A Child's Garden of Verses (1885) is Robert Louis Stevenson's book of poems spoken in a child's voice: rising by yellow candle-light in winter, watching rain fall on field and sea, playing at pirates, noticing a shadow, and blessing the world's abundance in the two lines of Happy Thought. Written while Stevenson often lived under the discipline of illness, the poems remember gardens, nurseries, and indoor days with affection rather than irony.
Theme
Nature / Landscape
149 works in the library take up nature / landscape, from Psalm 23 to The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire.
Works
George Berkeley's Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, published in Dublin in 1710 when its author was a twenty-five-year-old fellow of Trinity College, argues that the material world, understood as an unthinking substance existing outside every mind, is a philosophers' invention. What exists are minds and the ideas they perceive; for sensible things, to be is to be perceived.
The Almagest is Ptolemy's complete mathematical account of the motions of the Sun, Moon, planets and fixed stars, written in Greek at Alexandria about AD 150 under the title Mathematike Syntaxis (Mathematical Compilation). Its familiar name comes from the Arabic al-majisti, from a Greek word meaning the greatest.
An Introduction to Mathematics is a short book written for general readers in the Home University Library of Modern Knowledge, a popular series of compact introductions published in London by Williams and Norgate and in New York by Henry Holt in 1911. Whitehead wrote it just after the first volume of Principia Mathematica, and it was his first book for a wide public.
Claude Bernard published this book in Paris in 1865 as the opening of a larger treatise on experimental medicine that he never completed. It sets out, for physicians, the method by which he had made his own discoveries, and argues that medicine must become a science grounded in physiology and the laboratory.
Anne of Green Gables opens in Avonlea, a farming village on Prince Edward Island, where the elderly brother and sister Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert have arranged to adopt a boy from a Nova Scotia orphan asylum to help on their farm. Through a mistake the child sent is Anne Shirley, an eleven-year-old red-haired girl who talks without stopping, renames everything she loves and has survived a hard childhood by imagination.
As You Like It begins with two households divided by envy. Orlando, youngest son of the late Sir Rowland de Boys, complains to the old servant Adam that his elder brother Oliver keeps him like a peasant and denies him the education his father willed him.
Bliss and Other Stories, Katherine Mansfield's second collection, gathers fourteen stories written between about 1915 and 1920. It opens with Prelude, her longest work, and moves between New Zealand childhood, Bohemian London, Paris cafés and the hotels of the French Riviera.
Cædmon's Hymn is a nine-line poem in praise of God the Creator and the oldest surviving English poem whose maker is known by name. It survives because Bede told its story in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, finished in 731.
Cannery Row is a loosely plotted, affectionate portrait of the sardine-cannery district of Monterey, California, during the Depression, built from short narrative chapters alternating with self-contained vignettes or 'inter-chapters'. Its centre is Doc, a gentle, learned marine biologist who runs the Western Biological Laboratory, collects specimens from the tide pools, listens to Gregorian chant and Bach, reads poetry, and is trusted by everyone on the Row.
Captains Courageous begins in the smoking-room of a transatlantic liner in fog, where fifteen-year-old Harvey Cheyne, the spoiled only son of an American railroad and shipping millionaire, brags about his pocket money and annoys the grown men. Sick from a strong cigar, he goes out on deck, is pitched overboard by a roll of the ship, and is pulled out of the sea by Manuel, a Portuguese fisherman in a dory from the Gloucester schooner We're Here.
Ceremony follows Tayo, a young man of mixed Laguna and white ancestry, who returns to the Laguna Pueblo reservation in New Mexico after the Second World War deeply ill in body and mind. In the Philippines he fought alongside his cousin Rocky, the family's favoured son, and endured the Bataan Death March; Rocky died of his wounds during the march, and Tayo could not save him.
Charlotte's Web opens at breakfast on the Arable farm, when eight-year-old Fern learns that her father is going out to kill the runt of a new litter of pigs. She protests so fiercely against killing a creature for being small that he gives her the piglet to raise.
Cold Comfort Farm is a comic novel parodying the overwrought rural fiction of the early twentieth century, the 'loam and lovechild' school associated with writers such as Mary Webb and D. H. Lawrence. It is set in a slightly futuristic England of video-phones and air taxis.
Rousseau's Confessions is the founding text of modern autobiography. It promises to show 'a man in all the integrity of nature', the author himself, concealing nothing.
De Anima asks what soul is by beginning with the observable powers of living things. Aristotle reviews earlier accounts from thinkers such as Democritus, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and Plato, then rejects explanations that make soul either a wandering body, a harmony, or a separate passenger inside the organism.
De Materia Medica is an ancient pharmacopoeia: a systematic guide to plants, animals, minerals, wines, oils and manufactured preparations used as medicines. Dioscorides does not write a narrative.
Death Comes for the Archbishop follows Jean Marie Latour and Joseph Vaillant, French missionary priests sent to the newly annexed American Southwest to organize the Catholic Church in New Mexico. Cather shapes the novel less as a conventional plot than as a sequence of remembered journeys, encounters, hardships, and acts of pastoral administration.
Modelled on Cicero's On the Nature of the Gods, Hume's Dialogues are narrated by Pamphilus, a young man, to his friend Hermippus, and report a conversation at the house of Pamphilus's tutor, Cleanthes. Three speakers debate not whether God exists, which all profess to accept, but what can be known of God's nature by reason.
In 1972 Ananda Mohan Chakrabarty, a microbiologist working for the General Electric Company, applied for a patent on a bacterium of the genus Pseudomonas into which he had introduced plasmids, hereditary units outside the chromosome, that allowed it to break down several components of crude oil. No natural bacterium had this combined capacity.
The Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men is Jean-Jacques Rousseau's answer to a prize question set by the Academy of Dijon in 1753: what is the origin of inequality among men, and is it authorized by natural law? Rousseau's essay did not win the prize, but it was printed at Amsterdam by Marc-Michel Rey in 1755 with a dedication to the Republic of Geneva, a preface and extensive notes.
Francis of Assisi reaches modern popular culture through birds, wolves, poverty, brown robes, garden statues, animal blessings, Christmas cribs, and an almost ecological tenderness. The early sources are more demanding.
This volume joins Robert Frost's first three books of poems, all written about New England farm country and published between 1913 and 1916. A Boy's Will (London, 1913) is a book of short lyrics arranged in three parts, and the library text keeps the original contents page, where each title is followed by an italic gloss in the third person describing what the youth of the book is feeling: in Into My Own he imagines stealing away into dark trees and believes those who follow will find him only more sure of all he thought was true; in Storm Fear he is afraid of his own isolation; in The Tuft of Flowers a mower finds a patch of butterfly weed spared by the man who scythed the field before him and decides that men work together whether they work together or apart; and in Mowing a scythe whispers in the hay while the speaker concludes that fact is the sweetest dream labor knows.
East of Eden is a multigenerational saga set mainly in the Salinas Valley of California from the Civil War to the First World War, which retells the story of Cain and Abel through two families: the Trasks and the Hamiltons, the latter being the narrator's own maternal ancestors. Samuel Hamilton, a poor, inventive, generous Irish immigrant farmer and blacksmith, raises a large family on barren land.
Gray's Elegy is a meditation spoken at dusk in a village churchyard. In the opening stanzas the curfew bell rings, the cattle wind home, the ploughman plods away, and the speaker is left alone with the darkening fields, an owl complaining from the ivied tower, and the grassy mounds where the rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.
Elements of Chemistry (Traité élémentaire de chimie, Paris, 1789) is Antoine Lavoisier's systematic textbook of the new chemistry he had built over the previous fifteen years. The library text is Robert Kerr's English translation, published at Edinburgh in 1790; Kerr, an Edinburgh surgeon, added Fahrenheit temperatures in brackets beside Lavoisier's Réaumur degrees and appended rules for converting French weights and measures, and the text describes the thirteen copperplates of apparatus drawn by Madame Lavoisier.
Essays: First Series gathers twelve essays that Emerson worked up from his journals and from the lecture courses he gave in Boston in the late 1830s. Each pursues one idea through a rush of aphorisms, examples and images rather than a step-by-step argument, and together they set out his conviction that the same universal mind or soul speaks in every person and in nature.
Ethics Demonstrated in Geometrical Order is set out like Euclid: definitions, axioms, numbered propositions, proofs, corollaries and the discursive notes (scholia) where Spinoza speaks most freely. Its five parts lead from God to human blessedness.
Experimental Researches in Electricity gathers the numbered papers that Michael Faraday read to the Royal Society and printed in its Philosophical Transactions, in which he discovered electromagnetic induction, showed that all kinds of electricity are one, and found the quantitative laws of electrolysis. Volume 1, first published in London in 1839, collects the first fourteen Series, written between 1831 and 1838, in 1,748 numbered paragraphs, with a preface, an index and plates; the library text is the 1849 second edition reprint.
Gregor Mendel's 'Experiments in Plant Hybridisation' was read to the Natural History Society of Brünn (now Brno, in the Czech Republic) at its meetings of 8 February and 8 March 1865 and printed in the Society's proceedings, which appeared in 1866. Mendel, an Augustinian friar and schoolteacher, reported eight years of crossing varieties of the garden pea in his monastery garden.
Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry is an anthology of Irish fairy lore, ghost stories, legends and comic tales chosen and introduced by the young W. B. Yeats. Rather than collecting stories himself, Yeats gathered the best versions already printed by nineteenth-century Irish writers and folklorists: Thomas Crofton Croker, William Carleton, Samuel Lover, Patrick Kennedy, Lady Wilde, Letitia Maclintock, Douglas Hyde and others, along with poems by William Allingham, Samuel Ferguson, Edward Walsh and Yeats himself.
Gabriel Oak, a young shepherd farming his own small flock on Norcombe Hill, falls in love with Bathsheba Everdene, a proud, lively girl staying with her aunt nearby. She saves his life when he nearly suffocates in his smoky hut, but refuses his plain proposal, saying she wants somebody to tame her.
Farmer Boy tells about a year and more in the boyhood of Almanzo Wilder, the author's future husband, on his family's prosperous farm near Malone in northern New York in the 1860s. Almanzo is almost nine when the book opens in January, walking to the schoolhouse with his brother Royal and his sisters Eliza Jane and Alice.
Cyril, Anthea, Robert, and Jane, with their baby brother the Lamb, have come from two years in Camden Town to a white house in the Kent countryside near Rochester, between a chalk-quarry and a gravel-pit. Their father is called away on business and their mother goes to nurse their sick grandmother, leaving them in the care of the nursemaid Martha and the other servants.
Heraclitus's book does not survive; what remains are roughly 130 short sayings preserved as quotations by later authors such as Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch, Sextus Empiricus, Clement of Alexandria, Hippolytus and Diogenes Laertius. Modern editions number them according to Hermann Diels and Walther Kranz (DK), and the reference edition presents them in a fresh translation with commentary.
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is a frame narrative told through the letters of Robert Walton, an English explorer whose ship is trapped in Arctic ice. Walton rescues a dying stranger, Victor Frankenstein, who has been pursuing a gigantic figure across the frozen sea, and who tells his story as a warning to a man whose ambition resembles his own.
