Narrator

John Lescault

John Lescault
  • A thinking person’s guide to a better life. Ward Farnsworth explains what the Socratic method is, how it works, and why it matters more than ever in our time. Easy to grasp yet challenging to master, the method will change the way you think about life’s big questions.

    About 2,500 years ago, Plato wrote a set of dialogues that depict Socrates in conversation. The way Socrates asks questions, and the reasons why, amount to a whole way of thinking. This is the Socratic method—one of humanity’s great achievements. More than a technique, the method is an ethic of patience, inquiry, humility, and doubt. It is an aid to better thinking, and a remedy for bad habits of mind, whether in law, politics, the classroom, or tackling life’s big questions at the kitchen table.

    Drawing on hundreds of quotations, this book explains what the Socratic method is and how to use it. Chapters include “Question and Answer,” “Ignorance,” and “Socrates and the Stoics.” Socratic philosophy is still startling after all these years because it is an approach to asking hard questions and chasing after them. It is a route to wisdom and a way of thinking about wisdom. With Farnsworth as your guide, the ideas of Socrates are easier to understand than ever and accessible to anyone.

    As Farnsworth achieved with The Practicing Stoic and the Farnsworth’s Classical English series, ideas of old are made new and vital again. This book is for those coming to philosophy the way Socrates did—as the everyday activity of making sense out of life and how to live it—and for anyone who wants to know what he said about doing that better.

  • Atomic Bomb Island tells the story of an elite, top-secret team of sailors, airmen, scientists, technicians, and engineers who came to Tinian in the Marianas in the middle of 1945 to prepare the island for delivery of the atomic bombs then being developed in New Mexico, to finalize the designs of the bombs themselves, and to launch the missions that would unleash hell on Japan.

    Almost exactly a year before the atomic bombs were dropped, strategically important Tinian was captured by Marines—because it was only 1,500 miles from Japan and its terrain afforded ideal runways from which the new B-29 bombers could pound Japan. In the months that followed, the US turned virtually all of Tinian into a giant airbase, with streets named after those of Manhattan Island—a Marianas city where the bombs could be assembled, the heavily laden B-29s could be launched, and the Manhattan Project scientists could do their last work.

    Mariana Islands historian Don Farrell has done this story incredible justice for the seventy-fifth anniversary. The book is a thoroughly researched mosaic of the final phase of the Manhattan Project, from the Battle of Tinian and the USS Indianapolis to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

  • Make your writing and speech shine like the sun! Here’s the most entertaining and instructive book about enlivening and clarifying communication by comparing one thing to another.

    Ward Farnsworth provides a wide-ranging, practical tour of metaphors, arranged by theme. He shows how the best writers have put figurative comparisons to distinctive use―for the sake of caricature, to make an abstract idea visible, to make a complicated idea simple.

    Using hundreds of examples, Farnsworth demonstrates all the different stylistic ways that points can be unforgettably made. There are quotations from novelists, playwrights, philosophers, and orators—along with commentary on how and why they work to bring power to words both in person and and on paper.

    Writers and speakers, this book will make you a star.

  • Say it with style―on paper or in person.

    This book explains why the best writing sounds that way, with hundreds of examples from Lincoln, Churchill, and other masters of the language. Farnsworth shows how small choices about words, sentences, and paragraphs put force into writing and speech that have stood the test of time. This is must for anyone who wants to speak or write with clear, persuasive, enjoyable, unforgettable style.

  • Plato called it “daimon,” the Romans “genius,” the Christians “guardian angel”; today we use such terms as “heart,” “spirit,” and “soul.” While philosophers and psychologists from Plato to Jung have studied and debated the fundamental essence of our individuality, our modern culture refuses to accept that a unique soul guides each of us from birth, shaping the course of our lives. In this extraordinary bestseller, James Hillman presents a brilliant vision of our selves, and an exciting approach to the mystery at the center of every life that asks, “What is it, in my heart, that I must do, be, and have? And why?”

