password: ebooksclub.org
Saturday, January 15, 2011
Thursday, January 13, 2011
What the Night Knows by Dean Koontz free download
In the late summer of a long ago year, a killer arrived in a small city. His name was Alton Turner Blackwood, and in the space of a few months he brutally murdered four families. His savage spree ended only when he himself was killed by the last survivor of the last family, a fourteen-year-old boy.
Half a continent away and two decades later, someone is murdering families again, recreating
in detail Blackwood’s crimes. Homicide detective John Calvino is certain that his own family—his wife and three children—will be targets in the fourth crime, just as his parents and sisters were victims on that distant night when he was fourteen and killed their slayer.
As a detective, John is a man of reason who deals in cold facts. But an extraordinary experience convinces him that sometimes death is not a one-way journey, that sometimes the dead return.
Here is ghost story like no other you have read. In the Calvinos, Dean Koontz brings to life a family that might be your own, in a war for their survival against an adversary more malevolent than any he has yet created, with their own home the battleground. Of all his acclaimed novels, none exceeds What the Night Knows in power, in chilling suspense, and in sheer mesmerizing storytelling.
Half a continent away and two decades later, someone is murdering families again, recreating
in detail Blackwood’s crimes. Homicide detective John Calvino is certain that his own family—his wife and three children—will be targets in the fourth crime, just as his parents and sisters were victims on that distant night when he was fourteen and killed their slayer.
As a detective, John is a man of reason who deals in cold facts. But an extraordinary experience convinces him that sometimes death is not a one-way journey, that sometimes the dead return.
Here is ghost story like no other you have read. In the Calvinos, Dean Koontz brings to life a family that might be your own, in a war for their survival against an adversary more malevolent than any he has yet created, with their own home the battleground. Of all his acclaimed novels, none exceeds What the Night Knows in power, in chilling suspense, and in sheer mesmerizing storytelling.
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
SUZANNE BORKMANN & EMMA HOLLY free books download
Prince Joe (Tall, Dark & Dangerous, Book 1)
Catching Midnight by emma holly
Beyond Seduction by emma holly
Saturday, January 8, 2011
C - a novel by Tom McCarthy free download
password:ebooksclub.org
New York Times Review:
September 8, 2010
Code World
By JENNIFER EGAN
C
By Tom McCarthy
310 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $25.95
There are many stories Tom McCarthy chooses not to tell in “C,” his tour de force new novel encompassing the short life of one Serge Carrefax, born at the turn of the 20th century on a rural English estate. Serge’s father, a manic tinkerer with early wireless technology, runs a school for the deaf but seems oblivious to his own deaf wife, Serge’s mother, who’s so blinkered on opium (supplied by a mute gardener who grows the poppies himself) that she nearly lets Serge drown in a creek at age 2. Serge’s beloved older sister, Sophie, becomes sexually involved with a friend of their father’s and winds up committing suicide at 17 — possibly after having an abortion. Serge’s relationship to Sophie is preternaturally close, with incestuous overtones, and her death severs his only real human connection. But these dramas are merely suggested, their shadowy outlines ignored, sublimated or flat-out denied by those involved; Sophie’s self-poisoning is deemed an accident.
McCarthy, author of the ingenious 2006 novel “Remainder,” withstands the temptations of emotional plotting and holds out instead for something bigger, deeper, more universal and elemental. “C” is a rigorous inquiry into the meaning of meaning: our need to find it in the world around us and communicate it to one another; our methods for doing so; the hubs and networks and skeins of interaction that result. Gone is the minimalist restraint he employed in “Remainder”; here, he fuses a Pynchonesque revelry in signs and codes with the lush psychedelics of William Burroughs to create an intellectually provocative novel that unfurls like a brooding, phosphorescent dream. We follow Serge to a spa in or near Germany (where he goes to recover from bowel problems after Sophie’s death) to the killing fields of France (where he drops bombs on the Germans during World War I) to the interwar underbelly of London (where he nurtures a heroin habit among a demimonde of performers and spiritualists) to post-independence Egypt, highly suggestive of present-day Iraq, where he works in “communications,” ostensibly helping to erect a wireless radio system but also possibly doubling as a spy. What drives Serge isn’t love or friendship or even survival (born with a caul, like David Copperfield, he is sustained by a run of exceptional luck). He seeks the message behind all messages: an original, primordial, unifying signal. The fact that McCarthy manages to satisfy this tall order — while also justifying his odd title in so many different ways that I was reminded of *Hercule Poirot’s line from “Murder on the Orient Express”: “There are too many clues in this room” — is a testament to his literary resourcefulness and verbal pyrotechnics.
Throughout, “C” evokes the communications frenzy of a century ago, as well as our own. Here is Serge as a young teen*ager, at the start of World War I, turning the dial of his wireless transmitter in search of signals:
“The air is rich tonight: still and cold, high pressure, the best time of year. . . . Above 650, the clicks dissipate into a thin, pervasive noise, like dust. Discharges break across this: distant lightning, aurora borealis, meteorites. Their crashes and eruptions sound like handfuls of buckshot thrown into a tin bucket, or a bucketful of grain-rich gravy dashed against a wash-boiler. Wireless ghosts come and go, moving in arpeggios that loop, repeat, mutate, then disappear.”
Later, while dropping his first bombs from a fighter plane, Serge experiences a heady sense of convergence. “Whole swathes of space becoming animated by the plumed trajectories of plans and orders metamorphosed into steel and cordite, speed and noise. Everything seems connected: disparate locations twitch and burst into activity like limbs reacting to impulses sent from elsewhere in the body, booms and jibs obeying levers at the far end of a complex set of ropes and cogs and relays.”
For all of Serge’s lust for coherence, “C” (a nominee for the 2010 Man Booker Prize) raises apt questions about the moral and mental hazards of seeking double meanings from the external world. Widsun, the family friend who seduces Serge’s sister, is a government official specializing in encryption, and his affair with Sophie begins with his teaching her, against her father’s wishes, to crack coded newspaper messages arranging trysts. Sophie’s suicide is presaged by a hallucinatory state in which she imagines confluences all around her. “He’s done stuff to me,” she tells Serge of her anonymous lover. “I can see things. . . . When the bodies meet and separate, and more bodies come out, the parts all lie around in segments. . . . In London, *Stamboul, Belgrade, everywhere,” she says. “It’s all connected. I feel it inside me.”
Serge’s own sense of meaningful connection is keenest when he’s on heroin, but his addiction nearly kills him, and his preference for patterns over people dehumanizes him; he likens the men he shoots from the air to singed insects, and becomes sexually excited while mowing them down. As for the spiritualists, their vain hope that wireless communication can reach the dead fuels seances run by opportunistic frauds (ironically, using wireless transmission to pull off the hoax), one of whom Serge spectacularly unmasks.
