This famous treatise began as a letter to a young French friend who asked Edmund Burke’s opinion on whether France’s new ruling class would succeed in creating a better order. Doubtless the friend expected a favorable reply, but Burke was suspicious of certain tendencies of the Revolution from the start and perceived that the revolutionaries were actually subverting the true “social order.” As a Christian––he was not a man of the Enlightenment––Burke knew religion to be man’s greatest good...

Considered one of the finest historical works in the English language, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is lauded for its graceful, elegant prose style as much as for its epic scope. Remarkably accurate for its day, Gibbon's treatise holds a high place in the history of literature and remains an enduring subject of study.Gibbon's monumental work traces the history of more than thirteen centuries, covering the great events as well as the general historical progressi...

Ludwig von Mises is to economics what Albert Einstein is to physics, and Human Action is his greatest work. It is a systematic study that covers every major topic in the science of economics. It is also one of the most convincing indictments of socialism and statism ever penned. When it first appeared in English in 1949, it was a sensation, the largest and most scientific defense of human freedom ever published, igniting an eruption of critical acclaim. For instance, Rose Wilder L...

Challenged by an expert who said it couldn’t be done, Joshua Slocum, a fearless New England sea captain, set out in April 1895 to prove that a man could sail alone around the world. A little over three years and forty-six thousand miles later, the proof was complete. This is Slocum’s own account of his remarkable adventures during the historic voyage of the Spray.Whether Slocum was more accomplished as a writer or sailor is hard to say. His writing style is fast paced, wit...

Richard Henry Dana referred to this book as "a voice from the sea." Influencing such authors as Conrad and Melville, it has become a maritime classic that has inflicted legions of men with a passion for the sea.Dana, a law student turned sailor for health reasons, sailed in 1834 on the brigPilgrimfor a voyage from Boston around Cape Horn to California. Dana Point was named as a result of this journey. Drawing from his journals,Two Years before the Mastgives a vivi...

One of the world’s most profoundly influential literary works and the basis for Shakespeare’s Roman plays (Julius Caesar, Coriolanus, and Antony and Cleopatra), Plutarch’s Lives have been entertaining and arousing the spirit of emulation in countless readers since their creation at the beginning of the second century.Originally named Parallel Lives, the work pairs eminent Romans with famous Greek counterparts—like the orators Cicero and ...

James Boswell forever changed the genre of biography when he painstakingly transformed a scholarly profusion of detail into a perceptive, lifelike portrait of Dr. Samuel Johnson.James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson reveals a man of outsized appetites and private vulnerabilities and is the source of much of what we know about one of the towering figures of English literature. Boswell spent a great deal of time with Johnson in his final years and from his scrupulously accu...

During the 1930s at Oxford, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams—remarkable friends, writers, and scholars—met regularly to discuss philosophy and literature and to read aloud from their own works in progress. Calling themselves the Inklings, their circle grew. It was in this company that such classics as The Lord of the Rings, The Screwtape Letters, and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe first found an audience.Author Humphrey Carpenter...

Published in 1922 during those dark and dreary years of socialism's near-complete triumph, Socialism stunned the socialist world. Mises has given us a profoundly important treatise that assaults socialism in all its guises, a work that discusses every major aspect of socialism and leaves no stone unturned. A few of the numerous topics discussed include the success of socialist ideas; life under socialism: art and literature, science and journalism; economic calculation under socia...

Considered one of the finest historical works in the English language, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is lauded for its graceful, elegant prose style as much as for its grand scope and considerable accuracy. It is a remarkable survey of what the author calls "the greatest and, perhaps, most awful scene in the history of mankind."This third volume of Gibbon's masterpiece covers the years 1185 to 1453 and explores the rise of Islam, the Crusades, the invention of g...

Herodotus is not only the father of the art and the science of historical writing but also one of the Western tradition’s most compelling storytellers. His Histories is regarded as one of the seminal works of history in Western literature. He wrote these accounts of the fifth-century-BC wars between the Greeks and Persians with a continuous awareness of the mythic and the wonderful, while laying bare the intricate human entanglements at their core. This volume is one of the first ...

In 1787, William Bligh, commander of the Bounty, sailed under Captain Cook on a voyage to Tahiti to collect plants of the breadfruit tree, with a view to acclimatizing the species to the West Indies. During their six-month stay on the island, his men became completely demoralized and mutinied on the return voyage. But a resentful crew, coupled with ravaging storms and ruthless savages, proved to be merely stages leading up to the anxiety-charged ordeal to come. Bligh, along with e...