Daedalus Books

This landmark, myth-shattering work chronicles the Pentagon, the most powerful institution in America, the people who created it, and the pathologies it has spawned. Carroll proves a controversial thesis: the Pentagon is the biggest, loosest cannon in American history, and no institution has changed this country more.

Arthur (Art) Mumby and his irritating sister Myrtle live with their father, Revd Marmaduke Mumby, in the huge and rambling house, Larklight, travelling through space on a remote orbit far beyond the moon. One ordinary sort of morning they receive a correspondence informing them that a gentleman is on his way to visit, a Mr Webster. Visitors to Larklight are rare if not unique, and a frenzy of preparation ensues. But it is the wrong sort of preparation, as they discover when their guest arrives, and a Dreadful and Terrifying (and marvellous) adventure begins. It takes them to the furthest reaches of known space, where they must battle the evil First Ones in a desperate attempt to save each other — and the universe. Recounted through the eyes of Art himself, «Larklight» will be sumptuously designed and illustrated throughout.

The magical surrealism of the famous opera «The Love for Three Oranges» is vividly depicted in this pictorial adaptation, designed to create an awareness of classical music among young children. Combining humor, sorrow, fantasy, and a bit of the grotesque, this fanciful story tells the tale of a prince whose melancholy can only be cured by a hearty laugh. In order to break through his gloom, the king plans a splendid feast and orders the court jester, Truffaldino, to appear and cheer up his son. When the prince finally lets out a guffaw, he incurs the wrath of Fata Morgana, a malicious witch who curses him with an undeniable passion for three oranges — oranges that he must chase to the ends of the earth.

Baltimore, 1849. The body of Edgar Allan Poe has been buried in an unmarked grave. The public, the press, even Poe's family and friends accept the conclusion that Poe was a second-rate writer who died a drunkard. But none of this deters a young Baltimore lawyer named Quentin Clark, an ardent admirer who risks his own career and reputation in a passionate crusade to salvage Poe's. Clark discovers that Poe's last days are riddled with vital unanswered questions. The police, it seems, may be concealing things. But just when Poe's death seems destined to remain a mystery Quentin realizes he must find the one person who can solve this strange case: the real-life model for Poe's brilliant fictional detective character, C. Auguste Dupin, the hero of ingenious tales of crime and detection. Clark successfully recruits the man he believes to have inspired Poe's Dupin only to be confronted by another claiming to be the true model and a dangerous race between the two master detectives begins, each seeking to prove he is the real 'Dupin' by solving the mystery of Poe's death. In short order, Clark finds himself enmeshed in sinister machinations involving international political agents, a female assassin, the corrupt Baltimore slave trade and the lost secrets of Poe's final hours. With his own future hanging in the balance, he must turn master investigator himself to unchain his now imperiled fate from that of Poe. THE POE SHADOW is a beautifully detailed, ingeniously plotted tale of suspense which opens a thrilling new window on the truth behind Poe's demise, literary history's most persistent enigma.

Guy Fawkes is amongst the most celebrated figures in English history and Bonfire Night is a remarkably long lived and very English tradition. But why every November do we still mark a planned act of treason and terrorism that was defeated 400 years ago? James Sharpe examines the fateful night of 5 November, 1605 and the tangled web of religion and politics which gave rise to the plot. He uncovers how celebration of the event, and of Guy Fawkes, the one gunpowder plotter everyone remembers, has changed over the centuries. Today, although most of the religious connotations have long been ignored, the bonfires remain. The festival created in 1605 by the state and church to commemorate a failed act of Catholic terrorism, now provides an annual raison d'etre for the firework industry and a cause of concern for Britain's cat owners!