McCarthy’s prose strategy in “C” is not far from Serge’s druggy reveries — he aligns disparate things into larger patterns full of recurring images: analogies between the human body and earth, and machinery; hums and whirs; film screens; bowels and tunnels; electric circuits; cauls and other silken membranes. These repetitions come to feel like the articulation of a larger code — as if, were readers to plot their exact positions throughout the novel, they would discover a hidden message. The sense of being prepped for a vast interpretive task is heightened by the large quantities of information that Serge (and the reader) is asked to ingest, imparted by family members — Sophie on natural history, his father on the need for the deaf to vocalize — and then by a series of interlocutors who appear in the novel briefly, for the sole purpose of education: on the nature of bowel blockage and auto*intoxication; on the challenges of trying to capture combat in visual art; on the history of Alexandria as a communications hub; and assorted other topics. These lectures drag despite their thematic relevance; they feel artificially planted and, at times, alienatingly technical, as in this exchange between Serge and an engineer charged with filming the sounds of battlefield explosives:
“ ‘So the strings are time, or space?’ Serge asks.
“ ‘You could say either,’ the man answers with a smile. ‘The filmstrip knows no difference. The mathematical answer to your question, though, is that the strings represent the asymptote of the hyperbola on which the gun lies.’ ”
McCarthy clearly knows that the lectures are a risk. He describes the last of Serge’s educators, an archaeologist’s assistant with whom he has a fling in Egypt, thus: “Laura lectures Serge on Osiris, the information streaming out like a strip of punch-card paper issuing from her mouth — constant and regular, as though, by rubbing her forehead, she had set her exegetic apparatus at a certain speed from which it wouldn’t deviate until instructed otherwise.” Having established Laura’s monotony, McCarthy continues to quote her at length, interspersing her bulletins on ancient Egyptian burial practices with the archaeologist’s drunken recitations from The Book of the Dead. It’s as if he can’t resist telling us one more thing, suggesting yet another iteration or echo or metaphor, so we’ll be fully equipped to appreciate the wild, cumulative, synchronized outpouring he’s prepared for us. And indeed, the culmination of “C” so powerfully ratifies its audacious architecture that it justifies the occasional longueurs of getting there.
Still, the book’s lingering resonance owes less to its strenuous intellectual girding than to the mystery the story nonetheless retains. Like life, which we overinterpret at our peril, this strange, original book is — to its credit — a code too nuanced and alive to fully crack.
Jennifer Egan’s new book, “A Visit From the Goon Squad,” was published in June.
September 8, 2010
Code World
By JENNIFER EGAN
C
By Tom McCarthy
310 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $25.95
There are many stories Tom McCarthy chooses not to tell in “C,” his tour de force new novel encompassing the short life of one Serge Carrefax, born at the turn of the 20th century on a rural English estate. Serge’s father, a manic tinkerer with early wireless technology, runs a school for the deaf but seems oblivious to his own deaf wife, Serge’s mother, who’s so blinkered on opium (supplied by a mute gardener who grows the poppies himself) that she nearly lets Serge drown in a creek at age 2. Serge’s beloved older sister, Sophie, becomes sexually involved with a friend of their father’s and winds up committing suicide at 17 — possibly after having an abortion. Serge’s relationship to Sophie is preternaturally close, with incestuous overtones, and her death severs his only real human connection. But these dramas are merely suggested, their shadowy outlines ignored, sublimated or flat-out denied by those involved; Sophie’s self-poisoning is deemed an accident.
McCarthy, author of the ingenious 2006 novel “Remainder,” withstands the temptations of emotional plotting and holds out instead for something bigger, deeper, more universal and elemental. “C” is a rigorous inquiry into the meaning of meaning: our need to find it in the world around us and communicate it to one another; our methods for doing so; the hubs and networks and skeins of interaction that result. Gone is the minimalist restraint he employed in “Remainder”; here, he fuses a Pynchonesque revelry in signs and codes with the lush psychedelics of William Burroughs to create an intellectually provocative novel that unfurls like a brooding, phosphorescent dream. We follow Serge to a spa in or near Germany (where he goes to recover from bowel problems after Sophie’s death) to the killing fields of France (where he drops bombs on the Germans during World War I) to the interwar underbelly of London (where he nurtures a heroin habit among a demimonde of performers and spiritualists) to post-independence Egypt, highly suggestive of present-day Iraq, where he works in “communications,” ostensibly helping to erect a wireless radio system but also possibly doubling as a spy. What drives Serge isn’t love or friendship or even survival (born with a caul, like David Copperfield, he is sustained by a run of exceptional luck). He seeks the message behind all messages: an original, primordial, unifying signal. The fact that McCarthy manages to satisfy this tall order — while also justifying his odd title in so many different ways that I was reminded of *Hercule Poirot’s line from “Murder on the Orient Express”: “There are too many clues in this room” — is a testament to his literary resourcefulness and verbal pyrotechnics.
Throughout, “C” evokes the communications frenzy of a century ago, as well as our own. Here is Serge as a young teen*ager, at the start of World War I, turning the dial of his wireless transmitter in search of signals:
“The air is rich tonight: still and cold, high pressure, the best time of year. . . . Above 650, the clicks dissipate into a thin, pervasive noise, like dust. Discharges break across this: distant lightning, aurora borealis, meteorites. Their crashes and eruptions sound like handfuls of buckshot thrown into a tin bucket, or a bucketful of grain-rich gravy dashed against a wash-boiler. Wireless ghosts come and go, moving in arpeggios that loop, repeat, mutate, then disappear.”
Later, while dropping his first bombs from a fighter plane, Serge experiences a heady sense of convergence. “Whole swathes of space becoming animated by the plumed trajectories of plans and orders metamorphosed into steel and cordite, speed and noise. Everything seems connected: disparate locations twitch and burst into activity like limbs reacting to impulses sent from elsewhere in the body, booms and jibs obeying levers at the far end of a complex set of ropes and cogs and relays.”
For all of Serge’s lust for coherence, “C” (a nominee for the 2010 Man Booker Prize) raises apt questions about the moral and mental hazards of seeking double meanings from the external world. Widsun, the family friend who seduces Serge’s sister, is a government official specializing in encryption, and his affair with Sophie begins with his teaching her, against her father’s wishes, to crack coded newspaper messages arranging trysts. Sophie’s suicide is presaged by a hallucinatory state in which she imagines confluences all around her. “He’s done stuff to me,” she tells Serge of her anonymous lover. “I can see things. . . . When the bodies meet and separate, and more bodies come out, the parts all lie around in segments. . . . In London, *Stamboul, Belgrade, everywhere,” she says. “It’s all connected. I feel it inside me.”
