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100 Best Nonfiction

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100 Best Nonfiction includes Samuel Johnson (1998), Patriotic Gore (1962), The Great Bridge (2006), The Affluent Society (1991), Study of History: v.4 (R.I.I.A.) (1987).

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Samuel Johnson

by: W. Jackson Bate
release date: Jan 01, 1998
Samuel Johnson
W. Jackson Bate's Samuel Johnson has been hailed as a supreme example of the biographer's art and the first great modern life of Johnson. Bate's work is literary biography at its finest, delving into the character that formed Johnson's awesome intellect and fueled his prodigious output. When first published, this magisterial biography won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Patriotic Gore

by: Edmund Wilson
Patriotic Gore

Regarded by many critics as Edmund Wilson's greatest book, Patriotic Gore brilliantly portrays the vast political, spiritual, and material crisis of the Civil War as reflected in the lives and writings of some thirty representative Americans.

Critical/biographical portraits of such notable figures as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Ambrose Bierce, Mary Chesnut, William Tecumseh Sherman, and Oliver Wendell Holmes prove Wilson to be the consummate witness to the most eloquently recorded era in American history.

The Great Bridge

by: David McCullough
release date: Jan 01, 2006
The Great Bridge
McCullough tells the captivating narrative of the history of the 14-year construction of the Brooklyn Bridge (1869-1883). Read by the marvelous Nelson Runger.

The Affluent Society

by: John Kenneth Galbraith
release date: Jan 01, 1991
The Affluent Society
Galbraith's book-length argument contrasts the thoughtlessness of unrestrained affluence with well balanced sufficiency. Our modern global political-economic instability can be traced to this philosophical dichotomy.

Study of History: v.4 (R.I.I.A.)

by: Arnold J. Toynbee
release date: Dec 10, 1987
Study of History: v.4 (R.I.I.A.)
Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History has been acknowledged as one of the greatest achievements of modern scholarship. A ten-volume analysis of the rise and fall of human civilizations, it is a work of breath-taking breadth and vision. D.C. Somervell's abridgement, in two volumes, of this magnificent enterprise, preserves the method, atmosphere, texture, and, in many instances, the very words of the original. Originally published in 1947 and 1957, these two volumes are themselves a great historical achievement.
Volume 1, which abridges the first six volumes of Toynbee's study, includes the Introduction, The Geneses of Civilizations, and The Disintegrations of Civilizations. Volume 2, an abridgement of Volumes VII-X, includes sections on Universal States, Universal churches, Heroic Ages, Contacts Between Civilizations in Space, Contacts Between Civilizations in Time, Law and Freedom in History, The Prospects of the Western Civilization, and the Conclusion.
Of Somervell's work, Toynbee wrote, "The reader now has at his command a uniform abridgement of the whole book, made by a clear mind that has not only mastered the contents but has entered into the writer's outlook and purpose."

Mark Twain

by: Mark Twain
release date: Jan 01, 2011
Mark Twain
[This is Part 1 of a 2 part audiobook Cassette library edition.]

[Edited by Harriet Elinor Smith and other editors of the Mark Twain Project]

''I've struck it!'' Mark Twain wrote in a 1904 letter to a friend. ''And I will give it away--to you. You will never know how much enjoyment you have lost until you get to dictating your autobiography.''

Thus, after dozens of false starts and hundreds of pages, Twain embarked on his ''Final (and Right) Plan'' for telling the story of his life. His innovative notion -- to ''talk only about the thing which interests you for the moment'' -- meant that his thoughts could range freely. The strict instruction that many of these texts remain unpublished for one hundred years meant that when they came out, he would be ''dead, and unaware, and indifferent,'' and that he was therefore free to speak his ''whole frank mind.''

The year 2010 marks the one hundredth anniversary of Twain's death. In celebration of this important milestone, here, for the first time, is Mark Twain's uncensored autobiography, in its entirety, exactly as he left it. This major literary event offers the first of three volumes and presents Mark Twain's authentic and unsuppressed voice, brimming with humor, ideas, and opinions, and speaking clearly from the grave, as he intended.

