Daedalus Books

This elegantly illustrated series exhibits fantastic biographical accounts of the great names of all time. Full color.

The early 1900s were a time of great discovery. Robert Scott was a proud commander in the British Royal Navy who dreamed of planting his country's flag at the South Pole. Travel with Commander Scott and his team across the frozen Antarctic on their scientific expedition as they race to the South Pole. Experience the many hardships and trials of Scott and his team as they face disappointment and death when Norwegian Roald Amundsen is the first to make history on the icy continent.

Vincent van Gogh was a Western painter who lived at the end of the 19th century. His work as an artist continues to inspire today because it is fresh and unique. The paintings van Gogh created are full of movement and life, although the subjects are often simple. This is because the artist tried to paint the energy behind what he was seeing. As a result, people and flowers — even the houses and furniture in his pictures — seem to be alive. In the end, he suffered much loneliness and despair. During his life, his art never sold well and he thought he was a failure. Yet today his work is some of the most famous in the world.

Going strong after more than 50 years, the Berenstain Bears still have some adventures ahead of them and some lessons to learn. In these tales for readers and listeners 4 to 8, Brother and Sister Bear discover the importance of keeping their room clean; the whole family realizes that they are watching too much TV; the bears start eating healthy foods; and the kids are cautioned about strangers. Stan and Jan Berenstains' bright illustrations continue to evoke the good-natured humor of 1950s sit-coms.

Time is running out for the passengers and crew of the tourist cruiser Selene, incarcerated in a sea of choking lunar dust. On the surface, her rescuers find their resources stretched to the limit by the mercilessly unpredictable conditions of a totally alien environment.

Born in Salzburg Austria in 1756, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was recognized as a musical prodigy when he was three years old. He was 35 years old when he died. During his life, he completed 41 symphonies, 27 piano concertos, 23 string quartets, 17 piano sonatas, 7 major operas, and numerous works for voice and other instruments. But his road to fame was not easy. It was littered with loss and disappointment. He died in 1791.

Confucius was an important Chinese philosopher who lived in the fifth century B.C. The son of a poor nobleman, Confucius became a scholar of ancient Chinese music and literature. He spent most of his life as a traveling teacher. Much of his teaching focused on what made people happy and what made society run smoothly. He taught about the importance of polite behavior and proper ceremonial forms. Respect for ancestors, parents, and political leaders formed an important part of his philosophy. Many of Confucius' ideas were written down in a collection called the Analects. His teachings have been an important part of an education in China for over 2,000 years, and many generations of Chinese young people have studied his works.

On a cold winter's night in 1835, Halley's Comet blazed across the sky, as it did every 75 years. In a small house in a village in Missouri, the wail of a newborn baby shattered the night. He was the family's fifth child. They called him Samuel Langhorne Clemens. When Halley's Comet once again crossed the skies above the earth, Samuel Langhorne Clemens quietly took his leave of the world and followed the comet into history. His works remain alive, bringing pleasure to generation after generation of children and adults around the world.

Newsday called it the most authoritative and candid look yet at the personal lives... of the oft-scrutinized group. In The Love You Make, Peter Brown, a close friend and business manager of the band-and the best man at John and Yoko's wedding-looks at the four lads from Liverpool who established the greatest music phenomenon of the twentieth century. Written with the full cooperation of each of the group's members and their intimates, this book goes beyond the glitter to tell the inside story of the music, the marriages, the drugs, disagreements, and divorces-everything that made the Fab Four the phenomenon they are.

This is the story of special operations in the second world war as it has never been told before-directly by those who took part.

»Koba the Dread» is the successor to Martin Amis's celebrated memoir, Experience. It is largely political (while remaining personal). It addresses itself to the central lacuna of twentieth-century thought: the indulgence of communism by intellectuals of the West. In between the personal beginning and the personal ending, Amis gives us perhaps the best one hundred pages ever written about Stalin: Koba the Dread, Iosif the Terrible. Stalin said that the death of one person was tragic, the death of a million a mere 'statistic'. «Koba the Dread», during whose course the author absorbs a particular, a familial death, is a rebuttal of Stalin's aphorism.

As the 19th century gives way to the 20th, the Forsytes, presided over by the patriarchal Soames, must face the disintegration of the society that has upheld their family's position for generations. This beloved family saga, with its huge and lively cast of characters, remains a classic of popular literature.

With Hitler's invasion of Russia on Sunday 22 June 1941, the Eastern Front opened in World War II and politicians and generals around the world predicted the swift destruction of the Soviet armies. Nazi Germany threw men and equipment against Russia in unprecedented numbers: a total of five million men took part in the Blitz attack along the entire Russian frontier. Using interviews and primary evidence collected in Russia, Albert Axell tells the story of the Eastern Front as it unfolded, interweaving his accounts of the ordinary and extraordinary men and women soldiers of Russia with the progress of the war itself. The volume is both a history and a tale of courage and endurance; unbelievable heroism combined with an implacable refusal to admit defeat — whatever the odds.

This wonderfully engaging book asks young children to locate and count an assortment of objects placed in scenes with silly animals. It presents reproductions of eleven spectacular double-spread oil paintings framed with Joan Gallup's unique sculpted clay borders, along with plenty of her charming characters and creations. This beautiful gift edition is designed to become a childhood favorite!

From Doris Lessing, Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, one of her finest collections of short stories. Doris Lessing is unrivalled in her ability to capture the truth from the complexities of relationships and the stories in this wonderful collection have lost none of their original power. Two marriages, both middle class, liberal and 'rather literary', share a shocking flaw, a secret 'cancer'. A young, beautiful woman from a working class family is courted by a very eligible, very upmarket man. An ageing actress falls in love for the first time but can only express her feelings through her stage performances because her happily married lover is unobtainable. A dedicated, lifelong rationalist is tempted, after the death of his father, by the comforts of religious belief. In this magnificent collection of stories, which spans four decades, Doris Lessing's unique gift for observation, her wit, her compassion and remarkable ability to illuminate the complexities of human life are all remarkably displayed.

