Download or read book The Folly of the World written by Jesse Bullington and published by Hachette+ORM. This book was released on 2012-12-18 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On a stormy night in 1421, the North Sea delivers a devastating blow to Holland: the Saint Elizabeth Flood, a deluge of biblical proportions that drowns hundreds of towns, thousands of people, and forever alters the geography of the Low Countries. Where the factions of the noble Hooks and the merchant Cods waged a literal class war but weeks before, there is now only a nigh-endless expanse of grey water, a desolate inland sea with moldering church spires jutting up like sunken tombstones. For a land already beleaguered by generations of civil war, a worse disaster could scarce be imagined. Yet even disaster can be profitable, for the right sort of individual, and into this flooded realm sail three conspirators: a deranged thug at the edge of madness, a ruthless conman on the cusp of fortune, and a half-feral girl balanced between them. With The Folly of the World, Jesse Bullington has woven an extraordinary new tale of the depraved and the desperate.
Download or read book Banvard s Folly written by Paul Collins and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2015-03-10 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Hearteningly strange . . . Collins exhumes little-known figures [and] recounts their perversely inspiring battles against the more logical ways of the world.” —The Onion Here are thirteen unforgettable portraits of forgotten people: men and women who might have claimed their share of renown but who, whether from ill timing, skullduggery, monomania, the tinge of madness, or plain bad luck—or perhaps some combination of them all—leapt straight from life into thankless obscurity. Collins brings them back to glorious life. John Banvard was an artist whose colossal panoramic canvasses (one behemoth depiction of the entire eastern shore of the Mississippi River was simply known as “The Three Mile Painting”) made him the richest and most famous artist of his day . . . before he decided to go head to head with P. T. Barnum. René Blondot was a distinguished French physicist whose celebrated discovery of a new form of radiation, called the N-Ray, went terribly awry. At the tender age of seventeen, William Henry Ireland signed “William Shakespeare” to a book and launched a short but meteoric career as a forger of undiscovered works by the Bard—until he pushed his luck too far. Collins’ love for what he calls the “forgotten ephemera of genius” give his portraits of these figures and the other ten men and women in Banvard’s Folly sympathetic depth and poignant relevance. Their effect is not to make us sneer or revel in schadenfreude; here are no cautionary tales. Rather, here are brief introductions—acts of excavation and reclamation—to people whom history may have forgotten, but whom now we cannot.
Download or read book A Mad Wicked Folly written by Sharon Biggs Waller and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014-01-23 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Edwardian London, a girl dreams of being an artist, despite her family's disapproval. Welcome to the world of the fabulously wealthy in London, 1909, where dresses and houses are overwhelmingly opulent, social class means everything, and women are taught to be nothing more than wives and mothers. Into this world comes seventeen-year-old Victoria Darling, who wants only to be an artist—a nearly impossible dream for a girl. After Vicky poses nude for her illicit art class, she is expelled from her French finishing school. Shamed and scandalized, her parents try to marry her off to the wealthy Edmund Carrick-Humphrey. But Vicky has other things on her mind: her clandestine application to the Royal College of Art; her participation in the suffragette movement; and her growing attraction to a working-class boy who may be her muse—or may be the love of her life. As the world of debutante balls, corsets, and high society obligations closes in around her, Vicky must figure out: just how much is she willing to sacrifice to pursue her dreams?
Download or read book Stalin s Folly written by Konstantin Pleshakov and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2006 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stalin's cunning and ruthlessness brought him to supreme power in the Soviet Union. Yet in the summer of 1941 he appeared to lose his touch. With unparalleled access to the Soviet archives, this text reveals why the dictator behaved as he did.
Download or read book Hedy s Folly written by Richard Rhodes and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-08-07 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Rhodes delivers a remarkable story of science history: how a ravishing film star and an avant-garde composer invented spread-spectrum radio, the technology that made wireless phones, GPS systems, and many other devices possible. Beginning at a Hollywood dinner table, Hedy's Folly tells a wild story of innovation that culminates in U.S. patent number 2,292,387 for a "secret communication system." Along the way Rhodes weaves together Hollywood’s golden era, the history of Vienna, 1920s Paris, weapons design, music, a tutorial on patent law and a brief treatise on transmission technology. Narrated with the rigor and charisma we've come to expect of Rhodes, it is a remarkable narrative adventure about spread-spectrum radio's genesis and unlikely amateur inventors collaborating to change the world.
Download or read book The Folly and the Glory written by Tim Weiner and published by Henry Holt and Company. This book was released on 2020-09-22 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Tim Weiner, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, an urgent and gripping account of the 75-year battle between the US and Russia that led to the election and impeachment of an American president With vivid storytelling and riveting insider accounts, Weiner traces the roots of political warfare—the conflict America and Russia have waged with espionage, sabotage, diplomacy and disinformation—from 1945 until 2020. America won the cold war, but Russia is winning today. Vladimir Putin helped to put his chosen candidate in the White House with a covert campaign that continues to this moment. Putin’s Russia has revived Soviet-era intelligence operations gaining ever more potent information from—and influence over—the American people and government. Yet the US has put little power into its defense. This has put American democracy in peril. Weiner takes us behind closed doors, illuminating Russian and American intelligence operations and their consequences. To get to the heart of what is at stake and find potential solutions, he examines long-running 20th-century CIA operations, the global political machinations of the Soviet KGB, the erosion of American political warfare after the cold war, and how 21st-century Russia has kept the cold war alive. The Folly and the Glory is an urgent call to our leaders and citizens to understand the nature of political warfare—and to change course before it’s too late.
