Added by: Kahena | Karma: 11524.33 | Fiction literature | 7 February 2011
5
Cold Mountain
At first glance Cold Mountain may appear to be a civil war novel following each and every bloody battle. In fact, the civil war is just the background for a more intimate story about the journey of three lost souls.
Estes Park was hardly more than a post office in 1899, when young Joe Mills first saw Colorado's Front Range. A would-be Robinson Crusoe, Joe scaled peaks, watched wild animals, hunted and trapped, and generally roughed it in the region that would become Rocky Mountain National Park in 1915. A Mountain Boyhood, the true story of his adventures there, is as rich in human as in natural history. Joe meets a colorful bunch of early settlers, living for a while with a circuit-riding parson who operates a ranch. He learns campcraft and nature lore, crosses Flattop Mountain on snowshoes in midwinter to socialize, and builds a log cabin near Longs Peak (the fireplace still stands).
Prince Paul, Jack, Peggy, Nora and Mike have come to Africa on what seems an impossible search. Yet they mustn't give it up because Captain and Mrs Arnold have been kidnapped and taken to the Secret Mountain. But where is the mountain? And who are the strange red-haired people who live there? Their rescue expedition seems destined to fail, until they meet young Mafumu...
Mrs Mannering thinks that a peaceful holiday in the Welsh mountains couldn't possibly land the children in another dangerous adventure. How wrong she is! Philip, Dinah, Lucy-Ann and Jack are soon up to their necks in the mystery of a rumbling mountain, roaming wolves, and a mad genious who plans to rule the world.
