Classical Memoirs

Described variously as a 'polymath', a 'renaissance man' and 'one of the most colourful characters in the music business', Mike Batt has led an extraordinarily vibrant and challenging life that has been full of both glorious victories and bitter failures. For better or for worse, he is a man who has always lived life on his own terms. Idiosyncratic but mainstream, complicated but compassionate, steadfastly maverick in spirit but avowedly commercial in outlook. He is a man of great contradictions, but even greater talent.

Steinbeck’s vision is grounded in place—first in Central California, where he was born and lived until he was 41, and in his later life when he became a troubadour of the Americas, traversing the U.S. and Mexico. Throughout his long writing life—his work spans the years 1929 to 1966—his vision as a writer was fundamentally holistic and ecological: he believed that to understand people, you had to know something about the places they occupied, their landscapes, their histories, their spirits.

Home of the Jersey Devil, New Jersey has its share of other devils, from predatory nurses to thrill killers and sadists. Here you'll find a family that preyed on one of their own, a mass murderer with a list of grudges, an adulterous minister killed with his mistress, and a wife who cut up her husband. This state is rich in crime, with a significant number of high-profile cases, like the Lindbergh and Reso kidnappings, Unruh's rampage, and the celebrated success of America's Most Wanted in tracking down a man who'd slaughtered his entire family.

When a notorious lawyer, at the request of a famed composer, meticulously conceals his origins, his adoptive mother takes every measure to bury the truth. Pulling strings and enlisting influential allies—including a television icon—she constructs a carefully crafted facade to ensure he never uncovers his past. But as he grows older, cracks in the carefully constructed facade begin to show, leaving him haunted by an unsettling sense that something is being hidden from him.

Originally published in 1856, The Kidnapped and the Ransomed is the personal memoir of Peter Still, who was born a slave. He was yoked to servitude for more than four decades in Alabama and Kentucky. Still was finally freed with the help of two Jewish brothers.

Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure was one of the most banned and censored books in the history of literature. John Cleland (a contrary man of letters, prone to boasting and getting into trouble with the law) wrote it while he was in Fleet debtor’s prison. First published in 1748 and withdrawn within a year, it was not legally republished until a hundred years later. Widely considered to be the first example of literary erotica and a stylistic tour de force, with its combination of charm, daring and love of pleasure.

En 1845, Henry David Thoreau part vivre dans une cabane construite de ses propres mains, au bord de l'étang de Walden, dans le Massachusetts. Là, au fond des bois, il mène pendant deux ans une vie frugale et autarcique, qui lui laisse tout le loisir de méditer sur le sens de l'existence, la société et le rapport des êtres humains à la Nature. Une réflexion sereine qui montre qu'il faut s'abstraire du monde et de ses désirs pour devenir réellement soi-même.

This book reveals, for the first time, the story behind the writing of ‘Desiderata’. Beloved by millions, the poem was first published in 1927, but its true origins, along with the life of its author, have largely been lost to literary history. This account by actor and author Tim Dalgleish includes not only the story of ‘Desiderata’ but two additional, previously unpublished, chapters from a forthcoming biography of Max Ehrmann. This new material helps bring Max Ehrmann, the author of 'Desiderata', out of the shadows.

As he was composing what was to become his most enduring and popular book, E. B. White was obeying that oft-repeated maxim: "Write what you know." Helpless pigs, silly geese, clever spiders, greedy rats - White knew all of these characters in the barns and stables where he spent his favorite hours. In The Story of Charlotte's Web, Michael Sims shows how White solved what critic Clifton Fadiman once called "the standing problem of the juvenile-fantasy writer: how to find, not another Alice, but another rabbit hole."

The War Collection: Essential Battlefield Classics is a collection of 14 works of fiction, philosophy, military strategy, and epic poetry, read by esteemed cast of award-winning narrators. Included here are novels from Ernest Hemingway and Erich Maria Remarque; military strategy from Sun Tzu and Carl von Clausewitz; philosophy from Freud, and epic poetry from Homer, amongst much more.

Gene Stratton-Porter was a naturalist and fierce conservationist as well as an author, and one of the areas she held dearest was the Limberlost swamp. Indeed, she spent her income and life endeavouring to protect it.

The Romans hated Pompey’s greedy father, Strabo, with a vengeance. Yet when Pompey rose in prominence, Plutarch notes that he developed the opposite character, and the Romans loved him for it. Pompey had many great accomplishments in his military and political life, but his legacy lies in forming the First Triumvirate with Crassus and Caesar. When the alliance eventually dissolved, and Pompey fled from Caesar to his death, the Roman world would never be the same.

Toward the end of the Hundred Years War between France and England, as Merlin predicted, a great warrior emerged, uniting a beleaguered nation and leading it to improbable victories. It was said this warrior was a messenger of God. And it may have been, for a country was saved and a kingdom restored. This great leader of men, this messenger who united a nation, was a 17-year-old maiden named Joan.

Francis Sheridan paints a detailed picture of 18th century aristocracy and outlines Miss Sidney as a complex, virtuous, communicative, and unassuming young woman. Her emotional responses, however, begin to change after the disaster caused in her life by her first engagement. As she learns that her fiance has been in a previous relationship, and the affair had led to pregnancy, Miss Sidney was distraught, breaking off the engagement, and eventually finding someone else.

For many years an atheist, C. S. Lewis vividly describes the spiritual quest that convinced him of the truth and reality of Christianity, in his famous autobiography. "In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God...perhaps the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England." Thus Lewis describes memorably the crisis of his conversion. Surprised by Joy reveals both that crisis and its momentous conclusion that would determine the shape of Lewis' entire life.

Fifty years ago, a little boy was cast in a movie with some of Hollywood's brightest stars. The movie: It's a Wonderful Life; the boy: Jimmy Hawkins; today, he tells his story. Through personal recollection, careful research, and interviews with cast and crew, actor Jimmy Hawkins, who played four-year-old Tommy Bailey, takes you behind the scenes for a first-hand look at the American movie classic It's a Wonderful Life.

In August 1982, a 30-year-old woman, Jane Goodwin, was found murdered in her Newark, New Jersey apartment. Her killer had strangled Jane until she passed out. Then, reportedly, he ripped open her blouse, posed her with her breasts exposed, and repeatedly stabbed Jane in the chest. He left no fingerprints or DNA-just a shattered, grieving family. Over the next 19 years, three other women were attacked in a similar fashion. Police eventually caught their assailant, Edwin “Ned” Snelgrove, a promising college grad with an uncontrollable desire to hurt women.

In this historic memoir, Lee reflects on her life, her spiritual transformation, and her critical role in the Second Great Awakening - a movement that initiated a number of reforms. Today, it remains an important chronicle of faith and an invaluable record of a pioneer who broke through barriers of race, gender, and institutional inertia.

Every ambitious young man and woman would do well to listen to this book; seasoned businessmen and women will recognize something of their own successes and failures in a life that has had as many ups and downs as a turbulent stock market; and wives will see their own husbands in this audio, as well as their own frustrations with the men they love. We can only hope they possess the character of Bew’s wife, Wendy, whose own story leavens this loaf. Astute listeners will deduce that she is the quiet, unassuming anchor that gives this narrative its heartbeat.

Just hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor, 36 Japanese bombers attacked Wake Island and destroyed eight of its 12 aircraft. Two more raids shortly followed, further reducing the defensive possibilities for the men who were left to defend this small area of American soil in the center of the Pacific Ocean. The Story of Wake Island takes the listener to the heart of the action from the point of view of the commanding officer. It is a brilliant account of this tragic event that demonstrated the fighting spirit of the American soldier even in the face of unbeatable odds.