Frog and Toad Are Friends is a book of five short stories about two friends who live near each other by a meadow and a stream. In "Spring," Frog runs to Toad's house in April to wake him from his winter sleep, but Toad, who has been in bed since November, will not get up and asks Frog to come back at about half past May.
This volume gathers three works from the three stages of Galileo's career: the discoverer, the defender, and the old master of mechanics. The Starry Messenger (Sidereus Nuncius), printed at Venice in March 1610 and here read in Edward Stafford Carlos's 1880 English version, reports what Galileo saw through a telescope he had built and improved after hearing of a Dutch spyglass.
Germ Theory Papers gathers four scientific papers that the Harvard Classics printed together in 1910, in the volume of Scientific Papers that also contains Harvey: one by the Glasgow surgeon Joseph Lister and three by the French chemist Louis Pasteur. Each comes with the series' brief introductory note on its author.
God's Grandeur is an Italian sonnet that Hopkins wrote in February and March 1877 at St Beuno's College in North Wales, where he was studying theology in the final months before his ordination as a Jesuit priest. Like most of his poems it went unpublished in his lifetime; Robert Bridges printed it in 1918, almost thirty years after the poet's death.
Grasshopper on the Road is an easy-reader book of six short linked stories about a grasshopper who decides one morning to follow a road wherever it leads, and about the creatures he meets on the way, each of whom has made one idea the whole of life. In "The Club," a crowd of beetles welcomes him to their We Love Morning club and chants the praises of dew and sunrise, until Grasshopper admits that he also likes afternoon and night; they throw him out, and he walks on.
Heidi, in Elisabeth P. Stork’s public-domain English translation, tells of a small orphan brought to live with her reclusive Alm-Uncle high in the Swiss Alps, then carried away to Frankfurt’s closed rooms before homesickness and providence return her to mountain air, goats, and fir trees. Johanna Spyri’s novel joins outdoor joy to serious care for the sick, the lonely, and the hard-hearted.
Hippocratic Writings is not a single book but a library of early Greek medicine: case histories, ethical rules, theoretical essays, surgical manuals, dietetic advice, aphorisms and polemics against rival healers. Its strongest works begin from the sickbed.
In Flanders Fields is a fifteen-line poem written in early May 1915 by John McCrae, a Canadian army doctor, during the Second Battle of Ypres in Belgium, the battle in which German forces first used chlorine gas on the Western Front. By the traditional account, McCrae wrote it the day after burying his friend and former student Lieutenant Alexis Helmer, killed by a shell on 2 May, in a small cemetery near his dressing station beside the Yser canal, where wild poppies were blooming among the graves.
In Patagonia is an account of Chatwin's journey through the southern tip of South America in the mid-1970s, told in 97 short, numbered chapters that mix travel, history, legend and portraits of people met along the way. The book begins in childhood: in his grandmother's cabinet in England lay a piece of skin with coarse reddish hair, which he was told came from a 'brontosaurus' and had been sent by his grandmother's cousin, Charley Milward, a sailor who settled in Patagonia.
Frederick wrote the treatise known in English as Instructions for His Generals in the winter of 1746–1747, after the first two Silesian Wars had won and held the rich Austrian province of Silesia. Its French title was Les Principes généraux de la guerre; a German version, Die General-Principia vom Kriege, was printed in 1748 in a small number of copies for Prussian generals, who were bound to keep it secret.
Island of the Blue Dolphins is narrated by Karana, a girl of about twelve who lives in the village of Ghalas-at on a small island off the California coast in the early nineteenth century; her people call it the Island of the Blue Dolphins. A red-sailed ship brings Captain Orlov, a Russian, and a crew of Aleut hunters, who ask Karana's father, Chief Chowig, to let them take sea otter in exchange for goods.
Just So Stories is Rudyard Kipling's collection of comic tales that explain, in the voice of a father talking to a child he calls O Best Beloved, how things in the world came to be the way they are. Each story is followed by a poem.
The Kalevala is the national epic of Finland, compiled by the physician and folklorist Elias Lönnrot from oral songs he and others gathered in Finnish and Russian Karelia. Its fifty runes, or cantos, follow the deeds of the people of Kalevala, chiefly the old singer and sage Väinämöinen, the smith Ilmarinen and the reckless Lemminkäinen, and their long rivalry with Louhi, mistress of the cold northern land of Pohjola.
Keep the Lights Burning, Abbie is a short easy-reader history book about Abbie Burgess, the teenage daughter of the lighthouse keeper on Matinicus Rock, a bare island far out in the sea off the coast of Maine. In January 1856 Abbie's mother is sick, the family is running low on food and on oil for the lamps, and Captain Burgess must sail his small boat to the mainland town of Rockland for supplies and medicine.
Kidnapped is narrated by David Balfour, a seventeen-year-old Lowland Scot who in June 1751, after his father's death, leaves the village of Essendean with a letter for the House of Shaws. The minister Mr. Campbell sends him off with a shilling, a Bible and a handwritten recipe for lily-of-the-valley water, and with the news that he is a Balfour of Shaws.
Life on the Mississippi is Mark Twain's book about the great river in two eras: the steamboat age of his youth and the changed river he revisited in 1882. It opens with three chapters of history and lore, from De Soto and La Salle to the keelboat and raft men, including a long raft episode with the boy Huck Finn borrowed from the novel Twain was then writing.