Edited by the staff of the Mark Twain Papers & Project at the University of California, Berkeley; Robert H. Hirst, General Editor

Homage to Catalonia

by: George Orwell
release date: Jan 01, 2011
Homage to Catalonia
Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award

In 1936, George Orwell went to Spain to report on the civil war and instead joined the P.O.U.M. militia to fight against the Fascists. In this now justly famous account of his experience, he describes both the bleak and the comic aspects of trench warfare on the Aragon front, the Barcelona uprising in May 1937, his nearly fatal wounding just two weeks later, and his escape from Barcelona into France after the P.O.U.M. was suppressed.

As important as the story of the war itself - is Orwell's analysis of why the Communist Party sabotaged the workers' revolution and branded the P.O.U.M. as Trotskyist, which provides an essential key to understanding the outcome of the war and an ironic sidelight on international Communism. It was during this period in Spain that Orwell learned for himself the nature of totalitarianism in practice, an education that laid the groundwork for his great books Animal Farm and 1984.

Good-Bye to All That

by: Robert Graves
release date: Aug 01, 1995
Good-Bye to All That
"The objects of this autobiography, written at the age of thirty-three, are simple enough: an opportunity for a formal good-bye to you and to you and to you and to me and to all that; forgetfulness, because once all this has been settled in my mind and written down and published it need never be thought about again; money." Thus begins Robert Graves' classic 1929 autobiography with its searing account of life in the trenches of World War One; and yet this opening passage, together with much significant material, has been unavailable since 1957, when a middle-aged Graves totally revised his text, robbing it of the painfully raw edge that had helped to make it an international bestseller. By 1957 major changes in his private life had taken place. Graves was no longer living with Laura Riding, under whose influence and in whose honor the original had been written. By cutting out all references to Riding, by deleting passages which revealed the mental strains under which he had labored, and by meticulously editing the entire text, Graves destroyed most of what he had made so powerful but also removed from it the only context in which it could be fully understood. We are pleased to offer the original 1929 edition, edited and annotated by Robert Graves's nephew and biographer, whose lucid introduction greatly enhances its value.

Autobiographies

by: W. B. Yeats
release date: Jan 01, 1996
Autobiographies
Autobiographies consists of six autobiographical works that William Butler Yeats published together in the mid-1930s to form a single, extraordinary memoir of the first fifty-eight years of his life, from his earliest memories of childhood to winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. This volume provides a vivid series of personal accounts of a wide range of figures, and it describes Yeats's work as poet and playwright, as a founder of Dublin's famed Abbey Theatre, his involvement with Irish nationalism, and his fascination with occultism and visions. This book is most compelling as Yeats's own account of the growth of his poetic imagination. Yeats thought that a poet leads a life of allegory, and that his works are comments upon it. Autobiographies enacts his ruling belief in the connections and coherence between the life that he led and the works that he wrote. It is a vision of personal history as art, and so it is the one truly essential companion to his poems and plays.
Edited by William H. O'Donnell and Douglas N. Archibald, this volume is available for the first time with invaluable explanatory notes and includes previously unpublished passages from candidly explicit first drafts.

Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

by: Rebecca West
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon
First appearing in two volumes in 1942, this book was written as a result of the author's three journeys to Yugoslavia: one in 1936, another in 1937 and finally, in the summer of 1938. At first, she thought it was folly to consider a book on such a subject and it seems that her publishers thought so too. But the book became a historical, archaeological and political analysis of the country, as well as a conversation and an account of folklore, prophecy, and a record of landscape. The book also includes the author's views on religion, ethics, art, myth and gender. The book was completed as Yugoslavia was plunged into political turmoil, followed by invasion and four years of merciless civil and partisan warfare. It is being re-published half a century later during equally critical times for the people of the Balkans. Rebecca West is the author of nonfiction works such as "The Meaning of Treason" and "A Train of Powder", and works of fiction including "The Thinking Reed", "The Fountain Overflows" and "The Birds Fall Down".

Making of the Atomic Bomb

by: Richard Rhodes
release date: Jan 01, 1995
Making of the Atomic Bomb
The author recounts the story of how the atomic bomb was developed, from the discovery at the turn of century of the vast energy locked inside the atom, to the dropping of the first bombs on Japan during the Second World War.