    Drawing on the biographies of figures such as Ella Fitzgerald and Mohandas K. Gandhi, Hillman argues that character is fate, that there is more to each individual than can be explained by genetics and environment. The result is a reasoned and powerful road map to understanding our true nature and discovering an eye-opening array of choices—from the way we raise our children to our career paths to our social and personal commitments to achieving excellence in our time.

  • Washington, DC, gleams with stately columns and neoclassical temples, a pulsing hub of political power and prowess. But for decades it was one of the worst excuses for a capital city the world had ever seen. Before America became a world power in the twentieth century, Washington City was an eyesore at best and a disgrace at worst. Unfilled swamps, filthy canals, and rutted horse trails littered its landscape. Political bosses hired hooligans and thugs to conduct the nation’s affairs. Legendary madams entertained clients from all stations of society and politicians of every party. The police served and protected with the aid of bribes and protection money. Beneath pestilential air, the city’s muddy roads led to a stumpy, half-finished obelisk to Washington here, a domeless Capitol Building there. Lining the streets stood boarding houses, tanneries, and slums. Deadly horse races gouged dusty streets, and opposing factions of volunteer firefighters battled one another like violent gangs rather than life-saving heroes. The city’s turbulent history set a precedent for the dishonesty, corruption, and mismanagement that have led generations to look suspiciously on the various sin—both real and imagined—of Washington politicians. Empire of Mud unearths and untangles the roots of our capital’s story and explores how the city was tainted from the outset, nearly stifled from becoming the proud citadel of the republic that George Washington and Pierre L’Enfant envisioned more than two centuries ago.

  • Why did the US intelligence services fail so spectacularly to know about the Soviet Union’s nuclear capabilities following World War II? As Vince Houghton, historian and curator of the International Spy Museum in Washington, DC, shows us, that disastrous failure came just a few years after the Manhattan Project’s intelligence team had penetrated the Third Reich and knew every detail of the Nazi’s plan for an atomic bomb. What changed and what went wrong?

    Houghton’s delightful retelling of this fascinating case of American spy ineffectiveness in the then new field of scientific intelligence provides us with a new look at the early years of the Cold War. During that time, scientific intelligence quickly grew to become a significant portion of the CIA budget as it struggled to contend with the incredible advance in weapons and other scientific discoveries immediately after World War II. As Houghton shows, the abilities of the Soviet Union’s scientists, its research facilities and laboratories, and its educational system became a key consideration for the CIA in assessing the threat level of its most potent foe. Sadly, for the CIA, scientific intelligence was extremely difficult to do well. For when the Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb in 1949, no one in the American intelligence services saw it coming.

  • In 1834, Osborne Russell joined an expedition from Boston, which proceeded to the Rocky Mountains to capitalize on the lucrative salmon and fur trade. Beginning at the age of twenty, he detailed the life of a trapper in his journal and recorded his adventures through treacherous terrain, encounters with dangerous wildlife, and confrontations with the natives of the Rockies.

    Osbourne would remain there—hunting, trapping, and living off the land—for the next nine years. Journal of a Trapper is his remarkable account as he developed into an experienced trapper and a seasoned mountain man of the Rockies.

  • Can a single explosion change the course of history? An eruption at the end of the eighteenth century led to years of climate change while igniting famine, disease, and even perhaps revolution.

    Laki is Iceland’s largest volcano—and its most fearsome. Its eruption in 1783 is one of history’s great, untold natural disasters. Spewing out sun-blocking ash and then a poisonous fog for eight long months, the effects of the eruption lingered across the world for years. It caused the deaths of people as far away as the Nile and created catastrophic conditions throughout Europe.

    Island on Fire is the story not only of a single eruption but the people whose lives it changed, the dawn of modern volcanology, as well as the history―and potential―of other super-volcanoes like Laki around the world. And perhaps most pertinently, in the wake of the eruption of another Icelandic volcano, Eyjafjallajökull, which closed European air space in 2010, acclaimed science writers Witze and Kanipe look at what might transpire should Laki erupt again in our lifetime.

  • Robert Frost (1874–1963) was the most celebrated poet in America for most of the twentieth century. Although chiefly associated with the life and landscapes of New England, his work embodies penetrating and often dark explorations of universal themes.

