Download or read book The Transit of Venus written by Shirley Hazzard and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-03-09 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The award-winning, New York Times bestselling literary masterpiece of Shirley Hazzard—the story of two beautiful orphan sisters whose fates are as moving and wonderful, and yet as predestined, as the transits of the planets themselves A Penguin Classic Considered "one of the great English-language novels of the twentieth century" (The Paris Review), The Transit of Venus follows Caroline and Grace Bell as they leave Australia to begin a new life in post-war England. From Sydney to London, New York, and Stockholm, and from the 1950s to the 1980s, the two sisters experience seduction and abandonment, marriage and widowhood, love and betrayal. With exquisite, breathtaking prose, Australian novelist Shirley Hazzard tells the story of the displacements and absurdities of modern life. The result is at once an intricately plotted Greek tragedy, a sweeping family saga, and a desperate love story.
Download or read book Observations of the Transit of Venus 9 December 1874 written by Sydney Observatory and published by . This book was released on 1892 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Chasing Venus written by Andrea Wulf and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-05-01 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A “thrilling adventure story" (San Francisco Chronicle) that brings to life the astronomers who in the 1700s embarked upon a quest to calculate the size of the solar system, and paints a vivid portrait of the collaborations, rivalries, and volatile international politics that hindered them at every turn. • From the author of Magnificent Rebels and New York Times bestseller The Invention of Nature. On June 6, 1761, the world paused to observe a momentous occasion: the first transit of Venus between the Earth and the Sun in more than a century. Through that observation, astronomers could calculate the size of the solar system—but only if they could compile data from many different points of the globe, all recorded during the short period of the transit. Overcoming incredible odds and political strife, astronomers from Britain, France, Russia, Germany, Sweden, and the American colonies set up observatories in the remotest corners of the world, only to be thwarted by unpredictable weather and warring armies. Fortunately, transits of Venus occur in pairs; eight years later, they would have another opportunity to succeed. Thanks to these scientists, neither our conception of the universe nor the nature of scientific research would ever be the same.
Download or read book Venus Seen on the Sun written by Wilbur Applebaum and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2012-03-02 with total page 106 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The treatise by Jeremiah Horrocks (1618-1641) on the transit of Venus of 1639 is an account of an important astronomical observation, as well as an analysis and commentary on the changing state and practice of astronomy during the significant period between the achievements of Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) and Isaac Newton (1642-1727). This work has, in addition, the power to delight and charm us as the record of a young astronomer’s encounter with a rare astronomical event and the manner in which he discovered, observed, and drew conclusions from it. Its appeal is heightened by the knowledge that a self-trained young man stole a march on all the astronomers of his day.
Download or read book The Transit of Venus Enterprise in Victorian Britain written by Jessica Ratcliff and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2016-09-12 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the nineteenth century, the British Government spent money measuring the distance between the earth and the sun using observations of the transit of Venus. This book presents a narrative of the two Victorian transit programmes. It draws out their cultural significance and explores the nature of "big science" in late-Victorian Britain.
Download or read book Transit of Venus written by Nick Lomb and published by The Experiment. This book was released on 2012-04-03 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traces the impact on astronomy and science of the six times that the planet Venus has passed in front of the Sun since the discovery of the telescope in the seventeenth century, and discusses the 2012 transit, the last in this century.
Download or read book The Transits of Venus written by Harry Woolf and published by Ayer Company Pub. This book was released on 1981-01-01 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Transits of Venus written by William Sheehan and published by Prometheus Books. This book was released on 2010-12 with total page 407 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this unique and fascinating history of science, acclaimed popular science writer Sheehan and award-winning geographer Westfall take readers back through the centuries to chronicle the intrepid explorations of scientists and adventurers who studied the transits of Venus in the quest for scientific understanding. Maps & tables.
Download or read book The Future of Coptic Studies written by R MCL Wilson and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2023-07-10 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book We Need Silence to Find Out What We Think written by Shirley Hazzard and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2016-01-05 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spanning the 1960s to the 2000s, these nonfiction writings showcase Shirley Hazzard's extensive thinking on global politics, international relations, the history and fraught present of Western literary culture, and postwar life in Europe and Asia. They add essential clarity to the themes that dominate her award-winning fiction and expand the intellectual registers in which her writings work. Hazzard writes about her employment at the United Nations and the institution's manifold failings. She shares her personal experience with the aftermath of the Hiroshima atomic bombing and the nature of life in late-1940s Hong Kong. She speaks to the decline of the hero as a public figure in Western literature and affirms the ongoing power of fiction to console, inspire, and direct human life, despite—or maybe because of—the world's disheartening realities. Cementing Hazzard's place as one of the twentieth century's sharpest and most versatile thinkers, this collection also encapsulates for readers the critical events defining postwar letters, thought, and politics.
