Showing titles in Biological Sciences

Peter Randolph was born a slave in 1825 (?), was freed before the American Civil War, and became a clergyman in the Baptist tradition, dying in 1897. This is his 1893 autobiography. The latter third of the book is a slightly edited re-publication of a pamphlet he published in 1855 (so before the Civil War) entitled “Sketches Of Slave Life." This recording omits chapter fourteen of "From Slave Cabin To Pulpit" because it is only a several-pages-long list of friends of the author with no narrative.

Isabella Bird began travelling while in her early twenties to help alleviate illness that had plagued her since childhood. She was a single woman in her early forties when she made her trek through the Rocky Mountains. A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains details this fascinating account of her travels through a series of letters written to her sister, Henrietta. These letters are filled with beautiful, vivid descriptions of the scenery, the people she encountered, the way of life, and a mountain man named Jim Nugent, that was as rough as they come, but a complete gentleman with Ms. Bird. She ...

Pepys continues to live life to the hilt, juggling extra-marital shenanigans with a complicated homelife, difficulties with staff, power struggles with colleagues, concerns about his relationship with his mentor Lord Sandwich, not to mention fears about war with the Dutch. - Summary by Nicole Lee

The third volume of Teixeira de Mattos' translation of Chateaubriand's Memoirs from Beyond the Tomb covers the spectacular fall, exile, and death of Napoleon, and is replete with the author's trenchant views on the some of the most significant figures of his era, tinged with his signature melancholy. - Summary by Nicole Lee

This is an absorbing memoir of an inmate's experiences and impressions while in a London prison. He describes himself as "a man of education and worldly experience" and weighing "19 stone 13 lbs" (279 lbs), a stone being 14 lbs, at the beginning of his imprisonment but not upon his release. The author writes with a reporter's keen perception and a talented novelist's ability to engage and at times amuse the reader. - Summary by Lee Smalley

Sir Thomas Wyatt was an English poet, courtier and ambassador for King Henry VIII, who sent him on Embassies to the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. Wyatt's poetry is little read these days, perhaps because of the archaic nature of his language, but he was an important poet in his own day as he introduced into English poetry many ideas and techniques from other languages particularly Italian. He used the Sonnet form developed by Petrarch and verse forms used by Dante and others. His work influenced later Tudor poets including Philip Sidney and William Shakespeare. Wyatt's poems tend...

Jessie Pope published these poems during the early months of the First World War. They were very popular at the time and the author received many letters of support and gratitude including some from men serving at the Front. The poems illustrate the patriotic and optimistic (and perhaps rather naive) view of the war which many people had at the time. Later soldier poets like Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, who had personal experience of the conflict, painted a grimmer picture. Owen’s poem “Dulce et Decorum Est” was initially dedicated to Pope ("to a certain lady poetess") as a direct...

Charles Baudelaire was a French poet whose work is described as combining an exoticism inherited from the Romantics with the Realism of other French writers of his time. The Flowers of Evil (Les Fleurs du mal) is a book of lyric poetry and his most famous work. In it he expresses the changing nature of beauty in the rapidly industrialising Paris caused by Haussmann's renovation of the city during the mid-19th century. He coined the term modernity to designate the fleeting experience of life in an urban metropolis, and the responsibility of artistic expression to capture that experience. Les ...

Endymion is a poem by John Keats first published in 1818. Keats based the poem on the Greek myth of Endymion, the shepherd beloved of the moon goddess Selene. The poem elaborates on the original story and renames Selene "Cynthia" (an alternative name for Artemis). The poem is written in rhyming couplets in iambic pentameter (also known as heroic couplets). Keats dedicated this poem to the late poet Thomas Chatterton. The poem begins with the famous line "A thing of beauty is a joy for ever". (Summary by Alan Mapstone and Wikipedia)

Nina Salaman was a noted scholar, translator and columnist. As well as translating medieval Hebrew poetry, she was a poet in her own right. This collection, first published in 1910, shows her remarkable grace. ( Newgatenovelist)

Spenser explains in the dedication of this volume that the hymns to love and to beauty were written early in his career and their "heavenly" counterparts much later, in response to the dissatisfaction that one of the author's patrons expressed toward the earlier poems, although to a modern sensibility those are in no way offensive except perhaps in focusing upon the sublunary world. However that may be, all four poems are idealistic, expressing the neo-Platonic philosophy that was growing in popularity in Elizabethan England. According to this doctrine, the soul is primary and shapes the body ...

Le Rime (in English, The Rhymes) are the collection of lyric poems written by Dante Alighieri throughout his life. While the rest of Dante's works were prepared by himself for publication, these poems were written by him in letters, as parts of other works or independently, but only collected and ordered much later, by modern critics. Among these is found the famous collection of Rime Petrose, a cycle of poems dedicated to a woman nicknamed Pietra (Stone) due to her insensibility to the poet's love. As the work of a whole life, the poems are varied, and mirror the many different moments of ...

Maria Letitia Stockett was a highly respected English teacher in Baltimore, Maryland, but also well-known as an author. In addition to her poetry she wrote Baltimore: A Not Too Serious History in 1928, and America, First, Fast & Furious . This is a collection of her short lyrical poems of nature, sentient and spirit. - Summary by Larry Wilson

Leigh Hunt was an English poet, essayist and editor best remembered as the host of a literary circle which gathered at his home in Hampstead and attracted many well known writers of the day including Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, John Keats, William Hazlitt, Thomas Moore and Charles Lamb. He wrote many letters to various friends including some Epistles in Verse of which those to Byron, Moore, Hazlitt and Lamb are recorded here. He also made translations from Poets of Antiquity (Homer, Theocritus, Anacreon and Catullus) (Summary by Alan Mapstone)

"Early in the summer of 1860, I had an attack of gold fever. In Chicago, the conditions for such a malady were all favorable. Since the panic of 1857 there had been three years of general depression, money was scarce, there was little activity in business, the outlook was discouraging, and I, like hundreds of others, felt blue." Thus Chalkley J. Hambleton begins his pithy and engrossing tale of participation in the Pike's Peak gold rush. Four men in partnership hauled 24 tons of mining equipment by ox cart across the Great Plains from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Denver, Colorado. Hambleton ...

“Galloped on with no stopping, but merely to change horses until five o’clock in the evening—very tired indeed, but . . . saw fresh horses in the corral, and resolved to push on. At half-past seven, after having galloped a hundred and fifty-three miles, and been fourteen hours and a half on horseback got to the post—quite exhausted—I could scarcely speak . . . an hour before daylight was awakened by the Gaucho, got up, had some mate, mounted my horse, and as I galloped along felt pleased that the sun should find me at my work. . .” Later in life nicknamed “Galloping Head,” for ...

This is a wonderful collection of lyrical poetry and poetry in prose by India's most well-known poet, Rabindranath Tagore, whose book Gitanjali shot him to fame in the west. Originally written in Bengali, the poet himself translated the book into English. Most of the poems in The Crescent Moon focus on the love in a mother-child relationship and its development over the years as the child grows up, with a lot of nature imagery sprinkled in the verses. There are a lot of beautiful visual references to his homeland, India. - Summary by Anusha Iyer

William Cowper was an English poet and Anglican hymn writer. He was a forerunner of the Romantic movement in English poetry and strongly influenced the writing of nature poems. His work was admired by Coleridge, Wordsworth and Anne Bronte among others. Cowper was a strong supporter of the campaign for the abolition of slavery and wrote his most famous poem "The Negro's Complaint" to try to raise people's awareness of the horrors and injustices of the system.

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