Author: Shirley Hazzard
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374706352
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 338
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Book Description
The Great Fire is the winner of the 2003 National Book Award for Fiction. A great writer's sweeping story of men and women struggling to reclaim their lives in the aftermath of world conflict The Great Fire is Shirley Hazzard's first novel since The Transit of Venus, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1981. The conflagration of her title is the Second World War. In war-torn Asia and stricken Europe, men and women, still young but veterans of harsh experience, must reinvent their lives and expectations, and learn, from their past, to dream again. Some will fulfill their destinies, others will falter. At the center of the story, Aldred Leith, a brave and brilliant soldier, finds that survival and worldly achievement are not enough. Helen Driscoll, a young girl living in occupied Japan and tending her dying brother, falls in love, and in the process discovers herself. In the looming shadow of world enmities resumed, and of Asia's coming centrality in world affairs, a man and a woman seek to recover self-reliance, balance, and tenderness, struggling to reclaim their humanity.
Author: Jim Murphy
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.
ISBN: 1338113534
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 179
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Book Description
The Great Fire of 1871 was one of most colossal disasters in American history. Overnight, the flourshing city of Chicago was transformed into a smoldering wasteland. The damage was so profound that few people believed the city could ever rise again.By weaving personal accounts of actual survivors together with the carefully researched history of Chicago and the disaster, Jim Murphy constructs a riveting narrative that recreates the event with drama and immediacy. And finally, he reveals how, even in a time of deepest dispair, the human spirit triumphed, as the people of Chicago found the courage and strength to build their city once again.
Author: Mary Renault
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1480432873
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 605
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Book Description
New York Times Bestseller and Man Booker Prize Finalist: A novel of ancient Greece by the author Hilary Mantel calls “a shining light.” Alexander the Great stands alone as a leader and strategist, and Fire from Heaven is Mary Renault’s unsurpassed dramatization of the formative years of his life. His parents fight for their precocious son’s love: On one side, his volatile father, Philip, and on the other, his overbearing mother, Olympias. The story tells of the conqueror’s two great bonds—to his horse, Oxhead, and to his dearest friend and eventual lover, Hephaistion—and of the army he commands when he is barely an adult. Coming of age during the battles for southern Greece, Alexander the Great appears in all of his colors—as the man who first takes someone’s life at age twelve and who swiftly eliminates his rivals as soon as he comes to power—and emerges as a captivating, complex, larger-than-life figure. Fire from Heaven is the first volume of the Novels of Alexander the Great trilogy, which continues with The Persian Boy and Funeral Games. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Mary Renault including rare images of the author. “Mary Renault is a shining light to both historical novelists and their readers. She does not pretend the past is like the present, or that the people of ancient Greece were just like us. She shows us their strangeness; discerning, sure-footed, challenging our values, piquing our curiosity, she leads us through an alien landscape that moves and delights us.” —Hilary Mantel
Author: Carl Smith
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
ISBN: 0802148115
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 279
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Book Description
A definitive chronicle of the 1871 Chicago Fire as remembered by those who experienced it—from the author of Chicago and the American Literary Imagination. Over three days in October, 1871, much of Chicago, Illinois, was destroyed by one of the most legendary urban fires in history. Incorporated as a city in 1837, Chicago had grown at a breathtaking pace in the intervening decades—and much of the hastily-built city was made of wood. Starting in Catherine and Patrick O’Leary’s barn, the Fire quickly grew out of control, twice jumping branches of the Chicago River on its relentless path through the city’s three divisions. While the death toll was miraculously low, nearly a third of Chicago residents were left homeless and more were instantly unemployed. This popular history of the Great Chicago Fire approaches the subject through the memories of those who experienced it. Chicago historian Carl Smith builds the story around memorable characters, both known to history and unknown, including the likes of General Philip Sheridan and Robert Todd Lincoln. Smith chronicles the city’s rapid growth and its place in America’s post-Civil War expansion. The dramatic story of the fire—revealing human nature in all its guises—became one of equally remarkable renewal, as Chicago quickly rose back up from the ashes thanks to local determination and the world’s generosity. As we approach the fire’s 150th anniversary, Carl Smith’s compelling narrative at last gives this epic event its full and proper place in our national chronicle. “The best book ever written about the fire, a work of deep scholarship by Carl Smith that reads with the forceful narrative of a fine novel. It puts the fire and its aftermath in historical, political and social context. It’s a revelatory pleasure to read.” —Chicago Tribune
Author: Neil Hanson
Publisher: Turner Publishing Company
ISBN: 0470450703
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 275
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Book Description
