Showing results for "James Shapiro" in Literature & Fiction

1599 was an epochal year for Shakespeare and England. During that year, Shakespeare wrote four of his most famous plays: Henry the Fifth, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, and, most remarkably, Hamlet; Elizabethans sent off an army to crush an Irish rebellion, weathered an Armada threat from Spain, gambled on a fledgling East India Company, and waited to see who would succeed their aging and childless queen.

In the years leading up to 1606, since the death of Queen Elizabeth and the arrival in England of her successor, King James of Scotland, Shakespeare's great productivity had ebbed, and it may have seemed to some that his prolific genius was a thing of the past. But that year, at age 42, he found his footing again, finishing a play he had begun the previous autumn - King Lear - then writing two other great tragedies, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra.

For nearly two centuries, the authorship of William Shakespeare's plays has been challenged by writers and artists as diverse as Sigmund Freud, Mark Twain, Henry James, Helen Keller, Orson Welles, Malcolm X, and Sir Derek Jacobi. How could a young man from rural Warwickshire, lacking a university education, write some of the greatest works in the English language?

James Gleick's story begins at the turn of the 20th century, with the young H. G. Wells writing and rewriting the fantastic tale that became his first book, an international sensation: The Time Machine. A host of forces were converging to transmute the human understanding of time, some philosophical and some technological - the electric telegraph, the steam railroad, the discovery of buried civilizations, and the perfection of clocks.

The final issue of 2020...we all dealt with the trauma of the year in different ways. For creatives, they expressed themselves in words and images. Here are stories that deal with race and bias, with fear and death. How we deal with losing a loved one...and an unloved one. There is some laughter in the mix, as well as some tears. Poetry, reviews, interviews, and a graphic short come together with outstanding illustrations to make a bit of brilliance here in the darkest month of the darkest year many of us have ever experienced.

In war-torn Syria, the lone survivor of a massacre is pulled from beneath a pile of bodies. She is given one instruction: “Find Jed Walker.” Ex-CIA, Walker is a man who thought he was long out of the game. Discovering a terror outfit is smuggling people from the Middle East into the United States, he is drawn back in. At first Walker thinks these human traffickers are driven purely by profit and greed, but soon learns their motives are much worse—and they have ties to the highest levels of power.

The world is under cyber attack. The secretive terror outfit known as Zodiac is preparing to unleash chaos. The options for the hackers are endless. From massive data breaches, takedowns of critical infrastructure, and commandeering military hardware, nothing networked is safe. Knowing where they will strike is half the battle. The only thing certain is their intent to create a devastating global catastrophe. The US president has the power to enact the Internet Freedom Act—the “Kill Switch”—and turn off the Net, which will stop the attacks. But it’s not that simple.

Jed Walker, ex-CIA, is an outsider back in the game. He’s been chasing down a sinister group code-named Zodiac that the big guns—MI5, CIA, the Pentagon—have failed to eradicate. But as Walker follows the trail of bodies, uncovering secrets and making connections he’s not supposed to make, he finds the answers are closer to home than he ever imagined. Revenge is the obvious motive—but nothing is ever that simple in love and war. Can Walker find who’s responsible before the body count grows? Can he stop another terror attack before more innocents suffer?