Tintern Abbey, as the poem is usually called, is a meditation in blank verse spoken on the banks of the River Wye a few miles upstream of the ruined Cistercian abbey on the border of England and Wales. Its first title dates it to 13 July 1798, when Wordsworth was on a walking tour with his sister Dorothy, and it was printed that autumn as the last poem in Lyrical Ballads.
Little Britches: Father and I Were Ranchers is Ralph Moody's memoir of the four years, 1906 to 1910, that his family spent on a Colorado ranch, told from the point of view of the boy he was, eight years old when the story begins. His father, Charles, has a persistent cough from his work in a New Hampshire mill, and when a cousin, Phil, who sells gold stock in Denver, promises better prospects, the family leaves East Rochester for a run-down rented ranch near Fort Logan, southwest of Denver.
Little House in the Big Woods follows one year in the life of a pioneer family in a log house in the forests of Wisconsin, seen through the eyes of Laura, who is about five. She lives with Pa, who hunts, traps and farms; Ma, who keeps the house; her older sister Mary; baby Carrie; and Jack, the brindle bulldog.
Little House on the Prairie follows the Ingalls family through roughly a year in Kansas, on land the book calls Indian Territory, around 1869 and 1870. Pa sells the little house in the Big Woods of Wisconsin because the woods are filling with people and the game is growing scarce.
Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects is a collection of biographies of Italian artists from the late thirteenth century to Vasari's own day, arranged to tell the story of how the arts of design, after their decline in late antiquity, were reborn in Tuscany and brought to perfection in the age of Michelangelo. The library text is the first of the ten volumes of Gaston du C. de Vere's English translation of the 1568 edition, published 1912-1915.
Make Way for Ducklings is a picture book about a pair of mallards who raise their family in the middle of Boston. Mr. and Mrs. Mallard are looking for a place to live, but Mrs. Mallard rejects every spot Mr. Mallard likes, because there might be foxes in the woods or turtles in the water.
The Metamorphoses is a Latin poem in fifteen books of dactylic hexameter, about 12,000 lines, that strings together some 250 myths of transformation from the creation of the world to the deification of Julius Caesar and the reign of Augustus. Its unifying thread is change of form: gods, humans and nymphs become animals, plants, stones, stars and springs, usually at moments of extreme passion, violence or divine punishment.
Moby-Dick is Herman Melville's novel of the whaling voyage of the Pequod and of her captain's pursuit of a great white sperm whale. School Launch points readers to parent-chosen selections, while the library provides the complete text of the Etymology, Extracts, one hundred thirty-five chapters and Epilogue for those who want the whole voyage.
Mouse Soup is a story with four smaller stories inside it. A mouse is sitting under a tree reading a book when a weasel pounces on him, carries him home and puts him into a cooking pot to make mouse soup.
My Ántonia is presented as a memoir written by Jim Burden, a successful New York railroad lawyer, about a Bohemian girl he knew in his Nebraska childhood; a brief introduction by an unnamed friend frames his manuscript. Orphaned at ten, Jim travels from Virginia to live with his grandparents on the prairie near the town of Black Hawk.
My Side of the Mountain is the first-person record of Sam Gribley, a boy of about twelve who leaves his family's crowded New York City apartment to live alone for a year in the Catskill Mountains. Sam had told his father he meant to go to the old Gribley farm, land his great-grandfather once worked near the town of Delhi, and his father laughed and let him try, sure he would be back by morning.
Natural History: A Selection introduces one of antiquity’s great encyclopedic minds. Pliny wants to collect nature and human use together: stars, lands, peoples, animals, plants, metals, pigments, stones, medicines, marvels and technologies all belong to one vast inventory.
This record joins two Latin books by Johannes Kepler that together contain the three laws of planetary motion and the religious vision that drove his astronomy. The library does not store a text: the English translations of both books (William Donahue's New Astronomy, 1992; E. J. Aiton, A. M. Duncan and J. V. Field's Harmony of the World, 1997; and Charles Glenn Wallis's earlier version of Harmony Book V) are under copyright, and no public-domain English translation is available, so the record gives a summary and guide only.
Jefferson's selected writings show the range and tensions of the revolutionary Enlightenment in America. Notes on the State of Virginia began as answers to questions from a French diplomat, but it became Jefferson's most sustained book: a survey of Virginia's geography, natural history, laws, economy, population, slavery, Indigenous peoples, education, religion, and politics.
The Novum Organum ('new instrument') is the second and only substantially completed part of Bacon's projected Instauratio Magna, a six-part plan to rebuild human knowledge from its foundations. Its title throws down a challenge to the Organon, the collection of Aristotle's logical works that had governed university teaching for centuries.
Old Yeller is narrated by Travis Coates, who looks back on the year he was fourteen, in the late 1860s, on his family's homestead near the settlement of Salt Licks in the Texas Hill Country. After the Civil War cattle money is scarce, so Papa joins the other men of the settlement on a long drive to sell cattle in Kansas, leaving Travis as the man of the place with Mama and his little brother, Arliss.
De Magnete, magneticisque corporibus, et de magno magnete tellure (On the Magnet, Magnetick Bodies Also, and on the Great Magnet the Earth) was published in London in 1600 by William Gilbert, a Colchester-born physician who became president of the College of Physicians that year. It is the first large book devoted to experimental study of magnetism and one of the earliest works of natural philosophy built on systematic, repeated experiment.
On the Nature of the Universe, better known as De Rerum Natura, is a philosophical poem that tries to cure fear by explaining the world. Lucretius addresses Memmius and invokes Venus, then argues that religion has driven human beings to cruelty, as in the sacrifice of Iphigenia.
On the Origin of Species argues that species are not fixed, separately created kinds but populations changed over time by variation, inheritance, struggle, natural selection, and descent with modification. Darwin begins with variation under domestication, using pigeons, livestock, and cultivated plants to show how small differences can be preserved and accumulated.
