Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Volume One: List of Works from Which Quotes Taken

Perspectives on Ideas
Volume One
Compiled By
Raymond Stopper

List of Works from Which Quotes Were Taken

Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years. Sandburg, Carl. NY: Dell Publishing Co., Inc. 1926 (1960). Abraham Lincoln’s character was complex—melancholy, humorous, thoughtful. An avid newspaper reader whose sense of the past came from books.

Abraham Lincoln: The War Years 1861-1865. Sandburg, Carl. NY: Dell Publishing Co., Inc. 1925 (1954). Lincoln’s purpose in the Civil War was to preserve the Union, not to abolish slavery. The uncontrolled freedom of the press to insult his character probably led to creating an environment that encouraged his assassination.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The. Twain, Mark. NY: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc. 1884 (1982). Mark Twain. Whether to do the right thing according to the society of his time—turn Jim, the escaped slave, in to authorities or to do the wrong thing—set Jim free.

Americans, The: The Colonial Experience. Boorstin, Daniel J. New York: Vintage Books. 1958. The Puritans created a theocracy; the Virginians tried to duplicate English society.

Best and the Brightest, The. Halberstam, David. New York: Random House. 1972. JFK’s men became completely different when they worked for LBJ. Picked not as representative of the population, but because they were the brightest.

Blithedale Romance, The. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc. 1852 (1983). Less a romance than a novel. An early American feminist story. View of the obsessed reformer.

Booknotes: America’s Finest Authors on Reading, Writing, and the Power of Ideas. Lamb, Brian. New York: Time Books, Random House. 1997. On C-Span, Brian Lamb interviewed only people who wrote nonfiction. He would have nothing to do with fiction. Questions Brian Lamb asked on his program, Booknotes: Where do you write? Do you use a computer? How did you research this? What first got you interested in writing about this? How did you get a publisher’s attention? Why are all these folks in your dedication?

Brothers Karamazov, The. Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. NY: Airmont Publishing Co. 1879-1880 (1966). All of the brothers, in one way or another, contributed to the murder of their father.

Civilization: A Personal View. Clark, Kenneth. New York and Evanston: Harper & Row Publishers. 1969. Civilization needs confidence, energy and creativity. Civilization is fragile and can be destroyed.

Complete Plays of Aristophanes. Used the traditional freedom of Old Comedy to ridicule public figures, institutions and even the gods. His favorite butts were Cleon and Euripides. Also Socrates. Was conservative in his views, disapproving of Euripides’ humanizing of the gods and heroes. Another indication of the license permitted Old Comedy is the open but never prurient obscenity of the plays. His masterpiece is The Birds. Birds found “Cloudcuckooland,” a city in the clouds, to prevent the smoke from sacrifices to the gods from reaching them. The gods capitulate.

Country Doctor, A. Jewett, Sarah Orne. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc. 1884 (1994). Nan faced a choice: become a doctor or get married; you couldn’t do both. She chose to become a doctor against society’s expectations.

Country of the Pointed Firs, The. Jewett, Sarah Orne. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc. 1896 (1994). Jewett captures the colorful language of the people of the rural seacoast of Maine and the richness and loneliness of their lives.

Criticism: The Major Texts. Bate, Walter Jackson, ed. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc. 1952. . From Plato and Aristotle to Matthew Arnold and Edmund Wilson.

Crossing the Threshold of Hope. Pope John Paul II. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1994. The God of Catholicism, unlike the God or goal of Islam and Buddhism is a God that invites our souls to unite with Him.

Deephaven. Jewett, Sarah Orne. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc. 1877 (1994). An idyllic summer vacation spent by two young girls in a declining Maine seaport town.

Don Quixote of La Mancha. Cervantes, Miguel de. New York: The New American Library of World Literature, Inc. 1605, 1615 (1964). Reading chivalric romances leads a gaunt country gentleman and his companion Sancho to fight a largely imaginary world. If for no other reason, read this classic novel for the steady stream of proverbs.