Serge’s own sense of meaningful connection is keenest when he’s on heroin, but his addiction nearly kills him, and his preference for patterns over people dehumanizes him; he likens the men he shoots from the air to singed insects, and becomes sexually excited while mowing them down. As for the spiritualists, their vain hope that wireless communication can reach the dead fuels seances run by opportunistic frauds (ironically, using wireless transmission to pull off the hoax), one of whom Serge spectacularly unmasks.
McCarthy’s prose strategy in “C” is not far from Serge’s druggy reveries — he aligns disparate things into larger patterns full of recurring images: analogies between the human body and earth, and machinery; hums and whirs; film screens; bowels and tunnels; electric circuits; cauls and other silken membranes. These repetitions come to feel like the articulation of a larger code — as if, were readers to plot their exact positions throughout the novel, they would discover a hidden message. The sense of being prepped for a vast interpretive task is heightened by the large quantities of information that Serge (and the reader) is asked to ingest, imparted by family members — Sophie on natural history, his father on the need for the deaf to vocalize — and then by a series of interlocutors who appear in the novel briefly, for the sole purpose of education: on the nature of bowel blockage and auto*intoxication; on the challenges of trying to capture combat in visual art; on the history of Alexandria as a communications hub; and assorted other topics. These lectures drag despite their thematic relevance; they feel artificially planted and, at times, alienatingly technical, as in this exchange between Serge and an engineer charged with filming the sounds of battlefield explosives:
“ ‘So the strings are time, or space?’ Serge asks.
“ ‘You could say either,’ the man answers with a smile. ‘The filmstrip knows no difference. The mathematical answer to your question, though, is that the strings represent the asymptote of the hyperbola on which the gun lies.’ ”
McCarthy clearly knows that the lectures are a risk. He describes the last of Serge’s educators, an archaeologist’s assistant with whom he has a fling in Egypt, thus: “Laura lectures Serge on Osiris, the information streaming out like a strip of punch-card paper issuing from her mouth — constant and regular, as though, by rubbing her forehead, she had set her exegetic apparatus at a certain speed from which it wouldn’t deviate until instructed otherwise.” Having established Laura’s monotony, McCarthy continues to quote her at length, interspersing her bulletins on ancient Egyptian burial practices with the archaeologist’s drunken recitations from The Book of the Dead. It’s as if he can’t resist telling us one more thing, suggesting yet another iteration or echo or metaphor, so we’ll be fully equipped to appreciate the wild, cumulative, synchronized outpouring he’s prepared for us. And indeed, the culmination of “C” so powerfully ratifies its audacious architecture that it justifies the occasional longueurs of getting there.
Still, the book’s lingering resonance owes less to its strenuous intellectual girding than to the mystery the story nonetheless retains. Like life, which we overinterpret at our peril, this strange, original book is — to its credit — a code too nuanced and alive to fully crack.
Jennifer Egan’s new book, “A Visit From the Goon Squad,” was published in June.
Frankie Boyle - My Shit Life So Far free ebook
Shit My Dad Says free download
Sh*t My Dad Says
Author(s): Justin Halpern
Publisher: It Books
Date : 2010
Pages : 98 In PDF Format
Format : PDF, LIT, LRF, Mobi, Epub, RTF, TXT, PDB
Language : English
ISBN-10 : 0061992704
ISBN-13 : 978-0061992704
Size : 1.16 MB
Reviews:
"Sh*t My Dad Says is f______ great!...Very funny, very irreverent, very real. It’s refreshing at a time when we’re all choking to death on political correctness and can go for days without meeting a single person with common sense.” (Janet Evanovich, Time Magazine )
“A fun gift book that is bound to crack up anyone who flips through it.” (Los Angeles Times)
“Shoot-beer-out-your-nose funny.” (Maxim)
“This book is ridiculously hilarious, and makes my father look like a normal member of society.” (Chelsea Handler)
“Justin Halpern tosses lightning bolts of laughter out of his pocket like he is shooting dice in a back alley. In one sweep of a paragraph, he ranges from hysterical to disgusting to touching—and does it all seamlessly. Sh*t My Dad Says is a really, really funny book.” (Laurie Notaro, New York Times bestselling author of The Idiot Girls’ Action-Adventure Club)
“Read this unless you’re allergic to laughing.” (Kristen Bell)
“Justin Halpern’s dad is up there with Aristotle and Winston F*cking Churchill. He’s brilliant, and his son’s book is absolutely hilarious.” (A.J. Jacobs, New York Times bestselling author of The Know-It-All)
“If you’re wondering if there is a real man behind the quotes on Twitter, the answer is a definite and laugh-out-loud yes.” (Christian Lander, New York Times bestselling author of Stuff White People Like)
About The Author:
In the summer of 2009, Justin Halpern created a Twitter account as a way to archive his father's no-holds-barred, expletive-ridden words of wisdom. Within a month, @shitmydadsays became an Internet sensation. More than 2.5 million people currently follow Sam Halpern's musings on Twitter and Facebook alone.
Justin's first book, Sh*t My Dad Says (HarperCollins / ItBooks), a collection of essays about growing up with his unapologetically honest father, is a #1 New York Times bestseller.
Justin is also the creator of $#*! My Dad Says (WarnerBros/CBS), a sitcom starring William Shatner, Nicole Sullivan, Will Sasso, and Jonathan Sadowski. He serves as the show's co-executive producer along with his writing partner Patrick Schumacker.
Justin currently splits his time between Los Angeles and his parents' home in San Diego.
Author(s): Justin Halpern
Publisher: It Books
Date : 2010
Pages : 98 In PDF Format
Format : PDF, LIT, LRF, Mobi, Epub, RTF, TXT, PDB
Language : English
ISBN-10 : 0061992704
ISBN-13 : 978-0061992704
Size : 1.16 MB
Reviews:
"Sh*t My Dad Says is f______ great!...Very funny, very irreverent, very real. It’s refreshing at a time when we’re all choking to death on political correctness and can go for days without meeting a single person with common sense.” (Janet Evanovich, Time Magazine )
“A fun gift book that is bound to crack up anyone who flips through it.” (Los Angeles Times)
“Shoot-beer-out-your-nose funny.” (Maxim)
“This book is ridiculously hilarious, and makes my father look like a normal member of society.” (Chelsea Handler)
“Justin Halpern tosses lightning bolts of laughter out of his pocket like he is shooting dice in a back alley. In one sweep of a paragraph, he ranges from hysterical to disgusting to touching—and does it all seamlessly. Sh*t My Dad Says is a really, really funny book.” (Laurie Notaro, New York Times bestselling author of The Idiot Girls’ Action-Adventure Club)
“Read this unless you’re allergic to laughing.” (Kristen Bell)
“Justin Halpern’s dad is up there with Aristotle and Winston F*cking Churchill. He’s brilliant, and his son’s book is absolutely hilarious.” (A.J. Jacobs, New York Times bestselling author of The Know-It-All)
“If you’re wondering if there is a real man behind the quotes on Twitter, the answer is a definite and laugh-out-loud yes.” (Christian Lander, New York Times bestselling author of Stuff White People Like)
About The Author:
In the summer of 2009, Justin Halpern created a Twitter account as a way to archive his father's no-holds-barred, expletive-ridden words of wisdom. Within a month, @shitmydadsays became an Internet sensation. More than 2.5 million people currently follow Sam Halpern's musings on Twitter and Facebook alone.
