Showing results by author "ciesse" in All Categories

"The Story of the Exploration of Australia is one which we cannot willingly let die. There are many reasons for keeping alive the remembrance of such heroic deeds. It is due to the memory of those men who took their lives in their hands, and, in many cases, laid their bones in the desert; it is an act of gratitude on our part, who have entered on their labours; and it is a kind of information indispensable to every Australian who desires to know the history of his country." - Summary from the Author's Preface

A marvelous depiction of two sides of South Sea Islands' life through three separate tales. One, the experience of the incoming British keen to live free and exploit the innocent; the other the supernatural as perceived by Stevenson working in the lives of the natives. One tale carries the germ of the story of Madame Butterfly, since become a part of Western culture. Another is an extraordinary retelling of a German horror story transposed to a South Sea Island setting. The last is an effort of the pure Stevensonian imagination and there can be nothing better. - Summary by TONY ADDISON

"Letters from Hell" is a didactic Christian fantasy novel, with a faint resemblance to C.S. Lewis' "The Screwtape Letters." Otto, the narrator, has died in the prime of life. Through letters, he relates the torments and regrets that are a consequence of the self-centered and dissipated life he led in the world. He also describes the fates of other lost souls who inhabit Hell. (In this work, Hell is not the place of eternal torment, but the "holding area" until the final judgment.)There is also a preface written by George MacDonald. - Summary by TriciaG

The Douay–Rheims Bible is a translation of the Bible from the Latin Vulgate into English made by members of the Catholic seminary English College, Douai, France. It is the foundation on which nearly all English Catholic versions are still based.It was translated principally by Gregory Martin, an Oxford-trained scholar, working in the circle of English Catholic exiles on the Continent, under the sponsorship of William (later Cardinal) Allen. The New Testament appeared at Rheims in 1582; the Old Testament at Douai in 1609.The translation, although competent, exhibited a taste for Latinisms ...

The year is 1896. The United States is rocked by the election of an unlikely president. On election night, riots broke out in the streets of New York. The city was paralyzed with dread. Mobs organized under the lead of Anarchists and Socialists. Farther South, people celebrated. This was a President elected by the working class and he was a President who followed through with his commitment to fight for the rights of the people. This president would fight to end the enslavement of the people by money lenders, big bankers, corporations and government overtax. But can he be successful in a ...

Born in the Marshalsea Prison for Debtors, Amy—Little Dorrit—the daughter of the ruined, but self-respectful William Dorrit, has put her entire heart in caring for her dear father, until one day her humble path is crossed by Arthur Clennam. Their meeting proves providential not only for Amy's life, but for the whole Dorrit family, whose new rise will, in many ways, be also their fall. As in all his novels, in Little Dorrit Dickens ushers us into a fascinating and startlingly rich world of human characters and destinies, where virtue and nobility cross swords with vice and villainy, where ...

"Being some Account of Life and Work in the Province of Canterbury, South Island." A set fo 26 letters covering the Author's period of service in New Zealand as an Anglican priest. They cover his parochial work in Christchurch, on the West Coast, and Timaru. This is interspersed with commentary on Diocesan matters along with accounts of his journeys between New Zealand and England. - Summary by Beeswaxcandle

The Last of the Mohicans is an epic novel by James Fenimore Cooper, first published in January 1826. It was one of the most popular English-language novels of its time, and helped establish Cooper as one of the first world-famous American writers.The story takes place in 1757 during the French and Indian War, when France and Great Britain battled for control of the American and Canadian colonies. During this war, the French often allied themselves with Native American tribes in order to gain an advantage over the British, with unpredictable and often tragic results.(Wikipedia Excerpt)

Eugénie Grandet, first published in 1833, is one of Honoré de Balzac's finest novels, and one of the first works in what would become his large novel series titled La Comédie Humaine. Set in a provincial town in post-Revolutionary France, the story deals with money, avarice, love, and obsession. A wealthy old miser must manage the passion of his innocent daughter, who later has to navigate on her own the treacherous ways of a world in which money is "the only god." Balzac's meticulous use of psychological and physical detail influenced the development of 19th-century literary realism, in ...

