Banking on Form was so funny people said, that they daren’t read it in public places—but Pook in Boots is even funnier! Leaving the Bank, Pook continues his aggressive career in the Royal Marines, where he mixes with earls and orphans—leading them all cheerfully to perdition, willingly aided by the smallest Marine on record, the Hon. Lesley Pilkington-Goldberg. Opposing Pook and his dislike of discipline is that magnificent character Sergeant Canyon—fifteen stone of bad-tempered Saxon warrior—whose epic encounter with Pook in the Unarmed Combat Class is still remembered with awe by those who saw it. Running through the story is the love-interest of Pook’s girlfriends—unexpectedly connected with his celebrated inter-Service bout with the notorious Bandsman Bangle, which is described here for the first time. Because, as Pook remarks, “any fool can read a love yarn but it takes grit to read this type of literature.” We meet the shrewdest tactician of them all in Lieutenant Tudor—late house-detective at a London hotel—whose fondness for the ladies is second only to his skill in battle. What happens to Pook during the disastrous Exercise Seaweed, followed by the extraordinary Passing Out Parade and a hilarious party in the West End night-club, will confirm his position as the biggest laughter-raiser in the business. Colonel Tank sums up wisely when he observes: “Sometimes I wonder if I’m C.O. of a crack fighting regiment or the manager of a West End hotel for spies.”
In many of the Pook Books the part of the eternal woman behind Pook is played by the lovely Olga. Some readers asked to hear more about her, so Pook’s Tale of Woo is mainly devoted to her—and her eternal mother, Mrs. Brown. We see how the faithful and long-suffering Olga, engaged once more to Pook, is swept off her feet by the handsome, emotional Italian, Enrico, the dynamic lover who also becomes engaged to her in a tight threesome of who-woos-who. How Pook deals with this situation in Italy, becoming engaged to Enrico’s cousin in the process during a romantic Mediterranean cruise on a munitions ship, is a revelation in the wiles of women when they collect their male. Pook also tells of his early struggles as an actor, lecturer and writer for Sex International and the women’s magazines, and of his later struggles with his Producer’s wife in the film world. Peter Pook has written such an amusing book that even Olga’s mother smiled when she censored the script!
One of the most rewarding aspects of a writer’s work is to receive letters from readers asking for more information about his characters. Some requested details of Pook’s early days, while others wanted to hear more about that fiery little nobleman, Honners. In Pook’s Tender Years Peter Pook has tried to satisfy both demands by drawing on the most amusing anecdotes of those formative years from eight to nineteen, and many of these stories are nearer the truth than he cares to admit—such as the derailing of a tram with the aid of a kitchen poker and the destruction of his teacher’s desk by force of gravity. Also on record is Pook’s first meeting with Honners at the Convent of the Holy Angels, where Honners was an unwilling martyr to religious rigours and where Pook’s prayers were directed towards becoming a more proficient prize-fighter. Needless to say, in this book Pook begins his Tale of Woo, as he calls it, with his first love, Olga, and later as an enthusiastic gigolo working for the Renta-Gent Escort Bureau. The abundance of wit and humour to be found in Pook’s Tender Years should satisfy all those readers who enjoyed the previous Pook Books so heartily, as well as attracting many new fans to the Pook brand of fast entertainment.
Once again Pook comes up with another original formula for mirth and sheer reading pleasure which his fans enjoy so much. Schoolmaster Pook often illustrates his lessons by anecdotes from the War. His pupils like this too, but they like it even more when nostalgia so grips Pook that he seems to reminisce himself into the past before their very eyes. The boys and girls of Cudford Secondary School see Pook making love on the summit of the Great Pyramid of Egypt; being chased by German paratroops during the invasion of Crete; and finding himself blackmailed by a beautiful half-caste girl in Ceylon—not forgetting some remarkable experiences with Honners in Burma and on the Maldive Islands. Between these hilarious adventures, Pook takes a closer look at modern education, teachers and children, portraying aspects of school life of which the public is scarcely aware. Here is an opportunity to meet once more some of the memorable characters from former Pook Books, such as Commander Bray of the Navy, and Sergeant Canyon of the Royal Marines with whom Pook served during the War—and Dr Collins, his long-suffering Headmaster. Definitely a volume in the high tradition of humour Pook has established in recent years, and worthy to be added to the set which many readers are collecting, to savour many times over.
