It is a contemporary page-turning romp that also includes a scholarly account of 17th century Dutch history and an absorbing investigation into the mysterious life and work of the artist Bruegel the Elder.
Between 1980 and 1984, the FBI's anti-drug funding increased from $8 million to $95 million, according to the Budget of the U.S. government in 1990 (Katherine Beckett, Making Crime Pay: Law and Order in Contemporary American Politics, page 53).
His vivid recollections have been transformed from 5,000 neatly hand-written pages into a glossy, illustrated 330-page contemporary book packaged as an adventure odyssey, "Eye of the Storm".
These early books were written and illustrated on sheets of treated animal skin called parchment, or vellum, and sewn together into a codex format with pages that turned like the pages of contemporary books.
Together with librettist Gene Scheer and stage director Leonard Foglia, Heggie has done a masterful job of reducing 800 pages of Melville's novel to an accessible contemporary opera whose 60-page libretto fills the theater with a sense of magic, mystery, and the hypermasculinity of men at sea.
More siren than sylph, those women derive a sense of chic, and an unexpected emotional comfort, from reinventing themselves as contemporary incarnations of Ms. Page, or as modern-day retro-vixens like Katy Perry or Lana Del Rey, who have elevated the all-American calendar girl to an emblem of hip femininity.
Random Hearts (starring Harrison Ford and Kristen Scott Thomas), The Sunset Gang (starring Jerry Stiller, Uta Hagen, Harold Gould and Doris Roberts, Private Lies, Funny Boyss, Madeline's Miracles, Trans-Siberian Express and his Fiona Fitzgerald mystery series are only a few titles that have forever left Adler's mark on contemporary American authorship from page to stage to screen.
Brendon peppers his pages with contemporary allusions to the Roman empire, and they were legion.
The more contemporary evocations in these pages show that there are now many ways in which we can be European.
That is a broad-brush statement – but it is also pertinent to what all these contemporary artists on these pages tell us about the nature of inspiration.
In its place stood a complex, often chaotic grouping of many rival powers whose hostilities and alliances fill, in wearisome detail, the pages of contemporary chroniclers.
