While caring for an injured rabbit which becomes her confidant, horoscope writer, and a source of good luck, a thoughtful seventh grade girl learns to see things in more than one way.

"George Orwell is sometimes read as being disinterested in if not outright hostile to philosophy. Yet a fair reading of Orwell's work reveals an author whose work was deeply informed by philosophy and who often revealed his philosophical sympathies. Orwell said things of ethical significance, but he also affirmed and defended substantive ethical claims about humanism, well-being, normative ethics, free will and moral responsibility, moral psychology, decency, equality, liberty, justice, and political morality. George Orwell: The Ethics of Equality avoids a narrow reading of Orwell that considers only a few of his best-known works and instead considers the entirety of his corpus, contending that there are ethical commitments discernible throughout work that ground some of his best-known pronouncements and positions. While he is often read as a humanist, egalitarian, and socialist, too little attention has been paid to the nuanced versions of those doctrines that he endorsed and to those philosophical sympathies that led him to embrace them. George Orwell: The Ethics of Equality is the first monograph written by a philosopher that offers a reading of Orwell informed by historical and contemporary philosophy and promises to better our understanding of him and his work"--

For the first time, these two essential books on George Orwell have been brought together under one cover. The Unknown Orwell describes the first thirty years of Orwell's life—his childhood, the years at Eton and in Burma, and the struggles to become a writer. Orwell: The Transformation carries us forward into the crucial years 1933 to 1937 in which Eric Blair, minor novelist, became George Orwell, a powerful writer with a view, a mission, and a message.

"In Moulmein, in Lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people ..." So begins one of Orwell's most famous essays. In Orwell: The Road to Airstrip One Ian Slater explains why Orwell was hated in Moulmein and takes us on a fascinating intellectual journey that traces the development of Orwell's political and social criticism. Using a uniquely thematic approach, Slater also examines Orwell's self-criticism and, finally, the hidden and corrosive dangers of state and self-imposed censorship in a security-obsessed world. Slater's tour de force, critically acclaimed by those on both the left and the right, moves from Orwell's schooldays in England and his time as a policeman in Burma, through his years as a struggling poet, dishwasher, tramp in Paris, and tutor, schoolmaster, and bookshop assistant in London, to his critical experiences during the Spanish Civil War. Slater takes us beyond the events of Orwell's life to the bitter satire of the Russian Revolution in Animal Farm and the horrifying terror of Room 101 in 1984, Orwell's final novel, and shows that 1984 is as much a warning about the state of mind we call totalitarianism as it is a prophecy of an actual political state. As the war on terrorism continues and governments demand ever-increasing power over the individual in order to combat terrorism, Orwell: The Road to Airstrip One, reissued during Orwell's centenary, warns us that "he who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster."

George Orwell has been embraced, adopted, and co-opted by everyone from the far left to the neoconservatives. Each succeeding generation of Anglo-American intellectuals has felt compelled to engage the life, work, and cultural afterlife of Orwell, who is considered by many to have been the foremost political writer of the twentieth century. Every Intellectual's Big Brother explores the ways in which numerous disparate groups, Orwell's intellectual "siblings," have adapted their views of Orwell to fit their own agendas and how in doing so they have changed our perceptions of Orwell himself. By examining the politics of literary reception as a dimension of cultural history, John Rodden gives us a better understanding of Orwell's unique and enduring role in Anglo-American intellectual life. In Part One, Rodden opens the book with a section titled "Their Orwell, Left and Right," which focuses on Orwell's reception by several important literary circles of the latter half of the twentieth century. Beginning with Orwell's own contemporaries, Rodden addresses the ways various intellectual groups of the 1950s responded to Orwell. Rodden then moves on in Part Two to what he calls the "Orwell Confraternity Today," those contemporary intellectuals who have, in various ways, identified themselves with or reacted against Orwell. The author concludes by examining how Orwell's status as an object of admiration and detraction has complicated the way in which he has been perceived by readers since his death.