    New Hampshire features Frost’s meditations on rural life, love, and death, delivered in the voice of a soft-spoken New Englander. Critics have long marveled at the poet’s gift for capturing the speech of the region’s natives and his realistic evocations of the area’s landscapes. This compilation first published in 1923 earned Frost the first of his four Pulitzer Prizes, and includes several of his best-known poems: “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” and “Fire and Ice” as well as verse based on such traditional songs as “I Will Sing You One-O.”

  • Yellowstone Kelly is an Indian fighter and scout like no other. The devil-may-care Irishman can pick off hostiles and quote the classics with equal ease and accuracy. Even the mighty Sioux fear him—or most of them fear him.

    Sitting Bull’s main war chief, the dreaded Gall, fears no man, and Kelly has something of his that the warrior would gladly kill to get back—his woman.

  • For twenty-four winters, the blond child had been held captive by the Indians. Now rangy, raw-boned Ben Allison set out to heat up a stone-cold trail and bring Amy Johnston home.

    He was armed with only an old mountain man’s map, a cheap gold locket, an ornery pack mule, and his army Colt. It was an impossible mission leading straight into hostile Indian country. Ben was keenly aware that the search for Amy could very well be his own death hunt.

  • The great insights of the Stoics are spread over a wide range of ancient sources. This book brings them all together for the first time. It systematically presents what the various Stoic philosophers said on every important topic, accompanied by an eloquent commentary that is clear and concise. The result is a set of philosophy lessons for everyone—the most valuable wisdom of ages past made available for our times, and for all time.

  • “Last September the United States drew a thin curtain of radiation around the earth…The feat was regarded by some of its leading participants as the greatest scientific experiment of all time.” ―Walter Sullivan, the New York Times, March 19, 1959

    After the Soviet Union proved to the United States that it possessed an operational intercontinental ballistic missile with the launch of Sputnik in October 1957, the world watched anxiously as the two superpowers engaged in a game of nuclear one-upmanship. Amid this rising tension, Nicholas Christofilos, an eccentric Greek American physicist, brought forth an outlandish, albeit ingenious, idea to defend the United States from a Soviet attack: launching nuclear warheads to detonate in outer space, creating an artificial radiation belt that would fry incoming Soviet ICBMs. Known as Operation Argus, this plan is the most secret and riskiest scientific experiment in history, and classified details of these nuclear tests have been long obscured.

    In Burning the Sky, Mark Wolverton tells the unknown and controversial story of this scheme to reveal a fascinating narrative that still has powerful resonances today. He chronicles Christofilos’ unconventional idea from its inception to execution, when he persuaded the military to carry out the dangerous test―using the entire Earth’s atmosphere as a laboratory. Combining his investigation of recently declassified military documents with more than a decade of experience in researching and writing about the science of the Cold War, Wolverton examines the scientific, political, and environmental implications of Argus, as well as that of the atmospheric tests that followed. He also discusses the roles played by physicist James Van Allen and President Eisenhower in the scheme, and how the whistle-blowing journalists at The New York Times blew the lid off what was supposed to be America’s ultimate nuclear secret.

    Burning the Sky is an engrossing book that will intrigue any lover of scientific or military history and will remind readers why Project Argus remains frighteningly relevant nearly sixty years later.

  • The topic of neurotheology has garnered increasing attention in the academic, religious, scientific, and popular worlds. But there have been no attempts to explore more specifically how Jewish religious thought and experience may intersect with neurotheology. The Rabbi’s Brain engages this groundbreaking area.

    Topics included relate to a neurotheological approach to the foundational beliefs that arise from the Torah and associated scriptures, Jewish learning, an exploration of the different elements of Judaism (i.e., reform, conservative, and orthodox), an exploration of specifically Jewish practices (i.e., Davening, Sabbath, Kosher), and a review of Jewish mysticism. The Rabbi’s Brain engages these topics in an easy-to-understand style and integrates the scientific, religious, philosophical, and theological aspects of the emerging field of neurotheology.

