Showing results by narrator "John Lescault" in All Categories

The award-winning Beneath the American Renaissance is a classic work on American literature. It immeasurably broadens our knowledge of our most important literary period, as first identified by F.O. Matthiessen’s American Renaissance. With its combination of sharp critical insight, engaging observation, and narrative drive, it represents the kind of masterful cultural history for which David Reynolds is known. Here the major works of Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, and others receive striking, original readings set against the rich backdrop of contemporary popular writing.

Although American author Bret Harte is most readily associated with stories about the West, it is his skill with characterization that distinguishes him from the hundreds of others who set fictional tales in the region. The miners, soldiers, gamblers, entrepreneurs, and lost souls who populate these pages are limned with Harte's unique combination of dry wit and tender pathos. This charming collection of Harte's short stories focuses on life in old California.

Twins Virginia and Tommy Matthews have been on their own since they were orphaned at the age of five, surviving a merciless foster care system by relying on each other. Twelve years later, the world begins to collapse around them as a deadly contagion steadily wipes out entire populations and a devastating world war rages on for the cure. When Tommy is drafted for the war, the twins are faced with a choice: stay and accept their fate of almost certain death or run. Virginia and Tommy flee into the dark night.

What is the unique and most important feature that distinguishes man from all other living beings? Why is it that, contrary to the instinct of self-preservation, a parent will throw themselves headlong into fire or water to save their child? Why do people get married and why do they get divorced? Why do people have extramarital affairs and why do two people in a couple become jealous of one another? What is love?

As a young man, Gigi Paulo arrives in New York and is immediately drawn to a girl he sees in a bar near Penn Station. Before he can approach her, she is gone. He returns to the bar for weeks in hopes of seeing her again, dreams of her at night, and searches the crowds for her face. Quiet and careful, he is not the type to become obsessed by a stranger. But obsessed he is. Two years later he meets her at a party. Her name is Corrine.

History records few individuals as brilliant, powerful, and ruthless as Julius Caesar. Born into the Roman aristocracy, he surpassed the reputation of his family and altered the history of Rome and the Mediterranean world. When Caesar was born in 100 B.B., Rome was a city-state with a republican form of government. When he died in 44 B.C., Rome was on its way to becoming an empire. In those short 56 years, Caesar conquered the Gauls, began the Roman conquest of Britain, and campaigned from Spain to Egypt.

Stillton Academy, a small art college on the New England coast, is in financial trouble, and its days are numbered unless someone provides extraordinary help. The final straw may be the disappearance of an instructor with a female student - the daughter of the Academy’s only significant donor. Art critic Fred Taylor, called in to troubleshoot, goes undercover as a member of the faculty and shortly finds himself enmeshed in the conflicting motives and designs of faculty and students....

Churches committed to following Christ's example want this world changed for the sake of eternity. While the supernatural piece of making that happen goes without saying, how does a body of believers do its part to be in that "sweet spot" where true spiritual transformation occurs?

When impoverished American sculptor Roderick Hudson creates what is described as a work of genius, he is sent to Rome, where he becomes the talk of the city. But Roderick soon loses his inspiration and falls in love with a woman he'll never be with. Now on a path to self-destruction, can he be saved from himself?

A young woman in the hair salon raises her a in a furtive gesture, frank and tantalizingly brief, to show a friend the work in progress: a riot of stunning tattoos. From his accidental vantage point in the barber’s chair, Fred Taylor knows that those images—weird insects, beasts, and naked human figures—could only come from something nice, a painting that, if he could only see the original in person, might prove to be rare and of significant value. And the girls don’t have a clue.

In his perilous journey home after the Trojan War, Odysseus must pass through the land of the Cyclops, encounter Circe the Enchantress, and face the terrible Charybdis and the six-headed serpent Scylla.

In A.D. 64, on the night of July 19, a fire began beneath the stands of Rome’s great stadium, the Circus Maximus. The fire would spread over the coming days to engulf much of the city of Rome. From this calamity, one of the ancient world’s most devastating events, legends grew: that Nero had been responsible for the fire, and fiddled while Rome burned, and that Nero blamed the Christians of Rome, burning them alive in punishment, making them the first recorded martyrs to the Christian faith at Rome.

Someone is bumping off rock’s wrinkled royalty. After the death of the third aging rock star, lead singer Freddie Finger, astrologer-detective David Lowell takes on the case, scrutinizing suspects’ charts for any clues in the stars that could point to a killer.

One of the first true novels in the English language, Robinson Crusoe is the famous adventure of a castaway and his desert-island companion, Friday.

For over three hundred years, that's what the Hamilton family has called a shrinking swath of farmland in the Appalachian foothills of South Carolina. That's the failing tobacco farm where Walter and Maggie Hamilton choose to raise their three children. Walter has big plans to make the farm more profitable, but his plans are interrupted by World War II and family heartbreak. Walter returns from the war a changed man and finds Maggie, too, has changed, neither of them for the better. But at least their family is together again at...

Taken seriously, the information in this book will deliver to you any and everything that you desire to have. Wealth, health, a loving mate, fame, peace of mind, whatever you desire will be yours. This information has been held guarded in Secret Orders and Secret Societies for thousands of years. Ancient and controversial knowledge. This work reveals the secret of "The Secret", the foundation that supports the law of attraction. It also reveals the mental mechanism of manifesting the illusion of matter from thought, just as you are unconsciously doing right now.

In this easy-to-listen yet powerful book, Charlene takes you through five practical steps on employing your hope skills. There is exploration through subjective and dictionary definitions of hope before introducing the steps of this indistinct skill. In addition, we will journey through ways that hope can be stolen and, conversely, how we can sustain or reinforce our hope through action even during trying times.

Most of us take for granted that our books are vertical on our shelves with the spines facing out, but Henry Petroski, inveterately curious engineer, didn’t. As a result, listeners are guided along the astonishing evolution from papyrus scrolls boxed at Alexandria to upright books shelved at the Library of Congress. Petroski takes us into the pre-Gutenberg world, when books were so scarce they were chained to lecterns for security.