Showing results by narrator "Mark Smith" in All Categories

"The Battle of Life: A Love Story" is a novella by Charles Dickens, 1st published in 1846. It's the 4th of his five "Christmas Books", coming after "The Cricket on the Hearth", followed by "The Haunted Man & the Ghost's Bargain". The setting is an English village that stands on the site of a historic battle. Some characters refer to the battle as a metaphor for the struggles of life, hence the title.

When penniless businessman Mr Bedford retreats to the Kent coast to write a play, he meets by chance the brilliant Dr Cavor, an absent-minded scientist on the brink of developing a material that blocks gravity. Cavor soon succeeds in his experiments, only to tell a stunned Bedford the invention makes possible one of the oldest dreams of humanity: a journey to the moon. With Bedford motivated by money, and Cavor by the desire for knowledge, the two embark on the expedition.

"The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes" is the series of short stories that made the fortunes of the Strand magazine, in which they were first published, and won immense popularity for Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson. The detective is at the height of his powers and the volume is full of famous cases, including The Red-Headed League, The Blue Carbuncle, and The Speckled Band. Although Holmes gained a reputation for infallibility, Conan Doyle showed his own realism and feminism by having the great detective defeated by Irene Adler - the woman - in the very first story, A Scandal in Bohemia.

He is brave, tough as leather, and has left behind a trail of deadly enemies - outlaws he's hunted down or killed with the cold heart of a man used to violence. A feared bounty hunter and the scourge of bad men everywhere, Flintlock carries an ancient Hawken muzzle-loader, handed down to him from the mountain man who raised him. He stands as the towering hero of a new Johnstone saga.

The novel tells the story of a journey to the moon undertaken by the two protagonists: a businessman narrator named Mr. Bedford and Mr. Cavor, an eccentric scientist. Bedford and Cavor discover that the moon is inhabited by a sophisticated extraterrestrial civilization of insect-like creatures they call "Selenites".

White Fang is a novel by American author Jack London (1876-1916) - and the name of the story's eponymous character, a wild wolfdog. The story takes place in Yukon Territory and the Northwest Territories, Canada, during the 1890s Klondike Gold Rush and details White Fang's journey to domestication. It is a companion novel (and a thematic mirror) to London's best-known work, The Call of the Wild, which is about a kidnapped, domesticated dog embracing his wild ancestry to survive and thrive in the wild.

The Communist Manifesto (originally Manifesto of the Communist Party) is an 1848 political pamphlet by the German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Commissioned by the Communist League and originally published in London (in German as "Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei") just as the revolutions of 1848 began to erupt, the Manifesto was later recognized as one of the world's most influential political documents. It presents an analytical approach to the class struggle (historical and then-present) and the conflicts of capitalism and the capitalist mode of production, rather than a prediction of communism's potential future forms.

"The Reluctant Dragon" is an 1898 children's story by Kenneth Grahame, originally published as a chapter in his book Dream Days. It is Grahame's most famous short story, arguably better known than Dream Days itself or the related The Golden Age. It can be seen as a prototype to most modern stories in which the dragon is a sympathetic character rather than a threat.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a novel by Mark Twain. Commonly named among the Great American Novels, the work is among the first in major American literature to be written throughout in vernacular English, characterized by local color regionalism. Set in a Southern antebellum society that had ceased to exist about 20 years before the work was published, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is an often scathing satire on entrenched attitudes, particularly racism.

The Call of the Wild is a short adventure novel by Jack London published in 1903 and set in Yukon, Canada during the 1890s Klondike Gold Rush, when strong sled dogs were in high demand. The central character of the novel is a dog named Buck. The story opens at a ranch in Santa Clara Valley, California, when Buck is stolen from his home and sold into service as a sled dog in Alaska. He becomes progressively feral in the harsh environment, where he is forced to fight to survive and dominate other dogs. By the end, he sheds the veneer of civilization, and relies on primordial instinct and learned experience to emerge as a leader in the wild. London spent almost a year in the Yukon collecting material for the book.

"Kidnapped" is a historical fiction adventure novel by the Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson. Written as a "boys' novel" and first published in the magazine Young Folks from May to July 1886, the novel has attracted the praise and admiration of writers as diverse as Henry James, Jorge Luis Borges, and Seamus Heaney. A sequel, "Catriona", was published in 1893.

First serialized in "Outing" magazine, "White Fang" was published in 1906. The story takes place in Yukon Territory, Canada, during the Klondike Gold Rush at the end of the 19th century, and details a wild wolfdog's journey to domestication.

"White Fang" is a companion novel (and a thematic mirror) to London's best known work, "The Call of the Wild", which is about a kidnapped, domesticated dog embracing his wild ancestry to survive and thrive in the wild.

"Captains Courageous" is an 1897 novel by Rudyard Kipling that follows the adventures of fifteen year old Harvey Cheyne Jr., the arrogant and spoiled son of a railroad tycoon. The novel originally appeared as a serialization in McClure's, beginning with the November 1896 edition.

"The Mysterious Island" (French: "L'île mystérieuse") is a novel by Jules Verne, published in 1874. The novel is a crossover sequel to Verne's famous "Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea" and "In Search of the Castaways", though thematically it is vastly different from those books. An early draft of the novel, initially rejected by Verne's publisher and wholly reconceived before publication, was titled "Shipwrecked Family: Marooned With Uncle Robinson".

"Around the World in Eighty Days" (French: "Le tour du monde en quatre vingts jours") is a classic adventure novel by the French writer Jules Verne, first published in 1873. In the story, Phileas Fogg of London and his newly employed French valet Passepartout attempt to circumnavigate the world in 80 days on a 320,000 pounds wager (equal to 31,324,289 pounds today) set by his friends at the Reform Club. It is one of Verne's most acclaimed works.

The story takes place in the extreme conditions of the Yukon during the 19th century Klondike Gold Rush, where strong sled dogs were in high demand. After Buck, a domesticated dog, is snatched from a pastoral ranch in California, he is sold into a brutal life as a sled dog. The novella details Buck's struggle to adjust and survive the cruel treatment he receives from humans, other dogs, and nature. He eventually sheds the veneer of civilization altogether and instead relies on primordial instincts and the lessons he has learned to become a respected and feared leader in the wild.

"Tarzan of the Apes" is a novel written by Edgar Rice Burroughs, the first in a series of books about the title character Tarzan. It was first published in the pulp magazine All Story Magazine in October, 1912; the first book edition was published in 1914. The character was so popular that Burroughs continued the series into the 1940s with two dozen sequels. The novel tells the story of John Clayton, born in the Western coastal jungles of equatorial Africa to a marooned couple from England.

Dr. Watson chronicles here some of the more interesting detective cases that he and his good friend, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, have encountered during their association. We see the cases unfold as he does, scratch our heads as does he while the evidence is collected, and then marvel at the impeccable observations, remarkable insight, and doggedness which Holmes displays as he teases apart the tangled clues.

The Time Machine is a science-fiction novel by H. G. Wells, published in 1895. Wells is generally credited with the popularization of the concept of time travel by using a vehicle that allows an operator to travel purposely and selectively forwards or backwards in time. The term "time machine", coined by Wells, is now almost universally used to refer to such a vehicle.

One of the most significant self-help books in the last 100 years, The Science of Getting Rich is a unified approach anyone can apply to make wealth and success. Wallace Wattles has used his experience extensively in creating wealth and came up with a comprehensive outline that can be construed as what it takes for an individual to become rich. The running theme and factor in this book is your mindset as an individual.