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Summary
Summary
The first class at M.I.T. The last hope for a city in peril.
The acclaimed author of The Dante Club reinvigorates the historical thriller. Matthew Pearl's spellbinding new novel transports readers to tumultuous nineteenth-century Boston, where the word "technology" represents a bold and frightening new concept. The fight for the future will hinge on . . .
THE TECHNOLOGISTS
Boston, 1868. The Civil War may be over but a new war has begun, one between the past and the present, tradition and technology. On a former marshy wasteland, the daring Massachusetts Institute of Technology is rising, its mission to harness science for the benefit of all and to open the doors of opportunity to everyone of merit. But in Boston Harbor a fiery cataclysm throws commerce into chaos, as ships' instruments spin inexplicably out of control. Soon after, another mysterious catastrophe devastates the heart of the city. Is it sabotage by scientific means or Nature revolting against man's attempt to control it?
The shocking disasters cast a pall over M.I.T. and provoke assaults from all sides--rival Harvard, labor unions, and a sensationalistic press. With their first graduation and the very survival of their groundbreaking college now in doubt, a band of the Institute's best and brightest students secretly come together to save innocent lives and track down the truth, armed with ingenuity and their unique scientific training.
Led by "charity scholar" Marcus Mansfield, a quiet Civil War veteran and one-time machinist struggling to find his footing in rarefied Boston society, the group is rounded out by irrepressible Robert Richards, the bluest of Beacon Hill bluebloods; Edwin Hoyt, class genius; and brilliant freshman Ellen Swallow, the Institute's lone, ostracized female student. Working against their small secret society, from within and without, are the arrayed forces of a stratified culture determined to resist change at all costs and a dark mastermind bent on the utter destruction of the city.
Studded with suspense and soaked in the rich historical atmosphere for which its author is renowned, The Technologists is a dazzling journey into a dangerous world not so very far from our own, as the America we know today begins to shimmer into being.
Author Notes
Matthew Pearl received a degree in English and American Literature from Harvard University in 1997 and a law degree from Yale Law School in 2000. He writes novels including The Dante Club, The Poe Shadow, and The Last Dickens. He has also taught literature and creative writing at Harvard University and Emerson College.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Set in 1868 Boston, the latest historical fiction from Pearl (The Dante Club) finds protagonist Marcus Mansfield on the cusp of graduation from the newly formed Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he studies intently, spies on the Catholic girls' school, and fights Harvard's unfriendly rowing team. Life at the school is upended after a strange set of calamities takes place. In foggy Boston Harbor, ships collide, and all the glass in the city's central commercial district suddenly liquefies, maiming and killing Bostonians. The police are at a loss, not sure if these are crimes at all. Harvard's best-and mostly incompetent-minds are enlisted to solve the crime, leaving Mansfield and his friends no option but to form a secret club and solve the mystery themselves. In order to do so, they must contend with a scarred man, Harvard's satanic Medical Faculty (Med Fac) club, and antiscience trade unionists. Lighter than his previous novels, Pearl again blends detective fiction with historical characters (such as pioneering feminist and MIT-trained scientist Ellen Swallow), and his cast reads like a who's who of 19th-century Boston. The novel is lighter than some of Pearl's previous work, but still great fun to read. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
In a departure from his three previous novels, Pearl explores the early history of MIT. In 1868, the institute's first senior class nears graduation when ships in Boston harbor inexplicably plow into each other, causing massive damage and injury. Meanwhile, vendettas are born between Harvard and MIT when a fear of science is spread citywide by Harvard scholars infuriated by what they see as academic posing by their inferiors. Increasingly deadly events put MIT in the figurative dog house with the police. Pearl's signature complex plotting, strewn with red herrings and populated with unlikely villains, leaves readers as shocked and intrigued as the Bostonians. Dialogue evocative of the nineteenth century showcases well-researched period details but slows the pace, as MIT students engage in florid conversations. Still, Pearl's latest will certainly appeal to fans of leisurely paced, smart historical thrillers like Caleb Carr's The Alienist (1994) and Jed Rubenfeld's The Death Instinct (2011). HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Pearl's first three novels The Dante Club, The Poe Shadow, and The Last Dickens were all New York Times best-sellers. His latest, another literary-historical thriller, seems certain to join the elite club.--Baker, Jen Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
