PYRRHUS, King of Epirus, entered at the very beginning of his life upon the extraordinary series of romantic adventures, which so strikingly marked his career. He became an exile and a fugitive from his father's house when he was only two years old, having been suddenly borne away at that period by the attendants of the household, to avoid a most imminent personal danger that threatened him. The circumstances which gave occasion for this extraordinary...

Abbott was born at Hallowell, Maine to Jacob and Betsey Abbott. He graduated from Bowdoin College in 1820; He was a prolific author, writing juvenile fiction, brief histories, biographies, religious books for the general reader, and a few works in popular science. He died in Farmington, Maine, where he had spent part of his time after 1839, and where his brother, Samuel Phillips Abbott, founded the Abbott School. This book serves as an excellent introduction...

ABOUT five or six hundred years before Christ, almost the whole of the interior of Asia was united in one vast empire. The founder of this empire was Cyrus the Great. He was originally a Persian, and the whole empire is often called the Persian monarchy, taking its name from its founder's native land. Cyrus was not contented with having annexed to his dominion all the civilized states of Asia. In the latter part of his life, he conceived the idea...

B. M. (Bertha Muzzy) Bower was the first woman to make a career of writing popular westerns. And what a career it was-more than sixty novels published from 1904 to 1940, the year of her death, and still more posthumously. In the western orbit, Bower was-and still is-a star. Her first, Chip of the Flying U, lays out a ranch in Montana and introduces the Happy Family, the bunkhouse gang that reappears in her later books. Chip is the typical woman-shy...

A masterpiece of stories by H. G. Wells, masterfully tied together by time and place. First, a shop owner named Mr. Cave, enraptured by a crystal egg, struggles to find a way to keep his magical possession... Then we are, taken to a time when cave people struggled to find their place on the planet and keep their lives. The forward to the far future where, in the place the cave people once camped, a young couple's back are, bowed beneath the tyranny...

The action is set during World War I. While John Clayton, Lord Greystoke (Tarzan) is away from his plantation home in British East Africa, it is destroyed by invading German troops from Tanganyika. On his return he discovers among many burned bodies one that appears to be the corpse of his wife, Jane Porter Clayton. Another fatality is the Waziri warrior Wasimbu, left crucified by the Germans. (Wasimbu's father Muviro, first mentioned in this story,...

A story of Americans on the French Riviera in the 1930s is a portrait of psychological disintegration as a wealthy couple supports friends and hangers-on financially and emotionally at the cost of their own stability

The story of Oliver Twist - orphaned, and set upon by evil and adversity from his first breath - shocked readers when it was published. After running away from the workhouse and pompous beadle Mr Bumble, Oliver finds himself lured into a den of thieves peopled by vivid and memorable characters - the Artful Dodger, vicious burglar Bill Sikes, his dog Bull's Eye, and prostitute Nancy, all watched over by cunning master-thief Fagin. Combining elements...

Gladiator concerns a scientist who invents an "alkaline free-radical" serum to "improve" humankind by granting the proportionate strength of an ant and the leaping ability of the grasshopper. The scientist injects his pregnant wife with the serum and his son Hugo Danner is born with superhuman strength, speed, and bulletproof skin. Hugo spends much of the novel hiding his powers, rarely getting a chance to openly use them. The novel is widely assumed...

John Stuart Mill's resolute dedication to the cause of freedom inspired this 1859 treatise. Discussed and debated from time immemorial, the concept of personal liberty went without codification until the publication of this enduring work which applies an ethical system of utilitarianism to society and the state which to this day remains well known and studied. Mills (1806-1873), a British economist, philosopher, and ethical theorist whose argument...