The Schirmer Inheritance
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
It wasn’t anyone’s idea of a glamorous first assignment at a white show law firm. George Cary, former WWII bomber pilot and newly minted lawyer, was given the ignoble task of going through the tons of files on the Schneider Johnson case, just to make sure nothing had been overlooked. But, as luck would have it, George did discover something among the false claims and dead-end leads that made this into more than just another missing-heir-to-a vast-fortune case. And what he found would connect a deserter from Napoloeon’s defeated army to a guerrilla fighter in post-war Greece, and lead Cary himself into a dangerous situation where his own survival will depend more on what he learned in the army than anything he learned in law school.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
From the beginning of time to the end of days, from the 60-second minute to the Roaring '20s and the first millennium, the confident Waugh (author of Classical Music: A New Way of Listening, and grandson of novelist Evelyn) has written a zippy and hard-to-classify meditation on types and ways of thinking about time. Each of Waugh's chapters covers one unit of time (seconds, centuries) or one subject related to it (the Big Bang, the afterlife). Sumerian counting methods, early medieval theology, Anglo-Dutch disputes over the spring-driven pocket watch, 19th-century essayist William Hazlitt, the rise and fall of Greenwich Mean Time and a 156-year-old tortoise (among other topics) give zest to Waugh's paragraphs. Waugh clearly has assembled this intriguing book from his own researches; he seems especially good on English folklore and on ancient Rome. Sometimes he presents legend as if it were truth, however, or makes mistakes. Zeno's paradoxes (in which a tortoise wins a race with Achilles) did not go mysteriously unsolved until the invention of quantum theory. The Greek-language Old Testament called the Septuagint wasn't really produced by six translators from each of Israel's 12 tribes. The "existence of life" cannot refute the laws of thermodynamics. And so on. Moreover, Waugh can be funny, but his attempts at verve and humor make him sound silly or glib: the ancient Sumerians brought, he writes, "a much-needed element of calm into the frantic maelstrom of ancient life"; and he says, "It is a wonder that Jesus was so thin, for food was never far from his thoughts." Plenty of readers may enjoy Waugh's work, but its flaws detract from its appeal.
