Word: reisner
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...blank salvo at the Winter Palace in Petrograd and started the October Revolution. At first, sailors were the new Soviet government's most trusted fighters, but Lenin managed to alienate them. He put in charge of the navy a commissar who was, of all things, a woman, named Larisa Reisner-Raskol-nikova, and refused to allow the sailors to organize their own self-ruling local governments. As a result, the Baltic Fleet suddenly mutinied in 1921. Lenin crushed the revolt, but he never forgave the navy. He demoted it to the inglorious position of "naval forces of the Red Army...
After serving as instructor in Semitic Languages (1896-97), assistant professor of Semitic Archaeology (1905-10), and assistant professor of Egyptology (1910-1914), he was named professor of Egyptology (in 1914), and occupied that chair until his death on June 6, 1942, at the Harvard Camp in Curo. Reisner spent nearly all his adult life in Egypt as director of expeditions sponsored by Harvard, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the Egyptian government. Photographs show him as a portly figure with wire-rimmed glasses and a bristling mustache; he looks strikingly like Theodore Roosevelt. To his co-workers...
Despite the demands of his work, Reisner was able somehow to build, and bequeath to the University, his extensive mystery collection. Because his secretary asked that British and American troops in Egypt be allowed to read the books, Harvard did not receive Reisner's bequest until 1945. Although the story that it was expecting a shipment of soberminded treatises seems dubious, Widener's cataloguers were surprised to discover that about a fifth of the novels had been graded, much as term papers are graded by professors in Cambridge...
...grades, which are in pen, pencil, or crayon on either the flyleaf or title page, clearly represent Reisner's judgment. Many are in his handwriting, but some seem to have been set down by someone else--possibly a person who read the mysteries aloud, for Reisner's eyesight failed in his later years. An example of a dictated grade may be found in Night Express Murder by L.A. Knight: "A (he says B plus, but he enjoyed it until the end, which was poor...
...grades range from "A" to "D," but Reisner seems to have marked a few of the worst mysteries with an "X"; an extended search recently turned up two of these--Murder Island, by Wyndham Martyn, and The Screaming Skull and Other Stories, by Sidney Horler. Almost as rare were "A plus" novels: He Could Here Slipped, by Frances Beeding, Murders Force Fours, by David Hume, and The Happy Highwayman, by Leslie Charteris, were the only ones unearthed. The majority of the books received some variety of "A" or "B", however, and students who have read portions of the Reisner collection...