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The collections of the Advocates Library, with the exception of its legal books and manuscripts, were given by the Advocates to the National Library of Scotland in 1925.
Renowned journalist and biographer Gitta Sereny covered the Mary Bell case in the 1960s and wrote about it at the time. Mary, then eleven, was charged and subsequently convicted of the manslaughter of two younger boys. Following Mary's release on licence, and in collaboration with her, Sereny provides a thought-provoking biography of someone who was considered to have committed an evil crime of unparalleled horror. She brilliantly delves into the mind of this complex and damaged human being and reveals how little was done to investigate Mary's own troubled circumstances. A powerfully disturbing book, it will resonate with all who read it.
The twelfth-century French poet Chrétien de Troyes is a major figure in European literature. His courtly romances fathered the Arthurian tradition and influenced countless other poets in England as well as on the continent. Yet because of the difficulty of capturing his swift-moving style in translation, English-speaking audiences are largely unfamiliar with the pleasures of reading his poems. Now, for the first time, an experienced translator of medieval verse who is himself a poet provides a translation of Chrétien’s major poem, Yvain, in verse that fully and satisfyingly captures the movement, the sense, and the spirit of the Old French original. Yvain is a courtly romance with a moral tenor; it is ironic and sometimes bawdy; the poetry is crisp and vivid. In addition, the psychological and the socio-historical perceptions of the poem are of profound literary and historical importance, for it evokes the emotions and the values of a flourishing, vibrant medieval past.
The invisible world of child prostitution in America, England, and West Germany is fully explored here for the first time. Gitta Sereny's profoundly disturbing book is the result of two years of intensive interviews and research during which she met with, spoke with, and got to know child prostitutes here and abroad as well as their parents, their pimps, their lovers, and the teachers, psychologists, and police who are struggling to help. Writing with a strong commitment to the lives of these children, she gives us in detail the stories of ten girls and two boys. All of them are runaways for whom it was (actually or emotionally) impossible to return to home and family--and for whom the only ...
JACK LONDON (1876-1916), American novelist, born in San Francisco, the son of an itinerant astrologer and a spiritualist mother. He grew up in poverty, scratching a living in various legal and illegal ways -robbing the oyster beds, working in a canning factory and a jute mill, serving aged 17 as a common sailor, and taking part in the Klondike gold rush of 1897. This various experience provided the material for his works, and made him a socialist. "The son of the Wolf" (1900), the first of his collections of tales, is based upon life in the Far North, as is the book that brought him recognition, "The Call of the Wild" (1903), which tells the story of the dog Buck, who, after his master ́s death, is lured back to the primitive world to lead a wolf pack. Many other tales of struggle, travel, and adventure followed, including "The Sea-Wolf" (1904), "White Fang" (1906), "South Sea Tales" (1911), and "Jerry of the South Seas" (1917). One of London ́s most interesting novels is the semi-autobiographical "Martin Eden" (1909). He also wrote socialist treatises, autobiographical essays, and a good deal of journalism.