Best of
Modern

1996

The Mackenzie Family: Mackenzie's Pleasure / Mackenzie's Magic


Linda Howard - 1996
    Reprint.

The Devil You Know


Josephine Cox - 1996
    But for Sonny, the affair that has promised a future of hope and happiness must end in desperate fear. Late one evening, Sonny overhears a private conversation between Tony Bridgeman and his wife. Only then does she realise she is in great danger. Pregnant and afraid, Sonny flees her home to make a new life in the north of England, where she meets a gregarious and motherly new friend, Ellie Kenny. When the mysterious and handsome David Langham seems drawn to her, Sonny almost dares to believe that she could be happy again. But never far away is the one person who wants to destroy everything that she now holds dear...

Betting on the Muse: Poems and Stories


Charles Bukowski - 1996
    Fortunately, "Buk" left plenty of unpublished manuscript behind that, judging from this culling from it, is of a piece with the published stuff. That is, it consists of quasi-autobiographical poems and stories. The poems' lines are only one to six words long, and the stories' sentences aren't much longer. Poems and stories relay the adventures and attitudes, at all stages of his life, of loafer and lumpen intellectual Henry Chinaski. They are occasionally laugh-out-loud funny, occasionally laughable because Henry and his women and pals are such a bunch of slobs, and occasionally as boring as Henry and company claim their lives are. And, to tell the truth, they are effortlessly, magnetically readable, especially if you are susceptible to their bargain-basement existentialist charm. Plenty are. Ray Olson

Dark Rose


Mike Lunnon-Wood - 1996
    At first, no one could see what was happening. By the time the alarm was raised it was too late. Ireland had been seized: a financial assault consolidated by a military one. But as the island is overrun, it’s soon clear that the invaders did not anticipate the fierce resolve of of their Celtic opponents. Nor the determination of the country’s powerful allies to throw out the occupiers. While a strengthening Irish resistance mounts a fierce guerilla campaign to take their country back, the British bring to bear the full might of the Army, Royal Navy and RAF to liberate their friend and neighbour across the Irish Channel. Dark Rose takes a bold premise and weaves it into a breathtaking, action-packed military thriller. If you like Tom Clancy, Frederick Forsyth, Andy McNab, Chris Ryan, Larry Bond, Dale Brown or Damien Lewis then you’ll love Mike Lunnon-Wood. Perfect for fans of Red Storm Rising, Sniper One or Bravo Two Zero or movies like Red Dawn, Dunkirk or The Siege of Jadotville.

House of Echoes


Barbara Erskine - 1996
    Eager to begin a new life there with Luke, her husband, and Tom, her small son, she is also impatient to find out about her newly discovered family who lived there for generations.But not long after they move in, Tom wakes screaming at night. Joss hears echoing voices and senses an invisible presence, watching her from the shadows. Are they spirits from the past? Or is she imagining them? As she learns, with mounting horror, of Belheddon's tragic and dramatic history, her fear grows very real, for she realises that both her family and her own sanity are at the mercy of a violent and powerful energy which seems beyond anyone's control.

Medea and Her Children


Lyudmila Ulitskaya - 1996
    Childless Medea is the touchstone of a large family, which gathers each spring and summer at her home. There are her nieces (sexy Nike and shy Masha), her nephew Georgii (who shares Medea’s devotion to the Crimea), and their friends. In this single summer, the languor of love will permeate the Crimean air, hearts will be broken, and old memories will float to consciousness, allowing us to experience not only the shifting currents of erotic attraction and competition, but also the dramatic saga of this family amid the forces of dislocation, war, and upheaval of twentieth-century Russian life.

An Origin Like Water: Collected Poems 1967­-1987


Eavan Boland - 1996
    Included in this volume is the work from Eavan Boland's five early volumes of poetry: New Territory, The War Horse, In Her Own Image, Night Feed, and The Journey.The poems from Boland's first book, New Territory, show her to be, at twenty-two, a master of formal verse reflecting Irish history and myth. This collection charts the ways in which Boland's work breaks from poetic tradition, honors it, and reinvents it. Poems like "Anorexic," "Mastectomy," and "Witching" have an intensity reminiscent of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. In later poems, her subjects become more personal, sequencing Boland's life as a woman, poet, and mother. Boland writes, "I grew to understand the Irish poetic tradition only when I went into exile with it," becoming, in effect, "a displaced person / in a pastoral chaos."This collection demonstrates how Boland's mature voice developed from the poetics of inner exile into a subtle, flexible idiom uniquely her own.

