Robert Stone – författare

In a world divided by the ideological struggles of the Cold War, the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement, more than one-fifth of the people on the planet paused to watch the live transmission of the Apollo 11 mission. To watch as humanity took a giant leap forward.A companion book to the landmark documentary series on BBC TV.The journey from Cape Canaveral to the Moon was a tremendous achievement of human courage and ingenuity. It was also a long, deadly march, haunted by the possibility of catastrophic failure on the world’s stage. In an era when the most advanced portable computer weighed 70 pounds, had a 36-kilobite memory and operated on less power than a 60-watt lightbulb, the sheer audacity of the goal is breath-taking. But the triumph of imagination and the unity of the Earth that day would change the world.Based on eyewitness accounts and newly discovered archival material, Chasing the Moon reveals the unknown stories of the individuals who made the Moon landing a possibility, from inspirational science fiction writer Arthur C. Clark and controversial engineer Wernher von Braun, to pioneers like mathematician Poppy Northcutt and astronaut Edward Dwight. It vividly revisits the dawn of the Space Age, a heady time of scientific innovation, political calculation, media spectacle, visionary impulses and personal drama.

The 7th edition includes changes reflecting modern understanding, terminology and teaching of the musculoskeletal system. There are changes on 42 different pages including many new or enhanced notes on function and 20 new descriptions or explanations of anatomical relationships. All muscle illustrations are new.

The Eye You See With - the first and only collection of Robert Stone’s nonfiction - was carefully selected by award-winning novelist and Stone biographer Madison Smartt Bell. Divided into three sections, the collection includes the best of Stone’s war reporting, his writing on social change, and his reflections on the art of fiction. This is an extraordinary volume that offers up a clear-eyed look at the twentieth century and secures Robert Stone’s place as one of the most original figures in all of American letters.

A collection of short stories includes "Miserere," in which a widowed and childless librarian becomes an avid participant in the anti-abortion movement, and the title story, about the relationship between a father and his growing daughter.

This title is a story about a man pitting himself against the sea, against society, and against himself.

This thorough account of the life and films of the Spanish-Basque filmmaker Julio Medem is the first book in English on the internationally renowned writer-director of Vacas, La ardilla roja (Red Squirrel), Tierra, Los amantes del Círculo Polar (Lovers of the Arctic Circle), Lucía y el sexo (Sex and Lucía), La pelota vasca: la piel contra la piedra (Basque Ball) and Caótica Ana (Chaotic Ana),Initial chapters explore Medem’s childhood, adolescence and education and examine his earliest short films and critical writings against a background of a dramatically changing Spain. Later chapters provide accounts of the genesis, production and release of Medem’s challenging and sensual films, which feed into complex but lucid analyses of their meanings, both political and personal, in which Stone draws on traditions and innovations in Basque art, Spanish cinema and European philosophy to create a complete and provocative portrait of Medem and his work.

This thorough account of the life and films of the Spanish-Basque filmmaker Julio Medem is the first book in English on the internationally renowned writer-director of Vacas, La ardilla roja (Red Squirrel), Tierra, Los amantes del Círculo Polar (Lovers of the Arctic Circle), Lucía y el sexo (Sex and Lucía), La pelota vasca: la piel contra la piedra (Basque Ball) and Caótica Ana (Chaotic Ana),Initial chapters explore Medem’s childhood, adolescence and education and examine his earliest short films and critical writings against a background of a dramatically changing Spain. Later chapters provide accounts of the genesis, production and release of Medem’s challenging and sensual films, which feed into complex but lucid analyses of their meanings, both political and personal, in which Stone draws on traditions and innovations in Basque art, Spanish cinema and European philosophy to create a complete and provocative portrait of Medem and his work.

In this volume, eighteen experts from a variety of academic backgrounds explore the use of songs in films from the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking worlds. This volume illustrates how – rather than simply helping to tell the story of – songs in Hispanic and Lusophone cinema commonly upset the hierarchy of the visual over the aural, thereby rendering their hearing a complex and rich subject for analysis.Screening songs... constitutes a ground-breaking, interdisciplinary collection. Of particular interest to scholars and academics in the areas of Film Studies, Hispanic Studies, Lusophone Studies and Musicology, this volume opens up the study of Hispanic and Lusophone cinema to vital, new, critical approaches. The soundtracks of films as varied as City of God, All About My Mother, Bad Education and Buena Vista Social Club are analysed alongside those of lesser-known works that range from the melodramas of Mexican cinema’s golden age to Brazilian and Portuguese musical comedies from the 1940s and 1950s. Fiction films are studied alongside documentaries, the work of established directors like Pedro Almodóvar, Carlos Saura and Nelson Pereira dos Santos alongside that of emerging filmmakers, and performances by iconic stars like Caetano Veloso and Chavela Vargas alongside the songs of Spanish Gypsy groups, Mexican folk songs and contemporary Brazilian rap.

