This account of his four-months stay among the fiercest tribe in the remote Marquesan Island of Nukuheva was Herman Melville’s first book, and its enormous success – it was the best-selling of all his books during his lifetime – was essential in deciding the future author of the monumental “Moby Dick” to become a full-time writer.
A young sailor at the time on a whale-boat that had stopped off there to replenish its supplies, just a few weeks after the French has sent a full squadron of (…)
Most recent articles
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"Typee" (1846) by Herman Melville - a fascinating account of life in a South Sea island before the spread of Western civilization
1 May 2024, by Herman Melville -
"Ivanhoe’ by Walter Scott (1819)
22 April 2024, by Walter ScottWalter Scott’s best-known work, a historical novel that established him as the most celebrated European novelist for a good long time, recounting the complex struggles in 12th-century England between the Norman rulers – Richard Coeur-de-Lion and his ambitious brother John – and their numerous enemies and opponents, notably the Saxon nobility that still dreamed of reestablishing their authority and also highly-organized bands of outlaws in parts of the realm such as the forests of (…)
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"The Time Machine" (1895) by H. G. Wells
20 April 2024, by H. G. WellsH. G. Wells (1866-1946) was a prolific author in many diverse domains (novels, short stories, social commentary, history, satire and biography) and a very engaged social commentator and critic. He was nominated four times for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
But he is best remembered today for his pioneering works of science fiction, The Time Machine (1895) , The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), and The War of the Worlds (1898), that established him — with his (…) -
"The Last of the Mohicans" by James Fennimore Cooper (1826)
15 April 2024, by James Fennimore CooperAn American classic, an historical novel centred on the infamous Fort Henry massacre in 1757 during the Seven Years War when the English forces in that besieged fort surrendered to their French opponent Montcalm on the condition of safe conduct for their men and civilians – a condition that was immediately ignored by the Iroquois and Huron allies of Montcalm who massacred many hundreds of women and children as they left the fort.
At the beginning of the story the two lovely (…) -
"The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes" by Arthur Conan Doyle (1894)
8 April 2024, by Arthur Conan DoyleThe second collection of Sherlock stories published by Arthur Conan Doyle in book form, including two of the most memorable of them all: The Greek Interpreter, introducing Sherlock’s elder brother Mycroft who has an even greater gift of precise reasoning and deduction than his own, although he’s too phlegmatic to ever go out and do the field investigations necessary to obtain proof for a law court the way Sherlock does, being a member of the extraordinarily antisocial Diogenes club whose (…)
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"The Return of Sherlock Holmes" by Arthur Conan Doyle (1905)
1 April 2024, by Arthur Conan DoyleA collection of 13 Sherlock stories published by Arthur Conan Doyle between September 1903 and December 1904.
Beginning most effectively at the start of The Adventure of the Empty House with Sherlock’s own account of how he had managed to escape death at the hands of the infamous Professor Moriarty – an event that had provoked enormous disappointment in the reading public and a widespread demand for Sherlock’s return – and concluding with one of his most memorable accounts of all, The (…) -
"Walden" by Henry Thoreau – an ecological manifesto (1854)
26 March 2024, by Henry ThoreauThe author recounts how he had quite absented himself from the (mindless, to him) hustle and bustle of life in the thriving New England village of Concord to build a small log cabin deep in the woods nearby the pond (or rather small lake) of the title.
He describes in loving and indeed fascinating detail all the vegetable, animal, mineral, insect, and bird life that he saw around him and his quite extraordinary abode, in which he spent two full years including two particularly icy and (…) -
"A Study in Scarlet" by Arthur Conan Doyle (1887)
25 March 2024, by Arthur Conan DoyleThe very first Sherlock Holmes composition and the author’s first novel [1], where Sherlock and Doctor Watson meet for the first time in “London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained”, get along famously from the start after Holmes asks Doctor Watson “What have you to confess now? It’s just as well for two fellows to know the worst of one another before they begin to live together.”, move into shared lodgings in the (…)
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"The Engagement in St. Domingo" by Heinrich von Kleist (1811)
18 March 2024, by Heinrich von KleistIn the midst of the campaign of racial extermination of the thousands of white-skinned people left on Haiti (then called St. Domingo) after the successful uprising of slaves there in 1804, a young officer desperately seeks shelter and food for his small company of civilians in a wayside house, where he is lured into a very false sense of security by the family of the local killer-in-chief. We follow the ups and downs of the attempts of the officer to survive in the face of (…)
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"The Sign of the Four" by Arthur Conan Doyle (1890)
4 March 2024, by Arthur Conan DoyleAt the beginning of this second Sherlock Holmes novel [1] the eponymous detective is resorting to opium to allay his boredom when a young woman arrives to ask him – and Doctor Watson – to accompany her to a rendezvous that promises to reveal the mysterious fate of her father ten years previously. Off they go to begin to unravel, thanks to the quite extraordinary reasoning powers of the by-now-everyone’s-favorite detective, not only the fate of the poor lady’s husband but also of the fabulous (…)