The doctor suddenly appeared beside Will, startling him. He was sleek and prosperous, with a dainty goatee. Though he smiled reassuringly, the poet noticed that he kept a safe distance. In a soothing, urbane voice, the physician explained the treatment: stewed prunes to evacuate the bowels; succulent meats to ease digestion; cinnabar and the sweating tub to cleanse the disease from the skin. The doctor warned of minor side effects: uncontrolled drooling, fetid breath, bloody gums, shakes and palsies. Yet desperate diseases called for desperate remedies, of course. Were Shakespeare's shaky handwriting, his obsession with venereal disease, and his premature retirement connected? Did John Milton go blind from his propaganda work for the Puritan dictator Oliver Cromwell, as he believed, or did he have a rare and devastating complication of a very common eye problem? Did Jonathan Swift's preoccupation with sex and filth result from a neurological condition that might also explain his late-life surge in creativity? What Victorian plague wiped out the entire Brontë family? What was the cause of Nathaniel Hawthorne's sudden demise? Were Herman Melville's disabling attacks of eye and back pain the product of "nervous affections," as his family and physicians believed, or did he actually have a malady that was unknown to medical science until well after his death? Was Jack London a suicide, or was his death the product of a series of self-induced medical misadventures? Why did W. B. Yeats's doctors dose him with toxic amounts of arsenic? Did James Joyce need several horrific eye operations because of a strange autoimmune disease acquired from a Dublin streetwalker? Did writing Nineteen Eighty-Four actually kill George Orwell? The Bard meets House, M.D. in this fascinating untold story of the impact of disease on the lives and works of some the finest writers in the English language. In Shakespeare's Tremor and Orwell's Cough, John Ross cheerfully debunks old biographical myths and suggests fresh diagnoses for these writers' real-life medical mysteries. The author takes us way back, when leeches were used for bleeding and cupping was a common method of cure, to a time before vaccinations, sterilized scalpels, or real drug regimens. With a healthy dose of gross descriptions and a deep love for the literary output of these ten greats, Ross is the doctor these writers should have had in their time of need.

The making of literary reputations is as much a reflection of a writer's surrounding culture and politics as it is of the intrinsic quality and importance of his work. The current stature of George Orwell, commonly recognized as the foremost political journalist and essayist of the century, provides a notable instance of a writer whose legacy has been claimed from a host of contending political interests. The exemplary clarity and force of his style, the rectitude of his political judgment along with his personal integrity have made him, as he famously noted of Dickens, a writer well worth stealing. Thus, the intellectual battles over Orwell's posthumous career point up ambiguities in Orwell's own work as they do in the motives of his would-be heirs. John Rodden's George Orwell: The Politics of Literary Reputation, breaks new ground in bringing Orwell's work into proper focus while providing much original insight into the phenomenon of literary fame.Rodden's intent is to clarify who Orwell was as a writer during his lifetime and who he became after his death. He explores the dichotomies between the novelist and the essayist, the socialist and the anti-communist and the contrast between his day-to-day activities as a journalist and his latter-day elevation to political prophet and secular saint. Rodden's approach is both contextual and textual, analyzing available reception materials on Orwell along with audiences and publications decisive for shaping his reputation. He then offers a detailed historical and biographical interpretation of the reception scene analyzing how and why did individuals and audiences cast Orwell in their own images and how these projected images served their own political needs and aspirations. Examined here are the views of Orwell as quixotic moralist, socialist renegade, anarchist, English patriot, neo-conservative, forerunner of cultural studies, and even media and commercial star. Rodden concludes with a consideration of the meaning of Or

It is difficult now to recall the enormous impact that George Orwell's classic dystopia, Nineteen Eighty-Four, had on the psyche of the western world. Written by a dying man in the grimmest of circumstances, the novel was intended as both a warning against totalitarianism and the debasement of language, and as a reaction to Orwell's personal experiences with English socialism and World War II. Clearly, "1984" has turned out differently than Orwell depicted. Yet the power of the novel remains undiminished: it continues to scare and enlighten future generations of readers nearly a half century after its original publication. Well-known scholar Robert Plank provides a psychological examination of the roots of Nineteen Eighty-Four, and the curious parallels between the book and its antecedents, including the film Citizen Kane, the novels of Dostoevsky and Kafka, the philosophy of Whorf, Orwell's own life and works, and many other obvious and hidden influences. Complete with chronology, notes, bibliographies, and index.

Stuck on an island, a 14-year-old boy tries to thwart the nefarious plans of a reclusive author and his giant killer ferrets.

Something stinks about fishing. And as far as Cade Carlsen is concerned, it isn’t just his family’s best-selling catfish bait, either. While there is no denying that the secret recipe concocted by his grandfather does indeed produce one of the foulest odors ever known, it is not the bait’s smell but its effectiveness that bothers Cade. Fish feel pain, Cade is sure of it, so he and his family are complicit in the suffering and death of countless catfish. Cade is determined to make amends, but the question is, how?