    By reviewing the concepts in a stepwise, simple yet thorough discussion, listeners, regardless of their background, will be able to understand the complexities and breadth of neurotheology from the Jewish perspective. More broadly, issues will include a review of the neurosciences and neuroscientific techniques; religious and spiritual experiences; theological development and analysis; liturgy and ritual; epistemology, philosophy, and ethics; and social implications, all from the Jewish perspective.

  • A critical examination of economics’ past and future, and how it needs to change, by one of the most eminent political economists of our time

    The dominant view in economics is that money and government should play only a minor role in economic life. Economic outcomes, it is claimed, are best left to the “invisible hand” of the market. Yet these claims remain staunchly unsettled. The view taken in this important new book is that the omnipresence of uncertainty makes money and government essential features of any market economy.

    Since Adam Smith, classical economics has espoused non-intervention in markets. The Great Depression brought Keynesian economics to the fore; but stagflation in the 1970s brought a return to small-state orthodoxy. The 2008 global financial crash should have brought a reevaluation of that stance; instead the response has been punishing austerity and anemic recovery. This book aims to reintroduce Keynes’s central insights to a new generation of economists, and embolden them to return money and government to the starring roles in the economic drama that they deserve.

  • With commanding skill, Thomas R. Martin tells the remarkable and dramatic story of how a tiny, poor, and threatened settlement grew to become, during its height, the dominant power in the Mediterranean world for five hundred years. Encompassing the period from Rome’s founding in the eighth century BC through Justinian’s rule in the sixth century AD, he offers a distinctive perspective on the Romans and their civilization by employing fundamental Roman values as a lens through which to view both their rise and spectacular fall.

    Interweaving social, political, religious, and cultural history, Martin interprets the successes and failures of the Romans in war, political organization, quest for personal status, and in the integration of religious beliefs and practices with government. He focuses on the central role of social and moral values in determining individual conduct as well as decisions of state, from monarchy to republic to empire. Striving to reconstruct ancient history from the ground up, he includes frequent references to ancient texts and authors, encouraging readers to return to the primary sources.

    Comprehensive, concise, and accessible, this masterful account provides a unique window into Rome and its changing fortune.

  • A wise, personal, and wide-ranging meditation on science and society by the Nobel Prize–winning author of To Explain the World.

    For more than four decades, one of the most captivating and celebrated science communicators of our time has challenged the public to think carefully about the foundations of nature and the inseparable entanglement of science and society. In Third Thoughts, Steven Weinberg casts a wide net: from the cosmological to the personal, from astronomy, quantum mechanics, and the history of science to the limitations of current knowledge, the art of discovery, and the rewards of getting things wrong.

    Winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics and author of the classic The First Three Minutes, Weinberg shares his views on some of the most fundamental and fascinating aspects of physics and the universe. But he does not seclude science behind disciplinary walls, or shy away from politics, taking on what he sees as the folly of manned spaceflight, the harms of inequality, and the importance of public goods. His point of view is rationalist, realist, reductionist, and devoutly secularist.

    Weinberg is that great rarity, a prize-winning physicist who is entertaining and accessible. The essays in Third Thoughts, some of which appear here for the first time, will engage, provoke, and inform―and never lose sight of the human dimension of scientific discovery and its consequences for our endless drive to probe the workings of the cosmos.

  • One of the best-known experimental novels of the 1960s, Beautiful Losers is Cohen’s most defiant and uninhibited work.

    As imagined by Cohen, hell is an apartment in Montreal, where a bereaved and lust-tormented narrator reconstructs his relations with the dead. In that hell, two men and a woman twine impossibly and betray one another again and again. Memory blurs into blasphemous sexual fantasy—and redemption takes the form of an Iroquois saint and virgin who has been dead for three hundred years but still has the power to save even the most degraded of her suitors.

    By turns vulgar, rhapsodic, and viciously witty, Beautiful Losers explores each character’s attainment of a state of self-abandonment, in which the sensualist cannot be distinguished from the saint.

