Books published by publisher Fawcett Premier----t450

Chinua Achebe describes "Things Fall Apart" as a response to Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness", which is, comparatively, a denser, perhaps less accessible read. The parallels are there: the ominous drumbeats Marlow describes as mingling with his heartbeat are here given a source and a context. We, as readers, are invited into the lives of the Ibo clan in Nigeria. We learn their customs, their beliefs, terms from their language. Okonkwo, the main character, is the perfect anti-hero. He is maybe Achebe's ultimate creation: flawed, angry, deeply afraid but outwardly fierce. To have given us a perfect hero would have been to sell the story of these people drastically short. Achebe's great achievement is in rendering them as humans, people we can identify with. So they don't dress like Americans, or share our religious beliefs. Who's to say which method is correct, or if there has to be a correct and incorrect way. Achebe provokes thoughtfulness and important questions. His narrative is easy to read structurally, but the story itself is painful and frustrating. It is worthy of its subject.

History. A Vintage Collector's Edition. Number M492. Original price 95 cents. How could so literate a country as Germany become the scene of book burning and thought control? How could so sensitive a people participate in the organized and pitiless mass slaughter of millions of defenseless and innocent men, women, and children? How could a country with so notable a military tradition stumble into the greatest military catastrophes of modern history?

In this book, Isaac Asimov has reduced the complexities of a branch of mathematics to terms that anyone can understand. In an easy and informal style, he proceeds painlessly from the most basic concepts of algebra to the more refined considerations of quadratic and cubic equations, simultaneous equations, and those involving imaginary numbers. Also included are illustrations of the way algebra can be used in everyday life, as well as the roles it played in the discoveries of Galileo and Newton. --- excerpt from book's back cover