"TELL us where you get your ideas!" we demand of the talented and interesting writer. "Oh, the imagination on you! How do you do it?" He demurs, disclaims, and we note a modest fluffing-up of authorial plumage. He knows how wonderful he is. But good prose is so much less of a mystery, finally, so much less of a shock, than bad prose. Good prose, after all, relates to our shared essence: we know it when we read it, we assent to it, we get it. Bad prose, on the other hand, is arrestingly weird. It stops the clocks and twists the wires. It knits the brow in perplexity: What the hell is this? What's going on here? I was brought up short, for example, very early in Matthew Pearl's latest novel, "The Technologists," by the following line: "Incredulously, the captain extended his spyglass." I wavered and then stopped. How does one incredulously extend a spyglass? And what else can one do incredulously? incredulously, they cut down the hanged man. . . . Incredulously, she flossed her perfect teeth. . . . Incredulously, the reviewer contemplated the latest book from the best-selling author of "The Dante Club" and "The Last Dickens," whose literarily flavored historical novels have been published in 40 countries. . . . To the narrative, anyway: The year is 1868, and the captain is incredulously extending his spyglass in the direction of Boston Harbor, where a disaster is unfolding. Schooners and pleasure steamers and barks, their compass needles all awhirl, are crashing into one another and sinking. Some malignancy has fritzed the instruments! A couple of days later, on State Street in Boston's busy financial quarter, all the windows spontaneously melt. And not just the windows - clock faces, tumblers: "The glass lenses in his eyeglasses sank into his eye sockets and left him flailing." Panic in the streets. A nasty stockbroker, behaving rather like the Duke brothers at the climax of "Trading Places," barges through the plebs, crying: "My assets! Out of my way!" Two bizarre and terrible irruptions, two sets of unexplained phenomena. The metropolis is clearly under siege - but by whom or what? And what will happen next? Enter the Technologists, an A-Team of students, informally convened, from the newly established Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Here I began to enjoy myself. Pearl has clearly wallowed in his research, and "The Technologists" is pretty good on the societal and cultural forces arrayed against the fledgling M.I.T. Tribunes of the Industrial Revolution, warriors of enlightenment, pushing back the darkness with their inventions, its students and faculty are blackguarded left and right. The Harvard swells mock them for their closeness to the factory floor; the workers, who fear automation, throw tomatoes at them. ("Technology will bring God's wrath!") And the city fathers, hating their Darwinism - "the despicable teaching that we are descended from monkeys" - and un-Christian newfangledness, conspire against them. "Over there," one graybeard rumbles, "they will teach atheist machinists and the sons of farmers alike. The knowledge of science in such individuals cannot fail to lead to quackery and dangerous social tendencies." Do you hear a whisper of "The Da Vinci Code" in all this? I fancy I do. The crusty hierarchy hoarding its secrets, the gnostic devotion to Truth - thanks to Dan Brown, these things are in the DNA of the modern historical-thriller blockbuster. The archenemy in "The Technologists" is the one they call "the experimenter": the entity responsible for the colliding ships in Boston Harbor and the melted eyeglasses on State Street. The Technologists have pegged him for a rogue scientist, a trickster with test tubes, and slowly, by trial and error, they draw a bead on him. They must stop him, for he represents Science's shadow: a magus-like manipulator of matter, in the service not of knowledge but of fear. There is romance, there are fisticuffs. Laboratories explode. The manliest of the Technologists is haunted by his memories of the Civil War. "Say, what puts you in such a brown study this morning? That little social call yesterday from the men in blue?" Somebody says that You see the elements assembling. What we have in "The Technologists" is basically a ripping yarn with some war-of-ideas apparatus and plenty of period furniture, the whole accompanied by a distracting space-junk drone of bad writing. Like this: "Entering the college's study room, Marcus and Frank were preemptively hushed by a table of students in the corner before they even said anything." And this: "He lifted his hand to his hat, but she simply looked the other way with a crimson bloom tainting her pale cheeks." Now that's Victorian melodrama - Victorian pornography, almost. In a more ironic text, or one more aware of the possibility of pastiche, it might work; but Pearl appears to be using his 19th-century setting as a license to write extra-badly. Did I mention that "The Technologists" is nearly 500 pages long? There is a type of reader, I think, who likes to munch, munch, munch his way through a book like this. Not for him the dazzling compression, or the spark of novelty leaping from synapse to synapse - just a steady, satisfying rumination of printed matter. I don't mean to be rude: my own taste for shorter and flashier books is probably explained by the many hours of Donkey Kong I played in my youth. The point is that if the reader described above, and a sufficient number of readers like him, are alerted to the existence of "The Technologists," Matthew Pearl will have another great success. If not, not. James Parker writes the Entertainment column for The Atlantic.