One of today's most intrepid writers chronicles a deadly trek through the legendary region that gave birth to the gulag and gave Siberia its outsize reputation for perilous isolation. In a custom-built boat, Jeffrey Tayler travels some 2,400 miles down the Lena River from near Lake Baikal to high above the Arctic Circle, recreating a journey first made by Cossack forces more than three hundred years ago. He is searching for primeval beauty and a respite from the corruption, violence, and self-destructive urges that typify modern Russian culture, but instead he finds the roots of that culture — in Cossack villages unchanged for centuries, in Soviet outposts full of listless drunks, in stark ruins of the gulag, and in grand forests hundreds of miles from the nearest hamlet. That' s how far Tayler is from help when he realizes that his guide, Vadim, a burly Soviet army veteran embittered by his experiences in Afghanistan, detests all humanity, including Tayler. Yet he needs Vadim's superb skills if he is to survive a voyage that quickly turns hellish. They must navigate roiling whitewater in howling storms, but they eschew life jackets because, as Vadim explains, the frigid water would kill them before they could swim to shore. Though Tayler has trekked by camel through the Sahara and canoed down the Congo during the revolt against Mobutu, he has never felt so threatened as he does now.

A bizarre killer nicknamed «The Highwayman» has turned London's blazing-hot summer into a ticking time bomb, but never fear, detectives John May and Arthur Bryant are on the case! « is a new master of the classical detective story.»

Women have participated in war throughout history, but their experience in Russia during the First World War was truly exceptional. Between the war's beginning and the October Revolution of 1917, approximately 6,000 women answered their country's call. These courageous women became media stars throughout Europe and America, but were brushed aside by Soviet chroniclers and until now have been largely neglected by history. Laurie Stoff draws on deep archival research into previously unplumbed material, including many first-person accounts, to examine the roots, motivations, and legacy of these women. She reveals that Russia was the only nation in World War I that systematically employed women in the military, marking the first time that a government run by men had organized women for combat. And although they were originally envisioned as propaganda — promoting patriotism and citizenship to inspire the thousands of males who had been deserting or refusing to fight — Russian women also proved themselves more than capable in combat. Describing the formation, provisioning, and training of the units, Stoff sheds light on their social and educational backgrounds, while recounting a number of amazing individual stories. She tells how Maria Bochkareva, commander of the First Russian Women's Battalion of Death, and her unit met its baptism of fire in combat and how Bochkareva later traveled to the U.S. and met President Wilson. We also meet Maria Bocharnikova, who served with the First Petrograd Women's Battalion that defended the Winter Palace during the Bolshevik Revolution. Stoff also chronicles the exploits of the Second Moscow Women's Battalion of Death, Third Kuban Women's Shock Battalion, and the First Women's Naval Detachment. Stoff's remarkable account rescues from oblivion an important but still little-known aspect of Russia's experience in World War I. It also provides new insights into gender roles during a pivotal period of Russia's development and resonates with the current debates over the role of women in warfare.

If he's in the right mood, divine Angus might grant you sight of your true love in a dream; you might even fall in love with him — but he'll never love you back. This book retells the «Myth of Dream Angus» as part of the «Canongate Myths» series.

With small, teeming cartoon scenes so boisterous they frequently burst their borders, Williams catapults readers headlong through five of Dickens's best-known melodramas. Kirkus Reviews OLIVER TWIST, GREAT EXPECTATIONS, A TALE OF TWO CITIES, DAVID COPPERFIELD, and A CHRISTMAS CAROL are distilled into six-to ten-page stories that include the bare rudiments of each plot and droll illustrations featuring dialogue taken directly from the original works, spilling out of the frames into the margins with additional witty commentary. SCHOOL LIBRARY JOURNAL A fresh retelling that makes a good story as well as an introduction to classroom reading assignments or school dramatizations.

A brilliantly inventive, fabulously illustrated addition to the Far-Flung Adventure series from the award-winning, bestselling author and illustrator team, Paul Stewart and Chris Riddell. Set in the same world as Fergus Crane and Corby Flood's stories, this is the tale of a small boy, Hugo Pepper, and his amazing exploits. Raised in the Frozen North by reindeer herders, his parents eaten by polar bears when he was just a baby, Hugo discovers that the sled they arrived in has a very special compass — one that can be set to 'Home'. And so Hugo arrives in Firefly Square — to discover a group of very special friends, and a dastardly enemy... With three-toed snowmen, a secret buried treasure, and a host of fabulous stories, this is a fantastic new tale in this series.

Considered to be one of Agatha Christie's most controversial mysteries, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd breaks all the rules of traditional mystery writing. A widow's suicide has stirred rumors of blackmail, and of a secret lover named Roger Ackroyd, who was found stabbed to death in his study. The case is so unconventional that not even crack detective Hercule Poirot has a clue as to how to solve it.

