The Prize To The Hardy

Excerpt from The Prize to the Hardy When he had leisure for any occupation so unremunerative, old Nicholas Windsor's mind was wont to lose itself in wonder at the curious contrasts of his own career - contrasts that generally took on the concrete forms of Vera and her mother. Familiar as were these musings on his past and his present, they struck him with all the freshness of a new sensation as he let himself out of the threatening twilight of a certain October day into the subdued luxury of the library of his home. The gray light of late afternoon, struggling in through the windows, was lost in the glow of triumphantly blazing logs. There was serenity and rest in the atmosphere of home. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

This is a reproduction of the original artefact. Generally these books are created from careful scans of the original. This allows us to preserve the book accurately and present it in the way the author intended. Since the original versions are generally quite old, there may occasionally be certain imperfections within these reproductions. We're happy to make these classics available again for future generations to enjoy!

Focusing on figures such as Thomas Hardy, Alan Turing, Virginia Woolf, and the World War One poets, The Hardy Tree examines power, oppression and individual rights in ways that reverberate through our lives today. Uniting these themes is the issue of communication—the various methods and codes we use to reach one another. The book is arranged in four sections. The first visits Vladimir Nabokov as a child with alphabet blocks, Alan Turing at eleven writing home from boarding school with a “pen of his own making,” Virginia Woolf as a teenager practicing her penmanship, and Wilfred Owen trying to draw a musical note from a blade of grass on a battlefield on the Somme. The second section focuses more deeply on various types of encoding; the third erases the Magna Carta; the fourth offers a provisional peace. These sections lean against one another the way that history leans upon itself. Backed by Bierds’ intensive research and woven with scientific evidence, she pushes us to consider our futures in direct conversation with the past.

Bayport Elementary School is holding a science fair, and first prize is a gift certificate to a cool store called The Nature Place. The Hardys have projects only detectives could dream up—a fingerprint collection and a special spy-scope. Chet’s working on a hot dog cooker powered by the sun, and Mike Mendez is putting a camera in one of his robots to make it a burglar detector. But when two of the best projects get smashed, bully Zack Jackson blames Billy McGee, the new kid in the fourth grade. Billy can be clumsy, but is he really a walking natural disaster? The robot?s eye never lies, but will that be enough to save the science fair?

"A masterful portrait" (The Philadelphia Inquirer) from a Whitbread Award-winning biographer, and author of A Life of My Own. The novels of Thomas Hardy have a permanent place on every booklover's shelf, yet little is known about the interior life of the man who wrote them. A believer and an unbeliever, a socialist and a snob, an unhappy husband and a desolate widower, Hardy challenged the sexual and religious conventions of his time in his novels and then abandoned fiction to reestablish himself as a great twentieth-century lyric poet. In this acclaimed new biography, Claire Tomalin, one of today's preeminent literary biographers, investigates this beloved writer and reveals a figure as rich and complex as his tremendous legacy.