Guardian Review
Boston, 1868. When ships collide in the harbour after a catastrophic instrument failure, students at the fledgling MIT offer to help the police, convinced that only scientific minds can solve the mystery. Among them are civil war veteran Marcus Mansfield and lone female Ellen Swallow, who in real life as in fiction was not allowed to attend classes with the men and worked on her own in a separate laboratory. Fans of earlier Pearl thrillers such as The Dante Club will know what to expect. The marrying of real people and events to a fantastical plot is done neatly and without archness, and you certainly can't accuse Pearl of insufficient research. The social background is intriguing - the rivalry between MIT and Harvard; the deep suspicion of science as an adjunct of witchcraft; MIT's scholarships for the underprivileged. Recommended. - John O'Connell Boston, 1868. When ships collide in the harbour after a catastrophic instrument failure, students at the fledgling MIT offer to help the police, convinced that only scientific minds can solve the mystery. - John O'Connell.
Kirkus Review
The Last Dickens, 2009, etc.) latest, an improbable but entertaining yarn of weird science. Marcus Mansfield is trying to adjust to life as a civilian following years in a Confederate prison. He is a diffident and cautious fellow: "He did not volunteer for the war to be a hero, nor to change the world, either, but did think it was the best thing a man could do." He also wants to be left alone, having applied for a night watchman's job for the solitude and instead finding work in a dark corner of a machine shop, where he puts his talents to use designing things that are much ahead of their time. In a Boston scarcely bigger than a suburb today, he draws the attention of the head of a new school on the Back Bay along "surroundings that were grandly artificial, where the pupils would observe the way in which civil engineers could turn malodorous swamp...into a landscape of wide streets." All this comes just in time for the chase at hand, for someone has in turn been sabotaging the shipping in Boston's busy harbor, turning compasses upside down and sending freighters and schooners plowing into the docks at crazy angles. It's up to Mansfield and a team of proto-geeks at MIT to figure out what sort of devious soul would want to make like a whale and wreak Moby-Dick's vengeance on the good brahmins of Beacon Hill--and while the answer, which takes a good long time in coming, isn't in the least bit predictable, it also makes sense once it comes into focus. Marcus' enthusiasm for the chase is delightful--"We'll need Tech's best physicist on hand, of course!"--as is Pearl's appreciation for both 19th-century science and technology and affection for Beantown and its history. Of appeal to fans of Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes films, as well as aficionados of a good adventure layered with batteries, transformers and navigational tools.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Pearl's faultless fourth historical mystery centers on Boston in the late 1860s and the newly founded college that will become the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Three male students from different class backgrounds and the institution's sole female student team up to research a series of scientific mysteries baffling the Boston police. As part of MIT's first secret society, the Technologists, the students use chemicals, experiments, and such inventions as a primitive submarine to track a murderer whose abilities and education seem to parallel their own. The Technologists race to stay ahead of the police while dueling with their Harvard rivals and fending off antagonism from the trade unionists, who resent MIT's role in mechanizing factories. VERDICT Pearl has a special talent for making likable detectives out of historical figures (The Dante Club) and for pulling compelling plotlines from biographies (The Poe Shadow; The Last Dickens). Here, MIT and Harvard are brought to the foreground and so well depicted that they become historical characters in their own right. This thriller won't disappoint Pearl's many fans. [Library and academic marketing; on December 5 the publisher released an e-original short story as a tie-in to this novel.-Ed.]