Peter Freuchen drew upon his vast knowledge of nautical fact and legend, as well as his fantastic personal experiences, to write BOOK OF THE SEVEN SEAS. In these pages, readers will wrestle with sea monsters, drift endlessly in hot, dead calms, face raging storms, and battle mighty navies. They will join scientists and explorers on expeditions into the sea, across it, and to its floor to discover new life forms, new sources of wealth, and new lands to conquer.
The inimitable Freuchen paints an exciting and colorful picture of humankind's adventures at sea-from the first prehistoric voyages in open rafts to daring scientific explorations in bathyspheres. He tells of sailors who fought for fame and glory, traders who risked their lives for wealth, and galley slaves who sought only freedom. He exposes the scavengers of the sea-pirates, privateers, whalers, and wreckers who placed lights on rocky shoals to lure unsuspecting ships to disaster. He describes the greatest battles of the seven seas-from the destruction of the Persian fleet at Salamis to the great conflict at Leyte Gulf in the Philippines in World War II.
Revealed here are the great mysteries of the sea itself-monstrous waves over 100 feet high; rivers and currents flowing between underwater mountains and valleys; ghost ships, mermaids, and sea serpents. Here too are the great treasures of the sea-jewels, oil, minerals, and millions of dollars' worth of gold in each cubic mile of sea water.
The result of many years of exploration and research, this is a truly magnificent volume.

Over the past decade the popularity of black writers including E. Lynn Harris and Terry McMillan has been hailed as an indication that an active African American reading public has come into being. Yet this is not a new trend; there is a vibrant history of African American literacy, literary associations, and book clubs. Forgotten Readers reveals that neglected past, looking at the reading practices of free blacks in the antebellum north and among African Americans following the Civil War. It places the black upper and middle classes within American literary history, illustrating how they used reading and literary conversation as a means to assert their civic identities and intervene in the political and literary cultures of the United States from which they were otherwise excluded.

Forgotten Readers expands our definition of literacy and urges us to think of literature as broadly as it was conceived of in the nineteenth century. Elizabeth McHenry delves into archival sources, including the records of past literary societies and the unpublished writings of their members. She examines particular literary associations, including the Saturday Nighters of Washington, D.C., whose members included Jean Toomer and Georgia Douglas Johnson. She shows how black literary societies developed, their relationship to the black press, and the ways that African American women's clubs—which flourished during the 1890s—encouraged literary activity. In an epilogue, McHenry connects this rich tradition of African American interest in books, reading, and literary conversation to contemporary literary phenomena such as Oprah Winfrey's book club.

Forgotten Readers redirects contemporary thinking about the origins of African American literature and adds a vital element to scholarship on the history of the book.

Over the past decade the popularity of black writers including E. Lynn Harris and Terry McMillan has been hailed as an indication that an active African American reading public has come into being. Yet this is not a new trend; there is a vibrant history of African American literacy, literary associations, and book clubs. Forgotten Readers reveals that neglected past, looking at the reading practices of free blacks in the antebellum north and among African Americans following the Civil War. It places the black upper and middle classes within American literary history, illustrating how they used reading and literary conversation as a means to assert their civic identities and intervene in the political and literary cultures of the United States from which they were otherwise excluded.

Forgotten Readers expands our definition of literacy and urges us to think of literature as broadly as it was conceived of in the nineteenth century. Elizabeth McHenry delves into archival sources, including the records of past literary societies and the unpublished writings of their members. She examines particular literary associations, including the Saturday Nighters of Washington, D.C., whose members included Jean Toomer and Georgia Douglas Johnson. She shows how black literary societies developed, their relationship to the black press, and the ways that African American women’s clubs—which flourished during the 1890s—encouraged literary activity. In an epilogue, McHenry connects this rich tradition of African American interest in books, reading, and literary conversation to contemporary literary phenomena such as Oprah Winfrey’s book club.

Forgotten Readers redirects contemporary thinking about the origins of African American literature and adds a vital element to scholarship on the history of the book.

The first English language translation of one of the great poets of Russian Futurism.

China's most outrageous character--the magical Monkey who battles a hundred monsters--returns to the fray in this seventeenth-century sequel to the Buddhist novel Journey to the West. In The Tower of Myriad Mirrors, he defends his claim to enlightenment against a villain who induces hallucinations that take Monkey into the past, to heaven and hell, and even through a sex change. The villain turns out to be the personification of his own desires, aroused by his penetration of a female adversary's body in Journey to the West.

In this, his only novel, author Tung Yueh (1620-1686), a monk and Confucian scholar, picks up the slapstick of the original tale and overlays it with Buddhist theory and bitter satire of the Ming government's capitulation to the Manchus. After a nod to Journey's storyteller format, Tung carries Monkey's quest into an evocation of shifting psychological states rarely found in premodern fiction. An important though relatively unknown link in the development of the Chinese novel and window into late Ming intellectual history, The Tower of Myriad Mirrors further rewards by being a wonderful read.

Shuen-fu Lin is Professor of Chinese literature at the University of Michigan. Larry Schulz holds a Ph.D. in Chinese intellectual history from Princeton University and has published his dissertation, 'Lai Chih-te and the Phenomenology of Change,' and articles on traditional Chinese medicine. He is currently a senior officer at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.