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The Old Man and The Sea
Here, for a change, is a fish tale that actually does honor to the author. In fact The Old Man and the Sea revived Ernest Hemingway's career, which was foundering under the weight of such postwar stinkers as Across the River and into the Trees. It also led directly to his receipt of the Nobel Prize in 1954 (an award Hemingway gladly accepted, despite his earlier observation that "no son of a bitch that ever won the Nobel Prize ever wrote anything worth reading afterwards"). A half century later, it's still easy to see why. This tale of an aged Cuban fisherman going head-to-head (or hand-to-fin) with a magnificent marlin encapsulates Hemingway's favorite motifs of physical and moral challenge. Yet Santiago is too old and infirm to partake of the gun-toting machismo that disfigured much of the author's later work: "The brown blotches of the benevolent skin cancer the sun brings from its reflection on the tropic sea were on his cheeks. The blotches ran well down the sides of his face and his hands had the deep-creased scars from handling heavy fish on the cords." Hemingway's style, too, reverts to those superb snapshots of perception that won him his initial fame: Just before it was dark, as they passed a great island of Sargasso weed that heaved and swung in the light sea as though the ocean were making love with something under a yellow blanket, his small line was taken by a dolphin. He saw it first when it jumped in the air, true gold in the last of the sun and bending and flapping wildly in the air. If a younger Hemingway had written this novella, Santiago most likely would have towed the enormous fish back to port and posed for a triumphal photograph--just as the author delighted in doing, circa 1935. Instead his prize gets devoured by a school of sharks. Returning with little more than a skeleton, he takes to his bed and, in the very last line, cements his identification with his creator: "The old man was dreaming about the lions." Perhaps there's some allegory of art and experience floating around in there somewhere--but The Old Man and the Sea was, in any case, the last great catch of Hemingway's career. --James Marcus.
Price: $5.97
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Practice Makes Perfect: Spanish Verb Tenses
This convenient worktext gives students a unique approach to learning, remembering, and reviewing how to use Spanish verbs correctly The book provides a systematic presentation and review of Spanish verb forms and explains when and why a certain verb tense should be used. Practice Makes Perfect: Spanish Verb Tenses includes an impressive number of exercises and open-ended questions, numerous conjugation charts, a list of verbs and their prepositions, and Spanish-English and English-Spanish vocabulary lists. .
Price: $6.87
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Then Tress Said to Troy: The Best Ohio State Football Stories Ever Told with CD
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100 Successful College Application Essays (Second Edition)
The essay is the one part of the college application that allows an admissions committee to get a glimpse not only of what you are (grades, scores, club member), but of who you are. "Applicants are constantly advised to 'put their best foot forward,'" says Fred Hargadon, the dean of admissions at Princeton University and a contributor to this book. "But I must confess that I always liked the ones who put both feet forward." That doesn't mean that your essay needs to shock. It means you must put everything you've got into it. It means that "if you think the college might receive even one other essay like yours," according to Brooks School college counselor William K. Poirot, "rewrite it." The bulk of this book, as its title promises, comprises 100 examples of successful college-application essays. There are those who believe that reading essays will make you a better essay writer and those who don't. But reading these essays--and the experts' comments on them--will help you figure out what you want to write and how best to write it. From the essays included here, one surmises that the narrower your focus, the more effective the essay, as long as your narrowness doesn't cross over into insignificance. What matters most is not what you write about (these essays take on late-night TV game shows, self-induced baldness, the picture on a bag of Goldfish crackers, a family drive on the New Jersey Turnpike, and even a seven-inch plastic Godzilla), but what you do with your subject matter. --Jane Steinberg.
Price: $5.70
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501 Spanish Verbs: Fully Conjugated in All the Tenses in a New Easy-to-Learn Format Alphabetically Arranged
With more than 1 million copies in print, the new, updated edition of this all-time best selling language book of Spanish verbs is now printed in two colors for increased ease of reference. The most important and most commonly used Spanish verbs are presented alphabetically in chart form, one verb per page, and conjugated in all persons and tenses, both active and passive. This thorough guide to the use of verbs features many additional references and tips, including a bilingual list of more than 1,250 additional Spanish verbs, helpful expressions and idioms for travelers, and verb drills and tests with answers explained at the back of the book..
Price: $4.00
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A Midsummer Night's Dream (Shakespeare Made Easy)
Here are the books that help teach Shakespeare plays without the teacher constantly needing to explain and define Elizabethan terms, slang, and other ways of expression that are different from our own. Each play is presented with Shakespeare's original lines on each left-hand page, and a modern, easy-to-understand "translation" on the facing right-hand page. All dramas are complete, with every original Shakespearian line, and a full-length modern rendition of the text..
Price: $2.00
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The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories
Returning from a Kenyan safari in 1932, Ernest Hemingway quickly devised a literary trophy to add to his stash of buffalo hides and rhino horns. To this day, Green Hills of Africa seems an almost perverse paean to the thrills of bloodshed, in which the author cuts one notch after another in his gun barrel and declares, "I did not mind killing anything." Four years later, however, Hemingway came up with a more accomplished spin on his African experiences--a pair of them, in fact, which he collected with eight other tales in The Snows of Kilimanjaro. The title story is a meditation on corruption and mortality, two subjects that were already beginning to preoccupy the 37-year-old author. As the protagonist perishes of gangrene out in the bush, he recognizes his own failure of nerve as a writer: Now he would never write the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well. Well, he would not have to fail at trying to write them either. Maybe you could never write them, and that was why you put them off and delayed the starting. Well he would never know, now. In the story, at least, the hero gets some points for stoic acceptance, as well as an epiphanic vision of Kilimanjaro's summit, "wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun." (The movie version is another matter: Gregory Peck makes it back to the hospital, loses a leg, and is a better person for it.) But Hemingway's other great white hunter, in "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber," is granted a less dignified exit. This time the issue is cowardice, another of Papa's bugaboos: poor Francis is too wimpy to face down a wounded lion, let alone satisfy his treacherous wife in bed. Yet he does manage a last-minute triumph before dying--an absolute assertion of courage--which makes the title a hair less ironic than it initially seems. No wonder these are two of the highest-caliber (so to speak) tales in the Hemingway canon. --Bob Brandeis.
Price: $2.60
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