Life and death of a movie theater

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Roberta Kells Dorr

"The sadness and the tenderness of life are felt so acutely in the presence of beauty, and love is revealed more in our sorrow than in our joy. -Solomon, from Solomon's Song. The wisest of all kings, beloved son of King David and his wife Bathsheba, builder of a prosperous empire, lover to many wives and concubines-King Solomon was once merely a son of David with no guarantee of ever taking the throne. On the cusp of adulthood, with no direction in life, Solomon found himself infatuated . . . in love with a lowly shepherdess, a young maiden chosen for his father to serve David in his later years. Overhead clouds ceased to discharge life-giving rain, and the anxious people looked to King David for relief from the famine. In their weakness they turned from Yahweh and sacrificed to foreign gods. But the David's eldest son, Adonijah had a plan, one that could cost the Benjamites their lives. Revenge. Solomon was still Bathsheba's eldest son and with it came certain family expectations. His mother wanted nothing less than the throne for her eldest living son. He must marry a princess first, and then he can marry any common woman he desired. Solomon struggled against family expectations and his chief rival, his own brother, Adonijah; he fought against the most disappointing aspect of his quest to become ruler. 'Love is nothing, when pitted against strength and power.'"--

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Victoria Holt [i.e. E. Hibbert

When Sarah Ashington's actress mother dies after a devastating scandal, Sarah is left at her long-lost father's rambling, ancestral estate to face the disturbing questions of her own past. Then her father's death draws her to his Ceylon plantation -- and into the shadows of a legend from which their may be no return . . .

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Irving Stone

A politically-minded young lady and an awkward lawyer marry and eventually become President Abraham Lincoln and First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln.

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Paul Debreczeny

This study of the effect of literature on readers, both as individuals and as members of social groups, focuses on Russia's national poet, Alexander Pushkin, as a model for investigating the aesthetic and social functions of literature. The individual reader's response to the literary text is demonstrated in Part One through a broad range of memoirs, diaries, and correspondences in which Russian readers recorded their reactions to Pushkin. Part Two exposes the extent to which individuals' aesthetic responses are conditioned by their social environment. The aura surrounding the personality of an author is the subject of Part Three, in which the author shows how Pushkin's death in a duel with a foreigner contributed to his emergence as a symbol of the Russian nation, and how deep-seated anxiety about national identity gave rise to the Pushkin myth and to the canonization of the poet as martyr. Throughout the book, theoretical arguments are buttressed by close readings of Pushkin's works, especially The Prisoner of the Caucasus, Eugene Onegin, Poltava, Egyptian Nights, and several lyric poems.