1.
American Pastoral (film)
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American Pastoral is a 2016 American crime-drama film directed by Ewan McGregor and written by John Romano, based on the 1997 novel of the same name by Philip Roth. The film stars McGregor, Jennifer Connelly, Dakota Fanning, Peter Riegert, Rupert Evans, Uzo Aduba, Molly Parker, principal photography began on September 21,2015, in Pittsburgh. The film had its premiere on September 9,2016, at the 2016 Toronto International Film Festival was released in the United States on October 21,2016. At the 45th-year reunion of the class of Weequahic High School in Newark, New Jersey, author Nathan Zuckerman meets one of his old friends. They talk about Jerrys brother, former star athlete Seymour Swede Levov, in a flashback, Swede persuades his father, glovemaking magnate Lou Levov, to let him marry his high school sweetheart, beauty queen Dawn Dwyer. Lou is skeptical because Dawn is a devout Roman Catholic, and they have a daughter, Meredith, or Merry, and settle in the town of Old Rimrock, where they acquire a large farm. For much of her life, Merry struggles with a stuttering problem, by the time Merry reaches high school, she has become increasingly radicalized as the Vietnam War rages, and frequently goes to New York City to take part in antiwar protests. Fearing for her safety, Swede urges Merry to channel her energy into protesting against the war at home, a few days later, the local post office and gas station are blown up by a massive bomb, killing the gas stations owner. Merry disappears soon afterward, and is the suspect in the bombing. She isnt heard from again until Rita Cohen, a student at the Wharton School, comes ostensibly to do a study on the glovemaking industry, Swede meets Rita in a hotel, but spurns Ritas attempts to seduce him. The strain of Merrys disappearance briefly sends Dawn into a mental hospital and she gets a facelift soon afterward, and tries to get Swede to forget about Merry. Years later, when leaving a gallery crawl, Swede spots Rita on the street, Rita takes him to a skid-row area of Newark where Merry now lives. Here, Swede asks and Merry confesses to having made and planted 3 bombs and she also tells of how after escaping capture, she moved into the underground, when she was raped repeatedly. Merry wants to withdraw from society, as a penance for her crimes and she becomes a Jain and vows a life of non-violence. She has no desire to home even when Swede tries to trigger her childhood memories at a subsequent visit. We then see him in a series of shots through the years, growing older, outside the house where he found Merry. Back in the present, Nathan and Jerry attend Swedes funeral, answering himself how we know were alive, it is because we realize were wrong about everyone all the time. As the guests are about to leave, Merry arrives, having not since seen her father, Ewan McGregor as Seymour Swede Levov, a former high school star athlete and a successful Jewish American businessman
2.
Philip Roth
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Philip Milton Roth is an American novelist. He first gained attention with the 1959 novella Goodbye, Columbus, Roth is one of the most awarded American writers of his generation. His books have received the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle award. He received a Pulitzer Prize for his 1997 novel American Pastoral, which featured one of his characters, Nathan Zuckerman. The Human Stain, another Zuckerman novel, was awarded the United Kingdoms WH Smith Literary Award for the best book of the year, in 2001, in Prague, Roth received the inaugural Franz Kafka Prize. Philip Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey, and grew up in its Weequahic neighborhood and he is the second child of Bess and Herman Roth, an insurance broker. His family was Jewish, and his parents were first-generation Americans and he graduated from Newarks Weequahic High School in or around 1950. It has provided the focus for the fiction of Philip Roth, the Weequahic Yearbook describes Roth as A boy of real intelligence, combined with wit and common sense. Roth was known as a comedian during his time at school, Roth attended Bucknell University, where he earned a B. A. magna cum laude in English and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He pursued graduate studies at the University of Chicago, where he received an M. A. in English literature in 1955, Roth taught creative writing at the University of Iowa and Princeton University. He continued his career at the University of Pennsylvania, where he taught comparative literature before retiring from teaching in 1991. While at Chicago, Roth met the novelist Saul Bellow, as well as Margaret Martinson in 1956 and their separation in 1963, along with Martinsons death in a car crash in 1968, left a lasting mark on Roths literary output. Specifically, Martinson was the inspiration for characters in several of Roths novels, including Lucy Nelson in When She Was Good. Events in Roths personal life have occasionally been the subject of media scrutiny, on his religious views, Roth is an atheist, stating, When the whole world doesnt believe in God, itll be a great place. He also said during an interview to The Guardian, Im exactly the opposite of religious and its all a big lie. and Its not a neurotic thing, but the miserable record of religion. I dont even want to talk about it, its not interesting to talk about the sheep referred to as believers and its filled with fear and loneliness and anxiety—and I never needed religion to save me. In 1990, Roth married his companion, English actress Claire Bloom. In 1994 they separated, and in 1996 Bloom published a memoir, Leaving a Dolls House, certain aspects of I Married a Communist have been regarded by critics as veiled rebuttals to accusations put forth in Blooms memoir
3.