Double Helix, The: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA. Watson, James D. New York: Atheneum. 1968. Created the model of how genetic directions are written and transmitted. Science is not the well-planned and objective process it is supposed to be.

Editors on Editing: What Writers Need to Know About What Editors Do. Third Edition. Gross, Gerald, ed. New York: Grove Press. 1993 (1962, 1985). Describes what an editor does and the process of editing.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo: Essays and Lectures. New York: Literary Classics of the United States. 1803-1882 (1983 Emerson’s unit of thought is the epigrammatic sentence. His use of images created poetic prose. His ideas are often cryptic, requiring reflection and interpretation.

Emma. Austen, Jane. London: Oxford University Press. 1816. Emma tries to manipulate people and therefore puts herself into embarrassing situations. She learns to recognize her shortcomings.

End Zone. DeLillo, Don. New York: Pocket Books. 1973. A novel that reveals the psychology of playing competitive college football. The players’ lives are defined by football.

Fanshawe: A Tale. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1828. Scholarly ascetic saves girl from kidnapping. Refuses money and an offer of marriage from the girl. Returns to his studies and dies young.

Flowering of New England, The. Brooks, Van Wyck. New York: EF Dutton and Company, Inc. 1936 (1952). Tells the story of the New England Renaissance in the period between the Revolution and the Civil War. It was a springtime surge of energy and intellect, a revolution against theology, which had crushed the human spirit and confidence. It was an age of scholarship and high standards. Noah Webster sought to standardize the English language to bind the Union. Emerson spoke to the individual in each of his hearers. The issue of slavery: Channing’s book showed the effects on the slave and the masters. If Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin didn’t start the Civil War, it certainly contributed to it. A sense of nostalgia for rural childhood. Agassiz: love and appreciation for nature. It was an exciting time to be alive.

Fox at the Wood’s Edge: Loren Eiseley. Christianson, Gale. New York: Henry Holt and Company. 1990. Haunting and melancholy style for which he is especially remembered. Bridged the two cultures, science and art. Loren’s themes: desolation, loneliness, autumn winds, cold and death…. Loomis: “I think the author’s [Eiseley’s] real value is in his ability to make us aware, to shake up our egotistic complacency, of the unfathomable mystery of life and the wonder of the world.” His is the myth of the loner gazing down from the mountain slope, of the solitary hiker in the woods, of man against society giving permanent form to Thoreau’s dream of turning his back on an impoverished world of polluted skies and teeming cities. Eiseley’s ability to evoke powerful visual images. Integrated poetry and prose; could hardly tell the difference. Epitaph: “We loved the earth but could not stay.”

From Time to Time: A Novel. Finney, Jack. NY: Simon & Schuster. 1995. Jack Finney. Return to the past and an attempt by a 20th-century character to prevent WWI. The attempt to rewrite history fails because of the sinking of the Titanic.

Future Shock. Toffler, Alvin. New York: Bantam Books. 1971. Coping with too much change in too short a time. Specifies the many types of changes with which the modern citizen must deal.

German Dictatorship, The: The Origins, Structure and Effects of National Socialism. Bracher, Karl Dietrich. New York: Praegar Publishers. 1970. “The German dictatorship has failed, but German democracy has not yet been secured.”

Great Gatsby, The. Fitzgerald, F. Scott. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. 1925 (1953). Gatsby attempts to relive the past and his love for Daisy. In spite of his fabulous parties, when he is shot to avenge a killing he did not commit, no one attends his funeral.

Greek Way, The. Hamilton, Edith. New York: Time, Inc. 1930 (1963). The ancient Greeks faced the world with candor and joy, created the scientific spirit and championed the mind in an irrational world.

House of the Seven Gables, The. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. New York: Literary Classics of the United States. 1851 (1983). The evils of one generation are eventually resolved by a future generation. The heir of the curser marries the heir of the cursed.

