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Product Description
In its 80+ years, the Hardy Boys series has sold more than 50 million books in 25 or more languages, and has inspired five television series and many stage plays, websites, comic books, graphic novels and computer games. The series has shaped the way millions of American children see themselves and society, and has shaped the perceptions of America held by young people around the world. This book follows the creation and development of the series through 1979. Topics include the writing of Stratemeyer and McFarlane; the so-called "weird period"; the Cold War and the disco age; race, class and gender; family values; and law and order. Illustrations, bibliography, appendices and index.
A journey into the never-ending world of books.I stumbled upon books two decades ago at a leading bookstore on the Mount road, Chennai.My quest on books for competitive exams, instead, slowly started my journey into the unfathomable world of English literature.Having read only a handful of novels till then and introduced to hundreds of titles five years back while equipping myself with general knowledge for my professional courses interview, it was almost like my ending up in a dream world.To me, book titles always held a charm.Like a solitary tree on a barren plain or an unforgettable melody.Seeing the titles that often lingered in my mind for the past five years in an unending array on the shelves slowly led me into a wonderland of different genres to amuse my different frames of mind.A novel is a funny or dramatic world comfortably put between covers.A novel presents the reader (and more often than not the novelist too) a vicarious world, which he could not live in in practice.The world introduced to by a fine book would live in one's memory for the rest of his or her life.No doubt, a good novel introduces one to characters that end up intimate, long-standing relationships with the reader than with their real life kindreds.Shakespeare suggested through his ever-famous Juliet, 'what is in a name? That which we will call a rose by any other word would smell as sweet'.But except the immortal writers whose works smell as sweet no matter whether they carry a title at all, which makes the confident publisher highlight the author's name more than the title itself on the cover page, a book has to woo an occasional browser and spur his interest on it.Book titles often narrate the stories themselves - like 'To Kill a Mocking Bird,' 'East of Eden,' 'Gone With The Wind,' 'The Thorn Birds,' 'How Green Was My Valley' etc., Some titles are enthusing inasmuch as to make the reader wonder at what makes 'The House on the Strand' unique or what mysteries are hidden in 'The Shrouded Walls.'.The cover portraits also have their say.A vast landscape that arises the reader's interest and imagination or a portrait of a character with a facial expression that speaks volumes encourages the browser's interest on the book if the author is quite unknown.Blurbs on back cover of books come in handy to selectors whether it is worth a while to give the book a try or not.But what if the publisher intends to over estimate his publication by a catchy recommendation? Nevertheless, books carrying laurels of prominent publishers and novelists will never let one down.Like a good start that is imperative to a sprinter, a fine beginning would keep a writer in good stead.Who can forget Thomas Hardy's description about farmer Oak in 'Far From the Madding Crowd' or for that matter the circumstances leading Philip to be known in the county as Pip, Charles Dickens central character in 'The Great Expectations?'.Interestingly bookworms with an unquenchable thirst for the printed word identify each other while keenly surveying the corners of dusty bookshelves.Years back when I was cravingly flipping titles in a book shop, a foreign tourist identified my appetite for a good book and recommended me a bulky volume that famously starts as 'The Small Boys Were Early for the Hanging.' Ever since I completed the epic titled 'The pillars of the earth' that ran into a thousand plus pages, I have been longing for a sequel.Fortunately, Ken Folett fulfilled my yearning through his second volume 'THe World Without End.' A sequel by the author himself would do justice to the original masterpiece and it was proven once again.Publishers could save weak hearts by appending the blurb with few words of caution.Rohinton Mistry's 'A Fine Balance' gave me a traumatic night filled with nightmares after finishing it in a late night.I later recommend the book to a few friends with a due warning never to read the last few pages of the novel alone late into the night before calling it a day (or night).As one attires different outfits for different occasions, books too are occasion-specific.To beat the boredom of either seeing the parched country landscape or having to get along with strange and loquacious co-passengers during a long train journey, thrillers plaited with anxiety and hair-raising adventures would be of great service.The tribe of authors who can make a journey fascinating goes endless with authors like Wilbur Smith, Dan Brown, John Grisham, Robin Cook, Frederick Forsyth, Robert Ludlum etc., While convalescing from an illness, a romantic hit with diverse genres ranging from the Elizabethan drama 'Jane Eyre' to the voluminous 'The Far Pavilion' will help one keep his cool.A Nora Roberts or Danielle Steel title would cheer up young minds during a recession and so on.Though virtual online shops have come up today with an assortment of books, nothing can match the thrill of finding a long-craved title after hours of fumbling about crowded bookshelves in a store.The most thrilling moment in my life is finding a long-pursued book, mostly a single copy, humbly bedecking the corner of a shelf, unwanted by the busy shoppers.I cannot imagine of anything but books that sells like hot cakes without advertisement in today's consumer market.For good books the word of mouth is more powerful than millions of rupees that might be required for a colorful promotion campaigning.
