After a checkered career at sea and on land Leo Mack settles down in Blue Anchor shortly before the Civil War. A solitary man living in Ida Crabtree's boarding house, he earns his living as a tinker but finds his worth and mission when the war begins. As a traveling tinker he carries news of military events to isolated farmhouses and becomes in effect a broadcaster of war news. In time just about every person in the county knows Leo by name but nothing of his background. Isaac Brandimore takes it upon himself to tell Mack's story but dies before the work is finished. Emily Kingston comes forward to salvage the story and finish it, but not before Leo dies. Concluding the project, she observes that Leo Mack in tattered work clothes was "animated in good times and bad by blood and brain and spirit." His death, she tells us, diminished Blue Anchor.
The book dramatizes the plight of abolitionist Quakers living in eastern North Carolina during the Civil War. As the war rages from 1861 to 1865, both Union and Confederate forces tramp through the region to destroy whatever they come upon and confiscate, as the war drags on, anything of value. A Quaker family entrenched in rural tradition and a faith emphasizing peace quietly resists the brutality of war but is made to suffer. As Southerners, Union soldiers see them as the enemy. As abolitionists going against the grain of Southern culture, Confederate soldiers despise and harass them. When they refuse to pay the exemption tax, their men are required to go into the army. Refusing to bear arms, their mettle is severely tested at Gettysburg and Petersburg. The book is about courage and endurance in the maw of adversity. It is closely based on historical fact, Confederate records, and Quaker tradition.
Speaking the deepest and truest thoughts of humankind in the language available only to the gifted, the Victorian poets elected to do more than merely sing as versifiers. By coming to grips with thorny contemporary issues and suggesting workable solutions, they struggled to lead their people out of the wilderness. Tennyson, who came to be known as the voice of Victorianism, is the poet most often credited with this ambition. But Matthew Arnold and the other major poets had a similar aim. Their poems, while not devoid of feeling, are charged with the main currents of social, scientific, religious, and philosophical thought. Interwoven and resonating in sensuous song is their own thought. The best of the poetry fits the word and thought to the troubling developments of the time and rises to a prophecy to predict the problems of our time.
You will find here a collection of original short stories that will take you on an inward journey to nowhere and everywhere. Beginning with "Erpenbeck and Friend” and ending with "Growing Old," the journey will be easy and pleasant in some places, rough and rutted in others. Each story, as Mark Twain has said, will transport you to a faraway place and magically bring you home again for supper. Enjoy your meal, savor your supper.
Beacons River is a tale of ambition and human suffering in the mind and heart of a young man struggling for success as a novelist. Based on the life and career of nineteenth-century novelist George Gissing, the book is about a man wrestling with destiny as he dreams of making his mark in the world. Soon after his father dies, Andrew Beacon goes away to a Quaker boarding school with two younger brothers. An exemplary but lonely student, he wins a scholarship to a college known to be a stepping stone to Oxford or Cambridge. At eighteen, on the brink of realizing his dream, he meets a woman of the streets who changes the course of his life. After serving a month in prison, he leaves England to start over in America but returns a year later. Living in poverty with a drunken wife, he writes his first novels. When she dies at twenty-nine, he marries a woman whose violence drives him vixen-haunted from home. Badgered by loneliness and hardship but losing himself in his work, in time he finds the woman meant for him. The love they cherish before he dies completes the pattern of a life that runs like a tumultuous river from mountain to sea.
Bonheur was and is my name. Every person in my native France knew the name meant sunshine, well-being, happiness. But how does one find happiness in a prison known worldwide for its coarse and brutal inhumanity? Fifteen painful years, prime years of youth, I endured in that terrible place determined to escape. Though I planned each escape carefully, something always went wrong, and I found myself trying to survive in soul-shattering solitary confinement. I was small of statue and not very strong compared to the hulking convicts I lived with, and yet I need not remind you that strength comes in many forms.
In 1831, the beginning of a cruel decade in iron times for England, Thomas Carlyle observed: Man has walked by the light of conflagrations and amid the sound of falling cities, and now there is darkness and long watching till it be morning. Thirty years later Matthew Arnold counseled a faltering friend who had lost his way: Roam on! The light we sought is shining still. When the nineteenth century ended, having generated more questions than answers, more problems than solutions, a journalist writing for a London newspaper summed up the struggle in one short sentence: They searched in shadows, seeking light. In tumultuous and uncertain times the authors under scrutiny in this volume, masters of English prose, wrote and lectured to lead the nation out of shadow and confusion, or as one put it: out of the wilderness. They are in order of appearance Macaulay, Carlyle, Newman, Mill, Ruskin, Arnold, Darwin, Huxley, Morris, Pater, and Stevenson. Others of lesser note are Spencer, Stephen, and Butler.