Justin's first book, Sh*t My Dad Says (HarperCollins / ItBooks), a collection of essays about growing up with his unapologetically honest father, is a #1 New York Times bestseller.
Justin is also the creator of $#*! My Dad Says (WarnerBros/CBS), a sitcom starring William Shatner, Nicole Sullivan, Will Sasso, and Jonathan Sadowski. He serves as the show's co-executive producer along with his writing partner Patrick Schumacker.
Justin currently splits his time between Los Angeles and his parents' home in San Diego.
Friday, January 7, 2011
Thursday, January 6, 2011
Matt Ridley - The Rational Optimist free download
Life is getting better—and at an accelerating rate. Food availability, income, and life span are up; disease, child mortality, and violence are down—all across the globe. Though the world is far from perfect, necessities and luxuries alike are getting cheaper; population growth is slowing; Africa is following Asia out of poverty; the Internet, the mobile phone, and container shipping are enriching people's lives as never before. The pessimists who dominate public discourse insist that we will soon reach a turning point and things will start to get worse. But they have been saying this for two hundred years.
Yet Matt Ridley does more than describe how things are getting better. He explains why. Prosperity comes from everybody working for everybody else. The habit of exchange and specialization—which started more than 100,000 years ago—has created a collective brain that sets human living standards on a rising trend. The mutual dependence, trust, and sharing that result are causes for hope, not despair.
This bold book covers the entire sweep of human history, from the Stone Age to the Internet, from the stagnation of the Ming empire to the invention of the steam engine, from the population explosion to the likely consequences of climate change. It ends with a confident assertion that thanks to the ceaseless capacity of the human race for innovative change, and despite inevitable disasters along the way, the twenty-first century will see both human prosperity and natural biodiversity enhanced. Acute, refreshing, and revelatory, The Rational Optimist will change your way of thinking about the world for the better.
Yet Matt Ridley does more than describe how things are getting better. He explains why. Prosperity comes from everybody working for everybody else. The habit of exchange and specialization—which started more than 100,000 years ago—has created a collective brain that sets human living standards on a rising trend. The mutual dependence, trust, and sharing that result are causes for hope, not despair.
This bold book covers the entire sweep of human history, from the Stone Age to the Internet, from the stagnation of the Ming empire to the invention of the steam engine, from the population explosion to the likely consequences of climate change. It ends with a confident assertion that thanks to the ceaseless capacity of the human race for innovative change, and despite inevitable disasters along the way, the twenty-first century will see both human prosperity and natural biodiversity enhanced. Acute, refreshing, and revelatory, The Rational Optimist will change your way of thinking about the world for the better.
Comandante Che: Guerrilla Soldier, Commander, and Strategist, 1956-1967 FREE DOWNLOAD
PASSWORD: ebooksclub.org
Ian Mortimer - The Perfect King free download
The Perfect King
The Life of Edward III, Father of the English Nation
He ordered his uncle to be beheaded; he usurped his father's throne; he started a war which lasted for more than a hundred years, and taxed his people more than any other previous king. Yet for centuries Edward III was celebrated as the greatest king England had ever had, and three hundred years after his death it was said that his kingship was perhaps the greatest that the world had ever known.
In this first full study of the man's character and life, Dr Ian Mortimer shows how Edward personally provided the impetus for much of the drama of his fifty-year reign. In particular he shows how Edward did more than any other monarch before or since to create the English nation as we know it today. Edward overcame the tyranny of his guardians at the age of seventeen,and then set about developing a new form of awe-inspiring chivalric kingship. Under him the feudal kingdom of England became a highly organised, sophisticated nation, capable of raising large revenues and deploying a new type of projectile-based warfare, and without question the most important military nation in Europe. Yet under his rule England itself experienced its longest period of domestic peace in the middle ages, giving rise to a massive increase of the nation's wealth through the wool trade, with huge consequences for society, art and architecture. It is also to Edward that we owe our system of parliamentary representation, our local justice system, our national flag and the English language as the 'tongue of the nation'
All this leads us to wonder why he is normally overlooked in a list of England's greatest kings. The answer is simple: nineteenth century historians saw in him the opportunity to decry a warmonger, and painted himas a self-seeking, rapacious, tax-gathering conquerer. Yet as this book shows, beneath the strong warrior king was a compassionate, conscientious and often merciful man, resolute yet devoted to his wife, friends and family. Through his personal relationships, he emerges as a strikingly modern figure, to whom many will be able to relate. That is not surprising, as the majority of Englishmen alive today are descended from him. He is therefore a father of both the English nation and the English people, and consequently stands alongside William I as one of the two most important medieval figures in the history of England.
The Life of Edward III, Father of the English Nation
He ordered his uncle to be beheaded; he usurped his father's throne; he started a war which lasted for more than a hundred years, and taxed his people more than any other previous king. Yet for centuries Edward III was celebrated as the greatest king England had ever had, and three hundred years after his death it was said that his kingship was perhaps the greatest that the world had ever known.
In this first full study of the man's character and life, Dr Ian Mortimer shows how Edward personally provided the impetus for much of the drama of his fifty-year reign. In particular he shows how Edward did more than any other monarch before or since to create the English nation as we know it today. Edward overcame the tyranny of his guardians at the age of seventeen,and then set about developing a new form of awe-inspiring chivalric kingship. Under him the feudal kingdom of England became a highly organised, sophisticated nation, capable of raising large revenues and deploying a new type of projectile-based warfare, and without question the most important military nation in Europe. Yet under his rule England itself experienced its longest period of domestic peace in the middle ages, giving rise to a massive increase of the nation's wealth through the wool trade, with huge consequences for society, art and architecture. It is also to Edward that we owe our system of parliamentary representation, our local justice system, our national flag and the English language as the 'tongue of the nation'
All this leads us to wonder why he is normally overlooked in a list of England's greatest kings. The answer is simple: nineteenth century historians saw in him the opportunity to decry a warmonger, and painted himas a self-seeking, rapacious, tax-gathering conquerer. Yet as this book shows, beneath the strong warrior king was a compassionate, conscientious and often merciful man, resolute yet devoted to his wife, friends and family. Through his personal relationships, he emerges as a strikingly modern figure, to whom many will be able to relate. That is not surprising, as the majority of Englishmen alive today are descended from him. He is therefore a father of both the English nation and the English people, and consequently stands alongside William I as one of the two most important medieval figures in the history of England.