The Age of Jackson (Back Bay Books (Series))

by: Arthur Meier Schlesinger Jr.
release date: Nov 28, 1988
The Age of Jackson (Back Bay Books (Series))
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. won the Pulitzer Prize for The Age of Jackson. It is a triumph of historical scholarship, analysis, and interpretation and throws much new light on a host of Americans, well-known and less well-known, who come to life in remarkable portraits that are both brilliant and sensitive. We learn a good deal that is new about the Jacksonian era, its relation to the Jeffersonian age it succeeded and to the periods that have followed.

Ideas and Opinions

by: Albert Einstein
Ideas and Opinions
A new edition of the most definitive collection of Albert Einstein's popular writings, gathered under the supervision of Einstein himself. The selections range from his earliest days as a theoretical physicist to his death in 1955; from such subjects as relativity, nuclear war or peace, and religion and science, to human rights, economics, and government.

On Growth and Form

by: D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson
On Growth and Form
Why do living things and physical phenomena take the form they do? D'Arcy Thompson's classic On Growth and Form looks at the way things grow and the shapes they take. Analysing biological processes in their mathematical and physical aspects, this historic work, first published in 1917, has also become renowned for the sheer poetry of its descriptions. A great scientist sensitive to the fascinations and beauty of the natural world tells of jumping fleas and slipper limpets; of buds and seeds; of bees' cells and rain drops; of the potter's thumb and the spider's web; of a film of soap and a bubble of oil; of a splash of a pebble in a pond. D'Arcy Thompson's writing, hailed as 'good literature as well as good science; a discourse on science as though it were a humanity', is now made available for a wider readership, with a foreword by one of today's great populisers of science, explaining the importance of the work for a new generation of readers.

The Souls of Black Folk

by: W. E. B. Du Bois
release date: Jan 01, 2010
The Souls of Black Folk
The Souls of Black Folk, by W. E. B. Du Bois, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:
  • New introductions commissioned from today's top writers and scholars
  • Biographies of the authors
  • Chronologies of contemporary historical, biographical, and cultural events
  • Footnotes and endnotes
  • Selective discussions of imitations, parodies, poems, books, plays, paintings, operas, statuary, and films inspired by the work
  • Comments by other famous authors
  • Study questions to challenge the reader's viewpoints and expectations
  • Bibliographies for further reading
  • Indices & Glossaries, when appropriate
All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works.

One of the most influential books ever published in America, W. E. B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk is an eloquent collection of fourteen essays that describe the life, the ambitions, the struggles, and the passions of African Americans at the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century.

The first African American to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard University, Du Bois was a sociologist, historian, novelist, and activist whose astounding career spanned the nation's history from Reconstruction to the Civil Rights Movement. In The Souls of Black Folk, published in 1903, Du Bois argued against the conciliatory position taken by Booker T. Washington, at the time the most influential black leader in America, and called for a more radical form of aggressive protest—a strategy that would anticipate and inspire much of the activism of the 1960s.

Du Bois's essays were the first to articulate many of Black America's thoughts and feelings, including the dilemma posed by the black psyche's “double consciousness,” which Du Bois described as “this twoness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings . . . in one dark body.” Every essay in The Souls of Black Folk is a jewel of intellectual prowess, eloquent language, and groundbreaking insight. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the struggle for Civil Rights in America.

Farah Jasmine Griffin is Professor of English and Comparative Literature and African-American Studies at Columbia University in New York City.

Making of the English Working Class

by: E.P. Thompson
Making of the English Working Class
"Thompson's book has been called controversial, but perhaps only because so many have forgotten how explosive England was during the Regency and the early reign of Victoria. Without any reservation, The Making of the English Working Class is the most important study of those days since the classic work of the Hammonds."--Commentary

"Mr. Thompson's deeply human imagination and controlled passion help us to recapture the agonies, heroisms and illusions of the working class as it made itself. No one interested in the history of the English people should fail to read his book."--London Times Literary Supplement

Art and Illusion

by: E. H. Gombrich
Art and Illusion

An attempt to explain rationally the shifting styles of art, from antiquity to the present, employing modern concepts of visual perception, information theory, and learning.


A THEORY OF JUSTICE (ORIG EDN)

by: John Rawls
A THEORY OF JUSTICE (ORIG EDN)
Though the revised edition of A Theory of Justice, published in 1999, is the definitive statement of Rawls's view, so much of the extensive literature on Rawls's theory refers to the first edition. This reissue makes the first edition once again available for scholars and serious students of Rawls's work.

