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A carregar... The 22 Letters (1963)por Clive King
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Pertence à Série da EditoraPuffin Story Books (250)
Three brothers embark on daring journeys in this epic of high adventure that reimagines the origins of monumental discoveries in ancient history. Afraid that Aleph may have taught his sister, Beth, the priestly writing, his father sends him to climb the mountain as punishment. But Aleph couldn't teach Beth the sacred writing even if he tried--there are so many symbols, and he just can't seem to learn them. Instead, he and Beth have invented a new way of writing with only twenty-two letters. But his father won't hear it, and so Aleph must go up the mountain to count the felled trees at the lumber camp. Near the top of the mountain, however, Aleph discovers that all is not as it should be: The camp is empty! Curious, he sets off to find the loggers, never suspecting that the writing game he played with his sister will become invaluable, nor that his search will take him much farther than the mountaintop. Meanwhile, Aleph's two older brothers are on journeys of their own. Zayin, the eldest and a general in their city-state Gebal's small army, is on a quest to find monsters in the Valley of the Centaurs. Nun, the second son, aims for the sea and the Court of Minos. Then, grave news sends all three brothers hurrying home to protect their small city. But something even more disastrous looms on the horizon . . . From beloved children's author Clive King (Stig of the Dump), The 22 Letters is an epic tale of three great advances in history, told through the adventures of four young siblings. Não foram encontradas descrições de bibliotecas. |
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 Google Books — A carregar...GénerosSistema Decimal de Melvil (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999Classificação da Biblioteca do Congresso dos EUA (LCC)AvaliaçãoMédia: (4)
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Clive King is best known to my generation of readers for Stig of the Dump, in which a modern (ie 1963) boy makes friends with a caveman who has mysteriously appeared in the neighbourhood via a never-explained timeslip. It must be forty years since I last read it. It may be forty years also since I last read The Twenty-Two Letters, in which a family living in a city-state on the coast of what is now Lebanon about 3,500 years ago is torn apart by war and natural disaster, and start to rebuild their society by inventing the alphabet. The author worked for the British Council in Syria in 1951-55 and Lebanon from 1960 to 1966, when the book was published; and his fascination for the history of the region, and how it fed into world culture, is a warm underpinning for the slightly didactic themes of how three technological innovations (writing, celestial navigation an horse-riding) come together with the Thera eruption to create the foundations for Western civilisation.
It was a good book when I read it in the 1970s, and it's a good book now. There are some lovely asides, some of which I picked up at the time (the character who is obviously a Hebrew, without that word ever being used; the casual racist disdain of the sophisticated Mediterranean types for the incomprehensible pale-skinned northern Europeans) and some of which I was able to get only now with help from the Internet (the Serabit el-Khadim inscriptions). The copy I had as a child had some beautiful internal illustrations by Richard Kennedy; unfortunately the more recent reprint that I have now has only the cover and chapter headers. It would be worth getting an old paperback for the sake of the art. (