The author was quite overwhelmed at the way the antique trade took Pook in Business to their hearts. Some wrote to him praising the accurate background of the book—Pook spent ten happy years in the game of polishing-rags to riches—albeit bemoaning certain TV programmes which have made the customers too knowledgeable for comfort. Pook lets us share in the thrills and nightmares of acquiring one’s first shop, and opening it to see if the public will actually pay money for the debris of the past. Readers will delight in his advice about how to buy antiques, both from the auction sales and privately, and how he finally solved that unique paradox of the trade—“Any fool can sell it, but it takes a smart operator to buy it.” We meet the whole range of customers familiar to all dealers, from the overseas bargain-hunter to the eccentric lady who has an obsession for filling her house with junk—not forgetting the perils of purchasing stock which is still very much on HP. In this connection Pook employs the beautiful Olga as a kind of financial bloodhound. For the dealer and layman alike Pook in Business is a treasure house of hilarious anecdotes which you will want to read time and again—and maybe give you an unexpected interest in attics, cellars and dustbins.
Readers who opened a fun account with Banking on Form and Bwana Pook will be delighted by this latest addition to their libraries. When a bank clerk struggles as hard as Pook does to live an eventful life, he is sure to get into trouble with the Manager. Mr Putty and his Chief Clerk, Mr.Pants, disapprove strongly of Pook’s appearance as the nude prude in an all-colour girlie film, and when Pook and our old friend Honners take the Manager to a strip club, their account goes deep into the red. Of course, no Pook book would be complete without a bit of wooing, and who better for Pook to woo than the Bank Chairman’s daughter? How his plans are thwarted by the ancient ledger-keeper, Mr. Pills, must be read to be believed. Suffice to say that against an authentic background of commercial practice Pook hits a new high in hilarity.
With an ever increasing number of men and women taking up teaching as a career, it is fitting that Pook should reveal his own startling college experiences for the benefit of students about to join and for the delight of teachers whose college days are among their most vivid memories. The excellent work being done by our Colleges of Education is so well known both here and abroad that Pook decided to dwell chiefly on the lighter side of scholastic life, displaying the humour of lecturers, students and those unwitting guinea-pigs of our educational sorties—the school-children, who have to bear the brunt of the student’s endeavours in his new world of Teaching Practice. Against his customary accurate background of the profession, Pook stumbles through the whole range of college activities with characteristic enthusiasm, undaunted by the novel circumstance of being the only man among the six hundred girls who attend Dame May Boyle College of Education for Women. Understandably, he has to seek psychiatric treatment to face such a task, the results of which lead to one of the funniest books in the celebrated Pook series.
You’ll enjoy Pook and Honners in the Indian Navy, savouring the sweet life of the East. Honners breaks with naval tradition by opening a boarding-house in Bombay, providing a base for his ever-growing collection of war trophies. But that ruthless disciplinarian, Commander Bray, brings the war against Japan to their notice, and they experience the terrors of night convoy sailing. Here Pook becomes the first Navigating Officer ever to witness the sun rising in the west without another ship of the convoy in sight. Pook and Honners are selected to lead the landing party on the Ramsami beach-head, where they come under fire from the Japanese and their own Task Force. How they escape the Japanese by working in a Ramsami house of ill-fame is a hilarious climax to another extremely funny Pook book.
