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books tagged “us”
books tagged “us”
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Americans: The National Experienceby Daniel J. BoorstinISBN 007553701X (0-07-553701-X)
Softcover, McGraw-Hill
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Angle of Reposeby Wallace StegnerISBN 014016930X (0-14-016930-X)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Angle of Repose'Book summary:Wallace Stegner's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is a story of discovery -- personal, historical, and geographical. Confined to a wheelchair, retired historian Lyman Ward sets out to write his grandparents' remarkable story, chronicling their days spent carving civilization into the surface of America's western frontier. But his research reveals even more about his own life than he's willing to admit. What emerges is an enthralling portrait of four generations in the life of an American family.
Like other great quests in literature, Lyman Ward's investigation leads him deep into the dark shadows of his own life. The result is a deeply moving novel that, through the prism of one family, illuminates the American present against the fascinating background of its past. [via]
April 1865: The Month That Saved Americaby Jay WinikISBN 0060930888 (0-06-093088-8)
Softcover, Harpercollins
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Aspern Papers and Other Storiesby Henry JamesISBN 014004101X (0-14-004101-X)
Hardcover, Penguin
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Aspern Papers and Other Stories'Book summary:The Aspern Papers, which deals with a determined scholar's efforts to acquire a collection of letters by an important American poet, is combined with three stories that comment on social and artistic mores in turn-of-the-century London. [via]
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At Dawn We Slept: The Untold Story of Pearl Harborby Donald M. Goldstein, Katherine V. Dillon, Gordon William PrangeISBN 0140157344 (0-14-015734-4)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA
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› Find signed collectible books: 'At Dawn We Slept: The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor'Book summary:The surprise Japanese dawn air raid on the American naval fleet at Pearl Harbour on 7 December 1941 was one of the major turning points in history. It caused massive devastation, caught the United States unaware and plunged them into the Second World War, turning it into a truly global conflict. This gripping study scrupulously reconstructs the attack, from its meticulously planned conception, to its lightning execution and the bitter political controversy that followed. It is a story of Japan's daring, tactical brilliance and fanatical dedication, and of America's blind disbelief in a threat from the Far East that led it to ignore advance warnings from its own intelligence sources. Based on years of research, and countless interviews with survivors from both sides of the Pacific, "At Dawn We Slept" brings the human players in this epic drama to life. Demolishing many of the myths and conspiracy theories that surround Pearl Harbour, it is an unbiased, authoritative and monumental work. [via]
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At Dawn We Slept: The Untold Story of Pearl Harborby Katherine V. Dillon, Gordon William PrangeISBN 0070506698 (0-07-050669-8)
Hardcover, McGraw-Hill
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At Home in Mitfordby Jan KaronISBN 014025448X (0-14-025448-X)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA
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› Find signed collectible books: 'At Home in Mitford'Book summary:Father Tim, a cherished small-town rector, is the steadfast soldier in this beloved slice of life story set in an American village where the grass is still green, the pickets are still white, and the air still smells sweet. The rector's forthright secretary, Emma Garret, worries about her employer, as she sees past his Christian cheerfulness into his aching loneliness. Slowly but surely, the empty places in Father Tim's heart do get filled. First with a gangly stray dog, later with a seemingly stray boy, and finally with the realization that he is stumbling into love with his independent and Christian-wise next-door neighbor. Much more than a gentle love story, this is a homespun tale about a town of endearing characters-- including a mysterious jewel thief--who are as quirky and popular as those of Mayberry, R.F.D. --Gail Hudson [via]
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The Awakening And Selected Storiesby Kate ChopinISBN 0075542692 (0-07-554269-2)
Softcover, McGraw-Hill College
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Awakening And Selected Stories'Book summary:The Awakening shocked turn-of-the-century readers and reviewers with its treatment of sex and suicide. In a departure from literary convention, Kate Chopin failed to condemn her heroine's desire for an affair with the son of a Louisiana resort owner, whom she meets on vacation. The power of sensuality, the delusion of ecstatic love, and the solitude that accompanies the trappings of middle- and upper-class convention are the themes of this now-classic novel. The book was influenced by French writers ranging from Flaubert to Maupassant, and can be seen as a precursor of the impressionistic, mood-driven novels of Virginia Woolf and Djuna Barnes. Variously called "vulgar, " "unhealthily introspective, " and "morbid, " the book was neglected for several decades, not least because it was written by a "regional" woman writer. This edition also includes selected stories from Kate Chopin's Bayou Folk and A Night in Acadie, and an introduction and notes by Nina Baym. [via]
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The Beautiful and Damnedby F. Scott FitzgeraldISBN 0141180870 (0-14-118087-0)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Beautiful and Damned'Book summary:One of F. Scott Fitzgerald's best-known works, The Beautiful And Damned is a glittering novel set against an era of intoxicating excitement and ruinous excess. Hilarious and heartbreaking, this is a scathing, ironic tale whose fictional couple parallells the real-life relationship of Fitzgerald and his wife, from its romantic beginning to its tragic end. It remains tothis day a devastating portrait of insatiable greed, ruthless ambition, and wasted talent. [via]
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The Bell Jarby Sylvia PlathISBN 0061148512 (0-06-114851-2)
Softcover, Harpercollins
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Bell Jar'Book summary:The Bell Jar chronicles the crack-up of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful, but slowly going under--maybe for the last time. Sylvia Plath masterfully draws the reader into Esther's breakdown with such intensity that Esther's insanity becomes completely real and even rational, as probable and accessible an experiece as going to the movies. Such deep penetration into the dark and harrowing corners of the psyche is an extraordinary accomplishment and has made The Bell Jar a haunting American classic. [via]
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Belovedby Toni MorrisonISBN 0140283404 (0-14-028340-4)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Beloved'Book summary:Toni Morrison gently reads her own Pulitzer Prize-winning work in the unabridged version of this riveting tale of ex-slave Sethe and the beloved ghost that haunts her. While Morrison makes occasional odd pauses in her reading, what is lost in smoothness is more than made up for in quiet intensity as the author reads words obviously deeply felt. Her intimate knowledge of the characters and their motivations lends this reading an authority that helps the listener sort out the breaks in time and dialogue in this complex story of a woman coming to terms with her enslaved past and the loss of her husband and baby daughter. (Running time: 12 hours, eight cassettes) --Kimberly Heinrichs [via]
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Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern Warby Mark BowdenISBN 0140288503 (0-14-028850-3)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War'Book summary:The acclaimed New York Times bestseller Black Hawk Down is "a shocking account of modern warfare . . . gripping and horrifying" (San Francisco Chronicle)
Destined to become a classic of war reporting, Black Hawk Down is Mark Bowden's brilliant account of the longest sustained firefight involving American troops since the Vietnam War. On October 3rd, 1993, about a hundred elite U.S. soldiers were dropped by helicopter into the teeming market in the heart of Mogadishu, Somalia. Their mission was to abduct two top lieutenants of a Somali warlord and return to base. It was supposed to take an hour. Instead they found themselves pinned down through a long and terrible night fighting against thousands of heavily armed Somalis. The following morning, eighteen Americans were dead and more than seventy had been badly injured.
Drawing on interviews from both sides, army records, audiotapes, and videos (some of the material is still classified), Bowden's minute-by-minute narrative is one of the most exciting accounts of modern combat ever written--a riveting story that captures the heroism, courage, and brutality of battle.
