The Orchard Keeper is the first novel by the American novelist Cormac McCarthy. The novel is set in a small, isolated community in Tennessee, during the inter-war period. It is the story of John Wesley Rattner, a young boy, and Marion Sylder, an outlaw and bootlegger, who has killed Rattner's father, a fact to which both are oblivious. The main themes of the novel include fostering, hospitality, and nature. Woven in amongst descriptions of harsh surroundings, sudden actions - a swing of a tire iron, a porch falling off a building, a car falling into a creek, an owl swooping down - become turning points which in turn become new environments in which McCarthy's characters evolve.
A History of the Classical Greek World: 478 - 323 BC
This book gives an accessible account of classical Greek history, from the aftermath of the Persian Wars in 478 bc to the death of Alexander the Great in 323 bc. The author describes the years which witnessed the flourishing of democracy in Athens; the establishment of the Athenian empire; the Peloponnesian War, which involved the whole Greek world; the development of Macedonian power under Philip II; and the conquests of Alexander the Great. His account combines narrative with analysis, and deals with major social, economic and cultural developments as well as political and military events.
In order to assure brevity and clarity without missing the spirit of Russia or losing a sense of the complexities of life (ever-present complexities which can be unraveled only in retrospect by historians), particular care has been taken to supplement the text with appropriate appendices. The chronological table, for instance, divulges by the very sequence of events the logical and sometimes illogical course of his- tory and its influence on our lives. The maps reveal better than any description the causes and results of major trends. The index provides a biographical dictionary and a glossary of foreign terms, particularly useful.
This short book is intended to serve as a practical guide to Gaelic language sources (as opposed to administrative or ecclesiastical records in Latin, French, or English) for the history of these communities in the high Middle Ages, laying emphasis on published texts for which English translations are available. Under six headings (annals, genealogies, poems, prose tracts and sagas, legal material, colophons and marginalia), it discusses not only the nature of the sources themselves, the purpose for which they were originally created, and their survival and availability to researchers, but also how to glean usable historical information from them.
Telling people about research is just as important as doing it. But many researchers, who, in all other respects, are competent scientists, are afraid of writing. They are wary of the unwritten rules, the unspoken dogma and the inexplicably complex style, all of which seem to pervade conventional thinking about scientific writing.
