Word: tales
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...favor with Nazis and collaborators alike, he became Commissioner for Jewish Affairs for the Vichy government in May 1942, presiding over a nest of corruption and the deportation of 75,000 Jews to German death camps. He died in 1980, unpunished and unrepentant. Callil lays out Darquier's sordid tale with cool disdain and relentless research. She first encountered his name after the apparent suicide in 1970 of her young psychiatrist - his daughter, it turned out, who had been abandoned decades before. In Callil's gifted hands, Louis Darquier's story becomes a history of modern French anti-Semitism...
...more concerned with building a tower to heaven. Hopeless, the people turn to a wizard who cures their emotional ills using a mirror and advice so good it seems like magic. For the fictional Aburiria, think Africa. In Wizard of the Crow, Kenyan author Ngugi draws a folkloric tale out of the continent crippled by inequality, corruption and aids. But he sees the funny side, too. Wizard of the Crow is an epic farce, poking fun at Aburiria's idiotocracy as misunderstandings and mistaken identities throw its characters into one ridiculous adventure after another. All written in the lyrical style...
Written like a classic crime story, this true-life tale kicks off with a botched robbery and police chase. Authorities raid the villa of a Munich-based antiquarian to discover a collection of 4th century B.C. vases soaking off encrustations - and traces of theft - in a 1.5-m-deep swimming pool full of water and caustic chemicals. As the plot thickens, a cast of crooked art dealers, shady collectors and formidable art institutions are implicated in an investigation that steers Italy's Art Squad to a Geneva warehouse filled with looted national treasures. The warehouse's owner? Giacomo Medici, Italy...
...instructor who blows the whistle on his superiors over leaked exam questions; Polat, a shady money changer from China's Uighur minority who eventually finagles his way into the U.S.; and Chen Mengjia, an oracle-bones scholar whose mysterious death during the Cultural Revolution bedevils Hessler. The scholar's tale is the only one without a satisfying ending, but Hessler finds inspiration in the dogged optimism of Chen and his fellow intellectuals. "They had tried to reconcile Western ideas with Chinese traditions," he writes. "Most of them had failed, but ... somehow a spark of their idealism had survived. I recognized...
...Afghanistan, Mortenson remains convinced that terrorism should be fought with books, not bombs. "[Terrorism] happens because children aren't being offered a bright enough future," Mortenson told a gathering of U.S. Congress members not long after 9/11. Though awkwardly written in parts, Three Cups of Tea is an astonishing tale of compassion-and of a promise kept. -By Aryn Baker...