"Black Hawk Down ranks among the best books ever written about infantry combat. . . . A descendent of books like The Killer Angels and We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young."-- Bob Shacochis, The New York Observer
"If Black Hawk Down were fiction we'd rank it up there with the best war novels: The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer, or The Things They Carried, by Tim O'Brien."-- Tom Walker, The Denver Post
"Stands in a league with Shelby Foote's stirring Civil War Diary, Shiloh."-- Jim Haner, The Baltimore Sun
"One of the most gripping and authoritative accounts of combat ever written."-- Kirk Spitzer, USA Today
"Amazing . . . One of the most intense, visceral reading experiences imaginable. [via]More editions of Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War:
Blue Heavenby Joe KeenanISBN 0140107649 (0-14-010764-9)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA
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Bringing down the House: How Six Students Took Vegas for Millonsby Ben MezrichISBN 0099468239 (0-09-946823-9)
Softcover, Arrow
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The Buccaneersby Edith WhartonISBN 0140232028 (0-14-023202-8)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Buccaneers'Book summary:Set in the 1870s, the same period as Wharton's The Age of Innocence, The Buccaneers is about five wealthy American girls denied entry into New York Society because their parents' money is too new. At the suggestion of their clever governess, the girls sail to London, where they marry lords, earls, and dukes who find their beauty charmingand their wealth extremely useful.[via]After Wharton's death in 1937, The Christian Science Monitor said, "If it could have been completed, The Buccaneers would doubtless stand among the richest and most sophisticated of Wharton's novels." Now, with wit and imagination, Marion Mainwaring has finished the story, taking her cue from Wharton's own synopsis. It is a novel any Wharton fan will celebrate and any romantic reader will love. This is the richly engaging story of Nan St. George and guy Thwarte, an American heiress and an English aristocrat, whose love breaks the rules of both their societies.
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The Buccaneers of Americaby Alexander O. ExquemelinISBN 014044212X (0-14-044212-X)
Hardcover, Penguin
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Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Waterby Marc ReisnerISBN 0140178244 (0-14-017824-4)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water'Book summary:The story of the American West is the story of a relentless quest for a precious resource: water. This is the story of the early settlers, lured by promises of paradise. The author documents the rivalry between government giants and other institutions, in the competition to transform the West. [via]
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Cannery Rowby John SteinbeckISBN 0140177388 (0-14-017738-8)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Cannery Row'Book summary:Today, nearly forty years after his death, Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck remains one of America?s greatest writers and cultural figures. We have begun publishing his many works for the first time as blackspine Penguin Classics featuring eye-catching, newly commissioned art. This season we continue with the seven spectacular and influential books East of Eden, Cannery Row, In Dubious Battle, The Long Valley, The Moon Is Down, The Pastures of Heaven, and Tortilla Flat. Penguin Classics is proud to present these seminal works to a new generation of readers?and to the many who revisit them again and again."
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Cerdos En El Cielo/Pigs in Heavenby Barbara Kingsolver, Margara AverbachISBN 0060951222 (0-06-095122-2)
Softcover, Harpercollins
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Cerdos En El Cielo/Pigs in Heaven'Book summary:The Spanish-language edition of the New York Times best-seller tells the story of six-year-old Turtle Greer and what happens after she witnesses a freak accident at Hoover Dam. [via]
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City Of Glassby Paul AusterISBN 0140097317 (0-14-009731-7)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA
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› Find signed collectible books: 'City Of Glass'Book summary:Nominated for an Edgar Award for Best Mystery of the Year, City of Glass inaugurates the intriguing New York Trilogy of novels that the Washington Post Book World has classified as "post-existentialist private eye...It's as if Kafka has gotten hooked on the gumshoe game and penned his own ever-spiraling version." As a result of a strange phone call in the middle of the night, Quinn, a writer of detective fiction and crime books, becomes enmeshed in a case more puzzling than any he might have written. New York Times-bestselling author Paul Auster combines dark humor with Hitchcock-like suspense to City of Glass. [via]
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A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Courtby Mark Twain, Justin KaplanISBN 0140430644 (0-14-043064-4)
Softcover, Puffin
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court'Book summary:When Connecticut mechanic and foreman Hank Morgan is knocked unconscious, he wakes not to the familiar scenes of nineteenth-century America but to the bewildering sights and sounds of sixth-century Camelot. Although confused at first and quickly imprisoned, he soon realises that his knowledge of the future can transform his fate. Correctly predicting a solar eclipse from inside his prison cell, Morgan terrifies the people of England into releasing him and swiftly establishes himself as the most powerful magician in the land, stronger than Merlin and greatly admired by Arthur himself. But the Connecticut Yankee wishes for more than simply a place at the Round Table. Soon, he begins a far greater struggle: to bring American democratic ideals to Old England. Complex and fascinating, "A Connecticut Yankee" is a darkly comic consideration of the nature of human nature and society. [via]
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The Death and Life of Great American Citiesby Jane JacobsISBN 0140551417 (0-14-055141-7)
Softcover, Penguin USA
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Death and Life of Great American Cities'Book summary:Jane Jacobs sets out to produce an attack on current city-planning and rebuilding in America and to introduce new principles by which these should be governed. Throughout the post-war period, planners temperamentally unsympathetic to cities have been let loose on the urban environment. Inspired by the ideals of the Garden City or Le Corbusier's Radiant City, they have dreamt up ambitious projects based on self-contained neighbourhoods, super-blocks, rigid "scientific" plans and endless acres of grass. Yet they seldom stop to look at what actually works on the ground. The real vitality of cities, argues Jacobs, lies in their diversity, architectural variety, teeming street life and human scale. It is only when we appreciate such fundamental realities that we can hope to create cities that are safe, interesting and economically viable, as well as places that people want to live in. [via]
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The Deerslayerby James Fenimore CooperISBN 0140390618 (0-14-039061-8)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Deerslayer'Book summary:The last of the five Leatherstocking tales recalls Natty Bumppo's adventures as a young man among the Delaware Indians of New York [via]
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Downsize This!by Michael MooreISBN 0060977337 (0-06-097733-7)
Softcover, Harpercollins
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Downsize This!'Book summary:Americans today are working harder, working longer and yet for most of us, in this time of ruthless downsizing and political cronyism, job security, a decent standard of living and a comfortable retirement are becoming harder and harder to find. In this brilliantly funny and right-on-target diatribe, irreverent everyman michael moore gives his own bold views on who's behind the fading of the american dream. Whether issuing corporate crook trading cards, organizing a rodney king commemorative riot, sending a donation to pat buchanan from the john wayne gacy fan club (which was accepted) or trying to commit former right-wing congressman bob dornan to a mental hospital, the in-your-face host of tv nation and director/star of roger & me combines an expansive wit with biting social commentary to make you think and laugh at the same time. In hardcover, downsize this! stormed the bestseller lists of the new york times, wall street journal, washington post, san francisco chronicle and others. Given michael moore's enormous -- and growing -- constituency, this trade paperback edition brings his unique perspective on the nation to an even greater audience [via]
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East Is Eastby T. C. BoyleISBN 0140131671 (0-14-013167-1)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA
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The Education of Henry Adamsby Henry Adams, Jean GooderISBN 0140445579 (0-14-044557-9)
Softcover, Penguin USA
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Education of Henry Adams'Book summary:Many great artists have had at least intermittent doubts about their own abilities. But The Education of Henry Adams is surely one of the few masterpieces to issue directly from a raging inferiority complex. The author, to be sure, had bigger shoes to fill than most of us. Both his grandfather and great-grandfather were U.S. presidents. His father, a relative underachiever, scraped by as a member of Congress and ambassador to the Court of St. James. But young Henry, born in Boston in 1838, was destined for a walk-on role in his nation's history--and seemed alarmingly aware of the fact from the time he was an adolescent.
