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Type of bind: Paperback
EAN num: 9780543903907
ISBN number: 0543903907
Label: BookSurge Publishing
Manufacturer: BookSurge Publishing
Page Count: 210
Printing Date: February 19, 2001
Publishing house: BookSurge Publishing
Release Date: February 19, 2001
Sale Popularity Level: 1149975
Studio: BookSurge Publishing
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Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
`They were perhaps three hundred yards away from me, but their personalities seemed as vivid as if they were in the same room. I had an overpowering impression of a burning vitality which was also evil, a glowing, incandescent evil.' The Island of Sheep (1936) is John Buchan's last thriller, featuring the return of Richard Hannay, the hero of The Thirty-Nine Steps, Greenmantle, Mr Standfast and The Three Hostages, from a comfortable retirement. Hannay redeems his promise to protect the son of an old acquaintance from a sinister conspiracy, and the action moves quickly from England through the Scottish Borders to the Island of Sheep in the remote Norlands, where Hannay and his friends turn at last to confront their enemy. Memorable for its vivid evocations of place, the novel constitutes a complex reflection upon its own position at the end of Buchan's career and at the end of a modern Scottish tradition of adventure romances. This is the very first critical edition of The Island of Sheep, and the introduction explores the novel's themes and concerns in relation to Buchan's previous works.
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers -
I'm bit surprised that Buchan's Greenmantle seems to be more popular than this little gem. I put this book as a better read than 39 steps and Greenmantle, while the latter was a study in jingoism, advertising imperialism to all and sundry and dismissive of those of us with more melanin as savages, the former is dished with a plot that is quite unbelievable and over the top, really! This one, though peppered with lots of "Scots are great" and Scotland "a paradise on earth" and full of "burrrns" and glens is still a fast-track novel quite reminiscent of Don Brown's of our times. A good time pass and an interesting plot keep your interest till the "lived happily ever after" climax
PS:
Somehow I have a feeling that the writer wanted to take the story to China and maybe because of lack of time or dearth of requisite material he had to end the tale in "Norlands". Alas, who will know, he has been dead nearly 70 years!
Rated by buyers -
The three stars in my review are for *this edition* of the book. The book itself is great. If you love the Sherlock Holmes stories or books by Rider Haggard, you will love this book. Buchan tells a good tale, keeps the pace moving, and has a real love of place. His characters are not deep, but several of them are very likable, and you will care what happens to them. If you've been bored re-reading the same old books and you like adventure, by all means, get this book.
But not this edition. This Elibron books edition is *so badly done* that the authors should be tarred and feathered. It has been scanned in and then simply published as such. Totally cheap, with no human checking for scanning errors. They are egregious and distracting. The worst of all is the repeated phrase "the bland of Sheep" for "the Island of Sheep"--that being the title of the book! But there are many others, and sometimes they are so bad that you can't figure out what the original word was supposed to be. This makes it hard to sink into the story and lose yourself, as you're constantly being brought up short to ask yourself, "Is that a real word, or is it a scan-o?" The problem is made worse by two things: First, Buchan really does use an unusual vocabulary, including terms from hound tracking, Nordic words, terms from falconry and duck-hunting, and the like. So there are genuine additions to your vocabulary waiting here, and that makes it harder to pick out the scan-o's. Second, the scanning software they used apparently was linked to a dictionary and always fills in a real word instead of nonsense, where often if it just filled in nonsense, the original word would be easier to de-code. Example--it used "all" for "till" in one case. That took me a while of puzzling, and something like "tlll" would have been easier to figure out. "The" comes out as "me" several times. One of the funniest is "domes" for "clothes," which is repeated every time the word "clothes" should appear.
Buy this book, but buy it used and in some other edition. The editors at Elibron should be scolded and shouldn't sell another book until they can do some actual work to publish their books instead of scanning and selling without editing.
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