United States
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Forty-eight of the fifty states and the federal district are contiguous and located in North America between Canada and Mexico. The state of Alaska is in the northwest corner of North America, bordered by Canada to the east, the state of Hawaii is an archipelago in the mid-Pacific Ocean. The U. S. territories are scattered about the Pacific Ocean, the geography, climate and wildlife of the country are extremely diverse. At 3.8 million square miles and with over 324 million people, the United States is the worlds third- or fourth-largest country by area, third-largest by land area. It is one of the worlds most ethnically diverse and multicultural nations, paleo-Indians migrated from Asia to the North American mainland at least 15,000 years ago. European colonization began in the 16th century, the United States emerged from 13 British colonies along the East Coast. Numerous disputes between Great Britain and the following the Seven Years War led to the American Revolution. On July 4,1776, during the course of the American Revolutionary War, the war ended in 1783 with recognition of the independence of the United States by Great Britain, representing the first successful war of independence against a European power. The current constitution was adopted in 1788, after the Articles of Confederation, the first ten amendments, collectively named the Bill of Rights, were ratified in 1791 and designed to guarantee many fundamental civil liberties. During the second half of the 19th century, the American Civil War led to the end of slavery in the country. By the end of century, the United States extended into the Pacific Ocean. The Spanish–American War and World War I confirmed the status as a global military power. The end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 left the United States as the sole superpower. The U. S. is a member of the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Organization of American States. The United States is a developed country, with the worlds largest economy by nominal GDP. It ranks highly in several measures of performance, including average wage, human development, per capita GDP. While the U. S. economy is considered post-industrial, characterized by the dominance of services and knowledge economy, the United States is a prominent political and cultural force internationally, and a leader in scientific research and technological innovations. In 1507, the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller produced a map on which he named the lands of the Western Hemisphere America after the Italian explorer and cartographer Amerigo Vespucci
4.
Fiction
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Fiction is the classification for any story or similar work derived from imagination—in other words, not based strictly on history or fact. Fiction does not refer to a mode or genre, unless used in its narrowest sense to mean a literary narrative. Instead, the context of fiction is generally open to interpretation, characters and events within a fictional work may even be openly set in their own context entirely separate from the known universe, a fictional universe. Science fiction, for example, predicts or supposes technologies that are not realities at the time of the works creation, for example, Jules Vernes novel From the Earth to the Moon was published in 1865 and only in 1969 did astronaut Neil Armstrong first land on the moon. Historical fiction places imaginary characters into real historical events, in the early historical novel Waverley, Sir Walter Scotts fictional character Edward Waverley meets a figure from history, Bonnie Prince Charlie, and takes part in the Battle of Prestonpans. Some works of fiction are slightly or greatly re-imagined based on some originally true story, often, even when the author claims the fictional story is basically true, there may be artificial additions and subtractions from the true story to make it more interesting. One such example would be Tim OBriens The Things They Carried, creators of fantasy sometimes introduce entire imaginary creatures or beings such as dragons and fairies. In terms of the separation between fiction and non-fiction, the lines are now commonly understood as blurred, showing more overlap than mutual exclusion. Even fiction usually has elements of, or grounding in, truth, also, infinite fictional possibilities themselves signal the impossibility of fully knowing reality, provocatively demonstrating that there is no criterion to measure constructs of reality. The Internet has had a impact on the creation and distribution of fiction. Also, digital libraries such as Project Gutenberg make public domain texts more readily available, the combination of inexpensive home computers, the Internet and the creativity of its users has also led to new forms of fiction, such as interactive computer games or computer-generated comics. Countless forums for fan fiction can be online, where loyal followers of specific fictional realms create and distribute derivative stories. Types of literary fiction in prose, Short story, A work of at least 2,000 words, the boundary between a long short story and a novella is vague. Novella, A work of at least 17,500 words, joseph Conrads Heart of Darkness is an example of a novella. Novel, A work of 50,000 words or more, cartoonist Character Fiction writing Legend Mythology Non-fiction Pseudohistory Eco, Umberto 2009. On the ontology of fictional characters, A semiotic approach
5.
