02/06/2024
Rover Boys on the Ocean
The hearty, all-American Rover Boys sail by yacht to Africa in search of their kidnapped father. (Summary by BellonaTimes) [chương_files]
02/06/2024
Utopia of Usurers
“Now I have said again and again (and I shall continue to say again and again on all the most inappropriate occasions) that we must hit Capitalism, and hit it hard, for the plain and definite reason that it is growing stronger. Most of the excuses which serve the capitalists as masks are, of course, the excuses of hypocrites. They lie when they claim philanthropy; they no more feel any particular love of men than Albu felt an affection for Chinamen. They lie when they say they have reached their position through their own organising ability. They generally have to pay men to organise the mine, exactly as they pay men to go down it. They often lie about the present wealth, as they generally lie about their past poverty. But when they say that they are going in for a “constructive social policy,” they do not lie. They really are going in for a constructive social policy. And we must go in for an equally destructive social policy; and destroy, while it is still half-constructed, the accursed thing which they construct.” (Summary from Gilbert Keith Chesterton, d. 1936) [chương_files]
02/06/2024
Quintessence of Ibsenism (Version 2)
This is an essay providing an extended analysis of the works of Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen and of Ibsen’s critical reception in England. Shaw uses this “exposition of Ibsenism” to illustrate the imperfections of British society, using the idea of an imaginary “community of a thousand persons,” divided into three categories: Philistines, Idealists, and the lone Realist. The main discussion revolves around Ibsen’s recurring topic of the strong character holding out against social hypocrisy, while stating in his essay’s final sentence that the quintessence of Ibsenism is that “there is no formula.” ( Michele Eaton) [chương_files]
02/06/2024
Broken Vase and Other Stories
The Broken Vase and Other Stories; for Children and Youth, Compiled by a Teacher FITCHBURG: PUBLISHED BY S. & C. SHEPLEY. 1847. WM. J. MERRIAM, PRINTER, FITCHBURG. (Summary from the Frontspiece) [chương_files]
02/06/2024
United Kingdom House of Commons Speeches Collection, volume 2
This is the second LibriVox collection of speeches given in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom. The collection comprises recordings of 14 historic speeches given to the UK House of Commons between 1766 and 1956. Readings are of speeches origninally given by parliamentarians including William Pitt the Elder, John Stuart Mill, Dadabhai Naoroji, Lady Astor, Stanley Baldwin, Clement Attlee, Aneurin Bevan and Tony Benn. (Summary by Carl Manchester) [chương_files]
02/06/2024
Boy Scout And Other Stories For Boys
RICHARD HARDING DAVIS, as a friend and fellow author has written of him, was “youth incarnate,” and there is probably nothing that he wrote of which a boy would not some day come to feel the appeal. But there are certain of his stories that go with especial directness to a boy’s heart and sympathies and make for him quite unforgettable literature. A few of these were made some years ago into a volume, “Stories for Boys,” and found a large and enthusiastic special public in addition to Davis’s general readers; and the present collection from stories more recently published is issued with the same motive. This book takes its title from “The Boy Scout,” the first of its tales; and it includes “The Boy Who Cried Wolf,” “Blood Will Tell,” the immortal “Gallegher,” and “The Bar Sinister,” Davis’s famous dog story. It is a fresh volume added to what Augustus Thomas calls “safe stuff to give to a young fellow who likes to take off his hat and dilate his nostrils and feel the wind in his face.” (Summary by Publisher’s Note in book) [chương_files]
02/06/2024
Wonderful Wizard of Oz (version 4)
When Dorothy is swept away from her home in Kansas by a cyclone, she finds herself in a mysterious land inhabited by equally mysterious people. She is told that only Oz, the great Wizard, can help her get back home, so Dorothy sets off along the Yellow Brick Road to the Emerald City. Along the way she meets characters such as the brainless Scarecrow, the heartless Tin Woodman, and the Cowardly Lion. (Summary by Rachel) [chương_files]
02/06/2024
Superstition of Divorce
This short book was written in 1920, and in it Chesterton, with his usual wit and incisive logic, presents a series of articles defending marriage and indicating the weaknesses in divorce. He did this 16 years before the first Christian denomination in the world allowed its members to divorce. Till then Christendom was unanimous in standing against it. Chesterton saw clearly the trends of this time, and delivered this defense. (Summary by Ray Clare) [chương_files]
02/06/2024
Selected Essays
Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912) was, according to Emma Goldman, “the most gifted and brilliant anarchist woman America ever produced.” Today she is not widely known as a consequence of her short life. De Cleyre was especially influenced by Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft and Clarence Darrow. After the hanging of the Haymarket protesters in 1887, she became an anarchist. “Till then I believed in the essential justice of the American law of trial by jury,” she wrote in an autobiographical essay, “After that I never could.” She was known as an excellent speaker and writer – in the opinion of biographer Paul Avrich, she was “a greater literary talent than any other American anarchist” – and as a tireless advocate for the anarchist cause, whose “religious zeal,” according to Goldman, “stamped everything she did.” (Wikipedia) [chương_files]
02/06/2024
New Swiss Family Robinson
A parody of its famous predecessor, this short piece was written by Owen Wister for the Harvard Lampoon (Summary by David Wales) [chương_files]