Mark Twain - Autobiography free download
Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910),[1] better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist. He is noted for his novelsAdventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), called "the Great American Novel", and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876).
Tuesday, January 4, 2011
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot free download
Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells—taken without her knowledge—became one of the most important tools in medicine. The first “immortal” human cells grown in culture, they are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. If you could pile all HeLa cells ever grown onto a scale, they’d weigh more than 50 million metric tons—as much as a hundred Empire State Buildings. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the atom bomb’s effects; helped lead to important advances like in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions. Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked grave.Now Rebecca Skloot takes us on an extraordinary journey, from the “colored” ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to stark white laboratories with freezers full of HeLa cells; from Henrietta’s small, dying hometown of Clover, Virginia—a land of wooden slave quarters, faith healings, and voodoo—to East Baltimore today, where her children and grandchildren live and struggle with the legacy of her cells. Henrietta’s family did not learn of her “immortality” until more than twenty years after her death, when scientists investigating HeLa began using her husband and children in research without informed consent. And though the cells had launched a multimillion-dollar industry that sells human biological materials, her family never saw any of the profits. As Rebecca Skloot so brilliantly shows, the story of the Lacks family—past and present—is inextricably connected to the dark history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we are made of. Over the decade it took to uncover this story, Rebecca became enmeshed in the lives of the Lacks family—especially Henrietta’s daughter Deborah, who was devastated to learn about her mother’s cells. She was consumed with questions: Had scientists cloned her mother? Did it hurt her when researchers infected her cells with viruses and shot them into space? What happened to her sister, Elsie, who died in a mental institution at the age of fifteen? And if her mother was so important to medicine, why couldn’t her children afford health insurance? Intimate in feeling, astonishing in scope, and impossible to put down, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks captures the beauty and drama of scientific discovery, as well as its human consequences.
Amazon Best Books of the Month, February 2010: From a single, abbreviated life grew a seemingly immortal line of cells that made some of the most crucial innovations in modern science possible. And from that same life, and those cells, Rebecca Skloot has fashioned in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks a fascinating and moving story of medicine and family, of how life is sustained in laboratories and in memory. Henrietta Lacks was a mother of five in Baltimore, a poor African American migrant from the tobacco farms of Virginia, who died from a cruelly aggressive cancer at the age of 30 in 1951. A sample of her cancerous tissue, taken without her knowledge or consent, as was the custom then, turned out to provide one of the holy grails of mid-century biology: human cells that could survive--even thrive--in the lab. Known as HeLa cells, their stunning potency gave scientists a building block for countless breakthroughs, beginning with the cure for polio. Meanwhile, Henrietta's family continued to live in poverty and frequently poor health, and their discovery decades later of her unknowing contribution--and her cells' strange survival--left them full of pride, anger, and suspicion. For a decade, Skloot doggedly but compassionately gathered the threads of these stories, slowly gaining the trust of the family while helping them learn the truth about Henrietta, and with their aid she tells a rich and haunting story that asks the questions, Who owns our bodies? And who carries our memories? --Tom Nissley Amazon Exclusive: Jad Abumrad Reviews The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks Jad Abumrad is host and creator of the public radio hit Radiolab, now in its seventh season and reaching over a million people monthly. Radiolab combines cutting-edge production with a philosophical approach to big ideas in science and beyond, and an inventive method of storytelling. Abumrad has won numerous awards, including a National Headliner Award in Radio and an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Science Journalism Award. Read his exclusive Amazon guest review of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks: Honestly, I can't imagine a better tale. A detective story that's at once mythically large and painfully intimate. Just the simple facts are hard to believe: that in 1951, a poor black woman named Henrietta Lacks dies of cervical cancer, but pieces of the tumor that killed her--taken without her knowledge or consent--live on, first in one lab, then in hundreds, then thousands, then in giant factories churning out polio vaccines, then aboard rocket ships launched into space. The cells from this one tumor would spawn a multi-billion dollar industry and become a foundation of modern science--leading to breakthroughs in gene mapping, cloning and fertility and helping to discover how viruses work and how cancer develops (among a million other things). All of which is to say: the science end of this story is enough to blow one's mind right out of one's face. But what's truly remarkable about Rebecca Skloot's book is that we also get the rest of the story, the part that could have easily remained hidden had she not spent ten years unearthing it: Who was Henrietta Lacks? How did she live? How she did die? Did her family know that she'd become, in some sense, immortal, and how did that affect them? These are crucial questions, because science should never forget the people who gave it life. And so, what unfolds is not only a reporting tour de force but also a very entertaining account of Henrietta, her ancestors, her cells and the scientists who grew them. The book ultimately channels its journey of discovery though Henrietta's youngest daughter, Deborah, who never knew her mother, and who dreamt of one day being a scientist. As Deborah Lacks and Skloot search for answers, we're bounced effortlessly from the tiny tobacco-farming Virginia hamlet of Henrietta's childhood to modern-day Baltimore, where Henrietta's family remains. Along the way, a series of unforgettable juxtapositions: cell culturing bumps into faith healings, cutting edge medicine collides with the dark truth that Henrietta's family can't afford the health insurance to care for diseases their mother's cells have helped to cure. Rebecca Skloot tells the story with great sensitivity, urgency and, in the end, damn fine writing. I highly recommend this book. --Jad Abumrad Look Inside The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks Click on thumbnails for larger images Henrietta and David Lacks, circa 1945. Elsie Lacks, Henrietta’s older daughter, about five years before she was committed to Crownsville State Hospital, with a diagnosis of “idiocy.” Deborah Lacks at about age four. The home-house where Henrietta was raised, a four-room log cabin in Clover, Virginia, that once served as slave quarters. (1999) Main Street in downtown Clover, Virginia, where Henrietta was raised, circa 1930s. Margaret Gey and Minnie, a lab technician, in the Gey lab at Hopkins, circa 1951. Deborah with her children, LaTonya and Alfred, and her second husband, James Pullum, in the mid-1980s. In 2001, Deborah developed a severe case of hives after learning upsetting new information about her mother and sister. Deborah and her cousin Gary Lacks standing in front of drying tobacco, 2001. The Lacks family in 2009.