It gets worse. For the author could neither match his exalted ancestors nor dismiss them as dusty relics--he was an Adams, after all, formed from the same 18th-century clay. "The atmosphere of education in which he lived was colonial," we are told,
revolutionary, almost Cromwellian, as though he were steeped, from his greatest grandmother's birth, in the odor of political crime. Resistance to something was the law of New England nature; the boy looked out on the world with the instinct of resistance; for numberless generations his predecessors had viewed the world chiefly as a thing to be reformed, filled with evil forces to be abolished, and they saw no reason to suppose that they had wholly succeeded in the abolition; the duty was unchanged.
Here, as always, Adams tells his story in a third-person voice that can seem almost extraplanetary in its detachment. Yet there's also an undercurrent of melancholy and amusement--and wonder at the specific details of what was already a lost world.Continuing his uphill conquest of the learning curve, Adams attended Harvard, which didn't do much for him. ("The chief wonder of education is that it does not ruin everybody concerned in it, teachers and taught.") Then, after a beer-and-sausage-scented spell as a graduate student in Berlin, he followed his father to Washington, D.C., in 1860. There he might have remained--bogged down in "the same rude colony ... camped in the same forest, with the same unfinished Greek temples for workrooms, and sloughs for roads"--had not the Civil War sent Adams père et fils to London. Henry sat on the sidelines throughout the conflict, serving as his father's private secretary and anxiously negotiating the minefields of English society. He then returned home and commenced a long career as a journalist, historian, novelist, and peripheral participant in the political process--a kind of mouthpiece for what remained of the New England conscience.
He was not, by any measure but his own, a failure. And the proof of the pudding is The Education of Henry Adams itself, which remains among the oddest and most enlightening books in American literature. It contains thousands of memorable one-liners about politics, morality, culture, and transatlantic relations: "The American mind exasperated the European as a buzz-saw might exasperate a pine forest." There are astonishing glimpses of the high and mighty: "He saw a long, awkward figure; a plain, ploughed face; a mind, absent in part, and in part evidently worried by white kid gloves; features that expressed neither self-satisfaction nor any other familiar Americanism..." (That would be Abraham Lincoln; the "melancholy function" his Inaugural Ball.) But most of all, Adams's book is a brilliant account of how his own sensibility came to be. A literary landmark from the moment it first appeared, the Autobiography confers upon its author precisely that prize he felt had always eluded him: success. --James Marcus [via]
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The Endby Lemony Snicket, Brett HelquistISBN 0064410161 (0-06-441016-1)
Hardcover, Harpercollins Childrens Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The End'Book summary:Picking up from the final pages of the Pentultimate Peril, this farewell installment to the ridiculously (and deservedly!) popular A Series of Unfortunate Events places our protagonists right where we last left them: on a large, wooden boat in the middle of the ocean, trapped with their nemesis Count Olaf, who has armed himself with a helmet-full of deadly Medusoid Mycelium.
The situation quickly and--this being the Baudelaires--predictably deteriorates. Violet, Klaus, and Sunny find themselves tossed in a storm so terrible that our beloved narrator spends four pages describing how he cannot describe it. From this point on, fans of the series' smarty-pants wordplay and acrobatic narrative can rest assured that they're in for more of the same (and how) in this 368-page finale, and Daniel Handler's deadpan Snicket continues to tutor a generation in self-referential humor (including one particularly funny bit regarding three very short men carrying a large, flat piece of wood, painted to look like a living room). Snicket notes, of course, that if you read the entire series, "your only reward will be 170 chapters of misery in your library and countless tears in your eyes."
There's one big question, though, for anyone who's made it through "the thirteenth chapter of the thirteenth volume in this sad history": is the final book a fitting end? That question is probably best-answered by one of The End's most oft-repeated phrases: It depends on how you look at it. Those looking for conclusive resolution to the series' many, many mysteries may be disappointed, although some big questions do get explicit answers. Not surprisingly for a work so deliberately labyrinthine, though, even the absence of an answer can be sort of an answer--and reaction to The End can be something of a Rorschach test for readers. Or, as Lemony Snicket says, "Perhaps you dont know yet what the end really means." --Paul Hughes [via]
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Ethan Fromeby Edith Wharton, Doris Grumbach, Sarah Higginson BegleyISBN 0140187367 (0-14-018736-7)
Softcover, Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Ethan Frome'Book summary:Ethan works his unproductive farm, and struggles to maintain an existence with his suspicious and hypochondriac wife, Zeena. But when Zeena's cousin enters their household as a "hired girl", Ethan finds himself obsessed with her and with the possibilities for happiness she comes to represent. [via]
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The Europeansby Henry JamesISBN 0140432329 (0-14-043232-9)
Softcover, Penguin Classics
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Europeans'Book summary:Eugenia, an American expatriate brought up in Europe, arrives in rural New England with her charming brother Felix, hoping to find a wealthy second husband after the collapse of her marriage to a German prince. Their exotic, sophisticated airs cause quite a stir with their affluent, God-fearing American cousins, the Wentworths and provoke the disapproval of their father, suspicious of foreign influences. The arrival of the frivolous, handsome Felix is especially enchanting to Gertrude Wentworth, who is struggling against her sombre puritan upbringing. One of Henry James's most optimistic novels, The Europeans (1878) is a subtle and gently ironic examination of manners and morals, deftly portraying the impact of Old World experience on New World innocence. [via]
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Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Mealby Eric SchlosserISBN 006116139X (0-06-116139-X)
Softcover, Harpercollins
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Fast Food Nation Tie-in: The Dark Side of the All-american Meal'Book summary:Fast food has hastened the malling of our landscape, widened the chasm between rich and poor, fueled an epidemic of obesity, and propelled american cultural imperialism abroad. That's a lengthy list of charges, but here eric schlosser makes them stick with an artful mix of first-rate reportage, wry wit, and careful reasoning. Schlosser's myth-shattering survey stretches from california's subdivisions where the business was born to the industrial corridor along the new jersey turnpike where many fast food's flavors are concocted. Along the way, he unearths a trove of fascinating, unsettling truths -- from the unholy alliance between fast food and hollywood to the seismic changes the industry has wrought in food production, popular culture, and even real estate. He also uncovers the fast food chains' disturbing efforts to reel in the youngest, most susceptible consumers even while they hone their institutionalized exploitation of teenagers and minorities [via]
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Freedom Just Around The Corner: A New American History, 1585-1828by Walter A. McDougallISBN 0060957557 (0-06-095755-7)
Softcover, Perennial
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Freedom Just Around The Corner: A New American History, 1585-1828'Book summary:A powerful reinterpretation of the founding of America by a Pulitzer Prizewinning historian.
The creation of the United States of America is the central event of the past four hundred years," states Walter McDougall in his preface to Freedom Just Around the Corner. With this statement begins McDougall's most ambitious, original, and uncompromising of histories. McDougall marshals the latest scholarship and writes in a style redolent with passion, pathos, and humour in pursuit of truths often obscured in books burdened with political slants.
With an insightful approach to the nearly 250 years spanning America's beginnings, McDougall offers his readers an understanding of the uniqueness of the "American character" and how this character has shaped the wide ranging course of historical events. McDougall explains that Americans have always been in a unique position of enjoying "more opportunity to pursue their ambitionsèan any other people in history." Throughout Freedom Just Around the Corner the character of the American people shines, a character built out of a freedom to indulge in the whole panoply of human behaviour. The genius behind the success of the United States is founded on the complex, irrepressible American spirit.
A grand narrative rich with new details and insights about colonial and early national history, Freedom Just Around the Corner is the first instalment of a trilogy that will eventually bring the story of America up to the present day, a story epic, bemusing, and brooding.
