Introduction The Princess Bride begins with an introduction in which Goldman explains the (fictional) origin of the book. At ten years old, William is lying in bed recuperating from pneumonia, and his immigrant father reads to him from a book called The Princess Bride, written by S. Morgenstern, a great author. Like Goldman’s father, Morgenstern…
Tag: Summary
The Power and the Glory – Summary
Section 1 Chapter One of the first part of The Power and the Glory begins with Mr. Tench, a British dentist who is hoping to make enough money some day to go home. He strikes up a conversation with an educated stranger who he assumes is a doctor; this is the man referred to in…
The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri – Chapter Summaries
Chapter 1 1968 Ashima Ganguli is nearly nine months pregnant with her first child. She is in her apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her husband, Ashoke, is studying for his doctorate in engineering in the next room. Ashima’s labor begins, and the couple takes a taxi to the hospital. After Ashima has checked in, Ashoke leaves…
Ivanhoe by Walter Scott: Summary
Chapters 1–4 The opening chapters of Ivanhoe establish the novel’s historical and social context. King Richard I has been absent fighting in the Crusades, a series of wars fought between Muslims and European Christians over the holy city of Jerusalem. On his way home from the Crusades, Richard has been captured and imprisoned by the…
Police: Streetcorner Politicians (Summary & Review)
The complex and challenging role of the policeman in society is given a rigorous treatment by author William K. Muir. The book serves multiple purposes at once – it is part sociological research, part collection of interesting anecdotes and part informed commentary. The author excels in meeting each of these three objectives with élan. One…
Into the Woods (Play): Summary & Critique
The core idea of the play is its idea of bringing various fairy tale characters together. It is a mark of the fertile imagination of writer Stephen Sondheim that classic fairy heroes such as Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, Rapunzel etc, are brought under one grand narrative. While retaining their original features that these characters are…
Dune by Frank Herbert: Summary
The text of Dune is divided into three books of unnumbered chapters. Each chapter is headed by an epigraph that is a quotation, not from an existing literary work but from a pseudo-scholarly work attributed to Princess Irulan, whom the reader learns only at the very end of the novel becomes Paul’s wife. The various…
Cold Sassy Tree: Chapter Summaries
Chapters 1–4 In 1914, the novel’s narrator, Will Tweedy, recalls events in Cold Sassy, Georgia, that took place primarily in the summer of 1906, when he was fourteen years old. On the night of July 5 that year, Will’s grandfather, Rucker Blakeslee, arrives at Will’s home to have a drink of corn whiskey; Rucker’s wife,…
The Bonesetter’s Daughter: Chapter Summaries
Truth (Prologue) The Bonesetter’s Daughter begins with LuLing’s childhood memory of waking with her nursemaid, Precious Auntie, when she is six years old. Precious Auntie helps LuLing bathe and dress, like they do every morning, then they go to the ancestral hall to pray before breakfast. Precious Auntie, who is mute, uses her hands to…
Woman Work by Maya Angelou: Summary
Lines 1–14 This first stanza of ‘‘Woman Work’’ is the most important in the poem because it is here the reader could infer that the woman speaking is a slave. Lines 11 and 14 talk about crops that need tending. These are not just any crops, but those grown in the Deep South and traditionally…