English High Society

When a mysterious gentleman arrives on his doorstep, Alexander Moreland is astonished to discover that the stranger is not a gentleman at all but a beautiful young woman disguised as a man and in great need of assistance. The woman remembers nothing except her own name, Sabrina, and has only the contents of her pockets as clues to her identity. Sabrina is certain that she is on the run from someone or something - how else to explain the bruises on her face and the pervasive sense of dread she feels?

Probably the most famous of Edith Wharton's novels, Ethan Frome contrasts sharply with her usual ironic contemplation of the fashionable New York society to which she herself belonged and whose strengths and weaknesses she understood so well. Ethan Frome is a keenly-etched portrait of the simple inhabitants of a 19th-century New England village.

Agnes Wilkins is standing in front of an Egyptian mummy, about to make the first cut into the wrappings, about to unlock ancient (and not-so-ancient) history. Maybe you think this girl is wearing a pith helmet with antique dust swirling around her. Maybe you think she is a young Egyptologist who has arrived in Cairo on camelback. Maybe she would like to think that too. Agnes Wilkins dreams of adventures that reach beyond the garden walls, but reality for a 17-year-old debutante in 1815 London does not allow for camels....

As a boy, Robert D. Kaplan listened to his truck-driver father's evocative stories about traveling across America as a young man, travels in which he learned to understand the country from a ground-level perspective. In Earning the Rockies, Kaplan undertakes his own cross-country journey to recapture an appreciation and understanding of American geography that is often lost in the jet age.