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Girlfriend in a Comaby Douglas CouplandISBN 0060987324 (0-06-098732-4)
Softcover, Harpercollins
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Girlfriend in a Coma'Book summary:In this latest novel from the poet laureate of Gen X--who is himself now a dangerously mature 36--boy does indeed meet girl. The year is 1979, and the lovers get right down to business in a very Couplandian bit of plein air intercourse: "Karen and I deflowered each other atop Grouse Mountain, among the cedars beside a ski slope, atop crystal snow shards beneath penlight stars. It was a December night so cold and clear that the air felt like the air of the Moon--lung-burning; mentholated and pure; hint of ozone, zinc, ski wax, and Karen's strawberry shampoo." Are we in for an archetypal '80s romance, played out against a pop-cultural backdrop? Nope. Only hours after losing her virginity, Karen loses consciousness as well--for almost two decades. The narrator and his circle soldier on, making the slow progression from debauched Vancouver youths to semiresponsible adults. Several end up working on a television series that bears a suspicious resemblance to The X-Files (surely a self-referential wink on the author's part). And then ... Karen wakes up. Her astonishment--which suggests a 20th-century, substance-abusing Rip Van Winkle--dominates the second half of the novel, and gives Coupland free reign to muse about time, identity, and the meaning (if any) of the impending millennium. Alas, he also slaps a concluding apocalypse onto the novel. As sleeping sickness overwhelms the populace, the world ends with neither a bang nor a whimper, but a universal yawn--which doesn't, fortunately, outweigh the sweetness, oddity, and ironic smarts of everything that has preceded it. [via]
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The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishingby Melissa BankISBN 0140293248 (0-14-029324-8)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing'Book summary:Jane Rosenal, the narrator of The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing, is wise beyond her years. Not that that's saying much--since none of her elders, with the exception of her father, is particularly wise. At the age of 14, Jane watches her brother and his new girlfriend, searching for clues for how to fall in love, but by the end of the summer she's trying to figure out how not to fail in love. At twice that age, Jane quickly internalizes How to Meet and Marry Mr. Right, even though that retro manual is ruining her chances at happiness. In the intervening years, Melissa Bank's heroine struggles at love and work. The former often seems indistinguishable from the latter, and her experiences in book publishing inspire little in the way of affection. As Jane announces in "The Worst Thing a Suburban Girl Could Imagine": "I'd been a rising star at H----- until Mimi Howlett, the new executive editor, decided I was just the lights of an airplane."
Bank's first collection has a beautiful, true arc, and all the sophistication and control her heroine could ever desire. In "The Floating House," Jane and her boyfriend, Jamie, visit his ex-girlfriend in St. Croix, and right from the start she can't stop mimicking her beautiful competitor, in a notably idiotic fashion. "I'm like one of those animals that imitates its predators to survive," she realizes--one of several thousand of Bank's ruefully funny phrases. But even as Jane clowns around, desperately trying to keep up appearances, she is so hyperaware it hurts. Again and again, the author explores the dichotomy between life as it happens and the rehearsed anecdote, the preferred outcome. In The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing, even suburban quiet has "nothing to do with peace." Bank's much-anticipated debut merits all its buzz and, more to the point, transcends it. --Kerry Fried [via]
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The Golden Bowlby Henry JamesISBN 0140432353 (0-14-043235-3)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Golden Bowl'Book summary:This story of the alliance between Italian aristocracy and American millionaires is "a work unique among all [James's] novels: it is [his] only novel in which things come out right for his characters. . . . he had finally resolved the questions, curious and passionate, that had kept him at his desk on his inquiries into the process of living. He could now make his peace with America-and he could now collect and unify the work of a lifetime." -Leon Edel, The Life of Henry James [via]
A Good Scent from a Strange Mountainby Robert Olen ButlerISBN 0140176640 (0-14-017664-0)
Softcover, Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain'More editions of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain:
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Great Jones Streetby Don DelilloISBN 0140179178 (0-14-017917-8)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Great Jones Street'Book summary:Bucky Wunderlick, rock star and budding messiah, has hit a spiritual wall. In mid-tour he bolts fromhis band to hole up in a dingy East Village apartment and separate himself from the paranoid machine that propels the culture he has helped create. As faithful fans await messages, Bucky encounters every sort of roiling farce he is trying to escape. A penetrating look at rock and roll's merger of art, commerce and urban decay, Great Jones Street "reflects our era's nighmares and hallucinations with all appropriate lurid, tawdry shades" --The Cleveland Plain Dealer.[via]More editions of Great Jones Street:
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A History of the American Peopleby Paul JohnsonISBN 0060930349 (0-06-093034-9)
Softcover, Harpercollins
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A History of the American People'Book summary:"The creation of the United States of America is the greatest of all human adventures," begins Paul Johnson's remarkable new American history. "No other national story holds such tremendous lessons, for the American people themselves and for the rest of mankind." Johnson's history is a reinterpretation of American history from the first settlements to the Clinton administration. It covers every aspect of U.S. history--politics; business and economics; art, literature and science; society and customs; complex traditions and religious beliefs. The story is told in terms of the men and women who shaped and led the nation and the ordinary people who collectively created its unique character. Wherever possible, letters, diaries, and recorded conversations are used to ensure a sense of actuality. "The book has new and often trenchant things to say about every aspect and period of America's past," says Johnson, "and I do not seek, as some historians do, to conceal my opinions." Johnson's history presents John Winthrop, Roger Williams, Anne Hutchinson, Cotton Mather, Franklin, Tom Paine, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton, and Madison from a fresh perspective. It emphasizes the role of religion in American history and how early America was linked to England's history and culture and includes incisive portraits of Andrew Jackson, Chief Justice Marshall, Clay, Lincoln, and Jefferson Davis. Johnson shows how Grover Cleveland and Teddy Roosevelt ushered in the age of big business and industry and how Woodrow Wilson revolutionized the government's role. He offers new views of Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover and of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and his role as commander in chief during World War II. An examination of the unforeseen greatness of Harry Truman and reassessments of Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, and Bush follow. "Compulsively readable," said Foreign Affairs of Johnson's unique narrative skills and sharp profiles of people. [via]
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The House of Mirthby Edith WhartonISBN 0140187294 (0-14-018729-4)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The House of Mirth'Book summary:"The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth," warns Ecclesiastes 7:4, and so does the novel by Edith Wharton that takes its title from this call to heed. New York at the turn of the century was a time of opulence and frivolity for those who could afford it. But for those who couldn't and yet wanted desperately to keep up with the whirlwind, like Wharton's charming Lily Bart, it was something else altogether: a gilded cage rather than the Gilded Age.
One of Wharton's earliest descriptions of her heroine, in the library of her bachelor friend and sometime suitor Lawrence Selden, indicates that she appears "as though she were a captured dryad subdued to the conventions of the drawing room." Indeed, herein lies Lily's problem. She has, we're told, "been brought up to be ornamental," and yet her spirit is larger than what this ancillary role requires. By today's standards she would be nothing more than a mild rebel, but in the era into which Wharton drops her unmercifully, this tiny spark of character, combined with numerous assaults by vicious society women and bad luck, ultimately renders Lily persona non grata. Her own ambivalence about her position serves to open the door to disaster: several times she is on the verge of "good" marriage and squanders it at the last moment, unwilling to play by the rules of a society that produces, as she calls them, "poor, miserable, marriageable girls.
