A secret world of their ownJess Aaron's greatest ambition is to be the fastest runner in the fifth grade. He's been practicing all summer and can't wait to see his classmates' faces when he beats them all. But on the first day of school, a new kid, a new girl, boldly crosses over to the boy's side of the playground and outruns everyone.That's not a...more
Stanley Yelnats is under a curse. A curse that began with his no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing-great-great-grandfather and has since followed generations of Yelnats. Now Stanley has been unjustly sent to a boys' detention center, Camp Green Lake, where the warden makes the boys "build character" by spending all day, every day, digging holes: five ...more
Bob Slocum was living the American dream. He had a beautiful wife, three lovely children, a nice house...and all the mistresses he desired. He had it all -- all, that is, but happiness. Slocum was discontent. Inevitably, inexorably, his discontent deteriorated into desolation until...something happened. Something Happened is Joseph Heller's wonder...more
More than three decades after CATCH-22 captured the conscience and imagination of a generation, Joseph Heller has written the sequel to one of the most important novels of the twentieth century. CLOSING TIME revisits Yossarian, Milo Minderbinder, Chaplain Tappman and others--the characters who made CATCH-22 unforgettable, now older, if not wiser, f...more
First published in 1940, this study has become one of the classic works in social anthropology. The Nuer of the Southern Sudan are predominantly a pastoral people and the first part of the book describes their life as herdsmen, fishermen and gardeners. Their economic life is related to the absence of chieftainship and their democratic sentiment.
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The story of Amory Blaine's adolescence and undergraduate days at Princeton, This Side of Paradise captures the essence of an American generation struggling to define itself in the aftermath of World War I and the destruction of "the old order".
A fantasy of the future that sheds a blazing critical light on the present--considered to be Aldous Huxley's most enduring masterpiece. "Mr. Huxley is eloquent in his declaration of an artist's faith in man, and it is his eloquence, bitter in attack, noble in defense, that, when one has closed the book, one remembers."--Saturday Review of Literatur...more
Climb aboard for the swashbuckling adventure of a lifetime. Treasure Islandhas enthralled (and caused slight seasickness) for decades. The names Long John Silver and Jim Hawkins are destined to remain pieces of folklore for as long as children want to read Robert Louis Stevenson's most famous book. With it's dastardly plot and motley crew of rogues...more
This zany, sexy version of the story of King David, told as a modern allegory of what it is like for a Jew to survive in a hostile world, is "original, sad, wildly funny, and filled with roaring. . . . Heller's King David, a splendid creation, is not so much a man for all seasons as man in all his seasons" (The New York Times Book Review).