Catalog Search Results
Author
Series
Summary
"Two Years Before the Mast is a remarkable book, part travelogue and part seafaring adventure. A great look at what life was really like on the merchant sailing ships of the first half of the 19th century, Two Years Before the Mast is also part suspense yarn, with the hero's return to his native land in serious doubt due to events beyond his control. Seen through the eyes of young man in his late teens who looks for both a cure for his measles and...
Author
Summary
In the most seminal slave narrative ever written, Frederick Douglass writes, "From my earliest recollection, I date the entertainment of a deep conviction that slavery would not always be able to hold me within its foul embrace and in the darkest hours of my career in slavery, this living word of faith and spirit of hope departed not from me, but remained like ministering angels to cheer me through the gloom." Reading this narrative is to witness...
3) Roughing it
Author
Series
Summary
Originally published over one hundred years ago, "Roughing It" tells the (almost) true story of Mark Twain's rollicking adventures across the United States. A hilarious account of how the author tried finding wealth in the rocks of Nevada, it was published before his most famous works and shows why he would grow to become one of the most beloved American writers of all time. The story follows many of Twain's early adventures, including a visit to...
Author
Appears on list
Summary
The Oregon Trail is the gripping account of Francis Parkman's journey west across North America in 1846. After crossing the Allegheny Mountains by coach and continuing by boat and wagon to Westport, Missouri, he set out with three companions on a horseback journey that would ultimately take him over two thousand miles. His detailed description of the journey, set against the vast majesty of the Great Plains, has emerged through the generations as...
5) The Republic
Author
Series
Formats
Summary
"The Republic is Plato's masterwork. It was written 2,400 years ago and remains one of the most widely read books in the world, famous for both the richness of its ideas and the virtuosity of its writing. Presented as a dialogue between Plato's teacher Socrates and various interlocutors, it is an exhortation to study philosophy, inviting its readers to reflect on the choices we must make if we are to live the best life available to us. This complex,...
Author
Summary
The classic account of moving from slavery to freedom, by the celebrated African-American educator and university founder.
Booker T. Washington believed that every man and woman deserved a chance, regardless of their skin color. This classic work of literature, originally published in 1901, relays the story of a man born into slavery who, once freed, pursued education and racial equality. This new edition of Booker T. Washington's autobiography features...
Author
Series
Formats
Summary
"Based on a series of letters Mark Twain wrote from Europe for San Francisco and New York newspapers as a roving correspondent, The Innocents Abroad (1869) is a caricature of the sentimental travel books popular in the mid-nineteenth century. Mark Twain's fresh and humorous perspective on hallowed European landmarks lacked reverence for the past, and was as mocking about American manners (including his own) as it was about European attitudes. Twain...
Author
Series
Summary
A retelling of the medieval poem about a group of travelers on a pilgrimage to Canterbury and the tales they tell each other. With their astonishing diversity of tone and subject matter, The Canterbury Tales have become one of the touchstones of medieval literature. Translated here into modern English, these tales of a motley crowd of pilgrims drawn from all walks of life-from knight to nun, miller to monk-reveal a picture of English life in the fourteenth...
9) The Odyssey
Author
Series
Summary
Composed at the rosy-fingered dawn of world literature almost three millennia ago, The Odyssey is a poem about violence and the aftermath of war; about wealth, poverty and power; about marriage and family; about travelers, hospitality, and the yearning for home. This fresh, authoritative translation captures the beauty of this ancient poem as well as the drama of its narrative. Its characters are unforgettable, none more so than the "complicated"...
10) The Iliad
Author
Series
Summary
When Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey appeared in 2017--revealing the ancient poem in a contemporary idiom that was "fresh, unpretentious and lean" (Madeline Miller, Washington Post)--critics lauded it as "a revelation" (Susan Chira, New York Times) and "a cultural landmark" (Charlotte Higgins, Guardian) that would forever change how Homer is read in English. Now Wilson has returned with an equally revelatory translation of Homer's other...
Author
Summary
Marco Polo’s account of his journey throughout the East in the thirteenth century was one of the earliest European travel narratives, and it remains the most important. The merchant-traveler from Venice, the first to cross the entire continent of Asia, provided us with accurate descriptions of life in China, Tibet, India, and a hundred other lands, and recorded customs, natural history, strange sights, historical legends, and much more. From...
Author
Summary
In 1832, three years before Alexis de Tocqueville published Democracy in America, the English novelist Frances Trollope released Domestic Manners of the Americans, an eye-opening record of her travels in the young republic. Expecting a utopia of "justice and liberty for all," she is shocked to discover the contradictions at the heart of the American character. Funny and fearless, Trollope's biting critique became an international sensation. Yet, as...
13) A Shropshire lad
Author
Summary
A collection of sixty-three short poems by the English poet showing a young lad's reactions to love, beauty, friendship, and death as he approaches manhood.
Author
Series
Summary
Ten Days That Shook the World is an undisputed classic of political reportage. A stunning first-hand account overflowing with urgency and immediacy, Reed's masterpiece lives and breathes the streets, meeting halls, posters and pamphlets of the revolution he witnessed. Like no other work, it places the reader shoulder to shoulder with the people's militias, factory committees, propagandists and crowds which thronged St Petersburg's squares to protest,...
Author
Series
Summary
"Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire compresses thirteen turbulent centuries into an epic narrative shot through with insight, irony and incisive character analysis." "Famously sceptical about Christianity, unexpectedly sympathetic to the barbarian invaders and the Byzantine Empire, constantly aware of how political leaders often achieve the exact opposite of what they intend, Gibbon was alert to both the broad pattern of events and...
Author
Summary
Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet are arguably the most famous and beloved letters of the twentieth century. Written when the poet was himself still a young man, with most of his greatest work before him, they were addressed to a student who had sent Rilke some of his own writing, asking for advice on becoming a writer. The two never met, but over a period of several years Rilke wrote him these ten letters. Eloquent and personal, Rilke's meditations...
18) Utopia
Author
Series
Summary
"In his most famous and controversial book, Utopia, Thomas More imagines a perfect island nation where thousands live in peace and harmony, men and women are both educated, and all property is communal. Through dialogue and correspondence between the protagonist Raphael Hythloday and his friends and contemporaries, More explores the theories behind war, political disagreements, social quarrels, and wealth distribution and imagines the day-to-day lives...
19) Leviathan
Author
Summary
""During the time men live without a common Power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called Warre." Written during the turmoil of the English Civil War, Leviathan is an ambitious and highly original work of political philosophy. Claiming that man's essential nature is competitive and selfish, Hobbes formulates the case for a powerful sovereign -- or "Leviathan" -- to enforce peace and the law, substituting security for the...
20) The confessions
Author
Series
Formats
Summary
In his own day the dominant personality of the Western Church, Augustine of Hippo today stands as perhaps the greatest thinker of Christian antiquity, and his "Confessions" is one of the great works of Western literature. In this intensely personal narrative, Augustine relates his rare ascent from a humble Algerian farm to the edge of the corridors of power at the imperial court in Milan, his struggle against the domination of his sexual nature, his...