検索キーワード： 著者 "Beauty_23" すべてのカテゴリー

The Lost World is a 1912 novel by Arthur Conan Doyle concerning an expedition to a plateau (native name is Tepuyes) in South America (Venezuela) where prehistoric animals (dinosaurs and other extinct creatures) still survive. The character of Professor Challenger was introduced in this book. Interestingly, for a seminal work of dinosaur-related fiction, the reptiles only occupy a small portion of the narrative. Much more time is devoted to a war between early human hominids and a vicious tribe of ape-like creatures.

Imagine a strange, tropical place that is almost inaccessible. Time appears to have stood still there. Species of animal and plant life not seen elsewhere on Earth, except in the fossil record, inhabit the place. The lakes heave with the shapes of huge grey bulks moving under the surface. The woods are places where chittering cries move about above your head, as powerful apes move swiftly in the canopy of leaves. Then, a tree splinters nearby, and a dinosaur steps out from his hiding place... and he's eyeing YOU.Jurassic Park? Not quite. The Lost World was an inspiration for Jurassic Park; in ...

Life on the Mississippi is a memoir by Mark Twain detailing his days as a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River before the American Civil War. (Summary from Wikipedia)

Writer/entertainer Garrison Keillor (A Prairie Home Companion) on “The Innocents Abroad”: “…one of the best selling travel books of all time.” (The Writer’s Almanac, June 8, 2012)When you dive into Mark Twain’s (Samuel Clemens’) The Innocents Abroad, you have to be ready to learn more about the unadorned, ungilded reality of 19th century “touring” than you might think you want to learn. This is a tough, literary journey. It was tough for Twain and his fellow “pilgrims”, both religious and otherwise. They set out, on a June day in 1867, to visit major tourist sites in ...

Our Mutual Friend (written in the years 1864–65) is the last novel completed by Charles Dickens and is one of his most sophisticated works, combining psychological insight with social analysis. It centres on, in the words of critic J. Hillis Miller, "money, money, money, and what money can make of life" but is also about human values. In the opening chapters a body is found in the Thames and identified as John Harmon, a young man recently returned to London to receive his inheritance. Were he alive, his father's will would require him to marry Bella Wilfer, a beautiful, mercenary girl whom ...

The Mystery of Edwin Drood is the final novel by Charles Dickens. The novel was left unfinished at the time of Dickens' death, and readers have often speculated what the ending might have been. The novel is named after Edwin Drood, but it mostly tells the story of his uncle, a Jekyll-and-Hyde-esque choirmaster named John Jasper, who is in love with his pupil, Rosa Bud. Miss Bud is Drood's fiancée, and has caught the eye of the high-spirited and hot-tempered Neville Landless, who comes from Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) with his twin sister, Helena, and immediately makes an enemy of Drood. It is ...

This is the account of the perilous mission of Michael Strogoff, courier for Czar Alexander II, who is sent from Moscow to the besieged city of Irkutsk, where the governor, brother of the Czar, has taken his last stand against a Tartar rebellion led by the fearsome Feofar-Khan. When telegraph lines are cut between the Russian Far East and the mainland, Strogoff must make his way through hostile territory to warn the governor of the return of the traitor Ivan Ogareff, a disgraced former officer who seeks vengeance against the Tsar’s family by the destruction of Irkutsk.

"The wrongdoing of one generation lives into the successive ones and... becomes a pure and uncontrollable mischief." Hawthorne's moral for "The House of the Seven Gables," taken from the Preface, accurately presages his story. The full weight of the gloomy mansion of the title seems to sit on the fortunes of the Pyncheon family. An ancestor took advantage of the Salem witch trials to wrest away the land whereon the house would be raised... but the land's owner, about to be executed as a wizard, cursed the Pyncheon family until such time as they should make restitution.Now, almost two centuries...

The Sign of the Four (1890), also called The Sign of Four, is the second novel featuring Sherlock Holmes written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Doyle wrote four novels and 56 stories starring the fictional detective.The story is set in 1888. The Sign of the Four has a complex plot involving service in East India Company, India, the Indian Rebellion of 1857, a stolen treasure, and a secret pact among four convicts ("the Four" of the title) and two corrupt prison guards. It presents the detective's drug habit and humanizes him in a way that had not been done in the preceding novel A Study in Scarlet...

