San Antonio College Library

Presents the history of Santa Claus, from his origins as a bishop in the Eastern Roman Empire and his sanctification to the Dutch legend of Sinterklaas, the gift giver.

"After a meteoric rise, China today is one of the world's most powerful nations. Just a century ago, it was a crumbling empire, with literacy reserved for the elite few. In Kingdom of Characters, Jing Tsu argues that China's greatest and most daunting challenge was a linguistic one. Just as important as China's technological and industrial advances and political maneuvers was the century-long fight to make the Chinese language--with its many dialects...

The Historical Dictionary of Ian Fleming's World of Intelligence: Fact and Fiction includes hundreds of dictionary entries on actual cases of espionage, real-life spies, MI5, SIS, CIA, and KGB, as well as on the short stories and novels that define one of the most extraordinary fictional characters of all time.

John Mills spotlights the various ways in which the role of Hamlet has been performed over almost four centuries. He launches this work with the first Hamlet portrayal, that of Richard Burbage, and then, in chronological order, describes and analyzes the Hamlets of the other actors who make up the great tradition of English-language Shakespeare acting. Mills devotes an entire chapter to each actor, focusing on acting style, text interpretation, theatrical...

To a discerning man looking out upon the world, the varieties of human absurdity must appear endless. Seeing the many forms of vanity and hypocrisy; self-deception; unconscious violation of proper, sensible behavior; and all sides the laughable incongruity between saying and doing -- observing these things a man may respond in a number of ways. He may be indifferent, contemptuous, amused, or indignant. Or he may think of himself as sharing like other...

A science fiction film which moves from the pre-historic birth of intelligence toward the emergence of man as pure thought somewhere in the future.

A tale of suffering, sorrow, and redemption, "Ransom" is a retelling of one of the most famous stories in all of literature--Achilles's slaughter and desecration of Hector, and Priam's attempt to ransom his son's body in Homer's "The Iliad."