Showing results by narrator "Robin Field" in All Categories

Among the autobiographies of great military figures, Ulysses S. Grant’s is certainly one of the finest, and it is arguably the most notable literary achievement of any American president: a lucid, compelling, and brutally honest chronicle of triumph and failure. From his frontier boyhood, to his heroics in battle, to the grinding poverty from which the Civil War ironically rescued him, these memoirs are a mesmerizing, deeply moving account of a brilliant man told with great courage.

The first volume of Will Durant's Pulitzer Prize-winning series, Our Oriental Heritage: The Story of Civilization, Volume I chronicles the early history of Egypt, the Middle East, and Asia.

Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason; Being an Investigation of True and Fabulous Theology, published in three parts from 1794, was a best seller in America, where it caused a short-lived deistic revival. Promoting a creator-God while advocating reason in the place of revelation, Paine’s controversial pamphlet caused his native British audience, fearing the results of the French Revolution, to receive it with more hostility than their American counterparts.

One of the great innovators in American letters, Walt Whitman created a daringly new kind of poetry that became a major force in world literature. Leaves of Grass is his masterpiece, written in a pure, uninhibited style, combining sensual and mystical sensibilities. Its bold, joyous voice, its expansive optimism, and its transcendental vision made it uniquely American.

The Origin of Species sold out on the first day of its publication in 1859. It is the major book of the 19th century and one of the most readable and accessible of the great revolutionary works of the scientific imagination. Though, in fact, little read, most people know what it says—at least they think they do. The Origin of Species was the first mature and persuasive work to explain how species change through the process of natural selection. Upon its publication, the book began to transform attitudes about society and religion.

In his groundbreaking and controversial book The DIM Hypothesis, Dr. Leonard Peikoff casts a penetrating new light on the process of human thought and thereby on Western culture and history. In this far-reaching study, Peikoff identifies the three methods people use to integrate concrete data into a whole, as when connecting diverse experiments by a scientific theory, separate laws into a constitution, or single events into a story.

William Stoner is born at the end of the 19th century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to the state university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar's life, far different from the hardscrabble existence he has known. And yet as the years pass, Stoner encounters a succession of disappointments.

These stories display Twain's place in American letters as a master writer in the authentic native idiom. He was exuberant and irreverent, but underlying the humor was a vigorous desire for social justice and a pervasive equalitarian attitude.

Originally published in 1907, The Shepherd of the Hills is Harold Bell Wright's most famous work. In The Shepherd of the Hills, Wright spins a tale of universal truths across the years to the modern-day reader. His Eden in the Ozarks has a bountiful share of life's enchantments, but is not without its serpents.

Working at a plantation in his youth, Joel Chandler Harris found that much of his shyness disappeared in the slave QTLYters, and his background as the illegitimate son of an Irish immigrant helped fuse a close bond with the slaves. The language of his new friends and the African-American animal tales they shared later became the inspiration for Joel’s beloved Uncle Remus stories.

Pierre Glendinning is the 19-year-old heir to the manor at Saddle Meadows in upstate New York. Engaged to the blonde Lucy Tartan in a match approved by his domineering mother, Pierre encounters the dark and mysterious Isabel Banford, who claims to be his half sister, the illegitimate and orphaned child of his father and a European refugee. Driven by his magnetic attraction to Isabel, Pierre devises a remarkable scheme to preserve his father's name, spare his mother's grief, and give Isabel her share of the estate.

First published by brothers Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm in 1812 as a collection of retold Germanic folk stories, this collection of such well-known fairytales as Rapunzel and Sleeping Beauty transports listeners to a realm where “Once upon a time” often ends up “happily ever after”…and where giants, princesses, kings and fairies pursue power, find true love, have all sorts of magical adventures — and in the process reveal multi-faceted truths about human nature.

When a jealous Zeus discovers that the compassionate Titan, Prometheus, has introduced the gift of fire to liberate mere mortals from oppression and servitude, he has Prometheus bound to a rocky prison in the Scythian desert, where the god discloses the reason for his punishment.

Aristotle’s Poetics is the earliest-surviving work of dramatic theory and the first fully intact philosophical treatise to focus on literary theory. The respected Greek sage offers an account of what he calls "poetry" (which the Greeks understood to literally mean "making"), examining its "first principles" and identifying its genres and basic elements, including what he terms drama-comedy, tragedy, and the satyr play - as well as lyric poetry, epic poetry, and iambic pentameter, which he always associates with wit.

First published in 1873, The Gilded Age is both a biting satire and a revealing portrait of post-Civil War America - an age of corruption when crooked land speculators, ruthless bankers, and dishonest politicians voraciously took advantage of the nation's peacetime optimism. With his characteristic wit and perception, Mark Twain and his collaborator, Charles Dudley Warner, attack the greed, lust, and naiveté of their own time in a work that endures as a valuable social document and one of America's most important satirical novels.

A mere 18 years of age when his uncle, Julius Caesar, is murdered, Octavius Caesar prematurely inherits rule of the Roman Republic. Surrounded by men who are jockeying for power—Cicero, Brutus, Cassius, and Mark Antony—young Octavius must work against the powerful Roman political machinations to claim his destiny as first Roman emperor. Sprung from meticulous research and the pen of a true poet, Augustus tells the story of one man’s dream to liberate a corrupt Rome.

Published together for the first time are three of Ayn Rand's compelling stage plays. The courtroom drama Night of January 16th, a 1935 Broadway success famous for leaving the verdict to the audience, is presented here in its definitive, final revised text - a superb dramatization of Rand's vision of human strengths and weaknesses.

In the early spring of 1845, Henry David Thoreau built and lived in a cabin near the shore of Walden Pond in rural Massachusetts. For the next two years, he enacted his own Transcendentalist experiment, living a simple life based on self-reliance, individualism, and harmony with nature. The journal he kept at that time evolved into his masterwork, Walden, an eloquent expression of a uniquely American philosophy.

In 1835, a publishing firm asked McGuffey to create a series of graded Readers for primary-level students. The series consisted of stories, poems, essays, and speeches, and it is estimated that at least 120 million copies of McGuffey's Reader were sold between 1836 and 1960, placing its sales in a category with the Bible and Webster’s Dictionary.

Franklin’s Autobiography, one of the most regarded works in early American literature, began as a private collection of anecdotes for his son, but was soon transformed from reflective personal journaling into a work of national history. Filled with the inimitable nuances & wit of the inventor, philosopher, scientist and statesman, this engaging narration of Benjamin Franklin’s classic is as certain to delight modern readers as it did with his original audience.