Orphans of Eldorado

Orphans of Eldorado PDF Author: Milton Hatoum
Publisher: Canongate Books
ISBN: 1847673007
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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Book Description
A magical retelling of the myth of Eldorado, by Brazil's greatest writer. The Enchanted City has inhabited the fevered dreams of many European navigators and consquisitadores, but all have been unable to find it on the map.

Orphans of Eldorado

Orphans of Eldorado PDF Author: Milton Hatoum
Publisher: Canongate Books
ISBN: 1847673007
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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Book Description
A magical retelling of the myth of Eldorado, by Brazil's greatest writer. The Enchanted City has inhabited the fevered dreams of many European navigators and consquisitadores, but all have been unable to find it on the map.

Mourning El Dorado

Mourning El Dorado PDF Author: Charlotte Rogers
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813942675
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 521

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Book Description
What ever happened to the legend of El Dorado, the tale of the mythical city of gold lost in the Amazon jungle? Charlotte Rogers argues that El Dorado has not been forgotten and still inspires the reckless pursuit of illusory wealth. The search for gold in South America during the colonial period inaugurated the "promise of El Dorado"—the belief that wealth and happiness can be found in the tropical forests of the Americas. That assumption has endured over the course of centuries, still evident in the various modes of natural resource extraction, such as oil drilling and mining, that characterize the region today. Mourning El Dorado looks at how fiction from the American tropics written since 1950 engages with the promise of El Dorado in the age of the Anthropocene. Just as the golden kingdom was never found, natural resource extraction has not produced wealth and happiness for the peoples of the tropics. While extractivism enriches a few outsiders, it results in environmental degradation and the subjugation, displacement, and forced assimilation of native peoples. This book considers how the fiction of five writers—Alejo Carpentier, Wilson Harris, Mario Vargas Llosa, Álvaro Mutis, and Milton Hatoum—criticizes extractive practices and mourns the lost illusion of the forest as a place of wealth and happiness.

The Brothers

The Brothers PDF Author: Milton Hatoum
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1429932201
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
Introducing a major new voice in Brazilian letters. Set among a Lebanese immigrant community in the Brazilian port of Manaus, The Brothers is the story of identical twins, Yaqub and Omar, whose mutual jealousy is offset only by their love for their mother. But it is Omar who is the object of Zana's Jocasta-like passion, while her husband, Halim, feels her slipping away from him, as their beautiful daughter, RGnia, makes a tragic claim on her brothers' affection. Vivid, exotic, and lushly atmospheric, The Brothers is the story of a family's disintegration, of a changing city and the culture clash between the native-born inhabitants and a new immigrant group, and of the future the next generation will make from the ruins.

The Emperor's Beard

The Emperor's Beard PDF Author: Lilia Moritz Schwarcz
Publisher: Hill & Wang
ISBN: 9780809042197
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 436

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Book Description
Traces the origins and history of the Brazilian monarchy, the contrast between the empire in Brazil and the trend of establishing republics throughout the New World, and the impact of the reign of Dom Pedro II on the evolution of modern Brazil.

Ragnarok

Ragnarok PDF Author: A.S. Byatt
Publisher: Canongate Books
ISBN: 184767965X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 124

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Book Description
As the bombs rain down in the Second World War, one young girl is evacuated to the English countryside. Struggling to make sense of her new wartime life, she is given a copy of a book of ancient Norse myths and her inner and outer worlds are transformed. Linguistically stunning and imaginatively abundant, Byatt’s mesmerising tale - inspired by the myth of Ragnarok - is a landmark piece of storytelling from one of the world's truly great writers.

"That Fiend in Hell"