Iliad. In Anthology of World Masterpieces in One Volume. Homer. New York and London: WW Norton & Company. 800 BC (1980). Events of a few days near the end of the Trojan war, focusing on the withdrawal of Achilles from the contest and the disastrous effects of this act on the Greek campaign. The gods take sides. Achilles goes into battle knowing he is going to die. Achilles kills Hector who has run around the city three times before standing and fighting. Took place in the 13th century B.C. Four centuries later, the material was organized and attributed to Homer. Achilles embraces certain death rather than live a long life without glory.

Immense Journey, The. Eiseley, Loren. New York: Time, Inc. 1946 (1957). Series of essays concerned with the meaning of evolution. Eiseley views evolution as a continuing process, continuing to change to become—who knows what?

Innocents Abroad, The, or the New Pilgrims’ Progress. Twain, Mark. NY: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc. 1869 (1984). Twain looked on hallowed European landmarks with a fresh and humorous point of view and without reverence for the past.

Justice at Nuremberg. Conot, Robert E. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers. 1983. The purposes of the trial of the Nazi leaders at Nuremberg were to convict organizations and the individuals within them of conspiracy to kill five million Jews, to reveal the horror of the Nazi regime and to condemn wars of aggression in the future.

Kennedy. Sorenson, Theodore C. New York: Bantam Books. 1966. JFK sought the Presidency to get things done. Questioned, listened and learned. Knew that his most important role was to elucidate, educate and explain. His greatest lesson: never trust the experts. After listening to advice, the President made the decision.

Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. Vol. One. Boswell, James. New York: EP Dutton & Co., Inc. 1791 (1949). Johnson’s biography is made up of trifling incidents as well as significant events. Boswell stage-managed encounters between Johnson and others. Turned a wealth of detail into a perceptive, lifelike portrait.

Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher. Thomas, Lewis. New York: the Viking Press. 1974. Cells are complex ecosystems. Evolution is a game with only the winners staying at the table. Every creature is interdependent.

Lolita. Nabokov, Vladimir. NY: Berkeley Medallion Books. 1955. A record of the author’s love affair with the English language. Combines parody, fancy, literary puzzles and a satirical overview of American culture.

Marble Faun, The, or The Romance of Monte Beni. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc. 1860 (1983). Pure and innocent “faun,” Donatello, is made human by his first sin, killing Miriam’s stalker. Largely a travelogue of Rome. Setting does not blend with plot.

Medea. Euripides. Falling in love with Jason, Medea helps him to steal the Golden Fleece and to murder her brother to delay their pursuers. She persuaded the three daughters of Jason’s enemy Pelias that she could rejuvenate him if they would cut him in pieces, which they did and Jason’s Argonauts captured the city. Although he owed most of his success to her, Jason later repudiates her in order to marry Glauce, daughter of Creon. Medea murders her two children by Jason and escapes in a chariot drawn by winged serpents to Athens, where she marries Aegeus.
Euripides attacked, at least by implication, many attitudes accepted by the Athenians: the subordinate position of women (Alcestis) and foreign women in particular (Medea)…. In Medea, the sharp-tongued heroine makes his criticism of the treatment of women abundantly clear. It was in this reduction of tragic figures to human proportions that laid the groundwork for the New Comedy that was to come.

Middlemarch. Eliot, George. New York: Book-of-the-Month Club. 1871-1872 (1992). Full study of a provincial town in a previous age focused on the thwarted idealism of Dorothea Brooke and Dr. Lydgate.

Minority Report: HL Mencken’s Notebooks. NY: Alfred A. Knopf. 1956. A random collection of cynical and ironic notes on a variety of subjects.

Montaigne: Selected Essays. The Charles Colton-W. Hazlitt Translation. Bates, Blanchard, ed. New York: The Modern Library (Random House). 1580, 1588, 1595 (1949). ). Montaigne’s essays give the impression of not being planned, of moving as the mind muses, from idea to idea. Contrast to five-paragraph essay.

Nathaniel Hawthorne in His Times. Mellow, James R. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company. 1980. Review of Hawthorne’s writing and political career. Hawthorne is preoccupied with secret sin that enables the sinner to recognize hidden sin in others. Wrote tales, sketches and romances/novels.