  • Often called the “Father of Church History,” Eusebius was the first to trace the rise of Christianity during its crucial first three centuries from Christ to Constantine. Our principal resource for earliest Chrisitianity, The Church History presents a panorama of apostles, church fathers, emperors, bishops, heroes, heretics, confessors, and martyrs.

    This audiobook edition includes Paul L. Maier’s clear and precise translation, historical commentary on each book in The Church History, and numerous maps, illustrations, and photographs. These features promise to liberate Eusebius from previous outdated and stilted works, creating a new standard primary resource for listeners interested in the early history of Christianity.

  • A groundbreaking book about how ancient DNA has profoundly changed our understanding of human history

    Geneticists like David Reich have made astounding advances in the field of genomics, which is proving to be as important as archaeology, linguistics, and written records as a means to understand our ancestry.

    In Who We Are and How We Got Here, Reich allows listeners to discover how the human genome provides not only all the information a human embryo needs to develop but also the hidden story of our species. Reich delves into how the genomic revolution is transforming our understanding of modern humans and how DNA studies reveal deep inequalities among different populations, between the sexes, and among individuals. Provocatively, Reich’s book suggests that there might very well be biological differences among human populations but that these differences are unlikely to conform to common stereotypes.

    Drawing upon revolutionary findings and unparalleled scientific studies, Who We Are and How We Got Here is a captivating glimpse into humankind—where we came from and what that says about our lives today.

  • From the highly acclaimed New York Times bestselling author of The Returned comes a high-concept dystopian novel that imagines a world at war and two siblings who are forced on the run, challenged to do whatever it takes to protect themselves and each other.

    Stay and die or run and survive.

    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.

    Armed with only a pistol and their fierce will to survive, the twins set forth in search of a new beginning. Encountering a colorful cast of characters along the way, Tommy and Virginia must navigate the dangers and wonders of this changed world as they try to outrun the demons of their past.

    With deft imagination and breathless prose, The Crossing is a riveting tale of loyalty, sacrifice, and the burdens we carry with us into the darkness of the unknown.

  • Not all the folks who roamed the Old West were cowhands, rustlers, or cardsharps. And they certainly weren’t all heroes.

    Give-a-Damn Jones, a free-spirited itinerant typographer, hates his nickname almost as much as the rumors spread about him. He’s a kind soul who keeps finding himself in the wrong place at the wrong time.

    That’s what happened in Box Elder, a small Montana town. Tensions are running high, and anything—or anyone—could be the fuse to ignite them: a recently released convict trying to prove his innocence, a prominent cattleman who craves respect at any cost, a wily traveling dentist at odds with a violent local blacksmith, or a firebrand of an editor who is determined to unlock the town’s secrets.

    Jones walks into the middle of it all, and this time, he may be the hero that this town needs.

  • His good friend Mark Twain dubbed him “St. Andrew.” British Prime Minister William Gladstone called him an “example” for the wealthy. Such terms seldom apply to multimillionaires. But Andrew Carnegie was no run-of-the-mill steel magnate. At age thirteen and full of dreams, he sailed from his native Dunfermline, Scotland, to America. The story of his success begins with a $1.20-a-week job at a bobbin factory. By the end of his life, he had amassed an unprecedented fortune—and given away more than 90 percent of it for the good of mankind.

    Here, for the first time in one volume, are two impressive works by Andrew Carnegie himself: his autobiography and “The Gospel of Wealth,” a groundbreaking manifesto on the duty of the wealthy to give back to society all of their fortunes. And he practiced what he preached, erecting 1,600 libraries across the country, founding Carnegie Mellon University, building Carnegie Hall, and performing countless other acts of philanthropy because, as Carnegie wrote, “The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced.”

  • In this, his best-known work, the controversial American economist and social critic Thorstein Veblen appropriates Darwin’s theory of evolution to analyze the modern industrial system. For Veblen, the shallowness and superficiality observed in society results from the tendency to believe that true accomplishment lies in arriving at a condition of ostentatious wealth and status. In developing his thesis, Veblen traces the origins and development of ownership and property, offering extraordinary insights into consumerism, the evolution of class structure, the rise of leisure time, and how modern societal goals are grounded in monetary aspirations and achievements.