George Gissing's books, published during the last two decades of the nineteenth century, are memorable for their portraits of women. Only a few women played active roles in his life, but those who did exerted a lasting influence. In each of his novels he portrayed women vividly and with unerring realism. He worried, in fact, that some might see themselves in his books and rebuke him. His portraits of women are warm and human, revealing an essential sympathy that makes them timeless. An important feature of his novels, his feminine portraiture is worth careful study.
THERE IS A MAN BLAZING A TRAIL ACROSS THE SILVER SCREEN, DELIVERING PERFORMANCES OF SUCH ELECTRIC INTENSITY THAT HE HAS UNITED CRITICS AND CASUAL MOVIEGOERS ALIKE. THAT MAN IS TOM HARDY.Starring roles as Britain’s most dangerous prisoner in Bronson, both Kray twins in Legend and the villainous brute Bane in The Dark Knight Rises have showcased his raw talent, edginess and ability to utterly inhabit his characters. He has also cemented his status as that rare thing: the man that women want and men want to be. His appeal is endless.But things weren’t always so promising. Cloistered in a life of suburban predictability, a teenage Tom began getting his thrills from drugs and petty crime. He made his first mark in the award-winning series Band of Brothers but, in 2003, Tom collapsed on the streets of Soho, brought low by drug abuse. Yet, with the single-minded commitment that has come to characterise his acting performances, Tom banished his demons once and for all.Now, with the title role in the long-awaited Mad Max: Fury Road under his belt, and Hollywood at his feet, there is just no stopping this magnetic figure. This affectionate and in-depth biography reveals all the faces of Tom Hardy: the wayward boy he was, the driven professional he now is and the all-time legend he is sure to become.
In the autumn of 1850 the man called Mose, a fixture on the Horton plantation in North Carolina, is sold to a wily slave trader to settle a debt. Traveling southward, he sinks into cruel bondage while a woman sold by Horton at the same time runs northward to freedom. In Savannah Mose becomes the property of a kind master, but in Alabama under the thumb of Cody Hawk he suffers intensely. With some help from a slave named Pearl, he shakes off the deadly grip of a dark force, experiences a kind of rebirth, and gains the strength to escape the hell created by Hawk. Saving himself, he is not able to save Pearl.
From playing a rogue agent in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, to taking on the role of villainous Bane in Batman: The Dark Knight Rises, Tom Hardy is well on the way to becoming the finest actor of his generation. His raw talent, edginess and ability to utterly inhabit the characters he plays have already prompted comparisons to screen legends such as Marlon Brando and Robert De Niro. With a host of critically acclaimed performances under his belt and the bright lights of Hollywood beckoning , Tom's star is undoubtedly in the ascendant. Born into an idyllic, middle-class life in the suburbs, by his teenage years Tom had grown restless and started to rebel. Bad behaviour in the form of alcoholism, drug-taking and criminal activity ensued and after a brief stint working as a model, fate intervened and he found his way onto an acting course at his local college. Having been plucked from drama school to appear in Band of Brothers, by 2003, his addictions had got the better of him and he collapsed in Soho following a drugs binge. Rehabilitation followed, as did a rare second chance at hitting the big time. It was Hardy's standout performance as Stuart Shorter in BBC TV's Stuart: A Life Backwards and as Britain's most notorious prisoner in the film Bronson, which really made audiences and critics sit up and take notice. Since then, he has earned himself a reputation as a shape-shifting actor with the skill to slip effortlessly in and out of contrasting characters such as Eames in blockbusters Inception and Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights. This affectionate and in-depth biography reveals the actor and the life that has shaped him into the star he has become. It explores his wayward youth, his drama school years, his burnout and his complex route to eventual success. With a host of major films on the horizon in 2012 and beyond, his is clearly Hollywood's hottest property - and the best is yet to come.
Every person in France is fully aware that Bonheur means happiness and well-being. But how does a wretch convicted of a petty crime find happiness or even survival in a prison known for its inhumanity? That place robbed me of my youth, my teeth, and my peace of mind while instilling within me a fierce desire to escape. Though I planned each escape with great care, something always went wrong. Perhaps I was the sorry victim of a malicious destiny. If so, that mysterious force, was up against the resilience of the human spirit, its power to endure. More than a few times I survived soul-shattering solitary confinement to run as fast and as far as I could. I had little muscle compared to the hulking convicts in French Guiana, but we all know strength is not defined by muscle alone. My narrative speaks of desperate attempts to escape the oppressive heat, horror, and corruption of the prison colony the French called Bagne de Cayenne.
Even though his books never sold as well as those of more popular novelists, women in particular liked George Gissings work and often wrote to him for advice. They could see he was keenly interested in the lives of women and the long struggle to improve their condition in a gender-restrictive society dominated by males. Though Gissing tried to champion the womens cause, he did not entirely succeed. Perhaps he was too close to the changes affecting women to understand their situation fully. Perhaps with individual women a tenacious idealism blurred his vision. Perhaps the facts of his life and experience prevented a balanced judgment. Yet if he could say at the end of his career that he knew nothing at all about women, it was not because he had failed to write about them or to make a thorough study of them. Gissing used the woman question of his day to create female characters as much alive now as when he first began to write.
