Narrator

Bernard Mayes

Bernard Mayes
  • In this important book, G.K. Chesterton offers a remarkably perceptive analysis of social and moral issues, even more relevant today than in his own time. With a light, humorous tone but a deadly serious philosophy, he comments on errors in education, on feminism vs. true womanhood, on the importance of the child, and other issues, using incisive arguments against the trendsetters’ assaults on the common man and the family.

    Chesterton possessed the genius to foresee the dangers of implementing modernist proposals. He knew that lax moral standards would lead to the dehumanization of man. In this book, he staunchly defends the family against those ideas and institutions that would subvert it and thereby deliver man into the hands of the servile state. In addressing what is wrong, he also shows clearly what is right, and how to change things in that direction.

  • “How can men best live together?” Twenty-three centuries after its compilation, Politics still has much to contribute to this central question of political science. Aristotle’s thorough and carefully argued analysis covers a huge range of political issues in the effort to establish which types of constitution are best, both ideally and in particular circumstances, and how they may be maintained.

    Like his predecessor, Plato, Aristotle believed that the ideal constitution should be in accordance with nature, and that it is needed by man, “a political animal,” to fulfill his potential. His premises and arguments form an essential background to the thinking of such philosophers as Thomas Aquinas, Machiavelli, Jean Bodin, and Richard Hooker, and raise questions that are as relevant to modern society as they were to the ancient world.

  • This delightful tale of thwarted ambition and forbidden love follows the adventures and fortunes of an endearing young rogue, Frank Softly. Originally appearing serialized in Household Words in 1859, the rogue is one of Collins' most richly comic creations.

    Propelled into society by his ever-hopeful father, Frank is introduced to a variety of professions in order to make his fortune. Not industrious by nature, Frank finds working life a challenge, and by his twenty-fifth birthday, he has failed in medicine, portrait-painting, caricaturing, and even forgery. Disenchanted with life, he despairs of ever finding something to commit to—until he meets Alicia Dulcifer and her inexplicably wealthy father.

    Proffering his own take on picaresque storytelling—and with many a grain of truth for twentysomethings today—this is Wilkie Collins at his entertaining best.

  • Written more than a century before man landed on the moon, this classic adventure tale has proved to be one of Jules Verne’s most prophetic. It is also a forerunner of today’s science fiction.

    At the close of the Civil War, the members of the elite Baltimore Gun Club find themselves unemployed and bored. Finally, their president, Impey Barbicane, proposes a new project: build a gun big enough to launch a rocket to the moon. But when a daring volunteer elevates the mission to a “manned” flight, one man’s dream turns into an international space race.

    This is a story of rollicking action, humor, and vibrant imagination, full of both satire and scientific insight.

  • The Time Traveler first steps out of his magnificent time-transport machine in the year 802,700—more than 800,000 years beyond his own era. The brave explorer finds himself on a slowly dying Earth populated by a race of slender pacifists called the Eloi and decides to study this lush land of flower people before returning to his own age. These pacifists, he discovers, have built their wealth on the backs of a slave class forced to live below ground—the Morlocks. As the conflict between the classes surfaces, the Time Traveler finds that his only means of escape, his time machine, has been stolen.

    Wells’ amazing view of the future, propelled forward from his own Victorian era to the present, serves both as classic science fiction and as a parable of the chasm between the working-class suffering and the upper-class privilege of his day. Wells’ remarkable storytelling and provocative insight make this terrifying portrait of the men of tomorrow an enthralling tale sure to capture readers everywhere.

  • Written in the late eighteenth century as a reply to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution, Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man is unquestionably one of the great classics on the subject of democracy. A vindication of the French Revolution and a critique of the British system of government, it defended the dignity of the common man in all countries against those who would discard him as one of the “swinish multitude.”    

    Paine created a language of modern politics that brought important issues to the working classes. Employing direct, vehement prose, Paine defends popular rights, national independence, revolutionary war, and economic growth—all of which were considered, at the time, to be dangerous and even seditious issues. His vast influence is due in large measure to his eloquent literary style, noted for its poignant metaphors, vigor, and rational directness.

  • In 1787, William Bligh, commander of the Bounty, sailed under Captain Cook on a voyage to Tahiti to collect plants of the breadfruit tree, with a view to acclimatizing the species to the West Indies. During their six-month stay on the island, his men became completely demoralized and mutinied on the return voyage. But a resentful crew, coupled with ravaging storms and ruthless savages, proved to be merely stages leading up to the anxiety-charged ordeal to come. Bligh, along with eighteen men, was cast adrift in an open boat only twenty-three feet long with a small stock of provisions—and without a chart.