In the concluding volume of his portrait of Ivan Bunin, Marullo relates the struggle of the writer and of the emigre Russian artistic community in Europe to keep alive the memory of «patriarchal» Russia against a backdrop of personal suffering, poverty, war and longing for the homeland.

A memoir of Winston Churchill. It contains extracts from the candid diaries of Churchill's doctor Lord Moran, his devoted friend and confidant, revealing how the great man faced up to and absorbed the strain of events during the war years, the tremendous burden of his responsibilities, and his extraordinary resolution. Moran's keen observation, sensitivity, truth and insight should shed light on Churchill's conduct and personality. We hear of his weaknesses as well as his strengths: his rages, his jokes and salty comments, his occasional foolishness, and his rare cattiness. Moran also records details of other world figures, as well as the historic events in which Churchill played so momentous a part. This volume also contains an introduction by Lord Moran's son.

Twenty selections include humorous, touching tales about life in the shtetl, lovingly translated from the Yiddish with all the warmth and spirit of the originals. Features Progress in Kasrilevke, Summer Romances, Birth, There's No Dead, Someone to Envy, Three Widows, Homesick, On America, A Home Away from Home, and more.

Here Turgenev discusses the character of creative writing, the attitude of the artist to his environment, and the transmutation of the artist's experience into a work of art. The best possible introduction to the author a reader could ask for.

Since tales of his exploits began appearing in The New Yorker more than thirty years ago, Henry Bech, John Updike's playfully irreverent alter-ego, has charmed readers with his aesthetic dithering and his seemingly inexhaustible libido. The Bech stories — collected in one volume for the first time, and featuring a final, series-capping story, His Oeuvre — cast an affectionate eye on the famously unproductive Jewish-American writer, offering up a stream of wit, whimsy, and lyric pungency unmatched in American letters. From his birth in 1923 to his belated paternity and public apotheosis as a spry septuagenarian in 1999, Bech plugs away, globetrotting in the company of foreign dignitaries one day and schlepping in tattered tweeds on the college lecture circuit the next. By turns cynical and naive, wry and avuncular, and always amorous, he is Updike's most endearing confection — a Lothario, a curmudgeon, and a winsome literary icon all in one. A perfect forum for Updike's limber prose, The Complete Henry Bech is an arch portrait of the literary life in America from an incomparable American writer.

Philip Callow AIs splendidly readable biography of Robert Louis Stevenson recounts the life of Scotland. AIs finest writer of English prose and the author of such classics as Treasure Island and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. A sickly child, Louis became in turn a bohemian dandy, a literary gypsy traipsing through the mountains of France with a donkey, and at twenty-eight the lover of an American woman ten years his senior, the fabulous Fanny. His feelings are always his reasons, said O. Henry James, and caught in a sentence the secret of Stevenson AIs popularity as one of the last of the classic storytellers. Stevenson was destined to be a modern man.O-James Campbell, New York Times Book Review. Illustrated.

Ernest Hemingway called Huckleberry Finn the best book we've ever had. There was nothing before. There's been nothing as good since. Critical opinion of this book hasn't dimmed since Hemingway uttered these words; as author Russell Banks says in these pages, Twain makes possible an American literature which would otherwise not have been possible. He was the most famous American of his day, and remains in ours the most universally revered American writer. Here the master storytellers Geoffrey Ward, Ken Burns, and Dayton Duncan give us the first fully illustrated biography of Mark Twain, American literature's touchstone, its funniest and most inventive figure. This book pulls together material from a variety of published and unpublished sources. It examines not merely his justly famous novels, stories, travelogues, and lectures, but also his diaries, letters, and 275 illustrations and photographs from throughout his life. The authors take us from Samuel Langhorne Clemens's boyhood in Hannibal, Missouri, to his time as a riverboat worker — when he adopted the sobriquet Mark Twain — to his varied careers as a newspaperman, printer, and author. They follow him from the home he built in Hartford, Connecticut, to his peripatetic travels across Europe, the Middle East, and the United States. We see Twain grieve over his favorite daughter's death, and we see him writing and noticing everything. Twain believed that The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven. This paradox fueled his hilarity and lay at the core of this irreverent yet profoundly serious author. With essays by Russell Banks, Jocelyn Chadwick, Ron Powers, and John Boyer, aswell as an interview with actor and frequent Twain portrayer Hal Holbrook, this book provides a full and rich portrayal of the first figure of American letters.

The mind-bending novels of Philip K. Dick transcend genre to explore the nature of consciousness and reality, placing ordinary men and women in congress with the unknowable and the awe-full. Valis, the first in Dick's final trio of novels, is a theological detective story in which God is both a missing person and the perpetrator of the ultimate crime. The schizophrenic hero, a Dick alter-ego named Horselover Fat, begins receiving revelatory visions through a burst of pink laser light. As a coterie of religious seekers forms to explore these messages, they are led to a rock musician's estate, where a two-year old Messianic figure named Sophia confirms that an ancient, mechanical intelligence orbiting the earth has been guiding their discoveries. Mixing Gnostic Christianity with Dick's own strange philosophy, Valis is as funny and surprising as it is eye-opening.

When French artist Paul Gauguin visited Tahiti in 1891 he was fascinated by the native people's language and customs, and he was inspired by the vibrant colours of this new and exciting world. This volume follows him on his discovery of the island. Through Gauguin's colourful paintings, young readers can learn about the island, the lives of its inhabitants, and its exotic tropical plants and animals.