    With a cool gaze and devastating wit, Veblen examines the human cost paid when social institutions are founded on the consumption of unessential goods for the sake of personal profit. Fashion, beauty, sports, the home, the clergy, scholars—all are assessed for their true usefulness and found wanting. Indeed, Veblen’s critique covers all aspects of modern life from dress, class, industry, business, and home decoration to religion, scholarship, education, and the position of women, laying bare the hollowness of many cherished standards of taste and culture.

    The targets of Veblen’s brilliant, scathing satire are as evident today as they were when this classic of economic and social theory was first published, and his book still has the power to shock and enlighten.

  • In this compact yet comprehensive history of ancient Greece, Thomas R. Martin brings alive Greek civilization from its Stone Age roots to the fourth century BC. Focusing on the development of the Greek city-state and the society, culture, and architecture of Athens in its Golden Age, Martin integrates political, military, social, and cultural history in a book that will appeal to students and general readers alike.

    Now in its second edition, this classic work now features updates throughout.

  • In 2006, Christianity Today voted The God Who Is There as one of the top fifty books that have shaped evangelicals.

    For decades, The God Who Is There has been the landmark book that changed the way the church sees the world. In Francis Schaeffer’s remarkable analysis, we learn where the clashing ideas about God, science, history, and art came from and where they are going. This edition includes a foreword by James W. Sire that places Schaeffer’s seminal work in the context of the intellectual turbulence of the early twenty-first century.

    More than ever, The God Who Is There demonstrates how historic Christianity can fearlessly confront the competing philosophies of the world. The God who has always been there continues to provide the anchor of truth and the power of love to meet the world’s deepest problems.

  • Over twenty years ago, William F. Buckley Jr. launched the dashing character of Blackford Oakes like a missile over the literary landscape. This newly minted CIA agent—brainy, bold, and complex—began his career by saving the queen of England and quickly took his place in the pantheon of master spies drawn up by Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene, and John le Carré.

    Against the backdrop of Cold War intrigue, in this his eleventh outing, Oakes crosses swords with Kim Philby, perhaps the highest-ranking in the parade of defectors to the Soviet Union.

    Oakes is now himself a master spy, this time working outside the ambit of the director and around agency rules. His romance with an able and worldly Soviet doctor is consolation for the death of his beloved Sally. But after his return to Washington, he receives dismaying news. It is inevitable that the great Soviet spy and the renowned American agent will meet again—this time with deadly consequences.

  • 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. She seems to like his cooking and the blues albums he collects, but she never stays with him for long. As he discovers the secrets and violence of her life, Gigi finds himself unable to rescue her and barely able to save himself. He flees New York, but his obsession with Corrine follows him, even when he returns to his home in northern Minnesota, where he marries, has a daughter, and fishes the deep, quiet lakes he knows so well.

    After he dies, his daughter uncovers her father’s desire for this unknown woman, leaving her to question the inherent perils of his life as well as her own.

    Dark and poetic, Do Not Find Me moves between the voices of Gigi Paulo and his daughter with a compelling grace, its haunting undercurrents remaining long after the story has ended.

  • 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?

    One of Henry James’ first novels, Roderick Hudson is a compelling depiction of an artist whose inflated ambition and temperament gets the better of him.

  • The only audio edition of Necronomicon authorized by the H. P. Lovecraft Estate

    Originally written for the pulp magazines of the 1920s and ’30s, H. P. Lovecraft’s astonishing tales blend elements of horror, science fiction, and cosmic terror that are as powerful today as they were when first published. This tome brings together all of Lovecraft’s harrowing stories, including the complete Cthulhu Mythos cycle, just the way they were when first released. It will introduce a whole new generation of readers to Lovecraft’s fiction, as well as attract those fans who want all his work in a single, definitive volume.

