Howard Seely's books about Texas ranch life read as well today as they did when first published in the 19th century. Though not a Texan, Seely spent a lot of time there and captures the language and culture of the place with remarkable fidelity. The New York Times wrote of him: “Mr. Seely is not native to Texas, at least not to a Texas ranch. He is college-bred [Yale] and through his writings runs constant evidence of his Eastern culture. But he has deep sympathy with ranch life, and this sympathy the reader feels to be something more than the sympathy that is natural to a studious observer of manners and customs. Beneath the outer aspects of men as trained to the saddle and armed with ‘shooting irons,’ he sees the human nature that dominates and inspires every incident of daily life.” Seely's fiction was popular in its day and is now available for a new audience in ebook format. Be sure to LOOK INSIDE by clicking the cover above or download a sample.

New York Times Bestseller • Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize • An Oprah's Book Club Selection “Powerful . . . [Kingsolver] has with infinitely steady hands worked the prickly threads of religion, politics, race, sin and redemption into a thing of terrible beauty.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review The Poisonwood Bible, now celebrating its 25th anniversary, established Barbara Kingsolver as one of the most thoughtful and daring of modern writers. Taking its place alongside the classic works of postcolonial literature, it is a suspenseful epic of one family's tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in Africa. The story is told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it—from garden seeds to Scripture—is calamitously transformed on African soil. The novel is set against one of the most dramatic political chronicles of the twentieth century: the Congo's fight for independence from Belgium, the murder of its first elected prime minister, the CIA coup to install his replacement, and the insidious progress of a world economic order that robs the fledgling African nation of its autonomy. Against this backdrop, Orleanna Price reconstructs the story of her evangelist husband's part in the Western assault on Africa, a tale indelibly darkened by her own losses and unanswerable questions about her own culpability. Also narrating the story, by turns, are her four daughters—the teenaged Rachel; adolescent twins Leah and Adah; and Ruth May, a prescient five-year-old. These sharply observant girls, who arrive in the Congo with racial preconceptions forged in 1950s Georgia, will be marked in surprisingly different ways by their father's intractable mission, and by Africa itself. Ultimately each must strike her own separate path to salvation. Their passionately intertwined stories become a compelling exploration of moral risk and personal responsibility.

When first published, Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media made history with its radical view of the effects of electronic communications upon man and life in the twentieth century.

Introduces the major elements of semantics in a simple, step-by-step fashion. Sections of explanation and examples are followed by practice exercises with answers and comment provided.

Drawing on thousands of "reading autobiographies," in which generations of students wrote about their experiences with reading, this book investigates what makes young people want to read. Chapters include: (1) Growing with Books; (2) Learning To Read; (3) Literature and the Human Voice; (4) Reading Habits and Attitudes: When, Where, and How; (5) Sources for Books; (6) Reading and Human Relations; (7) What Books Do for Readers; (8) Subliterature; (9) Teachers and Teaching: The Secondary School Years; (10) Libraries and Librarians; (11) The Reading of Poetry; (12) The Classics; (13) Barriers: Why People Don't Read; and (14) Final Discussion. (ARH)

First published in 1927.

On the Duty of Civil Disobedience: This is Thoreau's classic protest against government's interference with individual liberty. One of the most famous essays ever written, it came to the attention of Gandhi and formed the basis for his passive resistance movement.