    His narrative, deeply personal yet objective, documents the voyage and Bligh's relationship to his men, thereby exposing the oft debated question of what kind of man he really was.

  • James Boswell forever changed the genre of biography when he painstakingly transformed a scholarly profusion of detail into a perceptive, lifelike portrait of Dr. Samuel Johnson.

    James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson reveals a man of outsized appetites and private vulnerabilities and is the source of much of what we know about one of the towering figures of English literature. Boswell spent a great deal of time with Johnson in his final years and from his scrupulously accurate memory and copious journal was able to faithfully record the brilliance and wit of Dr. Johnson’s conversation. Boswell’s aim and achievement was completeness; no detail was too small for him. On this point Dr. Johnson remarked to him, “There is nothing, sir, too little for so little a creature as man.” Boswell’s thirst for detail makes this indisputably the finest of many biographies of Johnson.

    This biography gained its unique place in literary history from the fact that its style was revolutionary. The usual style of biographers of that era was to record dry facts from the subject’s public life only. Boswell differed by incorporating actual conversations of Dr. Johnson, which Boswell had previously noted down in journals, and by including many more details of personal life. The result revolutionized the genre.

    For both its subject and its style, The Life of Samuel Johnson is still popular with modern critics and students of the history of English thought and of English literature.

  • Herodotus is not only the father of the art and the science of historical writing but also one of the Western tradition’s most compelling storytellers. His Histories is regarded as one of the seminal works of history in Western literature. He wrote these accounts of the fifth-century-BC wars between the Greeks and Persians with a continuous awareness of the mythic and the wonderful, while laying bare the intricate human entanglements at their core. This volume is one of the first accounts of the rise of the Persian Empire and serves as a record of the ancient traditions and politics of the time.

    In the instinctive empiricism that took him searching over much of the known world for information, in the care he took with sources and historical evidence, in his freedom from intolerance and prejudice, Herodotus virtually defined the rational, humane spirit that is the enduring legacy of Greek civilization.

  • One of the world’s most profoundly influential literary works and the basis for Shakespeare’s Roman plays (Julius CaesarCoriolanus, and Antony and Cleopatra), Plutarch’s Lives have been entertaining and arousing the spirit of emulation in countless readers since their creation at the beginning of the second century.

    Originally named Parallel Lives, the work pairs eminent Romans with famous Greek counterparts—like the orators Cicero and Demosthenes—giving illuminating treatments of each separately and then comparing the two in a pithy essay.

    This second and final volume includes Alexander and Caesar, Demetrius and Antony, Dion and Marcus Brutus, the aforementioned Demosthenes and Cicero, as well as biographies of Alexander, Caesar, Cato the Younger, and others.

  • One of the world’s most profoundly influential literary works and the basis for Shakespeare’s Roman plays (Julius CaesarCoriolanus, and Antony and Cleopatra), Plutarch’s Lives have been entertaining and arousing the spirit of emulation in countless readers since their creation at the beginning of the second century.

    Originally named Parallel Lives, the work pairs eminent Romans with famous Greek counterparts—like the orators Cicero and Demosthenes—giving illuminating treatments of each separately and then comparing the two in a pithy essay.

    The first of the two volumes in this translation by John Dryden presents Theseus and Romulus, Pericles and Fabius, Alcibiades and Coriolanus, Aristides and Marcus Cato, and Lysander and Sylla, among others. This is a brilliant social history of the ancient world.

  • Richard Henry Dana referred to this book as "a voice from the sea." Influencing such authors as Conrad and Melville, it has become a maritime classic that has inflicted legions of men with a passion for the sea.

    Dana, a law student turned sailor for health reasons, sailed in 1834 on the brigPilgrimfor a voyage from Boston around Cape Horn to California. Dana Point was named as a result of this journey. Drawing from his journals,Two Years before the Mastgives a vivid and detailed account, shrewdly observed and beautifully described, of a common sailor's wretched treatment at sea, and of a way of life virtually unknown at that time.

    This is a breathtaking true storyof adventure on the high seas.

  • Written between AD 413 and 426, The City of God is one of the great cornerstones in the history of Christian thought, a book vital to understanding modern Western society. Augustine originally intended it to be an apology for Christianity against the accusation that the Church was responsible for the decline of the Roman Empire. Indeed, Augustine produced a great amount of evidence to prove that paganism was responsible for this event. However, by the time the work was finished, the book had taken on a larger theme: a cosmic interpretation of history in terms of the conflict between good (the City of God) and evil (the Earthly City). Augustine foresees that, through the will of God, the people of the City of God will eventually win immortality, while those of the Earthly City will suffer destruction.

