Résultats lu par "C. James Moore" dans Toutes les catégories

In This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald gives us Amory Blaine, who, from boyhood through his early 20s, is on a quest for his identity, his philosophy, and his sense of place in a world never quite his own, a world in which he moves with barely concealed ego-fueled disgust and contempt. Fitzgerald's breakthrough novel, written in 1920 when the author was 23, manages to be both a thinly veiled autobiography and a sincere attempt by Fitzgerald to get into the head of the young, privileged personages of his time.

"Pillar of Fire", a great Ray Bradbury short story, is one of those horror tales that is guaranteed to raise goosebumps at every step of the bizarre way...from the graveyard to, well, a golden box launched into forever. 

F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby is more than one of America's most-read, taught, and debated novels. Gatsby represents a paradigm shift in the novel form, a deep dive into the intimacies of the dark and selfish aspects of human nature. The novel is an over-the-top display of the Jazz Age as seen through the eyes of a staid and - by his own account - honest Midwestern man, Nick Carraway.  

As tense, short story Westerns go, W.C. Tuttle's "Spawn of the Desert", set in the 1850s rugged Southwest mountains, is a splendid, fast-paced example of the classic genre of tales of gold and silver mining towns run by ruthless men, and inhabited by an eclectic population of miners, gamblers, gunmen, drunks, hardscrabble women, and the obligatory "colorful" characters. Tuttle (1883-1969) was one of the most prolific Western writers of his day, with more than 40 novels and short stories to his credit.

The Russians were playing Donald Trump and his allies long before the 2016 election - and continue to do so to this day. That much, and more, is made clear in this masterfully narrated audiobook.

"On the Duty of Civil Disobedience", published by Henry David Thoreau in 1849, speaks eloquently and personally about one man's desire to live a peaceful, government-free life. In this short essay, Thoreau lays out his philosophy best summed up by the author as, "That government governs best that does not govern at all." Thoreau takes on the key issues of his day: slavery and the Mexican war. 

Old Judge Anderson feared the inevitable - he was to be replaced by a Cyber, a lightning-fast, softly-speaking machine that deals out decisions from its cyber-bench free of human errors and motions. The District Attorney has a surprise up his sleeve for the Judge, a case against a man who claims he can outwit any Cyber, and is willing to prove it in Judge Anderson's court room. As the trial gets underway, Judge Anderson must come to grips with a future he wishes would just go away. What would his judicial and ethical hero, Justice Holmes, think? 

By the end of the 21st century, a deep-state human-systems organization, the Psychotechnic Institute, has begun melding neuroscience and psychoanalytics to create the foundation for generations of more peaceful, more powerful, more "sensitive" human beings. In Poul Anderson's 1954 science-fiction thriller, The Sensitive Man, one such human, Simon Dalgetty, is on the trail of brutal men who kidnapped Michael Tighe, keeper of the keys to the Institute's secrets, and, thus, to the fate of world order.  

 Tales of the Jazz Age is a delightful, sobering, thought-provoking, and downright curious collection of 11 of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short stories, published after his first two novels - This Side of Paradise (1920) and The Beautiful and Damned (1922) - but before The Great Gatsby (1925). 

Here, political scientist Jakub J. Grygiel brings to light the importance of incorporating geography into grand strategy. He argues that states can increase and maintain their position of power by pursuing a geostrategy that focuses on control of resources and lines of communication.

A sweet, exciting, and somewhat supernatural story of Champneys "Champ" Carter and his devoted and headstrong wife, Dolly, who, in the early teens of the 20th century, discover Carter's uncanny knack for picking winning racehorses. Carter, a struggling novelist, and Dolly, absent a family fortune due to her marriage to Champ, are making what they can with their very last dollars in a New York City apartment. He wishes nothing more than to make her happy, but finds himself unsuited for nearly every sort of real job except for his passion for writing.

Romance, intrigue, jewels, gold-laden tombs, ancient curses, Egyptian princesses, a dysfunctional British family, a heroic archaeologist, a conniving thief, a wicked and vengeful heir to a 4,000-year-old line of Egyptian kings all come together on the Nile in 1900s Cairo in a tale only L. Frank Baum - creator of the Oz stories - could tell with his adventure-tipped and action-filled pen. And no finer adventure and action-packed tale came from Baum's quill than The Last Egyptian: A Romance of the Nile.

Valgolia, a planet in the Epsilon Eridani star system, conquered Earth generations ago, but their conquest was incomplete. While Valgolians made possible greater prosperity, universal health, and interstellar trade for all Earthlings, the factional frictions of Earth - race against race, religion against religion, culture against culture - continue to bedevil the Valgolian's vision of a peaceable world for all mankind.

When Red, a young boy living on a vast country estate owned by his father, a world-renowned industrialist, finds and captures two small and strange-looking animals, he hides them away in an old bird cage in the loft of his father's barn. He has dreams of making big bucks in a circus sideshow featuring the two unusual creatures.

It is 1934. Red-headed Henry Cook, fresh out of Amherst and excited about working on his first book at an infamous writers' colony, arrives at the Vermont island retreat at the invitation of its owner, Thaddeus Hulbert, a boisterous, bellowing, bloviated curmudgeon, whose reputation as a novelist, columnist, and radio commentator has vaulted him to national prominence.

It is summer, in the probably distant future, and Artie Lindstrom - the wizard behind a remotely-triggered jar lid opener that became the weapon that defeated the Martian invasion, a water desalinization machine that inadvertently produced gin, and a death ray gun that obliterated Venus during the Three-Day War - has sketched out plans for an anti-gravity machine not much bigger than a mini-fridge.

From Abraham Lincoln's First Inaugural Address in 1861 to his brief remarks on the Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, battlefield in 1863 to his Second Inaugural Address given in 1865, America's 16th president, in three key speeches, defined the course of the nation's entry into, through, and out of the Civil War. These three speeches tell the story of a nation's stubborn reluctance to face peacefully the challenge of slavery, disunion, and war among the states.

Kenneth Grahame's 1898 children's story, "The Reluctant Dragon" (read here in its abridged version), is a lovely fable about a small boy's efforts to save the life of a large, lazy (self-professed), and droll blue-scaled dragon who prefers poetry to rampaging. Having taken up residence in a cave overlooking the beautiful English countryside, the dragon must contend with a challenge to fight none other than St. George, called by local villagers to slay the beast.

Written first as a series of stories in the late 19th century and published later as the quintessential Western novel in the early years of the 20th century, The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains by Owen Wister contains elements of breathtaking adventure, courage, grit, conflict, humor, and heartfelt emotions that continue to resonate in the 21st century.

How could things have gone so badly wrong? Writing with customary calmness and clarity, and drawing on unrivaled experience as a reporter in the region, Cockburn analyzes the unfolding of one of the West's greatest foreign policy debacles and the rise of the new jihadis.