Leading nicely on from my last piece about how to "tool up" to communicate properly in your relationship, I find myself compelled to mention the wonderful world of non-verbal communication, in particular, texting.Daily life seems to cocoon us more and more within the world of laptops and virtual relationships with others and as well as the plethora of benefits in terms of connecting us with ever larger circles of people, it can, in intimate relationships, kill some of the essence of good old fashioned face to face dialogue.Now I am not saying texting is bad because indeed it has its benefits.For example, sending a sweet nothing to your loved one as they journey through their day, just to show you care, is lovely.Or to wish them luck when they are just about to head into an interview.It saves money on a phone call and sometimes for a quick word or two, it's not necessary to speak.I guess I just want to explore and share my thoughts on using texting to communicate when you really do need to talk.I have been guilty, if I can call it that, of trying to get my point across when I was peed off about something in my previous relationships.My intention? To tell him how I feel and then shut him out because I need to run away for a while! My defence plan "You are gonna know how I feel, but you are gonna have to run after me to fix it!" Crazy huh! But that's me.Think about how you use texting when you want to say something but are and this is the point, afraid to speak the words.I have learnt about two styles of behaving in conflict in relationships.I will call these two folk, minimisers and maximisers for the purpose of illustration.Maximisers in conflict are usually the more emotionally flowery people who want to talk about everything to sort problems out and they only feel connected when their partner listens and hears them.Maximisers can be overbearing and intense and sometimes can scare their partners with huge outbursts of emotional lava.Texting trends tend to be "hot pursuit" style.A new client said of his girlfriend recently, "She freaks me out sometimes and literally stalks me on text! I feel trapped and pretty intimidated and can't escape, so I shut her out to get some peace." This is classic!The opposite style, minimising, is when in conflict, that person's style is to shut down and not talk about what's bothering them in the moment.They believe they are the logical rational ones that never start the rows and they feel they are often the more mature partner in the relationship.Their texting style is often short and sweet and boy, lots of minimisers use texting to keep their maximising partner, at bay.I have a friend who loves texting when her man "starts" cause she can tell him how she feels then turn the phone off to control his octopus style clinging.Sounding familiar? So in this way texting can nurture your tendency in conflict to remain where you are in your style of learned behaviour i.E.Maximising or minimising.My main point is that texting in conflict will usually inflame rather than smooth, because we can so easily take the words the wrong way.I will agree that sometimes a quick text to say "darling, I feel a little emotional about what you said earlier, can we talk later?" is ok, because it is stating how you feel rather than chucking a great big hang grenade criticism.But remember with texting, it is the words you use that can aggravate or smooth.So if you feel utterly compelled to text.Explain how you feel, NOT what your beau is doing to pee you off.Blaming and shaming never works and on text it's a very detached way of putting your point across.I had an emotionally intense relationship 3 years ago, where most of my more difficult conversations were on text because I felt afraid of his response.I can't talk for his feelings about it, but it was almost like I couldn't face him for fear that he would leave me at some point.I used to get really upset if he blocked me out and shut down when he was angry, so I would "fire" a text to try and wound him in his rabbit hole, then I would shut down and retreat hoping and praying he would come get me and make it better.Oh what a survival strategy!Let me go on to use an analogy here.Your world of you, is like an island.On your island, with all your thoughts and feelings and the way you see life, your partner cannot possibly know exactly where you are at because they are on their own island.When you send a text, imagine if you will that it is a flare, it lands on their island and can and will be received with their views and feelings and opinions about what the message is that you have sent.Not how you originally intended.Get me? The only way to really hear your partner or for them to hear you, is to visit the other's island and be fully present with them, leaving your island behind.This is what I teach in my work.Good old fashioned, heart centred connection where verbal communication, face to face, is the only true way to achieve a healthy conscious relational space.So often texting can be muddled in its "received" mode.Taking it the wrong way is common.How many times have you got it wrong when someone has texted you and how many times did your receiver take it the "wrong" way from you? Easy to do.Our previous experiences create a filtering system in our minds and certain words or messages will be absorbed, filtered and according to your values and beliefs you will react according to what your resulting "output" is.Having a conversation with your partner can ease the ability to take it the way to choose, rather than the way they meant it.Our stories about what we think is coming from our partner can be way off the mark, so please, if you to need to say something delicate, say it don't text it.It saves a lot of hassle in the long run!Finally.The next time, as you start to send a text to your loved one in a bad moment, perhaps after a row or even before one, stop and think a little.Does your relationship deserve to have you contributing in this way or would it be better to tell your loved one face to face how you feel about what is happening?Enjoy texting for the fun of it.Leave the tougher bits to the bravery of talking.Go on.You can do it!