-Catherine Lantz, Morton Coll. Lib., Cicero, IL (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Book 1 Civil and Topographical Engineering I April 4, 1868 Its proud lines intermittently visible through the early morning fog, the Light of the East might have been the most carefree ship that ever floated into Boston. Some of the sailors, their bearded faces browned and peeling from too much sun, cracked the last rations of walnuts in their fists or under their boot heels, singing some ancient song about a girl left behind. After wild March winds, stormy seas, dangerous ports, backbreaking work, and all the extremes of experience, they'd be handed a good pay at port, then freed to lose it to the city's myriad pleasures. The navigator held the prow steady, his eye on his instruments, as they waited for the fog to disperse enough for their signal to be seen by the pilot boat. Although Boston Harbor stretched across seventy-five square miles, its channels had been so narrowed for purposes of defense that two large ships could not safely pass each other without the harbor pilot's assistance. The Light's austere captain, Mr. Beal, strode the deck, his rare aura of high contentment amplified by the giddiness of his men. Beal could envision in his mind's eye the pilot boat breaking through the fog toward them, the pilot dressed like an undertaker, saluting indifferently and relieving Beal--for once--of his burdens. Then would come the view of the stretches of docks and piers, the solid granite warehouses never quite large enough for all the foreign cargo brought in by the merchants, then beyond that the State House's gold dome capping the horizon--the glittering cranium of the world's smartest city. In the last few years, with so many men returned from fighting the rebellion, even modest Boston merchants had become veritable industrialists, beset as they were by excess hands. This city had prided itself on its history from the time it was little more than a quaint village, but Beal was old enough to know how artificial its modern visage was. Hills that formerly sloped through the city had been flattened, their detritus used to fill in various necks and bays, the foundations for streets and new neighborhoods and wharves such as the one that soon would welcome them. He could remember when the Public Garden was plain mud marking Boston's natural boundary. A steam pipe bellowed from some unseen ship launching on its way or maybe, like them, gliding toward a journey's end, and Beal felt a solemn comradeship with all unknown voyagers. As he glimpsed the crescent moon and thought he would soon have enough light even in this nasty fog to lay course, his pleasant reverie was broken by a bright light flashing low in the water. When the captain craned forward, a lifeboat caught in the current, right in the path of their prow, sprang out from the mist. His lookout cried out while Beal seized his speaking trumpet and shouted orders to change course. A woman's scream floated up. The schooner veered adroitly in efforts to avoid the small craft, but too late. The lifeboat's passengers jumped for their lives as their boat split into pieces against the Light's prow, the screaming woman thrusting a small child above the waves. To the shock of the captain, another obstacle broke through the dense curtain of fog on the schooner's starboard side: a pleasure steamer, with its flags flying the signals of distress, and taking on water. "Clear lower deck!" Beal shouted. Light of the East had nowhere to go. The side of its hull grazed and then caught the stranded steamship, right through the forward bulkhead: Pipes snapped and scalding-hot steam rushed into the heavy air as the hold of the schooner was ripped open. Now it, too, took on water, fast. Chaos reigned on and off the ships. Beal snapped an order to throw the cargo overboard and repeated it sharply when his men hesitated. If they didn't unload right now, they would lose not only their profits, but also the ship and likely lives. "Captain! There!" called his lookout. Beal stared in astonishment from the railing as a stray breeze parted the fog. The wharf loomed ahead, but it was now clear they were approaching it from the wrong angle, parallel instead of perpendicular. Incredulously, the captain extended his spyglass. A bark flying British colors had wrecked against the tip of one of the piers and caught fire, while another schooner, marked the Gladiator, had drifted against the wharf, where its crew feverishly tried to tow it in. As he watched, fiery debris spread to the Gladiator's sails, which an instant later were wreathed in flames. At least half a dozen ships were visible in those few moments of clarity, and all were foundering in various states of distress across the once-orderly harbor, reverberating with shrieking whistles, bells, foghorns, and other desperate signals. Beal frantically stumbled and slid on his way to the navigational instruments. The needle of the steering compass, held under glass by the wheel, spun around violently, as if bedeviled, while on his pocket compass the needle was 180 degrees off the mark--north was south. He'd sailed by these navigational instruments--finely tuned with the expertise of nineteen centuries--for his entire life as a seaman, and he knew there should be no way for them to fail all at once. The pleasure