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Madame Butterfly is the story of the young Japanese girl Cho-Cho San, who marries a flighty American naval officer, and is thenceforth outcast from her relatives. Anxiously she awaits the return of her beloved husband, but when he finally anchors in the harbour, Cho-Cho San does not get the happy ending she was hoping for. This short story by John Luther Long has inspired Giacomo Puccini to write the opera of the same name. (Introduction by Availle)...

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Fiction, Literature, Romance

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This book contains small morsels of great practical wisdom and instruction for all. Solomon, no doubt, wrote the majority of this book, but the last proverb was authored by a King Lemuel, who wrote of the wisdom imparted to him by his mother. (Introduction by Mark Penfold)...

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Ancient Texts, Religion

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In the Hebrew Bible, the Book of Jonah is the fifth book in a series of books called the Minor Prophets. Unlike other prophetic books however, this book is not a record of a prophet’s words toward Israel. Instead of the poetry and prophetic prose of Isaiah or Lamentations, this book tells the story of a reluctant prophet who arguably becomes one of the most effective prophets in the entire Bible. (Summary by Wikipedia)...

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Religion

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Als der berückend gutaussehende Jüngling Dorian Gray sein Porträt betrachtet, kommt ihm der Gedanke, wie herrlich es sein müsste, wenn das Bild an seiner Stelle altern könnte, während er selbst für immer jung und schön bliebe. Als sich dieser fantastische Wunsch zu erfüllen beginnt, genießt Dorian seine ewige Jugend in vollen Zügen - während in seiner Seele ein grauenvolles Werk der Zerstörung seinen Lauf nimmt. (Zusammenfassung von Al-Kadi)...

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Literature

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When you dive into Mark Twain’s (Samuel Clemens’) The Innocents Abroad, you have to be ready to learn more about the unadorned, ungilded reality of 19th century “touring” than you might think you want to learn. This is a tough, literary journey. It was tough for Twain and his fellow “pilgrims”, both religious and otherwise. They set out, on a June day in 1867, to visit major tourist sites in Europe and the near east, including Greece, Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, “the Holy Land”, and Egypt. What Twain records, in often humorous, sometimes grotesque but always fascinating detail, are the day-to-day ups and downs of discovering the truth about people and places. The truths they learn are often far different than their education and rumor have made them preconceive. This is a voyage of discovery. It’s long and, in places, tiresome. But it’s revelatory about so much. As with some of his other works, Twain includes popular prejudices of his time, which are today considered socially unacceptable. His references to “Indians”, “Negroes” and “infidels” come to mind. Beyond the lows, though, there are the highs of Twain’s cutting wit and insight a...

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Adventure, Memoirs

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Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich is a work of humorous fiction by Stephen Leacock first published in 1914. It is the follow-up to his 1912 classic Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town. Like that work, it is a sequence of interlocking stories set in one town, but instead of focusing on a small Canadian town in the countryside, it is set in a major American metropolis and its characters are the upper crust of society. Although currently not as well-known as the earlier book, Arcadian Adventures was extremely popular in North America at the time of its publication and for a while was considered the greater success. It was also translated and published by the Bolshevik government soon after the 1917 revolution and it became a bestseller in the Soviet Union....

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Comedy, Humor

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This is the first of what is intended to be three projects featuring journal articles which chart the development of psychology as an academic discipline in the United States during the twentieth century. This first collection begins with an appraisal of functionalism by William James and takes in: early contributions to educational psychology; works of early feminist psychologists; discussions of behaviourism and pragmatism. Also included is Watson and Rayer's famous 1920 Little Albert study. (Summary by Carl Manchester)...