The Ants

by: Bert Holldobler
release date: Mar 28, 1990
The Ants

View a collection of videos on Professor Wilson entitled "On the Relation of Science and the Humanities"

This landmark work, the distillation of a lifetime of research by the world's leading myrmecologists, is a thoroughgoing survey of one of the largest and most diverse groups of animals on the planet. Hölldobler and Wilson review in exhaustive detail virtually all topics in the anatomy, physiology, social organization, ecology, and natural history of the ants. In large format, with almost a thousand line drawings, photographs, and paintings, it is one of the most visually rich and all-encompassing views of any group of organisms on earth. It will be welcomed both as an introduction to the subject and as an encyclopedia reference for researchers in entomology, ecology, and sociobiology.

The Mirror and the Lamp

by: Meyer H. Abrams
The Mirror and the Lamp
This highly acclaimed study analyzes the various trends in English criticism during the first four decades of this century.

The Mismeasure of Man

by: Stephen Jay Gould
release date: Feb 01, 1995
The Mismeasure of Man
The Mismeasure of Man

Principia mathematica

by: Alfred North Whitehead
Principia mathematica
The great three-volume Principia Mathematica (CUP 1927) is deservedly the most famous work ever written on the foundations of mathematics. Its aim is to deduce all the fundamental propositions of logic and mathematics from a small number of logical premises and primitive ideas, establishing that mathematics is a development of logic. This abridged text of Volume I contains the material that is most relevant to an introductory study of logic and the philosophy of mathematics (more advanced students will of course wish to refer to the complete edition). It contains the whole of the preliminary sections (which present the authors' justification of the philosophical standpoint adopted at the outset of their work); the whole of Part I (in which the logical properties of propositions, propositional functions, classes and relations are established); section A of Part II (dealing with unit classes and couples); and Appendices A and C (which give further developments of the argument on the theory of deduction and truth functions).

Elements of Style

by: William Strunk Jr.
release date: Jan 01, 2000
Elements of Style
You know the authors' names. You recognize the title. You've probably used this book yourself. This is The Elements of Style, the classic style manual, now in a fourth edition. A new Foreword by Roger Angell reminds readers that the advice of Strunk & White is as valuable today as when it was first offered.This book's unique tone, wit and charm have conveyed the principles of English style to millions of readers. Use the fourth edition of "the little book" to make a big impact with writing.

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

by: Gertrude Stein
release date: Jan 01, 1993
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
A fascinating insight into the vibrant culture of Modernism, and the rich artistic world of Paris's Left Bank, Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas includes an introduction by Thomas Fensch in Penguin Modern Classics. For Gertrude Stein and her wife Alice B. Toklas, life in Paris was based upon the rue de Fleurus and the Saturday evenings and 'it was like a kaleidoscope slowly turning'. Picasso was there with 'his high whinnying Spanish giggle', as were Cezanne and Matisse, Hemingway and Fitzgerald. As Toklas put it - 'The geniuses came and talked to Gertrude Stein and the wives sat with me'. A light-hearted entertainment, this is in fact Gertrude Stein's own autobiography and a roll-call of all the extraordinary painters and writers she met between 1903 and 1932. Audacious, sardonic and characteristically self-confident, this is a definitive account by American in Paris. Gertrude Stein (1874-1946), a writer of experimental prose, is one of the original American Modernists. Born in Pennsylvania, she lived most of her life in Paris with her partner, Alice B. Toklas. Experimental books like Three Lives (1909), Tender Buttons (1914), and The Making of Americans (1925) established her reputation as an avant-garde stylist, and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas made her an international celebrity. As an experimental writer she has been an inspiration to countless novelists and poets in our century, from Ernest Hemingway and Edith Sitwell in her own time to Jack Kerouac and Robert Duncan in ours. If you enjoyed The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, you might like Virginia Woolf's Orlando, also available in Penguin Modern Classics. 'Buttonholes the reader with its informality, its unhurried rhythms, deadpan humour and acerbic remarks' Frances Spalding, Sunday Times

Notes of a Native Son

by: James Baldwin
Notes of a Native Son
A new edition published on the twenty-fifth anniversary of Baldwin's death, including a new introduction by an important contemporary writer
 
Since its original publication in 1955, this first nonfiction collection of essays by James Baldwin remains an American classic. His impassioned essays on life in Harlem, the protest novel, movies, and African Americans abroad are as powerful today as when they were first written.
 
