Showing results by narrator "John Burlinson" in All Categories

Moby Dick, which has been considered the great American novel, was first published in 1851. For material, Melville drew on his experience on whaling ships between 1841 and 1844, the sinking of the whaling vessel Essex in 1820, and extensive perusal of literature on whaling and many other subjects.

R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) is a science-fiction drama that was first presented in Czech in 1921. It introduced the term "robot", which is derived from a Czech word meaning "worker," to international vocabulary. The action opens in a factory that has successfully produced thousands of robots, who are essentially mindless drones. An idealistic humanitarian activist launches a plan to imbue some of the robots with human traits. The robots which have been humanized then assume leadership over the other robots and seek to organize them in a revolution to take over the world.

Queen Marguerite de Navarre was one of the most powerful women of her age. Her masterpiece, The Heptameron, is a collection of some 72 stories told by five gentlemen and five ladies who find themselves stranded in an abbey. Proposed as an edifying way of passing the time while a bridge is being repaired, the tale-telling - as well as the conversations that follow each story - quickly becomes a battle of wits between the sexes, with tales concerning illicit lovers, romantic conquests, lecherous monks, manly honor, and women's virtue.

Harmonium was American poet Wallace Stevens's first book, published when he was 44 years old. It represents his complete poetic output up to that point in his life. It is now considered a masterpiece, one of the great contributions to literary Modernism. It is a mixture of pure, rational, philosophical thought, and imaginary nonsense-verse. It is striking in its diversity and includes some of Stevens' best known and most-loved poems.

Crazy Horse was as much feared by tribal foes as he was honored by allies. His war record was unmatched by any of his peers, and his rout of Custer at the Little Bighorn reverberates through history. Yet so much about him is unknown or steeped in legend. Crazy Horse: A Lakota Life corrects older, idealized accounts - and draws on a greater variety of sources than other recent biographies - to expose the real Crazy Horse: not the brash Sioux warrior we have come to expect but a modest, reflective man whose courage was anchored in Lakota piety.

In Dying to Learn, Michael Hunzeker develops a novel theory to explain how wartime militaries learn. He focuses on the Western Front, which witnessed three great-power armies struggle to cope with deadlock throughout the First World War. Through careful study of the British, French, and German experiences, the book provides a model that shows how a resolute focus on analysis, command, and training can help prepare modern militaries for adapting amidst high-intensity warfare in an age of revolutionary technological change.

Any of us could receive a diagnosis - a curable sickness, chronic disease, serious condition, or a terminal illness. Today, dying is usually an elongated process. So, how can we live well while suffering, and avoid being bullied by the obsessive inner voices of anxiety that leave us disconnected from the very life we hope to save? Instead, we can learn to embrace mystery, to understand that all of life’s suffering can be transformative, leaving behind a legacy of pure, powerful, and eternal love.

 A Gallery of Children is A. A. Milne's first published book of prose. It was released after his poetry collection, When We Were Very Young, and prior to Winnie the Pooh. With his characteristic blend of nonsense, wit and warmth, Milne offers 12 short stories of childish endeavour and mishap. They will delight and amuse listeners both young and not-so-young. 

As with many of Ostrovsky's plays, the target of the author's satire is the merchant class and the inevitable corruption associated with mercantile endeavors. In Ostrovsky's bitterly realistic world, all personal encounters end in transactions, some humourous and some tragic.

Learn the secrets of the pharaohs and Ancient Egypt! No matter how much you know about modern culture, there's no escaping the fact that ancient myths still impact our world today. Have you ever wondered why ancient Egyptian mythology has stood the test of time? Ancient Egyptian Mythology can give you a better understanding of Egypt and its culture.

Euripides (c. 480-406 B.C.E.) is the author of eighteen extant plays and many more only surviving in fragments. He is the youngest of the three great Athenian tragedians with Aeschylus and Sophocles. Hippolytus, bastard son of Theseus and the Amazon Hippolyta, has sworn chaste allegiance to the goddess Artemis, thus severely offending the goddess Aphrodite by failing to revere her. Aphrodite swears revenge and promises that he will die before the day is done, taking with him Queen Phaedra, wife of Theseus.

Endymion is the largest work by John Keats and was composed between April and November 1817. It was published in April 1818, and the critical reception was almost universally hostile. The plot is built around the ancient Greek legend of Endymion, the young shepherd whose beauty was such that the goddess of the Moon entreated Zeus to cast him into a permanent sleep so that she could gaze on him without interruption. Keats expands this story into an epistle on beauty and love, and weaves into it elements from several other Greek legends.

Stephen Leacock (1869 - 1944) is considered by many to be the Canadian counterpart to the better known American humorists Mark Twain and S.J. Perelman. In the early 20th century he was one of the most widely read authors in the English speaking world. Jack Benny and Groucho Marx considered Leacock as one of the funniest writers they had ever read. The following sketches have been adapted from pieces in the miscellanies Moonbeams from the Larger Lunacy and Further Foolishness, in which Leacock satirizes many of the social institutions of his time.    

A wife abandoned to the savage Sioux...a bold young beauty fights against two worlds of powerful men in search of love and fulfillment.

After the death of their father, Oedipus, Antigone and Ismene return to Thebes. The ruler is their unyielding uncle by marriage, Creon, who assumed command after the death of the sons of Oedipus, Eteocles, and Polynices in a fratricidal struggle to take control of the city. Creon has the body of one brother buried with full civic honors but forbids the burial of the body of the other, whom he regards as a traitor. Antigone's challenge to Creon's decree, which she considers unjust, results in the extinction of the family line of Oedipus.

In compiling this collection of humorous short stories by both well known and more obscure authors, Alexander Jessup applied a broad interpretation of humour; the stories span the period between 1839 and the beginning of the first World War. 

This is final installment in Edith Nesbit's classic trilogy of time-traveling adventures by four enterprising children.

The belief that Native Americans might belong to the fabled “lost tribes of Israel” - Israelites driven from their homeland around 740 BCE - took hold among Anglo-Americans and Indigenous peoples in the United States during its first half century. In Lost Tribes Found, Matthew W. Dougherty explores what this idea can tell us about religious nationalism in early America.

This translation, by an unknown hand, of D'Aurevilly's salacious miscellany, which consists of six novellas, was published in 1900 under the title Weird Women and is in the public domain. When the collection was first published in France in 1874, it caused up an uproar; it was declared a danger to public morality and the prosecutor issued orders for its seizure on the grounds of blasphemy and obscenity.

A central theme of Ostrovsky's plays is the inevitable struggle between the demands of personal morality and and those dictated by social propriety. In this grim drama, the dramatist sketches a tragic incident arising from the conflict of two social classes: the petty tradesmen and the nobility. From the coarse environment of the first emerge honest, upright natures like Krasnov, the earnest shokeeper; from the superficial, dawdling culture of the second come weak-willed triflers like the ineffectual landowner, Babayev.