Showing results by author "ciesse" in All Categories

The book commences with a feast organized by Ahasuerus, initially for his court and dignitaries and afterwards for all inhabitants of Shushan. Ahasuerus orders his wife Vashti to display her beauty before the guests. She refuses, and the King's advisors warn that, if unpunished, her actions would inspire other wives to disobey their husbands. Ahasuerus removes her as queen. (Jews believe that she was executed, He then orders all young women to be presented to him, so he can choose a new queen to replace Vashti. One of these is Esther, who was orphaned at a young age and is being fostered by ...

God permits "Satan," or in some translations "the adversary" or "the accuser," to put the virtue of Job to the test, at first by giving him power over his property, but forbidding him to touch his person. Satan begins by taking away all of Job's riches, his livestock, his house, his servants, and his children; a series of four messengers informs him that they have perished in various tragedies. In the meantime, only three of Job's friends come to visit him in his misfortune — Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite. A fourth, Elihu the Buzite, first begins talking...

孔子（公元前551年9月28日－前479年），子姓孔氏，名丘，字仲尼，鲁（今中國山东曲阜）人，中国春秋末期的思想家和教育家。孔子是中华文化中的核心学说儒家的首代宗師，集華夏上古文化之大成，在世時已被譽為“天縱之聖”、“天之木鐸”，是當時社會上最博學者之一，並且被后世尊为至聖（聖人之中的聖人）、至聖先師、万世师表。孔子和他创立的儒家思想对中国和朝鲜、台灣、日本、越南等地區有深远的影响，這些地區又被稱爲儒家文化圈...

Raveling Porcy's systematized enigma, Dan found himself with a spy's worst break—he was saddled with the guise of a famed man! A masterful science fiction tale told by one of the greats. - Summary by Paul Hampton

This is a very short volume of poems by Canadian poet Kate Seymour MacLean, containing only twenty poems. - Summary by Carolin

The Moberly–Jourdain incident was an event that occurred on 10 August 1901 in the gardens of the Petit Trianon, involving two female academics, Charlotte Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain. The women were both from educated backgrounds. During a trip to Versailles, they visited the Petit Trianon, a small château in the grounds of the Palace of Versailles, where they allegedly experienced a time slip, and saw Marie Antoinette as well as other people of the same period. After researching the history of the palace, and comparing notes of their experience, they published their work in a book ...

"Ecclesiastes is a wisdom book of the Old Testament. The author represents himself as the son of David, and king over Israel in Jerusalem. The work consists of personal or autobiographic matter, at times expressed in aphorisms and maxims illuminated in terse paragraphs with reflections on the meaning of life and the best way of life. The work emphatically proclaims all the actions of man to be inherently "vain", "futile", "empty", or "meaningless," depending on translation, as the lives of both wise and foolish men end in death. While the teacher clearly promotes wisdom as a means for a ...

The Books of Chronicles (Hebrew Divrei Hayyamim, דברי הימים, Greek Paralipomenon, Παραλειπομένων) are part of the Hebrew Bible (Jewish Tanakh and Christian Old Testament). In the Masoretic Text, it appears as the first or last book of the Ketuvim (the latter arrangement also making it the final book of the Jewish bible). Chronicles largely parallels the Davidic narratives in the Books of Samuel and the Books of Kings. It appears in two parts (I & II Chronicles), immediately following 1 & 2 Samuel and 1 & 2 Kings as a summary of them with minor details sometimes added. ...

"Psalms is a book of the Hebrew Bible included in the collected works known as the Writings. Psalms were written by various writers, including Israel's King David. The Book of Psalms is divided into five books: Book 1 -- Psa. 1-41; Book 2 -- Psa. 42-72; Book 3 -- Psa. 73-89; Book 4 -- Psa. 90-106; and Book 5 -- Psa. 107-150. The collection includes the following types of psalm, among others: Psalms for praise, guidance, consolation, recognition of God's creation, the need for repentance. Certain Psalms, such as Psa. 22 and Psa. 110 are accepted by Christians and certain Jews as messianic or ...

