Empire & Odyssey

Empire & Odyssey
Author: Rock Brynner
Publisher:
Total Pages: 418
Release: 2006
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:

Yul Brynner, the mysterious and exotic Hollywood star, was one of four generations in his family to bear that name. His Swiss-born grandfather, Jules, arrived in Shanghai almost by accident about 1865, but within twenty years had become a leading industrialist in the Far East. His business association with Tsar Nicholas II built Vladivostok and the Trans-Siberian Railway, then triggered the Russo-Japanese War, contributing to the fall of the Romanoffs. Jules' s son Boris regained control of the family's mines, but his experiences in China, Manchuria, and North Korea rivaled the ordeals of Dr. Zhivago. Yul's childhood took him to China and then to France, where, as a teenager, he performed in nightclubs with Russian Gypsies while becoming a trapeze acrobat in the circus. He moved to America before he spoke English and within five years was starring on Broadway. His son, with a colorful life of his own, has written the family's history.--From publisher description.

Ottoman Odyssey

Ottoman Odyssey
Author: Alev Scott
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 206
Release: 2019-05-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 1643131664

An exploration of the contemporary influence of the Ottoman Empire on the wider world, as the author uncovers the new Ottoman legacy across Europe and the Middle East. Alev Scott’s odyssey began when she looked beyond Turkey’s borders for contemporary traces of the Ottoman Empire. Their 800 years of rule ended a century ago—and yet, travelling through twelve countries from Kosovo to Greece to Palestine, she uncovers a legacy that’s vital and relevant; where medieval ethnic diversity meets twenty-first century nationalism—and displaced people seek new identities. It's a story of surprises. An acolyte of Erdogan in Christian-majority Serbia confirms the wide-reaching appeal of his authoritarian leadership. A Druze warlord explains the secretive religious faction in the heart of the Middle East. The palimpsest-like streets of Jerusalem's Old Town hint at the Ottoman co-existence of Muslims and Jews. And in Turkish Cyprus, Alev Scott rediscovers a childhood home. In every community, history is present as a dynamic force. Faced by questions of exile, diaspora and collective memory, Alev Scott searches for answers from the cafes of Beirut to the refugee camps of Lesbos. She uncovers in Erdogan's nouveau-Ottoman Turkey a version of the nostalgic utopias sold to disillusioned voters in Europe and America. And yet—as she relates with compassion, insight, and humor—diversity is the enduring, endangered heart of this fascinating region.

Mongolia

Mongolia
Author: Claire Sermier
Publisher:
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2002
Genre: Mongolia
ISBN:

The Lost Books of the Odyssey

The Lost Books of the Odyssey
Author: Zachary Mason
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Total Pages: 239
Release: 2010-04-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1429952490

A BRILLIANT AND BEGUILING REIMAGINING OF ONE OF OUR GREATEST MYTHS BY A GIFTED YOUNG WRITER Zachary Mason's brilliant and beguiling debut novel, The Lost Books of the Odyssey, reimagines Homer's classic story of the hero Odysseus and his long journey home after the fall of Troy. With brilliant prose, terrific imagination, and dazzling literary skill, Mason creates alternative episodes, fragments, and revisions of Homer's original that taken together open up this classic Greek myth to endless reverberating interpretations. The Lost Books of the Odyssey is punctuated with great wit, beauty, and playfulness; it is a daring literary page-turner that marks the emergence of an extraordinary new talent.

Colonial Odysseys

Colonial Odysseys
Author: David Adams
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2018-08-06
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1501720422

Works such as Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim, Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out, E. M. Forster's A Passage to India, and Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust explore the relationship between Britain and its colonies when the British Empire was at its height. David Adams observes that, because of their structure and specific literary allusions, they also demand to be read in relation to the epic tradition. The elegantly written and powerfully argued Colonial Odysseys focuses on narratives published in English between 1890 and 1940 in which protagonists journey from the familiar world of Europe to alien colonial worlds. The underlying concerns of these narratives, Adams discovers, are often less political or literary than metaphysical: in each of these fictions a major character dies as a result of the journey, inviting reflection on the negation of existence. Repeatedly, imaginative encounters with distant, uncanny colonies produce familiar, insular presentations of life as an odyssey, with death as the home port. Expanding postcolonial and Marxist theories by drawing on the philosophy of Hans Blumenberg, Adams finds in this preoccupation with mortality a symptom of the failure of secular culture to give meaning to death. This concern, in his view, shapes the ways modernist narratives reinforce or critique imperial culture—the authors project onto British imperial experience their anxieties about the individual's relation to the absolute.

Balthasar's Odyssey

Balthasar's Odyssey
Author: Amin Maalouf
Publisher: Random House
Total Pages: 402
Release: 2011-12-31
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1448128048

There are ninety-nine names for God in the Koran, is it possible that there is a secret one-hundredth name? In this tale of magic and mystery, of love and danger, Balthasar's ultimate quest is to find the secret that could save the world. Before the dawn of the apocalyptic 'Year of the Beast' in 1666, Balthasar Embriaco, a Genoese Levantine merchant, sets out on an adventure that will take him across the breadth of the civilised world, from Constantinople, through the Mediterranean, to London shortly before the Great Fire. Balthasar's urgent quest is to track down a copy of one of the rarest and most coveted books ever printed, a volume called 'The Hundredth Name', its contents are thought to be of vital importance to the future of the world. There are ninety-nine names for God in the Koran, and merely to know this most secret hundredth name will, Balthasar believes, ensure his salvation.

Mage's Odyssey 7

Mage's Odyssey 7
Author: Ethan Starborne
Publisher: MoreAudiobooks
Total Pages: 1446
Release: 2024-07-11
Genre: Fiction
ISBN:

Cricket Country

Cricket Country
Author: Prashant Kidambi
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 448
Release: 2019
Genre: History
ISBN: 0198843135

The extraordinary story of the first 'All India' national cricket tour of Great Britain and Ireland - and how the idea of India as a nation took shape on the cricket pitch.

Empire's Nature

Empire's Nature
Author: Amy R. W. Meyers
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 608
Release: 2012-12-01
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 080783856X

Completed in 1747, Mark Catesby's Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands was the first major illustrated publication on the flora and fauna of Britain's American colonies. Together with his Hortus Britanno-Americanus (1763), which detailed plant species that might be transplanted successfully to British soil, Catesby's Natural History exerted an important, though often overlooked, influence on the development of art, natural history, and scientific observation in the eighteenth century. Inspired by a major traveling exhibition of Catesby's watercolor drawings from the Royal Library, Windsor Castle, this collection of interdisciplinary essays considers Catesby's endeavors as a naturalist-artist, scientific explorer, experimental horticulturist, ornamental gardener, and early environmental thinker in terms of the interests held by the various, overlapping communities in which he functioned--particularly as those interests related to the British colonial enterprise. The contributors are David R. Brigham, Joyce E. Chaplin, Mark Laird, Amy R. W. Meyers, Therese O'Malley, and Margaret Beck Pritchard.