In The Land Of Marvels

Author : Barry Unsworth
Publisher : Nan A. Talese
Page : 306 pages
File Size : 54,6 Mb
Release : 2009-01-06
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780385529471

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Land of Marvels by Barry Unsworth Pdf

Barry Unsworth, a writer with an “almost magical capacity for literary time travel” (New York Times Book Review) has the extraordinary ability to re-create the past and make it relevant to contemporary readers. In Land of Marvels, a thriller set in 1914, he brings to life the schemes and double-dealings of Western nations grappling for a foothold in Mesopotamia (now Iraq) in the dying days of the Ottoman Empire. Somerville, a British archaeologist, is excavating a long-buried Assyrian palace. The site lies directly in the path of a new railroad to Baghdad, and he watches nervously as the construction progresses, threatening to destroy his discovery. The expedition party includes Somerville’s beautiful, bored wife, Edith; Patricia, a smart young graduate student; and Jehar, an Arab man-of-all-duties whose subservient manner belies his intelligence and ambitions. Posing as an archaeologist, an American geologist from an oil company arrives one day and insinuates himself into the group. But he’s not the only one working undercover to stake a claim on Iraq’s rich oil fields. Historical fiction at its finest, Land of Marvels opens a window on the past and reveals its lasting impact.

Author : Paola Bertucci
Publisher : JHU Press
Page : 157 pages
File Size : 51,5 Mb
Release : 2023-10-17
Category : Science
ISBN : 9781421447117

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In the Land of Marvels by Paola Bertucci Pdf

How a journey through Italy casts light on secrets, stereotypes, and the manipulation of information in eighteenth-century science. In 1749, the celebrated French physicist Jean-Antoine Nollet set out on a journey through Italy to solve an international controversy over the medical uses of electricity. At the end of his nine-month tour, he published a highly influential account of his philosophical battle with his Italian counterparts, discrediting them as misguided devotees of the marvelous. Paola Bertucci's In the Land of Marvels brilliantly reveals the mysteries of Nollet's journey, uncovering a subterranean world of secretive and ambitious intelligence gathering masked as scientific inquiry. The advent of electricity was a pivotal phenomenon not only in the history of physical experimentation, but also in the cultivation of popular scientific interest. Nollet's journey was supposedly inspired by the need to investigate, and subsequently report on, claims of the use of electrified "medicated tubes" by their Italian inventor Gianfrancesco Pivati. Motivated by economic interests in the silk industry, Nollet's journey was in fact an undercover mission commissioned by the French state to discover the secrets of Italian silk manufacture and possibly supplant its international success. The event that sparked the medical controversy—the unusual cure of a bishop—was a complete fabrication. Bertucci insightfully contrasts published accounts of the event with private documents and discusses how eighteenth-century scientists published fictional events and results to bolster their careers, ultimately leading to long-lasting misrepresentations of scientific practice and enduring stereotypes. In the Land of Marvels reveals the constellation of historical actors, from reputed physicists to travel writers and electrical amateurs, who manipulated information to gain authority and prestige.

Author : Barry Unsworth
Publisher : Random House
Page : 306 pages
File Size : 49,8 Mb
Release : 2011-11-30
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9781448108206

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Land of Marvels by Barry Unsworth Pdf

1914, and an English archaeologist called Somerville is fulfilling a lifelong dream: to direct an excavation in the desert of Mesopotamia. Yet forces beyond his control threaten his work. The Great War is looming, and various interest groups are vying for control over the land and its manyprizes. And Somerville, whose intention is purely to discover and preserve the land's ancient treasures finds his idealism sorely tested. Naked ambition, treachery and greed are at play, in a thrilling adventure from the master of the historical novel.

Author : Theodor Vernaleken
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 376 pages
File Size : 52,7 Mb
Release : 1884
Category : Folklore
ISBN : UOM:39015002282625

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In the Land of Marvels by Theodor Vernaleken Pdf

Author : John Mandeville
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 224 pages
File Size : 51,7 Mb
Release : 2012-09-13
Category : Travel
ISBN : 9780191629105

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The Book of Marvels and Travels by John Mandeville Pdf

'Another island in the Great Ocean has many sinful and malevolent women, who have precious gems in their eyes.' In his Book of Marvels and Travels, Sir John Mandeville describes a journey from Europe to Jerusalem and on into Asia, and the many wonderful and monstrous peoples and practices in the East. He tells us about the Sultan in Cairo, the Great Khan in China, and the mythical Christian prince Prester John. There are giants and pygmies, cannibals and Amazons, headless humans and people with a single foot so huge it can shield them from the sun . Forceful and opinionated, the narrator is by turns bossy, learned, playful, and moralizing, with an endless curiosity about different cultures. Written in the fourteenth century, the Book is a captivating blend of fact and fantasy, an extraordinary travel narrative that offers some revealing and unexpected attitudes towards other races and religions. It was immensely popular, and numbered among its readers Chaucer, Columbus, and Thomas More. Anthony Bale's new translation emphasizes the book's readability, and his introduction and notes bring us closer to Mandeville's medieval worldview. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Author : Theodor Vernaleken
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 372 pages
File Size : 44,6 Mb
Release : 1884
Category : Folklore
ISBN : HARVARD:HN1VJG

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In the Land of Marvels by Theodor Vernaleken Pdf

Author : Leslie Parry
Publisher : HarperCollins
Page : 223 pages
File Size : 42,8 Mb
Release : 2015-05-05
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780062367570

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Church of Marvels by Leslie Parry Pdf

