A Sense Of Wonderful Century

This book gathers together many of the illuminating essays on science fiction and fantasy film penned by a major critic in the SF field. The pieces are roughly organized in the chronological order of when the movies and television programs being discussed first appeared, with essays providing more general overviews clustered near the beginning and end of the volume, to provide the overall aura of a historical survey. Although this book does not pretend to provide a comprehensive history of science fiction and fantasy films, it does intermingle analyses of films and TV programs with some discussions of related plays, novels, stories, and comic books, particularly in the essays on This Island Earth and 2001: A Space Odyssey and its sequels. Inciteful, entertaining, and full of intelligent and witty observations about science fiction and its sometimes curious relationship with the visual media, these essays will both delight and entertain critics, fans, and viewers alike.

A survey of the last 100 years of science fiction, with representative stories and illuminating essays by the top writers, poets, and scholars, from Edgar Rice Burroughs and Samuel Butler to Robert A. Heinlein and and Jack Vance, from E.E. "Doc" Smith and Clifford D. Simak to Ted Chiang and Charles Stross-- and everyone in between. More than one million words of classic fiction and essays!

Ken Follett’s magnificent historical epic begins as five interrelated families move through the momentous dramas of the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the struggle for women’s suffrage. A thirteen-year-old Welsh boy enters a man’s world in the mining pits. . . . An American law student rejected in love finds a surprising new career in Woodrow Wilson’s White House. . . . A housekeeper for the aristocratic Fitzherberts takes a fateful step above her station, while Lady Maud Fitzherbert herself crosses deep into forbidden territory when she falls in love with a German spy. . . . And two orphaned Russian brothers embark on radically different paths when their plan to emigrate to America falls afoul of war, conscription, and revolution. From the dirt and danger of a coal mine to the glittering chandeliers of a palace, from the corridors of power to the bedrooms of the mighty, Fall of Giants takes us into the inextricably entangled fates of five families—and into a century that we thought we knew, but that now will never seem the same again. . . .

As big and exciting as the next century, this is a novel of real life at our giddy, feverish, topsy-turvy edge of the millennium. Turn of the Century is a good old-fashioned novel about the day after tomorrow--an uproarious, exquisitely observed panorama of our world as the twentieth century morphs into the twenty-first, transforming family, marriage, and friendship and propelled by the supercharged global businesses and new technologies that make everyone's lives shake and spin a little faster. As the year 2000 progresses, George Mactier and Lizzie Zimbalist, ten years married, are caught up in the whirl of their centrifugally accelerating lives. George is a TV producer for the upstart network MBC, launching a truly and weirdly groundbreaking new show that blurs the line between fact and fiction. Lizzie is a software entrepreneur dealing with the breakneck pleasures and pains of running her own company in an industry where the rules are rewritten daily. Rocketing between Los An-geles and Seattle, with occasional stopovers at home in Manhattan for tag-team parenting of their three children, George and Lizzie are the kind of businesspeople who, growing up in the sixties and seventies, never dreamed they would end up in business. They're too busy to spend the money that's rolling in, and too smart not to feel ambivalent about their crazed, high-gloss existences, but nothing seems to slow the roller-coaster momentum of their inter-secting lives and careers. However, after Lizzie, recovering from a Microsoft deal gone awry, becomes a confidante and adviser to George's boss, billionaire media mogul Harold Mose, the couple discovers that no amount of sophisticated spin can obscure basic instincts: envy, greed, suspicion, sexual temptation--and, maybe, love. When they and their children are finally drawn into a thrilling, high-tech corporate hoax that sends Wall Street reeling (and makes one person very, very rich), George and Lizzie can only marvel at life's oversized surprises and hold on for dear life. Like Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities, Kurt Andersen's Turn of the Century lays bare the follies of our age with laser-beam precision, creating memorable characters and dissecting the ways we think, speak, and navigate this new era of extreme capitalism and mind-boggling technology. Entertaining, imaginative, knowing, and wise, Turn of the Century is a richly plotted comedy of manners about the way we live now.

In a series of essays that explore the notion of what brings significance to our existences, clarifying why we have this longing beyond the present moment and an insatiable dissatisfaction with where we are, scholar Frank Martela tackles the subject of finding meaning in life. With beautiful decorative elements and an engaging design, the book approaches its subject in a readily digestible form. It grapples with some of life’s most pressing questions, like "Is happiness a worthy goal?" and "What is the foundation for meaning in a secular society?" and "Is life an existential void?" yet Martela answers these questions and more in a relaxed, conversational tone and with a wry sense of humor, placing some of life’s greatest philosophical concerns and quandaries into a modern-day context. Martela quickly and concisely gets to the heart of the matter: your place in the world and how to find meaning in life as countless thinkers and philosophers have done before, yet the emphasis here is on what we do with the life we have and how we can make it more meaningful. Part prescriptive and part armchair philosophy book, A Wonderful Life is accessible to everyone, from the well-read scholar to the apprentice as well as anyone curious about how to extract the greatest meaning and sense of purpose from their existence.

