Showing results for "Art" in Astronomy & Space Science

This fast-paced, swashbuckling, romantic comedy is loosely based on characters from the 1838 play “Ruy Blas” by Victor Hugo. Dumnois and D’Ennery’s script foregoes both historical accuracy and adherence to the more gloomy tone of Hugo’s original. Instead, the dramatists choose to tell the story of Don Caesar, a dashing, charismatic officer in the service of King Charles II of Spain. Don Caesar is devoted to wine, women, and song. He is particularly smitten with the beautiful gypsy, Maritana. Despite the carefree and somewhat rakish impression he initially makes, Don Caesar’s ...

The Natural History of Pliny the Elder is one of the largest single works to have survived from the Roman Empire. The full work consists of 37 books, covering more than 20.000 topics ranging from astronomy and mathematics to botany and precious stones. The book became a model for later encyclopaedias and gives a fascinating overview of the state of scientific knowledge almost 2000 years ago. This version of the Natural History (or, the "Pliny") has been adapted for a younger audience. This first volume contains Book I (Dedication) and Book II (An Account of the World and the Elements) out of a...

Frances Hodgson Burnett was born and grew up in Manchester, England, and emigrated to the United States with her family at the age of 16. For her first novels, written in Knoxville, Tennessee and published in New York, she drew upon her knowledge of life and speech of the Lancashire working classes. Set in a Lancashire mining town, That Lass o' Lowries is a gritty, and at times brutal, tale of romance across the classes, which stands in stark contrast to her later work. - Summary by Phil Benson

Four selected chapters from The Measure Of A Man; A Tale of the Big Woods, by Norman Duncan. What could be more Christmasy than: Babies, especially a homeless one; a woman who loves; a man who protects; a cold night; glittering stars; poor working-men witnesses; gifts. ( Title page and david wales)

Mowatt wrote The Fortune Hunter to be submitted to a contest held by the New World newspaper. (The novel won the $100 prize.) Contest rules dictated that the title of the work, that the setting had to be New York, and that the text had to be completed within six months. So, recycling a few characters from short stories written under the pen name “Helen Berkeley,” Mowatt quickly created a tale that started with two fashionable fellows in search of wealthy wives -- Brainard and Ellery. They, in turn, are pursued by the inexorable debt collector, Mr. Badger. Then the reader is introduced to ...

Another Pinero play from the early 1900s. With a social message about the effects of stardom on the star as well as those that love them. "I’m afraid there’s one thing finer than winning the woman you love and, when you’ve won her, being prepared to go through fire and water for her." "What’s that?" "Having the courage to give her up" - Summary by ToddHW Cast list: Viscount Farncombe: Tomas Peter Colonel the Hon. Arthur Stidulph: alanmapstone Baron von Rettenmayer: Nemo Captain Nicholas Jeyes: Campbell Schelp Lionel Roper: Hamlet Sam de Castro: Aaron White Herbert Fulkerson: Frédéric...

This is the epic of Finland. It is the combined folk tales of the Finnish nation starting with the birth of the world from the egg of a seabird and continuing to the birth of the Kaleva District, the lands of Finland. (Summary by Squid B. Varilekova)

Seventeen short nonfiction works in the public domain, independently chosen by the readers. Topics include science and natural history--the donkey, forestry, grape vines, astronomy, historian Agnes Mary Clerke, and Greek botanist Theophrastus ; philosophy-- Nicholas of Cusa and Emmanuel Kant; Sommerset Maugham's reminiscences of Spain; Joseph Conrad's sea stories; an encounter with a long-ago companion who has contracted leprosy (Joe of Lahaina); working in the dead-letter office; a dinner the painter Benjamin Hayden hosted for Wordsworth, Keats, and Charles Lamb; a portrait of Margaret Fuller...

"Editors of some of the most sensational newspapers say they make a newspaper to suit the public... it must startle with incident and surprise, found or invented." Charles Dudley Warner's lament, from Literature and the Stage, written in 1889, is testimony to the constancy of human preoccupations. War, religious persecution, foreign travel and exploration, dreams and nightmares, even chicken eggs and mice are among the 15 reader chosen topics in volume 107. The volume also contains a timely injunction to Do It Now and a formula to find the day of the week for any given date. Summary by Sue ...

Twenty short nonfiction works in the public domain, independently chosen by the readers. Topics include History--Jocelyn de Brakelond's 13th century chronicle of the Bury St. Edmund monastery, Lorenzo de Medici's Florence, the voyage of the Mayflower, and Mark Twain's essay Stirring Times in Austria; Philosophy--Kierkegaard and Leibniz; Speeches, Sermons, and Diary Entries from Abraham Lincoln, Robert Ingersoll, and Queen Victoria; Literature--a tribute to George Meredith and a critique of Mencken's The American Language; and Nature and the Natural World--George Mallory outlining the route to ...

