Penman, Sharon Kay:A King's Ransom
- hardcover 2014, ISBN: 9780399159220
Arlington, Texas: Sable Publishing Coprporation, 1977. CC4 - A limited edition (# 3 of 500) hardcover book in very good condition in fair dust jacket. Dust jacket has wrinkling, chipping,… More...
Arlington, Texas: Sable Publishing Coprporation, 1977. CC4 - A limited edition (# 3 of 500) hardcover book in very good condition in fair dust jacket. Dust jacket has wrinkling, chipping, crease, tears and open tears on the edges, corners and some sides, scattered scratches, scuffing, wrinkling, and rubbing, lightly moisture soiled, tanning, and shelf wear. Book lightly bowed and cocked, some bumped corners, light tanning and shelf wear. Includes a laid in ADDENDA sheet. Photographs by Roy Hamric, Foreword by Ralph w. Yarborough, Introduction by Pete A.Y. Gunter. The Big Thicket of Texas has long been called the Biological Crossroads of America. It is, acre for acre, more diverse biologically than any similar area in Central on South America, Africa, Australia, or Western Europe. It is unique in the world. Lois Williams Parker's book is the first comprehensive annotated bibliography on the Big Thicket - a thorough record of publications about this extraordinary region. This invaluable book is for all those who would preserve the wilderness, who love this region, the outdoors, wildlife, plants, and people. 9.75"x6.5", 225 pages. Satisfaction Guaranteed. The Big Thicket is the name given to a somewhat imprecise region of a heavily forested area in Southeast Texas in the United States. It is a highly biodiverse area for a temperate region, that has been described as "America's Ark" and the "Biological Crossroads of North America".The National Park Service established the Big Thicket National Preserve (BTNP) within the region in 1974 and it is recognized as a biosphere reserve by UNESCO. Although the diversity of animals in the area is high, with over 500 vertebrates, it is the complex mosaic of ecosystems and plant diversity that is particularly remarkable. Biologists have identified at least eight, and up to eleven, ecosystems in the Big Thicket area. More than 160 species of trees and shrubs, 800 herbs and vines, and 340 types of grasses are known to occur in the Big Thicket, and estimates as high as over 1000 flowering plant species and 200 trees and shrubs have been made, plus ferns, carnivorous plants, and more. The Big Thicket has historically been the most dense forest region in what is now Texas. Native Americans are known to have lived and hunted in the area nomadically, but did not establish permanent settlements there before the Alabama-Coushatta settled in the northeast about 1780. Spanish explorers and missionaries generally avoided the area and routed their roads around it. Logging in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries dramatically reduced the forest concentration. Efforts to save the Big Thicket from the devastation of oil and lumber industries started as early as the 1920s with the founding of the East Texas Big Thicket Association by Richard Elmer Jackson. In recent years, claims of the Big Thicket's position as a "biological crossroads" and its uniqueness have been called into question by some, arguing that the same habitat that occurs in Southeast Texas extends into Louisiana and eastward; however the importance of saving a representative sample of the Big Thicket was not questioned and regarded as something "for which we must be eternally grateful" by the same authors. While no exact boundaries exist, conservatively the area occupies all of Hardin County, most of Polk, and Tyler counties, and parts of Jasper, Liberty and San Jacinto counties, including areas between the Neches River on the east, the Trinity River on the west, Pine Island Bayou on the south, to the higher elevations and older Eocene geological formations to the north. Broader interpretations have included everything between the Sabine River on the east and the San Jacinto River on the west including much of Montgomery, Newton, Trinity, and Walker counties as well. Several attempts to define the boundaries of the Big Thicket have been made, including a biological survey in 1936 which included over 3,350,000 acres (13,600 km2) covering 14 counties. A later botanical based study in 1972 included a region of over 2,000,000 acres (8,100 km2). . Limited Edition. Hardcover. Very Good/Fair. 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall., Sable Publishing Coprporation, 1977, 2.5, New York: Oxford University Press, USA. Fine in Near Fine dust jacket. 1996. Hardcover. 2.08 x 8.79 x 5.91 Inches. 