The Historian - Elizabeth Kostova
If your pulse flutters at the thought of castle ruins and descents into crypts by moonlight, you will savor every creepy page of Elizabeth Kostova's long but beautifully structured thriller The Historian. The story opens in Amsterdam in 1972, when a teenage girl discovers a medieval book and a cache of yellowed letters in her diplomat father's library. The pages of the book are empty except for a woodcut of a dragon. The letters are addressed to: "My dear and unfortunate successor." When the girl confronts her father, he reluctantly confesses an unsettling story: his involvement, twenty years earlier, in a search for his graduate school mentor, who disappeared from his office only moments after confiding to Paul his certainty that Dracula--Vlad the Impaler, an inventively cruel ruler of Wallachia in the mid-15th century--was still alive. The story turns out to concern our narrator directly because Paul's collaborator in the search was a fellow student named Helen Rossi (the unacknowledged daughter of his mentor) and our narrator's long-dead mother, about whom she knows almost nothing. And then her father, leaving just a note, disappears also.

The Search for a Meaningful Past Philosophies, Theories, and Interpretations
TTC - Darren Staloff - The Search for a Meaningful Past Philosophies, Theories, and Interpretations
Course Number 427?16 lectures (45 minutes/lecture)
Taught by: Professor Darren Staloff?City College of New York
What is the point of history? What lessons can be drawn from it? How is history interpreted and understood? Is it an indicator of the future? Can it produce more than just stories?can it offer knowledge?
If these questions fascinate you as they have intellectuals of the last three centuries, then Professor Darren Staloff?s lectures are the spellbinding synthesis of relevant scholarly literature that you?ve been seeking.
This is not a course about dates and events, but one that presents key theories, interpretations, techniques, and visions of the past, leaving you free to select and apply a perspective you feel gives meaning to history.
Professor Staloff achieves this by examining the ideas of key thinkers from the last 275 years, taking each in turn and analyzing the contributions of each to our understanding of history. The result is a course that traces modern man?s struggle to comprehend his place in the world by unraveling the past.

Tintin and the Cigars of the Pharaoh
Scores of Egyptologists have tried to find the lost tomb of the Pharaoh Kih-Oskh; every single one has vanished. When Tintin and Snowy meet the eccentric Egyptologist, Doctor Sarcophagus, they are soon involved in the search themselves - and find that the tomb contains a more sinister secret than sand and mummies.

Matthew Costello-[Poltergeist The Legacy]-Maelstrom
You must remember...I am not lost. A beautiful apparition speaks these words to Father Philip--and disappears. Though he thought that he was done with the Legacy, the priest knows only they can help him. Their search takes them to the bottom of the sea--where an ancient nightmare is about to be reborn...