reviews

Dissection of a Dark Heart Author: Joseph Conrad An iconic tale of greed, imperialism, and racism, Heart of Darkness captures the transformation between complicity in a society and the horror of awakening realization. Marlow, a narrator that appears more than once in Conrad’s work (he was also present in Lord Jim) tells the story as he and some fellow sailors head back toward the Congo. This establishes a typical Conrad frame narrative, with the interjection of Marlow and his companions at the beginning and end and the actual tale itself consuming the middle of a fairly small, yet dense narrative. [...]

The Empire That Wasn't... Author:  Peter Stark Nowadays, Astoria is just a small city of 10,000 people in northwestern Oregon, most famous as the southern terminus of the Astoria-Meglar Bridge, a four mile span that crosses the massive Columbia River into Washington.  But despite its current diminutive status, the city has a rich history as the first American settlement on the Pacific Ocean.  Filled with heroes, wretches and occasional scorbutic insanity, Peter Stark’s Astoria is a rarely told historical saga of remarkable adversity that makes for some thrilling reading.  Following the completion of the Lewis and Clark expedition in 1806 [...]