In the postscript to the preface of Jude The Obscure, Thomas Hardy quotes a German reviewer of the novel.Sue Bridehead, the heroine, was described there as "the first delineation in fiction of the woman.Of the feminist movement - the slight pale 'bachelor' girl - the intellectualised, emancipated bundle of nerves" that modern conditions were producing.The book's reception 'cured' Hardy of the desire to write another novel, and all of the above happened before the dawn of the twentieth century.Jude The Obscure is a novel about relationships within marriage.Hardy's opinion was that legal ties between men and women ought to be breakable once the union had achieved dysfunction.It was an opinion that differed from that expected by the age.It prompted a bishop to burn the book, rather than the writer, who was unavailable at the time.Thomas Hardy's Jude Fawley was adopted into a baker's family, and harboured an ambition to self-teach himself into a classical education in Christminster's learned colleges.His schoolmaster, Mr Phillotson helped a little.Jude's ambition was always somewhat far fetched, though he applied himself diligently to his studies and achieved a great deal.In his formative years, he also learned the stonemason's trade to allow the earning of a living.On a country walk he then took up with Arabella, the daughter of a pig farmer.Having found himself stuck, he tried to learn how to stick real pigs but somehow the penetration never came easy.The couple parted, apparently childless.Sue, Jude's cousin and thus a co-member of a family reputed for its marital failures, was always a soul mate for the young man.But she never quite seemed up to the task of giving herself, giving of her self.Thus, when she married Phillotson, the much older, staid and perhaps already failed schoolmaster, his lack of demands on her fit exactly with her assumptions about how married life would progress.Sue certainly knew what she wanted from life and did everything in her power to secure it.Safety, security, respectability, perhaps property were top of her list.Arabella, the pig farming barmaid who lured the nave Jude, was similarly single-minded in pursuing her own, rather different interests.After leaving Jude, she takes up with a new man and hops it to Australia, apparently for good.Sue and Phillotson finally dissolve their marriage by mutual consent to allow Sue to pursue her desires.She and Jude, who love one another dearly, then make their lives together.They do not marry.They live as brother and sister, with lust on one side of the bed and revulsion on the other.A child arrives by train.The wizened-looking boy is Jude's, Arabella claiming she was pregnant before the couple separated.Sue and Jude offer a home for the waif, and then two more whose family fortunes have fallen on bad times.And then tragedy appears.Their world falls apart.Sue craves the responsibility of marriage, perhaps merely for the respectability she has lost, so she returns to a new marriage with Phillotson.As before, it's just for the show of it.Jude develops consumption.What happens in Jude The Obscure is the meat of the book.How it happens is less important than how the characters justify their actions, effectively their reactions to what life offers in response to their imagined aspirations.How these people seek to justify themselves tells much of what they think is expected of them by others, by the society at large.Thus the novel appears to be a study - even a treatise - in selfishness melded with self-obsession, but this is always shrouded in a coded justification that cites the need for social, societal, even sanctified heavenly approval.In many ways, Jude The Obscure's men are its victims, its women coldly triumphant, its tone vaguely misogynist.It has little time for the establishment, which is often portrayed as a conspiracy to promote misery.Christminster, Oxford in other words, is thought of as a great centre of high and fearless thought.But in reality it is "a nest of commonplace schoolmasters whose characteristic is timid obsequiousness to tradition." The alternative, self-congratulatory selfishness did not appear to be much better.Thus Jude The Obscure has much to say about our own time, about public virtue and the need to live according to the socially expected.
