Showing results by narrator "Peter Silverleaf" in All Categories

The moments that it took Gavrilo Princip to step forward to the stalled car and shoot dead Franz Ferdinand and his wife were perhaps the most fateful of the modern era. An act of terrorism of staggering efficiency, it fulfilled its every aim: it would liberate Bosnia from Habsburg rule, and it created a powerful new Serbia, but it also brought down four great empires, killed millions of men and destroyed a civilization. What made a seemingly prosperous and complacent Europe so vulnerable to the impact of this assassination?

In 1909 the entire world of dance changed forever when Les Ballets Russes, under the brilliant impresario, Serge Diaghilev, departed St. Petersburg and opened in Paris. They also made annual visits to the West End in London. Tragically, during their 1913 tour, two of their dancers are found murdered. Sherlock Holmes is brought into to find the murderer and prevent any more killings. The story adheres fairly closely to the incredible story of the reappearance of classical ballet in Western Europe and the introduction of modern interpretive dance.

"Animal Farm" is Orwell's classic satire of the Russian Revolution - an account of the bold struggle, initiated by the animals, that transforms Mr. Jones's Manor Farm into Animal Farm - a wholly democratic society built on the credo that All Animals Are Created Equal. But are they?

The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes is the final set of twelve (out of a total of fifty-six) Sherlock Holmes short stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle first published in the Strand Magazine between October 1921 and April 1927. The first British edition and the first American edition of the collection were both published in June 1927. However, they had slightly different titles.

Teeka and Taug have a baby (balu, in the ape language), which Teeka names Gazan and will not allow Tarzan near. She changes her mind after Tarzan saves the baby from a leopard.

Bukawai attempts to claim credit for Tibo's return and extort payment from the boy's mother, but is rebuffed. He plots vengeance against the native family and Tarzan, but is thwarted by the ape man. In this story Tarzan's life in the wild is contrasted with scenes from the civilized existence of his cousin in England, living the life he might have had had his parents not been marooned in Africa. The cousin does not shine in the comparison.

Jealous of Taug and Teeka's relationship with their baby, Tarzan kidnaps Tibo, a little boy from the neighboring village to be his own "balu". He tries with indifferent success to teach the terrified and homesick child ape ways. Meanwhile, Momaya, Tibo's mother does everything she can think of to find and recover her son, even visiting the hermit witch-doctor Bukawai, a terrible, diseased exile who keeps two fearsome hyenas as pets. He names a price for recovering Tibo she cannot afford, and she leaves disappointed.

Bukawai, finding Tarzan unconscious after a storm, takes the ape man captive and stakes him out for his hyenas to devour. Escaping, Tarzan leaves the witch doctor in the same trap, in which Bukawai suffers the very fate he had intended for his enemy.

Tarzan is taken captive by the warriors of a village of cannibals which has established a village near the territory of the ape tribe. He is saved from them by Tantor, the elephant.

"Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar" is a novel by American writer Edgar Rice Burroughs, the fifth in his series of twenty-four books about the title character Tarzan. It first appeared in the November and December issues of All-Story Cavalier Weekly in 1916, and the first book publication was by McClurg in 1918.

"The Son of Tarzan" is a novel by American writer Edgar Rice Burroughs, the fourth in his series of twenty-four books about the title character Tarzan. It was written between January 21 and May 11, 1915, and first published in the magazine "All-Story Weekly" as a six-part serial from December 4, 1915 to January 8, 1916. It was first published in book form by A. C. McClurg & Co. in March 1917 and has been reprinted numerous times since by various publishers.

"BOOK THE FOURTH: ISABEL": I come to the most evasive and difficult part of my story, which is to tell how Isabel and I have made a common wreck of our joint lives. It is not the telling of one simple disastrous accident.

Tarzan's courtship of the female ape Teeka ends in failure when her preference turns to their mutual friend, the male ape Taug. Tarzan wrestles with his humanness versus his ape-ness. The allusion to Helen of Troy enriches the story, making Tarzan and Taug's fight over Teeka take on symbolic proportions. Stan Galloway writes: "when Burroughs chooses to name Helen as an objective correlative for Teeka, he expects both literal and emotional connections to occur." Tarzan's final claim of the story - "Tarzan is a man. He will go alone." - echoes the plight of Adam in the Garden of Eden.

A beautiful young woman, just weeks away from giving birth, arrives at Baker Street in the middle of the night. Her sister was attacked by a bat and died and now it is attacking her. Could it be a vampire sent by the local band of Gypsies? Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson are called upon to investigate. The step-father, the local Gypsies and the furious future mother-in-law are all suspects.

THE MAN WHO WAS TWISTED BUT HIP. It is 1897 and France is torn apart by The Dreyfus Affair, a disgraceful episode of anti-Semitism that plagued France for a decade and brought out the worst of behavior in far too many French men and women. Westminster needs help from Sherlock Holmes to make sure that the evil tide of anti-Semitism that has engulfed France will not spread. While spending an uneventful morning searching for his nephew, Dr. Watson finds Sherlock Holmes and together they watch as a man is murdered, a direct consequence of the anti-Semitic conflict that is raging just across the Channel.

THE MYSTERY OF THE FIVE ORANGES. THE KIDNAPPING OF A YOUNG WOMAN LEADS SHERLOCK HOLMES INTO A DEADLY BATTLE WITH THE KKK. On a miserable rainy evening a desperate father enters 221B Baker Street. His daughter has been kidnapped and spirited off the North America. The evil network who has taken her have spies everywhere. Years ago in America they murdered his father and his wife. They set fire to his home and burned them to death. Now, if he goes to Scotland Yard he knows that they will kill his beloved daughter. There is only one hope - Sherlock Holmes.

THE HUDSON VALLEY MYSTERY. A TERRIBLE TRAGEDY HAS TAKEN PLACE JUST OUTSIDE NEW YORK CITY. A YOUNG MAN MURDERED HIS FATHER AND THEN WENT STARK RAVING MAD. Sherlock Holmes is called upon by the lad's mother to solve the crime. So Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson make their way to America. There they meet the villains of Tammany Hall and maybe - no one will ever know - a ghostly apparition the haunts the pleasant glade known as Sleepy Hollow.

No sooner has Sherlock Holmes arrived in Plymouth for a short vacation than he finds himself in the middle of an unsolved crime - the Telegraph Murders. Two electrical engineers were found dead after completing a contract for the new Western Union telegraph office. Holmes's very unusual helper in this case is an exceptionally pious but still attractive woman who is the proprietor of a Christian bookstore. Some evil genius is behind a scheme to rob shareholders of millions of pounds and is prepared to commit murder to make sure his diabolical plan works.

"A Voyage to Brobdingnag" is a novel by Jonathan Swift: Gulliver soon sets out again. When the sailing ship Adventure is blown off course by storms and forced to sail for land in search of fresh water, Gulliver is abandoned by his companions and left on a peninsula on the western coast of the North American continent.

Great Expectations is the thirteenth novel by Charles Dickens and his penultimate completed novel, that depicts the education of an orphan nicknamed Pip (a bildungsroman). It is Dickens's second novel, after David Copperfield, to be fully narrated in the first person. The novel was first published as a serial in Dickens's weekly periodical All the Year Round, from 1 December 1860 to August 1861. In October 1861, Chapman and Hall published the novel in three volumes.