One Last Look


Book Description

Calcutta in 1836: an uneasy mix of two worlds–the patient, implacably unchangeable India and the tableau vivant of English life created of imperialism’s desperation. This is where Lady Eleanor, her sister Harriet, and her brother, Henry–the newly appointed Governor-General of the colony–arrive after a harrowing sea journey “from Heaven, across the world, to Hell.” But none of them will find India hellish in anticipated ways, and some–including Harriet and, against her better judgment, Eleanor–will find an irresistible and endlessly confounding heaven. In Lady Eleanor–whose story is based on actual diaries–we have a keenly intelligent and observant narrator. Her descriptions of her profoundly unfamiliar world are vivid and sensual. The stultifying heat, the sensuous relief of the monsoon rains, the aromas and colors of the gardens and marketplaces, the mystifying grace and silence of the Indians themselves all come to rich life on the page. When she, Harriet, Henry, and ten thousand soldiers and servants make a three-year trek to the Punjab from Calcutta under Henry’s failing leadership, Eleanor’s impressions of the people and landscape are deepened, charged by her own revulsion and exaltation: “My life,” she says, “once a fastidious nibble, has turned into an endless disorderly feast.” Harriet, whose passivity conceals a dazed openness to the true India, and Henry, with his frightened adherence to the crumbling ideals of empire, become foils to Eleanor’s slow but inexorable seduction. Historically precise, gorgeously evocative, banked with the heat of unbidden desires, One Last Look is a mesmerizing tale of the complex lure of the exotic and the brazen failure of imperialism–both political and personal. It is a powerful confirmation of Susanna Moore’s remarkable gifts.




One Last Look


Book Description

Linda Lael Miller ignites the combustible passion between attorney Clare Westbrook and homicide detective Tony Sonterra in this page-turning conclusion to her New York Times bestselling trilogy. A senseless murder. A sizzling adventure. Carrying her lover Tony Sonterra's child, Clare Westbrook has finally buried her commitment phobia and said "yes" to Tony's marriage proposal. So why is fear running through her veins and haunting her dreams? Sonterra is fired up to leave Phoenix for small-town Arizona, to target a lethal desert crime ring. Clare's willing to stand by her man, but he won't be the only one flirting with danger on the job: as a special investigator for the D.A.'s office, Clare is plunged into a race to find a missing child whose mother was murdered. And on a case this hot, the promise of Clare's bright future could vanish in the blink of an eye....




Last Looks, Last Books


Book Description

Modern American poets writing in the face of death In Last Looks, Last Books, the eminent critic Helen Vendler examines the ways in which five great modern American poets, writing their final books, try to find a style that does justice to life and death alike. With traditional religious consolations no longer available to them, these poets must invent new ways to express the crisis of death, as well as the paradoxical coexistence of a declining body and an undiminished consciousness. In The Rock, Wallace Stevens writes simultaneous narratives of winter and spring; in Ariel, Sylvia Plath sustains melodrama in cool formality; and in Day by Day, Robert Lowell subtracts from plenitude. In Geography III, Elizabeth Bishop is both caught and freed, while James Merrill, in A Scattering of Salts, creates a series of self-portraits as he dies, representing himself by such things as a Christmas tree, human tissue on a laboratory slide, and the evening/morning star. The solution for one poet will not serve for another; each must invent a bridge from an old style to a new one. Casting a last look at life as they contemplate death, these modern writers enrich the resources of lyric poetry.




One Last Look


Book Description

Preparing for the birth of their first child, attorney Clare Westbrook and homicide detective Tony Sonterra start a new life in a small Arizona town only to find themselves drawn into a dangerous mystery.













Wild Life


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The Talaings


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Lee and Longstreet at High Tide


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