Dreadful

In 1656, a planter in colonial Maryland tortured and killed one of his slaves, an Angolan man named Antonio who refused to work the fields. Over three centuries later, a Detroit labor organizer named Simon Owens watched as strikebreakers wielding bats and lead pipes beat his fellow autoworkers for protesting their inhumane working conditions. Antonio and Owens had nothing in common but the color of their skin and the economic injustices they battled—yet the former is what defines them in America’s consciousness. In A Dreadful Deceit, award-winning historian Jacqueline Jones traces the lives of these two men and four other African Americans to reveal how the concept of race has obscured the factors that truly divide and unite us. Expansive, visionary, and provocative, A Dreadful Deceit explodes the pernicious fiction that has shaped American history.

A fascinating study of how elite white men in eighteenth-century Massachusetts incorporated the ethos of politeness into the law of criminal speech.

Shade, a sassy sprite, never fit in at her village, so when her treehouse burns down she sets out to find a new home and, with luck, others who love books and learning.

American author John Horne Burns (1916–1953) led a brief and controversial life, and as a writer, transformed many of his darkest experiences into literature. Burns was born in Massachusetts, graduated from Andover and Harvard, and went on to teach English at the Loomis School, a boarding school for boys in Windsor, Connecticut. During World War II, he was stationed in Africa and Italy, and worked mainly in military intelligence. His first novel, The Gallery (1947), based on his wartime experiences, is a critically acclaimed novel and one of the first to unflinchingly depict gay life in the military. The Gallery sold half a million copies upon publication, but never again would Burns receive that kind of critical or popular attention. Dreadful follows Burns, from his education at the best schools to his final years of drinking and depression in Italy. With intelligence and insight, David Margolick examines Burns’s moral ambivalence toward the behavior of American soldiers stationed with him in Naples, and the scandal surrounding his second novel, Lucifer with a Book, an unflattering portrayal of his experiences at Loomis.

My name is not actually Penny Dreadful. It is Penelope Jones. The 'Dreadful' bit is my dad's JOKE. But in fact I am completely UNDREADFUL. It is just that sometimes my BRILLIANT IDEAS turn into DISASTERS. E.g. I didn't mean for Dad to have to go to a crucial meeting with a plastic flowerpot stuck on his head, I was only trying to invent a Patented Brain Massaging Helmet. Plus how was I to know that you can't do chickenpox for show-and-tell, or go to ballet class dressed as a blue cat, because even in disguise I am INCREDIBLY CONTAGIOUS! Three fantastically funny Penny Dreadful adventures in one fab book! Shortlisted for the Roald Dahl Funny Prize 2011

My name is not actually Penny Dreadful. It is Penelope Jones. The 'Dreadful' bit is my dad's JOKE. But this time I really wasn't trying to be DREADFUL... No. I was just trying to DO MY BEST, so it is completely not my fault that right now I am sort of blueish all over and so is my sister Daisy's swan outfit. And I was also really TRYING TO HELP Joshua Bottomley fall in love with Daisy by doing a science experiment on him, but I did not know that he would just go a bit pale and green and it would all turn into one BIG kerfuffle! Get ready for a taste of destruction with Penny’s third side-splitting trio of troublesome tales! The first book in the Penny Dreadful series, ‘Penny Dreadful is a Magnet for Disaster’, was shortlisted for the Roald Dahl Funny Prize

Under the headings of 'Narrative of Law and Crime' and 'Narrative of Accident and Disaster' may be found an astonishing catalogue of terrible, grisly and most dreadful Victorian events. Fires and railway disasters abound; shipwrecks, floods and 'horrible affairs' leap from every page. Some of the crimes would surprise even the most ardent fan of crime fiction - it is doubtful that so many cases of such shocking violence and awful ingenuity have been collected together in one volume since. With a terrifying tale for every day of the year, Dickens' Dreadful Almanac will delight lovers of his work everywhere.