Lily's rather violent tumble down the social ladder provides a thumbnail sketch of the general injustices of the upper classes (which, incidentally, Wharton never quite manages to condemn entirely, clearly believing that such life is cruel but without alternative). From her start as a beautiful woman at the height of her powers to her sad finale as a recently fired milliner's assistant addicted to sleeping drugs, Lily Bart is heroic, not least for her final admission of her own role in her downfall. "Once--twice--you gave me the chance to escape from my life and I refused it: refused it because I was a coward," she tells Selden as the book draws to a close. All manner of hideous socialite beasts--some of whose treatment by Wharton, such as the token social-climbing Jew, Simon Rosedale, date the book unfortunately--wander through the novel while Lily plummets. As her tale winds down to nothing more than the remnants of social grace and cold hard cash, it's hard not to agree with Lily's own assessment of herself: "I have tried hard--but life is difficult, and I am a very useless person. I can hardly be said to have an independent existence. I was just a screw or a cog in the great machine I called life, and when I dropped out of it I found I was of no use anywhere else." Nevertheless, it's even harder not to believe that she deserved better, which is why The House of Mirth remains so timely and so vital in spite of its crushing end and its unflattering portrait of what life offers up. --Melanie Rehak [via]
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I Am an Oil Tankerby GloverISBN 0091877865 (0-09-187786-5)
Softcover, Trafalgar Square
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› Find signed collectible books: 'I Am an Oil Tanker'Book summary:"Everybody has a favourite station", writes Fi Glover in her bizarrely titled travel book I am an Oil Tanker. On arriving in a city for the first time, some people get a feel for the place by climbing the tallest building, others browse supermarket shelves or head for the nearest bar--Radio Five presenter Fi Glover asks her taxi driver what they listen to and scans the dial. This obsession has evolved into I am an Oil Tanker--part biography, part lightweight travelogue and partly an analysis and history of global radio.
Fi's search for the "perfect" station begins dully with visits to Blue Danube Radio in Vienna and a Radio Five football broadcast. However, things get rapidly more interesting with Irish UN troops doubling as volunteer DJs at Camp Shamrock in Southern Lebanon, line-dance-loving community shows in North Carolina and paranormal programmes from the Nevada desert. Out of "sheer curiosity" she heads for Palm Springs to listen to its Frank Sinatra station for retirees and to Monsterrat to hear one that kept broadcasting right through the volcanic eruption. While she doesn't visit many of the world's 35,000 registered stations, she does experience some wonderfully surreal diversions--from shoe-shopping with Reuters' man in Beirut to driving out of Las Vegas with a stranger called Jolene.
Fi's travelogue resembles her radio shows. The segments the stations are segued together with a "funny thing happened to me on the way to the studio" anecdotes and filled out with amusing asides. She writes as if talking to her listeners: musing over hotel room service, airline meals and rainy GLR outside broadcasts, and making you feel by the end that you know her intimately.
Not that I am a Oil Tanker is all flippant stuff--Fi also touches on serious matters like the role "hate radio" played in the Rwandan genocide or request shows for the "missing" in Columbia. However, overall this is mostly an irreverent, humorous personal rant in the Tony Hawkes Round Ireland with a Fridge vein. --Sarah Champion [via]
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In the Heart of the Seaby Nat PhilbrickISBN 0141001828 (0-14-100182-8)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA
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› Find signed collectible books: 'In the Heart of the Sea'Book summary:The appeal of Dava Sobel's Longitude was, in part, that it illuminated a little-known piece of history through a series of captivating incidents and engaging personalities. Nathaniel Philbrick's In the Heart of the Sea is certainly cast from the same mold, examining the 19th-century Pacific whaling industry through the arc of the sinking of the whaleship Essex by a boisterous sperm whale. The story that inspired Herman Melville's classic Moby-Dick has a lot going for it--derring-do, cannibalism, rescue--and Philbrick proves an amiable and well-informed narrator, providing both context and detail. We learn about the importance and mechanics of blubber production--a vital source of oil--and we get the nuts and bolts of harpooning and life aboard whalers. We are spared neither the nitty-gritty of open boats nor the sucking of human bones dry.
By sticking to the tried and tested Longitude formula, Philbrick has missed a slight trick or two. The epicenter of the whaling industry was Nantucket, a small island off Cape Cod; most of the whales were in the Pacific, necessitating a huge journey around the southernmost tip of South America. We never learn why no one ever tried to create an alternative whaling capital somewhere nearer. Similarly, Philbrick tells us that the story of the Essex was well known to Americans for decades, but he never explores how such legends fade from our consciousness. Philbrick would no doubt reply that such questions were beyond his remit, and you can't exactly accuse him of skimping on his research. By any standard, 50 pages of footnotes impress, though he wears his learning lightly. He doesn't get bogged down in turgid detail, and his narrative rattles along at a nice pace. When the storyline is as good as this, you can't really ask for more. --John Crace, Amazon.co.uk [via]
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The Jungleby Upton Beall SinclairISBN 0140390316 (0-14-039031-6)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Jungle'Book summary:Upton Sinclair's dramatic and deeply moving story exposed the brutal conditions in the Chicago stockyards at the turn of the nineteenth century and brought into sharp moral focus the appalling odds against which immigrants and other working people struggled for their share of the American dream. Denounced by the conservative press as an un-American libel on the meatpacking industry, this book was championed by more progressive thinkers, including then president Theodore Roosevelt, and was a major catalyst to the passing of the Pure Food and Meat Inspection act, which has tremendous impact to this day. [via]
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The Last of the Mohicansby James Fenimore CooperISBN 0140390243 (0-14-039024-3)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Last of the Mohicans'Book summary:Angered by the values of his materialistic society, Hawk-eye lives apart from the other white men, sharing the solitude and sublimity of the wilderness with his Mohican Indian friend, Chingachgook. As the savageries of war test these exiled men, they agree to guide two sisters in search of their father through hostile Indian country - even if it means risking everything. An enduring American classic, "The Last of the Mohicans" is a fast-paced portrait of fierce individualism and courage, set against massacres, raids, battles and a doomed love affair. It is also the unforgettable story of the friendship between two men. [via]
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The Liar's Clubby Mary KarrISBN 0140179836 (0-14-017983-6)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Liar's Club'Book summary:In this funny, razor-edged memoir, Mary Karr, a prize-winning poet and critic, looks back at her upbringing in a swampy East Texas refinery town with a volatile, defiantly loving family. She recalls her painter mother, seven times married, whose outlaw spirit could tip into psychosis; a fist swinging father who spun tales with his cronies - dubbed the Liars' Club; and a neighborhood rape when she was eight. An inheritance was squandered, endless bottles emptied, and guns leveled at the deserving and undeserving. With a row authenticity stripped of self pity,and a poet's eye for the lyrical detail, Karr shows us a "terrific family of liars and drunks...redeemed by a slow unearthing of truth." [via]
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Libraby Don DelilloISBN 0140156046 (0-14-015604-6)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Libra'Book summary:In this powerful, eerily convincing fictional speculation on the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Don DeLillo chronicles Lee Harvey Oswald's odyssey from troubled teenager to a man of precarious stability who imagines himself an agent of history. When "history" presents itself in the form of two disgruntled CIA operatives who decide that an unsuccessful attempt on the life of the president will galvanize the nation against communism, the scales are irrevocably tipped.[via]A gripping, masterful blend of fact and fiction, alive with meticulously portrayed characters both real and created, Libra is a grave, haunting, and brilliant examination of an event that has become an indelible part of the American psyche.