On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (De revolutionibus orbium coelestium) is the Latin treatise in which Nicolaus Copernicus, a canon of the cathedral of Frombork in Warmia, set the sun near the centre of the universe and made the earth a planet that turns daily on its axis and travels yearly around the sun. It was printed at Nuremberg by Johannes Petreius in 1543.
Opticks, or a Treatise of the Reflexions, Refractions, Inflexions and Colours of Light, is Isaac Newton's experimental account of light and colour, written in English and published in London in 1704. Newton opens by announcing that his design is not to explain the properties of light by hypotheses but to propose and prove them by reason and experiments, and the three books carry out that plan.
Gerard Manley Hopkins's Poems, published after his death in 1918, bring together a Jesuit priest's experiments in sound, perception, praise, and spiritual desolation. Hopkins's key ideas of inscape and instress name the particular form of a created thing and the energy by which that form is apprehended.
This volume gathers the three books that first introduced Emily Dickinson's poetry to the public, all published in Boston in the decade after her death in 1886. Poems (1890) was edited by Mabel Loomis Todd, a young Amherst neighbor, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the man of letters with whom Dickinson had corresponded since 1862; Poems: Second Series followed in 1891 under the same two editors, and Poems: Third Series in 1896, edited by Todd alone.
This volume joins two treatises by Aristotle that together set out what scientific knowledge is and how the natural world is to be understood. The Posterior Analytics, in two books, belongs to the logical works later grouped as the Organon.
Prince Caspian begins a year after The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy Pevensie are waiting on a railway platform on their way back to school when they are pulled out of England and set down on a wooded island beside a ruined castle.
Newton's Principia sets out the mathematical principles of natural philosophy and shows that the same laws can explain terrestrial motion and celestial order. The work begins with definitions of mass, quantity of motion, inertia, impressed force, centripetal force, absolute and relative space, and absolute and relative time.
Principles of Geology is Charles Lyell's argument that the earth's past can be explained by the same causes that are acting on it now, working at their present intensity over immense periods of time. The first edition appeared in three volumes in 1830, 1832 and 1833, under a subtitle describing it as an attempt to explain the former changes of the earth's surface by reference to causes now in operation.
Psalm 23 is a six-verse song of trust, headed in the Hebrew Psalter as a psalm of David and placed in the first book of Psalms, between the anguished cry of Psalm 22 and the processional hymn of Psalm 24. Its speaker never asks for anything.
Rome: An Empire's Story is a one-volume history of the Roman empire by the ancient historian Greg Woolf, first published in 2012 and issued in a revised second edition in 2022. In about three hundred pages of main text and eighteen chapters, it follows roughly fifteen hundred years of Roman power, from the small city-state of early Italy to the end of Roman rule over the Mediterranean in the age of the Arab conquests.
Sarah, Plain and Tall is a short chapter book narrated by Anna Witting, who lives on a prairie farm in the late nineteenth century with her father, Jacob, and her little brother, Caleb. Their mother died the day after Caleb was born, and since then Papa has stopped singing.
The W. J. Howey Company owned large citrus groves in Lake County, Florida, near a resort hotel it also operated. Each year it planted about five hundred acres, kept half and sold the rest to the public in narrow strips, explaining that the sales helped finance further planting.
Seven Pillars of Wisdom is Lawrence's account of his two years with the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire, from his first visit to the Hejaz in October 1916 to the entry into Damascus in October 1918. It opens with an introductory chapter that admits the book's political bad conscience: Lawrence knew that Britain and France had already divided the Arab lands in the Sykes–Picot agreement while he encouraged the Arabs to fight for independence.
Shane is a short Western novel in sixteen chapters, told years afterward by Bob Starrett, who was about eleven in the summer of 1889 when a stranger rode into his family's Wyoming valley. The rider, dressed in dark, fine clothes and calling himself only Shane, stops at the homestead of Joe Starrett, Bob's father, and Joe's wife, Marian.
Siddhartha is a short, lyrical novel set in India in the time of the Buddha, following the spiritual journey of a young man who seeks enlightenment through experience rather than doctrine. Siddhartha is the handsome, gifted son of a Brahmin, admired by all and loved by his friend Govinda.
Swann's Way (Du côté de chez Swann) is the first volume of Marcel Proust's seven-part novel In Search of Lost Time, which C. K. Scott Moncrieff translated under the title Remembrance of Things Past. Grasset issued it at Proust's expense in November 1913.
That Hideous Strength, subtitled A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-Ups, completes the trilogy that began with Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra, though it moves the action from other planets to an English university town. Mark Studdock, a young sociologist and fellow of Bracton College in Edgestow, longs to belong to the inner circle of the college's Progressive Element.
This volume contains Tacitus' two earliest works, both written in 98 CE, soon after the assassination of the emperor Domitian. The Agricola is a biography and eulogy of the author's father-in-law, Gnaeus Julius Agricola, who died in 93.
The Art of the Commonplace gathers Wendell Berry's agrarian essays on land, household, work, food, technology, economy, conservation, and the moral scale of community. The collection's title points to Berry's method: he resists abstraction by returning arguments to farms, watersheds, kitchens, tools, soil, neighbors, and inherited obligations.
The Art of War is a short treatise of thirteen chapters, around six thousand Chinese characters, written as a sequence of terse sayings introduced by the formula 'Sun Tzu said'. It begins by declaring war a matter of life and death for the state, to be studied through five constant factors: the moral law that binds people to their ruler, heaven (weather and seasons), earth (terrain and distance), the commander's qualities, and method and discipline.