Download or read book A Stricken Field written by Martha Gellhorn and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2011-08-22 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Martha Gellhorn was one of the first—and most widely read—female war correspondents of the twentieth century. She is best known for her fearless reporting in Europe before and during WWII and for her brief marriage to Ernest Hemingway, but she was also an acclaimed novelist. In 1938, before the Munich pact, Gellhorn visited Prague and witnessed its transformation from a proud democracy preparing to battle Hitler to a country occupied by the German army. Born out of this experience, A Stricken Field follows a journalist who returns to Prague after its annexation and finds her efforts to obtain help for the refugees and to convey the shocking state of the country both frustrating and futile. A convincing account of a people under the brutal oppression of the Gestapo, A Stricken Field is Gellhorn’s most powerful work of fiction. “[A] brave, final novel. Its writing is quick with movement and with sympathy; its people alive with death, if one can put it that way. It leaves one with aching heart and questing mind.”—New York Herald Tribune “The translation of [Gellhorn’s] personal testimony into the form of a novel has . . . force and point.”—Times Literary Supplement
Download or read book The 1769 transit of Venus written by Doyce Blackman Nunis and published by . This book was released on 1982 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Dud Avocado written by Elaine Dundy and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2010-11-17 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A smart, funny classic about a young and beautiful American woman who moves to Paris determined to live life to the fullest. The Dud Avocado follows the romantic and comedic adventures of a young American who heads overseas to conquer Paris in the late 1950s. Edith Wharton and Henry James wrote about the American girl abroad, but it was Elaine Dundy’s Sally Jay Gorce who told us what she was really thinking. Charming, sexy, and hilarious, The Dud Avocado gained instant cult status when it was first published and it remains a timeless portrait of a woman hell-bent on living. “I had to tell someone how much I enjoyed The Dud Avocado. It made me laugh, scream, and guffaw (which, incidentally, is a great name for a law firm).” –Groucho Marx "[The Dud Avocado] is one of the best novels about growing up fast..." -The Guardian
Download or read book Venus in Transit written by Eli Maor and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2004-02 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 2004, Venus crossed the sun's face for the first time since 1882. Some did not bother to step outside. Others planned for years, reserving tickets to see the transit in its entirety. But even this group of astronomers and experience seekers were attracted not by scientific purpose but by the event's beauty, rarity, and perhaps--after this book--history. For previous sky-watchers, though, transits afforded the only chance to determine the all-important astronomical unit: the mean distance between earth and sun. Eli Maor tells the intriguing tale of the five Venus transits previously observed and the fantastic efforts made to record them. This is a story of heroes and cowards, of reputations earned and squandered, all told against a backdrop of phenomenal geopolitical and scientific change. With a novelist's talent for the details that keep readers reading late, Maor tells the stories of how Kepler's misguided theology led him to the laws of planetary motion; of obscure Jeremiah Horrocks, who predicted the 1639 transit only to die, at age 22, a day before he was to discuss the event with the only other human known to have seen it; of the unfortunate Le Gentil, whose decade of labor was rewarded with obscuring clouds, shipwreck, and the plundering of his estate by relatives who prematurely declared him dead; of David Rittenhouse, Father of American Astronomy, who was overcome by the 1769 transit's onset and failed to record its beginning; and of Maximilian Hell, whose good name long suffered from the perusal of his transit notes by a color-blind critic. Moving beyond individual fates, Maor chronicles how governments' participation in the first international scientific effort--the observation of the 1761 transit from seventy stations, yielding a surprisingly accurate calculation of the astronomical unit using Edmund Halley's posthumous directions--intersected with the Seven Years' War, British South Seas expansion, and growing American scientific prominence. Throughout, Maor guides readers to the upcoming Venus transits in 2004 and 2012, opportunities to witness a phenomenon seen by no living person and not to be repeated until 2117.
Download or read book Transit When Planets Cross the Sun written by Michael Maunder and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although transits of planets across the Sun are rare (only Mercury and Venus orbit the Sun closer than us, and so can transit the Suns disc) amateur astronomers can observe, record and image other kinds of transits that are much more frequent. This book first tells the fascinating story of the early scientific expeditions to observe transits. It then explains how to observe transits of all sorts - even transits of aircraft as they fly between the observer and the Sun.
Download or read book The Great Fire written by Shirley Hazzard and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2007-04-01 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Great Fire is the winner of the 2003 National Book Award for Fiction. A great writer's sweeping story of men and women struggling to reclaim their lives in the aftermath of world conflict The Great Fire is Shirley Hazzard's first novel since The Transit of Venus, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1981. The conflagration of her title is the Second World War. In war-torn Asia and stricken Europe, men and women, still young but veterans of harsh experience, must reinvent their lives and expectations, and learn, from their past, to dream again. Some will fulfill their destinies, others will falter. At the center of the story, Aldred Leith, a brave and brilliant soldier, finds that survival and worldly achievement are not enough. Helen Driscoll, a young girl living in occupied Japan and tending her dying brother, falls in love, and in the process discovers herself. In the looming shadow of world enmities resumed, and of Asia's coming centrality in world affairs, a man and a woman seek to recover self-reliance, balance, and tenderness, struggling to reclaim their humanity.
Download or read book In Dependence written by Sarah Ladipo Manyika and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early sixties, Tayo Ajayi sails to England from Nigeria to take up a scholarship at Oxford University. There he discovers a whole generation high on visions of a new and better world. He meets Vanessa Richardson, the beautiful daughter of a former colonial officer. Their story, which spans four decades, is a bittersweet tale of a brave but doomed affair and the universal desire to fall truly, madly and deeply in love. A lyrical and moving story of unfulfilled love fraught with the weight of history, race and geography and intertwined with questions of belonging, aging, faith and family secrets. In Dependence explores the complexities of contemporary Africa, its Diaspora and its interdependence with the rest of the world.
