Robert C. Allen Books

"The Penguin Writers' Guides" series provide authoritative, succinct and easy-to-follow guidance on specific aspects of written English. Whether you need to brush up your skills or get to grips with something for the first time, these invaluable guides will help you find the best way to get your message across clearly and effectively. "Common Errors in English" is a thorough A-Z checklist of the mistakes that often crop up in all aspects of written English. It gives ready and authoritative guidance on today's usage difficulties, being up-to-date with all the latest controversies, pitfalls and oddities of our language. Written in a lively style, with plenty of interest and humour, "Common Errors" shouldn't be far from the fingertips of anyone who does any kind of writing.

What better way to sharpen your wits and your puzzle skills than with Mensa's book of Riddles & Conundrums?

From "Ma Perkins" and "One Man's Family" in the 1930s to "All My Children" in the 1980s, the soap opera has capture the imagination of millions of American men and women of all ages. In Speaking of Soap Operas , Robert Allen undertakes a reexamination of the production and consumption of soap operas through the use of a unique investigatory model based on contemporary poetics and reader-response theory.Although a considerable amount of research has been conducted on these programs, Allen argues that soap operas remain a phenomenon about which much is said but little is known. Soap operas are different from most other media programming -- they appear formless, refuse to end, require little work on the part of the viewer, and bear no recognizable marks of authorship. For these and other reasons, soap operas resist explanation from both traditional aesthetic and empiricist social science perspectives.The daytime dramatic serials generate nearly a billion dollars in revenue each year for the three commercial networks. Allen discusses in detail the economic and institutional functions of these programs in addition to the context of their production. He also considers the historical development of the soap opera as advertising vehicle, narrative structure and "women's fiction.

The Thesaurus has been completely overhauled to reflect the language children use today, to link in with the current school curriculum requirements for KS2 + 3, and modernise typography and design layout.

Channels of Discourse fills a significant gap in the critical literature on television. The eight distinguished scholars whose essays make up the collection consider commercial televisionin relation to the major strands of contemporary literary, cultural and cinematic criticism.

Reflects the language children use to link in with the school curriculum requirements and to modernise typography and design layout. This work contains the complete text of the "Oxford School Thesaurus".

"The Industrial Revolution was one of the great, transforming events of world history. Robert C. Allen explains what happened during this period, and why. He asks why the revolution occured in Britain rather than other countries, and looks at the impact of changing technology and business organizations on contemporary social structures."--Publisher's description.

Why did the industrial revolution take place in eighteenth-century Britain and not elsewhere in Europe or Asia? In this convincing new account Robert Allen argues that the British industrial revolution was a successful response to the global economy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He shows that in Britain wages were high and capital and energy cheap in comparison to other countries in Europe and Asia. As a result, the breakthrough technologies of the industrial revolution - the steam engine, the cotton mill, and the substitution of coal for wood in metal production - were uniquely profitable to invent and use in Britain. The high wage economy of pre-industrial Britain also fostered industrial development since more people could afford schooling and apprenticeships. It was only when British engineers made these new technologies more cost-effective during the nineteenth century that the industrial revolution would spread around the world.

Share the joy and mystique of muskie fishing with kids!

In his tumultuous lifetime, King of Country Music George Jones has been two men running in opposite directions. With top hits including "He Stopped Loving Her Today, " "Window Up Above, " and "She Thinks I Still Care, " he is the only country singer to have had a number-one hit single in each of the last four decades - the man who built a career on a voice that, in the words of one critic, "is so awesomely and elementally human that his music can be not just heard, but felt to issue from flesh and hot blood The other George Jones is a man who for most of his career drank whiskey like water; a man who shot at his best friend, destroyed his own home in a fit of drunken rage, and once, when he couldn't find his car keys, drove to the liquor store on a lawn mower. In this exciting biography that spans his entire life, both sides of George Jones are explored. We follow him through his impoverished boyhood in Texas, his stint on the honky tonk circuit, his simultaneous rise to superstardom and descent into alcoholic hell, and his stormy marriage to and dramatic divorce from the Queen of Country, Tammy Wynette. George Jones: The Life and Times of a Honky Tonk Legend brings readers up to the present as Jones marries the woman of his dreams, stays clean and sober, and achieves the ultimate status as the Grand Old Man of Country Music.