The Age of Wonder is a colorful and utterly absorbing history of the men and women whose discoveries and inventions at the end of the eighteenth century gave birth to the Romantic Age of Science. When young Joseph Banks stepped onto a Tahitian beach in 1769, he hoped to discover Paradise. Inspired by the scientific ferment sweeping through Britain, the botanist had sailed with Captain Cook in search of new worlds. Other voyages of discovery—astronomical, chemical, poetical, philosophical—swiftly follow in Richard Holmes's thrilling evocation of the second scientific revolution. Through the lives of William Herschel and his sister Caroline, who forever changed the public conception of the solar system; of Humphry Davy, whose near-suicidal gas experiments revolutionized chemistry; and of the great Romantic writers, from Mary Shelley to Coleridge and Keats, who were inspired by the scientific breakthroughs of their day, Holmes brings to life the era in which we first realized both the awe-inspiring and the frightening possibilities of science—an era whose consequences are with us still. BONUS MATERIAL: This ebook edition includes an excerpt from Richard Holmes's Falling Upwards.

Beautifully evocative and full of heart, this stunning work of historical fiction tells the story of Manhattan’s fabled American Museum In 1842, Phineas T. Barnum is a young man, freshly arrived in New York and still unknown to the world. With uncanny confidence and impeccable timing, he transforms a dusty natural history museum into a great ark for public imagination. Barnum’s museum, with its human wonders and extraordinary live animal menagerie, rises to become not only the nation’s most popular attraction, but also a catalyst that ushers America out of a culture of glassed-in exhibits and into the modern age of entertainment. In this kaleidoscopic setting, the stories of two compelling characters are brought to life. Emile Guillaudeu is the museum’s grumpy taxidermist, who is horrified by the chaotic change Barnum brings to his beloved institution. Ana Swift is a professional giantess plagued by chronic pain and jaded by a world of gawkers. The differences between these two are many: one is isolated and spends his working hours making dead things look alive, while the other has people pushing against her, and reacting to her, every day. But they both move toward change, one against his will—propelled by a paradigm shift happening whether he likes it or not, and the other because she is struggling to survive. In many shapes and forms, metamorphosis is at the core of Among the Wonderful. Pursuing this theme, the book weaves a world where upper Manhattan is still untrammeled wilderness, the Five Points is at the height of its bloody glory, and within the walls of Barnum’s museum, ancient tribal feuds play out in the midst of an unlikely community of marvels. “An engaging novel from newcomer Stacy Carlson. The great strength of this book is Carlson's evocation of time and place.” —O, The Oprah Magazine

"This reference provides a review of the academic and popular literature on the relationship between communications and media studies, cinema, advertising, public relations, religion, food tourism, art, sports, technology, culture, marketing, and entertainment practices"--Provided by publisher.

Ken Follett's extraordinary historical epic, the Century Trilogy, reaches its sweeping, passionate conclusion. In Fall of Giants and Winter of the World, Ken Follett followed the fortunes of five international families—American, German, Russian, English, and Welsh—as they made their way through the twentieth century. Now they come to one of the most tumultuous eras of all: the 1960s through the 1980s, from civil rights, assassinations, mass political movements, and Vietnam to the Berlin Wall, the Cuban Missile Crisis, presidential impeachment, revolution—and rock and roll. East German teacher Rebecca Hoffmann discovers she’s been spied on by the Stasi for years and commits an impulsive act that will affect her family for the rest of their lives. . . . George Jakes, the child of a mixed-race couple, bypasses a corporate law career to join Robert F. Kennedy's Justice Department and finds himself in the middle of not only the seminal events of the civil rights battle but a much more personal battle of his own. . . . Cameron Dewar, the grandson of a senator, jumps at the chance to do some official and unofficial espionage for a cause he believes in, only to discover that the world is a much more dangerous place than he'd imagined. . . . Dimka Dvorkin, a young aide to Nikita Khrushchev, becomes an agent both for good and for ill as the United States and the Soviet Union race to the brink of nuclear war, while his twin sister, Tanya, carves out a role that will take her from Moscow to Cuba to Prague to Warsaw—and into history.