Classic Biography

Richard Brookhiser has won a wide and loyal following for his stylish, pointed, and elegant biographies of George Washington and Alexander Hamilton. In America's First Dynasty, Brookhiser tells the story of America's longest and still greatest dynasty -- the Adamses, the only family in our...

Langston Hughes, born in 1902, came of age early in the 1920s. In The Big Sea he recounts those memorable years in the two great playgrounds of the decade--Harlem and Paris. In Paris he was a cook and waiter in nightclubs. He knew the musicians and dancers, the drunks and dope fiends. In Harlem...

The demon is a mob, and the mob is demonic. The Democratic Party activates mobs, depends on mobs, coddles mobs, publicizes and celebrates mobs—it is the mob. Sweeping in its scope and relentless in its argument, Demonic explains the peculiarities of liberals as standard groupthink behavior. To...

As author of the bestselling Why People Believe Weird Things and How We Believe, and Editor-in-Chief of Skeptic magazine, Michael Shermer has emerged as the nation's number one scourge of superstition and bad science. Now, in The Borderlands of Science, he takes us to the place where real...

Four works in one collection: The Call of Cthulhu, The Shadow Over Innsmouth, and At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft. Also The Life of Lovecraft: An Original Biography by CSA Publishing. Howard Lovecraft, well-known for his style of weird fiction and horror stories, is attributed as the creator of the Cthulhu Mythos and one of the most significant authors of supernatural horror fiction of the 20th-century.

Originally published in 1856, The Kidnapped and the Ransomed is the personal memoir of Peter Still, who was born a slave. He was yoked to servitude for more than four decades in Alabama and Kentucky. Still was finally freed with the help of two Jewish brothers.

Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada is an engrossing blend of scientific exploration and personal adventure. Clarence King describes the ascent of Mounts Tyndall, Shasta, and Whitney with a scientific poet’s eye, and makes the grandeur of the cliffs, the peaks, the glaciers, and the meadows of Yosemite Valley come alive through his remarkable gifts of portrayal. King describes nature like a master painter while his portrait of the people of California 20 years after the Gold Rush finds engaging expression in a subtle shift of style.

Walden is a work by noted transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau. The text is a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings. The work is part personal declaration of independence, social experiment, voyage of spiritual discovery, satire, and to some degree a manual for self-reliance. First published in 1854, Walden details Thoreau's experiences over the course of two years, two months, and two days in a cabin he built near Walden Pond amid woodland owned by his friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson, near Concord, Massachusetts.

In Volume Four, Dumas relates the 1819 murder of German dramatist August von Kotzebue by Karl Ludwig Sand, the campaign to destroy Father Urbain Grandier in 1634, who was successfully convicted of witchcraft and put to a brutal death, and the consequences of the amorous relationship between the prince of Brancaleone and Nisida.

"La folie et le désespoir ! Qu'on me donne cela comme levier, et je ferai bouger le monde". Verloc, espion infiltrant le milieu anarchiste, se voit sommé de commettre un attentat retentissant, sous peine de se voir retirer ses rétributions. Mais personne dans son entourage, à commencer par sa femme, ne sait rien de ses activités parallèles. Tout se gâte réellement lorsque Stevie, le frère attardé mental de la femme de M. Verloc, s'intéresse aux agissements de son beau-frère.

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 listeners 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.

The Bard was so incredibly prolific that even most Shakespeare scholars would welcome the occasional refresher course, and most of the rest of us haven't even got a clue as to what a petard actually is. Fear not, the best-selling authors of Homework for Grown-Ups are here to help.

In 1902, newly-married Jeannie Gunn (Mrs Aeneas Gunn) left the security and comfort of her Melbourne home to travel to the depths of the Northern Territory, Australia, where her husband had been appointed manager of 'The Elsey', a large cattle station. One of the very few white women in the area, she was at first resented by people on and around the station, till her warmth and spirit won their affection and respect. This is her moving and simple account of her life amidst the beauty and cruelty of the land.

William Shakespeare had nothing to do with the actor and moneylender William Shaksper from Stratford-upon-Avon. The man behind the nom de plume "William Shakespeare" was, in fact, a very well-educated aristocrat who often frequented the court of Elizabeth and whose real name was Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford. The dramas of Shakespeare were not written for the Globe Theatre but for the Queen's court.

THE TRUE STORY OF A CROSSDRESSING, TRANSATLANTIC ADVENTURER WHO ESCAPED FROM A SPANISH CONVENT IN 1599 AND LIVED AS A MAN—GAMBLING,FIGHTING DUELS, AND LEADING SOLDIERS INTO BATTLE Named a New York Times Book Review Notable Book One of the earliest known autobiographies by a woman, this is the...

¿Existe una alternativa a la globalización empresarial y al militarismo que asola nuestro planeta? Estas obras clásicas de Ernesto Che Guevara presentan una visión revolucionaria de un mundo diferente en el que la solidaridad humana y la comprensión sustituyen a la agresión y la...

“Startling and astringently poetic.” —The New York Times A literary discovery: an extraordinary account, in the tradition of The House on Mango Street and Angela’s Ashes, of a Colombian woman’s harrowing childhood This astonishing memoir was hailed as an instant classic when first...

In Let’s Go Exploring, Michael Hingston mines the strip and traces the story of Calvin’s reclusive creator to demonstrate how imagination―its possibilities, its opportunities, and ultimately its limitations―helped make Calvin and Hobbes North America’s last great comic strip.

The novelist who wrote THE GRAPES OF WRATH and the director who produced CRISIS AND LIGHTS OUT in Europe combined their superb talents to tell the story of the coming of modern medicine to the natives of Mexico. There have been several notable examples of this pen-camera method of narration, but...

Travel back in time to the boyhood of one of the most popular poets of the early 20th century. Author of "Little Orphan Annie", "The Old Swimmin' Hole", and hundreds more poems, "Bud" Riley spent his childhood in mid-nineteenth century Indiana, where stagecoaches were a common sight, rope swings were the only thrill rides, and telling spooky stories by firelight was the best entertainment of all.