Pook & Partners introduces another dynamic personality of the Pook fun club—Al Newman, a high-pressure salesman who persuades Pook to enter the property world in pursuit of that fortune he sought in Pook in Business. One of the snags in such a partnership is Al’s wife, Lorna, who regards Pook as her partner too—though not always in a strictly professional capacity. How Pook, with the assistance of Honners, ecapes from her clutches by falling into the jaws of a goodtime girl called Penny is an object lesson in the art of establishing a business and building it up to the pinnacle of financial insolvency. Some of the scenes are set in that traditional heart of British commercial life—the public house, where the giants of Cudford Estate Agency negotiate their property deals to the limits of human endurance, before being assisted from the premises at closing time in an almost insensible condition. Once again, in this tenth Pook Book, the wit and humour which his fans relish so much seem to flow non-stop from one of Britain’s cleverest comedy creators.
Beau Pook Proposes lays bare the jungle of the used car trade and the ruthless operators standing behind their gleaming bangers. Anything but a woman’s world, yet Pook enters it in partnership with his great-aunt Dot, a lady born before the motor car was invented, determined to make good in the nation’s toughest mart. We pity them as the victims of the notorious Tax Man con game, then marvel at Aunt Dot’s inspired counter-move against the Robbin’ Hoods of auto-ville.But this story is not all power struggle on the forecourts of Britain. Pook tells of his unrequited love for the beautiful Wanda Wells, and how in his despair he wrote to Nurse Dawn of Family Help magazine, and how Nurse Dawn came to his side by return of post to begin a love affair to melt the heart of any franchise dealer—wherein Pook becomes engaged to Nurse Dawn’s glamorous sister, Gipsy Rosa with the Crystal Ball. A poignant novel for all men who love cars and for all women who love ugly, muscle-bound men who love cars. Pook says beauty is only sin-deep anyway.
Peter Pook has graced many professions in his time, and has escaped from many difficult situations. In this latest adventure he takes up the task of teaching, bringing to his duties that unique blend of dedicated hilarity and profound near-scholarship which his thousands of readers find so hard to do without. The reader is taken right into the staffroom and classrooms of Cudford Secondary Modern School, to meet the very people we knew in the happiest days of our lives—the fat boy who sat next to us, the cutie who passed us inky love-notes, as well as the fiery Headmaster, Gym Mistress, and Fräulein. Naturally, Pook’s own extra-curricular activities involve him with the female teachers, but he does what passes for his best to conceal these affairs from his pupils, who lap up anything to do with S-E-X as eagerly as the staff themselves. Educationalists will be intrigued by Pook’s unorthodox approach to teaching in the Pop Age, when he strives to impart a knowledge of English to the D stream, who often find difficulty in using even their mother tongue. The N.U.T. and N.A.S. will be delighted by this shrewd appraisal of their problems, while the ordinary reader—Pook-addict or fresher—will revel in this lesson in laughter.
Banking on Form is an amusing and irreverent record of a powerfully-built young athlete who became caught up in the world of banking. Problems confront young Pook as he struggles to combine the art of banking with sex, body-building and a football career—a feat which understandably threatens to overwhelm him until a clever Austrian gentleman steps in with a timely solution.
Beneath the mirth and action of Playboy Pook is a serious attempt by the author to recapture those lush days of England before the war, and to get inside the minds of the young people who were fortunate enough to enjoy that fascinating era. The book is a sequel to Pook’s Tender Years, enabling the reader to meet again some delightful friends of Pook’s childhood and those adults like Aunt Mabel whose impression on youngsters remains throughout their lives. And no Pook book is complete without Honners, the arrogant little nobleman, whose efforts to evade parachute-jump training with the school cadet corps must be ranked as funny as anything Pook has yet written. Playboy Pook contains several memorable scenes, not the least of which is an unforgettable educational cruise to Greece, where young Puddle tries to purloin part of the Parthenon, Honners discovers a unique way of entering nightclubs without paying and Pook becomes involved with a passionate lady of the town in an Athens casino which he mistakes for a tube station.