“A straight-from-the-shoulder writer, writing about the troubled problems of this troubled earth with an illuminating intensity.” —Langston Hughes, The New York Times Book Review
 
“Written with bitter clarity and uncommon grace.” —Time

The Proper Study of Mankind

by: Isaiah,  Sir Berlin
release date: Aug 01, 1998
The Proper Study of Mankind
The long-awaited Isaiah Berlin 'Reader' -- an anthology of his best and most representative work, drawn from a lifetime's writing by this most distinguished philosopher and historian of ideas.

WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY ANDREW MARR

Isaiah Berlin was one of the leading thinkers of the century, and one of the finest writers. The Proper Study of Mankind selects some of the best of his essays. The full (and enormous) range of his work is represented here, from the exposition of his most distinctive doctrine -- pluralism -- to studies of Machiavelli, Tolstoy, Churchill and Roosevelt. In these pages he encapsulates the principal movements that characterise the modern age: romanticism, historicism, Fascism, relativism, irrationalism and nationalism. His ideas are always tied to the people who conceived them, so that abstractions are brought alive. His insights both illuminate the past and offer a key to the burning issues of today.

Guns of August

by: Barbara W. Tuchman
release date: Aug 03, 2004
Guns of August
Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best nonfiction books of all time

The Proud Tower, the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Guns of August, and The Zimmerman Telegram comprise Barbara W. Tuchman's classic histories of the First World War era

In this landmark, Pulitzer Prize–winning account, renowned historian Barbara W. Tuchman re-creates the first month of World War I: thirty days in the summer of 1914 that determined the course of the conflict, the century, and ultimately our present world. Beginning with the funeral of Edward VII, Tuchman traces each step that led to the inevitable clash. And inevitable it was, with all sides plotting their war for a generation. Dizzyingly comprehensive and spectacularly portrayed with her famous talent for evoking the characters of the war's key players, Tuchman's magnum opus is a classic for the ages.
 
Praise for The Guns of August
 
“A brilliant piece of military history which proves up to the hilt the force of Winston Churchill's statement that the first month of World War I was 'a drama never surpassed.'”—Newsweek
 
“More dramatic than fiction . . . a magnificent narrative—beautifully organized, elegantly phrased, skillfully paced and sustained.”—Chicago Tribune
 
“A fine demonstration that with sufficient art rather specialized history can be raised to the level of literature.”—The New York Times
 
“[The Guns of August] has a vitality that transcends its narrative virtues, which are considerable, and its feel for characterizations, which is excellent.”—The Wall Street Journal


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Civil War (v. 3)

by: Shelby Foote
Civil War (v. 3)
Book by Shelby Foote

ASPECTS OF THE NOVEL

by: E.M. Forster
ASPECTS OF THE NOVEL

A highly original and intelligent investigation of the novel from celebrated writer and “gentle genius” E. M. Forster

 

E. M. Forster's renowned guide to writing sparkles with wit and insight for contemporary writers and readers. With lively language and excerpts from well-known classics, Forster takes on the seven elements vital to a novel: story, people, plot, fantasy, prophecy, pattern, and rhythm. He not only defines and explains such terms as “round” versus “flat” characters (and why both are needed for an effective novel), but also provides examples of writing from such literary greats as Dickens and Austen. Forster's original commentary illuminates and entertains without lapsing into complicated, scholarly rhetoric, coming together in a key volume on writing that avoids chronology and what he calls “pseudoscholarship.”

Black Boy

by: Richard T. Wright
Black Boy

Richard Wright grew up in the woods of Mississippi amid poverty, hunger, fear, and hatred. He lied, stole, and raged at those around him; at six he was a "drunkard," hanging about in taverns. Surly, brutal, cold, suspicious, and self-pitying, he was surrounded on one side by whites who were either indifferent to him, pitying, or cruel, and on the other by blacks who resented anyone trying to rise above the common lot.

Black Boy is Richard Wright's powerful account of his journey from innocence to experience in the Jim Crow South. It is at once an unashamed confession and a profound indictment—a poignant and disturbing record of social injustice and human suffering.

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