Northanger Abbey. Austen, Jane. London: Oxford University Press. 1818. After reading Ann Radcliffe’s novel Mysteries of Udolpho, Catherine sees Northanger Abbey as a house of nightmarish mysteries and is terrified by her own imagination.

Not So Wild a Dream. Sevareid, Eric. New York: Atheneum. 1946 (1976). The tragedy of war is not in the dead nor in the living; it is in the living dead. Experience as a reporter before and during WWII.

Notes from Turtle Creek. Browning, Ted. Chadds Ford, PA: Brandywine Conservancy. 1991. He observed and interpreted nature for us, not as a scientist…but as one with a spiritual connection to nature equal to the American Indians’ oneness with nature.

Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonnus, Antigone. Sophocles. Unknowingly, Oedipus kills his father and marries his mother. When famine strikes Thebes, Creon banishes him from the city because of his sins and he learns what he has done. Jocasta (his mother/wife) commits suicide and he blinds himself with her brooch. Shunned by his own sons, he curses them and wanders, an outcast, for may years. His faithful daughter Antigone leads him to a grove at Colonus. Creon tries to force his return to Thebes so that his body, buried outside the gates, would magically protect the city in war. But Theseus, the king of nearby Athens, defends him. Dying, Oedipus promises that his tomb will guard Athens from harm.

On Writing Well: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction. Second Edition. Zinsser, William. New York: Harper and Row Publishers. 1980. Good writing has an aliveness that keeps the reader reading from one paragraph to the next.

Once and Future King, The. White, THE. New York: GP Putnam’s Sons. 1939. The story of King Arthur who tried to channel the natural inclination for brutal fighting into fighting for good causes.

Outermost House, The: A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod. New York: The Viking Press. 1928 (1956). The three great elemental sounds in nature are the sound of rain, the sound of wind in a primeval woods, and the sound of outer ocean on a beach. The creation is still going on.

Passions of the Mind: A Novel of Sigmund Freud. Stone, Irving. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc. 1971. Freud showed us how much of our rational lives was influenced by the unconscious.

Persuasion. Austen, Jane. Oxford University Press. 1818. With trenchant observation and in meticulous detail, Austen presented the quiet, day-to-day country life of the upper-middle class English. Couple breaks up and reunites.

Pickwick Papers, The. Dickens, Charles. London: Oxford University Press. 1837 (1992). A mixture of wit and wisdom; the introduction of Sam Weller and his widow-hating father; the sheer joy in using language.

Pride and Prejudice. Austen, Jane. London: Oxford University Press. 1813. Husband-hunting mother for her five daughters. Elizabeth becomes prejudiced against her future suitor, Darcy, because of his pride and arrogance.

Random Walk in Science, A. Mendoza, E., ed. New York: Crane, Russak & Co., Inc. 1973. The wit and intellect of the scientific mind. 133 selections of various lengths. Humorous and serious thoughts about science and scientists.

Road Ahead, The. Gates, William H. III with Nathan Mythrvold and Peter Rinearson. New York: Viking Penguin. 1995. There will be a day, not far distant, when you will be able to conduct business, study, explore the world, call up great entertainment, make friends, attend neighborhood markets, and show pictures to distant relatives—without leaving your desk or armchair. (1995)

Roughing It. Twain, Mark. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc. 1872 (1984). A journey from St. Louis across the plains to Nevada, a visit to the Mormons and life and adventures in Virginia City. Facts left behind in creation of picture of the frontier spirit and its lusty humor.

Scarlet Letter, The. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. NY: Literary Classics of the United States. 1850 (1983). The book treats Hawthorne’s favorite themes: first, all men are guilty of secret sin. Second, greater than Dimmesdale’s is Chillingworth’s sin, for he has invaded the sanctity of another’s soul.

Schweitzer Album, The: A Portrait in Words and Pictures. Anderson, Erica. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1965. The essence of Dr. Schweitzer’s life and thought is respect and reverence for all life.