Lieutenant Pook sounds pretty good, at least it did to Pook himself, who was seconded to the Royal Ramsami Navy to undertake the strangest mission ever to befall a naval officer. Precisely what that mission was, though, Pook never quite discovered. Assisted by Honners as navigating officer, Peter Pook sets out from the Eastern state of Ramsam as crack naval diver of the Fleet, on board the mystery ship Soonong. In command of the vessel is one of the toughest characters ever to sail the notorious China Coast, Commander Bray—250lb of the liverish breed that made Britain great, whose brilliant seamanship has made his name a legend throughout the repair yards of the Orient. His dislike of Pook is apparent from the first, and is helped along by jealousy over a beautiful half-caste girl, whom Pook unwittingly introduces to a house of ill-fame in the wicked city of Shaggapore. With superb confidence, born of utter incompetence, Pook blunders through the hazards of naval diving, religious taboos and Oriental marriage, under the all-seeing eye of the Nawab of Ramsam. He flirts with the Nawab’s wife, falls in love with a night-club singer, swims across a sacred lake and finally becomes enmeshed in the macabre religious practices of the Ramsamis. Nevertheless he still finds time to be shipwrecked in the Bay of Bengal and sink a warship under his captain’s feet. Happily, Commander Bray and Lieutenant Pook decide to bury the past like true shipmates and as a result of this resolve their bloody fight on the waterfront of Chattoo dockland sets a new standard in human conflict and endurance, albeit a new low in naval discipline. Whether or not the reader is acquainted with Pook’s earlier adventures in Banking on Form, Pook in Boots and Pook in Business, he will recognize this personality as the funniest on the current comedy scene.
Warning: the Publishers wish to state that they can accept no responsibility for the Pook addiction which will be the inevitable result of reading this book. Persons reading it do so as their own risk. Peter Pook is desperate for money. He decides therefore to marry it, figuring this to be the shortest way to eliminate the normal forty years’ graft known as earning a living. He selects Africa as his hunting ground, and soon tracks a rich quarry, but he loses her to a rival Romeo. Naturally he plans to accompany the happy couple on their honeymoon. With characteristic durability, Pook strikes gold in Johannesburg. He woos an heiress (against strong Afrikaans competition), but he has to live while doing so. To this end, he takes a job in the Capricorn Bank, where one of his duties is to wage financial war against the bank’s most powerful customer. This customer, of course, is the lady’s father. Devotion to duty demands deportation. “Surely there is some remote corner of Darkest Africa,” sighs the bank manager, “where I can work out my service till pension without Pook.” Pook meanwhile is beset by lions in the dreaded Mwanga jungle. The hilarity of this latest Pook book has to be experienced, and Pook’s many fans will revel in this unique exercise in laughter.
In Running the Batteries, Peter Ericson tells the story of the Union gunboats on the western rivers. Using original sources which let the participants speak for themselves, the book follows the Union navy as it battles its way down river to the sea. Battles such as Fort Henry, Fort Donelson, Island Number 10 and Vicksburg are brought out in great detail, as are lesser known battles such as Plum Run Bend, Memphis and the Red River Campaign.
Once again Pook comes up with another original formula for mirth and sheer reading pleasure which his fans enjoy so much. Schoolmaster Pook often illustrates his lessons by anecdotes from the War. His pupils like this too, but they like it even more when nostalgia so grips Pook that he seems to reminisce himself into the past before their very eyes. The boys and girls of Cudford Secondary School see Pook making love on the summit of the Great Pyramid of Egypt; being chased by German paratroops during the invasion of Crete; and finding himself blackmailed by a beautiful half-caste girl in Ceylon—not forgetting some remarkable experiences with Honners in Burma and on the Maldive Islands. Between these hilarious adventures, Pook takes a closer look at modern education, teachers and children, portraying aspects of school life of which the public is scarcely aware. Here is an opportunity to meet once more some of the memorable characters from former Pook Books, such as Commander Bray of the Navy, and Sergeant Canyon of the Royal Marines with whom Pook served during the War—and Dr Collins, his long-suffering Headmaster. Definitely a volume in the high tradition of humour Pook has established in recent years, and worthy to be added to the set which many readers are collecting, to savour many times over.
