The Last Drop

Description

A humorous tale about a New York bartender who receives mysteriously special potions from Borneo which can make people grow or shrink depending on which one they drink. When our hero uses the potion to deal with some unfriendly mobsters, the results are comic and riotously unpredictable—including an unexpected run-in with a dogfish.

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A humorous tale about a New York bartender who receives mysteriously special potions from Borneo which can make people grow or shrink depending on which one they drink. When our hero uses the potion to deal with some unfriendly mobsters, the results are comic and riotously unpredictable—including an unexpected run-in with a dogfish.

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The Ancient Engineers

Product Details

• ISBN13: 9780345482877
• Notes: Trade mark NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
• Educate: New

Description

From the dawn of history to the rise of the scientific method in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, invention and technology advanced with painful slowness. The reason was not that men were stupid during those thousands of years—it was the fact that most people were simply too busy trying to keep alive. The imagination and daring that leisure and security could divert to other ends were limited to a tiny group. It is about these brave men—whose genius enabled the Egyptians to build their pyramids, the Phoenicians to cross stormy seas, the Romans to erect magnificent public buildings—that this carefully researched and fascinatingly written account of the advance of early technology has been written.

Mr. de Camp describes the methods used by early irrigators, architects, and military engineers to build and maintain structures to serve their rulers' wants. He tells, for example, how the Pharaohs erected obelisks and pyramids, how Nebuchadnezzar fortified Babylon, how Dionysios' ordnance department invented the catapult, how the Chinese built the Great Wall, and how the Romans fashioned their roads, baths, sewers, and aqueducts. He recounts many intriguing anecdotes: an Assyrian king putting up no-parking signs in Nineveh; Plato inventing a water clock with an alarm to signal the start of his classes; Heron of Alexandria designing a coin-operated holy-water fountain; a Chinese emperor composing a poem to be inscribed on a clock invented by one of his civil servants.

The Ancient Engineers will delight students of technology and invention for its accurate portrayal of the foundations of modern engineering as well as lovers of history for its penetrating look at the material background of civilization and its unusual explanations of the world's social evolution.

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A reasonably scholarly but nonetheless accessible history of the great engineering feats of the human race up to the Renaissance, including a great chapter on Oriental architecture, a topic often neglected by such surveys.

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Conan and the Spider God

Description

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Lest Darkness Fall & Related Stories

Description

Rarely do books have such a great influence on a genre as Lest Darkness Fall has had on science fiction. Frequently quoted as one of the 'favorite' books of many of the masters of the field, this book by L. Sprague de Camp helped establish time-travel as a solid sub-genre of science fiction. ** An indication of the influence and longevity of the book is by the number of best-selling writers who have written stories in direct response to, or influenced by, Lest Darkness Fall. This new volume also includes three such stories by Frederik Pohl, David Drake and S. M. Stirling written over a period of forty-three years-a testament to the timelessness of the book. ** Similar, thematically, to Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, the book tells the tale of Martin Padway who, as he is walking around in modern Rome, is suddenly transported though time to 6th Century Rome. Once in ancient Rome, Padway (now Martinus Paduei Quastor) embarks on an ambitious project of single-handedly changing history. ** L. Sprague de Camp was a student of history (and the author of a number of popular works on the subject). In Lest Darkness Fall he combines his extensive knowledge of the workings of ancient Rome with his extraordinary imagination to create one of the best books of time travel ever written.

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Tales from Gavagan's Bar

Description

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Conan of Aquilonia, Book 11

Description

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