Author: Catherine Holder Spude
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806188200
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
As the Klondike gold rush peaked in spring 1898, adventurers and gamblers rubbed shoulders with town-builders and gold-panners in Skagway, Alaska. The flow of riches lured confidence men, too—among them Jefferson Randolph “Soapy” Smith (1860–98), who with an entourage of “bunco-men” conned and robbed the stampeders. Soapy, though, a common enough criminal, would go down in legend as the Robin Hood of Alaska, the “uncrowned king of Skagway,” remembered for his charm and generosity, even for calming a lynch mob. When the Fourth of July was celebrated in ’98, he supposedly led the parade. Then, a few days later, he was dead, killed in a shootout over a card game. With Smith’s death, Skagway rid itself of crime forever. Or at least, so the story goes. Journalists immediately cast him as a martyr whose death redeemed a violent town. In fact, he was just a petty criminal and card shark, as Catherine Holder Spude proves definitively in “That Fiend in Hell”: Soapy Smith in Legend, a tour de force of historical debunking that documents Smith’s elevation to western hero. In sorting out the facts about this man and his death from fiction, Spude concludes that the actual Soapy was not the legendary “boss of Skagway,” nor was he killed by Frank Reid, as early historians supposed. She shows that even eyewitnesses who knew the truth later changed their stories to fit the myth. But why? Tracking down some hundred retellings of the Soapy Smith story, Spude traces the efforts of Skagway’s boosters to reinforce a morality tale at the expense of a complex story of town-building and government formation. The idea that Smith’s death had made a lawless town safe served Skagway’s economic interests. Spude’s engaging deconstruction of Soapy’s story models deep research and skepticism crucial to understanding the history of the American frontier.

A Little History of the World

A Little History of the World PDF Author: E. H. Gombrich
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300213972
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
E. H. Gombrich's Little History of the World, though written in 1935, has become one of the treasures of historical writing since its first publication in English in 2005. The Yale edition alone has now sold over half a million copies, and the book is available worldwide in almost thirty languages. Gombrich was of course the best-known art historian of his time, and his text suggests illustrations on every page. This illustrated edition of the Little History brings together the pellucid humanity of his narrative with the images that may well have been in his mind's eye as he wrote the book. The two hundred illustrations—most of them in full color—are not simple embellishments, though they are beautiful. They emerge from the text, enrich the author's intention, and deepen the pleasure of reading this remarkable work. For this edition the text is reset in a spacious format, flowing around illustrations that range from paintings to line drawings, emblems, motifs, and symbols. The book incorporates freshly drawn maps, a revised preface, and a new index. Blending high-grade design, fine paper, and classic binding, this is both a sumptuous gift book and an enhanced edition of a timeless account of human history.

Rebel Rebel

Rebel Rebel PDF Author: Chris Sullivan
Publisher: Unbound Publishing
ISBN: 1789650038
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 497

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Book Description
Thirty-four essays and interviews with some of the greatest individuals, malcontents and free thinkers of the last 150 years - including Louise Brooks, Richard Pryor, David Bowie, Liam Gallagher and Daniel Day-Lewis - this is a collection that exonerates the maverick and celebrates the individual. It is an essential read for the left of field.

Ashes of the Amazon

Ashes of the Amazon PDF Author: Milton Hatoum
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
"The story of a long rebellion and the struggle to understand it. The rebel is Mundo, the embittered offshoot of a family split down the middle. The attempt to understand him falls to Lavo, a hard-working orphan who betters himself under the influence of Mundo's father.However, the symbolic heart of the book lies not so much in Manaus and the final years of a boom produced by the merciless exploitation of the forest, but further down the great river, in Vila Amazonia, the centre of a jute plantation and Mundo's worst nightmare.In his lifelong struggle to escape from his father's dynastic ambitions, Mundo distances himself as much as possible from this dead-centre of the novel, taking the plot to Rio de Janeiro and the effervescent worlds of Berlin and London in the 1970s. This beautiful, mature and bitter novel is the extraordinary result." -- BOOK JACKET.

Intimate Frontiers

Intimate Frontiers PDF Author: Felipe Martínez-Pinzón
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1786949725
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Intimate Frontiers: A Literary Geography of the Amazon analyzes the ways in which the Amazon has been represented in twentieth century cultural production. With contributions by scholars working in Latin America, the US and Europe, Intimate Frontiers reads against the grain commonly held notions about the region —its gigantism, its richness, its exceptionality, among other— choosing to approach these rather from quotidian, everyday experiences of a more intimate nature. The multinational, pluriethnic corpus of texts critically examined here, explores a wide range of cultural artifacts including travelogues, diaries, and novels about the rubber boom genocide, as well as indigenous oral histories, documentary films, and photography about the region. The different voices gathered in this book show that the richness of the Amazon lays not in its natural resources or opportunities for economic exploit, but in the richness of its histories/stories in the form of songs, oral histories, images, material culture, and texts.