She was an unschooled country peasant that lifted the fortunes of her uncrowned King and nation on her shoulders, but when she needed them was abandoned.  Joan of Arc stands alone among Mark Twain’s bibliography as a historical novel about the one person in history he admires above all others.

Twain’s account of Joan of Arc’s life is written from the perspective of a fictional version of Joan’s former secretary and page Sieur Louis de Conte written at the end of his life to his great-nephews and nieces.  The first part of the book focuses on her life in the village of Domremy, essentially where all but the last two years of her life occurred, and the beginning of her visions then quest to fulfill the commission she received.  The second part is her successful meeting with the King, formal acknowledgement of the Church that she wasn’t a witch, then her year-long military campaign—with numerous breaks due to political interference and foot dragging by Charles VII—that saw her mission completed, and finally her capture by the Burgundians.  The final part of the book was of her year in captivity and the long grueling “legal” process that the English-paid French clergy put her through to murder her as a heretic.  The final chapter is of Conte giving a brief account of the feckless Charles VII waiting over two decades to Rehabilitate his benefactor after allowing her to be murdered by not paying her ransom all those years before.

This was a labor of love for Twain to write and it was easy to tell given how professionally researched it was in every detail.  While many 20^th-Century critics and other Twain admirers don’t like this book because it’s not “classic” Twain because of his praise of Joan given that she’s French, Catholic, and a martyr when he disliked or hated all three; they didn’t seem to understand his hero worship of this teenage girl who put a nation on her shoulders to resurrect its existence.  Yet, while this was a straight historical novel there are touches of Twain especially in Conte’s “relating” the adventures of the Domremy boys when they were not in Joan’s presence, especially Paladin.

Joan of Arc is not the typical Mark Twain work, but that doesn’t mean one can not appreciate it for well, if not professionally, researched historical novel that it is.

Motley Crue's iconic drummer Tommy Lee had a recent conversation with Billboard and broke the silence on whether or not the band would postpone their next "The Stadium Tour" or not.

According to the legendary drummer of Motley Crue, the reunion tour is still an opportunity, and they have no plans to postpone or cancel the stages of the tour yet.

He also said that all the members of the group are in constant contact and that the apocalyptic atmosphere is developing, everyone will be in a good mood to have a good time in concert.

Here's what Tommy said:

"We are all in constant communication. Nikki and I have attended several production meetings. You are talking about different stages, it's like two children in a candy store who are putting together something that people will walk and said:

"Are you kidding ?!"

This is our mission today, and it certainly goes in that direction. By the time all of this apocalyptic shit is over, I think everyone will be in a great mood to go out and have the best time. I do.

“I hope everyone stays inside, and we can control that and go back to the normal people."

Don’t miss your chance to see World’s best-selling artists performing live. The Stadium Tour is approaching fast and Tickets4Chicago gives you the chance to grab Cheapest The Stadium Tour Chicago Tickets. To watch your favorite singers performing live it is best if you can get safe money transaction & fast delivery.

This is a very nice collection of oral tales from the Ottawa Valley. The tales come from a variety of backgrounds - so there is Quebecoise but also Anglo, Irish, Scots. Finnigan does a god job at capturing the voice. Well done.

Once upon a time, this classic mystery about the disappearance of some schoolgirls and one of their teachers in 1900s Australia had a final chapter that explained the disappearances. Lindsay’s publisher told her to cut it because it ruined the novel’s mystique. And cutting the last chapter turned out to be a stroke of genius. Thanks in part to Lindsay’s enigmatic foreword in which she tells readers to decide for themselves whether the events in the book are fact or fiction, people absolutely obsessed over the mystery. They scoured old newspapers for reports of missing girls and pestered Lindsay for answers to the point where interviewers were asked to avoid the question. She eventually gave the final chapter to her agent with her permission to have it published after her death. Which was a good move on her part. It probably saved her from a ghastly amount of next-level pestering once the answers were out there.

You see, Lindsay’s agent did publish the final chapter after her death, and I have to agree with the publisher who cut it. It 100% ruins the story in a serious “I know it was the sixties, but what was this woman smoking?” kind of way. So yay for the publisher. Pat on the back.

On the other hand, not all of the clues that tied in with that what-was-she-smoking ending were edited out, making it obvious that the real ending was cut. The book didn’t feel open-ended so much as it felt unfinished. So once again I find myself finishing a classic and finding it an okay book while being much more fascinated and satisfied by the story behind the story.

My experience in reading this very thorough and accomplished biography was a disjointed one, because, being in constant competition for my library's electronic version, I lost access several times for a period of weeks each time. This may have unfairly cost Ms Schenkar a star in my rating, because, with her unconventional though effective choice to arrange her biography by subject matter rather than chronology, I did find it difficult to re-orient myself each time I picked it up. (And, e-books being e-books, I didn't discover how to use the extensive chronology at the end until much too late in the process).

One of the things I realized as I was reading is how little of Highsmith's prodigious output I've actually read, not just novels and short stories under her own name but also various types of work to which she never owned or only, as with "The Price of Salt", only relatively late in her career. As a result, I was doing less "matching" than usual between the description of the life and the experience of the work, and was thrown more intensely into the details of the life itself. Blessings on Ms Schenkar for having synthesized the apparently massive legacy of self-documentation, in the form of diaries, "cahiers" and letters (not to mention a voluminous acquaintance ready and willing to speak). What emerges from all that synthesis, I'm sorry to say, is a picture of a truly unhappy and difficult woman who became increasingly anti-social as she aged (or perhaps counter-social, since she didn't exactly isolate herself, just antagonized everybody).

There are some very useful literary insights, especially around the inextricability of sex and death in Highsmith's work, and her invariable tendency to work in pairs of characters (something she shares with Wilkie Collins, I think). And though I can't think of anything in my own limited Highsmith reading that matches the sheer intensity (and viciousness) of her relationship with her mother, just knowing of some of that details of that particular inescapable love/hate does shine a light on Highsmith's darkness (as it were).

Schenkar is blunt in her assessment of Highsmith's stylistic defects: she has a "tin ear" and very little wit. In this, her biographer is her superior. I had to laugh out loud at this particular bon mot about Patricia's girlfriends: "Pat was still not sleeping with Chloe, but she would always prefer the bird in the bush to the bird in her bed."

This was, disjointed or no, a good read, and actually engendered in me a desire to read more of the works written by its subject. That's the mark of a successful biography.