Showing results by narrator "Robert Bethune" in All Categories

In this, the fourth volume of this series, we hear the poetry in which Byron began to make his mark on the world. Though his major breakthrough with Childe Harold is yet to come, his English Bards and Scotch Reviewers was a definite hit in its time, establishing Byron as a known poet and ensuring that his reputation as a literary bad-boy was off to a good start.

In this, the second volume of the work, William Hazlitt takes us through the history of Napoleon's campaigns in Italy and Egypt. In the course of these campaigns, and in Napoleon's life in Paris between them, we can see a young, brilliant military leader starting to transform himself from a leader of armies into a leader of nations. His brilliant successes on the battlefield bring him to the adoring attention of the French people and the rather alarmed attention of the French government.

In this, the 18th of the series, Dumas explores the history of a famous French aristocratic family: that of Marie de Rossan, also known as Diane de Joannis de Roussan and as Anne-Elisabeth De Rossan, but in any case the Marquise de Ganges and La Belle Belle Provençale - often described as the most beautiful woman of her time. It was, indeed, her beauty that undid her.

In this, the 17th of the series, Dumas, in this case more a novelist than a historian, turns his attention to a story from Russia: that of Vaninka. Her father was a Russian count and a general in the Russian Imperial army under Paul I. She falls in love with one of her father's officers, whose tragic but accidental death leads her to a savage crime. Ironically, bringing her to justice requires a great perversion of justice itself.

The marquise was tried, convicted, and executed for poisoning her father and two of her brothers. It appears that she learned the art of the poisoner from her lover, Godin de Sainte-Croix. She also targeted but did not kill her sister, a Carmelite nun. Her case launched what is known in French history as the Affair of the Poisons, a long-running judicial scandal that led to the execution or imprisonment of dozens of people, many of the highest rank in French society, including prominent members of the court of Louis XIV.

The Celebrated Crimes of Alexandre Dumas père was not written for children. The novelist has spared no language - has minced no words - to describe violent scenes of violent times. In this, the 14th of the series, Dumas, the novelist-historian, brings his storytelling skills to a famous subject: the background of one of the most famous of French lawsuits, centering around the secret abduction of Bernard de la Guiche, later count of Saint-Geran, from his mother, Suzanne de Longaunay, by the marquis de Saint-Maixant.

Ever since the time of Louis XIV, the story has been told of a man mysteriously snatched out of the world and buried for life not merely in a prison cell but also in an mask of iron: an imprisonment designed to ensure no one would ever know his name or even see his face. Dumas asks: Who was the man in the iron mask? Why was he imprisoned? Why were such strange precautions taken, and why was he treated with such respect and care, given everything he asked for--except his freedom and his name?

To paraphrase the note from the translator, The Celebrated Crimes of Alexandre Dumas pere was not written for children. The novelist has spared no language - has minced no words - to describe violent scenes of violent times. In this, the eighth of the series, Dumas explores the depths of a soul, that of Antonin Derues, a man capable of the most amazing hypocrisy, perfidy, and cruelty.

The story of Nisida is worthy of an Italian opera in the great romantic tradition, and indeed Donizetti attempted it, but without success. It is the story of an attempt by a womanizing nobleman to seduce and ruin the daughter of a poor but admirable fisherman, an attempt that ends in his death at the hands of her brother, who is then sentenced to die and is executed, but not by the hands of the law. The story is told in lush and melodramatic style, tending in places to comedy.

To paraphrase the note from the translator, The Celebrated Crimes of Alexandre Dumas père was not written for children. The novelist has spared no language - has minced no words - to describe violent scenes of violent times. In this, the fifth of the series, Dumas tells the story of Karl-Ludwig Sand, a man little known to the English-speaking world, but famous among German speakers; he was the man who assassinated August von Kotzebue, a vigorous advocate of Russia's interests and the interests of the Austrian Empire. In the years immediately following the fall of Napoleon, many people in Germany, particularly young people, were eagerly anticipating the coming of liberal government. Much to their dismay, the autocratic governments existing before the war were not only re-established, but put great energy to ensuring that a liberal revolution would never happen. Karl-Ludwig Sand, a young German student, became convinced that Kotzebue was the key figure in this wave of repression. He made up his mind to kill the man, and kill him he did.

In Avon's Harvest, Edwin Arlington Robinson devotes the majority of the audiobook to one long narrative poem of the same title, which tells the story of how a man's life was destroyed by the slow canker of an unreasoning hatred he formed as a young man, and of a sudden act of violence that flared out of it. Robinson's wields his sparse, simple, yet brilliantly polished verse like a scalpel, dissecting layer after layer of Avon's mind until the whole is laid bare as if on an operating table.

In this collection of dramatic narratives, Robinson explores his key interests: character and man's confrontation with the rocks and hard places of human existence. He gives us a fascinating piece of alternate history: a dialogue between Alexander Hamlton and Aaron Burr, testing who will betray and who will resist. He gives that bitter old man, John Brown, full scope to vent his deep-seated anger, and lets Rahel Varnhagen, in her old age, touch us with her memories of love.

In 1910, when Edwin Arlington Robinson published The Town Down the River, he included what has become one of his most famous poems: "Miniver Cheevy". His portrait of this man, a "child of scorn" who "wept that he was ever born," who "sighed for what was not", who "scratched his head and kept on thinking", captures Arlington's sense of life in 32 immortal lines. The other poems in the book, though not as famous as "Miniver Cheevy", amplify and explore Arlington's sense of the fate of humankind in ways both serious and comic.

In 1921, Edwin Arlington Robinson was only 52 and many of the pieces in his Collected Poems were written long before that. Yet he shows gifted understanding of old age, the passage of time, the slow decline that everyone must suffer, and the final cease and release of death. Isaac, in Isaac and Archibald, puts it very well to the poet's twelve-year-old alter ego.

Unlike most ghost story writers, Mary Louisa Molesworth does not want to make you wake up screaming in the middle of the night. You may wake up with a shiver, but you'll also wake wake up feeling thoughtful, musing on how the mysteries of love, compassion, and memory can extend themselves into the realm of the supernatural.

Stephen Crane's poetry is torn by a sense of his own sin, outraged by the capricious behavior of a God he rejected, his poems brim with bitteness, yet carry with them a sane and sarcastic humor as well. Tremendously laconic and always moving directly to the point, he demands his listener's full attention, and rewards it.

Here are three stories that will make you chuckle and shiver at the same time. Spirits can be funny when they turn out to have issues and problems of their own, and the authors of these stories, John Kendrick Bangs and H. G. Wells, have a fine time putting smiles on our faces - and wiping them off again!

Pity Sir Simon de Canterville, the poor Ghost of Canterville Chase! He killed his wife and was then starved to death by her brothers, but ever since then he's been happily haunting the family's mansion, always inventing fresh characters and costumes and blood-curdling shrieks.

In these two tales drawn from the magical world of the jungles of India, Rudyard Kipling explores issues of good and evil, courage and honor, materialism and spirituality. In "The King's Ankus", the wolf-boy Mowgli confronts a treasure made long ago by humankind--treasure for which humankind will kill, and kill, and kill again. In "The Miracle of Purun Bhagat", a man who has known wealth, and power, and great responsibility casts all that aside for the humble life of a wandering beggar-priest--until circumstances bring him once more to take command and save life.

Stephen Crane's second book of poetry followed up the success of his first book, Black Riders. His search for love, his lonely, bitter struggle to make his peace with God, the war in his heart between cynicism and an unshakeable longing for truth and beauty in the world--these all continue in his second book. Sadly, this second book was also his last, for he died tragically young.