For two decades Robert Stone made his living on the high seas. A modern-day pirate, he was a pioneer saturation oil-field diver, treasure hunter and smuggler, which brought him more money than he knew how to spend. Stone spent the last ten of his smuggling years in Africa, where he traded in illicit fuel. The murky waters of the Niger delta were his place of business as he operated in the most corrupt regime in the world, a place ruled by money and guns. Protected by the military he sold his black cargo to legitimate businesses all over the world, making millions of dollars in the process. Chasing Black Gold is a tale straight out of Hollywood, one which throws the reader into a world where suitcases full of millions in cash are flown around the globe on private jets, where the corrupt practices of Third World governments and military regimes must be mastered and a world of numbered bank accounts and countries of convenience, where living under false IDs and money laundering are all in a day’s work.

Michael Ahearn, a professor at a rural college, sheds his comfortable assumptions when he becomes obsessed with a new faculty member from the Caribbean, Lara Purcell. An expert in Third World politics, Lara is seductive, dangerous - and in thrall, she claims, to a voodoo spirit who has possession of her soul.Impassioned and determined, Michael pursues Lara in her native island of St. Trinity, heedless of the political upheaval there. Together they desperately attempt to reclaim all that Lara has lost. Yet island intrigue ensnares them. Lara sacrifices herself to ritual and superstition. Michael is caught unawares in a high-stakes smuggling scheme. In his feverish state of mind, the world becomes an ever-shifting phantasmagoria. He is, himself, possessed.

‘At once religious discussion, love story, mystery, delivered with the verve of an airport thriller . . . The central character of this book is Jerusalem; the book reeks of its myriad mythologies and beliefs . . . Damascus Gate is an amazing read . . . a rare and remarkable feast of writing’ Scotland on Sunday‘The heir of Conrad, Hemingway and, crucially, Graham Greene, Stone is at his best when his characters are in extremis . . . the scenes of violent confrontation could not have been rendered more powerfully by any other writer . . . formidable’ Sunday Telegraph‘A book that is not afraid to take on the big themes like faith, faction, spirituality, tribalism, identity and injustice . . . It is also an extraordinary treatment of Jerusalem itself . . . With Stone, it has found the kind of imaginative interpreter that every city waits for’ Sunday Times‘Writing this good should be engraved on tablets of stone in letters of fire and blood. Fantastic’ Uncut‘Stone has a journalist’s eye for detail, but a novelist’s eye for irony . . . Damascus Gate is rich with theme and atmosphere . . . few writers could even attempt to capture, as Stone does, both the intense, combative spirituality of Jerusalem and the festering menace of Gaza’ Esquire

A Flag for Sunrise is a novel of Americans drawn into the maelstrom of Tecan, a small Central American country on the brink of revolution. At a mission on the coast a priest is lapsing into alcoholic mysticism, while a young American nun is veering towards commitment to the cause. In a bar in Brooklyn, Frank Holliwell is lunching with an old CIA friend who is begging for a favour. On the Tex–Mex border, Pablo, a Coast Guard deserter, loco on speed, is about to take a job carrying mysterious contraband to Tecan. As these lives converge, as this small, crowded world erupts, the novel builds to an electrifying climax.

In an elite New England college, Professor Steven Brookman embarks upon a careless affair with a brilliant but reckless student, Maud Stack. She is a young woman whose passions are not easily contained or curtailed, and is known as something of a firebrand on campus. As the stakes of their relationship prove higher than either one could have anticipated, their union seems destined to yield tragic and far-reaching consequences.

‘A tough, elegant, alarming novel. Stone writes superbly about the sea, about fear and loneliness, about life in extremis . . . In Outerbridge Reach, he has produced what I believe will come to be recognized as a quintessential novel of the Reagan era, along with Updike’s Rabbit at Rest and Don DeLillo’s Mao II ’ John Banville, Guardian‘Stone has already written two of the best novels of the past twenty years, Dog Soldiers and A Flag for Sunrise. Outerbridge Reach makes it three . . . He is a great storyteller, whose plots move as relentlessly as those of the best thrillers, yet his prose is elegant and full of literary allusions’ A. Alvarez, Sunday Times ‘Stone’s fifth and finest novel is about going to sea and the difficulty of trying to find a way back again . . . if one half of Stone’s characters live their secret, interior lives apart from society, then the other half are desperately looking for their own ways out: drugs, murder, revolution, betrayal, infidelity . . . and, in the case of Owen Browne in Outerbridge Reach, sailing off the map of the world and mind altogether’ Scot Bradfield, Independent‘Its themes are contemporary and touched with cruelty . . . The toughness of Stone’s novels has been readily accepted as on the surface; but there’s an inner toughness of judgement that, when one stubs one’s toe on it, is even more impressive’ Robert M. Adams, New York Review of Books