Proverbs, a book of the Old Testament, is a collection of pithy Biblical sayings. It is wisdom literature by multiple authors, including Solomon. Throughout the book, Lady Wisdom and Lady Folly struggle to get the attention of the simple, leading them to glory or disgrace. (Summary by Sam Stinson)

Cecilia de Noël is an original and cleverly told ghost story, published in 1891. The story is told, Rashomon-like, from six different viewpoints. - Summary by Wikipedia and David Wales

Oh My Goodness! What a lot of incredible adventures are packed into this epic. The evil gnome king plots to destroy Oz and enslave it's people; evil creatures from many places are enlisted in this dastardly plan that has every chance of success. Dorothy brings her Aunt and Uncle from Kansas where they have been evicted from the farm, to live in Oz and they are given a tour of parts of Oz that have never been visited before. A city of paper dolls, a city of jig saw people, a city of bunnies and many many more odd and wonderful people are visited and enjoyed. But will the evil creatures succeed ...

(Segunda parte de esta serie de Cuentos Clásicos de América del Norte, esta vez con la presencia de tres de los más destacados autores del siglo XIX en este género. Esta recopilación de leyendas y relatos fantásticos transcurre entre las nacientes poblaciones e inhóspitos y misteriosos bosques de la Nueva Inglaterra, a la vista de las Montañas Katskill y las tierras bañadas por el río Hudson. En ellos podemos encontrar criaturas misteriosas, casacas rojas, colonos holandeses, patriotas puritanos, cabañas en la niebla... ¿Cuál es la historia de aquel que llaman El hombre sin Patria...

Everyone knows the story of the Headless Horseman but perhaps you, like me, did not remember what a marvelous story teller Washington Irving was. He observed human nature closely and like any good humorist, lets us laugh at our own silly and superstitious sides through the joy of having strangers be the ones to display them. If you, like me, have only vague and muddy memories of this story, you owe it to yourself to listen and laugh along with the rest of the world. My High School English teacher who could never interest me in 'literature', would be proud.

This is a collection of essays, verbal sketches, and stories by Washington Irving. Irving lived at the Alhambra Palace while writing some of the material for his book. In 1828, Washington Irving traveled from Madrid, where he had been staying, to Granada, Spain. At first sight, he described it as "a most picturesque and beautiful city, situated in one of the loveliest landscapes that I have ever seen." He immediately asked the then-governor of the historic Alhambra Palace as well as the archbishop of Granada for access to the palace, which was granted because of Irving's celebrity status. ...

The Deerslayer, or The First Warpath (1841) was the last of James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking tales to be written. Its 1740-1745 time period makes it the first installment chronologically and in the lifetime of the hero of the Leatherstocking tales, Natty Bumppo. (Introduction by Wikipedia)

C'est un roman historique, social et philosophique dans lequel on retrouve les idéaux du romantisme et ceux de Victor Hugo concernant la nature humaine. L'auteur lui-même accorde une grande importance à ce roman et écrit en mars 1862, à son éditeur Lacroix : « Ma conviction est que ce livre sera un des principaux sommets, sinon le principal, de mon œuvre ».Dans ce tome, Marius, devenu étudiant, rencontre Cosette et son père, M. Leblanc. Nous ferons la connaissance des membres de l'ABC et retrouverons quelques anciennes connaissances, les Thénardier et Javert. (résumé de Wikipedia...

Les Chouans is one of the novels in Balzac's series La Comedie Humaine. Its ostensible focus is a historical military conflict, but it also follows the love affair between an aristocratic beauty with one of the rebels.

The Voyage Out is the first novel by Virginia Woolf, published in 1915 by Duckworth; and published in the U.S. in 1920 by Doran. One of Woolf's wittiest social satires.Rachel Vinrace embarks for South America on her father's ship and is launched on a course of self-discovery in a kind of modern mythical voyage. The mismatched jumble of passengers provide Woolf with an opportunity to satirize Edwardian life. The novel introduces Clarissa Dalloway, the central character of Woolf's later novel, Mrs. Dalloway.E. M. Forster described it as "... a strange, tragic, inspired book whose scene is a ...

This great and terrifying poem about the final weeks of a long war fought between the Greeks and the Trojans before the city of Troy (here rendered into prose by Samuel Butler, himself a major nineteenth century English novelist) is at once violently graphic, emotionally searing and strikingly contemporary in its understanding of the extremities to which rage may drive men, even as they understand full well that they are pursuing their own doom. Nearly three thousand years before the advent of cinema, the author(s) of The Iliad had already mastered many of the tropes the Hollywood blockbuster ...