History of the United States
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The date of the start of the history of the United States is a subject of debate among historians. In recent decades American schools and universities typically have shifted back in time to more on the colonial period. Indigenous people lived in what is now the United States for thousands of years before European colonists began to arrive, mostly from England, the Spanish built small settlements in Florida and the Southwest, and the French along the Mississippi River and the Gulf Coast. By the 1770s, thirteen British colonies contained two and a million people along the Atlantic coast east of the Appalachian Mountains. After the end of the French and Indian Wars in the 1760s, Tax resistance, especially the Boston Tea Party, led to punitive laws by Parliament designed to end self-government in Massachusetts. American Patriots adhered to an ideology called republicanism that emphasized civic duty, virtue. Armed conflict began in 1775 as Patriots drove the royal officials out of every colony and assembled in mass meetings, in 1776, the Second Continental Congress declared that there was a new, independent nation, the United States of America, not just a collection of disparate colonies. With large-scale military and financial support from France and the leadership of General George Washington. The peace treaty of 1783 gave the new nation the land east of the Mississippi River, the central government established by the Articles of Confederation proved ineffectual at providing stability, as it had no authority to collect taxes and had no executive officer. Congress called a convention to meet secretly in Philadelphia in 1787 and it wrote a new Constitution, which was adopted in 1789. In 1791, a Bill of Rights was added to guarantee inalienable rights, with Washington as the first president and Alexander Hamilton his chief political and financial adviser, a strong central government was created. When Thomas Jefferson became president he purchased the Louisiana Territory from France, a second and final war with Britain was fought in 1812. Encouraged by the notion of Manifest Destiny, federal territory expanded all the way to the Pacific, the U. S. always was large in terms of area, but its population was small, only 4 million in 1790. Population growth was rapid, reaching 7.2 million in 1810,32 million in 1860,76 million in 1900,132 million in 1940, Economic growth in terms of overall GDP was even faster. However, compared to European powers, the military strength was relatively limited in peacetime before 1940. The expansion was driven by a quest for land for yeoman farmers. The expansion of slavery was increasingly controversial and fueled political and constitutional battles, the 1860 presidential election of Republican Abraham Lincoln was on a platform of ending the expansion of slavery and putting it on a path to extinction. Seven cotton-based deep South slave states seceded and later founded the Confederacy months before Lincolns inauguration, No nation ever recognized the Confederacy, but it opened the war by attacking Fort Sumter in 1861
6.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
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Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is an educational and trade publisher in the United States. Headquartered in Bostons Back Bay, it publishes textbooks, instructional materials, assessments, reference works. The company was known as Houghton Mifflin Company but changed its name following the 2007 acquisition of Harcourt Publishing. Prior to March 2010, it was a subsidiary of Education Media and Publishing Group Limited, in 1832, William Ticknor and James Thomas Fields had gathered an impressive list of writers, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau. The duo formed a relationship with Riverside Press, a Boston printing company owned by Henry Oscar Houghton. Shortly after, Houghton also founded a company with partner George Mifflin. The company still had debt from when it merged from Houghton, Osgood and Company, in 1884, James D. Hurd, the son of Melancthon Hurd became a partner. Three people in 1888 became partners as well, James Murray Kay, Thurlow Weed Barnes, shortly thereafter the company established an Educational Department, and from 1891 to 1908 sales of educational materials increased by 500 percent. Soon after 1916, Houghton Mifflin became involved in publishing standardized tests and testing materials, the company was the fourth-largest educational publisher in the United States in 1921. In 1961, Houghton Mifflin famously passed on Julia Childs Mastering the Art of French Cooking, giving it up to Alfred A. Knopf who later published it in 1962. It went on to become a success and is considered by many to be the bible of French cooking. Houghton Mifflins strategic error was depicted in the 2009 film Julie & Julia, in 1967, Houghton