Download or read book Ultimate Folly written by Henry Macrory and published by Biteback Publishing. This book was released on 2018-06-12 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A gripping story of greed, treachery and ruthless ambition. Few people have led such an extraordinary life as Whitaker Wright. Few have died in such sensational circumstances. Beginning his career as an impoverished preacher, Wright crossed the Atlantic to prospect for gold, surviving a Native American massacre before he made his fortune. Then the bubble burst. Leaving behind a string of angry investors, he fled to England to start again. Soon he was one of the world's richest men. At his 10,000-acre estate in Surrey, he employed an entourage of seventy-seven staff, moved a hill that blocked his view and built an underwater glass smoking room. On his vast steam yacht, he entertained the Prince of Wales, the Kaiser and half of Britain's aristocracy. His downfall was as dramatic as his ascent. On the last trading day of the nineteenth century, his financial empire – which he had propped up by cooking the books – went belly up. This time, the trail of furious investors stretched all the way to the Prime Minister. With the police in hot pursuit, Wright fled to New York, but his escape was short-lived. At the end of what the press dubbed 'the most dramatic trial of modern times' he was sentenced to seven years in jail. Minutes later, he sprang a last dreadful surprise... Other great swindlers have followed in Wright's footsteps, but none have surpassed him in daring and shamelessness. Drawing on family papers and archives from around the world, this compelling account of Wright's life reads like a thriller and offers an insight into the mind of the ultimate gambler and conman.
Download or read book The Folly written by Ivan Vladislavic and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2015-09-22 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A vacant patch of South African veld next to the comfortable, complacent Malgas household has been taken over by a mysterious, eccentric figure with "a plan." Fashioning his tools out of recycled garbage, the stranger enlists Malgas's help in clearing the land and planning his mansion. Slowly but inevitably, the stranger's charm and the novel's richly inventive language draws Malgas into "the plan" and he sees, feels and moves into the new building. Then, just as remorselessly, all that seemed solid begins to melt back into air.
Download or read book Folly written by Laurie R. King and published by Bantam. This book was released on 2002-05-28 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An acclaimed master of suspense creates a heroine you will never forget in this superbly chilling novel of a woman who begins a desperate undertaking that may transform her life--or end it. WHAT HAPPENS IF YOUR WORST FEARS AREN’T ALL IN YOUR MIND? Rae Newborn is a woman on the edge: on the edge of sanity, on the edge of tragedy, and now on the edge of the world. She has moved to an island at the far reaches of the continent to restore the house of an equally haunted figure, her mysterious great-uncle; but as her life begins to rebuild itself along with the house, his story starts to wrap around hers. Powerful forces are stirring, but Rae cannot see where her reality leaves off and his fate begins. Fifty-two years old, Rae must battle the feelings that have long tormented her--panic, melancholy, and a skin-crawling sense of watchers behind the trees. Before she came here, she believed that most of the things she feared existed only in her mind. And who can say, as disturbing incidents multiply, if any of the watchers on Folly Island might be real? Is Rae paranoid, as her family and the police believe, or is the threat real? Is the island alive with promise--or with dangers? With Folly, award-winning author LAURIE R. KING once again powerfully redefines psychological suspense on a sophisticated and harrowing new level, and proves why legions of readers and reviewers have named her a master of the genre.
Download or read book The March of Folly written by Barbara W. Tuchman and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 1985-02-12 with total page 530 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Barbara W. Tuchman, author of the World War I masterpiece The Guns of August, grapples with her boldest subject: the pervasive presence, through the ages, of failure, mismanagement, and delusion in government. Drawing on a comprehensive array of examples, from Montezuma’s senseless surrender of his empire in 1520 to Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, Barbara W. Tuchman defines folly as the pursuit by government of policies contrary to their own interests, despite the availability of feasible alternatives. In brilliant detail, Tuchman illuminates four decisive turning points in history that illustrate the very heights of folly: the Trojan War, the breakup of the Holy See provoked by the Renaissance popes, the loss of the American colonies by Britain’s George III, and the United States’ own persistent mistakes in Vietnam. Throughout The March of Folly, Tuchman’s incomparable talent for animating the people, places, and events of history is on spectacular display. Praise for The March of Folly “A glittering narrative . . . a moral [book] on the crimes and follies of governments and the misfortunes the governed suffer in consequence.”—The New York Times Book Review “An admirable survey . . . I haven’t read a more relevant book in years.”—John Kenneth Galbraith, The Boston Sunday Globe “A superb chronicle . . . a masterly examination.”—Chicago Sun-Times
Download or read book The Folly of Loving Life written by Monica Drake and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fiction. Short Stories. Women's Studies. Following her acclaimed novels Clown Girl and The Stud Book, Monica Drake presents her long-awaited first collection of stories. THE FOLLY OF LOVING LIFE features linked stories examining an array of characters at their most vulnerable and human, often escaping to somewhere or trying to find stability in their own place. These stories display the best of what we love about Monica's writing the sly laugh-out-loud humor, the sharp observations, the flawed but strong characters, and the shadowy Van Sant-ish Portland settings. "What can I say about Monica Drake's stories? They are brilliant, sure. They are hilarious, yes. Each one is a marvel. But more importantly-they are raw and awake and full of life. At the center of each one is the bright beating heart of what literature can be: Relevant, unusual, entertaining, fascinating, unique. These are not characters-and Drake's is not a voice-that you can ignore or forget."—Pauls Toutonghi"
Download or read book The Folly of Fools written by Robert Trivers and published by Basic Books (AZ). This book was released on 2011-10-25 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the author's theorized evolutionary basis for self-deception, which he says is tied to group conflict, courtship, neurophysiology, and immunology, but can be negated by awareness of it and its results.