    Stories include:

    “Dagon”
    “Herbert West – Reanimator”
    “The Lurking Fear”
    “The Rats in the Walls”
    “The Whisperer in the Darkness”
    “Cool Air”
    “In the Vault”
    “The Call of Cthulu”
    “The Color Out of Space”
    “The Horror at Red Hook”
    “The Music of Erich Zann”
    “The Shadow Out of Time”
    “The Dunwich Horror”
    “The Haunter of the Dark”
    “The Outsider”
    “The Shunned House”
    “The Unnameable”
    “The Thing on the Doorstep”
    “Under the Pyramids”

  • Loosely based on sensational press reports of a Moscow student’s murder by fellow revolutionists, The Possessed depicts the destructive chaos caused by outside agitators who move into a provincial town. The enigmatic and ideological Stavrogin dominates the novel, his magnetic personality influencing his tutor, the liberal intellectual poseur Stepan Verhovensky, and the teacher’s revolutionary son Pyotr, as well as other radicals. Stavrogin is portrayed as a man of strength without direction, capable of goodness and nobility. When he loses his faith in God, however, he is seized by brutal desires he does not fully understand.

    Widely considered the greatest political novel ever written, The Possessed showcases Dostoevsky’s brilliant characterization, amazing insight into the human heart, and crushing criticism of the desire to manipulate the thought and behavior of others.

  • In 1895, two young men destined to make their mark on American life, Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge, discovered they shared a common interest in the remarkable way ordinary Americans demonstrated the real character of the young nation. They were convinced that the brilliance of American liberty could best be found in the lives of everyday heroes.

    These two men researched and wrote the twenty-six inspiring stories in Hero Tales. From great battles of the War for Independence to the intrepid explorations that opened up the western frontier, from the struggles of the early pioneers to the tragedies of the Civil War, these stories capture the essence of the American spirit.

    Especially moving is the last chapter, on Abraham Lincoln, in which narrator Patrick Cullen reads Walt Whitman's poem for Lincoln, "O Captain, My Captain," as well as two of Lincoln's speeches, the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural Address.

    1. "Washington" by Henry Cabot Lodge
    2. "Daniel Boone and the Founding of Kentucky" by Theodore Roosevelt
    3. "George Rogers Clark and the Conquest of the Northwest" by Theodore Roosevelt
    4. "The Battle of Trenton" by Henry Cabot Lodge
    5. "Bennington" by Henry Cabot Lodge
    6. "King's Mountain" by Theodore Roosevelt
    7. "The Storming of Stony Point" by Theodore Roosevelt
    8. "Gouverneur Morris" by Henry Cabot Lodge
    9. "The Burning of the Philadelphiai"by Henry Cabot Lodge
    10. "The Cruise of the Wasp"by Theodore Roosevelt
    11. "The General Armstrong Privateer" by Theodore Roosevelt
    12. "The Battle of New Orleans" by Theodore Roosevelt
    13. "John Quincy Adams and the Right of Petition" by Henry Cabot Lodge
    14. "Francis Parkman" by Henry Cabot Lodge
    15. "Remember the Alamo" by Theodore Roosevelt
    16. "Hampton Roads" by Theodore Roosevelt
    17. "The Flag-Bearer" by Theodore Roosevelt
    18. "The Death of Stonewall Jackson" by Theodore Roosevelt
    19. "The Charge at Gettysburg" by Theodore Roosevelt
    20. "General Grant and the Vicksburg Campaign" by Henry Cabot Lodge
    21. "Robert Gould Shaw" by Henry Cabot Lodge
    22. "Charles Russell Lowell" by Henry Cabot Lodge
    23. "Sheridan at Cedar Creek" by Henry Cabot Lodge
    24. "Lieutenant Cushing and the Ram Albermarle"by Theodore Roosevelt
    25. "Farragut at Mobile Bay" by Theodore Roosevelt
    26. "Lincoln" by Henry Cabot Lodge

  • Here is the world's most famous master plan for seizing and holding power. Astonishing in its candor, The Prince is a disturbingly realistic and prophetic work on what it takes to be a prince, a king, a president.