Mifflin became a publicly traded company on the New York Stock Exchange under the stock symbol HTN. Under president Nader F. Darehshori Houghton Mifflin acquired in 1994 for $138 million McDougal Littell, a publisher of secondary school materials. Heath and Company, a publisher of educational resources. In 1996, the company created their Great Source Education Group to combine the supplemental material product lines of their School Division and these two companies. In 1998, HMH announced a sub-brand called LOGAL Software, which was to release a new line of interactive science software called Science Gateways, as of 2017, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is offering the Logal Science brand as a licensing opportunity on its website. Mergers and acquisitions activities have had effects on this company. In 2001, Houghton Mifflin was acquired by French media giant Vivendi Universal for $2.2 billion including assumed debt, on December 22,2006, it was announced that Riverdeep PLC had completed its acquisition of Houghton Mifflin
7.
Hardcover
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A hardcover or hardback book is one bound with rigid protective covers. It has a flexible, sewn spine which allows the book to lie flat on a surface when opened, following the ISBN sequence numbers, books of this type may be identified by the abbreviation Hbk. Hardcover books are printed on acid-free paper, and are much more durable than paperbacks. Hardcover books are more costly to manufacture. If brisk sales are anticipated, an edition of a book is typically released first. Some publishers publish paperback originals if slow hardback sales are anticipated, for very popular books these sales cycles may be extended, and followed by a mass market paperback edition typeset in a more compact size and printed on shallower, less hardy paper. In the past the release of an edition was one year after the hardback. It is very unusual for a book that was first published in paperback to be followed by a hardback, an example is the novel The Judgment of Paris by Gore Vidal, which had its revised edition of 1961 first published in paperback, and later in hardcover. Hardcover books are sold at higher prices than comparable paperbacks. Hardcovers typically consist of a block, two boards, and a cloth or heavy paper covering. The pages are sewn together and glued onto a flexible spine between the boards, and it too is covered by the cloth, a paper wrapper, or dust jacket, is usually put over the binding, folding over each horizontal end of the boards. On the folded part, or flap, over the front cover is generally a blurb, the back flap is where the biography of the author can be found. Reviews are often placed on the back of the jacket, bookbinding Paperback How to make a simple Hardcover book
8.
International Standard Book Number
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The International Standard Book Number is a unique numeric commercial book identifier. An ISBN is assigned to each edition and variation of a book, for example, an e-book, a paperback and a hardcover edition of the same book would each have a different ISBN. The ISBN is 13 digits long if assigned on or after 1 January 2007, the method of assigning an ISBN is nation-based and varies from country to country, often depending on how large the publishing industry is within a country. The initial ISBN configuration of recognition was generated in 1967 based upon the 9-digit Standard Book Numbering created in 1966, the 10-digit ISBN format was developed by the International Organization for Standardization and was published in 1970 as international standard ISO2108. Occasionally, a book may appear without a printed ISBN if it is printed privately or the author does not follow the usual ISBN procedure, however, this can be rectified later. Another identifier, the International Standard Serial Number, identifies periodical publications such as magazines, the ISBN configuration of recognition was generated in 1967 in the United Kingdom by David Whitaker and in 1968 in the US by Emery Koltay. The 10-digit ISBN format was developed by the International Organization for Standardization and was published in 1970 as international standard ISO2108, the United Kingdom continued to use the 9-digit SBN code until 1974. The ISO on-line facility only refers back to 1978, an SBN may be converted to an ISBN by prefixing the digit 0. For example, the edition of Mr. J. G. Reeder Returns, published by Hodder in 1965, has SBN340013818 -340 indicating the publisher,01381 their serial number. This can be converted to ISBN 0-340-01381-8, the check digit does not need to be re-calculated, since 1 January 2007, ISBNs have contained 13 digits, a format that is compatible with Bookland European Article Number EAN-13s. An ISBN is assigned to each edition and variation of a book, for example, an ebook, a paperback, and a hardcover edition of the same