The complete online text of The Deserter by Richard Harding Davis.

The American journalist Richard Harding Davis (1864-1916) was also a fiction writer and dramatist whose swashbuckling adventures were popular with the American public. Richard Harding Davis was born into a well-to-do and rather pious Episcopalian family...

Richard Harding Davis may be better remembered in late-twentieth-century America for being the son of novelist Rebecca Harding Davis than he is for his own literary accomplishments. In late-nineteenth-century America, however, Davis epitomized the Americ...

Richard Harding Davis was one of the most colorful, daring, and attractive figures in journalism in the late 1800s and early 1900s; he was also highly competent, honest, and dependable. Because of his dashing life-style, which seemed never to impede his...

Mombasa and Zanzibar DESERTION by Abdulrazak Gurnah Bloomsbury, £16.99, pp. 262, ISBN 0747577560 £14.99 (plus £2.25 p&p) 0870 800 4848 The bitterness of the immigrant experience, the tumultuous coming of independence to a former British colony, forbidden love and miscegenation within a close-knit...

CHINCHILLA FARMBy Judith Freeman Norton. 308 pp. $19.95 Chinchillas mate for life. What accounts for such a "deep and unquestioning track of fidelity" is a mystery to us of a more flawed and selfish species. When Verna Flake's wayward husband, Leon, says he...

When the New York Mets build their new ballpark, they might want to model it after Chase Field. The Mets have won 11 straight games in the hitter-friendly home of the Arizona Diamondbacks, and Thursday night's 9-4 victory topped them all. Damion Easley and David...

Skinny-dipping in Arabia? If it feels good, why not? So I was swimming naked. It was broad daylight, but I figured the private infinity pool behind our private bungalow in this exclusive desert...