Fighter pilot Manfred von Richthofen (the Red Baron) lacked innate aerobatic ability. As a tyro, he attempted to solve this problem through denial, going so far as to sneer at stunting as pointless. Great War air combat experience proved quite the reverse, and so we would anticipate a short and sad fighting life for the fellow. Yet the Red Baron became the Great War's single greatest scorer, as measured by total victories. How did he do it? This book is concerned with tactics, especially t...

Jules Verne has written, and Virginia Champlin translated, The Tribulations of a Chinaman in China, which is, as a matter of course, highly amusing and absurd. The scenes are laid in a country not often chosen in fiction, and the plan is as novel as it is preposterous. Nobody but this extravagant and irresponsible author would have been likely to have executed such a piece of work. To give the plot would be to spoil it: enough to say that the hero, Kin-fo, who is young, rich, handsome, and...

Jules Verne's conceptions are as brilliant as ever. Dr. Sarrasin, a French savant, simple in taste and absorbed in science, delivers an address at the Brighton Scientific Association. The publication of it with his name in ' The Daily Telegraph' discovers him to a London lawyer as the lost heir of the Begum, whom his uncle had married in India. He inherits a moderate property of twenty-one millions sterling, all ready for him in the Bank of England. Dr. Schultz, a German professor, also a ...

We leave it to the critics to determine the value of Jules Verne's descriptions if they were shorn of the marvellous in which he delights to clothe them. All we can say is. his grotesque images are highly amusing. Here we have the story of the Sepoy Mutiny in India, and hear a great deal about the terrible Nana who set it a-going. The Steam House is a gigantic engine of steel, fashioned like a huge elephant, impelled by steam, and dragging several vast cars as big as houses, up and down th...

The Tribulations of a Chinaman in China: Illustrated, is an adventure novel by Jules Verne, first published in 1879. The story is about a rich Chinese man, Kin-Fo, who is bored with life, and after some business misfortune decides to die.The book is a traditional adventure, similar in style to Around the World in Eighty Days, which is one of the author's more well-known books. However, it does contain more humour as well as criticism of topics such as the British opium trade in Chi...

Jules Verne's cyclopedic fancy this time finds scope for its vagaries in the Californian Eldorado, among the millionaires of absolutely limitless resources, who, the French romancer would have us believe, form a large class of the population around the Golden Gate. Nevertheless, the story is of the Crusoe order, and is concerned with the adventures of the restless young Californian, Godfrey Morgan, and his companion, the dancing-master, Tartlet, upon a strange island where they have been w...

A book of remarkable and thrilling adventures, very much in the style of Mr. Verne's previous books, and adapted to interest either boy-readers or adults. The "Giant raft" is as immense as the "Steam house," and the characters and incidents quite as original. The story opens with the finding of a paper of hieroglyphics by an adventurer in a Brazilian forest—he puts it wiih some gold coin in a silver case, places it near his head, and falls asleep. The object excites the attention of a "gua...

Jules Verne, in this chief of his works, has set himself to tell the story of all the most stirring adventure of which we have any written record—to give the history, "from the time of Hanno and Herodotus down to that of Livingstone and Stanley," of those voyages of exploration and discovery which are among the most exciting episodes in the history of human enterprise. The wonderful journey of Marco Polo; the voyages of Columbus and Vasco da Gama; the conquests of Cortez and Pizarro; the o...

This book hinges upon the extraordinary adventures of a mad French inventor who has imagined a diabolical engine of war that in its explosive effects surpasses anything in this direction ever conceived by mortal man. The story is of a most exciting character throughout. It has an added and highly piquant interest from the fact that Turpin, the celebrated and excitable inventor, declared at the time of the first publication, that he has been libelled in the person of the mad hero of "Facing...

"The Green Ray" is in Jules Verne's best manner: it contains some of the impossibilites raisonnets which are at once his distinguishing characteristic and the secret of his world wide popularity. Most of the marvels or impossibilities in "The Green Ray " are to be found in the picture there presented to us of Scottish names, manners and costumes. It will hardly be denied that such a Scotch family name as "Ursiclos," and such clans as the clan "McDouglas" and " the clan "Melville," are suff...

This time Mr. Verne's novel is set in beautiful Norway. The wealthy schoolfriend of schoolmaster Malarius discovers that Erik, one of his students, is actually an orphan and was raised by a local fisherman. He takes the bright, young lad to Stockholm and tries to find out where the roots of his mysterious life lay ...

This forms the third and concluding volume of Verne's Celebrated Travels an Travellers. One is struck with the great mass of interesting matter, geographical, ethnological, and other, which is here compacted together; bespeaking as it does no small amount of research, an still more afiording fresh evidence of that instinctive perception of the popular which is, to a large extent, the secret of the author's success in his numerous works. A preliminary chapter is devoted to a general survey o...