Sketches by Boz. Dickens, Charles. London: Oxford University Press. 1836. Sketches on a variety of topics, including poverty, pub conversation, journalism, prison life, life in London, Christmas, the unhappiness of Nicodemus Dumps, etc. who was always down in the dumps.

Spectator, The. Volume One. Addison and Steele and Others. Smith, Gregory, ed. New York: Dutton, Everyman’s Library. 1711 (1964). Entertaining essays designed to encourage moral reform; unlike sermons, they were not severe. Assault the vice, not the person.

Star Thrower, The. Eiseley, Loren. New York, London: Harcourt Brace Ivanovich. 1978. Eiseley bridged the two cultures of science and art and related nature and humanity. His essays are poetic in style, suggestive, ironic and often paradoxical. The title essay is about a lonely man who walks the beach in the dawn and returns beached starfish to the sea.

Story of Philosophy, The. 28th Printing. Durant, Will. New York: Pocket Books. 1953 (1976). This book is an attempt to make the specialized knowledge of philosophy accessible to the average reader. From Plato to John Dewey.

Strictly Speaking: Will America Be the Death of English? Newman, Edwin. Indianapolis/New York: the Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc. 1974. Edwin Newman. For direct and precise language would make conversation more interesting…would help to substitute facts for bluster…and would promote the practice of organized thought and even of occasional silence.

Tales and Sketches, Parts One, Two, Three and Four. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, (1830-1852) 1982. “Young Goodman Brown”; “The Ambitious Guest”; “My Kinsman, Major Molineaux”; “The Devil in Manuscript”; “The May Pole of Merry Mount”; “The Minister’s Black Veil”; “David Swan, A Fantasy”; “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment”; “Legends of the Province House: Lady Eleanore’s Mantle”; “The Birth Mark”; “Drowne’s Wooden Image”; “Rappaccini’s Daughter”; “Main Street”; “Ethan Brand”; “Feathertop, A Moralized Legend”; and “The Artist of the Beautiful” are some of the more famous examples.

Tender Is the Night. Fitzgerald, F. Scott. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. 1933 (1961). Female mental patient marries her psychiatrist and eventually gains her independence from him. Europe after WWI.

This Side of Paradise. Fitzgerald, F. Scott. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. 1920 (1948). Virtually a record of the “Lost Generation” in its college days, the novel treats Fitzgerald’s characteristic theme of true love blighted by money lust and is remarkable for its honest and detailed descriptions of the early “Jazz Age.”

Thousand Days, A: John F. Kennedy in the White House. Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr. New York: Houghton-Mifflin Co., 1965. JFK quickened heart and mind, inspired the young, met crises, led society to new possibilities of justice and the world to new possibilities of peace.

Time Present, Time Past. Bradley, Bill. NY: Alfred A. Knopf. 1996. JFK quickened heart and mind, inspired the young, met crises, led society to new possibilities of justice and the world to new possibilities of peace.

True Believer, The: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements. Hoffer, Eric. New York: Time Incorporated. 1951 (1963). ‘True Believers’ are frustrated people driven by guilt, failure and self-disgust to bury their own identity in a cause oriented to some future goal.

Universe and Dr. Einstein, The. Barnett, Lincoln. NY: Time, Inc. Book Division. 1948 (1957). We can no longer know the reality of the world around us through our senses. It can only be described by mathematical equations. Since everything in the universe is moving there is no stationary frame of reference to use in measuring its motion, although nothing moves faster than light. E = mc2. Mass becomes energy at the square of the speed of light and becomes radiation. The Einstein universe is curved, but can’t be visualized; can only be described mathematically.

V Was for Victory: Politics and American Culture During WWII. Blum, John Morton. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 1976. The selling of the war to Americans; popular concepts of our own fighting men, our allies, and the enemy; the return of prosperity after the long Depression and its effect on consumers, business big and small, and government; how we treated Italians and Italian-Americans, Japanese and Japanese-Americans, and our attitude toward Jewish refugees; the growth of black self-awareness and its results; party politics of the time….