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Macbethby William Shakespeare, Stephen OrgelISBN 0140714782 (0-14-071478-2)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Macbeth'Book summary:One of Shakespeare's greatest, but also bloodiest tragedies, was written around 1605/06. Many have seen the story of Macbeth's murder and usurpation of the legitimate Scottish King Duncan as having obvious connection to contemporary issues regarding King James I (James VI of Scotland), and the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. King James was particularly fascinated with witchcraft, so the appearance of the witches chanting "Fair is foul, and foul is fair" at the opening of the play seemed particularly topical, as was Macbeth's betrayal of Banquo, from whom James claimed direct descent.
However, the play is clearly far more than a piece of royal entertainment. It is also a fast-moving and dramatically satisfying piece of theatre. Macbeth's existential struggle between loyalty to his King and his "Vaulting ambition" is fascinating to watch, as his is struggle with Lady Macbeth, and her own terrifying refusal of her maternal role. The play shows an intensification of Shakespeare's interest in mothers and their effect upon ruling masculinity, and also contains some of the most memorable speeches in the entire canon, including Macbeth's reflections that ultimately life "is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing". --Jerry Brotton [via]
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Main Streetby Sinclair LewisISBN 0140189017 (0-14-018901-7)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Main Street'Book summary:Sinclair Lewis's barbed portrait of Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, shattered the myth of the American Middle West as God's Country and became a symbol of the cultural narrow-mindedness and smug complacency of small towns everywhere. At the center of the novel is Carol Kennicott, the wife of a town doctor, who dreams of initiating social reforms and introducing art and literature to the community. The range of reactions to Main Street when it was published in 1920 was extraordinary, reflecting the ambivalence in the novel itself and Lewis's own mixed feelings about his hometwon of Sauk Centre, Minnesota, the prototype for Gopher Prairie.[via]More editions of Main Street:
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Mao IIby Don DelilloISBN 0140152741 (0-14-015274-1)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Mao II'Book summary:Don DeLillo's follow-up to Libra, his brilliant fictionalization of the Kennedy assassination, Mao II is a series of elusive set-pieces built around the themes of mass psychology, individualism vs. the mob, the power of imagery and the search for meaning in a blasted, post-modern world. Bill Gray, the world's most famous reclusive novelist, has been working for many years on a stalled masterpiece when he gets the chance to aid a hostage trapped in a basement in war-torn Beirut. Gray sets out on a doomed, quixotic journey, and his disappearance disrupts the cloistered lives of his obsessed assistant and the assistant's companion, a former Moonie who has also become Bill's lover. This haunting, masterful novel won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1992. [via]
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Microserfsby Douglas CouplandISBN 0060987049 (0-06-098704-9)
Softcover, Harpercollins
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Microserfs'Book summary:Narrated in the form of a Powerbook entry by Dan Underwood, a computer programmer for Microsoft, this state-of-the-art novel about life in the '90s follows the adventures of six code-crunching computer whizzes. Known as "microserfs," they spend upward of 16 hours a day "coding" (writing software) as they eat "flat" foods (such as Kraft singles, which can be passed underneath closed doors) and fearfully scan the company email to see what the great Bill might be thinking and whether he is going to "flame" one of them.
Seizing the chance to be innovators instead of cogs in the Microsoft machine, this intrepid bunch strike out on their own to form a high-tech start-up company named Oop! in Silicon Valley. Living together in a sort of digital flophouse --"Our House of Wayward Mobility" -- they desperately try to cultivate well-rounded lives and find love amid the dislocated, subhuman whir and buzz of their computer-driven world.
Funny, illuminating and ultimately touching, Microserfs is the story of one generation's very strange and claustrophobic coming of age. [via]
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The Music of Chanceby Paul AusterISBN 0140154078 (0-14-015407-8)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Music of Chance'Book summary:Finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, The Music of Chance follows Jim Nashe who, after squandering an unexpected inheritance, picks up a young gambler named Jack Pozzi hoping to con two millionaires. But when their plans backfire, Jim and Jack are indentured by their elusive marks and are forced to build a meaningless wall with bricks gathered from ruins of an Irish castle. Time passes, their debts mount, and anger builds as the two struggle to dig themselves out of their Kafkaesque serfdom. New York Times-bestselling author Paul Auster (The New York Trilogy) brings us back into his strange, shape-shifting world of fiendish bargains and punitive whims, where chance is a powerful yet unpredictable force. [via]
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Native Sonby Richard Wright, Arnold RampersadISBN 0060929804 (0-06-092980-4)
Softcover, HarperCollins Canada, Limited
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Native Son'Book summary:Bigger Thomas is doomed, trapped in a downward spiral that will lead to arrest, prison, or death, driven by despair, frustration, poverty, and incomprehension. As a young black man in the Chicago of the '30s, he has no way out of the walls of poverty and racism that surround him, and after he murders a young white woman in a moment of panic, these walls begin to close in. There is no help for him--not from his hapless family; not from liberal do-gooders or from his well-meaning yet naive friend Jan; certainly not from the police, prosecutors, or judges. Bigger is debased, aggressive, dangerous, and a violent criminal. As such, he has no claim upon our compassion or sympathy. And yet...
A more compelling story than Native Son has not been written in the 20th century by an American writer. That is not to say that Richard Wright created a novel free of flaws, but that he wrote the first novel that successfully told the most painful and unvarnished truth about American social and class relations. As Irving Howe asserted in 1963, "The day Native Son appeared, American culture was changed forever. It made impossible a repetition of the old lies [and] brought out into the open, as no one ever had before, the hatred, fear and violence that have crippled and may yet destroy our culture."
Other books had focused on the experience of growing up black in America--including Wright's own highly successful Uncle Tom's Children, a collection of five stories that focused on the victimization of blacks who transgressed the code of racial segregation. But they suffered from what he saw as a kind of lyrical idealism, setting up sympathetic black characters in oppressive situations and evoking the reader's pity. In Native Son, Wright was aiming at something more. In Bigger, he created a character so damaged by racism and poverty, with dreams so perverted, and with human sensibilities so eroded, that he has no claim on the reader's compassion:
"I didn't want to kill," Bigger shouted. "But what I killed for, I am! It must've been pretty deep in me to make me kill! I must have felt it awful hard to murder.... What I killed for must've been good!" Bigger's voice was full of frenzied anguish. "It must have been good! When a man kills, it's for something... I didn't know I was really alive in this world until I felt things hard enough to kill for 'em. It's the truth..."
Wright's genius was that, in preventing us from feeling pity for Bigger, he forced us to confront the hopelessness, misery, and injustice of the society that gave birth to him. --Andrew Himes [via]More editions of Native Son:
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Out of Our Past: The Forces That Shaped Modern Americaby Carl N. DeglerISBN 0061319856 (0-06-131985-6)
Softcover, Harpercollins
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Out of Our Past: The Forces That Shaped Modern America'Book summary:The original edition of this now classic work was hailed by Jacob Cohen in The Nation as "the finest one-volume interpretation of American history extant." For this Third Edition of Out of Our Past, Carl Degler has added a comprehensive new chapter on the historical development of American families, brought up to date the discussion of U.S. foreign policy, greatly expanded sections dealing with the place and history of women in our past, and made numerous changes throughout the text in light of scholarship published since the appearance of the 1970 Revised Edition. [via]
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Palimpsest: A Memoirby Gore VidalISBN 0140260897 (0-14-026089-7)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA
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Pigs in Heavenby Barbara KingsolverISBN 006109868X (0-06-109868-X)
Softcover, HarperCollins Canada, Limited
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Pigs in Heaven'Book summary:Six-year-old Turtle Greer witnesses a freak accident at the Hoover Dam, leading to a man's dramatic rescue. But Turtle's moment of celebrity draws her into a crisis of historical proportions that will envelop not only her and her mother, Taylor, but everyone else who touched their lives in a complex web connecting their future with their past. With this wise, compelling novel, the acclaimed New York Times bestselling author of The Poisonwood Bible, The Bean Trees, and Animal Dreams vividly renders a world of heartbreak and redeeming love as she defines and defies the boundaries of family, and illuminates the many separate truths aboutthe ties that bind us and tear us apart.
