The Snail-watcher, and Other Stories PDF Download

Author: Patricia Highsmith
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Manners and customs
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Author: Lewis Thomas
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101667060
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 162

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A Pulitzer Prize Finalist The medusa is a tiny jellyfish that lives on the ventral surface of a sea slug found in the Bay of Naples. Readers will find themselves caught up in the fate of the medusa and the snail as a metaphor for eternal issues of life and death as Lewis Thomas further extends the exploration of man and his world begun in The Lives of a Cell. Among the treasures in this magnificent book are essays on the human genius for making mistakes, on disease and natural death, on cloning, on warts, and on Montaigne, as well as an assessment of medical science and health care. In these essays and others, Thomas once again conveys his observations of the scientific world in prose marked by wonder and wit.

Author: Patricia Highsmith
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
ISBN: 0802195512
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Short stories of suspense by the author of Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley—“a brilliant collection” with a foreword by Graham Greene (The Sunday Times). Master of tension Patricia Highsmith is best known for her novels of ever-increasing suspense, but she is equally adept at the short story, where “she is after the quick kill rather than the slow encirclement of the reader.” Eleven is Highsmith’s first collection of short stories—dark masterpieces of obsession and foreboding, violence and instability (Graham Greene, from the foreword). In these pages, naturalists meet gruesome ends and unhinged heroes disturb our sympathies; simple cases of murder turn out to be something even more sinister, and the cruelties of childhood come to unsettling life. This is a captivating, important collection from “one of the truly brilliant short-story writers of the twentieth century” (Otto Penzler).

Author: Elisabeth Tova Bailey
Publisher: Algonquin Books
ISBN: 1565126068
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Bedridden and suffering from a neurological disorder, the author recounts the profound effect on her life caused by a gift of a snail in a potted plant and shares the lessons learned from her new companion about her the meaning of her life and the life of the small creature.

Author: Jeanette Winter
Publisher: Anne Schwartz Books
ISBN: 0375867740
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 49

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Acclaimed picture book biographer Jeanette Winter has found her perfect subject: Jane Goodall, the great observer of chimpanzees. Follow Jane from her childhood in London watching a robin on her windowsill, to her years in the African forests of Gombe, Tanzania, invited by brilliant scientist Louis Leakey to observe chimps, to her worldwide crusade to save these primates who are now in danger of extinction, and their habitat. Young animal lovers and Winter's many fans will welcome this fascinating and moving portrait of an extraordinary person and the animals to whom she has dedicated her life. The Watcher was named a Best Book of the Year by the Boston Globe, Kirkus Reviews, Booklist, and the Bank Street College of Education.

Author: Lewis Thomas
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0140243283
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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This magnificent collection of essays by scientist and National Book Award-winning writer Lewis Thomas remains startlingly relevant for today’s world. Luminous, witty, and provocative, the essays address such topics as “The Attic of the Brain,” “Falsity and Failure,” “Altruism,” and the effects the federal government’s virtual abandonment of support for basic scientific research will have on medicine and science. Profoundly and powerfully, Thomas questions the folly of nuclear weaponry, showing that the brainpower and money spent on this endeavor are needed much more urgently for the basic science we have abandoned—and that even medicine’s most advanced procedures would be useless or insufficient in the face of the smallest nuclear detonation. And in the title essay, he addresses himself with terrifying poignancy to the question of what it is like to be young in the nuclear age. “If Wordsworth had gone to medical school, he might have produced something very like the essays of Lewis Thomas.”—TIME “No one better exemplifies what modern medicine can be than Lewis Thomas.”—The New York Times Book Review

Author: Vivian Gornick
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1466819014
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 188

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A guide to the art of personal writing, by the author of Fierce Attachments and The End of the Novel of Love All narrative writing must pull from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform event, deliver a bit of wisdom. In a story or a novel the "I" who tells this tale can be, and often is, an unreliable narrator but in nonfiction the reader must always be persuaded that the narrator is speaking truth. How does one pull from one's own boring, agitated self the truth-speaker who will tell the story a personal narrative needs to tell? That is the question The Situation and the Story asks--and answers. Taking us on a reading tour of some of the best memoirs and essays of the past hundred years, Gornick traces the changing idea of self that has dominated the century, and demonstrates the enduring truth-speaker to be found in the work of writers as diverse as Edmund Gosse, Joan Didion, Oscar Wilde, James Baldwin, or Marguerite Duras. This book, which grew out of fifteen years teaching in MFA programs, is itself a model of the lucid intelligence that has made Gornick one of our most admired writers of nonfiction. In it, she teaches us to write by teaching us how to read: how to recognize truth when we hear it in the writing of others and in our own.

Author: Patricia Highsmith
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393020311
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 744

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With the savage humor of Waugh and the macabre sensibility of Poe, Patricia Highsmith (1921-1995) brought a distinctly contemporary acuteness to her prolific body of noir fiction. Including over 60 short stories written throughout her career, this collection reveals the stunning versatility and terrifying power of her work.

Author: Lewis Thomas
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101667052
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 162

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Elegant, suggestive, and clarifying, Lewis Thomas's profoundly humane vision explores the world around us and examines the complex interdependence of all things. Extending beyond the usual limitations of biological science and into a vast and wondrous world of hidden relationships, this provocative book explores in personal, poetic essays to topics such as computers, germs, language, music, death, insects, and medicine. Lewis Thomas writes, "Once you have become permanently startled, as I am, by the realization that we are a social species, you tend to keep an eye out for the pieces of evidence that this is, by and large, good for us."

Author: Marvin Kaye
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780751500301
Category : Ghost stories
Languages : en
Pages : 658

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