My name is Jonathan Blue. During the last two decades of the nineteenth century, I worked many hours each day for acceptance as a writer. In my youth, I dreamed of becoming a classical scholar at Oxford or Cambridge. When the fantasy was shattered by a stupid excess of emotion, I attempted to begin a new life in America. A year later, I was living in a London slum with a drunken wife. In grim poverty, I wrote about poor people struggling to survive in slums among the worst in the world. They were my neighbors, and from them came inventive and motive force. In maturity I lived with a delicate and beautiful woman, but in failing health for a short time. Then like a turbulent river, I dashed unimpeded to the sea.
One glance at the contents of this book will tell any lover of sea stories that an exciting saga of danger and adventure aboard a three-masted sailing ship named the Windhover is about to unfold. She leaves Bermuda in the summer of 1871 to cross the Atlantic and the Mediterranean en route to Naples, Italy. By no means will it be a journey without incident. On the high seas, sour provisions bring crew and captain into conflict. As the squabble becomes incendiary, the second mate, who narrates the story, must find a way to overcome a mutinous crew, regain control of the ship, and bring her to safe haven.
A Quaker community in North Carolina finds itself opposing both the North and the South during the Civil War. In the fall of 1860, chilly winds of change sweep through Cross Keys and touch everybody. As the war rages from 1861 to 1865, armies on both sides tramp through the region, confiscating property and hurting the innocent. Walter Kirkwood refuses to pay the exemption tax and goes away to war in the spring of 1863. Near the end of that year his father, David Kirkwood, is called to military duty. In the thick of battle Walter suffers three terrible days at Gettysburg. His father, refusing to bear arms, is placed in the front lines at Petersburg as punishment for disobeying orders. At home the women and children endure and survive. It is a story of courage in the face of adversity, a novel closely based on historical fact and Quaker tradition.
aAnd then the hoary sage came fortha]and smote the ground with wooden staffa]and bade the assembly harken.a The Victorian sage was a wise and well-informed man who wrote compelling prose as teacher, preacher, and prophet. He wanted to lead his people out of the wilderness, and he believed earnestly that he had the means by which to do it. In tumultuous and uncertain times, he worked long and hard to be heard. At the end of his life, he looked back to ask with some dismay whether anyone had heard at all. At times he was gravely disappointed, even bitter, as he convinced himself that the people who needed him most had neither listened nor learned. In brighter moments he was certain his work was not done in vain. Performing as sage were Macaulay, Carlyle, Newman, Mill, Ruskin, Arnold, Darwin, Huxley, Morris, and Pater. Others of lesser note were Spencer, Stephen, Butler, and Stevenson.
Half biography and half critical study, this book about George Gissing is for the general reader. It draws a parallel between the women in Gissing's life and the women in his novels. His books span the last two decades of the nineteenth century and are memorable for their portraits of women. Only a few women played active roles in Gissing's life, but all exerted a lasting influence. Their imprint allowed him to portray women vividly and with unerring realism, though at times in variable tones of gray...in charcoal. Gissing's feminine portraiture, rendered in shades of somber experience, is one of the most striking features of his work and one of the most valuable for the reader of today. It derived from his intense and abiding interest in the women of his time and the way they lived their lives. His portraits of women, warm and human, were shaped in all their detail by an essential sympathy that made them neither topical nor contemporary but timeless. Some of the women in his life became models for fictional women as alive today as when he first created them.
James Carl Nelson tells the dramatic true story of five brilliant young soldiers from Harvard, a thrilling tale of combat and heroism. Five Lieutenants tells the story of five young Harvard men who took up the call to arms in the spring of 1917 and met differing fates in the maelstrom of battle on the Western Front in 1918. Delving deep into the motivations, horrific experiences, and ultimate fates of this Harvard-educated quintet—and by extension of the brilliant young officer class that left its collegiate and post-collegiate pursuits to enlist in the Army and lead America's rough-and-ready doughboys—Five Lieutenants presents a unique, timeless, and fascinating account of citizen soldiers at war, and of the price these extraordinary men paid while earnestly giving all they had in an effort to end "the war to end all wars." Drawing upon the subjects' intimate, eloquent, and uncensored letters and memoirs, this is a fascinating microcosm of the American experience in the First World War, and of the horrific experiences and hardships of the educated class of young men who were relied upon to lead doughboys in the trenches and, ultimately, in open battle.
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Documents the stories of five young Harvard students who met different fates while serving in World War I, drawing on uncensored letters and memoirs to illuminate the impact of the conflict on the educated class of soldiers.
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