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Psychology

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This essay, written in 1795, puts forth a plan for a lasting peace between nations and peoples. Kant puts forth necessary means to any peace, and argues that nations can be brought into federation with one another without loss of sovereignty. In one translation, telling of the historical impact of this essay, this federation is called a “league of nations.” The supplements and appendices are of considerable interest on their own. The supplements contain an argument regarding the use which nature makes of war, and the way in which nature, in the end, impels us towards peace. The appendices return to the question of whether his theory is mere theory, or whether it bears translation into practice. In this, he distinguishes between the moral politician and the political moralist, pointing out ways in which practical considerations conceal and excuse behavior that leads us towards discord and war. This essay continues to be relevant, and of great importance today, much to our shame. We hope still to find the perpetual peace which Kant argued as a obligatory goal, and we still have need of fear that we will, as Kant warned, “find Perpetua...

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Philosophy

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volunteers bring you 13 recordings of Pillow and Stone by Abram S. Isaacs. This was the Weekly Poetry project for April 24, 2011. Abram S. Isaacs (1851-1920) was an American rabbi, author, and professor. Isaacs received his education at the New York University, from which he was graduated in 1871. He became a Rabbi at Barnett Memorial Temple at Paterson, New Jersey. For thirty-five years he occupied a chair at the New York University, first as Professor of Hebrew, then of Germanic languages, and later of Semitics. (summary from Wikipedia)...

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Instruction, Philosophy, Religion, Poetry

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Read in English, this is a pivotal document in the history of Zionism and the State of Israel. Herzl designed this work to elevate the discussion of the Jewish Question so it would no longer take the form of violent abuse or sentimental vindication but of a debate, practical, large, earnest, and political. While few of Herzl's proposals were actually carried out, the importance of A JEWISH STATE was in the groundswell of support for a Jewish homeland engendered by its solutions to the practical problems of establishing a new state. In the words of a contemporary, [Herzl] made it seem possible. Benjamin Ze’ev Herzl (1860-1904) was a Hungarian writer, political economist, and Jewish activist. (Summary by Adrian Praetzellis)...

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Economics/Political Economy, History, Religion

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William Bernard Ullathorne was a Benedictine monk and Roman Catholic priest who ministered in Australia from 1833 until 1840 and then returned to his native England, where he was ordained a bishop in 1847 and served as Bishop of Birmingham from 1850 until 1888. He is best known for his catechetical trilogy: The Endowments of Man, The Groundwork of the Christian Virtues, and Christian Patience, published in the 1880s. Christian Patience is presented in twelve lectures. Bishop Ullathorne teaches that Christian patience is both a special virtue and a universal virtue. As a special virtue, it is opposed to two opposite vices: a vice of excess, and a vice of defect. Patience is the virtuous mean between the excess vice of obstinacy and the defect vice of impatience. As a universal virtue, patience in found in all the Christian virtues, as it strengthens and perfects them. (Introduction by dave7)...

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Fiction about (or involving) motion pictures started appearing in the late nineteenth-century, when writers first became aware of early kinetoscope technologies. These stories grew more and more popular as the public became increasingly fascinated with the movies, the film industry, and the odd inhabitants of Hollywood. These stories reflect and often respond to the public's fascination with the movies; at the same time, they also reveal their fears and anxieties about the new medium. The first volume of this anthology collects 16 short stories and a monologue about motion picture technology and the film industry published between 1895 and 1922. (Summary by ChuckW)...

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Fiction, Short stories

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Britain won the Moon Race! Decades before Neal Armstrong took his giant leap for mankind two intrepid adventurers from Lympne, England, journeyed there using not a rocket, but an antigravity coating.Mr. Bedford, who narrates the tale, tells of how he fell in with eccentric inventor Mr. Cavor, grew to believe in his researches, helped him build a sphere for traveling in space, and then partnered with him in an expedition to the Moon.What they found was fantastic! There was not only air and water, but the Moon was honeycombed with caverns and tunnels in which lived an advanced civilization of insect-like beings. While Bedford is frightened by them and bolts home, Cavor stays and is treated with great respect.So why didn't Armstrong and later astronauts find the evidence of all this? Well, according to broadcasts by Cavor over the newly-discovered radio technology, he told the Selenites too much about mankind, and apparently, they removed the welcome mat! (Summary by Mark)...