  • In Reason in Art, Santayana explores the social and psychological origins of art. He examines its moral and ideal functions, its lapses into tastelessness, and the distinctive character of music, speech, poetry, and prose. The Spanish-born philosopher sees art as part of the broader human context, concluding that art prepares “the world to receive the soul and the soul to master the world.”

  • Challenged by an expert who said it couldn’t be done, Joshua Slocum, a fearless New England sea captain, set out in April 1895 to prove that a man could sail alone around the world. A little over three years and forty-six thousand miles later, the proof was complete. This is Slocum’s own account of his remarkable adventures during the historic voyage of the Spray.

    Whether Slocum was more accomplished as a writer or sailor is hard to say. His writing style is fast paced, witty, and exhilarating, an absorbing match to his harrowing adventures—adventures that included being chased by Moorish pirates off Gibraltar; escaping a fleet of hostile canoes; being submerged by a great wave off the Patagonian coast; an encounter with Black Pedro, “the worst murderer in Tierra del Fuego”; and foiling a nocturnal attack by savages by strewing carpet tacks on the Spray’s deck.

  • Having coined the phrase "the war that will end war," H. G. Wells was disillusioned by the World War I peace settlement. Convinced that humanity needed to awaken to the instability of the world order and remember lessons from the past, the author of numerous science fiction classics set out to write about history. Wells hoped to remind mankind of its common past, provide it with a basis for international patriotism, and guide it to renounce war. The work became immensely popular, earning him world renown and solidifying his reputation as one of the most influential voices of his time.

    Topics range from the world before man and the first living things to civilizations, religions, wars, and everything in between. Wells truly covers the whole of human history.

  • Famous for its unflagging narrative power, fine organization, and irresistibly persuasive arguments, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire has earned a permanent place of honor in historical literature. Gibbon's elegantly detached erudition is seasoned with an ironic wit, and remarkably little of his work is outdated.

    This second volume covers AD 395 to AD 1185, from the reign of Justinian in the East to the establishment of the German Empire of the West. It recounts the desperate attempts to hold off the barbarians, palace revolutions and assassinations, theological controversy, and lecheries and betrayals, all in a setting of phenomenal magnificence.

  • Considered one of the finest historical works in the English language, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is lauded for its graceful, elegant prose style as much as for its grand scope and considerable accuracy. It is a remarkable survey of what the author calls "the greatest and, perhaps, most awful scene in the history of mankind."

    This third volume of Gibbon's masterpiece covers the years 1185 to 1453 and explores the rise of Islam, the Crusades, the invention of gunpowder, Genghis Khan and the Mongol invasions, the Turkish conquests, and the beginning of the Renaissance.

    The publication of this work in 1788 ended twenty years of Gibbon's contemplation and vast research on his subject and made this virtually self-educated man the most famous historian of his time.

  • This timeless work is applicable to everyone who has experienced the struggle between good and evil in his own soul. St. Augustine, born in Tagaste, Numidia, in North Africa (now Constantine) in 354, was raised by a devout Christian mother. He abandoned the Christianity in which he had been brought up, taking on a mistress who bore him an illegitimate son. After hearing the sermons of Ambrose, he began a great internal struggle which led to his conversion in 387. The Confessions describes his conversion, shedding light on the questions that troubled him on his way to the Cross. The earliest of autobiographies, The Confessions remains unsurpassed as a sincere and intimate record of a great and pious person laying bare his soul before God. Other than Scripture, it is the most famous––and perhaps the most important––of all spiritual books.

  • Considered one of the finest historical works in the English language, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is lauded for its graceful, elegant prose style as much as for its epic scope. Remarkably accurate for its day, Gibbon's treatise holds a high place in the history of literature and remains an enduring subject of study.

    Gibbon's monumental work traces the history of more than thirteen centuries, covering the great events as well as the general historical progression. This first volume covers AD 180 AD to AD 395, which includes the reign of Augustus, the establishment of Christianity, and the Crusades.

  • This famous treatise began as a letter to a young French friend who asked Edmund Burke’s opinion on whether France’s new ruling class would succeed in creating a better order. Doubtless the friend expected a favorable reply, but Burke was suspicious of certain tendencies of the Revolution from the start and perceived that the revolutionaries were actually subverting the true “social order.” As a Christian––he was not a man of the Enlightenment––Burke knew religion to be man’s greatest good and established order to be a fundamental pillar of civilization.

    Blending history with principle and graceful imagery with profound practical maxims, this book is one of the most influential political treatises in the history of the world. Said Russell Kirk, “The Reflections must be read by anyone who wishes to understand the great controversies of modern politics.”