Stick and Rudder is the first exact analysis of the art of flying ever attempted. It has been continuously in print for 33 years. It shows precisely what the pilot does when he flies, just how he does it, and why. Because the basics are largely unchanging, the book therefore is applicable to large airplanes and small, old airplanes and new, and is of interest not only to the learner but also to the accomplished pilot and to the instructor himself.

This is the start of a series of four books following three friends through their career in the navy. Terence, Jack and Alick first meet at a boarding school, and become fast friends, not least because together they stand up to the school bullies. Later, they join the navy together, and though they join different ships and are mostly apart, adventures involving sea battles, storms, and even pirates, have a way of allowing their paths to cross in order to look after one another as they did in school. - Summary by Carolin

We had hoped that our drama's scene might lie on a pirate ship at sea. We had wished for a swaying mast, full-set with canvas—a typhoon to smother our stage in wind. We had hoped to walk a victim off the plank, with the sea roaring in the wings. But our plot deals stubbornly with us. Alas, our pirates grow old and stiff. They have retired, as we say, from active practice and live in easy luxury on shore. Yet we shall see that their villainy still thrives. - Summary from Prologue By the way, Section 0 has a buncha interesting explanations by the author on why and how the play came about and ...

The Plain Writing Act of 2010 (Act) is intended to make it easy for the public to understand government documents. The SEC, like other federal agencies, must write documents in plain writing, defined under the Act as writing that is "clear, concise, well-organized, and follows other best practices appropriate to the subject or field or audience." Starting in October 2011, the Act requires us to write new and substantially revised documents in plain language using the Federal Plain Language Guidelines.As a disclosure agency, the SEC is committed to communicating with investors in easily ...

Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt was a Prussian geographer, naturalist, explorer, and influential proponent of romantic philosophy. Many consider him to be the last of the great polymaths. After his death in 1859, the scientific world began to divide into separate disciplines, each with its own knowledgeable but narrowly defined experts. Humboldt’s mind encompassed all that was then known of nature in one great whole. He could well be considered the father of modern ecology and earth studies. His great scientific and literary achievement was the multi-volume Cosmos, twenty ...

LibriVox volunteers bring you 17 recordings of Christmas Bells by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. This was the Fortnightly Poetry project for December 18, 2022. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (27 February 1807 - 24 March 1882) was an American poet and teacher best known for the poems "Paul Revere's Ride", "The Song Of Hiawatha" and "Evangeline." He was one of the so-called fireside poets from New England. This poem was written on Christmas Day 1863 and deals with the stark contrast between the Christmas message of peace on earth and the brutal and devastating American Civil War which was at its height...

William Caruthers was a retired newspaperman who spent 25 years listening to stories told by the inhabitants of Death Valley. This 1951 book collects those stories; the printed version has many interesting pictures. ''Of the actors who made the history of the period, few remain. It was the writer’s good fortune that many of these men were his friends. It is the romance, the comedy, the often stark tragedy these men left along the trail which you will find in the pages that follow.'' (Preface and David Wales)

Moon’s Iᴍᴘᴇʀɪᴀʟɪsᴍ ᴀɴᴅ Wᴏʀʟᴅ Pᴏʟɪᴛɪᴄs is perhaps the best-known work of the Columbia University professor and political scientist; It was published in 1926 and did not go out-of-print until at least 1940. “What convenient volume,” he asks, exists as a “general account of the greater imperialism of our own times?” A question which was suitably answered by the publication of this sweeping survey of the field. Written in what would prove to be the gathering twilight of European imperialism, and with the inclination towards reflection that only the ...

This memoirs chronicles Madame Vigée Lebrun's childhood and the early discovery of her talent, the fortuitous break that introduced her to the world of "portraiture of the stars," her expeditious flight from France at the height of the French Revolution, her continued success as a portraitist for the various royal houses of Europe, and her ultimate return to France. In this memoirs, Lebrun illustrates how she overcame the prejudices of the art world that prescribed how women painters could practice their art form, as well as the subject matter they could paint. (James K. White)

The Light Princess is a fairytale written by George MacDonald about a young princess who is cursed by her wicked aunt to be without gravity. The only time the princess is not light and able to be normal is when she is in water. She soon grows an attachment to the lake near her palace and spends as much time in this lake as she can. A young prince who set out to find a princess to marry stumbled upon this young princess' palace. She was nothing like any princess that he had met before, and they soon spent nights swimming together in her lake. But when the lake starts to dry up, due to the same ...