Describes the birth of the Indian nation and of its spiritual leader, Mahatma Gandhi as the British Empire diminished in power and gave India its freedom.

"In 1936, originally intending merely to report on the Spanish Civil War as a journalist, George Orwell found himself embroiled as a participant-as a member of the Workers Party of Marxist Unity. Fighting against the Fascists, Orwells account of life in the trenches-with a democratic army composed of men with no ranks, no titles, and often no weapons-and of his near fatal wounding, is painfully vivid and occasionally comic. As the politics became...

In Providence, R.I., in 1848, Edgar Allan Poe reluctantly investigates the problems of eleven-year-old Edmund, whose family has mysteriously disappeared and whose story suggests a new Poe tale with a ghastly final twist.

"Nothing so coarsely indecent as the whole history of Jude in his relations with his wife Arabella has ever been put in English print," asserted M. O. W. Oliphant, the Scottish humorist. Hardy's "Jude the Obscure--the ill-received novel that was to be his last--is a strikingly modern portrait of provincial, workaday life, frank sexuality, and the desire to transcend the mire of prosaic living. Amy M. King is Assistant Professor of Literature at the...

It was the first war we could not win. At no other time since World War II have two superpowers met in battle. Now Max Hastings, preeminent military historian, takes us back to the bloody, bitter struggle to restore South Korean independence after the Communist invasion of June 1950. Using personal accounts from interviews with more than 200 vets-including the Chinese-Hastings follows real officers and soldiers through the battles. He brilliantly...

A spellbinding travel book, The Sea and the Jungle is an account of the author's journey on the tramp steamer Capella-which was bringing supplies to a railroad construction site-on the Amazon and Madeira rivers. Tomlinson's experiences on the trip and his stories about the events at the construction site are the stuff of true adventure; it was hailed as an instant classic.

A little princess is protected by her friend Curdie and her newly-discovered great-great-grandmother from the goblin miners who live in caves beneath the royal castle.

From the author of 1984, George Orwell narrates the journey of a writer among the down-and-out in two great cities in this sobering, truthful portrayal of poverty and society. Famous for its realistic and unsentimental description of poverty, Down and Out in London and Paris follows the adventures of a penniless British writer who finds himself rapidly descending into the seedy heart of two great European capitals. As a dishwasher in Paris, he describes...

Admiral of the Ocean Sea is Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison's classic biography of the greatest sailor of them all, Christopher Columbus. It is written with the insight, energy, and authority that only someone who had himself sailed in Columbus' path to the New World could muster. Morison undertook this expedition in a 147-foot schooner and a 47-foot ketch, the dimensions of these craft roughly matching those of Columbus' Santa Maria and Niña.

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A powerful and courageous work of fiction, Hard Times looks at working conditions in a Victorian factory town in the industrial north of England. It's an extraordinary novel that considers how enslavement to systems at the expense of imagination and feeling can wreck human lives. This edition celebrates Charles Dickens' most openly campaigning novel, through which the author said he aimed to 'strike the heaviest blow in my power'. Hard Times explores...