Tom Swift and His Motor-Cycle, or, Fun and Adventures on the ... by Victor Appleton

Tom Swift and His Aerial Warship, number 18 in the series, has Tom working on a modified dirigible to which he plans on attaching a large gun from the gondola. The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry

Tarzan the Untamed by Edgar Rice Burroughs Read more of Bernard Norcott-Mahany's 2015 reviews of books about the First World War:Īll Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque Both are presented in ways we could only characterize today as racially insensitive. The two most controversial characters from our perspective are the black servants of the Swifts: Eradicate Andrew Jackson Abraham Lincoln Sampson (aka “Rad”), an elderly black man, fiercely loyal to the Swifts and to his mule, Boomerang and Koku, an African prince of great height and strength, who does a lot of the heavy lifting required in Tom’s workshop. In the world of boys’ adventure, inventing is a very perilous profession, it seems.Īll of these books feature some recurring characters worth mentioning: Ned Newton, Tom’s best friend, who works for the local bank, an employer awfully generous in the amount of free time they give young Newton, as he spends well over half of his 40 hours hanging out with Tom Mary Nestor, Tom’s sweetie (their love, always platonic, of course) the eccentric neighbor, Wakefield Damon, known for his peculiar expletives (e.g. Each of the books involve Tom inventing some new device, and having a series of adventures as he tries to perfect his invention, and/or keep it from falling into the wrong hands. Tom lives in a small town in upstate New York with his father, Barton Swift, himself an inventor.

Released between 1910-1941, the 40 adventure novels in this series feature a young inventor named Tom Swift, whose story begins in the book Tom Swift and His Motor Cycle. Victor Appleton was actually the pseudonym for several uncredited authors of the popular Tom Swift series, which was published by the Edward Stratemeyer syndicate, a group which released several series of books for boys (especially Tom Swift and the Hardy Boys) and for girls (the Nancy Drew series.)

Tom Swift and His Motor-Cycle, or, Fun and Adventures on the ... by Victor Appleton