The Monuments of a Divided State St. Louis was at the center of several key Civil War events from the Dred Scott decision through the Mississippi Campaign that cut the Confederate States in two. Visit the site from which enslaved people tried to cross the Mississippi River to the free state of Illinois. Discover how hundreds of lawsuits by enslaved people set the stage for the Dred Scott decision that lit the fuse to the Civil War. See the military base that produced over 200 Civil War generals and the arsenal that secessionists and unionists fought to control. Author Peter Downs goes behind the monuments and historic sites to explore the people, relationships and events that influenced the course of civil war in St. Louis and the nation.
The present-day Parish of Greatham lies in the county of Hampshire, on either side of the old Farnham (Surrey) to Petersfield Turnpike. The 'Domesday Book' of 1086 recorded Greatham as being 'Terra Regis', a Latin term meaning 'Land of the King', indicating that this was once a Royal manor belonging to William the Conqueror himself. In later years, the manor passed through many families by marriage and by purchase, including the Devenish, Marshall, Norton, Freeland, Love, Chawner and Coryton families. The name of the village has changed many times, however slightly, over the years. Greteham, Grietham, Gretham, Grutham, Gratham all derived from two separate words, the 'Old-English' (Anglo-Saxon) 'ham', meaning 'village, estate, manor or homestead' and an old Scandinavian word 'griot' or 'gryt', meaning 'stones or stony ground'. Thus the name 'Greotham' came into being, literally a 'stony estate' or 'farm on gravel'.
The Rough Guide to Belize is the ultimate travel guide to this unique country, with clear maps and detailed coverage of all the best attractions, from the beautiful, sun-washed cayes to the soaring Mayan pyramids. Discover Belize's highlights with stunning photography and extensive information on everything from the country's magnificent Barrier Reef - the longest in the Western Hemisphere - to its mist-shrouded jungles. Find detailed practical advice on what to see and do in Belize, relying on up-to-date descriptions of the best resorts, hotels, spas, and restaurants for all budgets. The Rough Guide to Belize also features sections featuring Belize's splendid underwater life, plus its ancient Mayan pyramids and sites. Explore every corner of Belize with more user-friendly maps than any other guidebook.
One of the most rewarding aspects of a writer’s work is to receive letters from readers asking for more information about his characters. Some requested details of Pook’s early days, while others wanted to hear more about that fiery little nobleman, Honners. In Pook’s Tender Years Peter Pook has tried to satisfy both demands by drawing on the most amusing anecdotes of those formative years from eight to nineteen, and many of these stories are nearer the truth than he cares to admit—such as the derailing of a tram with the aid of a kitchen poker and the destruction of his teacher’s desk by force of gravity. Also on record is Pook’s first meeting with Honners at the Convent of the Holy Angels, where Honners was an unwilling martyr to religious rigours and where Pook’s prayers were directed towards becoming a more proficient prize-fighter. Needless to say, in this book Pook begins his Tale of Woo, as he calls it, with his first love, Olga, and later as an enthusiastic gigolo working for the Renta-Gent Escort Bureau. The abundance of wit and humour to be found in Pook’s Tender Years should satisfy all those readers who enjoyed the previous Pook Books so heartily, as well as attracting many new fans to the Pook brand of fast entertainment.
Writers James Robinson, Peter J. Tomasi and JT Krul are joined by artists Eddy Barrows, Ardian Syaf and Ed Benes for this essential BLACKEST NIGHT storyline tie-in title that features Batman, Superman and the Titans dealing with their greatest villains and loved ones returning from the dead as evil Black Lanterns. Collects BLACKEST NIGHT: BATMAN issues #1-3, BLACKEST NIGHT: SUPERMAN issues #1-3 and BLACKEST NIGHT: TEEN TITANS issues #1-3.
A youth volunteers for spy activity in the Civil War and is instructed to get information about Island Number Ten, a Confederate strongpoint in the Mississippi.
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