Cart
  • Sign In
Narrator

James Adams

James Adams

  • From one of literature’s finest storytellers comes an enchanting tale of secrets, the supernatural—and fatal attraction.

    Renowned English surgeon Arthur Burdon is engaged to the beautiful Margaret Dauncey, who is studying art in Paris. The match is met with approval from all sides, and everyone is happy—until the mysterious Oliver Haddo enters the picture. Both Arthur and his fiancée dislike the enormously fat and eccentric Oliver but are fascinated by his stories of black magic, by his demonstrations of a power that seems inhuman. And while they scoff at his boasts, their dislike turns to loathing.

    A month later, Margaret disappears. The note she leaves behind begins: “When you receive this, I shall be on my way to London. I was married to Oliver Haddo this morning.” Why? How? What mysterious power had the Magician used? What further revenge might he be plotting? The answers are revealed in this hair-raising fantasy.

  • This riveting history is a firsthand account of the long and arduous search for one of the greatest explorers of the nineteenth century. Journalist and adventurer Henry M. Stanley was known for his search for the legendary David Livingstone, and their eventual meeting led to the popular quotation “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”

    A real-life adventure story, How I Found Livingstone in Central Africa tells of the incredible hardships—disease, hostile natives, tribal warfare, impenetrable jungles, and other obstacles—faced by a daring explorer. This must-have account also includes a wealth of information on various African peoples.

  • Before Jurassic Park, there was The Lost World.

    This classic terror-adventure novel has set the standard for today’s popular entertainment as followed by Michael Crichton and Steven Spielberg. Featuring the bold Professor Challenger, a character many critics consider one of the most finely drawn in science fiction, The Lost World is the account of a scientific expedition by four high-spirited Englishmen—two scientists, a big-game hunter, and a journalist—deep into the Amazon jungle. In this region, cut off from the outside world by unscalable vertical cliffs and fetid swamps, they encounter a world where dinosaurs roam free and natives fight a murderous war with their fierce neighbors, the ape-men. Trapped on the isolated plateau with only hunting rifles as protection, the four must use savvy and intellect to escape from this primeval terror.

  • The leviathan is the vast unity of the State. But how are unity, peace, and security to be attained? Hobbes’ answer is sovereignty, but the resurgence of interest today in Leviathan is due less to its answers than its methods: Hobbes sees politics as a science capable of the same axiomatic approach as geometry.

    Written during the turmoil of the English Civil War, Leviathan was, in Hobbes’ lifetime, publicly burnt and even condemned in Parliament as one of the causes of the Great Fire of London in 1666. Its current appeal lies not just in its elevation of politics to a science, but in its overriding concern for peace, its systematic analysis of power, and its convincing apologia for the then-emergent market society in which we still live.

  • Stevenson’s tragic masterpiece unfolds against a hauntingly beautiful Scottish landscape, where the 1745 Jacobite rising is dividing the country against itself. Amidst this outer conflict, one family finds itself devastatingly divided from within, as two brothers discover their opposing loyalties. Their rivalry soon spreads from war to love, as both try to win the hand of a wealthy and beautiful kinswoman.

    Through a series of adventures, including seas voyages, piracy, and buried treasure, Stevenson weaves an acutely moving, psychologically complex story of the elemental struggle between good and evil.

  • This three-part work includes A Discourse on Method, Meditations on the First Philosophy, and Principles of Philosophy.

    By calling everything into doubt, Descartes laid the foundations of modern philosophy. With the celebrated words “I think, therefore I am,” his compelling argument swept aside ancient and medieval traditions. He deduced that human beings consist of minds and bodies, that these are totally distinct “substances,” and that God exists and that he ensures we can trust the evidence of our senses. Ushering in the “scientific revolution” of Galileo and Newton, his ideas have set the agenda for debate ever since. His philosophical methods and investigation changed the course of Western philosophy and led to or transformed the fields of metaphysics, epistemology, physics, mathematics, political theory, and ethics.

  • On a freezing February day, a stranger emerges from out of the gray to request a room at a local provincial inn. Who is this out-of-season traveler? More confounding is the thick mask of bandages obscuring his face. Why does he disguise himself in this manner and keep himself hidden away in his room?

    Aroused by trepidation and curiosity, the local villagers bring it upon themselves to find the answers. What they discover is a man trapped in a terror of his own creation and a chilling reflection of the unsolvable mysteries of their own souls.

    In the tradition of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein comes another undisputed classic of science fiction and horror to stir the imagination and conscience. It is considered by many to be one of the greatest science fiction horror stories ever written.

  • Caius Cornelius Tacitus, a Roman orator and public official, is considered one of the greatest historians as well as one of the greatest prose stylists of the Latin language. In The Histories, he describes and interprets the period in which he lived, beginning with the political situation that followed Nero's death in AD 69 and ending with the death of Domitian in AD 96 and the close of the Flavian dynasty. The five books of the history still in existance are part of an original work of twelve to fourteen books.

    The narrative as it now exists, with its magnificent introduction, is a powerfully sustained piece of writing. Because Tacitus was a conscious literary stylist, both his thought and his manner of expression gave life to his work. He wrote in the grand style, helped by the solemn and poetic usage of the Roman tradition, and he exploited the Latin qualities of strength, rhythm, and color.

  • In this political work written in 1516, Utopia is the name given by Sir Thomas More to an imaginary island. Book I ofUtopia, a dialogue, presents a perceptive analysis of contemporary social, economic, and moral ills in England. Book II is a narrative describing a country run according to the ideals of the English humanists, where poverty, crime, injustice, and other ills do not exist. Locating his island in the New World, More bestowed it with everything to support a perfectly organized and happy people.

    The name of this fictitious place, Utopia, coined by More, passed into general usage and has been applied to all such ideal fictions, fantasies, and blueprints for the future, including works by Rabelais, Francis Bacon, Samuel Butler, and several by H. G. Wells, including hisA Modern Utopia.

  • In The Truth about Muhammad, New York Times bestselling author and Islam expert Robert Spencer offers a telling portrait of the founder of Islam—perhaps the first such portrait in half a century—unbounded by fear and political correctness, unflinching, and willing to face the hard facts about Muhammad’s life that continue to affect our world today.

    Spencer details Muhammad’s development from a preacher of hellfire and damnation into a political and military leader who expanded his rule by force of arms, promising his warriors luridly physical delights in paradise if they were killed in his cause. He explains how the Qur’an’s teachings on warfare against unbelievers developed, with constant war to establish the hegemony of Islamic law as the last stage. Spencer also gives the truth about Muhammad’s convenient “revelations” justifying his own licentiousness; his joy in the brutal murders of his enemies; and above all, his clear marching orders to his followers to convert non-Muslims to Islam—or force them to live as inferiors under Islamic rule.