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Adventure, Science fiction, Teen/Young adult

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Few things, even in literature, can really be said to be unique — but Moby Dick is truly unlike anything written before or since. The novel is nominally about the obsessive hunt by the crazed Captain Ahab of the book’s eponymous white whale. But interspersed in that story are digressions, paradoxes, philosophical riffs on whaling and life, and a display of techniques so advanced for its time that some have referred to the 1851 Moby Dick as the first “modern” novel. (Summary by Stewart Wills)...

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Adventure, Sea stories

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volunteers bring you 27 recordings of The Lovers by Emily Dickinson. This was the Weekly Poetry project for May 27, 2012. The verses of Emily Dickinson belong emphatically to what Emerson long since called the Poetry of the Portfolio,—something produced absolutely without the thought of publication, and solely by way of expression of the writer's own mind. Such verse must inevitably forfeit whatever advantage lies in the discipline of public criticism and the enforced conformity to accepted ways. On the other hand, it may often gain something through the habit of freedom and the unconventional utterance of daring thoughts. In the case of the present author, there was absolutely no choice in the matter; she must write thus, or not at all. A recluse by temperament and habit, literally spending years without setting her foot beyond the doorstep, and many more years during which her walks were strictly limited to her father's grounds, she habitually concealed her mind, like her person, from all but a very few friends; and it was with great difficulty that she was persuaded to print, during her lifetime, three or four poems. Yet she wrot...

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Romance, Poetry

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The experiments herewith reported were undertaken with the view of introducing certain improvements into the oil-drop method of determining e and N and thus obtaining a higher accuracy than had before been possible in the evaluation of these most fundamental constants.Physical Review, Vol. II, No. 2...

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Essay/Short nonfiction, Science

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Tom Swift is the young protagonist in a series of juvenile adventure novels which began in the early twentieth century and continue to the present. Tom Swift is a genius inventor whose breakthroughs in technology (especially transport technology) drive the plots of the novels, placing them in a genre sometimes called invention fiction or Edisonade. This book is the 20th in the original series published from 1910 -1942, written by a ghost writer using the name of Victor Appleton. This adventure takes Tom and his cohorts to Honduras in search of a Mayan idol of gold. (K. McAsh adapted from information found on Wikipedia)...

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Children, Adventure, Teen/Young adult

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Ozma of Oz was the third title in the Oz series by L. Frank Baum. In this book Dorothy is shipwrecked and lands on the shores of a fairy country that adjoins Oz, the land of Ev. There she meets Tiktok, a wind-up mechanical man; a talking chicken, Billina; and Ozma, the girl ruler of Oz who is leading a quest to rescue the royal family of Ev from their captivity by the Nome King. Dorothy is also reunited with her old friends, the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, and the Cowardly Lion. Together the adventurers travel to the Nome King’s underground kingdom and have many exciting adventures before returning to Oz, and for Dorothy, eventual return to her family in the “civilized” world. (Summary by Judy Bieber)...

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Children

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Bruno and Waldo Gillespie are orphaned brothers living with the extremely eccentric Professor Phaeton Featherwit. One day they set off in one of the professor's machines to investigate a tornado at close range and accidentally get sucked into it! They are then transported by the tornado and find themselves in a barren, uncharted wasteland wherein lies a city-- a long lost Aztec city! Find out what happens next to the brothers and the professor in this harrowing and exhilarating adventure! Description by Kehinde...

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Adventure, Children, Fiction

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A cautionary tale about the evils of interference, matchmaking and good intentions turned awry, Emma is the study of a young woman raised without sufficient discipline or occupation. Handsome, clever and rich, Emma is the epitome of what a young woman should be in Regency England, except for the fact that her indulgent father and lack of a mother have left her spoiled and used to getting her own way. Emma's only true critic and voice of reason is Mr. Knightley, a gentleman whose opinion she values greatly. She delights in meddling in the romantic affairs of everyone around her, thinking celibacy is a privilege she alone can enjoy by virtue of her social standing. In the end, Emma is forced to acknowledge both her own lack of insight into the motives of others, and admit her need for a companion who can challenge her to become a better woman. (Summary by Moira Fogarty)...

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Romance, Fiction