Kirjahaku

This collection includes three full-length plays, WEST MEMPHIS MOJO, SQUATS, and DARK RIVER, and one short play, OLD SOLIDERS. WEST MEMPHIS MOJO: Set in a black barbershop in Arkansas, 1955, WEST MEMPHIS MOJO sings the unsung heroes of the blues tradition. A young songwriter, working as a shoeshine boy, collaborates with the shop owner and a small-time recording artist to create new blues tunes. Amidst racial tensions and the politics of the white-owned music industry, this play explodes with the conflicts surrounding each character's pursuit of the American dream. SQUATS: A diverse group of homeless people, from a pregnant teenager to a thirty-year-old mental patient to a street musician in his forties, struggle to survive. DARK RIVER: Explores what happens when a family business has unintentionally poisoned their town. OLD SOLIDERS: It is Armistice Day, 1962. Three veterans of the World Wars exchange army stories, lament the vagaries of age, and wait for the arrival of Harry, their old army buddy. OLD SOLDIERS is about friendship, loyalty, and the very personal realities of war. WEST MEMPHIS MOJO "WEST MEMPHIS MOJO ... written with skill and wit by Martin Jones, is set in a barbershop in West Memphis, Arkansas, in November, 1955, when rock and roll was starting to take off - when, that is, white record companies and other entrepreneurs were making forays into rhythm and blues ... The story is a simple one, though none the less powerful for that ... What matters most of all, of course, is the absolute authenticity of character and emotion. Mr Jones is a very good writer ..." -Edith Oliver, The New Yorker SQUATS "... SQUATS portrays what it is to be young and human in a world defined by poverty, homelessness, mental illness, prostitution, domestic abuse, arson, alcoholism, suicide, teen-age pregnancy and AIDS. But SQUATS is neither preachy nor overdone. It doesn't take on a shopping list of societal ills. Rather, they are the landscape for the characters. Problems intertwine and contribute to each other. Though this landscape is bleak, the plot and the quirky characters are not ... It is written with insight and compassion." -Barbara Bartels, The Times Record DARK RIVER "... DARK RIVER concerns a failing family business that has inadvertently poisoned the waters ... DARK RIVER is an environmental Crime and Punishment ... Yet DARK RIVER transcends mere allegory. Jones uses pollution as a metaphor for the sins of the fathers ..." -W D Cutlip, Casco Bay Weekly

Is sharing food such an everyday, unremarkable occurrence? In fact, the human tendency to sit together peacefully over food is actually rather an extraordinary phenomenon, and one which many species find impossible. It is also a pheonomenon with far-reaching consequences for the global environment and human social evolution. So how did this strange and powerful behaviour come about? In Feast, Martin Jones uses the latest archaeological methods to illuminate how humans came to share food in the first place and how the human meal has developed since then. From the earliest evidence of human consumption around half a million years ago to the era of the TV dinner and the drive-through diner, this fascinating account unfolds the history of the human meal and its huge impact both on human society and the ecology of the planet.

Is sharing food such an everyday, unremarkable occurrence? In fact, the human tendency to sit together peacefully over food is actually rather an extraordinary phenomenon, and one which many species find impossible. It is also a pheonomenon with far-reaching consequences for the global environment and human social evolution. So how did this strange and powerful behaviour come about? In Feast, Martin Jones uses the latest archaeological methods to illuminate how humans came to share food in the first place and how the human meal has developed since then. From the earliest evidence of human consumption around half a million years ago to the era of the TV dinner and the drive-through diner, this fascinating account unfolds the history of the human meal and its huge impact both on human society and the ecology of the planet.

In Nebraska in 1972, three members of the Peak family, father, mother, and teenage daughter, were murdered. Beth, an adult daughter, who was not home at the time the crimes were committed, must come to terms with the apparently senseless act and find a way to live with the horror. "'The nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.' This line from Wallace Stevens's poem The Snowman perfectly reflects both the style and the content of VANISHING POINTS. This play is and isn't a story about murder. It exists and does not exist as sensational melodrama. What we see is not necessarily what we get because Martin Jones is rare among contemporary playwrights: He uses the stage to make visible the invisible. Ghosts inhabit VANISHING POINTS, but not the Halloween kind. Jones conjures up those psychological specters populating Henry James's The Turn of the Screw--emotions that refuse to die, grieves that will not stay buried... Jones avoids conventional docudrama. His script unfolds in blatantly theatrical fragments, brief scenes, in a lyrical mix of expressionism and impressionism. Instead of facts and figures from a typical case study, here dreams, nightmares and pain assume tangible shapes... ...this further solidifies his reputation. With depressing frequency the majority of new playwrights give us media realism. Too often their influences are television and film, genres where photographic imagery can reflect the material world but not the unconscious. It takes a play like VANISHING POINTS to reveal what only the theater can capture: 'The nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.'" Richard Stayton, The Los Angeles Herald Examiner

