Books about Cowardice from Amazon.com

When Lord Jim first appeared in 1900, many took Joseph Conrad to task for couching an entire novel in the form of an extended conversation--a ripping good yarn, if you like. (One critic in The Academy complained that the narrator "was telling that after-dinner story to his companions for eleven solid hours.") Conrad defended his method, insisting that people really do talk for that long, and listen as well. In fact his chatty masterwork requires no defense--it offers up not only linguistic pleasures but a timeless exploration of morality.

The eponymous Jim is a young, good-looking, genial, and naive water-clerk on the Patna, a cargo ship plying Asian waters. He is, we are told, "the kind of fellow you would, on the strength of his looks, leave in charge of the deck." He also harbors romantic fantasies of adventure and heroism--which are promptly scuttled one night when the ship collides with an obstacle and begins to sink. Acting on impulse, Jim jumps overboard and lands in a lifeboat, which happens to be bearing the unscrupulous captain and his cohorts away from the disaster. The Patna, however, manages to stay afloat. The foundering vessel is towed into port--and since the officers have strategically vanished, Jim is left to stand trial for abandoning the ship and its 800 passengers.

Stripped of his seaman's license, convinced of his own cowardice, Jim sets out on a tragic and transcendent search for redemption. This may sound like the bleakest of narratives. But Lord Jim is also touching, elevating, and often funny. Here, for example, the narrator describes the ship's captain (proving that clothes do indeed make the man):

He made me think of a trained baby elephant walking on hind-legs. He was extravagantly gorgeous too--got up in a soiled sleeping suit, bright green and deep orange vertical stripes, with a pair of ragged straw slippers on his bare feet, and somebody's cast-off pith hat, very dirty and two sizes too small for him, tied up with a manilla rope-yarn on the top of his big head. You understand a man like that hasn't a ghost of a chance when it comes to borrowing clothes.

This is formidable prose by any standard. But when you consider that Conrad was working in his third language, the sublime after-dinner story that is Lord Jim seems even more astonishing an accomplishment. --Teri Kieffer.
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English officer and gentleman Harry Feversham has wealth, social position, a beautiful fiancée, Ethne Eustace, and a brotherly bond with three close friends. But he also harbors a dark secret. Though he is expected to continue his family’s proud tradition of military service, he cannot forget the shameful stories he heard as a child: tales of men who shirked their duty and disgraced themselves in battle. Fearing he too will flee from combat, Harry resigns his commission when his regiment is ordered to the war-torn Sudan. Following this decision, he receives a white feather—symbolizing cowardice—from each of his friends, and a fourth from Ethne. To redeem himself in their eyes, and his own, he embarks on an epic quest, traveling alone to Africa disguised as an Arab. As Harry endures desert heat, raging enemies, and the hellish prison known as the House of Stone, his heroic exploits become the stuff of legend.

Originally published in 1902, The Four Feathers, A. E. W. Mason’s best-known novel of adventure and romance, explores a plethora of complex moral issues within a framework of exotic intrigue and breakneck action. What is courage? What is cowardice? What is loyalty? And how do we balance the conflicting demands of country, family, friends, lovers, and one’s own ideals?

