THE STOLEN WHITE ELEPHANT
A little satirical gem from the pen of Mark Twain
All the narratives ended with the observation that "three hundred thousand citizens and four detectives saw the terrible creature, while two of the latter also met death."
The best-selling series "Selected» of Acid Publications is enriched with seven new titles, seven new small books, big thoughts, which come to be added to the previous 16 titles.
The big White Siamese Elephant, sent as a gift by the Asian country's government to the Queen of England, disappears at a stopover in New York en route to Great Britain. The person responsible for transporting the elephant then turns to the sharp-eyed, great-looking and generally "brilliant" Inspector Blunt, who immediately mobilizes the entire police force to find and arrest the unfortunate alive, with results that are if nothing else laughable...
O Mark Twain he comfortably debunks both the – as it seems old – myth of the cerebral detective and much of the so-called "police" literature.
About the author:
All of us know the American author and humorist Samuel Langhorne Clemens under the pseudonym Mark Twain, who was born in Florida, Missouri in 1835 and died in Reading, Connecticut in 1910. One of the most famous and finest humorists of all time, he conquered the world audience. both thanks to the novels with the adventures of his legendary young heroes, such as Tom Sawyer and Hawk Finn, and thanks to his dozens of humorous short stories and hundreds of inimitable witticisms.
Also featured in the series are:
- The Opening – Sigmund Freud
- The Prophet – Khalil Gibran
- Literary Eutrapelas – Stephen Leacock
- The Bible of the Chosen – Robert Athlyi Rogers
- Tao Te Ching – Lao Tzu
- Responses from the Trenches of the 20thu Century – George Orwell
- Civil Disobedience – Henry David Thoreau
- Walking – Henry David Thoreau
- The Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Man – Jerome K. Jerome
- If – Rudyard Kipling
- The Book of Tea – Kakuzo Okakura
- The Book of Five Circles – Miyamoto Musashi
- The Art of War – Sun Tzu
- The Ruler – Niccolò Machiavelli
- The Art of Always Being Right - Arthur Schopenhauer
- The Recognition of the Rights of Woman – Mary Wollstonecraft
Silverchild –
The narrator meets a most dignified gentleman on a train, who tells him about his personal adventure when he undertook to transport an elephant from Siam to the United Kingdom. When they stopped in New York, the elephant was stolen(!) and he turned to the police to find it. And somewhere there the laughter begins.
The book is one of the great author's satirical works where, contrary to what classic detective novels teach us, detectives are not the smartest people on earth. Quite the opposite, I would say!