Showing results by author "ciesse" in All Categories

The Ramsey family, with house guests, visit the Isle of Skye at least twice. The plot is not at all the point though, as this is a book about how people think and feel and relate. There’s insight into the world of childhood thought and emotion, and a variety of views of adult cares and perceptions.I hope this doesn’t make it sound ‘difficult’, it doesn’t need to be – just let the sentences flow and make your own sense of the words. It’s perhaps as close as a novel can come to the highly individual experience of looking at a painting. … - Summary by Cori SamuelThis recording was...

Jo's Boys is the third book in the Little Women trilogy by Louisa May Alcott, published in 1886. In it, Jo's "children", now grown, are caught up in real world troubles. All three books - although fiction - are highly autobiographical and describe characters that were really in Alcott's life. This book contains romance as the childhood playmates become flirtatious young men and women. The characters are growing up, going out into the world and deciding their futures.(Summary from Wilkipedia)

Benjamin Bonneville spent the years 1832 to 1835 on the adventure of a lifetime, leading an expedition of trapping, trading, and exploring in the wilds of Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Washington, Oregon, Utah, Nevada and California. Here is Washington Irving's colorful summary of the world that Bonneville observed, experienced, and cherished: the gay free trapper and his steed, decked out in wild array, and tinkling with bells and trinketry; the savage war chief, plumed and painted and ever on the prowl; the traders' cavalcade, winding through defiles or over naked plains, with the stealthy war ...

Jack and Jill went up a hill To coast with fun and laughter. Jack fell down and broke his crown, And Jill came tumbling after. When Jack and Jill tumble off of their sled on the first good snow of the season, their injuries cause them to be bedridden for many months putting an end to their fun and frolics. Their parents and friends fill their days with the joys of Christmas preparations, a theatrical production and many other imaginative events. Both learn how to become better friends to each other and their other school mates through their many trials. This is sure to become a family favorite...

9/11 Commission Report, formally titled Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, is the official report of the events leading up to the September 11, 2001 attacks. It was prepared by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (informally sometimes known as the "9/11 Commission" or the "Kean/Zelikow Commission") at the request of the President of the United States and Congress. The commission convened on November 26, 2002 (441 days after the attack) and their final report was issued on July 22, 2004.

Writer/entertainer Garrison Keillor (A Prairie Home Companion) on “The Innocents Abroad”: “…one of the best selling travel books of all time.” (The Writer’s Almanac, June 8, 2012)When you dive into Mark Twain’s (Samuel Clemens’) The Innocents Abroad, you have to be ready to learn more about the unadorned, ungilded reality of 19th century “touring” than you might think you want to learn. This is a tough, literary journey. It was tough for Twain and his fellow “pilgrims”, both religious and otherwise. They set out, on a June day in 1867, to visit major tourist sites in ...

The largest surviving body of Pliny's work is his Epistulae (Letters), a series of personal missives directed to his friends, associates and the Emperor Trajan. These letters are a unique testimony of Roman administrative history and everyday life in the 1st century CE. Especially noteworthy among the letters are two in which he describes the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in August 79, during which his uncle Pliny the Elder died (65 and 66 in this edition), and one in which he asks the Emperor for instructions regarding official policy concerning Christians (Trajan Letter 97). Other letters ...

Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, marquise de Sévigné (5 February 1626 – 17 April 1696) was a French aristocrat famous for the precision, clarity, wit and vividness of her letters, which deal with personal issues and also with public events in the France of Louis XIV - Summary by Wikipedia

The first book in the 20-novel Rougon-Macquart Cycle. A monument of French naturalism. The sprawling tale of a family in Provence, during the Second Empire, the family that grew out of the liaisons between Adelaide Fouque and her husband Rougons, and the smuggler Macquart. - Summary by Mark Leder

"The Fall of the Nibelungs" is Margaret Armour's plain prose translation from the middle high German of the "Nibelungenlied", a poetic saga of uncertain authorship written about the year 1200. The story is believed by many to be based on the destruction of the Burgundians, a Germanic tribe, in 436 by mercenary Huns recruited for the task by the Roman general Flavius Aëtius. The introduction to the 1908 edition summarizes the story, "And so 'the discord of two women,' to quote Carlyle, 'is as a little spark of evil passion, which ere long enlarges itself into a crime; foul murder is done; and ...