The Bears on Hemlock Mountain is a short chapter book about Jonathan, an eight-year-old boy who lives with his mother and father in a stone farmhouse at the foot of Hemlock Mountain in Pennsylvania, long ago. The mountain is really a big hill, and everyone tells Jonathan that there are no bears on it.
Thornton W. Burgess’s The Burgess Bird Book for Children (1919) teaches bird identification through Peter Rabbit’s visits in the Old Orchard, where Jenny Wren and neighbors speak in character while Burgess slips in real habits, songs, and looks. The method is story first, natural history second: children remember the House Wren because they met Jenny, then learn what to watch for outdoors.
The Call of the Wild follows Buck, a huge St. Bernard and Scotch shepherd cross, through one terrible and transforming year of the Klondike gold rush. Buck lives as the lord of Judge Miller's estate in the Santa Clara Valley of California until Manuel, a gardener's helper who needs money for his lottery gambling, sells him to dog traders.
The Canon of Medicine (al-Qanun fi al-Tibb) is Ibn Sina's encyclopedia of medicine in five books, and Book I, the subject of this record, sets out the general principles on which the rest depends. It opens with a definition: medicine is the science of the states of the human body in health and when not in health, and of how health is lost and restored, with a theoretical part that gives knowledge and a practical part that guides the physician's judgment.
The Chemical History of a Candle prints six lectures that Michael Faraday gave to a 'juvenile audience' at the Royal Institution in London over the Christmas season of 1860–61. Faraday opens by declaring that no door into natural philosophy is more open than the burning candle, and he keeps the whole course tied to that single object while it leads him through heat, chemistry, the air and the living body.
The Complete Poems of Walt Whitman gathers the evolving work of a poet who made the self expansive enough to contain a democracy. The center is Leaves of Grass, first published in 1855 and revised across multiple editions until Whitman's death.
The Courage of Sarah Noble tells, in eleven short chapters, how eight-year-old Sarah Noble went with her father, John Noble, into the Connecticut wilderness in 1707 to build a house for their family. The rest of the Nobles stay behind in Massachusetts.
The Cricket in Times Square is set at a newsstand in the Times Square subway station in New York City at the end of one summer. The stand belongs to the Bellini family: Papa, Mama, and their son Mario, who keeps it open late in the hope of selling a few more papers, because business is poor.
The Descent of Man applies evolutionary theory to human beings and develops Darwin's account of sexual selection. Darwin argues that humans share ancestry with other animals and that differences between human and animal mental faculties are differences of degree rather than absolute kind.
Darwin's Expression of the Emotions is one of the founding works of comparative psychology. It asks how humans and animals express fear, anger, joy, grief, shame, disgust, attention, and other states through face, posture, voice, tears, hair, muscles, and involuntary action.
The Fate of Rome is a history of the Roman Empire from its height in the second century AD to the crises of the seventh, written by the classicist Kyle Harper and published by Princeton University Press in 2017 in its series on the history of the ancient world. Its argument is that the empire's long story cannot be told only through emperors, armies and barbarian peoples: changes in climate and the arrival of new infectious diseases were active forces that repeatedly struck a society whose own success had made it vulnerable.
The Golden Bough sets out to explain one strange rule. In the sacred grove of Diana at Nemi, in the Alban Hills near Rome, the priest, called the King of the Wood, held office until a runaway slave broke a bough from a certain tree and killed him in single combat, becoming priest in turn.
The Homeric Hymns are a collection of thirty-three anonymous Greek poems addressed to the gods, composed in the same dactylic hexameter and formulaic language as the Iliad and Odyssey. Ancient audiences treated many of them as Homer's own; most scholars now see them as the work of different singers over a long period, with the four great narrative hymns usually dated to the archaic age and some short pieces much later.
The Hound of the Baskervilles brings Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson to Dartmoor to investigate a family curse. It opens in Baker Street with a walking stick left by a visitor, from which Holmes deduces a young country doctor with a curly-haired spaniel.
The Jungle Book is a collection of seven animal stories, each followed by a song or poem. The first three tell of Mowgli, a man's cub raised by wolves in the Seeonee hills of central India.
The Koran, or Quran ('recitation'), is the central scripture of Islam. It consists of 114 chapters called suras, of very unequal length, each made up of verses (ayat).
The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757 is set in the wilderness of northern New York during the French and Indian War. Colonel Munro, the Scottish commander of Fort William Henry on Lake George, which the scout calls the Horican, is threatened by the French general Montcalm and his Native allies.
The Little House is a picture book about a small pink house built by a man on a little hill far out in the country. He builds her strong and declares that she must never be sold, so that his descendants many generations on can live in her.
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket begins as a sea adventure told by a young Nantucketer whose craving for forbidden experience repeatedly overrides judgment. Pym and his friend Augustus Barnard first make a disastrous drunken voyage in the Ariel, a small boat nearly destroyed before rescue.
The Natural History of Selborne is a book of letters about one Hampshire parish, written by its curate over about twenty years to two learned correspondents: the zoologist Thomas Pennant and the lawyer and antiquary Daines Barrington. White opens with the place itself: its position among the chalk downs and sandy heaths of east Hampshire, its soils, springs and beech hanger, the deep hollow lanes worn into the rock, the forest of Wolmer and its decayed deer.
The Old Man and the Sea follows Santiago, an aging Cuban fisherman who has gone eighty-four days without taking a fish, as he sails far into the Gulf Stream and hooks a marlin larger than his skiff. Hemingway narrows the plot until skill, endurance, hunger, memory, prayer, and pain are concentrated in one body at sea.