steamer they had crashed into suddenly lurched forward with a boom. In seconds it was entirely underwater. Where it had been, a vortex opened, sucking under those already stranded in the water, and then spitting them out high into the air. "To the lifeboats!" shouted Beal to his thunderstruck crew. "Find anyone alive and get as far away as you can!" II Charles Submerged. As the waves soothed his naked body, his athletic strokes worked in concert with the rhythm of the current. The first week in April had not yet promised any warmth, the water still rather icy. But he willingly endured the chill ripping through his body for the better feeling swimming afforded him. It was a feeling of being alone but not lonely, a sense of freedom from all restrictions and control. Floating, kicking, somersaulting--try as he could to make noise, the water rendered him irrelevant. Throughout his boyhood in a port town, he'd heard so many people spoken of as "lost at sea." Now it seemed to him the strangest turn of phrase. As long as he was in the water, he could not be lost. He could bask, bathe, disappear, and the water sheltered him as much in Boston as it had back home. Not that he ever felt homesick, as some of the other Institute students did who had come from outside Boston. He still traveled the forty miles back and forth to Newburyport by train every day to keep down living expenses, although it cost him more than an hour each way. To his mother and stepfather, the Institute remained a strange detour from his good position at the machine shop, and a daily interruption to his help at home. His stepfather, James, had always been unhappy, plagued by a partial deafness in his left ear that made him shun all society and friends. He worked as a night watchman for a jeweler because he preferred the solitude and uneventful nature of the position. He assumed people were speaking ill of him because he could not hear what they said, which led him to the further conclusion that city life, being loud, was an evil cacophony of deceit. As for his mother, she was a religious zealot of the old Puritan kind who saw danger in urban life and no value to the son's studies in Boston. Even now, when he was a senior, graduation a mere two and a half months away, they did not accept that he--Marcus Mansfield, of all people!--was a student at a college. Marcus plunged his head back into the cool water, ears tingling as he surveyed the river--a tranquil and forgiving lane that ran between Boston and Cambridge, lined by a gentle, sloping green sward that would shade swimmers and oarsmen from the hot days to come. Unseen behind the thick weather, above the riverbank and the fields and marshes skirting it, there lurked the crowded brick and iron and gold-domed city, propelling Marcus forward with the powerful thrust of a gigantic engine. At the shallow bend of the river Marcus took another big breath and sank, closing his eyes and relishing the drop. Down below, pieces of debris and lumber had lodged in the muddy riverbed. As he brushed against the foreign articles, he heard a voice beckon, distant, as though issued from the sky: "Mansfield! Mansfield! We need you!" Marcus bobbed up from under the water and then grabbed onto the side of a boat. "Mansfield! There you are! You're late." "How did you know I was swimming?" "How did we--? Ha! Because I saw a pile of clothes back there on the shore, and who else would dare plunge into this freezing Styx!" The tall, blond oarsman dangled a suit of clothes above Marcus's head. "Actually, it was Eddy who recognized your clothes." "Morning, Marcus," said the second, smaller oarsman with his usual open smile. "And since Eddy and I were both ready," continued Bob, "we pushed out to find you." "Then you were early," said Marcus, treading water toward the bank, "before I was late." "Ha! I'll take that. Get dressed--we need our third oar." He shook himself dry on the bank and climbed into his gray trousers and light shirt. His two companions presented a study in opposites as they helped him into their boat: Bob, with the quintessential New Englander's clear skin and crown of handsome curls, standing carelessly at the edge of the shell; Edwin Hoyt, slight and frail-looking, throwing the little weight he possessed to the other side in anticipation of a tragic drowning. Despite knowing the water and boats pretty well, Marcus had not grown up indulging in such impractical pursuits as rowing for pleasure, with its arbitrary rules and catchwords. Some weeks before, Bob had announced one morning, "This is the day, fellows!" to Marcus and Edwin, their fellow Institute of Technology senior, as he bounded ahead of them on the way to a lecture. "Which day?" "Spring is here, Mansfield, and since it's our last one at the college it's time I showed you rowing just as I