Book Synopses
Told from rotating viewpoints, the novel relates the story
of Pechorin, an effete Romantic hero who, despite his
audacious lifestyle, is bored with the world and with himself. Set in the
1830’s, Pechorin travels through the Caucasus
mountains, riding horses, hunting, evading death and doing the mazurka with
society women.
"Community, Identity,
Stability" is the motto of Aldous Huxley's utopian World State. Here
everyone consumes daily grams of soma, to fight depression, babies are born in
laboratories, and the most popular form of entertainment is a "Feelie," a movie that stimulates the senses of sight,
hearing, and touch. Though there is no violence and everyone is provided for,
Bernard Marx feels something is missing and senses his relationship with a young women has the potential to be much more than
the confines of their existence allow. Huxley foreshadowed many of the
practices and gadgets we take for granted today--let's hope the sterility and
absence of individuality he predicted aren't yet to come.
When
14-year-old Elliot Schroeder is selected by NASA to be the first Junior
Astronaut, he has no way of knowing the profound effect it will have on Vincent
Ole Tome, a Maasai herder who is also 14 years old. An unexpected event puts
the boys in contact via short-wave radio, and an African drought and an
in-space emergency bring about a climactic fact-to-face meeting.
Dr.
Faustus
Christopher
Marlowe based his play Doctor Faustus
on stories about a scholar and magician, Johann Faust, who allegedly sold his
soul to the devil to gain magical powers. Born in 1488, the original Faust
wandered through his German homeland until his death in 1541. In 1587, the
first story about his life appeared in Germany, translated into English in 1592
as The History of the Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Doctor John Faustus.
The Great Gatsby is arguably Fitzgerald's finest work and
certainly the book for which he is best known. A portrait of the Jazz Age in
all of its decadence and excess, Gatsby captured the spirit of the author's
generation and earned itself a permanent place in American mythology.
Self-made, self-invented millionaire Jay Gatsby embodies some of Fitzgerald's--and
his country's--most abiding obsessions: money,
ambition, greed, and the promise of new beginnings. Gatsby's rise to glory and
eventual fall from grace becomes a kind of cautionary tale about the American
Dream. It's also a love story, of sorts, the narrative of Gatsby's unrealistic
passion for Daisy Buchanan. His millions made, Gatsby buys a mansion across
Long Island Sound from Daisy's patrician East Egg address, throws lavish
parties, and waits for her to appear. When she does, events unfold with all the
tragic inevitability of a Greek drama, with detached, cynical neighbor Nick Carraway acting as chorus throughout.
Goddess
of Yesterday
The
dramatic and bloody siege of Troy is one of the oldest and best of human
stories, and in Goddess of Yesterday
Caroline Cooney tells it afresh through the eyes of Anaxander,
the daughter of the king of a tiny Greek island. As a child she is taken as a
hostage to the island of King Nicander. When she is
13, marauding pirates sack the palace, killing everyone but her. Anaxander frightens them off by pretending to be the
goddess Medusa, with the help of an octopus as a hairdo. When she is rescued by
the ships of King Menalaus, she assumes the identity
of a princess, Nicander's daughter, and becomes a
royal guest. When Menalaus's cold and vain wife,
Helen, runs off to Troy with her lover, Paris, Anaxander
goes along to protect Helen's baby son. Within the walls of Troy, she is torn
with conflicting loyalties as the bronze-clad warriors of Menalaus
land their ships on the plains below the city and war is imminent. The
characters of the Iliad come vividly alive in this action-filled novel: the
shallow and amoral Paris, the wailing prophetess Cassandra in her tower prison,
and especially Hector, a big, straight-talking sweetheart.
Jonathan
Swift's satirical novel was first published in 1726, yet it is still valid
today. Gulliver's Travels describes
the four fantastic voyages of Lemuel Gulliver, a
kindly ship's surgeon. Swift portrays him as an observer, a reporter, and a
victim of circumstance. His travels take him to Lilliput where he is a giant
observing tiny people. In Brobdingnag, the tables are
reversed and he is the tiny person in a land of giants where he is exhibited as
a curiosity at markets and fairs. The flying island of Laputa
is the scene of his next voyage. The people plan and plot as their country lies
in ruins. It is a world of illusion and distorted values. The fourth and final
voyage takes him to the home of the Houyhnhnms,
gentle horses who rule the land. He also encounters Yahoos, filthy bestial
creatures who resemble humans. Gulliver’s Travel’s is a skillful
blend of fantasy and realism which makes it hilarious, frightening, and
profound. Swift's alter ego plays tricks on us, and our gullibility uncovers
one of the world's most disturbing satires of the human condition.
Esperanza and her family didn't always live on Mango Street. Right off she says
she can't remember all the houses they've lived in but "the house on Mango
Street is ours and we don't have to pay rent to anybody, or share the yard with
the people downstairs, or be careful not to make too much noise, and there
isn't a landlord banging on the ceiling with a broom. But even so, it's not the
house we thought we'd get." Esperanza's childhood life in a
Spanish-speaking area of Chicago is described in a series of spare, poignant,
and powerful vignettes. Each story centers on a detail of her childhood: a
greasy cold rice sandwich, a pregnant friend, a mean boy, how the clouds looked
one time, something she heard a drunk say, her fear of
nuns: "I always cry when nuns yell at me, even if they're not
yelling." Esperanza's friends, family, and neighbors wander in and out of
her stories; through them all Esperanza sees, learns, loves, and dreams of the
house she will someday have, her own house, not on Mango Street.
