Mark Twain was known as a great American short story writer as well as novelist and humorist. This collection of eighteen of Mark Twain's best short stories, including both the well known and the lesser known, displays his mastery of Western humor and frontier realism, the qualities for which he is best known. The stories also show how Twain earned his place in American letters as a master writer in the authentic native idiom. He was exuberant and irreverent, but underlying the humor was a vigorous desire for social justice and equality.
Today complex numbers have such widespread practical use--from electrical engineering to aeronautics--that few people would expect the story behind their derivation to be filled with adventure and enigma. In An Imaginary Tale, Paul Nahin tells the 2000-year-old history of one of mathematics' most elusive numbers, the square root of minus one, also known as i. He recreates the baffling mathematical problems that conjured it up, and the colorful characters who tried to solve them.
The Encyclopedia of Lawmen, Outlaws, and Gunfighters
Standoffs, saloons and sunsets spring to mind when one envisions the rough and tumble of the early days of the American frontier. Indeed, the golden period of the American West produced some of the most notorious badmen and bravest lawmen in American history, many of whom have become legends. Some rogues are familiar: John Wesley Hardin (who, it is said, killed more than 40 men), William Bonney (Billy the Kid), Wild Bill Hickok, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Others are not so well known but were no less dangerous...
The Encyclopedia Of HollywoodThe only book that combines stars, films, genres, and history into one encyclopedic reference, The Encyclopedia of Hollywood, Second Edition provides an authoritative, unique insight into America's popular film industry. Since writing the first edition of this book more than a decade ago, the authors have become well-known film critics, and they bring their experience, insider knowledge, and detailed understanding of Hollywood to each entry. Thoroughly updated and revised,
Aesop's Fables or Aesopica refers to a collection of fables credited to Aesop, a slave and story-teller who lived in ancient Greece between 620 and 560 BC. Aesop's Fables have become a blanket term for collections of brief fables, especially beast fables involving anthropomorphic animals. His fables are some of the most well known in the world. The fables remain a popular choice for moral education of children today.