On a windy afternoon in early spring Rory MacLean fell to earth in Anissari, a village surrounded by white mountains in an ancient corner of Crete. MacLean's mother had died only a few months earlier and he had been engulfed by grief. But an old desire had also taken hold to build and fly an aeroplane. And so he set off to the land where Daedalus and Icarus had made their maiden flight and settled in to days of eating lamb and drinking wine with his Cretan neighbours and, with their help, attempting to build a Woodhopper from scratch and make it fly.
'Drawn on by his eagerness for the open sky, he left his guide and soared upwards...' Ovid tells the tales of Theseus and the Minotaur, Daedalus and Icarus, the Calydonian Boar-Hunt, and many other famous myths. Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th-century California and the Russian steppe. Here are stories lyrical and savage; poems epic and intimate; essays satirical and inspirational; and ideas that have shaped the lives of millions. Ovid (c.43 BCE-17 CE). Ovid's other works available in Penguin Classics are The Erotic Poems, Fasti, Heroides and Metamorphoses.
A group wake up, alone in space, their homes gone, taken from them. However their homes aren't the only things to be taken, not only has their home been wiped away and taken by others, they have no memory of how anything has happened. Embark on their journey to find the truth of their home, and who they are with Icarus Falling.
"In book two of the fast-paced Icarus Corps series, the team wages war on the Conglomeration--and this battle may be the final one. The rapacious Confederation has taken their war to our solar system. Now that the human and PAC forces won a decisive battle on the moon, they need to try to head off the coming armada before their overpowering strength is amassed and The Icarus Corps is once again on the front line. Book two in The Icarus Corps, Titan's Fall continues Devin's adventures as he wards off a fierce race of alien conquerors"--
Three interconnected short-stories set in Paris explore the issue of choice, survival and transformation. In the first story, a young man on his first business trip is waylaid by an aberrant elevator. In the pivotal tale, a young scientist re-imagines the Greek myth of Icarus and his fall to earth. In the final story, a young woman who cannot recall her own name relates the fantastical tale of a girl who can fly.
In The Icarus Syndrome, Peter Beinart tells a tale as old as the Greeks - a story about the seductions of success. Beinart describes Washington on the eve of three wars - World War I, Vietnam and Iraq - three moments when American leaders decided they could remake the world in their image. Each time, leading intellectuals declared that history was over, and the spread of democracy was inevitable. Each time, a president held the nation in the palm of his hand. And each time, a war conceived in arrogance brought untold tragedy. In dazzling colour, Beinart portrays three extraordinary generations: the progressives who took America into World War I, led by Woodrow Wilson, the lonely preacher's son who became the closest thing to a political messiah the world had ever seen. The Camelot intellectuals who took America into Vietnam, led by Lyndon Johnson, who lay awake night after night shaking with fear that his countrymen considered him weak. And George W. Bush and the post-cold war neoconservatives, the romantic bullies who believed they could bludgeon the Middle East and liberate it at the same time. Like Icarus, each of these generations crafted 'wings' - a theory about America's relationship to the world. They flapped carefully at first, but gradually lost their inhibitions until, giddy with success, they flew into the sun. But every era also brought new leaders and thinkers who found wisdom in pain. They reconciled American optimism - our belief that anything is possible - with the realities of a world that will never fully bend to our will. In their struggles lie the seeds of American renewal today. Based on years of research, The Icarus Syndrome is a provocative and strikingly original account of hubris in the American century - and how we learn from the tragedies that result.
It�s Clara who�s desperate to enter the labyrinth and it�s Clara who�s bright, strong, and fearless enough to take on any challenge. It�s no surprise when she�s chosen. But so is the girl who has always lived in her shadow. Together they enter. Within minutes, they are torn apart forever. Now the girl who has never left the city walls must fight to survive in a living nightmare, where one false turn with who to trust means a certain dead end.
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, by Zsolt Alapi, tells the story of an immigrant who has left the United States during the Vietnam War and who tries to find a home in Montreal, which for him is initially an alien culture. Subtly linked as a first-person narrative that travels between the present and the past, the book also explores the narrator?s psyche as he attempts to find meaning in his passion for art and literature. Rare is the Canadian work of fiction that explores so in- depth the relationship of literature to the psychological, sexual, and personal makeup of an individual while considering at the same time the complexity of exile, both physical and spiritual.
Taking risks and exploring the unknown are as vital to human beings as our need for air, for growth, for affi rmation that we exist for something. These 19 stories reach deep into humanity’s compulsion for the rush of new experiences. But gently, because it’s not only records we might shatter. When does adventure turn to recklessness? What happens when we toe the edge above the void and face the big silence, where we might see God -- and die without warning? The Icarus Syndrome seeks to capture our push for more and hold it to the light, lofty and free, for as long as we dare tempt the downward slip. Both are possible; only one is assured.
