Title Search Results

A behind-the-scenes look at the Bronx Zoo focuses on its thousands of animals, hundreds of employees and mission to conserve wildlife around the world.

A contemporary prose rendering of the great medieval French epic, The Song of Roland is as canonical and significant as the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf. It extols the chivalric ideals in the France of Charlemagne through the exploits of Charlemagne's nephew, the warrior Roland, who fights bravely to his death in a legendary battle. Against the bloody backdrop of the struggle between Christianity and Islam, The Song of Roland remains a vivid portrayal of medieval life, knightly adventure, and feudal politics. The first great literary works of a culture are its epic chronicles, those that create simple hero-figures about whom the imagination of a nation can crystallize, observed V. S. Pritchett. The Song of Roland is animated by the crusading spirit and fortified by national and religious propaganda. This edition features W. S. Merwin's glowing, lyrical translation.From the Trade Paperback edition.

The rule of the Directorate—run by powerful genetically altered humans permanently linked with the GI-net—is being challenged by planetary rebellions. At this crucial time, a planet known only as World is discovered, where descendants of humans stranded long ago have survived to become a race of warriors led by Prophets with the ability to see the pathways of the future. And one misstep in the first contact between World’s warriors of Spider and the Directorate could destroy both World and empire...

Malcolm Bradbury’s classic skewering of 1970s academia, hailed by the New York Times as “an encyclopedia of radical chic as well as a genuinely comic novel” Among the painfully hip students and teachers at the liberal University of Watermouth, Howard Kirk appears to be the most stylish of them all. With his carefully manicured mustache and easygoing radicalism, Kirk prides himself on being among the most highly evolved teachers on his redbrick campus. But beneath Kirk’s scholarly bohemianism and studied cool is a ruthless, self-serving Machiavellian streak. A sociology lecturer who outwardly espouses freethinking nonconformity, Kirk is himself vain and bigoted, dismissing female students and colleagues while releasing vitriol against those who contradict him, particularly his clever, wayward wife, Barbara, the long-suffering mother of his two children. A funny and incisive satire of academia and ideological hypocrisy, The History Man is one of Malcolm Bradbury’s most acclaimed novels and remains just as sharp and witty today as when it was first published.

Larry is an unqualified, unemployable, inebriated prankster who rides a tide of booze onto the glorious shores of an undiscriminating Quick-Lube. Taking a part-time job vacuuming and washing windshields, Larry finds himself mixed up with hostile co-workers and unsatisfied customers, while also finding himself smitten with his lovely boss, Lupe Torrez. Will Larry keep it together long enough to win the girl, provide for man's best friend (his dog Arrow), and do his grandmother proud?

In the last days of a dying logging town, Christian returns to his family home for his father Henry's wedding. While home, Christian reconnects with his childhood friend Oliver, who has stayed in town working at Henry's timber mill and is now out of a job. As Christian gets to know Oliver's wife Charlotte, daughter Hedvig, and father Walter, he discovers a secret that could tear Oliver's family apart.

Helen is serving a life sentence at Sloatsburg women's prison for the murder of her children. Dr. Louise Forrest, a recently divorced mother of an eight-year-old boy, is the new chief of psychiatry there. Captain Ike Bradshaw is the corrections officer who wants her. And Angie, an ambitious Hollywood starlet contacted by Helen, is intent on nothing but fame. Drawing these four characters together in a story of shocking and disturbing revelations, The Big Girls is an electrifying novel about the anarchy of families, the sometimes destructive power of maternal instinct, and the cult of celebrity.From the Trade Paperback edition.

In The Lost World, the first in a series of books to feature the bold Professor Challenger—a character many critics consider one of the most finely drawn in science fiction—Challenger and his party embark on an expedition to a remote Amazonian plateau where, as the good professor puts it, “the ordinary laws of Nature are suspended” and numerous prehistoric creatures and ape-men have survived. “Just as Sherlock Holmes set the standard—and in some sense established the formula—for the detective story . . . , so too has The Lost World set the standard and the formula for fantasy-adventure stories . . . ,” Michael Crichton writes in his Introduction. “The tone and techniques that Conan Doyle first refined in The Lost World have become standard narrative procedures in popular entertainment of the present day.”

The story of an American Communist militia that fought for the Spanish Republicans in the 1936-39 Civil War.

Filled with sex and violence--in and out of time and space--the three books of The Illuminatus are only partly works of the imagination. They tackle all the coverups of our time--from who really shot the Kennedys to why there's a pyramid on a one-dollar bill.