Download or read book The Praise of Folly written by Desiderius Erasmus and published by . This book was released on 1913 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book On Folly Beach written by Karen White and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2016-06-28 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Emmy Hamilton's mother encourages her to buy the local book store, Folly's Finds, she hopes it will distract her daughter from the loss of her husband. But the seller has one condition: Emmy must allow Lulu, the late owner's difficult elderly sister, to continue working there. For the most part Emmy ignores Lulu, but a bundle of love letters she finds in a box help her better understand Lulu. As details of a possible murder and a mysterious disappearance during WWII are revealed, the two women discover that fate has brought them together.
Download or read book The World Beneath Their Feet written by Scott Ellsworth and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2020-02-18 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2020 National Outdoor Book Award for Best History/Biography A saga of survival, technological innovation, and breathtaking human physical achievement -- all set against the backdrop of a world headed toward war -- that became one of the most compelling international dramas of the 20th century. As tension steadily rose between European powers in the 1930s, a different kind of battle was already raging across the Himalayas. Teams of mountaineers from Great Britain, Nazi Germany, and the United States were all competing to be the first to climb the world's highest peaks, including Mount Everest and K2. Unlike climbers today, they had few photographs or maps, no properly working oxygen systems, and they wore leather boots and cotton parkas. Amazingly, and against all odds, they soon went farther and higher than anyone could have imagined. And as they did, their story caught the world's attention. The climbers were mobbed at train stations, and were featured in movies and plays. James Hilton created the mythical land of Shangri-La in Lost Horizon, while an English eccentric named Maurice Wilson set out for Tibet in order to climb Mount Everest alone. And in the darkened corridors of the Third Reich, officials soon discovered the propaganda value of planting a Nazi flag on top of the world's highest mountains Set in London, New York, Germany, and in India, China, and Tibet, The World Beneath Their Feet is a story not only of climbing and mountain climbers, but also of passion and ambition, courage and folly, tradition and innovation, tragedy and triumph. Scott Ellsworth tells a rollicking, real-life adventure story that moves seamlessly from the streets of Manhattan to the footlights of the West End, deadly avalanches on Nanga Parbat, rioting in the Kashmir, and the wild mountain dreams of a New Zealand beekeeper named Edmund Hillary and a young Sherpa runaway called Tenzing Norgay. Climbing the Himalayas was the Greatest Generation's moonshot-one that was clouded by the onset of war and then, incredibly, fully accomplished. A gritty, fascinating history that promises to enrapture fans of Hampton Sides, Erik Larson, Jon Krakauer, and Laura Hillenbrand, The World Beneath Their Feet brings this forgotten story back to life.
Download or read book Fortune s Folly written by Deva Fagan and published by Henry Holt and Company (BYR). This book was released on 2009-04-14 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ever since her mother died and her father lost his shoemaking skills, Fortunata has survived by telling fake fortunes. But when she's tricked into telling a grand fortune for a prince, she is faced with the impossible task of fulfilling her wild prophecy—or her father will be put to death. Now Fortunata has to help Prince Leonato secure a magic sword, vanquish a wicked witch, discover a long-lost golden shoe, and rescue the princess who fits it. If only she hadn't fallen in love with the prince herself !
Download or read book Blood Tears and Folly written by Len Deighton and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2021-07-15 with total page 554 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Every page of Deighton's work glows with the excitement of discovery ... wonderful' Geoff Dyer, Guardian This unflinching history of the darkest days of the Second World War covers the entire world stage, from the Battle of the Atlantic to Pearl Harbor. Rooted in the personal accounts of the soldiers themselves, Blood, Tears and Folly is a sweeping, moving account of the political machinations, the strategy and tactics, the weapons and the men on both sides who created a world of devastation. 'If he had never written a word of fiction Deighton would still be remembered for his scholarly and merciless history of the Second World War, Blood, Tears and Folly' Peter Millar, The Times