Acclaim for The Great Fire of London "Popular narrative history at its best, well researched, imaginatively and dramatically written. . . . The author marshals his story and his mass of contemporary quotations with great skill." —Times Literary Supplement "The brilliance of its narrative chapters . . . a marvelous eye for evocative detail. Hanson’s prose is animated by the ferocious energy of the fire and seems to be guided by its inexorable movement. He creates the literary equivalent of the special effects in a disaster movie. . . . A rich mixture of imagination and research." —The Daily Telegraph (London) "He writes with knowledge and verve. As if making a television documentary on a natural disaster, he includes a gripping technical chapter on the mechanism and chemistry of combustion. This works brilliantly. . . . The book gains immeasurably from the author's eye for detail and from his understanding of the beliefs and prejudices of the day. . . . Informative and lively account." —The Sunday Times (London) "The best depiction of the Great Fire seen to date. . . . He manages to describe not only the atmosphere of the event itself, but also the experience of living in seventeenth-century Britain." —Soho Independent "A riveting book for those who like their history with a bit of mystery." —The Brisbane News "A rollicking good yarn." —The Age (Melbourne) "Blends high-class original research with a narrative style that mimics fiction. . . . Horrific subjects have served this man well and he has a knack for plugging into the dark themes that run like molten rivers beneath our social veneer." —New Zealand Herald "Neil Hanson’s descriptions of the inferno are like CNN reports from Kosovo." —Camden New Journal "It's not the technical data which makes the book so riveting though. It's the flair with which Hanson invests his account with qualities usually reserved for novels–narrative drive, persuasive character sketches, vivid scene stealing." —Sunday Star Times (New Zealand)
Author: Rachel Caine
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0698180828
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 370
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Book Description
The New York Times Bestseller In Ink and Bone, bestselling author Rachel Caine introduced a world where knowledge is power, and power corrupts absolutely. Now she continues the story of those who dare to defy the Great Library—and rewrite history... Jess Brightwell has survived his introduction to the sinister, seductive world of the Library, but serving in its army is nothing like he envisioned. His life and the lives of those he cares for have been altered forever. Embarking on a mission to save one of their own, Jess and his band of allies make one wrong move and suddenly find themselves hunted by the Library’s deadly automata and forced to flee Alexandria, all the way to London. But Jess’s home isn’t safe anymore. The Welsh army is coming, London is burning, and soon Jess must choose between his friends, his family, and the Library, which is willing to sacrifice anything and anyone in the search for ultimate control...
Author: Shirley Hazzard
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 0374720487
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 318
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Book Description
Collected Stories includes both volumes of the National Book Award–winning author Shirley Hazzard’s short-story collections—Cliffs of Fall and People in Glass Houses—alongside uncollected works and two previously unpublished stories Shirley Hazzard's Collected Stories is a work of staggering breadth and accomplishment. Taken together, these twenty-eight short stories are masterworks in telescoping focus, ranging from quotidian struggles between beauty and pragmatism to satirical send-ups of international bureaucracy, from the Italian countryside to suburban Connecticut. Hazzard's heroes are high-minded romantics who attempt to fit their feelings into the twentieth-century world of office jobs and dreary marriages. After all, as she writes in "The Picnic," "It was tempting to confine oneself to what one could cope with. And one couldn't cope with love." And yet it is the comedy, the tragedy, and the splendor of love, the pursuit and the absence of it, that animates Hazzard's stories and provides the truth and beauty that her protagonists seek. Hazzard once said, "The idea that somebody has expressed something, in a supreme way, that it can be expressed; this is, I think, an enormous feature of literature." Her stories themselves are a supreme evocation of writing at its very best: probing, uncompromising, and deeply felt.
Author: John O'Leary
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1501117742
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 288
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Book Description
In the bestselling tradition of Brene Brown’s Daring Greatly and Nick Vujicic’s Life Without Limits comes a rousing 7-step plan for living a life on fire, filled with hope and possibility—from an inspirational speaker who survived a near-fatal fire at the age of nine and now runs a successful business inspiring people all around the world. When John O’Leary was nine years old, he was almost killed in a devastating house fire. With burns on one hundred percent of his body, O’Leary mustered an almost unimaginable amount of inner strength just to survive the ordeal. The insights he gained through this experience and the heroes who stepped into his life to help him through the journey—his family, the medical staff, and total strangers—changed his life. Now he is committed to living life to the fullest and inspiring others to do the same. An incredible and emotionally honest account of triumph over tragedy, On Fire contains O’Leary’s reflections on being that little boy, the life-giving choices made then, and the resulting lessons he learned. O’Leary very clearly shares that without the right people providing the right guidance, at the right time, he never would have made it through those five months in the hospital, let alone the years that followed as he struggled to regain mobility, embrace his story, and ignite clarity of his life’s purpose. On Fire encourages us to seize the power to choose our path and transform our lives from mundane to extraordinary. Once we stop thinking solely on the big moments in our lives, we can begin to focus on those smaller opportunities that tend to pass us by. These are the events—the inflection points in our lives—that can determine how we feel about life now, where we are headed in the future, and how many lives we can impact along the way. We can’t always choose the path we walk, but we can choose how we walk it. Empowering, inspiring, remarkably honest, and heartfelt, O’Leary’s strength and incredible spirit shine through on every page.
Author: William H. Cottrell
Publisher: Mountain Press
ISBN: 9780878424917
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
To help readers understand the science of fire, Cottrell illustrates combustion events that most people are familiar with, such as a flickering candle. He uses these illustrations to introduce readers to wildland fire behavior, fire types, and fuel levels.
Author: Dan Howell
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1473528070
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 227
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Book Description
Hello reader! In this book is a world. A world created by two awkward guys who share their lives on the internet! We are Dan and Phil and we invite you on a journey inside our minds! From the stories of our actual births, to exploring Phil’s teenage diary and all the reasons why Dan’s a fail. Learn how to draw the perfect cat whiskers, get advice on how to make YouTube videos and discover which of our dining chairs represents you emotionally. With everything from what we text each other, to the time we met One Direction and what really happened in Vegas... This is The Amazing Book Is Not On Fire!
