Showing results by narrator "Robin Field" in All Categories

The first volume of Will Durant's Pulitzer Prize-winning series, Our Oriental Heritage: The Story of Civilization, Volume I chronicles the early history of Egypt, the Middle East, and Asia.

A mere 18 years of age when his uncle, Julius Caesar, is murdered, Octavius Caesar prematurely inherits rule of the Roman Republic. Surrounded by men who are jockeying for power—Cicero, Brutus, Cassius, and Mark Antony—young Octavius must work against the powerful Roman political machinations to claim his destiny as first Roman emperor. Sprung from meticulous research and the pen of a true poet, Augustus tells the story of one man’s dream to liberate a corrupt Rome.

Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason; Being an Investigation of True and Fabulous Theology, published in three parts from 1794, was a best seller in America, where it caused a short-lived deistic revival. Promoting a creator-God while advocating reason in the place of revelation, Paine’s controversial pamphlet caused his native British audience, fearing the results of the French Revolution, to receive it with more hostility than their American counterparts.

One of the great innovators in American letters, Walt Whitman created a daringly new kind of poetry that became a major force in world literature. Leaves of Grass is his masterpiece, written in a pure, uninhibited style, combining sensual and mystical sensibilities. Its bold, joyous voice, its expansive optimism, and its transcendental vision made it uniquely American.

Mark Twain spills his wit and whimsical sense of humor into his novel The Diaries of Adam and Eve. The story tells of the events that took place in the Garden of Eden prior to the entrance of the deceitful serpent. Adam and Eve are not exactly getting along. Through the struggles listed in their diaries, one can safely assume that these two very different human beings are each other’s greatest source of frustration.

In the early spring of 1845, Henry David Thoreau built and lived in a cabin near the shore of Walden Pond in rural Massachusetts. For the next two years, he enacted his own Transcendentalist experiment, living a simple life based on self-reliance, individualism, and harmony with nature. The journal he kept at that time evolved into his masterwork, Walden, an eloquent expression of a uniquely American philosophy.

The Origin of Species sold out on the first day of its publication in 1859. It is the major book of the 19th century and one of the most readable and accessible of the great revolutionary works of the scientific imagination. Though, in fact, little read, most people know what it says—at least they think they do. The Origin of Species was the first mature and persuasive work to explain how species change through the process of natural selection. Upon its publication, the book began to transform attitudes about society and religion.

In his groundbreaking and controversial book The DIM Hypothesis, Dr. Leonard Peikoff casts a penetrating new light on the process of human thought and thereby on Western culture and history. In this far-reaching study, Peikoff identifies the three methods people use to integrate concrete data into a whole, as when connecting diverse experiments by a scientific theory, separate laws into a constitution, or single events into a story.

Brought to you by Penguin. By the author of Stoner, the surprise international bestseller After the brutal murder of his great-uncle, Julius Caesar, Octavian, a shy and scholarly youth of nineteen, suddenly finds himself heir to the vast power of Rome. He is destined, despite vicious power...

Published together for the first time are three of Ayn Rand's compelling stage plays. The courtroom drama Night of January 16th, a 1935 Broadway success famous for leaving the verdict to the audience, is presented here in its definitive, final revised text - a superb dramatization of Rand's vision of human strengths and weaknesses.

Sketches New and Old is a compilation of fictional stories written by Mark Twain. Among them is "A Ghost Story". In each story, one can catch a great sense of Twain's humor and creativity. These classic sketches from Twain are no longer than 10 minutes, but all show his quick witted humor in response to the events of the day.

The Civil War is Julius Caesar’s personal account of his war with Pompey the Great - the war that destroyed the five-hundred-year-old Roman Republic. Caesar the victor became Caesar the dictator. In three short books, Caesar describes how, in order to defend his honor and the freedom of both himself and the Roman people, he marched on Rome and defeated the forces of Pompey and the Senate in Italy, Spain, and Greece.

Among the autobiographies of great military figures, Ulysses S. Grant’s is certainly one of the finest, and it is arguably the most notable literary achievement of any American president: a lucid, compelling, and brutally honest chronicle of triumph and failure. From his frontier boyhood, to his heroics in battle, to the grinding poverty from which the Civil War ironically rescued him, these memoirs are a mesmerizing, deeply moving account of a brilliant man told with great courage.

The classic story, told in the first person by Jim Hawkins, whose mother kept the Admiral Benbow Inn, and who shared in the adventures from start to finish. An old sea dog comes to this peaceful inn one day, apparently intending to finish his life there. He hires Jim to keep a watch out for other sailors, but despite all precautions, he is hunted out and served with the black spot that means death. Jim and his mother barely escape death when Blind Pew, Black Dog, and other pirates descend on the inn in search of the sea dog’s papers. Jim snatches up a packet of papers to square the sailor’s debt, when they were forced to retreat from the inn.

These stories display Twain's place in American letters as a master writer in the authentic native idiom. He was exuberant and irreverent, but underlying the humor was a vigorous desire for social justice and a pervasive equalitarian attitude.

This 1896 novel follows the Mark Twain series of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), and Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894). Tom finds himself on another exciting adventure as he serves as detective for a mysterious murder in the banks of the Mississippi. Listen to this suspenseful, yet whimsical story of Tom and Huckleberry and be fascinated once again with Mark Twain’s imagination.

An American editor arrives in Venice on a quest to acquire some unpublished letters written by his favorite Romantic poet, Jeffrey Aspern. He tracks down the mistress to whom the letters were addressed, a now elderly Miss Bordereau, and presents himself as a prospective lodger. In hopes of gaining access to the secret papers, he begins courting Miss Bordereau's plain spinster niece, Miss Tina.

In A Tramp Abroad, the ever adventurous Mark Twain brings his wit and creativity to his travels in Europe. Twain takes fictional liberty, turning his travels into an entertaining journey as he visits many of the countries of Central Europe. Listeners are sure to be delighted and humored as they enjoy what is considered by many to be one of Mark Twain's best works.

A murdered servant girl is found in the palace of King Herod Antipas. The prefect, Pontius Pilate, is in attendance. The populace has already been buzzing over the brutal death of one of their prophets, John, known familiarly as the Baptizer, and scandal is in the air.

Born in 1800, William Holmes McGuffey had a remarkable ability to memorize, and could commit to mind entire books of the Bible. After becoming a teacher at the age of 14, classroom size was just one of several challenges faced by McGuffey. In many one-teacher schools, students - ages varied from six to twenty-one, and few textbooks existed. In 1835, a publishing firm asked McGuffey to create a series of graded Readers for primary level students. The series consisted of stories, poems, essays and speeches and it is estimated that at least 120 million copies of McGuffey's Readers were sold between 1836 and 1960.