This great and terrifying poem about the final weeks of a long war fought between the Greeks and the Trojans before the city of Troy (here rendered into prose by Samuel Butler, himself a major nineteenth century English novelist) is at once violently graphic, emotionally searing and strikingly contemporary in its understanding of the extremities to which rage may drive men, even as they understand full well that they are pursuing their own doom. Nearly three thousand years before the advent of cinema, the author(s) of The Iliad had already mastered many of the tropes the Hollywood blockbuster ...

Homer’s Iliad is the first great work of Western literature. Composed in twenty-four books of Greek hexameter poetry, it portrays the events of the last year of the Trojan War. Its translation into rhyming couplets by Alexander Pope is considered by some the greatest act of translation in English. Its power sweeps the reader along through an epic tale that begins with the wrath of Achilles and ends with the burial of Hector, breaker of horses. (Introduction by Steve Perkins)

The book is a selection of letters written by Tagore, in various places in Bengal, India.

A neat book on dream analysis by the founding father of psychoanalysis. This book is about the inner theater and the workings of the mind in the dreaming state. Covering lots of topics, the Austrian psychoanalyst's work on dreams is worth reading for anyone who would get up with a question mark face, trying to remember the dream they had just moments before and trying to understand what message their dream was conveying, if at all it was. (Summary by sidhu177)

The second part in the story of Anne Shirley, covering her years of teaching at Avonlea School, before she heads off to college.Other books in this series by this reader:Anne of Green GablesAnne of the IslandAnne's House of DreamsRainbow ValleyRilla of Ingleside

The Ramsey family, with house guests, visit the Isle of Skye at least twice. The plot is not at all the point though, as this is a book about how people think and feel and relate. There’s insight into the world of childhood thought and emotion, and a variety of views of adult cares and perceptions.I hope this doesn’t make it sound ‘difficult’, it doesn’t need to be – just let the sentences flow and make your own sense of the words. It’s perhaps as close as a novel can come to the highly individual experience of looking at a painting. … - Summary by Cori SamuelThis recording was...

This is a sequel to Kidnapped. Many thought Kidnapped ended quite abruptly. The reason is Stevenson planned on writing a sequel. Catriona takes up the story of David Balfour on the same day Kidnapped ends. He must now try to clear his name and the name of James Stewart of the Appin murder. This will not be easy because the Campbells want James Stewart to hang."Catriona: Being Memoirs of the Further Adventures of David Balfour at Home and Abroad, in which are set forth his misfortunes anent the Appin Murder, his troubles with Lord Advocate Grant: captivity on the Bass Rock, Journey into Holland...

More New Arabian Nights: The Dynamiter (1885) is a collection of linked short stories by Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny Vandegrift. Three gentlemen of little means and no occupation meet in the Bohemian Cigar Divan, a tobacco shop with couches to sit and smoke. They read of a reward offered for information as to the whereabouts of a man with big moustaches and a sealskin coat. They agree among themselves that they will separate and search for the man so as to claim the reward. The stories that follow concern their adventures. They meet again in the cigar divan in an epilogue to their travels...

Candide, ou l’Optimisme, (“Candide, or Optimism”) (1759) is a picaresque novel by the Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire. Voltaire never openly admitted to having written the controversial Candide; the work is signed with a pseudonym: “Monsieur le docteur Ralph”, literally “Mister Doctor Ralph.”Sardonic in outlook, it follows the naïve protagonist Candide from his first exposure to the precept that “all is for the best in this, the best of all possible worlds,” and on through a series of adventures that dramatically disprove that precept even as the protagonist clings to ...

The framing story concerns a man who dreams of speaking to Venus about love while she wears furs. The unnamed narrator tells his dreams to a friend, Severin, who tells him how to break him of his fascination with cruel women by reading a manuscript, Memoirs of a Supersensual Man.This manuscript tells of a man, Severin von Kusiemski, so infatuated with a woman, Wanda von Dunajew, that he requests to be treated as her slave, and encourages her to treat him in progressively more degrading ways. At first Wanda does not understand or relate to the request, but after humouring Severin a bit she ...

The novel is a fictionalized account of one man's experiences of the year 1665, in which the Great Plague struck the city of London. The book is told roughly chronologically, though without sections or chapter headings.