Showing results by narrator "Robert Bethune" in All Categories

The Kalevala is the signature work of traditional Finnish culture. In story after story, it explores the human and divine world as understood by the traditional runic singers of the north. It sings of how the universe came to be, how the natural world works, how divine and supernatural worlds relate to the world of humankind, how human beings relate to each other, how good and evil and life and death function in the world.

Noted transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau spent two years, two months, and two days chronicling his near-isolation in the small cabin he built in the woods near Walden Pond on land owned by his mentor, 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.

Just as Proust derives an entire world of feeling, people and events from the taste of a madeleine, James G. Frazer brings us into a worldwide survey of religion, folklore, culture, symbolism and ritual using the Priest of Nemi as his starting point. Starting from the image of the lonely, doomed high priest, prowling his precinct night and day, sword in hand, hardly daring to sleep as he awaited the assault of the man who would kill him and take his place, Frazer roams the world of ancient and modern religious and ceremonial practice in search of the underlying universals of human thought.

Thomas Carlyle's The French Revolution is a landmark of literary history. Conceived not as a dry recounting of facts, but as a personal, vivid, direct and dramatic encounter with the turbulent times of revolutionary France, it is in fact an extended dramatic monologue in which we meet not only the striking personalities and events of the time, but the equally striking personality and mind of Thomas Carlyle himself.

Originally published in German as Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido, this is the book that set Carl Jung on his independent path as a psychoanalytic theorist and explorer of the mysterious world of the unconscious mind of the individual and the mythological mind of humanity. He bases his work on an exploration of Miss Frank Miller's Quelques Faits d'Imagination Creatrice, demonstrating complex connections between Miller's self-portrait of her own dreams and fantasies and the world of myth, symbol, and religion.

As Hillaire Belloc explains it, one fine day while walking about the town in northern France where he was born, he suddenly decided to take a pilgrimage to Rome. Not just any pilgrimage, mind you. He not only decided to walk the whole way, but he decided to make a beeline for the Holy City, doing everything possible to avoid leaving the straight path.

Unlike most editions of Poor Richard, this one includes essentially all of the text, not just the aphorisms and sayings. This gives you, Courteous Listener, a much better appreciation of how Franklin wrote and thought. In particular, you will find that the full body of the Poor Richard almanacs contains a great deal of religious and spiritual thought in which Franklin laid out and propounded his understanding of Christianity as it stood in his day.

Carl Jung's Collected Papers on Analytical Psychology gathers in one volume some of his most important and influential shorter writings, and also some pieces that, from our perspective almost a century later, seem quaint or even idiosyncractic. The volume provides wonderful insight into his mind and thought as he reached a position of prominence in the world of psychoanalysis.

Frederick Jackson Turner was the dean of American historians in his time. He originated, and he and his students popularized, the Frontier Hypothesis of American history: that the primary driving force in the development of American society and politics was the encounter with the frontier, conceived of as a vast area of essentially free land, a seemingly limitless resource available to all comers.

In this audiobook, William L. Riordan, one of the "muckracker" journalists, records Plunkitt's take on politics in Plunkitt's own words - as delivered from the bootblack stand at the New York County Courthouse, Plunkitt's only office. His take on life, politics, and morality is as delightfully frank as it is astonishingly cynical. Enjoy!

The fundamental message of A Preface to Politics is that statesmanship cannot succeed if it focuses merely on the forms and mechanics of government and the technical development and administration of policy. Political leadership can be successful only if political leaders attune themselves to the human beings they lead, keeping themselves abreast of their wants and needs and the social and cultural movements among them. No political mechanism can function without intelligent, perceptive, and responsive people to make it work.

Thomas Carlyle's The French Revolution is a landmark of literary history. Conceived not as a dry recounting of facts, but as a personal, vivid, direct and dramatic encounter with the turbulent times of revolutionary France, it is in fact an extended dramatic monologue in which we meet not only the striking personalities and events of the time, but the equally striking personality and mind of Thomas Carlyle himself.

When Lord Byron published Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, he woke up one moring to find himself famous. Not long after that, when the word of his separation from Lady Byron got out, he woke up one morning to find himself infamous. Ever since then, his name has been linked inextricably with great lyric poetry and great sexual scandal. Women found him irresistible; he found them irresistible, and the resulting fireworks flared through the skies of the English upper classes of the Regency with tremendous color and enormous noise.

Although the theories presented in this book, a 1915 edition of the lectures Jung presented at Fordham University, are now thoroughly outdated, this book is still a fascinating glimpse of Jung's mind at a crucial time in his life. Just three years previously, he had struck out on his own, publishing his Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido, known in English as Psychology of the Unconscious.

Imagine a boardinghouse in the days when the Civil War was still a decade in the future, in which an erudite, polished, witty, sophisticated, learned gentleman holds forth each day at breakfast, entertaining the boarders with fascinating talk: observations on people and nature, occasional flights of verse, remarks on current events, moralizations and philosophical thoughts, and anything else that comes to his mind.

Thomas Gray is worldfamous as the author of "Gray's Elegy", more properly known as "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard". He did not write very much, but he did write more than just his most famous poem. This collection is a recording of the 1768 Dodsley edition, the primary publication of his poetry that he published during his lifetime.

Thomas Carlyle's The French Revolution is a landmark of literary history. Conceived not as a dry recounting of facts, but as a personal, vivid, direct, and dramatic encounter with the turbulent times of revolutionary France, it is in fact an extended dramatic monologue in which we meet not only the striking personalities and events of the time, but the equally striking personality and mind of Thomas Carlyle himself.

Childe Harold narrates the experiences of a young nobleman, sated with the wine, women, and song of his native England, who goes forth in search of the wine, women, song, and adventure of Spain, Greece, and the Ottoman Empire. The book is literally an armchair travelogue in rhyming couplets. He expresses himself in vivid, forceful and emotional language on all that he enounters and shapes his experience into a deep study of that subject so favored by all the Romantic poets - himself.

At one point in his moody, erotic, and barbarous romance of She, H. Rider Haggard puts into the mouth of his narrator, Horace L. Holly, the observation that her story sounded like some extraordinary invention of a speculative brain. That, precisely, is what She is: a really marvelously inventive story, combining an amazing variety of what should be utterly implausible ideas into a fabric that constantly feels like truth.

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.