The Popol Vuh, the Book of the Mat or Council Book, is the sacred and historical book of the K'iche' Maya of highland Guatemala, written in K'iche' by anonymous nobles in the 1550s and preserved in Francisco Ximénez's copy of about 1701. The library's text is not a full translation but Lewis Spence's 1908 English study, which retells and partly translates the first books from Brasseur de Bourbourg's French and Ximénez's Spanish and then comments on them.
The Prussian Officer and Other Stories, published by Duckworth in London in late 1914, is D. H. Lawrence's first collection of short fiction: twelve stories, most of them revised from magazine versions written between about 1907 and 1914. Two are set among German soldiers, the rest in the colliery villages and farms of the English Midlands where Lawrence grew up.
The Red Badge of Courage follows Henry Fleming, a young private of the 304th New York, through two days of fighting in an unnamed Civil War battle that readers have long identified with Chancellorsville in May 1863. Crane calls him almost always simply the youth.
The River War: An Historical Account of the Reconquest of the Soudan is the young Winston Churchill's history of the Anglo-Egyptian campaigns of 1896–1899 that destroyed the Mahdist state in the Sudan. Churchill begins with geography and the Nile, which he presents as the thread on which the whole story hangs, and then with the rebellion of Muhammad Ahmad, a Dongolawi boat-builder's son and Sufi ascetic who proclaimed himself the Mahdi in 1881.
The Road Not Taken is a twenty-line lyric in four five-line stanzas, first printed in The Atlantic Monthly in August 1915 and placed by Frost, in italics, at the head of his third book, Mountain Interval (1916). It is among the most quoted American poems and among the most often misread.
The Sceptical Chymist is a philosophical dialogue in which Robert Boyle tests the two reigning theories of what bodies are made of: the four elements of the Aristotelians (earth, water, air and fire) and the three principles, or tria prima, of the Paracelsian chemists (salt, sulphur and mercury). Both schools appealed to the same evidence, the analysis of mixed bodies by fire.
The Secret Garden begins in imperial India, where Mary Lennox is a sickly, spoiled and emotionally neglected child. A cholera outbreak kills her parents and household, and Mary is sent to Misselthwaite Manor in Yorkshire to live with her reclusive uncle Archibald Craven.
The Sign of the Beaver takes place in the Maine woods in 1768. Matt Hallowell, twelve years old and about to turn thirteen, has helped his father clear land and build a log cabin on a new claim.
The Sketch Book is a miscellany of essays, travel sketches and tales presented as the notebook of Geoffrey Crayon, a genial American bachelor who crosses the Atlantic to look at the England he has known from books. Crayon opens by explaining that he wanders to see the shifting scenes of life, then describes the voyage itself, a visit to the Liverpool historian William Roscoe, and a portrait of a wife who sustains her ruined husband.
The Song of Hiawatha is a book-length poem in twenty-two cantos with an Introduction, retelling legends of the Ojibway and neighbouring peoples around a single hero on the south shore of Lake Superior, which the poem calls Gitche Gumee, the shining Big-Sea-Water. The Introduction presents the songs as gathered by the singer Nawadaha from the forest, the birds and the rivers, and addresses readers who believe every human heart is human.
Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws (De l'esprit des lois), published anonymously at Geneva in 1748 after many years of reading and travel, asks why the laws of different peoples differ and what makes them fit or unfit for those who live under them. His answer is that laws are relations: they must suit the form of government and also the climate and soil, the religion, commerce, manners and size of a nation.
The Story of My Boyhood and Youth is John Muir's account of his first twenty-five years, from a Scottish seaside town to the edge of what he calls the University of the Wilderness. In the first chapter he remembers Dunbar on the stormy North Sea coast: rambles with his grandfather David Gilrye, who taught him his letters from shop signs, scrambles over the ruins of Dunbar Castle, fights and dares with schoolmates, the servant girls' terrifying tales of the Dandy Doctors who were said to steal children for the Edinburgh dissecting rooms, and a school where Mr. Lyon and his father together drilled grammar and Bible verses into him by memory and the rod.
The Swiss Family Robinson is told by a Swiss pastor who, with his wife and four sons, emigrates by sea toward a new settlement and is shipwrecked after a week-long storm. The crew abandons the ship in the boats, leaving the family alone on a wreck lodged among rocks near an unknown tropical coast.
The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902) is Beatrix Potters short picture-story of a disobedient young rabbit who squeezes under Mr. McGregors gate after his mother has warned him away—his father, she reminds them, was put in a pie. Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cotton-tail gather blackberries; Peter eats lettuces, beans, and radishes until he meets Mr. McGregor, loses his shoes and blue jacket, hides in a watering can, and at last slips home frightened and unwell.
Richard Hannay, a thirty-seven-year-old Scottish-born mining engineer who has made his money in Rhodesia, has come home to London in the spring of 1914 and finds himself bored almost to despair. One May evening a neighbor from the top floor of his building, an American named Franklin P. Scudder, begs to be taken in.
The book, known in Italy as Il Milione and in early French manuscripts as the Devisement du Monde (Description of the World), is less a diary than a geography of Asia as the Polos knew it, organized by route and region and told in the voice of Rustichello, who often addresses the reader directly. The Prologue tells how the Venetian brothers Niccolò and Maffeo Polo, trading in the Crimea and on the Volga in the 1260s, were carried by war farther and farther east until envoys brought them to Kublai, the Great Kaan of the Tartars, who questioned them about the Pope and the Christian faith and sent them back to Rome asking for a hundred learned Christians and oil from the lamp of the Holy Sepulchre.