Saturday, January 1, 2011
Charlaine Harris- Sookie Stackhouse 1 - 10 free download
Charlaine Harris - Sookie Stackhouse 01 - Dead Until Dark.pdf
Charlaine Harris - Sookie Stackhouse 02 - Living Dead In Dallas.pdf
Charlaine Harris - Sookie Stackhouse 03 - Club Dead.pdf
Charlaine Harris - Sookie Stackhouse 04 - Dead to the World.pdf
Charlaine Harris - Sookie Stackhouse 04.5 - Fairy Dust.pdf
Charlaine Harris - Sookie Stackhouse 04.6 - Dancers in the Dark (Night's Edge).pdf
Charlaine Harris - Sookie Stackhouse 04.7 - One Word Answer [(a) Bite].pdf
Charlaine Harris - Sookie Stackhouse 05 - Dead as Doornail.pdf
Charlaine Harris - Sookie Stackhouse 06 - Definitely Dead.pdf
Charlaine Harris - Sookie Stackhouse 06.5 - Tacky.pdf
Charlaine Harris - Sookie Stackhouse 07 - All Together Dead.pdf
Charlaine Harris - Sookie Stackhouse 07.5 - Dracula Night.pdf
Charlaine Harris - Sookie Stackhouse 08 - From Dead to Worse.pdf
Charlaine Harris - Sookie Stackhouse 08.5 - Gift wrapped.pdf
Charlaine Harris - Sookie Stackhouse 08.6 - Lucky.pdf
Charlaine Harris - Sookie Stackhouse 09 - Dead and Gone.pdf
Charlaine Harris - Sookie Stackhouse 10 - A Touch of Dead.pdf
Charlaine Harris - Sookie Stackhouse 02 - Living Dead In Dallas.pdf
Charlaine Harris - Sookie Stackhouse 03 - Club Dead.pdf
Charlaine Harris - Sookie Stackhouse 04 - Dead to the World.pdf
Charlaine Harris - Sookie Stackhouse 04.5 - Fairy Dust.pdf
Charlaine Harris - Sookie Stackhouse 04.6 - Dancers in the Dark (Night's Edge).pdf
Charlaine Harris - Sookie Stackhouse 04.7 - One Word Answer [(a) Bite].pdf
Charlaine Harris - Sookie Stackhouse 05 - Dead as Doornail.pdf
Charlaine Harris - Sookie Stackhouse 06 - Definitely Dead.pdf
Charlaine Harris - Sookie Stackhouse 06.5 - Tacky.pdf
Charlaine Harris - Sookie Stackhouse 07 - All Together Dead.pdf
Charlaine Harris - Sookie Stackhouse 07.5 - Dracula Night.pdf
Charlaine Harris - Sookie Stackhouse 08 - From Dead to Worse.pdf
Charlaine Harris - Sookie Stackhouse 08.5 - Gift wrapped.pdf
Charlaine Harris - Sookie Stackhouse 08.6 - Lucky.pdf
Charlaine Harris - Sookie Stackhouse 09 - Dead and Gone.pdf
Charlaine Harris - Sookie Stackhouse 10 - A Touch of Dead.pdf
John Harrington - Best Business Practices for Photographer free download
Product Description
A follow-up to the successful and acclaimed "Best Business Practices for Photographers", this updated and expanded edition serves as an even more comprehensive guide to achieving financial success and personal satisfaction in your business as a photographer. Included in this new edition are sections on licensing your work, making the career change from a staff photographer to a freelancer, surviving an IRS audit, and more. This book includes best practices in interacting with clients, negotiating contracts and licenses, and business operations. "Best Business Practices for Photographers, Second Edition" is the key to a successful career in photography.
About the Author
John Harrington has built a photography business that has been successful, with income having risen ten-fold since he started. He is a teacher that can communicate to an audience. He has spoken in the past at courses and meetings of The NPPA's Northern Short Course, The White House News Photographers Association, Smithsonian Institution, Corcoran School of Art and Design, American Society of Media Photographers Capital Region, University of Maryland, Northern Virginia Community College, Trinity College, and the Northern Virginia Photographic Society. He has worked for over 16 years as an active photographer in Washington DC and around the world, working with both editorial and commercial clients. Editorially, his credits have included the Associated Press, New York Times, Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, US News and World Report, The National Geographic Society, USA Today, People, MTV, and Life. For corporate and public relations clients, John has successfully placed images with the wire services (Associated Press, Reuters, Gannett, Agence France Presse, and UPI) over three hundred times. Commercially, John has worked with well over half of the top fortune 50 companies, and even more of the top 500. Ad campaigns for Seimens, Coca Cola, General Motors, Bank of America, and Freddie Mac, to name a few, have been seen worldwide
A follow-up to the successful and acclaimed "Best Business Practices for Photographers", this updated and expanded edition serves as an even more comprehensive guide to achieving financial success and personal satisfaction in your business as a photographer. Included in this new edition are sections on licensing your work, making the career change from a staff photographer to a freelancer, surviving an IRS audit, and more. This book includes best practices in interacting with clients, negotiating contracts and licenses, and business operations. "Best Business Practices for Photographers, Second Edition" is the key to a successful career in photography.
About the Author
John Harrington has built a photography business that has been successful, with income having risen ten-fold since he started. He is a teacher that can communicate to an audience. He has spoken in the past at courses and meetings of The NPPA's Northern Short Course, The White House News Photographers Association, Smithsonian Institution, Corcoran School of Art and Design, American Society of Media Photographers Capital Region, University of Maryland, Northern Virginia Community College, Trinity College, and the Northern Virginia Photographic Society. He has worked for over 16 years as an active photographer in Washington DC and around the world, working with both editorial and commercial clients. Editorially, his credits have included the Associated Press, New York Times, Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, US News and World Report, The National Geographic Society, USA Today, People, MTV, and Life. For corporate and public relations clients, John has successfully placed images with the wire services (Associated Press, Reuters, Gannett, Agence France Presse, and UPI) over three hundred times. Commercially, John has worked with well over half of the top fortune 50 companies, and even more of the top 500. Ad campaigns for Seimens, Coca Cola, General Motors, Bank of America, and Freddie Mac, to name a few, have been seen worldwide
Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff free download
The Woman Who Had the World Enthralled
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
CLEOPATRA
A Life
By Stacy Schiff
Illustrated. 368 pages. Little, Brown & Company. $29.99.
From the start Cleopatra’s story was larger than life: epic in scale, mythic in symbolism and operatically over the top in its grandeur and its spectacle. As Stacy Schiff describes it in a captivating new biography, Cleopatra’s meeting with Julius Caesar was “a singular, shuddering moment,” when “two civilizations, passing in different directions, unexpectedly and momentously” touched.