Stories from a Siberian Village


Vasily Shukshin - 1996
    Credited with revitalizing the short story as a genre in Russian literature, he was posthumously honored with the Soviet Union's highest literary prize following his untimely death at the age of forty-five. Stories from a Siberian Village introduces Shukshin to English readers with twenty-five stories that reflect the Siberian origins of his artistic identity. These stories, most of which have never before appeared in English, are set in a remote Siberian village caught in transition between rural traditions and modern Soviet life. There Shukshin's peasants—survivors of revolution, collectivization, and war—seek their identity in a "brave new world." Eccentrics and oddballs, Shukshin's protagonists are restless freedom seekers whose dreams and foibles are as broad and inexplicable as their native Siberian landscape. As touchy as artists and as unpretentious as truck drivers, they struggle with questions of life and death, faith and reason, custom and progress. From their mutual misapprehensions and the gap between their dreams and reality arises Shukshin's biting humor.

The Return of John MacNab


Andrew Greig - 1996
    Bold, sassy, impulsive, with a taste for a good time, flirtation and strong drink, Kirsty Fowles very nearly gets the better of everyone.

Jimmy & Rita


Kim Addonizio - 1996
    Haunted by their childhoods of material and emotional poverty, Jimmy and Rita float through days in urban San Francisco.

Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909-1917


T.S. Eliot - 1996
    Alfred Prufrock” as well as ribald verse and other youthful curios. “Perhaps the most significant event in Eliot scholarship in the past twenty-five years” (New York Times Book Review). Edited by Christopher Ricks.

The Hours of the Night


Sue Gee - 1996
    Gillian is a loner, an eccentric poet in her thirties, who has a difficult relationship with her very different mother: a well-known and expert gardener. Into their strange and secluded world, described with beautifully observed detail, come strangers from London to disrupt life as Gillian knows it. But with the joy of the love that she is to discover, will also come the pain and suffering of experience and the stark realities of the adult world.

The Chinese Century


Jonathan D. Spence - 1996
    It brings together nearly 300 hundred stunning photographs, most of them never before published outside China, and an authoritative and accessible text by Jonathan Spence and Annping Chin. Here are the last rulers of the waning empire and the revolutionaries who were to overthrow them; the warlords and capitalists who exploited the new order; the chaos of civil war and the brutality of the Japanese invasion and occupation; the Long March and the great famine; the triumph of the Red Army and the terrible cruelty and suffering of the Cultural Revolution; the depredations and downfalls of the Gang of Four; and the tragedy of Tiananmen Square. Alongside these often shocking scenes are glorious landscapes and teeming cities, intimate portraits of Chinese men and women, townspeople and peasants, artists, writers, film stars and the country's leaders, as they have rarely been seen in the West. THE CHINESE CENTURY's spectacular array of photographs bring to life, as never before, the hidden face of China.

Kensington Heights


Leslie Thomas - 1996
    Until the other bizarre and eccentric inhabitants of the building start arriving on his doorstep.And the Savage gets a visit from a homeless waif he meets in the local launderette called Korky.Korky's intrusion on Savage's private world alters his whole existence. High above the London rooftops this strange and contradictory relationship blooms like an improbable flower and Savage begins to realise that the world can creep under even the most firmly closed doors.'As ever in a Thomas novel, we constantly shift from tears to laughter and back again' Daily Express' A moving and jolly book ... with hardly a dull moment and difficult not to be cheered by' Times

A Private Mythology: Poems


May Sarton - 1996
    Ethereal and sensual, these intensely vivid poems capture the sights and textures of new places, people, and landscapes as experienced with a poet's fresh eye.

Britain and the Defeat of Napoleon, 1807-1815


Rory Muir - 1996
    Rory Muir looks beyond the purely military aspects of the struggle to show how the entire British nation played a part in the victory. His book provides a total assessment of how politicians, the press, the crown, civilians, soldiers and commanders together defeated France. Beginning in 1807 when all of continental Europe was under Napoleon's control, the author traces the course of the war throughout the Spanish uprising of 1808, the campaigns of the Duke of Wellington and Sir John Moore in Portugal and Spain, and the crossing of the Pyrenees by the British army, to the invasion of southern France and the defeat of Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo. Muir sets Britain's military operations on the Iberian Peninsula within the context of the wider European conflict, and examines how diplomatic, financial, military and political considerations combined to shape policies and priorities. Just as political factors influenced strategic military decisions, Muir contends, fluctuations of the war affected British political decisions. The book is based on a comprehensive investigation of primary and secondary sources, and on a thorough examination of the vast archives left by the Duke of Wellington. Muir offers vivid new insights into the personalities of Canning, Castlereagh, Perceval, Lord Wellesley, Wellington and the Prince Regent, along with fresh information on the financial background of Britain's campaigns. This vigorous narrative account will appeal to general readers and military enthusiasts, as well as to students of early nineteenth-century British politics and military history.