This warm and witty novel presents itself as the first person narration of an immensely likeable and resourceful woman who, born in the most shameful of circumstances, comes to be desired by, and indeed married to, many men, in the course of her life — some of whom she inveigles into marriage on false pretences — who, when all else fails, resorts to an extraordinarily successful life of crime, pulling many ingenious heists until at last she is nabbed and faced with a real prospect of being hanged. Moll's descriptions of the amorous inclinations of males are often very funny — and not the...

In 1908, the National Monetary Commission was established by Congress to study financial boom-and-bust cycles. Senator Nelson Aldrich (Republican-RI) was chair of the commission. He, in secret enclave with a group of bankers, drafted what was called The Aldrich Plan, which provided for a central "bank" that would hold funds individual banks could borrow in the case of a bank run, print currency, and act as the fiscal agent of the US government. However, the plan gave little power to the government and seemed to give almost absolute control of the country's currency to Wall Street financiers. ...

A Tale of Two Cities is a novel by Charles Dickens, set in London and Paris before and during the French Revolution. With well over 200 million copies sold, it ranks among the most famous works in the history of fictional literature. The novel depicts the plight of the French peasantry demoralized by the French aristocracy in the years leading up to the revolution, the corresponding brutality demonstrated by the revolutionaries toward the former aristocrats in the early years of the revolution, and many unflattering social parallels with life in London during the same time period. It follows ...

What really killed Sir Charles Baskerville? Is his nephew, Sir Henry, in danger from the legendary family curse, a gigantic black hound? Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson are on the case in this classic mystery, set on lonely Dartmoor in Devonshire. Neolithic ruins, a perilous quagmire, eerie sounds in the night, and (of course) fog all add to the fun, with an escaped convict thrown in for good measure. (Summary by Laurie Anne Walden)

The story is told almost entirely from the point of view of the first person narrator, David Copperfield himself, and was the first Dickens novel to be written as such a narration. The story deals with the life of David Copperfield from childhood to maturity. David's father had died six months before he was born, and seven years later, his mother remarries but David and his step-father don’t get on and he is sent to boarding school. As David settles into life we are taken along with him and meet a dazzling array of characters, some of whom we will never forget and some of whom we won't want ...

Dr. Watson sits down again to ruminate over his notes of all the mysteries he has joined Sherlock Holmes in investigating. In the “Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes”, he has gathered twelve more of the most interesting puzzles for the public’s appreciation. He concludes with the bittersweet note that he believes the last story will be his final collaboration with the famous sleuth. -

If it is a truth universally acknowledged that a good-looking girl cannot fail of attracting a clever young man does it follow that the reverse is also true? If the man comes of a terrifyingly dysfunctional family and the girl in question likes to see spooks and horrors round every corner, yes. Morland by name, Lackland by nature, Catherine, not altogether addicted to the heroine role in general, finds this greatness thrust upon her in the (fortunately, principally financial) fantasies of her would-be inamorato's father, the General. When the General finds she is the artless, simple girl that ...

Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen's first published novel, focuses on the lives and loves of two sisters, Elinor and Marianne Dashwood. The sensible Elinor and the sensitive Marianne both fall for men whose affections are otherwise engaged. The novel includes a wonderful cast of colorful supporting characters, as well as Austen's trademark dry wit and ironic narration. (Summary by Elizabeth Klett)

"Please sir, I want some more," the famous line spoken by Oliver Twist at age nine, becomes the tipping point of a huge change in Oliver's life. He is soon captured into the service of Fagin and his gang of pick-pocketing boys. But, Mr. Brownlow saves him from arrest, and for the first time in his young life Oliver finds comfort and caring. Unfortunately, he is recaptured into the seedy and disgusting world he had escaped, and meets with Bill Sykes, a dangerous criminal. There are numerous delightful or wicked characters that carry the story along, such as the Artful Dodger-- a boy of the ...

Miss Frances, the youngest Ward sister, "married, in the common phrase, to disoblige her family, and by fixing on a lieutenant of marines, without education, fortune, or connexions, did it very thoroughly. She could hardly have made a more untoward choice." Some years later, pregnant with her ninth child, Mrs. Price appeals to her family, namely to her eldest sister and her husband, Sir Thomas Bertram, for help with her over-large family. Sir Thomas provides assistance in helping his nephews into lines of work suitable to their education, and takes his eldest niece, Fanny Price, then ten years...

Roughing It is semi-autobiographical travel literature written by American humorist Mark Twain. It was authored during 1870–71 and published in 1872 as a sequel to his first book Innocents Abroad. This book tells of Twain's adventures prior to his pleasure cruise related in Innocents Abroad.