The Transit of Venus

The Transit of Venus PDF Author: Shirley Hazzard
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143135651
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 385

Book Description
The award-winning, New York Times bestselling literary masterpiece of Shirley Hazzard—the story of two beautiful orphan sisters whose fates are as moving and wonderful, and yet as predestined, as the transits of the planets themselves A Penguin Classic Considered "one of the great English-language novels of the twentieth century" (The Paris Review), The Transit of Venus follows Caroline and Grace Bell as they leave Australia to begin a new life in post-war England. From Sydney to London, New York, and Stockholm, and from the 1950s to the 1980s, the two sisters experience seduction and abandonment, marriage and widowhood, love and betrayal. With exquisite, breathtaking prose, Australian novelist Shirley Hazzard tells the story of the displacements and absurdities of modern life. The result is at once an intricately plotted Greek tragedy, a sweeping family saga, and a desperate love story.

Chasing Venus

Chasing Venus PDF Author: Andrea Wulf
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307958612
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 346

Book Description
A “thrilling adventure story" (San Francisco Chronicle) that brings to life the astronomers who in the 1700s embarked upon a quest to calculate the size of the solar system, and paints a vivid portrait of the collaborations, rivalries, and volatile international politics that hindered them at every turn. • From the author of Magnificent Rebels and New York Times bestseller The Invention of Nature. On June 6, 1761, the world paused to observe a momentous occasion: the first transit of Venus between the Earth and the Sun in more than a century. Through that observation, astronomers could calculate the size of the solar system—but only if they could compile data from many different points of the globe, all recorded during the short period of the transit. Overcoming incredible odds and political strife, astronomers from Britain, France, Russia, Germany, Sweden, and the American colonies set up observatories in the remotest corners of the world, only to be thwarted by unpredictable weather and warring armies. Fortunately, transits of Venus occur in pairs; eight years later, they would have another opportunity to succeed. Thanks to these scientists, neither our conception of the universe nor the nature of scientific research would ever be the same.

The Great Fire

The Great Fire PDF Author: Shirley Hazzard
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374706352
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Book Description
The Great Fire is the winner of the 2003 National Book Award for Fiction. A great writer's sweeping story of men and women struggling to reclaim their lives in the aftermath of world conflict The Great Fire is Shirley Hazzard's first novel since The Transit of Venus, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1981. The conflagration of her title is the Second World War. In war-torn Asia and stricken Europe, men and women, still young but veterans of harsh experience, must reinvent their lives and expectations, and learn, from their past, to dream again. Some will fulfill their destinies, others will falter. At the center of the story, Aldred Leith, a brave and brilliant soldier, finds that survival and worldly achievement are not enough. Helen Driscoll, a young girl living in occupied Japan and tending her dying brother, falls in love, and in the process discovers herself. In the looming shadow of world enmities resumed, and of Asia's coming centrality in world affairs, a man and a woman seek to recover self-reliance, balance, and tenderness, struggling to reclaim their humanity.

Transit of Venus

Transit of Venus PDF Author: Rowan Metcalfe
Publisher: Huia Publishers
ISBN: 9781869690830
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Book Description
The story of the Bounty mutiny is well known. Fletcher Christian's mutineers set Captain William Bligh and others adrift in a ship's boat. Bligh sailed some 5000 kilometres to safety; the mutineers returned to Tahiti before making their way to isolated and uninhabited Pitcairn Island. But what of the Tahitian women who joined the Bounty at Tahiti? Their powerful and compelling story is told in Transit of Venus. Mauatua and her friends and relatives speak directly to us in beautiful and startlingly perceptive ways as they move away from their homeland and pass into the feverish intensity of drunkenness, betrayal and murder that mark the early years on Pitcairn. In so doing they assert their place in a story that has fascinated readers for generations.

Collected Stories

Collected Stories PDF Author: Shirley Hazzard
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 0374720487
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 318

Book Description
Collected Stories includes both volumes of the National Book Award–winning author Shirley Hazzard’s short-story collections—Cliffs of Fall and People in Glass Houses—alongside uncollected works and two previously unpublished stories Shirley Hazzard's Collected Stories is a work of staggering breadth and accomplishment. Taken together, these twenty-eight short stories are masterworks in telescoping focus, ranging from quotidian struggles between beauty and pragmatism to satirical send-ups of international bureaucracy, from the Italian countryside to suburban Connecticut. Hazzard's heroes are high-minded romantics who attempt to fit their feelings into the twentieth-century world of office jobs and dreary marriages. After all, as she writes in "The Picnic," "It was tempting to confine oneself to what one could cope with. And one couldn't cope with love." And yet it is the comedy, the tragedy, and the splendor of love, the pursuit and the absence of it, that animates Hazzard's stories and provides the truth and beauty that her protagonists seek. Hazzard once said, "The idea that somebody has expressed something, in a supreme way, that it can be expressed; this is, I think, an enormous feature of literature." Her stories themselves are a supreme evocation of writing at its very best: probing, uncompromising, and deeply felt.

The Transit of Venus Enterprise in Victorian Britain

The Transit of Venus Enterprise in Victorian Britain PDF Author: Jessica Ratcliff
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822981858
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 336

Book Description
In the nineteenth century, the British Government spent money measuring the distance between the earth and the sun using observations of the transit of Venus. This book presents a narrative of the two Victorian transit programmes. It draws out their cultural significance and explores the nature of "big science" in late-Victorian Britain.

Transit of Venus

Transit of Venus PDF Author: Nick Lomb
Publisher: The Experiment
ISBN: 1615190554
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 229

Book Description
Traces the impact on astronomy and science of the six times that the planet Venus has passed in front of the Sun since the discovery of the telescope in the seventeenth century, and discusses the 2012 transit, the last in this century.

Transit of Venus

Transit of Venus PDF Author: Julian Evans
Publisher: Eland Publishing
ISBN: 9781780600536
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
The Pacific Ocean calls to mind a world of fabulous kingdoms and noble savages, guilt free sex and gin-clear lagoons, and a perfect idleness fed by lush fruits and fish-rich seas. Ever since Captain Cook first went to Tahiti in 1769 to observe the transit of Venus across the sun, this dream of the Pacific has not lost its force. But Julian Evans's journey through the island archipelagos of the Great Ocean was also informed by a quest into our more modern myths - such as Peacekeeper missiles and nuclear bombs being tested by the US Army. With humour and vivid imagery, honesty and a wickedly sardonic wit, Evans uncovers the reality of these two Pacific dreams: a brave new ocean where the islanders have money and booze, military coups and cold-war politics, atomic explosions and rising sea levels, but where, in the remotest atolls, beyond all our modernity and rationality, the old dream of islands continues to assert itself.

The Transit of Empire

The Transit of Empire PDF Author: Jodi A. Byrd
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452933170
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 337

Book Description
Examines how “Indianness” has propagated U.S. conceptions of empire
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