Walden Or, Life in the Woods. Thoreau, Henry David. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc. 1854 (1985). Convinced that the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation, Thoreau lived alone in a cabin at Walden Pond, outside Concord, New Hampshire, from 1845 to 1847. His aim was to front only the essential facts of life, to emancipate himself from slavery to material possessions.

War and Peace. Tolstoy, LN. Hammondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, Ltd. 1869 (1957). Tolstoy alternated literary forms, using fiction to tell his story of the maturing of Pierre Bezukhov, Andre Bolkonsky and Natasha Rostova during the Napoleonic campaigns in Russia, and essays in which he discusses the ironies and absurdity of war.

Watchers at the Pond. Russell, Franklin. New York: Time Incorporated. 1961 (1966). The diversity of life in this miniature universe seemed infinite. In an hour, one bladderwort caught five hundred thousand creatures. The worm gulped down the rotifer and the frog swallowed the worm; the kingfisher killed the frog and the hunt passed endlessly from creature to creature. The lungs of the pond were the leaves. Billions of leaves hung, rustled, whispered, gleamed, and flickered. Thousands of breathing valves or stomata through which the leaf inhaled carbon dioxide and exhaled oxygen. In one summer, the trees would release more water than was contained in the pond.

Waverly, or ‘Tis Sixty Years Since. Scott, Sir Walter. London: The Caxton Publishing Company. Melrose Edition. 1814. Hanoverian Edward Waverly is converted to the Jacobite (Stewart?) cause, falls in love with a young, beautiful but fanatical Jacobite lady, fights for the Jacobite cause, is rejected by the Jacobite beauty and marries the steadfast, loyal Rose. Portraits of the highlanders and their courage.

Western Canon, The: The Books and School of the Ages. Bloom, Harold. New York, San Diego, London: Harcourt Brace & Company. 1994. Literature does not exist to alter individuals or society; people read to enlarge their lonely existence by understanding the complexity of motivation and point of view in the world without didacticism and moralizing.

Wings of Morning: The Story of the Last American Bomber Shot Down Over Germany in World War II. Childers, Thomas. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co. 1995. The author, an historian, used the letters home by the crew of the Black Cat to re-create the lives of the crew who, as the war with Germany was ending, were shot down practically as people were celebrating VE Day. The ironies and mistakes of war are vividly illustrated. The reader is with the men as they train and fly their missions.

Writer’s Book, The. Hull, Helen, ed. New York: Barnes and Noble, Inc. 1950. Novelists can make readers feel as if they participated in the events of the novel while journalists enable readers only to witness events. Short story writers are psychologists analyzing people under stress. People want to read stories about the emotions they experience. Eric Barnouw: two kinds of audience satisfaction: one consists of stimuli to practically all the senses as in watching a play; the other is stirred by mere suggestion into a great deal of thinking and feeling.

Writer’s Chapbook, The. Plimpton, George, ed. New York: Viking. 1989. A collection of thoughts on reading and writing dealing with questions like the following: What is a writer? How does one write a novel? Why are poems so difficult to read? How do writers write? What are the characteristics of good writing? What is communication? What is literature?

Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews. Cowley, Malcolm, ed. New York: The Viking Press, Inc. 1957 (1965). Malcolm Cowley: There would seem to be four stages in the composition of a story: the germ of the story, then a period of more or less conscious meditation, then the first draft and finally the revision. Interviews with authors like EM Forster, James Thurber, Thornton Wilder, William Faulkner, Simenon, Frank O’Connor, Robert Penn Warren, Nelson Algren, etc.

Wuthering Heights. Bronte, Emily. NY: Pocket Books, Inc. 1847 (1954). Raw emotion. The story of Heathcliff and Catherine. A gypsy orphan, Heathcliff is picked up from the streets of Liverpool by Earnshaw and brought home to be reared as one of his own children. Heathcliff’s passionate and ferocious nature finds its complement in Earnshaw’s daughter Catherine and he falls passionately in love with her. His violent love for Catherine brings her to her grave at the birth of her daughter Cathy.

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