book would each have a different ISBN. The ISBN is 13 digits long if assigned on or after 1 January 2007, a 13-digit ISBN can be separated into its parts, and when this is done it is customary to separate the parts with hyphens or spaces. Separating the parts of a 10-digit ISBN is also done with either hyphens or spaces, figuring out how to correctly separate a given ISBN number is complicated, because most of the parts do not use a fixed number of digits. ISBN issuance is country-specific, in that ISBNs are issued by the ISBN registration agency that is responsible for country or territory regardless of the publication language. Some ISBN registration agencies are based in national libraries or within ministries of culture, in other cases, the ISBN registration service is provided by organisations such as bibliographic data providers that are not government funded. In Canada, ISBNs are issued at no cost with the purpose of encouraging Canadian culture. In the United Kingdom, United States, and some countries, where the service is provided by non-government-funded organisations. Australia, ISBNs are issued by the library services agency Thorpe-Bowker
9.
OCLC
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The Online Computer Library Center is a US-based nonprofit cooperative organization dedicated to the public purposes of furthering access to the worlds information and reducing information costs. It was founded in 1967 as the Ohio College Library Center, OCLC and its member libraries cooperatively produce and maintain WorldCat, the largest online public access catalog in the world. OCLC is funded mainly by the fees that libraries have to pay for its services, the group first met on July 5,1967 on the campus of the Ohio State University to sign the articles of incorporation for the nonprofit organization. The group hired Frederick G. Kilgour, a former Yale University medical school librarian, Kilgour wished to merge the latest information storage and retrieval system of the time, the computer, with the oldest, the library. The goal of network and database was to bring libraries together to cooperatively keep track of the worlds information in order to best serve researchers and scholars. The first library to do online cataloging through OCLC was the Alden Library at Ohio University on August 26,1971 and this was the first occurrence of online cataloging by any library worldwide. Membership in OCLC is based on use of services and contribution of data, between 1967 and 1977, OCLC membership was limited to institutions in Ohio, but in 1978, a new governance structure was established that allowed institutions from other states to join. In 2002, the structure was again modified to accommodate participation from outside the United States. As OCLC expanded services in the United States outside of Ohio, it relied on establishing strategic partnerships with networks, organizations that provided training, support, by 2008, there were 15 independent United States regional service providers. OCLC networks played a key role in OCLC governance, with networks electing delegates to serve on OCLC Members Council, in early 2009, OCLC negotiated new contracts with the former networks and opened a centralized support center. OCLC provides bibliographic, abstract and full-text information to anyone, OCLC and its member libraries cooperatively produce and maintain WorldCat—the OCLC Online Union Catalog, the largest online public access catalog in the world. WorldCat has holding records from public and private libraries worldwide. org, in October 2005, the OCLC technical staff began a wiki project, WikiD, allowing readers to add commentary and structured-field information associated with any WorldCat record. The Online Computer Library Center acquired the trademark and copyrights associated with the Dewey Decimal Classification System when it bought Forest Press in 1988, a browser for books with their Dewey Decimal Classifications was available until July 2013, it was replaced by the Classify Service. S. The reference management service QuestionPoint provides libraries with tools to communicate with users and this around-the-clock reference service is provided by a cooperative of participating global libraries. OCLC has produced cards for members since 1971 with its shared online catalog. OCLC commercially sells software, e. g. CONTENTdm for managing digital collections, OCLC has been conducting research for the library community for more than 30 years. In accordance with its mission, OCLC makes its research outcomes known through various publications and these publications, including journal articles, reports, newsletters, and presentations, are available through the organizations website. The most recent publications are displayed first, and all archived resources, membership Reports – A number of significant reports on topics ranging from virtual reference in libraries to perceptions about library funding