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Prelude to Civil War the Nullification Controversyby William W. FreehlingISBN 0061313599 (0-06-131359-9)
Softcover, Harpercollins College Div
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Prodigal Summerby Barbara KingsolverISBN 0060959037 (0-06-095903-7)
Softcover, Perennial
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Prodigal Summer'Book summary:There is no one in contemporary literature quite like Barbara Kingsolver. Her dialogue sparkles with sassy wit and earthy poetry; her descriptions are rooted in daily life but are also on familiar terms with the eternal. With Prodigal Summer, she returns from the Congo to a "wrinkle on the map that lies between farms and wildness." And there, in an isolated pocket of southern Appalachia, she recounts not one but three intricate stories.
Exuberant, lush, riotous--the summer of the novel is "the season of extravagant procreation" in which bullfrogs carelessly lay their jellied masses of eggs in the grass, "apparently confident that their tadpoles would be able to swim through the lawn like little sperms," and in which a woman may learn to "tell time with her skin." It is also the summer in which a family of coyotes moves into the mountains above Zebulon Valley:
The ghost of a creature long extinct was coming in on silent footprints, returning to the place it had once held in the complex anatomy of this forest like a beating heart returned to its body. This is what she believed she would see, if she watched, at this magical juncture: a restoration.
The "she" is Deanna Wolfe, a wildlife biologist observing the coyotes from her isolated aerie--isolated, that is, until the arrival of a young hunter who makes her even more aware of the truth that humans are only an infinitesimal portion in the ecological balance. This truth forms the axis around which the other two narratives revolve: the story of a city girl, entomologist, and new widow and her efforts to find a place for herself; and the story of Garnett Walker and Nannie Rawley, who seem bent on thrashing out the countless intimate lessons of biology as only an irascible traditional farmer and a devotee of organic agriculture can. As Nannie lectures Garnett, "Everything alive is connected to every other by fine, invisible threads. Things you don't see can help you plenty, and things you try to control will often rear back and bite you, and that's the moral of the story."Structurally, that gossamer web is the story: images, phrases, and events link the narratives, and these echoes are rarely obvious, always serendipitous. Kingsolver is one of those authors for whom the terrifying elegance of nature is both aesthetic wonder and source of a fierce and abiding moral vision. She may have inherited Thoreau's mantle, but she piles up riches of her own making, blending her extravagant narrative gift with benevolent concise humor. She treads the line between the sentimental and the glorious like nobody else in American literature. --Kelly Flynn [via]
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Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877by Eric FonerISBN 0060937165 (0-06-093716-5)
Softcover, Harpercollins
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877'Book summary:This "masterful treatment of one of the most complex periods of American history" (New Republic) made history when it was originally published in 1988. It redefined how Reconstruction was viewed by historians and people everywhere in its chronicling of how Americans -- black and white -- responded to the unprecedented changes unleashed by the war and the end of slavery. This "smart book of enormous strengths" (Boston Globe) has since gone on to become the classic work on the wrenching post-Civil War period -- an era whose legacy reverberates still today in the United States.
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The Red Ponyby John SteinbeckISBN 0140177361 (0-14-017736-1)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Red Pony'Book summary:This cycle of coming-of-age stories tells of a spirited adolescent boy whose encounters with birth and death teach him about loss and profound emptiness, instead of giving him the more conventional hero's pragmatic "maturity."[via] -
The Rules of Attractionby Bret Easton EllisISBN 0140112286 (0-14-011228-6)
Softcover, Penguin Group (Canada)
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Rules of Attraction'Book summary:The author of Less Than Zero delivers a startling novel about three students entangled in a loveless sexual triangle. Wealthy upperclass students, they indulge in a routine of happy hours, parties, late night drinking bouts, drug abuse, and casual sex fueled by a desperate desire for love. [via]
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The Scarlet Letterby Nathaniel HawthorneISBN 0140390197 (0-14-039019-7)
Softcover, Penguin USA
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Scarlet Letter'Book summary:Hailed by Henry James as "the finest piece of imaginative writing yet put forth in the country, " Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter" reaches to our nation's historical and moral roots for the material of great tragedy. Set in an early New England colony, the novel shows the terrible impact a single, passionate act has on the lives of three members of the community: the defiant Hester Prynne; the fiery, tortured Reverend Dimmesdale; and the obsessed, vengeful Chillingworth. With "The Scarlet Letter," Hawthorne became the first American novelist to forge from our Puritan heritage a universal classic, a masterful exploration of humanity's unending struggle with sin, guilt and pride. [via]
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The Scarlet Letter and Selected Talesby Nathaniel Hawthorne, Thomas E. ConnollyISBN 0140430520 (0-14-043052-0)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA
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Tales of the Cityby Armistead MaupinISBN 0060964049 (0-06-096404-9)
Softcover, Harpercollins
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Tales of the City'Book summary:Since 1976, Maupin's Tales of the City has etched itself upon the hearts and minds of its readers, both straight and gay. From a groundbreaking newspaper serial in the San Francisco Chronicle to a bestselling novel to a critically acclaimed PBS series, Tales (all six of them) contains the universe--if not in a grain of sand, then in one apartment house. [via]
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Thomas Jefferson: A Lifeby Willard Sterne RandallISBN 0060976179 (0-06-097617-9)
Softcover, Harpercollins
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Thomas Jefferson: A Life'Book summary:A biography of Thomas Jefferson, who despite his legendary intelligence and political savvy, could be ruthless, not to mention lawless, in his efforts to preserve his causes. Jefferson operated on two levels, as his opposition to slavery as a slaveowner attests. But as Willard Sterne Randall argues, this duality is what made him so effective. Whether Jefferson's 1784 draft of Virginia's constitution "prefigured the founding documents of republics in Europe, Asia, Africa and South America, as well as the Confederate States of America," as Randall claims, is questionable, but his impact on international trade, diplomatic discussions and the success of the state of Virginia cannot be disputed. [via]
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The Tortilla Curtainby T. C. BoyleISBN 014023828X (0-14-023828-X)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Tortilla Curtain'Book summary:[via]Winner of the Prix Medicis Etranger
Topanga Canyon is home to two couples on a collision course. Los Angeles liberals Delaney and Kyra Mossbacher lead an ordered sushi-and-recycling existence in a newly gated hilltop community: he a sensitive nature writer, she an obsessive realtor. Mexican illegals Candido and America Rincon desperately cling to their vision of the American Dream as they fight off starvation in a makeshift camp deep in the ravine. And from the moment a freak accident brings Candido and Delaney into intimate contact, these four and their opposing worlds gradually intersect in what becomes a tragicomedy of error and misunderstanding.
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Tortilla Flatby John SteinbeckISBN 0140042407 (0-14-004240-7)
Softcover, Viking Pr
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Tortilla Flat'Book summary:Today, nearly forty years after his death, Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck remains one of America?s greatest writers and cultural figures. We have begun publishing his many works for the first time as blackspine Penguin Classics featuring eye-catching, newly commissioned art. This season we continue with the seven spectacular and influential books East of Eden, Cannery Row, In Dubious Battle, The Long Valley, The Moon Is Down, The Pastures of Heaven, and Tortilla Flat. Penguin Classics is proud to present these seminal works to a new generation of readers?and to the many who revisit them again and again."[via] -
Travels With My Radioby Fi GloverISBN 0091882745 (0-09-188274-5)
Softcover, Trafalgar Square
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Travels With My Radio'Book summary:"Everybody has a favourite station", writes Fi Glover in Travels with My Radio. On arriving in a city for the first time some people get a feel for the place by climbing the tallest building, others browse supermarket shelves or head for the nearest bar--Radio Five presenter Fi Glover asks her taxi driver what they listen to and scans the dial. This obsession has evolved into Travels with My Radio--part biography, part lightweight travelogue and partly an analysis and history of global radio.