Whether she's extolling the virtues of vegetarianism and the global village, raising awareness about the world's moral and social ills, or simply playing with her Malibu Stacy doll and dreaming of ponies, Lisa Simpson is a role model for the 21st century. This title helps discover Lisa's lifelong ambitions.

Between 1962 and 1970, Paul McCartney sold 140 million albums throughout the world: co-authored with John Lennon twenty-six US and UK number one singles: recorded the first rock album (Revolver) and took the whole thing to a pinnacle (Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band). As a member of the most important rock band ever, Paul McCartney convinced millions of fans to pick up electric guitars and others to denounce him as a degenerate or worse. He helped usher in the Love Generation, took a personal stance on the drug problem, and left the world dumbfounded when the Fab Four called it quits in the early seventies. However, to this day McCartney remains one of the most beloved and respected of musicians, and the biggest box office draw in the world. McCartney is a tale of self-destruction and epic excess, as well as creative genius and brilliant music. The Beatles' bloody infighting, the sex, drugs, and McCartney's extraordinary marriages are revealed here in full. This book remains a celebratory feast for millions of fans, capturing the glorious rush of the best songs and revealing the untold stories behind them.

A brilliantly researched and realized history, an essential addition to the literature of World War II. The 1941 Battle of Moscow — unquestionably one of the most decisive battles of the Second World War — marked the first strategic defeat of the German armed forces in their seemingly unstoppable march across Europe. The Soviets lost many more people in that one battle than the British and Americans lost in the whole of the war. Now, with authority and narrative power, Rodric Braithwaite tells the story in large part through the individual experiences of ordinary Russian men and women. Setting his narrative firmly against the background of Moscow and its people, Braithwaite begins in early 1941, when the Soviet Union was still untouched by the war raging to the west. We see how — despite abundant secret intelligence — the breaching of the border by the Wehrmacht in June took the country by surprise, and how, when the Germans pushed to Moscow in November, the Red Army and the capital's inhabitants undertook to defend their city. Finally, in the winter of 1941-1942, they turned the Germans back on the very outskirts. Braithwaite's dramatic, richly illustrated narrative of the military action offers telling portraits of Stalin and his generals. By interweaving the personal remembrances of soldiers, politicians, writers, artists, workers, and schoolchildren, he gives us an unprecedented understanding of how the war affected the daily life of Moscow, and of the extraordinary bravery, endurance, and sacrifice — both voluntary and involuntary — that was required of its citizens.

Julia Child single handedly awakened America to the pleasures of good cooking with her cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking and her television show The French Chef, but as she reveals in this bestselling memoir, she didn't know the first thing about cooking when she landed in France. Indeed, when she first arrived in 1948 with her husband, Paul, she spoke no French and knew nothing about the country itself. But as she dove into French culture, buying food at local markets and taking classes at the Cordon Bleu, her life changed forever. Julia's unforgettable story unfolds with the spirit so key to her success as a cook and teacher and writer, brilliantly capturing one of the most endearing American personalities of the last fifty years.

In 1761, at a boarding school in New England, a young Mohawk Indian named Joseph Brant first met Samuel Kirkland, the son of a colonial clergyman. They began a long and intense relationship that would redefine North America. For nearly fifty years, their lives intertwined, at first as close friends but later as bitter foes. Kirkland served American expansion as a missionary and agent, promoting Indian conversion and dispossession. Brant pursued an alternative future for the continent by defending an Indian borderland nestled between the British in Canada and the Americans, rather than divided by them. By telling their dramatic story, Alan Taylor illuminates the dual borders that consolidated the new American nation after the Revolution. By constricting Indians within reservation lines, the Americans sought to control their northern boundary with the British Empire, which lingered in Canada. The border became firm as thousands of settlers established farms, held as private property, all around the new reservations. This struggle also pitted the federal government against the leaders of New York, competing to control the lands and the Indians of the border country. They contended for the highest of stakes because the transformation of Indian land constructed the wealth and the power of states, nations, and empires in North America. In addition to land, the frontier contest pivoted on murders, which repeatedly tested who had legal jurisdiction: Indians or newcomers. To assert power, the contending regimes sought to try and execute Indians or settlers who killed one another. To defend native autonomy, however, the Indians asserted an alternative by covering the graves ofvictims with presents to console their kin. When the gallows replaced covered graves, the Indians lost their middle position as free peoples. Taylor breaks with the stereotype of Indians as defiant but doomed traditionalists, as noble but futile defenders of ancient ways. In fact, the borderland Indians demonstrated remarkable adaptability and creativity in coping with the contending powers and with the growing numbers of invading settlers. Led by Joseph Brant, the natives tried to manage, rather than entirely to block, the process of settlement. Taylor shows that they did so in ways meant to preserve Indian autonomy and prosperity. Rather than sell lands for a song to governments, the Indians sought greater control and revenue by leasing lands directly to settler tenants. But neither the British nor the American leaders could accept Indians as landlords, as competitors in the construction of power from land in North America. Once a middle ground, the borderland became a divided ground, partitioned between the British Empire and the American republic.

