Showing results by narrator "Robin Field" in All Categories

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Plato's dialogue in the Symposium, which has as its topic the subject of love, explores the idea of love as a means of ascent to contemplation of the Divine. For Plato, generally, to love other human beings is to direct one's mind to love of Divinity. One proceeds from recognition of another's beauty to appreciation of Beauty as it exists apart from any individual, to consideration of Divinity, the source of Beauty, to love of Divinity.

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.

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.

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.

Regarded by many as the most luminous example of Twain's work, this historical novel chronicles the French heroine's life, as purportedly told by her longtime friend--Sieur Louis de Conte.

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.

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.

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.

Pinocchio, The Tale of a Puppet is a novel for children by Carlo Collodi is about the mischievous adventures of Pinocchio, an animated marionette, and his poor father, woodcarver Geppetto. It is considered a classic of children's literature and has spawned many derivative works of art. This is not the story we've seen in film, but the original version - full of harrowing adventures faced by Pinocchio.

The Civil War is Julius Caesar’s personal account of his war with Pompey the Great - the war that destroyed the five-hundred-year-old Roman Republic. Caesar the victor became Caesar the dictator. In three short books, Caesar describes how, in order to defend his honor and the freedom of both himself and the Roman people, he marched on Rome and defeated the forces of Pompey and the Senate in Italy, Spain, and Greece.

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.

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.

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.

"To Calvin H. Higbie, of California, an honest man, a genial comrade and a steadfast friend," this book is inscribed by the author, "in memory of the curious time when we two were millionaires for ten days." So the witty Mark Twain dedicates his second travelogue and charming SEMI-sequel to The Innocents Abroad.