Fi's search for the "perfect" station begins dully with visits to Blue Danube Radio in Vienna and a Radio Five football broadcast. However, things get rapidly more interesting with Irish UN troops doubling as volunteer DJs at Camp Shamrock in Southern Lebanon, line-dance-loving community shows in North Carolina and paranormal programmes from the Nevada desert. Out of "sheer curiosity" she heads for Palm Springs to listen to its Frank Sinatra station for retirees and to Monsterrat to hear a station that kept broadcasting right through the volcanic eruption. While she doesn't visit many of the world's 35,000 registered stations, she does experience some wonderfully surreal diversions--from shoe-shopping with Reuters' man in Beirut to driving out of Las Vegas with a stranger called Jolene.
Fi's travelogue resembles her radio shows. The segments are segued together with "a funny thing happened to me on the way to the studio" anecdotes and filled out with amusing asides. She writes as if talking to her listeners: musing over hotel room service, airline meals and rainy GLR outside broadcasts--making you feel that you know her intimately by the end.
Not that Travels with My Radio is all flippant stuff--Fi also touches on serious matters like the role "hate radio" played in the Rwandan genocide or request shows for the "missing" in Columbia. However, overall this is mostly an irreverent, humorous personal rant in the Tony Hawkes Round Ireland with a Fridge vein. --Sarah Champion [via]
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Turn of the Screwby Henry JamesISBN 0140620613 (0-14-062061-3)
Softcover, Penguin Group (Canada)
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Turn of the Screw'Book summary:"The Turn of the Screw and The Aspern Papers" combines two of Henry James' most popular works into one conveniently sized volume. "The Turn of the Screw" is an intense psychological tale of terror. Beginning in an old house on Christmas Eve, it is the story of a Governess who comes to live with and take care of two young children. The Governess loves her new position in charge of the young children, however she is soon disturbed when she begins to see ghosts. In "The Aspern Papers" we have the story of a man who travels to Venice in search of Juliana Bordereau, whom he believes is in possession of some personal letters of the famous and now dead American poet, Jeffrey Aspern. Readers will delight in this classic collection of Henry James' most popular novellas. [via]
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Typeeby Herman Melville, John BryantISBN 0140434887 (0-14-043488-7)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Typee'Book summary:Webster's paperbacks take advantage of the fact that classics are frequently assigned readings in English courses. By using a running English-to-Hindi thesaurus at the bottom of each page, this edition of Typee by Herman Melville was edited for three audiences. The first includes Hindi-speaking students enrolled in an English Language Program (ELP), an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) program, an English as a Second Language Program (ESL), or in a TOEFLý or TOEICý preparation program. The second audience includes English-speaking students enrolled in bilingual education programs or Hindi speakers enrolled in English-speaking schools. The third audience consists of students who are actively building their vocabularies in Hindi in order to take foreign service, translation certification, Advanced Placementý (APý) or similar examinations. By using the Webster's Hindi Thesaurus Edition when assigned for an English course, the reader can enrich their vocabulary in anticipation of an examination in Hindi or English.
TOEFLý, TOEICý, APý and Advanced Placementý are trademarks of the Educational Testing Service which has neither reviewed nor endorsed this book. All rights reserved. [via] -
Uncle Tom's Cabinby Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ann DouglasISBN 0140390030 (0-14-039003-0)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Uncle Tom's Cabin'Book summary:Product Details Paperback Publisher: Penguin Books; Later Printing edition (1986) Language: English ISBN-10: 0140390030 ISBN-13: 978-0140390032 ASIN: B000KIVCLI Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5.1 x 1.3 inches Shipping Weight: 1 pounds [via]
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Vietnam: A Historyby Stanley KarnowISBN 0140145338 (0-14-014533-8)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Vietnam: A History'Book summary:Pulitzer Prize-winning author Stanley Karnow offers the defintive history of the Vietnam conflict--a monumental narrative that analyzes, clarifies, and demystifies the tragic ordeal of this unpopular, unwinnable war. Photos. [via]
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Vinelandby Thomas PynchonISBN 0141180633 (0-14-118063-3)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Vineland'Book summary:Seventeen years after he shocked and dazzled readers with Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon returns with a novel as astonishing, as kaleidoscopic, as funny, and as satisfying as that legendary work. Vineland is peopled with a startling array of quirky characters and combines elements of daytime drama and the political thriller, resulting in a haunting evocation of 20th-century America. [via]
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The Wayward Busby John SteinbeckISBN 0140187529 (0-14-018752-9)
Softcover, Penguin Group (Canada)
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Wayward Bus'Book summary:This book is a replica of the original from the collections of The New York Public Library; it was produced from digital images created by The New York Public Library and its partners as part of their preservation efforts. To enhance your reading pleasure, the aging and scanning artifacts have been removed using patented page cleaning technology. We hope you enjoy the result. [via]
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The Wealth of Nations: Adam Smith ; Introduction by Alan B. Krueger ; Edited, With Notes and Marginal Summary, by Edwin Cannanby Adam Smith, Andrew S. SkinnerISBN 0140436154 (0-14-043615-4)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Wealth of Nations: Adam Smith ; Introduction by Alan B. Krueger ; Edited, With Notes and Marginal Summary, by Edwin Cannan'Book summary:Smith offers his considered response to the French Physiocrats and assesses the nature of the mercantile system.[via]More editions of The Wealth of Nations: Adam Smith ; Introduction by Alan B. Krueger ; Edited, With Notes and Marginal Summary, by Edwin Cannan:
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The Wealth of Nations/Books I-IIIby Adam Smith, Andrew S. SkinnerISBN 0140432086 (0-14-043208-6)
Softcover, Viking Pr
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Wealth of Nations/Books I-III'Book summary:Back cover:
By pin-pointing the 'division of labour' as a major explanation of economic growth, Adam Smith laid the foundations of economic theory in general and of 'classical' economics in particular. But Andrew Skinner shows in his introduction to this edition that the real sophistication of The Wealth of Nations lies less in its overall picture of a vast analytical system - a capitalist economy - in which all the parts can be seen simultaneously interacting with each other. Moreover, he stresses that Smith's view of society was mot a merely economic one, and that The Wealth of Nations is for from being an apologia for unregulated business enterprise: Smith was at pains to show that economic advance can have undesirable social consequences, and that labour which is economically unproductive can be beneficial to society at large. [via]More editions of The Wealth of Nations/Books I-III:
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Winesburg, Ohioby Sherwood AndersonISBN 0140186557 (0-14-018655-7)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Winesburg, Ohio'Book summary:A collection of short stories dealing with a small town in Ohio. [via]
More editions of Winesburg, Ohio:
- Winesburg, Ohio: ISBN 0140247793 (0-14-024779-3)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA - Winesburg, Ohio: ISBN 0140155015 (0-14-015501-5)
Softcover, Penguin USA - Winesburg, Ohio: ISBN 0140006095 (0-14-000609-5)
Hardcover, Penguin Books - Winesburg, Ohio: ISBN 0140186557 (0-14-018655-7)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA
- Winesburg, Ohio: ISBN 0140247793 (0-14-024779-3)
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