Strauss was an early pioneer in the ongoing 'Quest of the Historical Jesus' movement, and his Life of Jesus is one of the few landmarks in the field. The first edition of Strauss' book was published in Germany in 1835, when he was only 27 years old. He focused his attention on battling two theological fronts which were current at the time - the biblical Literalists who believed the miracles in the Gospels were to be taken as literal history, and the Rationalists, who believed that the Gospel miracles were true but could be explained by natural and rational causes. Strauss rejected both camps ...

"Harold Transome is a landowner who goes against his family's political tradition (much to his mother's distress), while Felix Holt is a sincere radical. The setting of the book, the 1832 parliament election, is used to discuss the social problems of that time. A secondary plot involves Esther Lyon, the stepdaughter of a minister who is the real heiress to the Transome estate, with whom both Harold Transome and Felix Holt fall in love. Esther loves poor Felix Holt, but would she choose a comfortable life with Harold Transome?" (Summary by Stav Nisser)

Abigail Adams lived the American Revolution as the wife of one of its central figures--John Adams. Her family correspondence, published along with a memoir by her grandson, Charles Francis Adams, brings that era into eloquent focus. What was it like to hear the cannon's roar from your window? to face pestilence? food shortages? rampant inflation? devalued coinage? to raise four children alone--and earn the money to keep your household afloat, while your husband was engaged in politics and diplomacy miles and oceans away . . . for years at a time? It's all there in her private letters, letters ...

Dick Martin is on his last day on the job at Scotland Yard, having planned to retire early due to an inheritance windfall, when he becomes entangled in a strange and convoluted mystery involving a missing heir, a stolen library book, vivisection, a series of murders and a mysterious tomb with a complicated and unique set of locks, the keys of which have been scattered to the winds. But as the pieces start to come together, what seems at first a series of odd and random coincidences begin to add up to a sinister plot to seize a fortune! (Summary by Ben Tucker)

Numa manhã de Inverno, o cosmopolita Jacinto decide regressar à sua Tormes natal, pacata vila das serras portuguesas, acompanhado por Zé Fernandes, narrador-personagem desta história. A Cidade e as Serras faz um retrato dos contrastes entre a excitação da vida citadina e a genuína beleza da vida no campo.

This is the biography of Abraham Lincoln, written by two of his private secretaries. (Summary by ashleighjane)

Pollyanna visits Boston for the summer and stays with the grumpy, miserable, yet very wealthy Ruth Carew. Lonely in a big city away from her old companions and forbidden from talking to strangers, Pollyanna begins to despair of ever making new friends. Through her teenage years and into adulthood, will Pollyanna and her glad game be able to make a difference in the light of persistent grumpiness, disabilities, crippling poverty, and a major personal loss? - Summary by ElizaCast:Customer: Marie ChristianDella Wetherby: blueriveririsDr. Charlie Ames: Wayne CookeDr. Thomas Chilton: Doug ...

Originally entitled A frutefull pleasaunt, and wittie worke of the beste state of publique weale, & of the newe yle, called Utopia: written in Latine, by ... Syr Thomas More knyght, and translated into Englishe by Raphe Robynson ...The first book tells of the traveller Raphael Hythloday, to whom More is introduced in Antwerp. The second book consists of Hythloday's description of the island and people of Utopia, their customs, laws, religions, economy, language and relations with other nations. Hythloday portrays Utopia as an idealised state, where all property is common to all the people and ...

The framing story concerns a man who dreams of speaking to Venus about love while she wears furs. The unnamed narrator tells his dreams to a friend, Severin, who tells him how to break him of his fascination with cruel women by reading a manuscript, Memoirs of a Supersensual Man.This manuscript tells of a man, Severin von Kusiemski, so infatuated with a woman, Wanda von Dunajew, that he requests to be treated as her slave, and encourages her to treat him in progressively more degrading ways. At first Wanda does not understand or relate to the request, but after humouring Severin a bit she ...

“Being the Familiar Correspondence of Vincent Van Gogh ... [Van Gogh's] art was appreciated during his life only by a very few and it is but within recent years that it has found admirers who in many cases have been most ardently enthusiastic. Of the following letters, some were addressed to his brother and the remainder to his friend E. Bernard. (Summary from Preface)