Showing results by narrator "Robert Bethune" in All Categories

This volume of The Poetry of Lord Byron is focused on work in which Byron dealt with certain themes that recurred throughout his career, especially personal integrity in the search for freedom and for love, and the suffering that can go with that search. "The Prisoner of Chillon", the keynote piece of this volume, is one of Byron’s most riveting pieces. Based on the true story of Francois Bonivard, it tells a story of political repression and human endurance.

An experiment. A declaration. A spiritual awakening. Noted transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau spent two years, two months, and two days chronicling his near-isolation in a small cabin he built in the woods near Walden Pond, on land owned by his mentor and the father of Transcendentalism, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Immersing himself in nature and solitude, Thoreau sought to develop a greater understanding of society amidst a life of self-reliance and simplicity. Originally published in 1854, Walden remains one of the most celebrated works in American literature.

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam as translated into English by Edward Fitzgerald is one of our best-loved books of poetry - and for good reason. Cynical, self-deprecating, witty, mystical, in love with wine and beauty while aware of life and death, Omar's poems put many thoughts we have all had into words we can all enjoy.

This was Carl Sandburg's breakthrough book. It is easy to see how it draws directly on Sandburg's life in Chicago, because it speaks powerfully of the specific character of that city, and indeed, begins with his famous poem that names Chicago as the "City of the Broad Shoulders." His poetry is deeply aware of the inner life of the city, from a homeless woman freezing in a doorway to the lifestyles of the rich and powerful.

John Maynard Keynes died in 1946, but his name is still prominent in economics and politics worldwide. Although his contributions to economic theory established and maintain his fame, he also - particularly at the time in his life when he wrote the present book, Economic Consequences of the Peace - showed a flair for practical political work. At the end of World War I he was appointed as the British Treasury's representative to the Versailles Peace Conference. His experiences at the Conference formed the basis of this book.

English society in the 1860s was on the brink of enormous change, and some of the biggest changes coming to birth in that time were tremendous changes in the status of women - changes affecting politics, economics, law, government, business, education, psychology, religion, and sexuality, and the list goes on. The changes John Stuart Mill foresaw in 1861 as he wrote The Subjection of Women were just beginning to surface in his own time and have not yet run their full course in ours.

Frost's third book of poetry, North of Boston, is an extraordinary set of poems that are nearly dramas, conversations drawn from the heat of life, love, and death. From "Home Burial" and "Death of the Hired Man" to "A Hundred Collars" and "The Generations of Man", Frost's work in this volume spans the whole range of human experience, expressed always in his characteristic dry, matter-of-fact, yet wonderfully musical verse.

Frost weaves together themes of innocence and experience, love and joy and pain, in a sequence of poems that relate to each other while also standing alone as vivid, fresh expressions of intense feeling that speak as freshly today as they did when they were written.

When Lytton Strachey published Emininent Victorians, he took the general perception of the Victorian age among English-speaking readers and turned it upside-down. Four of the most eminent and idealized heroic figures of the Victorian age came under his witty and unsparing gaze and emerged, astonishingly enough, as human beings.

To paraphrase the note from the translator, The Celebrated Crimes of Alexandre Dumas père was not written for children. The novelist has spared no language - has minced no words - to describe violent scenes of violent times. In this, the first of the series, Dumas tells the luridly sexy, amazingly violent, and strikingly amoral story of the three most famous members of the Borgia family - Pope Alexander VI, Lucrezia, and above all Cesare.

Carl Sandburg fixed his eyes on the people of his time and place. He ignored or scorned the wealthy, the comfortable, the complacent, the powerful and those who serve them; he had no time for the ruling class. His eyes were open to the immigrant, the laborer, the hobo, the farmer, the man who works with his hands, the woman who runs a family, the soldier who goes to war for them.

This is Carl Sandburg's fourth collection of poetry. His signature style, a rough-and-ready free verse that often transforms into poetic prose, is in full view. Like Whitman before him and like Masters and Frost in his own time, he puts his focus directly on life as he sees it around him, life in the rough-and-tumble Chicago of the early 20th century and life in the American West at a time when that wild country was finally succumbing to civilization

In this, the 13th of the series, Dumas, the novelist-historian, finds ample scope for his favorite approach. His subject is a well-documented historical figure: Ali Tepelini, most often known as Ali Pasha and known even in his own day as The Lion of Tepelen. Dumas presents us with an extraordinary character, a man of tremendous courage, unstoppable tenacity, matchless duplicity, extreme debauchery, disgusting cruelty, and amazing ingenuity.

This volume of Lord Byron’s poetry contains four sets of his poems, starting with his famous book of poetry, Hebrew Melodies, and continuing with the Poems of the Separation, poetry he wrote in the period 1816-1823, his “Jeux d’Esprit”, and a group of poems written in homage to the great poets of Italy. Hebrew Melodies is a collection of lyrics Byron wrote to be set to music, as indeed they were, by a composer named Isaac Nathan.

In 1642, a pregnant Hester Prynne is found guilty of adultery, shunned by her neighbors, and forced to wear a scarlet letter 'A' on her dress. Meanwhile, Hester's husband - long thought to be lost at sea - has returned to Boston under the assumed name 'Roger Chillingworth' and plots to uncover her lover's identity. After her daughter Pearl is born, Hester is frequently visited by both Reverend Dimmesdale and Chillingworth, but always refuses to name her lover.

First published in 1849, this essay argues that individuals have rights and duties in relation to their government. Motivated by his disgust over both slavery and the Mexican-American War, Thoreau argued that individuals must not permit nor enable their government to act against their own consciences. This version of "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience" was recorded as part of Dreamscape's Walden and On the Duty of Civil Disobedience.

Renowned experts delve into the stark reality of the Alien presence on Earth. Riveting case studies of Air Force and Naval Alien encounters, UFO crash retrievals, interactions with E.T.'s, suppressed Alien technology and more are explored suggesting a foreboding and spellbinding conclusion for the fate of Mankind.

Sigmund Freud's Psychopathology of Everyday Life is surely the most approachable and enjoyable of all his works. By turning the spotlight of his ideas about the nature and function of the unconscious mind onto simple and easily understandable incidents that we have all experienced, such as slips of the tongue, forgetfulness, and the like, he shows us, often in rather humorous ways, just how our unconscious minds have a powerful influence on everything we do.

There's a long tradition of English Christmas stories, sometimes serious, sometimes humorous, often revolving around ghosts and apparitions. Dickens drew on it in a serious vein in A Christmas Carol; here, Jerome K. Jerome tells hilarious stories from around an English Christmas fireside.

In this set of "Uncanny Tales," Mary Louisa Molesworth deftly makes us feel the shiver of ghostly mystery without actually giving us a ghost! Or, to put it another way, she's interested in a different kind of ghostly presence. In "The Man with the Cough", it is the ghostly presence of a secret agent, and the ghostly experience of events that seem like a dream, but have real-world consequences. In "Halfway Between the Stiles", it is the ghostly presence of old memories of love that will not die away, and again, the real world responds. In "Will Not Take Place", it is a man who almost becomes a ghost.