Kirjahaku

In February of 1897 a family of six--four generations, including twin infant sons and their aged great-grandmother--was brutally murdered in rural North Dakota. The weapons used were a shotgun, an axe, a pitchfork, a spade, and a club. Several Dakota Indians from the nearby Standing Rock reservation were arrested, and one was tried, pronounced guilty and sentenced to be hanged. The conviction was reversed by the state supreme court, which ordered a new trial. Only a week later, however, a mob of thirty angry men broke into the county jail in the middle of the night, dragged three of the five accused Indians out, and hanged them from a butcher's windlass. These events were fodder for hundreds of newspaper articles, letters, and legal documents. Many of those documents, including the transcript of the trial convicting one of the Indians and the statement by the state supreme court reversing the conviction, are collected in this work, and, with the author's commentary, tell a disturbing tale of racism and revenge in the pioneer West, one that provided the basic story line for Ojibwe novelist Louise Erdrich's acclaimed novel The Plague of Doves.

With his Miller's Tale, Chaucer transformed a colorless Middle Dutch account into the lively, dramatic story of raunchy Nicholas, sexy Alison, foolish John and squeamish Absolon. This book focuses on the ways Chaucer made his narrative more effective through dialogue, scene division, music, visual effects and staging. The author pays special attention to the description of John the carpenter's house, the suspension of the three tubs from the beams, and the famous shot-window through which the story's bawdy climax is enacted. The book's second half covers more than 30 of the tale's retellings--translations, adaptations, bowdlerized versions for children, coloring books, novels, musicals, plays and films--and examines the ways the retellers have followed Chaucer in dramatizing the story, giving it new life on stage and screen. The Miller's Tale has had many lives--it promises to have many more.

The raft that carries Huck and Jim down the Mississippi River is often seen as a symbol of adventure and freedom, but the physical specifics of the raft itself are rarely considered. Peter Beidler shows that understanding the material world of Huckleberry Finn, its limitations and possibilities, is vital to truly understanding Mark Twain’s novel. He illustrates how experts on Twain’s works have misinterpreted important aspects of the story due to their unfamiliarity with the various rivercraft that figure in the book. Huck and Jim’s little raft is not made of logs, as it is often depicted in illustrations, but of sawn planks, and it was originally part of a much larger raft. Beidler explains why this matters and describes the other rivercraft that appear in the book. He gives what will almost certainly be the last word on the vexed question of whether the lengthy “raft episode,” removed at the publisher’s suggestion from the novel, should be restored to its original place.