    When, in 1512, Machiavelli was removed from his post in his beloved Florence, he resolved to set down a treatise on leadership that was practical, not idealistic. The prince he envisioned would be unencumbered by ordinary ethical and moral values. Through the years, The Prince has been misunderstood to the extent that Machiavelli's name has become synonymous with unscrupulous political behavior. However, it remains essential reading as the ultimate book on power politics. In it Machiavelli analyzes the usually violent means by which men seize, retain, and lose political power. The Prince provides a remarkably uncompromising picture of the true nature of power, no matter who controls it or in what era.Included are selections from Machiavelli's Discourses upon the First Ten Books of Titus Livy.

  • Both a masterpiece of Russian populist writing and a parody of the entire genre, Poor People is an early example of Dostoevsky’s genius.

    Written as a series of letters, Poor People is the tragic tale of a petty clerk and his impossible love for a young girl. Longing to help her and her family, he sells everything he can, but his kindness leads him only into more desperate poverty, and ultimately into debauchery. As a typical “man of the underground,” he serves as the embodiment of the belief that happiness can only be achieved with riches.

    This work is remarkable for its vivid characterizations, especially of Dievushkin, the clerk, solely by means of his letters to the young girl and her answers to him.

  • This recording presents a series of patriotic selections of unquestioned literary merit. The stories have been chosen with special regard to their effectiveness as avenues through which young people may experience the sentiments upon which love of native land depends. Featuring iconic American heroes such as Lincoln, Washington, and Davy Crockett, these selections will inspire an enthusiasm for the American spirit and a pronounced regard for the institutions and ideals sacred to all Americans.

    The stories include:

    “The Man without a Country” by Edward Everett Hale
    “Washington” by Nina Moore Tiffany
    “Davy Crockett, Defender of the Alamo” by Charles Fletcher Allen
    “Lincoln: The Man of Sorrows” by Major Stephen Brice
    “What a Boy Saw of the Civil War with Glimpses of General Lee” by Leighton Parks
    “A Message to Garcia” by Elbert Hubbard

  • Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Curie, Einstein: all of these geniuses had one thing in common. They had not only the imagination to conceive great ideas but also the integrity and determination to pursue and defend their science whatever the obstacles.

    In spite of resistance and sometimes persecution by societies reluctant to let go of old views, these scientists persevered in their research and fought for the truths they discovered. While giving birth to the modern scientific outlook, the fact of evolution, the theory of relativity, or the secrets of atomic energy, they also struggled for the preservation of intellectual freedom and against the dangers inherent in the misuse of science.

    Their stories will renew our confidence in the human spirit by reminding us of what men and women are capable of when they have the ability and courage to achieve great things.

  • In 1839, two years after graduating from Harvard, Henry David Thoreau and his older brother, John, took a boat-and-hiking trip from Concord, Massachusetts, to the White Mountains of New Hampshire. After John’s sudden death in 1842, Thoreau began to prepare a memorial account of their excursion during his stay at Walden Pond. Modern readers have come to see Thoreau’s story of the river journey as an appropriate predecessor to Walden, depicting the early years of his spiritual and artistic growth.

    “Just as the current of the stream bears along the boat with Thoreau and his brother, so the current of ideas in his mind bears along the reader by evoking the joy and nostalgia that Thoreau feels for those lost, golden days. As Thoreau says, human life is very much like a river running always downward to the sea, and in this book we enter for a moment the flow of Thoreau’s unique existence.”—Masterplots

  • Compiled from magazine articles published in the 1850s after his death, Cape Cod details several short trips Thoreau made to "the bare and bended arm ofMassachusetts" between 1849 and 1855. "He went to the Cape out of curiosity," explains Paul Theroux, "but in the course of his travel a great thing happened: Thoreau, the woodsman and landlubber, discovered the sea."

    Encounters with the ocean dominate the book, from the fatal shipwreck of the opening episode to the late reflections on the Pilgrims' Cape Cod landing and reconnaissance. Along the way, Thoreau relates the experiences of fishermen and oystermen, lighthouse keepers and ship captains, and their chronicles of exploration, settlement, and survival on the Cape against the threats of the wild sea and of encroaching modernity.