Jacinto Benavente y Martinez was one of Spain's most important dramatists of the 20th century and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1922. Los Intereses Creados ' main figure is Crispin, the spectacular puppet master who manipulates the other characters with invisible strings. A sparkling satire on selfishness and greed in the modern world.

Philip Roth's new novel is a candidly intimate yet universal story of loss, regret, and stoicism. The best-selling author of The Plot Against America now turns his attention from one family's harrowing encounter with history (New York Times) to one man's lifelong skirmish with mortality. The fate of Roth's everyman is traced from his first shocking confrontation with death on the idyllic beaches of his childhood summers, through the family trials and professional achievements of his vigorous adulthood, and into his old age, when he is rended by observing the deterioration of his contemporaries and stalked by his own physical woes. A successful commercial artist with a New York ad agency, he is the father of two sons from a first marriage who despise him and a daughter from a second marriage who adores him. He is the beloved brother of a good man whose physical well-being comes to arouse his bitter envy, and he is the lonely ex-husband of three very different women with whom he's made a mess of marriage. In the end he is a man who has become what he does not want to be. The terrain of this powerful novel — Roth's twenty-seventh book and the fifth to be published in the twenty-first century — is the human body. Its subject is the common experience that terrifies us all. Everyman takes its title from an anonymous fifteenth-century allegorical play, a classic of early English drama, whose theme is the summoning of the living to death.

Love Over Scotland is the third in the series and revolves around the many colourful characters that come and go at No. 44 Scotland Street. McCall Smith handles the characters with his customary charm and deftness — the stalwart Tory chartered surveyor, the pushy mother, most importantly in this novel, the Italian-speaking prodigy, Bertie.

Written when Hemingway was at the height of his creative powers, the stories in Winner Take Nothing glow with the mark of his unique talent. Hunters, wives, old men of wisdom, waiters, fighters, women loved, women lost: they are all here, living on the raw edge, making love, facing the inevitable reality of death. The characters, the dialogue, the settings, the remarkable insight could have come only from Hemingway's imagination. As an introduction to his work, or as an overview of the themes he developed at greater length in his novels, it is a stunningly successful collection.

This is the definitive thesaurus for middle school and high school students seeking to communicate more effectively by means of a broader vocabulary. No other book at this level offers as many synonyms, example sentences, or features. New to this edition is an informative Parts of Speech table.

Fanboy has never had it good, but lately his sophomore year is turning out to be its own special hell. The bullies have made him their favorite target, his best (and only) friend seems headed for the dark side (sports and popularity), and his pregnant mother and the step-fascist are eagerly awaiting the birth of the alien life form known as Fanboy's new little brother or sister. Fanboy, though, has a secret: a graphic novel he's been working on without telling anyone, a graphic novel that he is convinced will lead to publication, fame, and — most important of all — a way out of the crappy little town he lives in and all the people that make it hell for him. When Fanboy meets Kyra, a.k.a. Goth Girl, he finds an outrageous, cynical girl who shares his love of comics as well as his hatred for jocks and bullies. Fanboy can't resist someone who actually seems to understand him, and soon he finds himself willing to heed her advice — to ignore or crush anyone who stands in his way.

The Beauty of the Beast is an exciting book offering lasting value. The poetic parade of the animal king dom ranges from the lowly earthworm to the majestic whale an d just about every creature in between. All poems are brief and fun to read aloud.