Do you believe in ghosts?They are mostly unseen.Unnoticeable.And believe it or not they are moving behind the scenes in the publishing industry.If you're lucky you might catch a fleeting glimpse.They are officially called 'ghostwriters'.A ghostwriter is a writer who writes on an assigned topic under someone else's name, with their consent.They often write books completely from scratch but sometimes their work involves rewriting or polishing an existing work.Most books by famous personalities are actually written by ghostwriters.When you see an autobiography or memoir from a politician, businessperson, or celebrity, chances are that it has been written by a ghostwriter.Here are a few examples.The autobiography "Ronald Reagan. An American Life" was ghosted by Robert Lindsey."Learning to Sing", the autobiography of American Idol star Clay Aiken, was written with ghostwriter Allison Glock.The autobiographies of Doris Day and Sophie Loren were written by A.E.Hotchner.So how popular is ghostwriting? Statistics are hard to come by since many people don't want to reveal that their book is ghosted.Some industry estimates suggest that up to fifty percent of all non-fiction books are ghostwritten.A client may decide to hire a ghostwriter because the client does not have any writing talent or because they are too busy.Ghostwriters, for their part, are usually well-established writers already, and are selected on that basis.What do Ghostwriters Write?Ghostwriters are hired to write many types of documents, from autobiographies for famous personalities to e-books for internet marketing gurus, and even letters for politicians.They also write fiction.Sometimes it is for a series of books written by several ghostwriters under one name, as with the stories of Nancy Drew or The Hardy Boys.Ghostwriters also continue to write novels under the name of popular authors who have died, as in the case of Robert Ludlum.Is Ghostwriting Ethical?Although ghostwriting is a widely accepted practice within the publishing industry, some people outside of the industry complain that ghostwriting is deceptive.But that is not necessarily true.Consider for a moment the ghostwriting process.The client is the author of the work in that they are the person who is really behind the content.It is the client's ideas, the client's stories and experiences.It is the client's words recorded on hours of interview tapes.The ghostwriter is a professional consultant providing expertise in the area of bringing together all the information, organizing it, and writing it up in a way that will produce a marketable and readable masterpiece.What Skills does a Ghostwriter Need?A ghostwriter must be a good writer.He or she should also have good interviewing skills, since they will spend many hours and days interviewing clients.They should have the ability to ask good questions that will draw out the best aspects of a story.Another skill - which may need to be developed - is the ability to maintain the client's voice so that the book reads like the client, not the ghostwriter.How is a Ghostwriter Paid?Ghostwriters usually charge a flat fee for their work.Sometimes they will reduce their ghostwriting fee in return for a percentage (perhaps 25-50%) of the royalties, or in rare cases they may waive their fee in return for a percentage of royalties.The advantage of a flat fee is that a ghostwriter knows exactly how much he or she will be paid.The risk of relying on royalties is that even if the book is well-written, the ghostwriter has no control over the book's marketing and promotion.Does a Ghostwriter get Any Credit?More often than not, the public never knows that a book was ghostwritten.Sometimes ghostwriters are even legally bound to not reveal that they have ghosted a particular book.Occasionally ghostwriters will receive some credit.The writer's name may appear on the cover as a co-author or it might read "as told to Jenny Ghost." Another way to thank the ghostwriter is under the acknowledgements, for example ".And thanks to Joe Ghoul without whom this book would never have been completed".Are You Thinking of Becoming a Ghostwriter?It could be an excellent career move.You've probably heard it said that everyone has a book inside them.Well, the fact of the matter is that not everyone has the time or the skill to write it.As long as there is a story to be told, ghostwriters will continue to be in demand.