Cleopatra was born a goddess, became a queen at 18 and at the height of her power, Ms. Schiff writes, “she controlled virtually the entire eastern Mediterranean coast, the last great kingdom of any Egyptian ruler. For a fleeting moment she held the fate of the Western world in her hands.” Having inherited a kingdom in decline, Cleopatra would go on to lose it, regain it, nearly lose it again, amass an empire and then lose it all.
She was a resourceful leader: disciplined, self-assured and shrewd in her management of her country’s affairs; a sovereign who “knew how to build a fleet, suppress an insurrection, control a currency, alleviate a famine.”
She would go down in history, however, not as “the sole female of the ancient world to rule alone and to play a role in Western affairs,” Ms. Schiff writes, but as the consort of Caesar and later Mark Antony: a woman depicted by historians and poets as a wanton temptress symbolizing “insatiable sexuality” and unlawful love.
In “Cleopatra: A Life,” Ms. Schiff strips away the accretions of myth that have built up around the Egyptian queen and plucks off the imaginative embroiderings of Shakespeare, Shaw and Elizabeth Taylor.
In doing so, she gives us a cinematic portrait of a historical figure far more complex and compelling than any fictional creation, and a wide, panning, panoramic picture of her world.
Though this volume obviously retraces some familiar ground — covered in earlier books like Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s “Cleopatra: Histories, Dreams and Distortions” — Ms. Schiff deftly sifts legend from fact, reminding the reader that the first drafts of Cleopatra’s life were written by followers of her enemy Octavian (who vanquished her and Antony, and went on to become Caesar Augustus) and that the great poets of Latin literature were “happy to expound on her shame.”
Instead of the stereotypes of the “whore queen,” Ms. Schiff depicts a “fiery wisp of a girl” who grows up to become an enterprising politician: not so much a great beauty as a charismatic and capable woman, smart, saucy, funny and highly competent, a ruler seen by many of her subjects as a “beneficent guardian” with good intentions and a “commitment to justice.”
Because of the gaps and contradictory testimony in the historical record, portions of Ms. Schiff’s narrative are necessarily based on guesses and hypotheses. But Ms. Schiff seems to have inhaled everything there is to know about Cleopatra and her times, and she uses her authoritative knowledge of the era — and her instinctive understanding of her central players — to assess shrewdly probable and possible motives and outcomes.
As she did in “Véra: Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov,” her Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, Ms. Schiff also demonstrates a magician’s ability to conjure the worlds her subject inhabited with fluent sleight of hand. In this case she waves onto the stage Cleopatra’s Alexandria in all its splendor and beauty: its gleaming marble edifices, the oversize sphinxes and falcons that lined the paths to the city’s Greek temples, the Doric tombs decorated with crocodile gods in Roman dress. She enables the reader to see Cleopatra’s court — her elaborate retinue of tasters, scribes, lamplighters, royal harpists, masseurs, pages, doorkeepers, notaries, silver stewards, oil keepers and pearl sorters — and to picture her fleet of royal barges, equipped with gyms, libraries, shrines to Dionysus and Aphrodite, gardens, grottos, lecture halls, spiral staircases, copper baths, stables and aquariums.
In “Cleopatra,” Ms. Schiff also creates a portrait of an incestuous and lethal family in which sibling marriage and the murders of parents, children, spouses and brothers and sisters were common practice — a portrait as bloody and harrowing as anything in “Titus Andronicus.” And by drawing on scholarship about social and political practices of the day, she provides us with a keen understanding of the relative freedom and power enjoyed by women in Cleopatra’s day, as well as the sort of enlightened schooling the queen-to-be would have received as a girl. Like Caesar, we learn, she would have had a traditional Greek education that included Herodotus and Thucydides, instruction in the art of speech-making and perhaps nine languages too.
In fact, Cleopatra and Caesar had not only complementary political agendas, Ms. Schiff observes, but also closely matched personalities: both were “congenial, charismatic, quick-tongued people” with an “intellectual curiosity that was the trademark of their age, a lightheartedness and a humor that set them apart from their peers.” Both were natural performers. Both “had daringly crossed lines in their bids for power; both had let the dice fly.”
“Both,” she continues, “had as great a capacity for work as for play and rarely distinguished between the two.”
Caesar was so impressed with Cleopatra’s kingdom that on returning to Rome he would establish a series of reforms, inspired partly by what he had observed in Egypt: most notably, laying the foundation for a public library, commissioning an official census and planning a series of engineering innovations based on Egypt’s sophisticated locks and dikes.
As for Antony, Ms. Schiff writes, he had “immediate, practical needs” — Egypt’s wealth could help underwrite his military ambitions — that dovetailed with Cleopatra’s “long-range imperial ambitions” and her “thirst for territory.” Unlike most Romans, Antony “had longtime experience with quick-thinking, capable women” (including his mother and his wife), while Cleopatra shared his taste for theater and the ability to indulge it.
“Whether or not anyone lost his or her head to the other,” Ms. Schiff writes, “it is difficult to believe sex failed to figure in the picture early on. Antony and Cleopatra were at the height of their power, reveling amid heady perfume to sweet music, under kaleidoscopic lights, on steamy summer nights, before groaning tables of the finest food and wine in Asia. And while he was unlikely to have been a slave to his love for Cleopatra, as various chroniclers assert, the truth was that wherever Mark Antony went, sexual charm inevitably followed. His tunic tucked high on his rolling hips, he had slept his way across Asia at least once: Plutarch assigns him ‘an ill name for familiarity with other people’s wives.’ ”
Writing with verve and style and wit, Ms. Schiff recreates Cleopatra’s lavish courting of Antony (including one dinner in which there was a knee-deep expanse of roses and some of the attendees received not gift baskets but furniture and horses decked out in silver-plated trappings) and his even more extravagant offerings to her (including the library of Pergamum and a host of territories that gave her dominion over Cyprus, portions of Crete and all but two cities of the thriving Phoenician coast). For that matter, Ms. Schiff even manages to make us see afresh famous scenes like Antony’s painful death after his defeat at the hands of Octavian, and Cleopatra’s subsequent suicide.
Her death — “an honorable death, a dignified death, an exemplary death,” over which she presided herself, “proud and unbroken to the end” — even won over her detractors, Ms. Schiff observes: “by the Roman definition she had at last done something right; finally it was to her credit that she had defied the expectations of her sex.”
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
CLEOPATRA
A Life
By Stacy Schiff
Illustrated. 368 pages. Little, Brown & Company. $29.99.