Written in 1847, this novel remains a favorite, especially among younger
readers and listeners who continue to be entranced by the young Jane and her
mysterious Mr. Rochester. The story of an unhappy orphan and her life as a
governess at Thornfield is filled with difficulty,
including a shocking revelation on her wedding day. The happy ending finally
arrives, though, and Jane and Rochester are united forever. Long criticized as
being melodramatic and contrived, Jane Eyre has nonetheless become a romantic
classic and is often the book that introduces students to serious literature.
Bronte's suspense-filled plot adapts well to the audio format. This version,
although abridged, omits nothing of importance. Juliet Stevenson, a Royal
Shakespeare Company associate, reads with the drama the story demands and makes
each character emerge with life and energy.
Kaffir Boy
In this powerful account of growing
up black in South Africa, a young writer makes us feel
intensely the horrors of apartheid. Living illegally in a shanty outside Johannesburg,
Johannes (renamed Mark) Mathabane and his illiterate
family endured the heartbreak and hopelessness of poverty and the violence of
sadistic police and marauding gangs. He describes his drunken father's attempts
to inculcate his tribal beliefs and to prevent his son from getting an educationthe one means by which he might escape from the
ghetto. Encouraged by his determined mother and grandmother, Mathabane taught himself to read English and play tennis,
and, through the assistance of U.S. tennis star Stan Smith and his own efforts
and intelligence, obtained a tennis scholarship from a South Carolina college
in 1978.
The Kite Rider
In
thirteenth-century China, after trying to save his widowed mother from a
horrendous second marriage, twelve-year-old Haoyou
has life-changing adventures when he takes to the sky as a circus kite rider
and ends up meeting the great Mongol ruler Kublai Khan.
Notes from the Underground
Notes from the Underground is a self-portrait of a man who calls
himself an "antihero." He is never named but writes in first person
his views on several issues ranging from free will to man's ability to make
intelligent decisions. He then turns to some events in his own life. Fyodor
Dostoevsky makes a note at the beginning of the book that the notes and the
writer are fictional. He does, however, note that such a person must exist
because the current social climate is such that there's no
way he couldn't exist. This fictitious author often makes a particular point,
and then argues as if the reader were submitting objections, then answers. All
the while, he insists that he never intends for anyone to read the notes, but
writes as if he's writing to an audience.
This is the story of a two lonely and alienated men who work as farm laborers,
drifting from job to job in California. Lennie is
gentle giant, physically strong but mentally retarded. George guides and
protects Lennie but also depends on him for
companionship. Together, they have a dream to someday buy a little farm where
they can grow crops and raise rabbits and live happily ever after. This, of
course, is not to be as the title suggests. "The best laid plans of mice
and men" is a line in a poem by Robert Burns, which describes how a field
mouse's world is destroyed by a plow.
The Outsiders
The Outsiders is about two weeks in the life of a 14-year-old boy.
The novel tells the story of Ponyboy Curtis and his
struggles with right and wrong in a society in which he believes that he is an
outsider.
Deerfield, Massachusetts is one of the most remote, and therefore dangerous,
settlements in the English colonies. In 1704 an Indian tribe attacks the town,
and Mercy Carter becomes separated from the rest of her family, some of whom do
not survive. Mercy and hundreds of other settlers are herded together and
ordered by the Indians to start walking. The grueling journey -- three hundred
miles north to a Kahnawake Indian village in Canada
-- takes more than 40 days. At first Mercy's only hope is that the English
government in Boston will send ransom for her and the other white settlers. But
days turn into months and Mercy, who has become a Kahnawake
daughter, thinks less and less of ransom, of Deerfield, and even of her
"English" family. She slowly discovers that the "savages"
have traditions and family life that soon become her
own, and Mercy begins to wonder: If ransom comes, will she take it?
Their
Eyes Were Watching God
Their Eyes Were Watching God is
arguably the best-known and perhaps the most controversial of Zora Neale Hurston. The novel follows the fortunes of Janie
Crawford, a woman living in the black town of Eaton, Florida. Hurston sets up
her characters and her locale in the first chapter, which, along with the last,
acts as a framing device for the story of Janie's life. Unlike Wright and Ralph
Ellison, Hurston does not write explicitly about black people in the context of
a white world--a fact that earned her scathing criticism from the social
realists--but she doesn't ignore the impact of black-white relations either
Woodsong
An autobiographical book that provides a look at a man who thought, because he was a hunter and a trapper, that he knew about the outdoors. Instead, he discovered he knew very little until he opened himself to the realities of predators and prey, and to the lessons taught to him by the animals he encountered and the sled dogs he trained and raced. Some of the lessons are violent and painful, brought on by the natural instincts of wild animals or Paulsen's own mistakes; others are touching or humorous, and convey a sense of observation and awareness of the various personality traits of the dogs he has raised and run.