Best of
Modern

1981

A-Level Physics


Roger Muncaster - 1981
    New 'Consolidation' sections and questions designed to provide a link between GCSE and A-level feature in the text.At the end of each section there are many questions - ideal for consolidation and revision - mainly from past A-level examination papers. Over 15 of these past-paper questions have been added in the Fourth Edition. Answers are included.

Company / Ill Seen Ill Said / Worstward Ho / Stirrings Still


Samuel Beckett - 1981
    In Company a solitary hearer lying in blackness calls up images from the far-off past. Ill Seen Ill Said meditates upon an old woman living out her last days alone in an isolated snow-bound cottage, watched over by twelve mysterious sentinels. In Worstward Ho, a breathless speaker unravels the sense of things, acting out the unending injunction to ‘Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’ And Stirrings Still, published in the Guardian a few months before Beckett’s death in 1989, is the last prose work and testament of ‘this great soothsayer of the age, and of the aged’ (Christopher Ricks).The present edition includes several short prose texts (Heard in the Dark I & II, One Evening, The Way, Ceiling) which represent work in progress or works ancillary to the composition of these late masterpieces.Edited by Dirk Van Hulle.

The Tent Peg


Aritha van Herk - 1981
    J.L. is on the run from an empty heart and is desperate for solitude. Yet solitude eludes her from the moment she hangs up her pots and pans in the cook tent, and the men in the camp begin to drift toward her, drawn by her silence. These men are drifters, romantics and outcasts - men who have come to the North in search of answers for questions they can't define.

The Other Side of Silence


Ted Allbeury - 1981
    John Powell, the youngest member of the Milord Committee that monitors Philby's every move, is assigned the task of finding out why. Is it an old man's whim, or a carefully planned KGB operation? To find out Powell must journey into the labyrinth of a man's legendary past, sifting through every rumour, every plot, every shadowy alliance, until the journey leads him into the darkest and most dangerious recesses of them all, the heart and mind and motivation of the man himself — Kim Philby.

The Song of Phaid the Gambler


Mick Farren - 1981
    International.If you know the CIA are bugging the line and charging you for their time.If you know the cat is watching you and reporting back to Control.If you know that paranoids are the only people who really know what is happening.If you hold these truths to be self-evident, then let The Song of Phaid the Gambler into your life and know that you are not alone.

Baja Oklahoma


Dan Jenkins - 1981
    Still convincingly female, though in no way dumb and girly, fortyish Juanita serves drinks to the colorful crew patronizing Herb's Cafe in South Fort Worth, worries herself sick over a hot-to-trot daughter proving too fond of drugs and the dealers who sell them, endures a hypochondriac mother whose whinings would justify murder, dates a fellow middle-ager whose connections with the oil industry are limited to dipstick duty at his filling station—and, by the way, she also hopes to become a singer-songwriter in the real country tradition of Bob Wills and Willie Nelson. That Juanita is way too old to remain a kid with a crazy dream doesn't matter much to her. In between handing out longneck beers to customer-acquaintances battling hot flashes and deciding when boyfriend Slick is finally going to get lucky, Juanita keeps jotting down lyrics reflective of hard-won wisdom and setting them to music composed on her beloved Martin guitar. Too many of her early songwriting results are one-dimensional or derivative, but finally she hits on something both original and heartfelt: a tribute to her beloved home state, warts and all.

Perspectives on Our Age


Jacques Ellul - 1981
    Unique insight into the details of Ellul's personal life accompany thought-provoking commentary on the origins and development of his beliefs and theories. The religious, technological, and sociological analyses of the modern world that Ellul made famous are discussed in this glimpse into his life and work.Jacques Ellul was a professor at the University of Bordeaux. He is the author of Propaganda, The Subversion of Christianity, and The Technological Society. William H. Vanderburg is the director of the Center for Technology and Social Development at the University of Toronto. He is the author of The Growth of Minds and Cultures and The Labyrinth of Technology.

The Defector


Evelyn Anthony - 1981
    She was his debriefer: Davina Graham, a dedicated British operative who made her work her life. But he was lonely and bored, and he missed his family. So she took him home...When she fell in love with Sasanov, Davina Graham already knew that he would only co-operate if they brought his wife and daughter out of Russia. It was an almost impossible mission - booby-trapped by treachery and studded with deceit - but it was one for which she had to volunteer.Even if by some strange and miraculous twist of fate she succeeded as an agent, she would have lost the only thing she wanted as a woman.

Forward into Battle: Fighting Tactics From Waterloo To Vietnam


Paddy Griffith - 1981
    It showed that Wellington's infantry had won by their mobility rather than their musketry, that the bayonet did not become obsolete in the nineteenth century as is often claimed, and that the tank never supplanted the infantryman in the twentieth. A decade later, the author has been able to fill out many parts of his analysis and has extended it into the near future. The Napoleonic section includes an analysis of firepower and fortification, notably at the Battle of New Orleans in 1815. Additional discussions of the tactics of the American Civil War have been included. The evolution of small-unit tactics in the First World War is next considered, then the problem of making an armored breakthrough in the Second World War. Following is a discussion of the limitations of both the helicopter and firepower in Vietnam. The author points to some of the lessons learned by the U.S. military and the doctrine which resulted from that experience. Concluding is a glimpse at the strangely empty battlefield landscape that might be expected in any future high technology conflict. From the Trade Paperback edition.