Showing results by narrator "Charles Featherstone" in All Categories

Long before the term “science fiction” was coined in 1929, Edgar Allan Poe was writing tales that reached for the stars, probed the boundaries of life and death, and imagined strange future histories. Best known as the master of the macabre, Poe here turns his restless imagination to what...

Between every stimulus and every response, there is a space. Three to five seconds wide. Most people never feel it. They react before it opens, then construct an explanation afterwards for why the reaction was reasonable. The explanation is almost always wrong. You Are Not Your Reaction is about...

This complete edition spans 2,400 years (431 BCE–1944) in 40 hours, 155 speeches, and 52 speakers, including foundational addresses by Gandhi and Mao—voices that shaped modern Asia. Begin in 431 BCE with Demosthenes, whose structural genius remains the DNA of modern expression. Traverse Athens’ zenith via Pericles’ Funeral Oration, Alexander’s volatile proclamations, and Rome’s crisis in Cicero’s showdown with Cataline—featuring Caesar’s sole surviving senate address and Mark Antony’s incendiary eulogy.

The most popular and well-known of Allen's bestselling self-help books, As A Man Thinketh is a pocket companion for thoughtful people, about the power and right application of thought.

The late 19th Century was a time of liberation. After the collapse of empires, people of all creeds demanded their equality. We begin with two speeches that represent the old order, by Bismarck. Between the two speeches he went from being Prussia’s last Minister President to being the Germany’s first Chancellor. A statesman in the oldest mold, he argues for nationalist dominance against forces temporal and religious.

The Tàishàng Gǎnyìng Piān (太上感應篇) is the most influential morality text in Chinese history, a succinct layperson's guide to Daoist ethics. It gives a long series of life rules, for both action and thought, listing specific good and bad deeds and the consequences they invite, with...

It looks like a simple riddle book. A monk asks, "Has a dog Buddha‑nature?" The master replies, "Mu." Nothing more. But this single syllable—meaning literally "no" or "not"—has undone more clever minds than any philosophical argument. The Gateless Gate (Wúménguān) is a collection of 48...

"You can surpass God himself. He is beyond suffering evil; you are above it. Despise poverty; no man lives as poor as he was born: despise pain; either it will cease or you will: despise death; it either ends you or takes you elsewhere: despise fortune; I have given her no weapon that can reach...

Embark on a journey through 2,400 years of history with this definitive collection of 161 of the world’s greatest speeches. Presented chronologically, this master volume spans from the golden age of Athens in 431 BCE to the dawn of a new China in 1926, now complete with seminal speeches from India’s Mohandas Gandhi and China’s Mao Tse-Tung.

The tale of King Alfred, the Christian king who in 878AD battled a Viking invasion that had conquered the rest of England and burnt some cakes. He then became the last holdout of resistance against the invaders and forced the conversion of the Danish king Guthrum to Christianity after the battle of Ethandun.

When the alchemist Cornelius Agrippa begins work on a secret elixir, his young apprentice Winzy believes it can cure him of only one thing: his hopeless love for Bertha. In a moment of despair, he drinks it, certain he will wake indifferent to her at last. He does not. Instead, he wakes more...

A thousand miles beyond the nearest outpost, deep in the far north, an isolated prospector gets an unexpected visitor: a stranger named Thomas Stevens, looking for tobacco and a place by the fire. Before the night is out, Stevens has told him why he is really there, recounting how his dog and...

The true teachings of Jesus, stripped of mysticism, hierarchies and rules; the philosophy of humanity's greatest teacher as "a very strict, pure, and complete metaphysical and ethical doctrine." From Tolstoy's preface: An examination of Christian teaching not according to interpretations [by...

"The Elements of Style" is an American English writing style guide in numerous editions. The original was written by William Strunk Jr. in 1918, and it was published by Harcourt in 1920, comprising eight "elementary rules of usage," ten "elementary principles of composition," "a few matters of form," a list of 49 "words and expressions commonly misused," and a list of 57 "words often misspelled."

In 100 AD, Plutarch wrote what would become the first science fiction about the civilisation on the moon, appended to a rigorous scientific analysis of current knowledge about the moon. Orbital mechanics, optics, atmospheric refraction, lunar geography, planetary and stellar composition...

“If you have lost a son, you have only ceased to hold him; you have not lost him. He is beyond all harm… Nature lends us children not as possessions, but as gifts that must be returned.” The two most personal letters that Seneca wrote were to his mother, after he had been exiled to Corsica...

“The drug can make a man the exact opposite of what he is…” John Sturman has everything except the one thing that matters: the creative spark that would win the heart of Sylvia March, the woman who believes her soul can only mate with genius. But when his brother returns from India...

Written as a letter of a friend who’s not sure he’s on the right path De Tranquillitate Animi is one of the most intimate and practical works of Stoic philosophy. Serenus confesses to a restless indecision, a “sickness of the soul” that keeps him vacillating between public duty and...

The Classic of Changes (I Ching / Yìjīng / 易經) is one of the oldest and most enduring texts in the Chinese literary tradition, and one of the oldest books on record. The trigrams and method are classically attributed to the culture hero and legendary emperor Fu Xi (c. 2800 BCE), who also...

Can happiness be built, or does it only arrive by chance? Seneca takes up what he calls the question everyone rushes toward without stopping to think about: what is a happy life, and how is one actually achieved? Addressed to his elder brother Gallio, this is the Stoic legend at his most...