Classical Memoirs

Experience Alexandra David-Neel's captivating and inspirational journey to become the first Western woman to reach the Tibetan holy city of Lhasa and be received by the Dalai Lama. Enduring backbreaking travel, threatening militaries, disease, and countless other dangers, David-Neel's journey is an epic demonstration of perseverance and courage.

In her moving account of how she came to understand the world around her despite being blind and deaf since childhood, Helen Keller confirms that no physical obstacle can hinder the achievements of the human mind. Included with Keller's poignant autobiography are her letters, spanning 15 years, which reveal her remarkable intellectual growth and empathic soul. Commentary by her teacher, Anne Sullivan, and the book's original editor is also featured, providing illuminating insight from two of Keller's closest companions.

Edgar Huntly, or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker (1787) by Charles Brockden Brown is considered one of the first American Gothic novels. The castles and crypts of the European Gothic literary tradition is replaced by the mountains and valleys of the hostile American wilderness, including the tense relationship between Americans and Indians on the frontier. In some ways a detective story, the novel is complex in its examination of gender relations, religious and ethnic clashes, and the complicated psychology of its titular character.

A Son of the Middle Border is an epic story of the quest for new frontiers during the last half of the nineteenth century, and of the gradual, heartbreaking failure of America's pioneer ideal.

In Let’s Go Exploring, Michael Hingston mines the strip and traces the story of Calvin’s reclusive creator to demonstrate how imagination―its possibilities, its opportunities, and ultimately its limitations―helped make Calvin and Hobbes North America’s last great comic strip.

The fourth volume of memoirs from the author who inspired the BBC series All Creatures Great and Small. Finally home from London after his wartime service in the RAF, James Herriot is settling back into life as a country vet. While the world has changed after the war, the blunt Yorkshire clients and menagerie of beasts with weird and wonderful ailments remain the same.

Three years after her journey through Vystrana, the illustrious (and occasionally scandalous) Lady Trent defies convention to embark on an expedition to the war-torn continent of Eriga, home of the legendary swamp-wyrm. Accompanied by an old associate and a runaway heiress, Isabella must brave oppressive heat and other hazards in order to satisfy her fascination with all things draconian. Her courage, resourcefulness, and scientific curiosity will be tested as never before.

Corazón, Diario de un Niño, es el clásico universal de la literatura de Edmondo de Amicis. Enrique, chico italiano del siglo XIX, narra a través de su diario escolar todo lo importante que pasa en la escuela con sus compañeros de clase, sus maestros y su familia. Lecciones de amor, valor, honestidad e integridad. Un audiolibro que no puede faltar en la vida de los niños y jóvenes del presente, pues los valores son perennes y universales.

Mary Tyler Moore made her name as Dick Van Dyke's wife on the eponymous show; she was a cute, unassuming housewife that audiences loved. But when screenwriters James Brooks and Allan Burnes dreamed up an edgy show about a divorced woman with a career, network executives replied: "Americans won't watch television about New York City, divorcées, men with mustaches, or Jews." But Moore and her team were committed, and when the show finally aired, in spite of tepid reviews, fans loved it.

Dr. Johnson may have been correct in saying that “Rousseau was a very bad man,” but none can argue that his ideas are among the most influential in all of world history. It was Rousseau, the father of the romantic movement, who was responsible for introducing at least two modern day thoughts that pervade academia. The Confessions is Rousseau’s landmark autobiography. Both brilliant and flawed, it is nonetheless beautifully written and remains one of the most moving human documents in all of literature.

In clear and entertaining prose, Plotkin explores a thousand years of music, introduces listeners to more than 100 great works, and profiles in depth many significant composers, including Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Berlioz, Tchaikovsky, Dvoxak, and Mahler. He describes all the musical instruments in the orchestra, defines major musical terms, and makes music theory comprehensible for the uninitiated. There are also conversations with important musicians who offer fascinating insights about their art.

When reading and writing are the most important things in the world. Jevick, the pepper merchant's son, has been raised on stories of Olondria, a distant land where books are as common as they are rare in his home - but which his mother calls the Ghost Country. When his father dies and Jevick takes his place on the yearly selling trip to Olondria, Jevick's life is as close to perfect as he can imagine. Just as he revels in Olondria's Rabelaisian Feast of Birds, he is pulled drastically off course and becomes haunted by the ghost of an illiterate young girl.

John Amos Comenius, a 17th-century theologian and reformer, had so great an influence on Western schooling that he has been called the father of modern education. To this day he remains one of the most influential and fascinating thinkers in the history of education. In this concise introduction to the work of Comenius, Dr. David Smith sketches some of Comenius's central ideas, pointing to several important themes that summarize Comenius's tireless work for educational reform. Listeners will discover that amongst the literally hundreds of works Comenius wrote in Czech and Latin, many of which are lost to us today, he created one of the world's most successful children's books; suggested that learning should resemble gardening; and proposed that joy, piety, and harmony are central to the education of children.

This audiobook chronicles the entire history of this legendary Christian metal band, covering just about everything there is to know about Stryper - not just the fluff. Such questions as, "How did Stryper evolve?" and "What really happened during the Against the Law time period?" are all answered here. The answers, derived from countless hours of interviews, come directly from the band members themselves and many others.

Limited Edition of One is unlike any other music book you will ever have hear. Part the long-awaited memoir of Steven Wilson, whose celebrated band Porcupine Tree began as teenage fiction before unintentionally evolving into a reality that encompassed Grammy-nominated records and sold-out shows around the world, before he set out for an even more successful solo career.

These have been called the most famous and beloved letters of the past century. Rainer Maria Rilke himself said that much of his creative expression went into his correspondence, and here he touches upon a wide range of subjects that will interest writers, artists, and thinkers. This luminous translation of Rainer Maria Rilke's classic offers brilliant inspiration to all people who seek to know and express their inner truth.

The remarkably honest and brilliantly entertaining memoir of one of our finest acting Dames whose long and celebrated career includes her much-loved performance as Livia in I, Claudius and who was married for 20 years to the hell-raising Hollywood star Peter O'Toole. Siân Phillips has a long and celebrated career on both stage and screen. For the first time, her two best-selling volumes of memoir Private Faces and Public Places will be available as a single volume with a brand new foreword by the author.

At age seventeen, Toni Bentley was chosen by Balanchine, then in his final years, to join the New York City Ballet. From both backstage and onstage, she carries us through the serendipitous history and physical intricacies and demands of Serenade: its dazzling opening, with seventeen women in a double-diamond pattern; its radical, even jazzy, use of the highly refined language that is ballet; its place in the choreographer’s own dramatic story of his immigration to the United States from Soviet Russia.

M. William Phelps, explores what goes on behind-the-scenes in this unique serial killer series as he investigates and films an episode. He takes readers and fans of the series deep into his personal life and a dark connection to the Eastbound Strangler case, how he feels about several suspects named by law enforcement, and shares an exclusive interview he conducted with a woman who claims she was with the murderer and his final victim, Kim Raffo, on the night before Kim's body was found. What kind of serial killer removes his victims' shoes and socks and lays them out in a row, facing east?

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839-1908) was the greatest writer ever to come from Brazil and one of the masters of nineteenth-century fiction. Susan Sontag calls him "the greatest writer ever produced in Latin America", surpassing even Borges. Harold Bloom says that Machado is "the supreme black literary artist to date". And Allen Ginsburg calls him "another Kafka". And The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas is his masterpiece, a dazzling, tragic, and profound novel that belongs next to the greatest works of his contemporaries Melville and Dostoevsky.