promised. Why, I hardly knew one end of the oar from the other until I was nine years old. A scrawny boy I was, the smallest Richards ever!" This served to emphasize what a commanding twenty-two-year-old Bob had become. Marcus could not actually recall Bob promising to teach them, but let that pass, given Bob's enthusiasm. To his surprise, Marcus found rowing not to be the wasted time he expected, and it took his mind away from worrying about the looming future away from the Institute. It was at once calming and exciting, a thrill when the shell launched across the surface of the water as though alive. They tried to recruit more oars among their classmates to join them, but the few willing candidates never did find time. As their small vessel pushed steadily along, Bob began laughing to himself. "I was just thinking of my brothers," he explained. "They used to warn me about the sea serpent of the Charles. Nearly one hundred feet long, they said, with humps like a camel and a cry like a braying donkey crossed with an elephant's trumpeting. You know how I have to take it upon myself to investigate anything in nature. Well, for three months I searched out old Charley, until I determined that the water wouldn't sustain a sea serpent's diet." "But how did you know what a sea serpent ate?" Edwin asked seriously. "Bob, would you mind rowing farther east today?" Marcus proposed. "A quest! Where to?" "I haven't seen the harbor since . . ." Marcus did not finish his sentence. "Better not to, Marcus," Edwin said quickly. "I caught sight of it this morning after it was all over. The whole harbor was up in smoke. It was like looking into the face of a bad omen." "Eager to see the destruction?" "Actually, Bob, I was hoping to learn something from seeing how they begin the repairs," Marcus corrected him. "There is already some debris on the riverbed that must have drifted on the current." He stopped when he saw Bob's face narrow as he looked out on the water behind them. "What is it?" "Just my luck," Bob said. "Faster, fellows! Go! Come on, Mansfield, faster! Well rowed, Hoyt! All clear, come on!" A forty-nine-foot shell had shot out of the trees sheltering a narrow adjoining channel with the speed of a lightning bolt. Six flashing oars creased the surface of the river in synchronized strokes, throwing off white streaks behind them. The rowers were bare from the waist up, with crimson handkerchiefs wrapped around their heads, and their flexing muscles glistened in the strengthening sun. As Marcus peered back at them, they looked like highly educable pirates, and he knew it would be a lost cause to attempt to elude whatever this boat was. "Who are they?" he marveled. "Blaikie," Bob explained as the three of them pulled as hard as they could. "His is the best Harvard six there ever was, they say. Will Blaikie--he's the stroke oar. I'd rather stare into the mouth of the serpent." Edwin wheezed between strokes, "Blaikie . . . was . . . at Exeter . . . with Bob and me." The other vessel came on with a spurt too powerful to shake, now just a length behind. "Plymouth!" cried the lantern-jawed lead rower on the lightning bolt. The boat went by theirs and then reversed and ranged alongside of them. "Why, it is you, Plymouth!" said the stroke oar, Blaikie, to Bob with a gleaming smile. Even seated in his shell, he presented the particular mincing swagger of a Harvard senior. "It's been ages. You're not forming a randan team, are you?" "We've been borrowing a shell from the boat club," said Bob, motioning for his friends to stop rowing. Marcus could not remember seeing his classmate so deflated. "Don't tell me you're still dragging your heels over at that embryo of a college, Plymouth?" Blaikie asked. "We are seniors now, like you." "Tant pis pour vous," interjected one of the Harvard boys, eliciting chuckles from the others. "I fear civilizing your classmates into respectable gentlemen will take more than teaching them to grip an oar," Blaikie went on cheerfully. "Science cannot substitute for culture, old salt. I used to agonize, Plymouth, what I would most rather be, stroke of the Harvard, president of the Christian Brethren, or First Scholar of the class. Now I know what it is to be all three." He was reminded by one of his oarsmen not to forget president of one of the best college societies. "Yes, Smithy! But it is best not to speak of the societies to outsiders." "We are doing things far more important--things you wouldn't begin to understand, Blaikie." "Just how many of you Technology boys are there?" Throwing out his chest, Bob answered, "Fifteen men in the Class of '68. About thirty-five in the other three classes, and we expect more than ever in the next freshman group." Excerpted from The Technologists: A Novel by Matthew Pearl All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