On a camping trip in the Canadian woods, eleven-year-old Sam Beaver, a Montana rancher's son who loves wild things and keeps a journal that ends each night with a question, discovers a pair of trumpeter swans nesting on a hidden pond. He keeps their secret, and when a fox creeps up on the sitting pen he drives it off with a stick.
The Tyger is the most famous lyric in William Blake's Songs of Experience, which he etched, printed and hand-coloured in 1794 and issued together with the earlier Songs of Innocence under the subtitle Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul. It is the counterpart of The Lamb in Innocence, where a child asks a lamb who made it and answers that its maker is the gentle Lamb of God.
The Voyage of the Beagle is Darwin's account of his five-year journey around South America, the Pacific, Australia, and the Atlantic aboard HMS Beagle. It is a travel book before it is an evolutionary treatise: Darwin describes landscapes, fossils, earthquakes, volcanoes, coral reefs, animals, plants, Indigenous peoples, imperial violence, slavery, disease, and the practical hardships of field observation.
The War of the Worlds is told by an unnamed writer on philosophical subjects who lives on Maybury Hill near Woking in Surrey, looking back some years after the events. Book One, The Coming of the Martians, opens with astronomers seeing jets of gas leap from the surface of Mars.
The Wind in the Willows (1908) follows Mole’s break into the sunlight, Rat’s river manners, Badger’s solid hospitality, and Toad’s reckless motorcar mania among the English riverbank and Wild Wood. Kenneth Grahame writes animal characters who keep human foibles without losing the feel of water, willow, and snow.
Theodore Roosevelt's Autobiography, written at Sagamore Hill in 1913, is less a full life than a series of chapters on the work and convictions of a public man. A foreword dated 1 October 1913 calls for joining practical efficiency with lofty idealism.
Hesiod's two complete poems are the oldest Greek attempts to explain, in verse, where the gods came from and how a man ought to live under them. Both are in dactylic hexameter, the meter of Homer, and both begin with the Muses.
Timaeus offers Plato's most elaborate cosmological account, framed by Socrates' wish to see the ideal city in motion and Critias's story of ancient Athens and Atlantis. Timaeus then delivers a likely story about the cosmos, not a demonstration with mathematical certainty.
Christiaan Huygens read the substance of this treatise to the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris in 1678 and published it in French at Leiden in 1690 as Traité de la lumière, with a short discourse on the cause of gravity. The library text is Silvanus P. Thompson's literal English translation of 1912, complete, with the author's preface, Thompson's note and a table of matters; the many geometrical figures are marked but not reproduced.
Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair is a lyric sequence of erotic longing, memory, landscape and loss. The poems do not tell a plot, but they trace an emotional arc from sensual address to abandonment and despair.
In 1866 ships in several oceans report a huge, swift, glowing creature, and some are holed by it. Pierre Aronnax, a professor at the Museum of Natural History in Paris who happens to be in New York, publishes the opinion that it is a gigantic narwhal and is invited to join the American frigate Abraham Lincoln, under Commander Farragut, which sails to hunt it.
Uncle Vanya, subtitled Scenes from Country Life, takes place over a few months on a provincial Russian estate. For twenty-five years Ivan Petrovich Voitski, Uncle Vanya, has managed the property with his niece Sonia, sending its income to her father, Professor Alexander Serebrakoff, the widower of Vanya's sister, whom Vanya once revered as a great scholar.
Understood Betsy follows nine-year-old Elizabeth Ann, an orphan raised in a medium-sized Midwestern city by her Great-aunt Harriet and Aunt Frances, a piano teacher who has studied child-rearing books and correspondence courses and is determined that her niece shall be thoroughly understood. Elizabeth Ann is thin, pale and frightened of dogs, thunder and examinations, and Aunt Frances shares and rehearses every fear with her.
Walden; or, Life in the Woods is Henry David Thoreau's account of the two years and two months, from July 4, 1845, to September 1847, that he spent living alone in a one-room house he built himself beside Walden Pond, about a mile and a half south of the village of Concord, Massachusetts. He compresses the experiment into the cycle of a single year, moving from summer through winter to the thaw of spring, in eighteen chapters.
Watership Down is the epic of a small band of rabbits who leave their home to found a new one. In the Sandleford warren in Berkshire, a small, nervous rabbit named Fiver, who has visions, sees the field covered in blood and begs his brother Hazel to warn the Chief Rabbit, the Threarah, who dismisses them.
What Is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell is a short book based on public lectures that Erwin Schrödinger gave at Trinity College Dublin in February 1943, under the auspices of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies.
Where the Red Fern Grows is narrated by Billy Colman, now a grown man in a town far from the Ozarks. Walking home from work one evening, he rescues an old redbone hound from a pack of town dogs, feeds it and lets it go home, and the encounter brings back the story of his boyhood.
White Fang follows a wolf-dog from his birth in a cave in the frozen North to a sunny estate in California. The novel opens with two men, Bill and Henry, hauling a coffin across the Yukon wilderness while a starving wolf pack trails them.
Wickard v. Filburn, 317 U.S. 111, decided on 9 November 1942, tested how far the commerce power of Congress could reach into the fields of a single farm.
Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) opens in the Hundred Acre Wood, where a Bear of Very Little Brain lives under the name of Sanders and Christopher Robin asks for stories about him. A. A. Milne builds the book from short chapters of honey, balloons, floods, Heffalumps, Expositions to the North Pole, and birthday muddles.
Wuthering Heights is a violent family romance told through layered narration. Mr. Lockwood, a tenant at Thrushcross Grange, becomes curious about his landlord Heathcliff and the strange household at Wuthering Heights.