In the Heat of the Day


Michael Anthony - 1996
    A washerwoman, a caramel seller, a notorious jail-breaker and a host of other characters join a violent protest against the proposed Waterworks Bill.

Wild Indians And Other Creatures


Adrian C. Louis - 1996
    In these interrelated stories, most animals speak and most humans drink. A number of these irrelevant stories of Indian life are reworkings of traditional Trickster talescomplete with horny humanesque coyotes, randy ravens, and mystical bears - which transcend that form and become something new and arresting. Set on and around the Pine Ridge Reservation of South Dakota, these unsettling, often politically incorrect stories almost function as a novel. Many are laugh-out-loud funny, while others are stark and sad, yet grimly human and powerful. Many more stories and lives are interwoven in these sometimes bawdy but always moving and memorable tales. In Wild Indians & Other Creatures, Adrian C. Louis, one of the leading American Indian poets, presents an unblinking look at the social ills of reservation life while at the same time speaking of hope and survival for native peoples.

War in the Pacific (Volume 1)


Jerome T. Hagen - 1996
    Gen. Jerome Hagen's illustrious history of the Pacific War continues in volume II covering the chronology of Japan's invasion of China.

The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and Political Intolerance on Campus


David O. Sacks - 1996
    In the name of diversity, many leading academic and cultural institutions are working to silence dissent and stifle intellectual life. This book exposes the real impact of multiculturalism on the institution most closely identified with the politically correct decline of higher education—Stanford University. Authored by two Stanford graduates, this book is a compelling insider’s tour of a world of speech codes, “dumbed-down” admissions standards and curricula, campus witch hunts, and anti-Western zealotry that masquerades as legitimate scholarly inquiry. Sacks and Thiel use numerous primary sources—the Stanford Daily, class readings, official university publications—to reveal a pattern of politicized classes, housing, budget priorities, and more. They trace the connections between such disparate trends as political correctness, the gender wars, Generation X nihilism, and culture wars, showing how these have played a role in shaping multiculturalism at institutions like Stanford. The authors convincingly show that multiculturalism is not about learning more; it is actually about learning less. They end their comprehensive study by detailing the changes necessary to reverse the tragic disintegration of American universities and restore true academic excellence.

France, 1814 - 1914


Robert Tombs - 1996
    The survey begins with an exploration of national obsessions and attitudes. It considers the tendency to revolution and war, the preoccupation with the idea of a New Order and the deep strain of national paranoia that was to be intensified by the dramatic debacle of the Franco-Prussian War. Robert Tombs then investigates the structures of power and in Part Three he turns his attention to social identities, from the individual and family to the nation at large. When every aspect of the period has been put under the microscope, Robert Tombs draws them all into the broad political narrative that brings the book to its rousing conclusion. Bursting with life as well as learning, this is, quite simply, a tour de force.

Author's Pen and Actor's Voice: Playing and Writing in Shakespeare's Theatre


Robert Weimann - 1996
    Through close reading and careful analysis Weimann offers a reconsideration and redefinition of Elizabethan performance and production practices. The study reviews the most recent methodologies of textual scholarship, the new history of the Elizabethan theater, performance theory, and film and video interpretation, and offers a new approach to understanding Shakespeare. Weimann examines a range of plays as well as other contemporary works. A major part of the study explores the duality between playing and writing.

The Collected Stories of William Carlos Williams


William Carlos Williams - 1996
    This new edition of The Collected Stories of William Carlos Williams contains all fifty-two stories combining the early collections The Knife of the Times (1932), Life Along the Passaic (1938) with the later collection Make Light of It (1950) and the great long story, “The Farmers’ Daughters” (1956). When these stories first appeared, their vitality and immediacy shocked many readers, as did the blunt, idiosyncratic speech of Williams’ immigrant and working-class characters. But the passage of time has silenced the detractors, and what shines in the best of these stories is the unflinching honesty and deep humanity of Williams’ portraits, burnished by the seeming artlessness which only the greatest masters command.

Cosmology and Astrophysics Through Problems


Thanu Padmanabhan - 1996
    The author has designed the problems to develop each core topic in a simple and coherent way, and he provides full solutions to make this book completely self-contained. The first half of the book covers the core subjects of astrophysical processes, gravitational dynamics, radiative processes, fluid mechanics and general relativity. The second half uses these concepts to develop modern cosmology; topics include the Friedmann model and thermal history, the dynamics of dark matter and baryons in an expanding universe, the physics of high-redshift objects and the very early universe. This unique self-study textbook will be of key interest to graduate students and researchers in cosmology, astrophysics, relativity and theoretical physics. It is particularly well suited to graduate-level courses.