Showing results by narrator "Lee Winfield" in All Categories

In this essay, Thoreau contends that an individual should not permit a government to overrule their conscience. He argues that one’s conscience ought to take priority over the law, in order to avoid becoming an agent of injustice. He was partly motivated by the institution of slavery and by the Mexican-American war of 1846-1848.

Joseph Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent (1907) is a tragic tale based on the themes of espionage, double agents, anarchism, and terrorism. The story is set in London in 1886 and deals with Mr. Verloc, who works as a spy for an unnamed country. When he becomes involved in an anarchist plot to blow up the Greenwich Observatory, things go haywire, revealing an unholy mess that involves politicians, policemen, foreign diplomats, and London's high society.

Encircled by the Centaurian Empire, the growing Terran system is being suppressed and prevented from expanding. Terra is desperate to break free, and a war with Proxima Centauri ensues. It’s a battle of technology, with the two sides just barely staying ahead of one another. Then Thomas Cole arrives from 1913.

Henry David Thoreau was an American naturalist, essayist, poet, and philosopher. "The Service" (1840) is an essay that uses war and military discipline as metaphors for human life. Displaying a taste for paradox, "The Service" must have been inspired by the discourses on peace and nonresistance that were popular in New England at the time.