Book Excerpt: ...n ill-greased pulley, and ended by degenerating into a terrible spasm of coughing. The fire basket now clearly lit up his large head, with its scanty white hair and flat, livid face, spotted with bluish patches. He was short, with an enormous neck, projecting calves and heels, and long arms, with massive hands falling to his knees. For the rest, like his horse, which stood immovable, without suffering from the wind, he seemed to be made of stone; he had no appearance of feeling either the cold or the gusts that whistled at his ears. When he coughed his throat was torn by a deep rasping; he spat at the foot of the basket and the earth was blackened.Étienne looked at him and at the ground which he had thus stained."Have you been working long at the mine?"Bonnemort flung open both arms."Long? I should think so. I was not eight when I went down into the Voreux and I am now fifty-eight. Reckon that up! I have been everything down there; at first trammer, then putter, when I h...

Germinal (1885) is the thirteenth in Émile Zola's cycle of twenty novels about the Rougon-Macquart dynasty. It tells the story of Étienne Lantier, from the illegitimate Macquart branch of the family, who arrives in the mining settlement of Montsou, and witnesses at first hand the appalling conditions in which miners live and work.Gradually becoming embroiled in a bitter dispute between the miners and their employers, he eventually leads the strike which is the centrepiece of the novel. But this is more than the struggle of labour against capital. It is also the struggle of the hungry against the well-fed, against the passivity and resignation passed down over generations of starving people, and ultimately against hunger itself, represented by the fantastical devouring monster of the mine, which swallows up men, just as the beast of the modern industrial economy relentlessly swallows up capital. This apparent pessimism about society is offset by the possibility of rebirth and regeneration. For all the inherited misery of the downtrodden, the old order may some day be overturned.

Zola's masterpiece of working life, Germinal (1885), exposes the inhuman conditions of miners in northern France in the 1860s. By Zola's death in 1902 it had come to symbolize the call for freedom from oppression so forcefully that the crowd which gathered at his State funeral chanted "Germinal! Germinal!"While it is a dramatic novel of working life and everyday relationships, Germinal is also a complex novel of ideas, given fresh vigor and power in this new translation. It is also the thirteenth book in the Rougon-Macquart cycle, which celebrates its centenary in October 1993 with a new film.

The thirteenth novel in Émile Zola’s great Rougon-Macquart sequence, Germinal expresses outrage at the exploitation of the many by the few, but also shows humanity’s capacity for compassion and hope. Etienne Lantier, an unemployed railway worker, is a clever but uneducated young man with a dangerous temper. Forced to take a back-breaking job at Le Voreux mine when he cannot get other work, he discovers that his fellow miners are ill, hungry, and in debt, unable to feed and clothe their families. When conditions in the mining community deteriorate even further, Lantier finds himself leading a strike that could mean starvation or salvation for all. New translation Includes introduction, suggestions for further reading, filmography, chronology, explanatory notes, and glossary

The novel's central character is Etienne Lantier, previously seen in L'Assommoir (1877), a young migrant worker who arrives at the forbidding coalmining town of Montsou in the bleak far north of France to earn a living as a miner. Sacked from his previous job on the railways for assaulting a superior - he befriends the veteran miner Maheu, who finds him somewhere to stay and gets him a job pushing the carts down the pit. Etienne is portrayed as a hard-working idealist but also a naïve youth; Zola's genetic theories come into play as Etienne is presumed to have inherited his Macquart ancestors' traits of hotheaded impulsiveness and an addictive personality capable of exploding into rage under the influence of drink or strong passions. -- from http://www.barnesandnoble.com (Jan. 21, 2014).

In the last few years the study of germinal centers of the lymphoid tissue has progressed at an accelerated pace. Questions about their role and their significance in immune responses that could not be answered, mainly because of tedmicallimitations, are presently approached experimentally from many different directions. Hypotheses, some more than half a century old, receive renewed attention. At this time, members of the Biology Division, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, U.S.A., and of the Institute of Pathology, University of Bern, Switzerland, decided to bring together workers interested in the field. The Conference was held in Bern, June 22-24, 1966, and included fifty-seven contributions which were discussed at length. The range of interest extended from phylogenesis and anatomy to studies on cell proliferation, immunohistochemistry, cancer research and radiobiology. The aim of this broad coverage was to combine all available information on the role of germinal centers in immune responses in a single package, instead of leaving it scattered around in reports dealing with divergent immunological problems. This attempt is reflected in the present book. A rather large space has been devoted to the lively discussions which followed the reports, the volume of most of which had been voluntarily limited. The discussions are not reported verbatim but care has been taken to insure neutrality and objectivity in the necessary adaptation of the shortened transcription. We have been very fortunate indeed, to have Drs.

This book meets the demand of a recent surge of interest in germinal centers, the foci of antigen-induced, rapidly proliferating B lymphocytes, representing sites in mammalian lymphoid tissue where memory B cells are generated. Various aspects of the generation of germinal centers, the somatic hypermutation process and the cellular interactions involved in the selection process are discussed in detail. A chapter on germinal center-derived lymphomas completes the treatment.