Books with title Barbarian

Obie hates Los Angeles and all the junk that goes with it-especially trying to fit in at Thomas Turney High School. But with bounty hunters trying to capture him, his Renegade roommates urge him to lay low with his band and forget about ever getting back hoome. it's hard to blend in at school, though, when you've just made enemies with the football team. Obie can't keep away from Allison, the most popular girl in school and the girlfriend of the star quarterback, Sledge. And when his true love, Inna, shows up and pleads for his help, Obie must return to the one place he fears most.

"A sword untried is a sword untested," says one raven to another as they set out to witness the fate of the finest farm in Garmrland and its owner, Barbarian Lord. When he is cheated out of his lands and banished, Barbarian Lord begins a quest for allies and for justice, encountering monsters, ghouls, gods, and mediocre poets along the way. Combining the rich traditions of the Vikings and Nordic lore with sword-and-sorcery-and slyly understated humor-this graphic novel introduces an original hero with classic flair, brought to life in Matt Smith's beautifully drawn, detailed, and action-filled black-and-white illustrations.

The ancient Romans used the word barbarian to describe people who were coarse, rude, or even just foreign. Over time the word has also come to connote bloodthirsty cruelty. But were the Goths, the Huns, the Vikings, and the Mongols as barbaric as we?ve been led to believe? In dynamic, detailed spreads that young readers will pore over, bestselling author Steven Kroll and illustrator Robert Byrd explore how these nomadic warriors lived, worshipped, and celebrated. Their wandering armies brought together Europe and Asia through trade and conquest and, in doing so, changed the world forever.

Barbarian Days is William Finnegan’s memoir of an obsession, a complex enchantment. Surfing only looks like a sport. To initiates, it is something else entirely: a beautiful addiction, a demanding course of study, a morally dangerous pastime, a way of life. Raised in California and Hawaii, Finnegan started surfing as a child. He has chased waves all over the world, wandering for years through the South Pacific, Australia, Asia, Africa. A bookish boy, and then an excessively adventurous young man, he went on to become a distinguished writer and war reporter. Barbarian Days takes us deep into unfamiliar worlds, some of them right under our noses—off the coasts of New York and San Francisco. It immerses the reader in the edgy camaraderie of close male friendships annealed in challenging waves.Finnegan shares stories of life in a whites only gang in a tough school in Honolulu even while his closest friend was a Hawaiian surfer. He shows us a world turned upside down for kids and adults alike by the social upheavals of the 1960s. He details the intricacies of famous waves and his own apprenticeships to them. Youthful folly—he drops LSD while riding huge Honolua Bay, on Maui—is served up with rueful humor. He and a buddy, their knapsacks crammed with reef charts, bushwhack through Polynesia. They discover, while camping on an uninhabited island in Fiji, one of the world’s greatest waves. As Finnegan’s travels take him ever farther afield, he becomes an improbable anthropologist: unpicking the picturesque simplicity of a Samoan fishing village, dissecting the sexual politics of Tongan interactions with Americans and Japanese, navigating the Indonesian black market while nearly succumbing to malaria. Throughout, he surfs, carrying readers with him on rides of harrowing, unprecedented lucidity.Barbarian Days is an old-school adventure story, an intellectual autobiography, a social history, a literary road movie, and an extraordinary exploration of the gradual mastering of an exacting, little understood art. Today, Finnegan’s surfing life is undiminished. Frantically juggling work and family, he chases his enchantment through Long Island ice storms and obscure corners of Madagascar.

“Smith’s debut graphic novel has guts, gore, and glory set against a harsh, Viking-influenced backdrop . . . An easy summer reading pick.”—School Library Journal “A sword untried is a sword untested,” says one raven to another as they set out to witness the fate of the finest farm in Garmrland and its owner, Barbarian Lord. When he is cheated out of his lands and banished, Barbarian Lord begins a quest for allies and for justice, encountering monsters, ghouls, gods, and mediocre poets along the way. Combining the rich traditions of the Vikings and Nordic lore with sword-and-sorcery—and slyly understated humor—this graphic novel introduces an original hero with classic flair, brought to life in Matt Smith’s beautifully drawn, detailed, and action-filled black-and-white illustrations. “An accessible, memorable thrill of a graphic novel.”—Bulletin “This plot is nothing if not action-driven, the multitudinous battle scenes and abundant swordplay (and excellent sound effects) making this an excellent choice for readers interested in Game of Thrones but who perhaps aren’t quite ready for some of its more mature subject matter.”—Kirkus Reviews “All bend knee and hail! Barbarian Lord!”—Previews “Interesting callbacks to Norse mythology will make this graphic novel an easy pleaser for fans of Rick Riordan’s books and K. L. Armstrong and M. A. Marr’s Blackwell Pages series.”—School Library Journal