A ravishing first novel, set in vibrant, tumultuous turn-of-the-century New York City, where the lives of four outsiders become entwined, bringing irrevocable change to them all. New York, 1895. Sylvan Threadgill, a night soiler cleaning out the privies behind the tenement houses, finds an abandoned newborn baby in the muck. An orphan himself, Sylvan rescues the child, determined to find where she belongs. Odile Church and her beautiful sister, Belle, were raised amid the applause and magical pageantry of The Church of Marvels, their mother’s spectacular Coney Island sideshow. But the Church has burnt to the ground, their mother dead in its ashes. Now Belle, the family’s star, has vanished into the bowels of Manhattan, leaving Odile alone and desperate to find her. A young woman named Alphie awakens to find herself trapped across the river in Blackwell’s Lunatic Asylum—sure that her imprisonment is a ruse by her husband’s vile, overbearing mother. On the ward she meets another young woman of ethereal beauty who does not speak, a girl with an extraordinary talent that might save them both. As these strangers’ lives become increasingly connected, their stories and secrets unfold. Moving from the Coney Island seashore to the tenement-studded streets of the Lower East Side, a spectacular human circus to a brutal, terrifying asylum, Church of Marvels takes readers back to turn-of-the-century New York—a city of hardship and dreams, love and loneliness, hope and danger. In magnetic, luminous prose, Leslie Parry offers a richly atmospheric vision of the past in a narrative of astonishing beauty, full of wondrous enchantments, a marvelous debut that will leave readers breathless.

Author : THEODOR. VERNALEKEN
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 50,8 Mb
Release : 2018
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 1033110671

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IN THE LAND OF MARVELS by THEODOR. VERNALEKEN Pdf

Author : Theodor Vernaleken
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 382 pages
File Size : 47,9 Mb
Release : 2015-07-19
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1331779960

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In the Land of Marvels by Theodor Vernaleken Pdf

Excerpt from In the Land of Marvels: Folk-Tales From Austria and Bohemia The following collection of folk-tales from Lower Austria and Bohemia was made by Prof. Vernaleken, who wrote them down faithfully from word of mouth, and published them as a sort of supplement to the Children's and Household Stories of the Brothers Grimm, which were derived mostly from North-Western Germany. As these excursions into the land of marvels not only delight the imagination of youthful readers, but afford rich material to the scientific student of the history of the human spirit, a few words upon this subject may not be out of place in introducing the volume to English readers. The Marchen or folk tale is a form of oral tradition which has come down from lip to lip from the remotest antiquity j borne in olden times in the memory of bards or reciters, and now preserved as a house-lore among the peasantry of Europe. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."

Author : Barry Unsworth
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 128 pages
File Size : 54,6 Mb
Release : 2014-12
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 162715874X

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Land of Marvels by Barry Unsworth Pdf

Author : Rebecca Bushnell
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
Page : 377 pages
File Size : 40,9 Mb
Release : 2021-03-12
Category : Literary Collections
ISBN : 9780812297812

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The Marvels of the World by Rebecca Bushnell Pdf

Long before the Romantics embraced nature, people in the West saw the human and nonhuman worlds as both intimately interdependent and violently antagonistic. With its peerless selection of ninety-eight original sources concerned with the natural world and humankind's place within it, The Marvels of the World offers a corrective to the still-prevalent tendency to dismiss premodern attitudes toward nature as simple or univocal. Gathering together medical texts, herbals, and how-to books, as well as scientific, religious, philosophical, and poetic works dating from antiquity to the dawn of the Enlightenment, the anthology explores both mainstream and unconventional thinking about the natural world. Its seven parts focus on philosophy and science; plants; animals; weather and climate; ways of inhabiting the land; gardens and gardening; and European encounters with the wider world. Each section and each of the book's selections is prefaced with a helpful introduction by volume editor Rebecca Bushnell that weaves connections among these compelling pieces of the past. The early writers collected here wrote with extraordinary openness about ways of coexisting with the nonhuman forces that shaped them, Bushnell demonstrates, even as they sought to control and exploit their environment. Taken as a whole, The Marvels of the World reveals how many of these early writers cared as much about the natural world as we do today.

Author : Theodor Vernaleken
Publisher : Franklin Classics
Page : 362 pages
File Size : 42,8 Mb
Release : 2018-10-16
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 0343445093

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In The Land Of Marvels by Theodor Vernaleken Pdf

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Author : Theodor Vernaleken
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 394 pages
File Size : 54,5 Mb
Release : 2014-02
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 1293717789

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In the Land of Marvels by Theodor Vernaleken Pdf

Author : Enid Blyton
Publisher : Good Press
Page : 172 pages
File Size : 51,8 Mb
Release : 2021-08-31
Category : Fiction
ISBN : EAN:4066338035431

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The Folk of the Faraway Tree by Enid Blyton Pdf

In the enchanting realm of the Faraway Tree, a spoiled and haughty girl named Connie arrives for a summer stay with three adventurous children. Unfazed by the magical wonders and whimsical creatures dwelling within the tree, Connie stubbornly denies their existence, even as the Angry Pixie showers her with ink and Dame Washalot drenches her. However, as the children embark on their journey to the top of the tree, Connie's skepticism is shattered by delightful surprises.

Author : Doug Wechsler
Publisher : Boyds Mills Press
Page : 60 pages
File Size : 47,5 Mb
Release : 2008
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN : 1590785886

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Marvels in the Muck by Doug Wechsler Pdf

The salt marsh is not so friendly to humans, but it's the only place to be for many creatures and plants. Breathtaking photographs and fascinating facts reveal the secrets of the salt marsh and celebrate this squishy and surprising habitat.