From the start Cleopatra’s story was larger than life: epic in scale, mythic in symbolism and operatically over the top in its grandeur and its spectacle. As Stacy Schiff describes it in a captivating new biography, Cleopatra’s meeting with Julius Caesar was “a singular, shuddering moment,” when “two civilizations, passing in different directions, unexpectedly and momentously” touched.
Cleopatra was born a goddess, became a queen at 18 and at the height of her power, Ms. Schiff writes, “she controlled virtually the entire eastern Mediterranean coast, the last great kingdom of any Egyptian ruler. For a fleeting moment she held the fate of the Western world in her hands.” Having inherited a kingdom in decline, Cleopatra would go on to lose it, regain it, nearly lose it again, amass an empire and then lose it all.
She was a resourceful leader: disciplined, self-assured and shrewd in her management of her country’s affairs; a sovereign who “knew how to build a fleet, suppress an insurrection, control a currency, alleviate a famine.”
She would go down in history, however, not as “the sole female of the ancient world to rule alone and to play a role in Western affairs,” Ms. Schiff writes, but as the consort of Caesar and later Mark Antony: a woman depicted by historians and poets as a wanton temptress symbolizing “insatiable sexuality” and unlawful love.
In “Cleopatra: A Life,” Ms. Schiff strips away the accretions of myth that have built up around the Egyptian queen and plucks off the imaginative embroiderings of Shakespeare, Shaw and Elizabeth Taylor.
In doing so, she gives us a cinematic portrait of a historical figure far more complex and compelling than any fictional creation, and a wide, panning, panoramic picture of her world.
Though this volume obviously retraces some familiar ground — covered in earlier books like Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s “Cleopatra: Histories, Dreams and Distortions” — Ms. Schiff deftly sifts legend from fact, reminding the reader that the first drafts of Cleopatra’s life were written by followers of her enemy Octavian (who vanquished her and Antony, and went on to become Caesar Augustus) and that the great poets of Latin literature were “happy to expound on her shame.”
Instead of the stereotypes of the “whore queen,” Ms. Schiff depicts a “fiery wisp of a girl” who grows up to become an enterprising politician: not so much a great beauty as a charismatic and capable woman, smart, saucy, funny and highly competent, a ruler seen by many of her subjects as a “beneficent guardian” with good intentions and a “commitment to justice.”
Because of the gaps and contradictory testimony in the historical record, portions of Ms. Schiff’s narrative are necessarily based on guesses and hypotheses. But Ms. Schiff seems to have inhaled everything there is to know about Cleopatra and her times, and she uses her authoritative knowledge of the era — and her instinctive understanding of her central players — to assess shrewdly probable and possible motives and outcomes.
As she did in “Véra: Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov,” her Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, Ms. Schiff also demonstrates a magician’s ability to conjure the worlds her subject inhabited with fluent sleight of hand. In this case she waves onto the stage Cleopatra’s Alexandria in all its splendor and beauty: its gleaming marble edifices, the oversize sphinxes and falcons that lined the paths to the city’s Greek temples, the Doric tombs decorated with crocodile gods in Roman dress. She enables the reader to see Cleopatra’s court — her elaborate retinue of tasters, scribes, lamplighters, royal harpists, masseurs, pages, doorkeepers, notaries, silver stewards, oil keepers and pearl sorters — and to picture her fleet of royal barges, equipped with gyms, libraries, shrines to Dionysus and Aphrodite, gardens, grottos, lecture halls, spiral staircases, copper baths, stables and aquariums.
In “Cleopatra,” Ms. Schiff also creates a portrait of an incestuous and lethal family in which sibling marriage and the murders of parents, children, spouses and brothers and sisters were common practice — a portrait as bloody and harrowing as anything in “Titus Andronicus.” And by drawing on scholarship about social and political practices of the day, she provides us with a keen understanding of the relative freedom and power enjoyed by women in Cleopatra’s day, as well as the sort of enlightened schooling the queen-to-be would have received as a girl. Like Caesar, we learn, she would have had a traditional Greek education that included Herodotus and Thucydides, instruction in the art of speech-making and perhaps nine languages too.
In fact, Cleopatra and Caesar had not only complementary political agendas, Ms. Schiff observes, but also closely matched personalities: both were “congenial, charismatic, quick-tongued people” with an “intellectual curiosity that was the trademark of their age, a lightheartedness and a humor that set them apart from their peers.” Both were natural performers. Both “had daringly crossed lines in their bids for power; both had let the dice fly.”
“Both,” she continues, “had as great a capacity for work as for play and rarely distinguished between the two.”
Caesar was so impressed with Cleopatra’s kingdom that on returning to Rome he would establish a series of reforms, inspired partly by what he had observed in Egypt: most notably, laying the foundation for a public library, commissioning an official census and planning a series of engineering innovations based on Egypt’s sophisticated locks and dikes.
As for Antony, Ms. Schiff writes, he had “immediate, practical needs” — Egypt’s wealth could help underwrite his military ambitions — that dovetailed with Cleopatra’s “long-range imperial ambitions” and her “thirst for territory.” Unlike most Romans, Antony “had longtime experience with quick-thinking, capable women” (including his mother and his wife), while Cleopatra shared his taste for theater and the ability to indulge it.
“Whether or not anyone lost his or her head to the other,” Ms. Schiff writes, “it is difficult to believe sex failed to figure in the picture early on. Antony and Cleopatra were at the height of their power, reveling amid heady perfume to sweet music, under kaleidoscopic lights, on steamy summer nights, before groaning tables of the finest food and wine in Asia. And while he was unlikely to have been a slave to his love for Cleopatra, as various chroniclers assert, the truth was that wherever Mark Antony went, sexual charm inevitably followed. His tunic tucked high on his rolling hips, he had slept his way across Asia at least once: Plutarch assigns him ‘an ill name for familiarity with other people’s wives.’ ”
Writing with verve and style and wit, Ms. Schiff recreates Cleopatra’s lavish courting of Antony (including one dinner in which there was a knee-deep expanse of roses and some of the attendees received not gift baskets but furniture and horses decked out in silver-plated trappings) and his even more extravagant offerings to her (including the library of Pergamum and a host of territories that gave her dominion over Cyprus, portions of Crete and all but two cities of the thriving Phoenician coast). For that matter, Ms. Schiff even manages to make us see afresh famous scenes like Antony’s painful death after his defeat at the hands of Octavian, and Cleopatra’s subsequent suicide.
Her death — “an honorable death, a dignified death, an exemplary death,” over which she presided herself, “proud and unbroken to the end” — even won over her detractors, Ms. Schiff observes: “by the Roman definition she had at last done something right; finally it was to her credit that she had defied the expectations of her sex.”
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