 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. He tells us about the Sultan in Cairo, the Great Khan in China, and the mythical Christian prince Prester John. There are giants and pygmies, cannibals and Amazons, headless humans and people with a single foot so huge it can shield them from the sun . Forceful and opinionated, the narrator is by turns bossy, learned, playful, and moralizing, with an endless curiosity about different cultures. Written in the fourteenth century, the Book is a captivating blend of fact and fantasy, an extraordinary travel narrative that offers some revealing and unexpected attitudes towards other races and religions. It was immensely popular, and numbered among its readers Chaucer, Columbus, and Thomas More. Anthony Bale's new translation emphasizes the book's readability, and his introduction and notes bring us closer to Mandeville's medieval worldview. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Author : Leslie Parry
Publisher : HarperCollins
ISBN 13 : 0062367579
Total Pages : 223 pages
Book Rating : 4.70/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Church of Marvels written by Leslie Parry and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2015-05-05 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Barry Unsworth
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781408428603
Total Pages : 287 pages
Book Rating : 4.01/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Land of Marvels written by Barry Unsworth and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Barry Unsworth has the extraordinary ability to re-create the past and make it relevant to contemporary readers. In Land of Marvels, an historical thriller set in 1914, he brings to life the schemes and double-dealings of Western nations grappling for a f

Author : Eduardo Mendoza
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780002710374
Total Pages : 418 pages
Book Rating : 4.74/5 ( download)

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Download or read book City of Marvels written by Eduardo Mendoza and published by . This book was released on 1990 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Theodor Vernaleken
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 372 pages
Book Rating : 4.JG/5 ( download)

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Download or read book In the Land of Marvels written by Theodor Vernaleken and published by . This book was released on 1884 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Douglas Wolk
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 0735222185
Total Pages : 385 pages
Book Rating : 4.82/5 ( download)

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Download or read book All of the Marvels written by Douglas Wolk and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2023-10-03 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2022 Eisner Award for Best Comics-Related Book The first-ever full reckoning with Marvel Comics’ interconnected, half-million-page story, a revelatory guide to the “epic of epics”—and to the past sixty years of American culture—from a beloved authority on the subject who read all 27,000+ Marvel superhero comics and lived to tell the tale “Brilliant, eccentric, moving and wholly wonderful. . . . Wolk proves to be the perfect guide for this type of adventure: nimble, learned, funny and sincere. . . . All of the Marvels is magnificently marvelous. Wolk’s work will invite many more alliterative superlatives. It deserves them all.” —Junot Díaz, New York Times Book Review The superhero comic books that Marvel Comics has published since 1961 are, as Douglas Wolk notes, the longest continuous, self-contained work of fiction ever created: over half a million pages to date, and still growing. The Marvel story is a gigantic mountain smack in the middle of contemporary culture. Thousands of writers and artists have contributed to it. Everyone recognizes its protagonists: Spider-Man, the Avengers, the X-Men. Eighteen of the hundred highest-grossing movies of all time are based on parts of it. Yet not even the people telling the story have read the whole thing—nobody’s supposed to. So, of course, that’s what Wolk did: he read all 27,000+ comics that make up the Marvel Universe thus far, from Alpha Flight to Omega the Unknown. And then he made sense of it—seeing into the ever-expanding story, in its parts and as a whole, and seeing through it, as a prism through which to view the landscape of American culture. In Wolk’s hands, the mammoth Marvel narrative becomes a fun-house-mirror history of the past sixty years, from the atomic night terrors of the Cold War to the technocracy and political division of the present day—a boisterous, tragicomic, magnificently filigreed epic about power and ethics, set in a world transformed by wonders. As a work of cultural exegesis, this is sneakily significant, even a landmark; it’s also ludicrously fun. Wolk sees fascinating patterns—the rise and fall of particular cultural aspirations, and of the storytelling modes that conveyed them. He observes the Marvel story’s progressive visions and its painful stereotypes, its patches of woeful hackwork and stretches of luminous creativity, and the way it all feeds into a potent cosmology that echoes our deepest hopes and fears. This is a huge treat for Marvel fans, but it’s also a revelation for readers who don’t know Doctor Strange from Doctor Doom. Here, truly, are all of the marvels.