Tim was just an ordinary eleven year old boy with a passion for growing vegetables and solving mysteries. In a year on his very own allotment the two would combine to form a series of exciting adventures that show that being small is not a disadvantage. "Short fast paced stories are an excellent way to draw in the young reader." "Mystery solving with a hint of gardening advice along the way." "A modern day Enid Blyton."

Tim and Al were just two boys with a passion for mysteries and working on their allotment. In this, their second year on their allotment, the two would combine to put the boys into a lot of danger, but to give them a lot of fun. From pumpkin competitions to murders, it is going to be an exciting year. "A modern day Enid Blyton" "It is great to see the characters back and grown with new characters who you really care for" "A great way to draw in the young reader with a series of short fast paced stories" "A great sequel to the most enjoyable Digging up a Mystery"

Tim and Al are two twelve-year-old boys with a passion for solving mysteries and puzzles. The Highbrow Hotel is overrun with thefts, its squirrels are missing, people are being killed, and even the hotel grounds hold a four-hundred-year-old mystery. The boys are looking forward to a peaceful holiday. It looks like that is not going to happen. "Humour and mysteries, a perfect combination" "A modern day Enid Blyton" "A great little read"

Another collection of short stories that range from the silly to the serious - plenty of humour thrown in! Beware - you may see yourself in some of these!

A collection of short stories all set in the outdoors, that range from the sublime to the ridiculous. Mad humour is interspersed with real-life adventure.

Ridiculously authentic life episodes are interspersed with thought-provoking pieces and downright literary cheek in this latest collection. There are stories based in the outdoors, like Gorging and Where's the Proof? and stories that deal with deeper issues, like Hao-Hao and One Man's Good Name. There is plenty of humour, and the whiff of real-life that the reader will recognise.

Failure in Palestine traces Britain’s attempts to reconcile her commitments to Palestine with her interests in the rest of the Middle East through bureaucratic and diplomatic paths to her eventual abandonment of Palestine. The text offers an excellent analysis of British decision making in this crucial period, whose repercussions are felt to the present day.

In Unlocking the Past, Martin Jones, a leading expert at the forefront of bioarchaeology?the discipline that gave Michael Crichton the premise for Jurassic Park?explains how this pioneering science is rewriting human history and unlocking stories of the past that could never have been told before. For the first time, the building blocks of ancient life?DNA, proteins, and fats that have long been trapped in fossils and earth and rock?have become widely accessible to science. Working at the cutting edge of genetic and other molecular technologies, researchers have been probing the remains of these ancient biomolecules in human skeletons, sediments and fossilized plants, dinosaur bones, and insects trapped in amber. Their amazing discoveries have influenced the archaeological debate at almost every level and continue to reshape our understanding of the past. Devising a molecular clock from a certain area of DNA, scientists were able to determine that all humans descend from one common female ancestor, dubbed ?The Mitochondrial Eve,” who lived around 150,000 years ago. From molecules recovered through grinding stones and potsherds, they reconstructed ancient diets and posited when such practices as dairying and boiling water for cooking began. They have reconstituted the beer left in the burial chamber of pharaohs and know what the Iceman, the five-thousand-year-old hunter found in the Alps in the early nineties, ate before his last journey. Conveying both the excitement of innovative research and the sometimes bruising rough-and-tumble of scientific debate, Jones has written a work of profound importance. Unlocking the Past is science at its most engaging.

This is the third book in the George Melville Mystery series and as such sees our eponymous hero Melville, now a fully-fledged operative working for SIS (MI6) embark on his first full mission under the guidance and not so careful eye of hapless spy and team leader, Mad Dog. Once again the story embraces the murky world of pre-second world war espionage, and moves from underneath a quaint church in Ely, to the Greek islands, to Paris, Rome and Palestine, and sees Melville, having been made team leader, face a stark choice of supporting his team and his country, or ensuring his beloved wife and child are kept alive. From the chaotic violence of pre-war Palestine, to the cold-hearted world of espionage and double agents, the team once again face adventure and dangers as they search for the Emerald Tablet, and encounter once again, A George Melville Mystery.