696 pages. Edgar Allan Poe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue" launched the detective story in 1841. The genre began as a highbrow form of entertainment, a puzzle to be solved by a rational sifting of clues. In Britain, the stories became decidedly upper crust: the crime often commited in a world of manor homes and formal gardens, the blood on the Persian rug usually blue. But from the beginning, American writers worked important changes on Poe's basic formula, especially in language and locale. And with World War I, the Roaring '20s, the rise of organized crime and corrupt police with Prohibition, and the Great Depression, American detective fiction branched out in all directions, lead by writers such as Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, who brought crime out of the drawing room and into the "mean streets" where it actually occured. In The Oxford Book of American Detective Stories, Tony Hillerman and Rosemary Herbert bring together thirty-four tales that illuminate both the evolution of crime fiction in the United States and America's unique contribution to this highly popular genre. Tracing its progress from elegant "locked room" mysteries, to the hard-boiled realism of the '30s and '40s, to the great range of styles seen today, this superb collection includes virtually all the great crime writers, including Erle Stanley Gardner, Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, Rex Stout, Ellery Queen, Ed McBain, Sara Paretsky, Sue Grafton, and Hillerman himself. There are also many delightful surprises: Bret Harte, for instance, offers a Sherlockian pastiche with a hero named Hemlock Jones, and William Faulkner blends local color, authentic dialogue, and dark, twisted pride in "An Error in Chemistry." We meet a wide range of sleuths, from armchair detective Nero Wolfe, to Richard Sale's journalist Daffy Dill, to Robert Leslie Bellem's wise-cracking Dan Turner, to Linda Barnes's six-foot, red-haired, taxi-driving female P.I., Carlotta Carlyle. And we sample a wide variety of styles, from tales with a strongly regional flavor, to hard-edged pulp fiction, to stories with a feminist perspective. Perhaps most important, the book offers a brilliant summation of America's signal contribution to crime fiction, highlighting the myriad ways in which we have reshaped this genre. The editors show how Raymond Chandler used crime, not as a puzzle to be solved, but as a spotlight with which he could illuminate the human condition; how Ed McBain, in "A Small Homicide," reveals a keen knowledge of police work as well as of the human sorrow which so often motivates crime; and how Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer solved crime not through blood stains and footprints, but through psychological insight into the damaged lives of the victim's family. And throughout, the editors provide highly knowledgeable introductions to each piece, written from the perspective of fellow writers and reflecting a life-long interest--not to say love--of this quintessentially American genre. American crime fiction is as varied and as democratic as America itself. Hillerman and Herbert bring us a goldmine of glorious stories that can be read for sheer pleasure, but that also illuminate how the crime story evolved from the drawing room to the back alley, and how it came to embrace every corner of our nation and every facet of our lives. ., Oxford University Press, USA, 1996, 4.5, New York: Marian Wood Books/Putnam. Near Fine in Very Good+ dust jacket. 2014. First Edition. Hardcover. 0399159223 . Short closed tear top fore edge ; A bright, solid book dustjacket in Mylar, unclipped.; Plantagenet Series #5; 9.3 X 6.7 X 2.2 inches; 685 pages; "This long-anticipated sequel to the national bestseller Lionheart is a vivid and heart-wrenching story of the last event-filled years in the life of Richard, Coeur de Lion. Taken captive by the Holy Roman Emperor while en route home—in violation of the papal decree protecting all crusaders—he was to spend fifteen months imprisoned, much of it in the notorious fortress at Trefils, from which few men ever left alive, while Eleanor of Aquitaine moved heaven and earth to raise the exorbitant ransom. For the five years remaining to him, betrayals, intrigues, wars, and illness were ever present. So were his infidelities, perhaps a pattern set by his father’s faithlessness to Eleanor. But the courage, compassion, and intelligence of this warrior king became the stuff of legend, and A King’s Ransom brings the man and his world fully and powerfully alive." ., Marian Wood Books/Putnam, 2014, 4<