All traces of self-esteem have been brutally stripped from Malachy Kitchen, an Intelligence officer posted to Iraq. He is accused of cowardice while on patrol with an infantry platoon ambushed by insurgents. Word spreads that he ran under hostile fire. In the military family there is no worse crime. Humiliated and broken, kicked out of the army, Malachy sinks into despair. He becomes an isolated recluse in a drug-infested London estate. But the mugging of an elderly widow by addicts lights a flame that draws him to fight to regain his lost pride. His target is the network of narcotics traders. Pushers, dealers, suppliers are that network, and at their head is Ricky Capel, a crime baron importing heroin into the UK. Untouchable up to now, Capel will have to confront an enemy more driven than any of the policemen he has so far successfully outwitted. Capel is fighting a war on only one front, but when his Albanian associates demand that he uses his drug route to ferry an Islamic fanatic to Britain, suddenly he is vulnerable from other directions. From the author who "isn't just abreast of the headlines, [but] ahead of them" (The Washington Post Book World), and who is truly "one of the unsung heroes of the political thriller" (Chicago Tribune), this is a novel at once international and personal--and altogether riveting..
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Boyles, who has lived and worked in France for several years, examines the internal crises--a falling birthrate, an expanding Muslim minority, economic stagnation, a lessening of international prestige--that have changed the personality of what was once La Belle France..
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Some philosophers we read to discover the nature of the universe Others we read to discover the nature of ourselves In the second group, Soren Kierkegaard stands alone as a towering figure, a man who revolutionized our concept of the human condition. His insights go to the core of the dilemmas that haunt the modern mind and spirit. This clear and enlightening study provides a fascinating analysis of Kierkegaard's thinking and its practical applications. The reader comes in contact with a vision of perils and potential of individual existence that is far more profound than the shallow questions and easy answers offered by the swarm of contemporary "self-help" panaceas. The book leaves one with a realization of the vast depths that lie within us, and of the daring and determination it takes to explore them in order to become all that a human being can and should be. This edition was published in 1981 by NAL Penguin Inc..
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WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY ROBERT D. KAPLAN
COMMENTARY BY VIRGINIA WOOLF, HAROLD BLOOM, EDWARD SAID,
F. R. LEAVIS, AND ROBERT PENN WARREN

"        Never were Mr. Conrad's felicity of phrase and charm of atmosphere more obvious. . . . A book of the rare literary quality of Lord Jim is something to receive with gratitude and joy."--The New York Times

Originally published in 1900, Lord Jim is one of Joseph Conrad's most complex literary masterpieces. The story of a young sailor whose moment of cowardice haunts him for the rest of his life, Lord Jim explores Conrad's lifelong obsessions with the nature of guilt and the possibility of redemption.
        Nostromo is considered by many to be Conrad's supreme achievement, and Conrad himself referred to Nostromo as his "widest canvas." Set in the fictitious South American republic of Costaguana, Nostromo reveals the effects that misguided idealism, unparalleled greed, and imperialist interests can have on a fledging nation. V. S. Pritchett wrote: "Nostromo is the most strikingly modern of Conrad's novels. It is pervaded by a profound, even morbid sense of insecurity which is the very spirit of our age."
        Robert D. Kaplan's Introduction explains why the two novels together form Conrad's darkest glimpse into the flawed nature of humankind.

JOSEPH CONRAD (1857-1924) grew up amid political unrest in Russian-occupied Poland. After twenty years at sea in the French and British merchant navies, he settled in England in 1894. Over the next three decades, he revolutionized the English novel with works such as Youth (1902), Heart of Darkness (1902), Typhoon (1903), The Secret Agent (1907), Under Western Eyes (1911), Chance (1913), and Victory (1915).

ROBERT D. KAPLAN is a correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly and the author of seven books of travel and foreign affairs that have been translated into a dozen languages, including Balkan Ghosts, The Ends of the Earth, and An Empire Wilderness, all bestsellers, and a collection of essays, The Coming Anarchy. He lectures frequently to the U.S. military..
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The classic realistic novel of war, from the perspective of a young recruit..
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What happened in the California energy crisis, why it happened and who was to blame. California's energy deregulation is one of the biggest regulatory, political and public policy mistakes in the last hundred years. Partially deregulating California's electricity markets has worked a strange alchemy on politics and business. The results cast a harsh light on: * Partisans -- who didn't understand their ideology * NIMBY consumers -- who wanted cheap energy * Political compromisers -- who proved worse than extremists * Explotative corporations -- who misread the situation These factors turned economic outcomes upside down: smart players failed and bumblers stumbled into windfalls. And while California went dark, other states' deregulation succeeded. .
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